The Last Hour of Gann

by R. Lee Smith

  Relief struck him like a slap—a short shock and a spreading glow. He grunted again and filled the steeper with some of the redsash leaves. She didn’t want to be told that was the right decision. A brace or two ago, Meoraq had known nothing at all about women, but he already knew that much.

  “Where did you get that?”

  The lifeless question held no clues. Meoraq followed Amber’s incurious gaze to the tea box in his hands. Odd…he’d never really looked at it before, beyond determining that it was sufficiently lavish to satisfy his spite. Now its inlay reminded him in an uncomfortable way of the mosaic on the wall in the ruins—a lost world, a flying ship.

  He flicked his spines and tossed the steeper into the stewing pouch. “From a man in Tothax.”

  “A man?” She took the box back and inspected it more closely. “Hunh. It doesn’t look like something a man would give.”

  “He didn’t have a choice.”

  Amber opened and closed a few drawers, sniffing disinterestedly at the various blends. “I guess you like tea a lot, huh?”

  “Better than I like boiled water.”

  “Please go after them.” The hoarseness of her damaged voice robbed it of all passion. Her face showed no more emotion than her voice, but her eyes saw him, he was sure. She was very close to death (he would never admit it, but Meoraq had begun to wonder if she might be dead already, her unburnt clay going through the motions of life and no more), but she was not speaking from grief now. She thought she was calm, reasonable. She thought she could convince him.

  “I swore I would not leave you,” he said.

  “I’m asking you to go.”

  “I didn’t swear myself to you.”

  Amber put his tea box back in his pack and his pack back in his tent. “It’s the same as killing them, you know.” Her voice was still calm, still reasonable. “Scott can say anything he wants about his imaginary skyport, but if you know they’ll die without you and you let them leave anyway, you killed them.”

  The Sheulek in him judged that uncomfortably close to truth, but not entirely so. “I gave them a choice,” he told her, which was also not a whole truth.

  “We aren’t leaving tracks.” Amber turned her head to look back the way they’d come, but there was nothing to show their passage. “Every day, the ground is getting harder and the wind is always blowing. When I woke up, we were five days behind them. Now we’re seven, because I can’t get myself together. And we’ll be ten days or more before I can make a real effort here, and by then, their trail will be gone.”

  “They will go east,” he reminded her. “They will go on to Xi’Matezh the same as we do. He thinks his ship is there.”

  “They’ll starve.”

  “Starvation is not a quick death.” He hated to give the thought, plausible as it was, any more validation, but it was only truth. “Their strength will flag long before they fail. They will den down and we will find them.”

  “Thirst, then. They don’t know how to look for water.”

  “They won’t have to look too hard after all this season’s rains, and they have nearly all my flasks to help them carry it. Apart from which, even before I found you, S’kot had sense enough to make his camp by water.”

  “They’ll freeze. Animals could eat them. The storms will come back. Another starship could crash on top of them! A thousand things could happen, damn it!”

  “The tea is ready,” said Meoraq, dipping his cup. “Come and have some.”

  She did not come, but she took the tea when he offered it. She drank, wiped her eyes, then drank the rest. He refilled the cup. She held it and stared at him.

  “They made a choice,” he said again. “So did I.”

  “And that’s it, huh?” She shook her head side-to-side, started to drink, then breathed out a harsh sigh and put the cup aside. “Do you have a family, Meoraq?”

  The question took him aback. He could not imagine what had prompted it and dreaded where it would lead. He felt his spines lower and had to force them up again in feigned nonchalance. “Two brothers. Some blood-kin in other cities. Why?”

  “How would you feel if they were out here? How easy would it be for you to just sit back and say God will keep them safe?”

  “Nduman is out here,” he replied. “At least as often as I am. And Sheul keeps him safe. Salkith…You may have a point about Salkith, but I feel I ought to observe that not even he would be out here following S’kot.”

