The Last Hour of Gann

by R. Lee Smith

  8

  The sun rose in Gedai the same as in Yroq and Meoraq was awake to see it. They had made camp atop a high, narrow ridge, which gave him an impressive view in any direction. He could have watched the sun rise if he wanted. Instead, he sat with his back to the morning and watched the light crawl over the broken walls of distant Praxas.

  He had hoped for a full hour of travel before darkness shackled him. He received perhaps half of that, not at a run, but at a torturous stride that seemed to hurl him back in time to that first day herding humans across the prairie.

  The boy was not delicate. He did not run, but slipped through trees and thorn-breaks as easily as any saoq, and had a knack for finding pathways far superior to Meoraq’s own. Yet when the light was gone, the boy halted and would go no further. This was only common sense in the wildlands and Meoraq knew it. Still, he tried to coax the boy on and then order him and finally threaten.

  The boy remained impervious, laughing as he invited Meoraq to beat him, “or whatever takes your pleasure, sir,” but the day was done and so was he.

  So they camped. The boy started a fire and brewed nai. There was bread and cuuvash in the pack of provisions Onahi had given them. There was no tent, but the boy was no stranger to sleeping wild. He lay down and was silent. Meoraq paced, drank hot nai, meditated, patrolled, drank cold nai, lay down, sat up, thought of Amber.

  He did eventually sleep, but his sleep was thin and haunted. He woke uncounted times, only to stare in vain at the empty night, the faint coals, the boy.

  A night’s broken rest only further frayed his senses. Long before dawn, he was aware of paranoia, like grains of sand, itching under his scales. He heard things out in the forest, went out to search for the source, and then heard things at his camp. Worse, he did not hear things, which unnerved him even more, as ridiculous as he knew that to be. He felt tense and frustrated and always at the knife’s edge of furious. He felt watched.

  Now it was morning and as God raised His lamp over the world, Meoraq could feel clarity like a cooling hand once more in his heart and mind.

  He reached over and shook the boy, who rolled muttering onto his belly and glowered at him through a shield of his crossed arms.

  “You never sleep,” said the boy.

  Meoraq grunted and kicked dirt over the coals. “We’re moving now. Get up.”

  “What did they take from you anyway?”

  Meoraq caught the boy by the back of his ill-fitting tunic and hauled him to his feet. “We’re moving,” he said again. “Now.”

  “The Sheulek who comes in the summer makes the governor give him anything he wants. I thought that was the whole point of being Sheulek.” The boy thought a moment, then shrugged and smiled. “That and getting dipped everywhere you go.”

  “There’s a reason you were never meant to be one.”

  The boy’s smile did not diminish, but even so, it grew a thinned, painted-on appearance. “I’m sure there’s more than one.” He picked up his pack and rolled his blanket away. When he straightened up again, his smile had broadened into a disturbing grimace of good cheer. “Luckily, I have you. Let’s go.”

  They went. The boy didn’t bother looking for a trail, but traveled vaguely eastward, veering toward landmarks as they came across them—this oddly shaped boulder, that great direthorn tree—and if reaching them meant wading a frigid stream or climbing a soft ravine, that was what they did. The sky took on the bruised color that came before a storm and within the hour, it had found them. The ground turned to clutching mud beneath their feet. The boy wasn’t slowed in the slightest. Meoraq considered himself an expert at wildlands travel, but it was difficult to keep pace.

  And why, by Gann? Because he’d had a few nights’ bad sleep? Run all the way to Praxas without food? Had to walk now in a little hard rain? In his first striding days, he’d run three days and nights straight through on nothing but water for no better reason than to get someplace with a hot bath. And a bather.

  ‘I am not a young man anymore,’ he thought, and felt a pang of dismay stab all the way through him. Not for the careless youth now behind him, but for the future he could only pray he hadn’t lost. He would never be a young man again, but now, more than ever, he wanted to be an old one, in Xeqor, with his wife and children.

  Lightning arced across the sky, close enough that he could smell it. Thunder came immediately after. The wind gusted, blowing stinging shards of rain directly into his eyes, so that for a moment, he seemed to be falling blindly forward.

