The Last Hour of Gann (84 page)

The thought of having to eat anything put another hot, jagged rock in her stomach. They ground together, breaking off points that stabbed their way into her heart, her throat, her eyes.

Amber nodded.

He grunted and left, letting in a great gust of frigid air before the flap fell shut behind him.

Amber pushed his blanket back and moved off of his bedroll. She put his tunic on over her shirt so she wouldn’t have to feel it touching her skin. It was soft and warm and a bit stiff. It smelled faintly of smoke, but mostly of new shoes; it had never been worn. She cried a little, but only a little. Then she scrubbed her eyes dry on her sleeve, put her boots on, and crawled out of his tent.

The sun was even higher than she’d thought, almost directly overhead. Everyone was up, milling restlessly through the camp with nothing to do, nowhere to go. She saw Nicci first, because Nicci was there on Amber’s mat where she could dimly remember leaving it, although the memory felt days old, unreliable. Amber limped over, holding her stomach in the cradle of one arm, and bent laboriously to collect her spear.

Nicci watched solemnly until Amber had straightened herself out. Then she huddled up tighter under her blanket—hers and Amber’s both—and said, “Are you all right?”

All her life, no matter how she’d actually felt at the time, the answer to that question had been yes, usually in the kind of scornful, impatient tone that was meant to make the other person sorry they’d ever asked. Now, although she still could not bring herself to admit to the truth out loud, Amber shook her head.
             

“You look pretty bad. Amber, I…about last night, I mean…” Nicci looked away, shivering under her blankets,
toward Scott’s fire. Toward Scott himself, standing by his tent and watching them. She dropped her eyes, not looking at either of them anymore, but said, “Do you need help? To…you know…go?”

Amber considered it, which was depressing enough, but in the end, she knew that no matter how uncomfortable the short walk to the boulder designated as the bathroom might be, it wouldn’t hurt any less to hang off Nicci’s arm. She shook her head again and limped off alone.

By the time she managed to shift her clothes, squat without falling over, pee out the shrieking leaden hell in her guts, and put herself right again, she had begun to feel dizzy as well as tired and hurt. Feverish. Gripping her spear, she sat on the rock that had hidden her bathroom activities from camp and bent forward as much as her stomach would let her, letting her swimming head dangle over her knees.

“Here you are! And by Gann’s closed hand, here you are
alone
!”

She raised her head
just enough to see Meoraq’s boots stomping toward her through the grass. “I had to pee,” she said dully. “I don’t do that in front of an audience.”

He kept coming, which she expected, and when he reached her, he took her by the chin and forced her to sit up straight. She more or less expected that, too. But the hand that wasn’t iron at her jaw was gentle as he stroked her hair back and peered into her eyes, and the yellow stripes at his throat had faded almost entirely to black. He was still glaring, but it was hard for lizards not to glare.

‘He said he liked me,’ she thought suddenly, which was not exactly true. What he’d said was, ‘I don’t care about anyone else,’ but the implication was there. He’d said that and then he put her in his tent to sleep and gave her his tunic in the morning and where was she supposed to go from there? She found herself wondering…if she put her arms around him right now, would he give her another of those stilted pats? Or would he hold her?

“I would be very clear now,” he murmured, rubbing his thumb lightly back and forth beneath her left eye. It hurt a little, like it had bruised up. She didn’t think she’d even been hit in the eye, just the ear. “You are not to leave my camp. Not alone. Not in company. Not at all. How do you mark me?”

“I’m still in camp. This counts as camp.” She watched his red eyes move, reading all the pain the old Amber could have kept hidden, thinking how easy it would be to just let go of her spear and hold on to him instead. “It isn’t your camp anyway.”

He snorted,
but even that was gentle. “Whose then?”

“It belongs to all of us.”

“Ah.” He stepped back, gesturing for her to stand, which she eventually was able to do. He watched, spines forward, intent, as she took her first steps, then joined her at her side. He said, “I took a talon on my first tachuqi hunt.”

“Oh yeah?” She had no idea what that meant.

“Truth. And on my second, I took its foot to my chest. Why I wasn’t killed, only God could say. As it was, I was thrown some distance and briefly lost my reason, but I was able to walk back to the city and I slept in my own bed in the billets that night.”

“Wow,” said Amber, because she felt like she’d ought to be in the conversation. She hoped her noticeable lack of enthusiasm didn’t make it seem like she was being sarcastic, but she just hurt too much to care.

“I remember thinking that night how blessed I had been. A few shallow scratches, a knock on the head—hardly worth the mention.” His spines flicked. He glanced at her, smiling in that severe, lizardish way. “Come the morning bell, I felt as if I’d been nailed into a crate and thrown down the stairs.”

That was such an apt description of what she feeling that Amber
managed a thin, strained smile.

“But the following day was tolerable, if not pleasant, and the day following that, I decided I would live after all. Every day, Soft-Skin.” He tapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A little better.”

“In the meantime, I’m making things worse.” She stopped walking while they still had some privacy, leaning heavily and with shaking hands on her spear. “Look at me. I’m not going anywhere today.”

“No.”

“You don’t get it.” Amber looked into camp, where more than a few faces were turned toward them, watching. “We’ve used up all our screwing-around time and they all know it. Now they all know I’m going to slow us down even more. Acting like it doesn’t matter doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“It matters,” he said mildly. “But if Sheul wills that we are on this side of the mountains when the snows come, so be it. Xi’Matezh will wait for us.”

“We’ll starve to death if that happens.”

He thumped her lightly on the forehead with one knuckle. “You forget that I have wintered in the wildlands before.”

“With fifty people to feed?”

