The Last Hour of Gann

by R. Lee Smith

Amber did not fight him, did not cry out, did not even breathe.

  Three more knocks, deliberate and loud.

  Zhuqa stopped rock-rigid above her. His arms shook where he leaned on them, not (she was sure) from the strain and violence of his thrusts, as much as from the strain of not letting go to his killing rage. Amber, the only living thing in the room, held very still and watched him as he turned his head and looked at the door.

  He breathed. Once. Twice.

  “I,” he said in a rasping, hellish hiss, “do not care if the skies have split open and are shitting fire all over my camp! Move the fuck on!” he roared, once more in that dragon’s voice she felt even in her womb.

  A moment’s stillness. Zhuqa’s heaving breath moved her minutely back and forth on the table. He didn’t look at her.

  Tok. Tok. Tok.

  He shoved himself back and out of her, snarling curses as he gripped his cock and wrenched it with difficulty and obvious pain back into his body, cinching his loin-plate on to keep it there. Metal flashed; knives flew to his hands as he crossed the room, flung the door open—

  And stood there.

  Meoraq’s name leapt like hope itself in her heart, but it died…because in that stillness, she heard what Zhuqa saw: the baby.

  Amber sat up slowly, not daring yet to leave the table or even bring her legs together, but she had to at least look. Zhuqa’s friend Iziz stood on the other side of the door, Xzem huddled small at his side, and the baby thrust out as if in sacrifice before Zhuqa’s naked blades. She hadn’t been able to hear it crying through the door. She could barely hear it now. Its cries, little more than an endless, rusty “weh…weh…” breathed through a throat scraped raw by screams.

  “It hasn’t eaten,” said Iziz.

  Zhuqa sheathed his knives. “Since?”

  After a moment, and a light cuff to the back of her head from Iziz, Xzem stammered, “Since third-hour last, my lord.”

  “Since third-hour? You tell me this now?” Zhuqa looked at the baby, then at the woman who held it, incredulous. “Tell me why I should not go this instant and pull an arm off your shit-sired little poke!”

  “Please, my lord! It is not my fault! It does not want me! I thought…it would suck when it became hungry enough, but…oh mercy, my lord!”

  “Mercy?” Zhuqa snatched at the scruff of her filthy shift and yanked her off her knees. “I offered you mercy, woman! I offered you more than a used-up breed-pot like you deserves and you repay me by starving my child half the fucking day?!”

  Xzem wailed.

  “She says it quiets up in your creature’s arms,” Iziz put in. “She thought if the creature touched it…”

  Zhuqa straightened up and glanced back at Amber. The yellow stripes at his throat throbbed, but they were fading. He released Xzem and stepped back.

  Amber kicked down off the table and limped hurriedly over to take the baby from its weeping wetnurse. It hung against her breasts for perhaps half a minute more, and then suddenly brought both hands up to smack against her skin in a strong, pinching grip. It pulled in a deep, deep breath, and screamed it out—weak no longer, but full-lunged and furious. Fluid poured in an immediate, answering trickle from Xzem’s flaccid teat, but it was Amber’s breast it blindly gnawed, futile for them both.

  The two men stood to one side while Amber and Xzem tried for several maddening minutes to fit the three of them together, offering no help and no encouragement. The baby cried louder, drawing strength from the touch it craved more than the milk it needed, until the flashings along its pale, scrawny throat began to turn yellow with rage.

  Zhuqa and Iziz snorted in unison.

  “It’s a son,” Iziz declared. “Only a boy could get that worked up over riding a woman.”

  “In fairness, it is one damned fine ride,” Zhuqa replied.

  “Better than a quick fuck into my mother?”

  “Better than a slow fuck into God.”

  Iziz looked at him, startled and trying to smile. “That’s a blasphemous lie.”

  “No,” said Zhuqa seriously, watching Amber. “It isn’t.”

  “You, sir, are a pervert. All that smooth skin. It must be like fucking a baby.”

  Zhuqa said something in reply, but Amber didn’t hear. Smooth skin. Smooth and soft.

  She looked around, then thrust the baby back into Xzem’s arms and ran to the table. “Do you have anything else like this?” she asked in lizardish, holding up the wineskin. “To wrap it in?”

