The Last Hour of Gann (77 page)

They made their camp
that night beside a thick copse of trees that gave them at least some shelter from the wind and enough wood to set several good fires. Meoraq’s evening hunt proved fruitless, but Scott and his people still had a few bones to gnaw and Meoraq had cuuvash for himself and Amber. Afterwards, he took her to the open plains to continue her spear-training. She didn’t want to, but she didn’t fight back when he pulled her bodily away with him, and after a few light cuffs, she stopped trying to stare off at her Nicci and paid attention to him.

When it grew too dark to see, Amber
took the first watch and set off to make her noisy patrol around the camp with renewed and entirely undeserved confidence. Meoraq occupied himself as best he could in the hopes that she would tire soon and come back to keep him company, but eventually he ran out of things to do. Alone and restless, he retreated to the edge of camp and tried to meditate, but Amber’s face intruded in the stillness of his mind and her words kept creeping back:
Is it sex
?

He’d told her it was not and he thought he still believed it, but he didn’t know what else to call the persistent distraction that took him every time he heard her, saw her, thought of her. It wasn’t sex, or at least it wasn’t the way sex had always been in his life, but it was something hot and deep and urgent beneath his skin, something he could not conquer no matter how often or how fervently he prayed. He could not in truth pretend surprise at this; a prayer must be sincerely offered to earn Sheul’s
ear and he could not swear that he truly wished to be free of these feelings. The Word told him there was no sin in temptation, only in surrender, but that wasn’t much comfort to him as he fought night after day after night to find peace from his clay’s carnality.

A boy of the warrior’s caste learned the Word long before he felt any urgings of his clay, but learning a thing does not always prepare one to encounter it. Meoraq had known of sex from books, from lectures, from the whispered speculations of older boys, and of course, from that night that he had seen his pregnant mother with his father, but he had been well in
to his thirteenth year before he ever felt the burn in his own belly.

There had been no cause for it that first time. No woman had ever s
et foot in Tilev. Boys did all the work normally done by servants. Even those females who met the fires of the training masters did so in the antechambers between Tilev and the eastern garrison. So there had been no spark, only a sparring match no different from hundreds of others he had fought without incident. But this one brought out the fires in him—which had itself been happening more and more frequently that year—and they didn’t go away when the match was won. And it must have been a bad win at that, because Meoraq remembered very vaguely being pulled from the beaten boy and held in half a choke by Master Takktha when it was over. Had there been a certain watchfulness in the old man’s eye as he watched Meoraq struggle his way back to calm? He hadn’t noticed then, but he thought so now. Once released, he had retreated from the ring to lean against the wall, still fighting those fires while they burned and flared needlessly inside him. He knew the Word, yes, and the lectures and the lessons and all of it, but sex was the furthest thing from his mind in that moment. If he’d wanted anything at all, it was to get back in the sparring ring and beat on someone until these fires either went away…or swallowed him. And so it was thinking that and kneading through his breeches at his slit, which had ached worse than a broken tooth but still somehow wanted to be touched, that Meoraq felt himself extrude for the first time.

He remembered screaming, even though he must have known intellectually what was happening to him. He screamed because of the alien thing pushing out of his own body and he screamed because it hurt to touch his breeches or even the swollen edges of his slit, but mostly he screamed because it wasn’t him at all, it was Gann inside of him, and after all his years of training and all his top marks and awards, he was utterly powerless in Gann’s grip.

Master Takktha cleared the arena at once. As Meoraq fell to his knees in mingled shame and shock and that first awful, baffling need, he remembered feeling the training master’s hands on his shoulders and hearing that voice calm in his ear: “Breathe, Uyane. Put your hands on the ground and give me your breathing. A slow count to six, son, deep and even.”

And he’d managed, somehow. His hands had been bruised for days from beating against the tiles to keep from gripping at himself, but gradually Master Takktha’s voice steadied
him and he began to count. By his fourth recitation, he could feel himself slowly retracting, but it had been all Meoraq could do in that time not to take that terrible thing in his fist, right there in front of Takktha and Sheul and all the world.