His expression did not change in any way that she could see, but it became more thoughtful all the same. It was not, however, a good-gracious-I-hadn’t-thought-of-that kind of thoughtful, but more of a how-c
an-I-dumb-this-down-any-further? “God has set me on this road,” he told her. “And God will see me reach its end.”

“I’m sure he will,” said Amber, rubbing at her eyes. “But God has made it pretty fucking clear that he doesn’t care if the rest of us die.”

“Do not be blasphemous.”

“D
on’t be a zealot,” she snapped back, and rubbed her eyes some more.

“Come.”
Meoraq tapped at her carefully with his knuckles. “I have tea for you.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I know. Come anyway.”

Amber
raised her head. One of the women was pointing at her, saying something unheard to the rest of them while they all stood outside the Resource Tent and shivered in their worn-out Manifestors’ uniforms. One of the others shrugged and, looking Amber right in the eye, made a crude circle of one fist and rammed her finger into it a few times. A riot of
ewwws
and
Oh Gods
drifted toward her on the wind as they laughed.

Nicci was with them. She didn’t laugh, but she didn’t walk away either.

M
eoraq put his hand on her back and gave her a little nudge.

She looked at him, wishing she was the old Amber, the tough Amber, the Amber who could just walk away. She
dropped her eyes back to the toes of her resoled boots and let him take her to his fire.

* * *

After his own encounter with the tachuqi that had kicked him to the ground, a young Meoraq had been on light detail a total of fourteen days. He wished he could give Amber the same, but he simply couldn’t.

On his frequent patrols, taking careful note of each fresh ghet-track and gnawed tachuqi bone, Meoraq found himself thinking of the road they had crossed outside of the ruins. The Gelsik road, he thought, although the particulars didn’t
matter. It would lead to a city where Meoraq could declare conquest and demand enough cuuvash from its provisioners to make the rest of his pilgrimage without worry. He would have to demand a cart and a young bull to pull it, and since it seemed wasteful to haul two or three hundred bricks of cuuvash in an otherwise empty cart, he would demand enough tents and blankets to keep all the humans out of the weather. Warm clothes for Amber…and maybe even a new wristlet.

But as tempting as the thought was,
he knew he would never do it. If pressed to give reasons, he could have said that this was a holy test set before him by Sheul Himself, and if the only way he could come through it was to cheat, he had already failed. That was a good reason, one that left unsaid the far more honest facts that if he took the humans with him to a city, his pilgrimage might well end there, and if he went alone, Scott would leave Amber to her own care, which was no care at all.

So Meoraq thinned the tachuqi meat as much as possible by stewing it with all the edible roots and leaves he could forage, and on the morning of the third day following the attack, when the last bitter drop was taken (given to Amber, fed to Nicci), he gave the order to strike camp and move on.

They walked, and if Meoraq had wagered his own left foot against the making of three spans distance in the course of that day, he would yet be walking. Even the humans complained it was not enough—there had to be some black joke in that—and Amber’s name was in all their mutterings.

She had begun well enough
but soon flagged, dropping further and further behind until she and her Nicci were only two dark points on the very edge of the world. At first she carried her spear, then dragged it behind her, and finally began to lean on it. Meoraq spent much of the day looking back from some ridge or another, watching her struggle, thinking of himself limping along just that way, and the fourteen days he had been given for healing. But that was fourteen days within the walls of great Xeqor and this was the wildlands. He knew she was driving her exhausted body to the very edge of collapse so that she would not be a burden to them. He knew also that she was a burden anyway.

Meoraq had been the tool of Sheul’s
judgment all his adult life. The unfairness gnawed at him.

That evening, after his camp was made (if it could be called evening while the sun was only half-fallen from its highest point), Meoraq went alone into the plains on the pretext of hunting. There, he removed his harness
and his tunic, and bent his neck before Sheul. He prayed, reciting the Deliverance through all twelve invocations, and meditating until his heart was clear and all his clay was numb with cold.

When this was done, Meoraq bent yet further, gathering a palmful of wet earth to daub over his mortal heart. The wind dried it to a gritty shell against his bare skin in moments. He bowed low, shivering, to press his hands flat to Gann. His prayers were not ended, but only begun.

“O my Father,” he said, “hear Your son. I cry out to You from the darkness where I am in desperate need of succor. Great Father, the cold season is almost upon me and I can see no way for all the humans You have given me to survive such a wintering. I know that the lives of these few humans are a small measure of the hundreds of families who would depend upon me if I am called to be steward of Uyane’s line in Xeqor and I am ashamed to show my face to You and admit that even so, the burden is too great. I must cry out to You, merciful Sheul, for shelter in the wild places, for food in the hour of famine, and for strength in the bodies of the weak.”

Meoraq paused to reapply humility in the form of mud on his exposed chest. He could not feel it anymore. His shivering had become a constant tremor throughout his limbs. It took great effort to bend back to the ground without sprawling across it—effort that made him think of Amber fighting one foot down in front of the other, where his thoughts had been since this prayer began. Now he must come to it.

“Great Sheul, O my Father, You have called me to this pilgrimage and given me the honor of this ordeal. My heart is sick with shame that I cannot steward these humans without Your intervention, but I must be shamed, O Sheul, or I must see them die. We have been too long in the wildlands and with this new attack upon my camp, we will be there longer still. A woman was injured…” Meoraq trailed off, painted more mud onto his numb and aching chest, and said, “A good woman was injured, but by Your mercy, she lives. Now I bend on her behalf.”

Hearing those words spoken aloud, even before Sheul who surely knew all things, made Meoraq profoundly uncomfortable. He hesitated, then said the words which were
soon to haunt him: “Her wounds slow us all and I cannot tend these humans in the wildlands indefinitely.” This was truth, but even truth could be molded into many shapes. “I ask You as Your true son who has served and loved You all my life, relieve her of her pains and so relieve me of this burden.”