  “Hold!” ordered Meoraq, and threw down his pack. He hunkered beside it, breathing too hard, lost in thoughts of Amber, how she’d clung to him that night in the ruins…the little cries she made each time the thunder rolled.

  “Are we stopping?” the boy asked, watching from a cautious distance.

  “Resting.” Meoraq tipped his head back, let his mouth fill with water, and swallowed. It tasted of the storm and strange, green leaves.

  “I thought you Sheulek didn’t need rest. I thought God moved you at His speed.”

  “Only at His direction. Mine is the same clay as any other’s.” Meoraq cupped his hands and splashed rainwater over his face. “You don’t know much about Sheulek.”

  “True enough, I suppose. The one that comes in the summer only stays a few days. He stays with the governor.” The boy moved from one tree to another, restlessly tapping at each trunk. “No one ever has a trial for him. He says Praxas is such a—”

  Thunder cracked overhead, shaking the air over his scales and the bones in his breast as it rolled slowly away.

  “—a peaceful place,” the boy finished, now from behind him. “Why do you keep looking up? It’s just rain.”

  “I know.”

  “You look nervous.”

  “I’m not.”

  But Amber…wherever she was…

  ‘Sheul, my Father, be with her tonight,’ he prayed, watching sparks sweep across the sky. ‘She is so frightened of the weath—’

  He had his head back, his snout raised, his arms at rest on his knees. The boy’s looped belt dropped over his head and before Meoraq’s eyes could identify the danger, it had cinched tight.

  No air. A perfect choke. He had less than a minute to break it. Meoraq’s sabks were already in his hands and stabbing backwards, but the boy skimmed around them with the same ease as he’d navigated thorns and gullies all day. Abandoning that, he slashed at the belt, but the boy wore a braid and the cheap leather was thick and stiff. He hadn’t made a single good cut before the boy bashed the rock into his hand. Once. Twice. Then the other. Disarmed.

  Through a haze of smothering grey, Meoraq heaved himself backwards, groping blindly for an arm, a throat, his tunic, anything. The boy leapt out of the way, heaving with him, and then Meoraq was on his back on the ground, staring at the world through shades of grey that shook with his own pulse. In his last seconds, he tried to pull the belt out of the boy’s grip, but he had no leverage and no strength. He could feel the scratching of his scales on the taut leather vibrating through his skull, but even that felt distant, unimportant. He could see his mouth opening and closing; the world beyond was smoke and shadow and the white open eye of death.

  Then, silence.

  Rain fell into his open eyes. He could not blink. The boy’s face loomed over him, colorless, indistinct. Was he dead? He couldn’t move, not even when the boy shoved him over on his side. He could feel tugging, prodding—the boy, searching for treasure—and the final kick of frustration when he found none.

  Stormlight flickered through the grey in a constant sheet. Meoraq could see the boy’s boots circling to stand before him. He could see the black shape of his father’s knife sprawled in the mud before his snout. He could see each dimpled knot in the cord of Amber’s hair tied at his arm where it sprawled unfelt over him. He saw these things, only these things, and he thought that must be important.

  More silence. It had become heavy, a weight on his ears. He could not hear his pulse
anymore, but he thought he could still feel it, in his fingers of all places. The grey was fading slowly to black. His chest hurt.

  “That was so much easier than I have been led to believe,” the boy remarked. Even his voice was grey.

  Meoraq’s head was lifted, the belt loosened and then yanked away. He heard it go, felt it striping his throat with pain as scales caught in that cheap braid were torn loose.

  The boy had killed him. That was bad enough, but he knew the boy would never burn him. He would never be wholly dead, never see the House of his true Father, never know the eternal peace that comes after. He must lie here and die forever. Would he feel it when he rotted? Would he feel it when the ghets came? Did they even have ghets in Gedai? He took a breath. He tried to cough and couldn’t. Dead men couldn’t cough.

  His father’s voice, pained: Son, dead men don’t breathe, either.

  …Truth.

  The boy was unbuckling Meoraq’s belt, replacing his own shoddy piece of leather.