  They looked at her, both of them frowning, as she mimed putting on a shawl.

  Damn it. She slowed down, trying to work her mouth around the alien words: “I need something with smooth skin.” Frustrated, she slapped her naked body a few times and then slapped the leather flask. “Like me!”

  “What the hell is that thing barking on about?”

  Zhuqa’s spines flared. He looked at the baby and then at the wineskin. He came over to the table and took it from her.

  “No, you idiot!” Amber said, exasperated into English. “I don’t want a drink, I need—”

  “I hear you, woman,” said Zhuqa. He uncapped the neck, righted the bowl that had once held their scattered dinner, and carefully poured the contents of the wineskin out. As he shook the last drops free, he drew his knife.

  “What are you doing? Oh Zhuqa, no. Please, that’s a perfectly good—and there it is,” Iziz sighed, rubbing at his brow-ridges as Zhuqa sliced the skin open down its lengthy middle. After a short silence and a few meditative breaths, Iziz turned a glare on Amber and snapped, “Do you know how hard it is to make a watertight vessel out in the fucking wildlands? No, of course you don’t, you are a fucking watertight vessel!”

  “Mind your manners,” Zhuqa said distractedly.

  “That was a perfectly good corroki bladder! What the fuck does she want with it?!”

  “She wants to put the baby in it.”

  “Wants to…? Why by the names of Gann and God would she want to do that?”

  “So it will think she’s holding it, you fool. Quiet down.” Zhuqa tossed the flap of the cut wineskin to Amber, who took it and folded the baby into its dry side until it was entirely cocooned but for its snouted face.

  “Hush, baby,” she said. “I’m here. Amber’s here.” And with that, she placed the damp, wine-stinking bundle back in Xzem’s reluctant arms, its wailing mouth close to the leaking eye of Xzem’s teat. At its first accidental bite, the small head turned, shoving itself up so that most of the lizardlady’s single breast was swallowed into its stiff, lipless mouth. Its hungry cries turned at once to grunts of effort and then to soft, slurping sounds.

  It drank.

  “So,” Iziz said after a moment. “It wanted a blanket. Shows what I know about sprats. My apologies for disturbing you, Zhuqa.” He reached down to take Xzem’s arm.

  “Let it eat.” Zhuqa sat down, picked up his cup and dunked it in the bowl. He gestured ruefully. “Have a drink. It’ll be full of dust and dead yifu by the morning.”

  “Waste not the gifts of God,” said Iziz piously, picking up the whole bowl for a series of deep swallows.

  Zhuqa sipped at his cup, picked splinters off the nearest chunk of roast, and tossed that at Amber. “A good thought, Eshiqi. Eat.”

  She did, but without appetite, too much aware of Xzem’s hungry stare.

  Iziz helped himself to a baked root, unzipped its skin, and swished it through the wine a few times before popping it whole into his mouth. He studied Amber while he chewed and swallowed, then said, “You know I have to ask…”

  “Go on then.”

  “What it is really like to dip it in that thing? Honestly.”

  Zhuqa grunted, looking Amber over, then flexed his spines in a shrugging gesture. “Perverse. More than you can imagine.”

  “With respect, sir, you have no idea the sorts of things I imagine.”

  “She’s smooth, like baby-skin. Soft all over. Soft inside.” He took another sip of his drink and chuckled. “She cums
like a man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She oils up when she cums. Like a man. She even has a little sa’ad.”

  “What?!”

  “And she’s so soft inside, softer than her outsides even. There’s nothing to catch on, nothing to push against, nothing but this soft, wet squeeze.”

  Iziz drew back in a wince of queasily fascinated revulsion. “So it’s like fucking a sack of hot shit. Your pardon, a hot sack of male shit. There’s something wrong with you, Zhuqa.”

  “I don’t describe it well. It’s nothing like a real woman’s sleeve. It’s like…like skin. A second skin over your cock. Every time you move, you can feel it gripping and pulling at you, all over, all the time. Just moving in her feels amazing. The only thing that compares is my first fuck—well, my first with a woman—and only because it was my first and has that same sort of revelation. Otherwise, there is no comparison, no more than you can liken a bite of this shit—” He picked up a root and tossed it back on the table. “—to fried bread and fancies. She’s hard to look at, but she’s like fucking God.”