  “All right, so she made a mistake. You don’t just give up on family!”

  ‘She did,’ Meoraq thought. To keep from saying it—and oh, but his whole heart and soul wanted to say it, even knowing how deeply it would stab her—he said instead, “Have you any other family but that…but N’ki?”

  “No. It’s just me and her.” The words faltered as they left her mouth. She looked away. “I guess it’s just me now.”

  “I am with you.”

  “Yeah.” But she stayed quiet for a time, just staring into nothing. At last, while he struggled to find something to say to bring her back from wherever she had gone, she stirred and looked at him. “What about you? Where are your parents?”

  “My mother died years ago. My father…very recently.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, just as N’kosa had done.

  “Thank you.” He still wasn’t certain that was the right response. “He served well, died well, and dwells in our true Father’s Halls now.”

  Her brows creased. “How do you have a good death?”

  “He died in judgment and Sheul was with him.”

  “That makes a difference, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  She fell into a silence, which should have been welcome enough, but oddly wasn’t. At length, unable to think of what else to say and loathe to let the conversation die, he said, “Your mother is dead also?” and wanted to hit himself for saying it almost immediately. When was that ever good conversation?

  Yet Amber merely said, “Yeah. But I don’t think God was with her.”

  It was a startling thing to say on its own merit, and doubly so for the dry way in which she said it. “Why not?”

  She did not answer, only stared into the fire and was silent. The light had a way of playing about her face, making her seem a stranger—too hard-worn for his Amber.

  “How did she die?” he asked.

  She sighed and rubbed at her face. “Christ, I don’t even know how to answer that. I guess some people would say she was sick.”

  “What do you say?” he asked cautiously.

  “I try not to say anything. How did your mother die?”

  He frowned, but answered readily enough. “She was probably childsick. I remember she complained of feeling overtired for a few days and that she felt heavy. My father offered to send for a surgeon, but she said she was sure it would pass. Then one night, she just started screaming.”

  The walls of House Uyane were strong. It had not been Yecedi’s screams but that of her dressing-maid running to Rasozul’s chamber that woke Meoraq and his brothers in the room they shared when home from school. Too big to share a cupboard, too young to have earned a room of their own, they sat up in huddles on the floor, looking at each other in the light from the lamp that stupid Salkith couldn’t sleep without and listened to the thunder of their father’s feet racing to the other end of the house.

  He was back again in mere moments, it seemed, bellowing for the carriage. Salkith, the only one of them senseless enough to act, opened the door just as Rasozul flew by with their mother thrashing and weeping in his arms. Salkith, naturally, dropped right there in the doorway and started crying, but their father hadn’t even seemed to see him. All the rest of that night and deep into the next day, they waited. When Rasozul finally opened their door, he had seemed a different man, or a dead one—cold clay in the shape of their father—the air around him choked with the stink of smoke more foul than anything he’d ever smelled in his life. Salkith took one look and started bawling again. And
their father, who seldom had much patience for Salkith’s soft-headed moods, slid down the door’s frame to the floor, pulled Salkith onto his lap, and began to weep with him.

  “Meoraq?”

  He stirred and focused on Amber, on whose strange face his eyes had been resting all this time while he sat silent. He grunted an acknowledgement at her to disguise his embarrassment at losing himself that way, but her creased brows only creased that much further.

  “I guess you were close, huh?”

  “No,” he admitted. “I didn’t…know her very well.”

  Now they were both quiet. Meoraq, determined not to fall back into that same pool of sucking mud, gazed into the fire instead and refused to think about Yecedi’s pyre and the stink that had clung to his father’s skin for days afterwards.

  “My mother killed herself,” said Amber.

  He looked at her. She looked at the fire.