  ‘I take back my thought about your perfect choke,’ he thought peevishly, and breathed again. ‘I should be unconscious now.’ He struggled to scrape up a better insult, but there was nothing in dumaqi good enough. ‘You suck,’ he thought finally, savagely. ‘Lizard.’

  “How long have you been a Sheulek?” asked the boy, buckling on Meoraq’s belt. “I wish I’d asked…I’ve been doing this job for six years. Do you know what that means? Eh?” The boy’s boot nudged at Meoraq’s thigh, then drew back and slammed into his ribs. “It means they won’t let me do it much longer,” he said as Meoraq watched his fingers slowly grip the ground. “Too tall, they tell me. Too old. Soon it’ll be another boy out here, and what the hell am I supposed to do? They say Zhuqa won’t take me, not even to work their stupid crops or clear the canals. Zhuqa only takes real raiders.” Another kick, harder than the first. “I could be a raider. I killed you, didn’t I?”

  In the midst of the grass before him, a single gray blade began to bleed in green. Color, coming back into the world. He breathed.

  “I probably should have waited until we were closer,” the boy mused, circling again. “Not sure how I’m going to move your body sixteen spans to the camp, but I probably don’t need the whole thing. Nothing about the head proves you’re Sheulek…and the arm doesn’t prove you’re dead…” The boy hunkered down to pick up one of Meoraq’s sabks. He admired it in the stormlight, then struck it under Meoraq’s chin and rocked his head back and forth. “What would you do if you were me?”

  Meoraq took the knife and slammed it into the side of the boy’s throat.

  He and the boy stared at each other. He felt no need to speak. He had no questions, really.

  The storm was moving on, lightning breaking into separate sparks, thunder growing distant. The rain fell even harder, but that was all right; the rain was cool on his scraped throat and bruised ribs.

  Meoraq pushed himself awkwardly to his knees and then his feet, dragging the boy up with him. “The law,” he rasped, and had to stop and cough into his palm. There was no blood on his fingers and the pain of the effort was minimal. It took strength to break a man’s ribs, and everything this scrawny youth possessed had gone into the choke. Meoraq hurt, but he thought he was all right.

  “The law requires me to ask,” he said again, adjusting his grip on the knife’s hilt. “Do you wish to pray?”

  “This is not supposed to happen,” the boy whispered.

  Meoraq pulled the knife across his throat slowly, bringing blood in a fall and not a spray, guiding the boy to his knees while he made his little struggles, and then letting him fall where Gann willed when it was over. He found his other honor-blade, cleaned them both, sheathed them. He took his belt back. He found the pitted toy of a knife stowed away in the dead boy’s boot and broke it. He stood and stared at the body until the rain had washed the blood away.

  Sixteen spans. He didn’t think the boy had been lying about that. They had been traveling east, and he didn’t think the boy had been leading him false either. But crop? Canals? That was not a raider’s camp. That was a settlement, one that could not possibly have gone unnoticed for as many years as the boy claimed to be visiting it.

  The sky flashed; a final stroke of lightning, a final snap and growl of thunder. In the back of his mind, Meoraq heard the phantom crash of shattered glass and felt Amber slamming up against his back as she’d done that long-ago night in the ruins.

  Ruins. For as long as Sheul had forbidden his children to enter the ruins, those who had gone to Gann had nested in them. Yes, they might hide their crop in the roofless husks where the Ancients had made their homes and yes, they might even have canals worth restoring, but so what? Sixteen spans, generally eastward, look for ruins? Was that hope? There were ruins everywhere!

  But ruins stand, he thought suddenly. After so many days, he would never catch a moving pack, but ruins were a pin to hold his Amber in place. He could have her back.

  If he could find her.

  Meoraq looked wearily out across the world, his eyes sweeping dully across the whole of the horizon and up, up into heaven. The rain poured down his face and across his aching throat. “Mine is the same clay as any other’s,” he said. “I do not move at Your speed, Father, but at Your direction. I cry out to You from the darkness. I cry, Father. Please. I cry. Help me.”

  The wind changed, just a little. He turned his face to keep the rain in his eyes. To the east.