  Iziz studied him over the lip of the bowl. “Of all the sex you’ve had, you said. And then you said…with a woman.”

  Zhuqa looked at him, then at his cup. He put the cup down a little harder than he had to and gave it a short push away. “Strong drink weakens the mouth and the mind, says the Prophet,” he muttered. “It was a long time ago, Iziz. The door is shut.”

  Iziz put the bowl down. “You weren’t born out here, I know that much. You were a Sheulek!”

  “In training.”

  “Still…who the hell got you on the ground long enough to get a poke at you?”

  Zhuqa glanced at Amber. She looked at the baby. He snorted laughter and looked back at Iziz. “You are the fatherless son of a wildland exile and the nameless catch-cock who served the whole of his camp. What could you possibly understand about anything I could tell you of that life?”

  “She has a name, I just don’t remember what it is.” Iziz drank. “Why are we talking about me? I want to hear the story of mighty Zhuqa getting plugged.”

  “That isn’t what happened.”

  “It wasn’t even a man, was it? I knew it. You were ravished by a wild kipwe.”

  “No.”

  “Before I came here, I ran with a camp that used to hold kipwe shows,” recalled Iziz, his attention wandering to the bowl in his hands. “They’d strap a slave into a kind of harness. I don’t know…the kipwe had to be trained special, I guess…and every time I saw it, I had to wonder…How the hell do you train a kipwe to fuck something? How do you even start?”

  “Do you want to hear this story?”

  “Yes.” Iziz drank.

  “In the cities, in the Houses, in the caste of the warrior, they take you away as soon as you can be trusted to walk without falling on your ass or piss without it running down your leg. They send you to a special place close to the innermost walls to train you. You live there with the other boys of your caste, all ages, all together, and you only go home for the cold season. You speak to no one but the men who train you and the boys who train beside you. You learn nothing but prayer and the laws of God.” Zhuqa paused to fill his cup again from the bowl in his friend’s hands.

  “No women?” asked Iziz.

  Zhuqa snorted. “The only time I ever saw women was when I was home for the cold season, and they were only servants. My mother had been turned out by then. I had no sisters. I think it’s possible I went the first ten years of my life without knowing there was such a thing as women. Truth. No idea.”

  “Ten.” Now Iziz snorted. “I was fucking them before that.”

  “It was a sheltered life.”

  “It was a wasted one. No wonder you were all cock-rubbers and boy-pokes.”

  “Never heard either word until I was sent out of the walls.”

  “Lies.”

  “God’s own truth. God’s and Gann’s.”

  “Go on then. Your sick string of lies fascinates me.”

  “There was a man in the training grounds. Eight years my elder. High-born, low-bred. A rough.”

  “Used to crawl into other cupboards at night and poke the little boys,” Iziz guessed.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me, but what he used to do to me was swagger around on the training field after the masters had left us to our targets and beat on whoever caught his eye. Just sneak up from behind with a practice staff and beat them down, calling out the techniques he used like he was a master at lessons, but really just beating on the boy. It wasn’t the first time I’d played his game—”

  “But this time,” said Iziz dramatically, “you fought back.”

  “I fought back every time, boy. I was a Sheulek in training, not a camp-born cock-rubber like you.”

  They saluted one another, Iziz tapping his bowl respectfully at Zhuqa’s raised cup, and both drank.

  “But it had been a bad run of days for me,” Zhuqa admitted after a swallow. “Angry days. Things I’d always been able to shake off were striking at me like lightning out of the sky, just—” Zhuqa brought his hands banging together, making Xzem jump and the baby let out one grunting wail before it resumed sucking. “—and I was burning,” Zhuqa finished, glancing their way. His eye lingered on Amber. “And I had been all day on that training field with Master Naxuuk chewing off my hide one scale at a time, and it was all I could do not to just let that lightning burn me up when that staff came swinging out of the black and caught me right here.” Zhuqa clapped a hand over his side, just below his ribs.

  Iziz frowned. “God’s Hammer, Zhuqa.”