  “I don’t know if she meant to. I guess it could have been an accident. She was taking something that she thought would make her feel good, something she knew was poison. She took it anyway and she took too much. I came home and she was trashing the apartment, puking and pissing herself and smashing stuff on the walls. She was out of care credits, so they wouldn’t send a medi-bus. I had to drive her to the hospital with her screaming in my ear and Nicci crying in the back and me yelling at both of them to just shut up.” She was quiet for a moment. “Those were my last words to her. ‘Shut the fuck up.’” Another short silence. Amber shrugged and looked at the fire. “And they let her die. You know how it is. High risk, low insurance. I guess I should be mad at them…but I’m not. I’m mad at her.”

  Meoraq looked lamely back into the fire. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. He did not know what poison the woman had taken, but suspected it was something like phesok, which fools often chewed in defiance of the Word, breaking faith with Sheul for a handful of dreams. What could he tell her now to comfort her? Amber’s mother did not see their true Father’s face; she had masked herself forever.

  “When they told us she was dead, do you know the first thing I felt? I mean, the very first thing.” Amber uttered a short flutter of humorless laughter. “I was relieved. Nice daughter, huh? I’d just lost my mother, not to mention our home, our insurance and our whole damn life, but for that first moment, the weight fell off, not on, you know?”

  He grunted, uncomfortable but listening.

  “She wasn’t a bad person, I guess.” Amber glanced at him. “She didn’t build machines or anything. And she had friends. Not many, but she had them. It was just me.”

  “You?”

  “Who didn’t like her.” Her eyes flinched even when no other part of her did. She looked away. “I didn’t like her,” she said again. “My own mother. She was just so…bitter and angry and so fucking eager to stick poison in her veins and trade everything she had—including us—for more. And I know that’s a pretty sick excuse, but I felt like I’d been watching her die for years. As bad as it was, having it over, finally over, felt good.”

  Her voice cracked. Meoraq frowned and watched the coals.

  “I wish I was the kind of person who could just…miss her! But I don’t. You have to understand, she was my mother and for the last three years of her life, all I wanted was to just grab Nicci and get away from her. And then she finally died and I don’t even think I waited a whole day before I started planning how I was going to make Nicci get on the ship that brought her here!” She flung out her hands to show him all the empty world, then slapped them down again on her thighs. “I appreciate that you saved my life. I’m grateful. It may not sound like it, but I am. I don’t want to die. But how could you? One person—and I don’t care who that person is—one person is not worth the lives of fifty other people, especially when that one person is me!”

  “You?”

  “I’m not…I’m not nice, damn it! You put everyone else in danger to save a horrible human being!”

  “You are as our Father made you, Soft-Skin.” And as she slapped her hands over her face, he calmly went on, “He knew you would come here, where modesty and gentleness and womanly subservience could only get you killed. All things follow Sheul’s great design.”

  “Bullshit. God has nothing to do with me.”

  “Do not be blasphemous.” He reached out to gentle the chastisement with a tap to her knee, and another, for no real reason at all, to the soft blade of her cheek. “When you came upon your mother sick with poison, you tried to save her. You say you didn’t like her, but you tried.”

  “Meoraq, you’re not listening.”

  “And you forced Nicci on the ship, you say. I doubt you had her tied and dragging behind you, but even if so, you put her on the ship because you would not leave her behind. That is who you are, Soft-Skin. So say whatever you like about how evil you are and how poor a person and how small of worth, but even in the midst of all that, remember that you still took the time to thank me.”

  She stared at him, her soft brow furrowed.

  He picked up the now-cold tea, poured it back into the stewing pouch and dipped her out a fresh cup. She took it when he held it out, but she was still frowning, still trying to think of the right words that would move him on without her.

  “I am a Sword and a true son of Sheul,” he told her. “I will not leave the one human He has returned to me to chase after those who have put their faith instead in S’kot. Make whatever argument you wish. Ask as often as pleases you. I will not go if it means leaving you behind.”

  He could see the thought that came into her eyes then. See it and read it, as easily as words written on a page.