  He started walking.

  * * *

  Amber’s first full day as a slave passed because even the worst days do, hour by uncounted hour, undisturbed by rescue. There was no food in the workpit, only a barrel of stale water under a leaking faucet that served dually as drinking and wash-water. At some point, Hruuzk appeared and took the new slaves away. Dkorm left with Xzem and the babies soon afterwards. The work changed from doing things to cleaning up, so Amber rallied what was left her of her strength and cleaned alongside them, although she let them do the more vigorous sweeping and scrubbing while she put things away. After another stretch of time, Hruuzk returned and called the children to him in a noisy flock. He hunkered down to talk to them, tapping at this or that one to keep their attention, before he sent them out—chattering children in front, silent slave-women behind.

  “Finish up,” he called to her, pointing at the small lump of clay left on the table. “No sense running that all the way down when you can put another three lamps on the shelf and be done. Do it well, but do it quick.” He pulled a piece of what sure appeared to be her last surviving Manifestor’s shirt and used it to wipe out the socket of his missing eye. “Been a long day and I want a piss and a poke before it’s over.”

  Amber rolled out coils of clay and made the last lamps with hands that ached like rotten teeth and barbed wire where her spine used to be. She found herself wishing dully that Zhuqa would hurry up and get here. All he’d want from her was sex and she could do that lying down.

  When she finished and turned around, there was Zhuqa in the doorway with Hruuzk, as if she’d summoned him with the thought. She was not glad to see him, but she was relieved and that was bad enough. She started toward him.

  Hruuzk stopped her with an upraised hand and pointed back at the table. “I said, finish. Wipe it down.”

  Amber looked at the slicks of wet and dried clay she’d been pressing into the rough planks all day, knowing there’d be no wiping that, it would have to be scrubbed. With her shoulders and her back. With her damned, aching hands.

  She glanced at Zhuqa.

  His spines came all the way forward; Hruuzk’s slapped flat. In two long strides, Zhuqa’s hulking slave-master was across the room with his huge hand on the back of Amber’s neck, shoving her flat against the table. He yanked her shift up, exposing her all the way to the back of her head. The sound of his belt coming off lit up Amber’s tired brain in every possible shade of panic, but before her fear had fully coalesced, it was dissipated with a crack like gunshot as he brought the belt d
own on her bare back.

  She cawed, more from shock than pain, but the pain came with the second blow and then she was screaming. Amber had been slapped, shoved, punched, and hit with a car, but she had never been beaten like this. It wasn’t even like he was hitting her, but more like he was cutting belt-sized strips into her flesh and ripping them away. Three, four, five, and after that, she could not count, could only kick and slap in futility against the table as the world lit up red and black with every swing of Hruuzk’s arm.

  Then he let go of her and she fell to the ground in a scrambling, sobbing heap. He picked her up by the hair, shook her until she found her feet, then smacked her on the underside of her chin with the folded loop of his belt to make her look at him. His neck was black. His eye was calm and alert. “In this room,” said Hruuzk, not unkindly, “I am master. And no matter how badly you think you have it, I can always make things worse.”

  Amber nodded, trembling and slapping at the tears on her face. Her back was burning, as if she’d pressed it up against a hot furnace and just held it there. Every movement, even breathing, pulled the pain into new dimensions and blew it up hotter and hotter.

  Hruuzk released his hold on her hair and patted her on the head. “Good girl. Go on then.”

  She staggered away from him into the other room and found a shallow basin. She had to lean over the barrel to fill it with water. She had to reach up to get a rag. Her fumbling hand dropped the coarse brush and she had to bend all the way down to pick it up. She poured out the water to soften the dried clay and scrubbed, screaming behind her clamped jaws as the coarse fabric of her shift scratched at her back. Hruuzk stood behind her the whole time with his belt looped comfortably around his fist; she made sure she got every trace of clay.

  By the time she finished, her back felt as though it had been whipped with a leather belt, instead of flayed open and set on fire. She was all right. There were still tears leaking out of her eyes, like the hurt little cries leaking out of her throat, but her head was working again and she thought she was all right.