  “Felt like it.”

  “How old was this man?”

  “He was three years after his ascension, they said, so he must have been at least twenty and two.”

  “So you were fourteen?”

  “Almost.”

  “Fuck Gann.” Iziz put the bowl aside and eyed his leader with a disturbed expression. “What did you do?”

  “You mean after I fell over pissing myself?” Zhuqa snorted. “He got in a few more good shots. I could hear him calling them out. Leaping Drop. Prayer Block. Radiant Twist. No matter what I covered up, there was something else for him to hit. And then he stepped back and let me get up. I could hear him talking, lecturing the other boys, and that lightning struck. And I went at him.”

  “Like piss you did.”

  Zhuqa drank, shrugging his spines. “He saw me coming and hit me again, ready with some technique or another. I don’t remember what it was. I do remember that he hit me…but hitting didn’t stop me. It was just more lightning. There must have been a time we were grappling because I remember climbing him…not on him, but climbing him, like a drop-stair. Then he went down and I began to beat on him the way I have never beaten anyone since. I have killed men, Iziz, and taken several days to do it that I did less damage. It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. I hit him until I broke every bone in my right hand and even that couldn’t stop me hitting him. Have you ever been south as far as Kthuat?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “They have stands of trees around there. Dead trees, mostly. Full of beetles—”

  “Oh, Gann’s fuck-stick, the yumont.” Iziz shuddered. “I heard about those. Saw scars men said came from them. Thought it was a lie to scare us boys from wandering.”

  “They’re real. They live in the meat of those dead trees where it’s always warm and if a man should sleep up against one, they might come crawling out and bore in under his scales to live in his meat instead. Something in the bite keeps you from feeling it at first, but then they die. And they itch. If you’re quick about it, you can pry up your scales and dig the body out, but they melt away pretty fast and if that happens, that itch clings around for days upon days and there’s nothing anyone can do to help it. That’s what it was like for me. Hitting him was like scratching over my scales at the itch I could never reach under them. And when it was over, he was lying there on the g
round, trying to crawl away. My whole body was on fire wanting to get at that goddamned itch…and my cock came out. Look at her.”

  Iziz glanced around. Amber started to look at the baby, then gave up and looked back at them.

  “Look at what? I can’t read that face,” Iziz said. “I don’t even know how you can look at it while you’re dipping in it.”

  “Just the eyes, then.”

  “I cry. What’s she thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” said Zhuqa. “But there’s something in those eyes.”

  Iziz looked back and forth between the two of them for a few seconds, then snorted and gave Zhuqa a sock to the chest. “Forget her. You’re just getting to the good part. Go on.”

  “The good part.” Zhuqa checked his cup, but it was empty. He picked up a root and peeled it instead. “The only thing I knew about cocks at that time in my life was that I had one and I took that entirely on faith. Never seen it, mine or anyone else’s. I knew nothing about sex, other than Sheul gives a man the fire so that he could pass it into a woman and she could grow a baby. Go on and laugh, I know you want to.”

  Iziz barked a few times, then rubbed at his eyes. “I was trying to hold it in.”

  “You were never any good at that. So it came out for the first time in all my sheltered life and I felt air on it and the air was fire. There was this swaggering little shit of a boy, crawling on the ground in a puddle of his own piss and blood, more than half-naked because I had somehow torn most of his clothes away beating on him. At no time did I think it would feel good or that it would serve the slaveson right. I didn’t even hope it would hurt. I saw the pucker of Gann’s pipe and then I was in it.”

  “Fourteen and didn’t know about fucking,” marveled Iziz. “How was it?”

  “It didn’t feel right.”

  “Noble Sheulek in training that you were.”

  “Piss on that. It felt great, just didn’t feel right. It was that itch all over again, only six times worse. He was screaming and thrashing around worse than he’d done when I was beating on him, and all I could think was that this was close to whatever it was I needed and if I could just get there, everything would stop burning. Fucking helped, so fucking harder ought to help more, and that was what I did, without another thought in my head, until they pulled me off him. I don’t even know who. I fought, but whoever it was got me in a choke and when I woke up, the itch was gone and I was in the cell.”