  “And you will not go,” he said dryly, “if it means leaving me. Hear Uyane Meoraq and mark him well, human: Sheul has given me your life and I do not give it back to you. I have been lenient with your freedoms until now. No longer. Do not test me. I’m not very nice either.”

  She started to speak, then abruptly raised the cup and drank tea instead.

  He relented and gave her a tap, letting the touch linger somewhat longer than was appropriate. “Yet they will go on to Xi’Matezh, eh? Whether by Sheul’s guidance or by S’kot’s, they will go. And we will follow. If God gives them back to me, I will take them in.”

  She shook her head again, up and down this time, but she didn’t seem much comforted. He didn’t know what else to tell her, and after the silence had stretched out long enough for her tea to cool again, he finally cried a mental surrender and said it: “What are you thinking?”

  “Why?”

  “Insufferable…This is my camp and I’ll ask whatever questions I please.”

  She was already shaking her head, one hand back over her face. “No, I meant, that’s what I was thinking. I was thinking why? What you just said…” She uncovered her face to look at him, frowning. “You’re really not nice. Everyone knows it.”

  He shrugged that off.

  “So why did you stay with me? Five days…” Her eyes grew distant. She huffed out a laugh without a smile. “You did things for me my own mother never did. What…”

  More silence. Meoraq took the cup, renewed its contents, and drank it himself.

  “Look, I’ll just say it,” she said suddenly. The color was high in her cheeks, very bright against her sickbed pallor. “What do you want from me? Because I realize I’m in no position to bargain, but I need to know.”

  He studied the question, knowing it was trapped, but unable to see the trigger. Cautiously, he said, “I want you to be well.”

  “And after that?”

  He did not know how to answer that. There were answers—I want things to be the way they were. I want to talk the way I talk when I’m with you. I want to stand at Xi’Matezh and see your face filled with wonder when our Father receives us. I want to take my pilgrimage and share it with you. I want you to want to share it with me—but nothing in Meoraq’s life had prepared him to speak any of them out loud. He hesitated, hunting for some true thi
ng he knew how to say, and said, “I wait on Sheul’s will.”

  She leaned slightly forward and searched his eyes while he held very still and kept them open for her. Wind shook the walls of the tent and carried smoke away. The tea, half-gone, cooled in his hand, but he didn’t notice. Her eyes were so green and all he could think as he stared into them was that moment when she had opened them from the thick of her dying sleep and seen him.

  Amber drew back, frowning. “Okay. But I’m sleeping out here from now on.”

  He grunted assent, still thinking of her eyes, then abruptly snapped his spines up in surprise. “Why?”

  Her jaw clenched. “Because.”

  “That’s a word, not a reason,” he said mechanically and smacked a hand over his snout. “I can’t listen to myself anymore. You’re turning me into my father.”

  “Because I’m not your pack or your spare shirt or whatever it is that your god told you I was. I don’t belong in your tent!”

  “You’re not two days yet out of a killing sleep, you lunatic! A strong rain would wash you away!”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve slept in the rain.”

  Meoraq rubbed his snout, his brow-ridges, his throat…but in the end, he had to laugh just a little. “I asked You to restore her,” he admitted. And to Amber: “I’m not going to sit here and argue with a sick woman. Drink. I have meat if you think you can eat. Rest as much as you can—wherever you like,” he added generously. “And we’ll talk again when it rains.”

  He rose and took up his empty flask, already planning to turn the next pouch of heated water into a bath. They could both use one, although he already knew she wouldn’t want to share. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, either. Amber naked and white with fever at his side was one thing; Amber naked and rubbing soap into his scales was quite another.

  Meoraq stopped at the edge of camp and looked back. Amber was still sitting in the mouth of his tent, holding his cup in both hands like a child. Her hair, like trampled grass, bent crazily in the wind. His shirt on her body was oversized, loose enough at the neck to show a dark, tapering line—like a guiding arrow, he thought vaguely—pointing down between her swelled teats to her belly.