Of the rest of the day, he remembered little, except that he had been released from lessons to pray, and he’d had to get a real metal loin-plate from the commercer before he went back to the barracks. As he’d been
undressing in the dark, the weight of his new loin-plate like a stone tied to his belly, some brunt acting as dorm-warden laughingly called out to him, asking if he’d been locked in the closet where he’d run off to rub his cock. Meoraq spent the rest of that night in a holding cell with shackles binding his aching hands. The brunt spent that night and the one following in the infirmary.

Cock-rubber. It was the worst name to call a boy, the worst thing a boy could do. Every other
carnal sin spoken of in the Word could be shut out behind the walls of Tilev, but every boy was alone with his clay and the temptation of ‘Gann’s grip’. Some succumbed. More than half the whippings administered in Tilev were in answer to that crime. Meoraq personally knew of three boys who had been locked into their loin-plates and one who had actually been branded and exiled after exhausting all forgiveness.

Endure the flesh
, said the Prophet,
do not indulge it
. What pleasure came with the act of physical union was never to be sought for its own sake, but only as a sincere exaltation of life and as Sheul’s own blessing. To that end, there were no less than forty-four carnal laws written in the Word by which men could be judged, although it could not be said that all men were judged as equals. Most men were permitted none but their wife’s embrace during their lifetime, but the steward of every great House had a husband’s right over every woman who owed him obedience, and all those born under the Blade had liberty when Sheul gave them the fire.

Of course, one still had to see a woman to know His fires, and most of those in the warrior’s caste were men like his cousin Nkosa, who might have a servant now and then to add variety to the drudgery of siring sons on his wife, but who surely could not expect to bend more than six backs beneath him in a lifetime. Meora
q might have that many in a day, if he wanted them, and have each one twice at each encounter without breaking faith.

He
had been with many women in his twelve years of Striding (as Master Tsazr had said on that long-ago day, more than he could count), but what of that? He had also gone cheerfully without, not merely for days but for days by the
brace
. And while there were a few times that he could recall being aware of the lack, for the most part, he seldom thought of women at all if he were not exposed to them. He had felt Gann’s lusts on occasion when traveling but never,
never
suffered from them. Then again, he had never felt them this way before—dawn to dusk to dawn again, every hour almost unceasing. It was more than temptation; it was torture.

T
he endless wind dropped to no more than a breeze, catching some human’s low moan in its sudden silence. Maria, he thought, stubbornly refusing to open his eyes and see. Maria and her man, her Eric, shut away in their silly little tube of a tent. Doing whatever it was that humans did when they were mating. He was not listening. He did not care. Someday, long years hence, when he was in some distant city after conquest or (just perhaps) home in Xeqor as steward to his House, he might think of this moment as he gripped at the bent back of a true woman, a normal woman, one obedient and respectful in her manner, who knew to bend her neck to a Sheulek’s whim and show some damned appreciation for it. A pretty woman, while he was at it, or at least not one with flesh like warm putty and hair sprouting everywhere and a face that looked like she’d been using it to beat her way through a brick wall. A proper woman who would never raise her eyes to him, much less her voice. A mewling, bowing, milk-veined woman…but it was Amber he wanted tonight.

Meoraq hissed to himself, stubbornly ignoring the ache and throb behind his loin-plate. He tried to meditate
, counting breaths in the dark.

Never mind. Regardless of the wife he would be given when and if he returned from Xi’Matezh, he was Sheulek now. He was the master of his clay
at every hour and in every temptation. He was Uyane Meoraq, a Sword and a true son of Sheul, and no slave to the lure of any female. He was his own man, and even if one were to drop this instant at his feet—

A heavy body struck up against his back and, with a sharp cry and a failed grasping hand, Amber tumbled over his shoulder and landed heavily half in and half out of his lap. Her knee knocked him in the snout as she thrashed to right herself. He swore, grabbing at her with one hand and his injured face with the other, and heaved her off onto the ground. “Mind where you put your feet, damn it!”

“Don’t yell at me! What the hell are you doing, sitting in the middle of…of…”

“Of the
ground
?” he suggested. “Where else should I be sitting, eh? In the sky? What are you doing walking about in the dark anyway?”

“I couldn’t see you,” she grumbled, righting herself and rubbing at her knee.

“Then carry a lamp. Where are you going?”

“
Scott has all the flashlights and he never lets me have one. And I still say you should be in your tent and not lurking around where people can trip over you. Aren’t you supposed to be lying on those hides anyway? Tell me I didn’t carry one all day so you could ignore it.”

“
If it bothers you, go to my tent and lie on them,” he countered, and felt with bitter triumph the immediate throbbing of his slit. “A Sheulek goes where he will, asks what he will, and sits where he will. Now, and for the third time, where are you going at Gann’s hour, insufferable human?”

“
I’m on watch! I was watching things!” She stopped there, perhaps in deference to the few raised voices protesting this interruption to their sleep, then heaved a sigh at him and punched her hands onto her hips. “I thought I heard something, that’s all. I wasn’t going anywhere.”

Meoraq’s
frustration sharpened itself at once to a ready point. He put a hand on his kzung and stood up fast, peering into the dark in all directions.

“
Relax,” said Amber. “It turned out to be nothing but a bad mood with a lizardman attached. Go to bed, Meoraq. I’m getting you up in a few hours.”

She stomped away
without his word of release, muttering to herself and leaving Meoraq to count his breaths and silently beseech his soul’s divine Father to give him either some measure of mastery over the lust that was once again throbbing behind his loin-plate, or mastery over the temper he was forever losing to these fits of human incivility. Where did she get the nerve to speak to him like that in the first place? To give him orders?! He was Sheulek, damn it, and she was…she was…

She was a woman, was what she was. She was a woman in his camp and beholden to him for the protection he provided, just as any woman of any city he had entered as conqueror. She owed him her respectful obedience and if he ordered her to bend her back, she—

Her neck, he amended in some distraction. Bend her neck. This was a matter of disrespect and whatever else he wanted (
Is it sex?
she asked, the first time he had ever heard the word spoken aloud by any woman.
Is it sex?
and she’d been looking right at him) was nothing but an ordeal of this pilgrimage to be endured and defeated. Until then, Amber—along with all the rest of her people—would bend her neck and give obedience to the master of this camp and that was all,
all
, he wanted from her.

He was Sheulek. Truth was his bloodright. He knew a lie when he heard one spoken. He knew a lie when he spoke it himself.

Cursing, Meoraq got up and stalked into his tent. He fastened it against the wind and against the soft sound of Amber’s footsteps as she made her clumsy patrol. Then he lay down on the damned hides, fully dressed and aching behind his loin-plate, and pressed both hands to his brows. “O Sheul my Father, look down and see Your son in suffering,” he muttered. “As clay is made hard by the fires, so do I ask that my weak flesh be tempered and made fast against the wickedness of Gann. I cannot stand alone against sin, my Father, no more than clay may hold its form unfired.”

Fire, fire, and fire again. Where was his mind? Meoraq hissed through his teeth at the top of his tent and began again, the Supplication this time.

“Great Sheul, O my Father, behold Your son in the hour of Gann. I am the unformed clay upon Your wheel. I am the untempered sword at Your forge. I am the unlit lamp without Your fire at my heart. Shape me, temper me, illuminate me.”

It was not immediate, but as the ache in his loins subsided, peace overtook his troubled mind at last. He lost himself gradually in meditation, slipping in and out of memory, undisturbed now by the soft sounds that sometimes escaped the tent where humans lay together in what little privacy they had and vaguely proud of how undisturbed he was.