The Last Hour of Gann

by R. Lee Smith

  And their children.

  The baby bothered him. Not the slave-mother’s yearling, which was already dead in every way save that of its clay, but the other baby. The one that Amber refused to leave behind even at the risk of her own life. He did not know precisely what she would say to him if he told her that the creature she was cuddling only looked like a baby with a soul, but was in truth no more than Gann’s clay given the seeming of life by the abominable sin of its conception…no, he didn’t know what she would say to that, but he was reasonably certain it would come in shouts and perhaps with her fist bouncing off his hide.

  Meoraq grunted to himself, glancing back into the darkness where he knew his wife to be, even if he could not see her. Sheul’s urges again flared, but he walked on and gradually the fires became coals. Once he was rid of the slaves, he would show Sheul a proper thanks for the return of his Amber, but for now, the enemy was surely close.

  And the enemy’s clay-born spawn, even closer.

  It looked like a baby. It sounded like one. Its tiny fingers gripped at Amber’s soft breast like the fingers of any true baby he had seen. Not that his interest in watching such things had ever been strong, he had to admit that, which meant that if there were some subtle clue proving the child’s innate sin, he could only assume he’d missed it.

  The child’s sin needed no proving. All his life, the priests had made it clear that if the corruption of Gann was in either parent, the corruption was in the child. What was bred into the clay could not be smoothed out, even by the Father’s hands. This was truth.

  And it was truth that the thing that looked like a baby had surely been sired by one of the raiders—men who freely indulged the urges of the clay until Sheul Himself closed His eyes to them. Men who poisoned their minds and bodies with strong drink and phesok. Men who carried bladed weapons and who used them to do wrongful murder upon other men. Men who made trade of female flesh for their sexual pleasure, and of male flesh also, if no females could be procured. The women who lay in union with such men had either been born to them, sired of their sin, or had been exiled from their cities for sins of their own. Either way, they were also lost to Sheul and therefore it followed that all children born to them—all, regardless of what innocent mask the offspring might don—belonged to Gann.

  The sun was rising. Through the rain, he could see faint threads of grey in the east, a reminder of the pilgrimage he was supposed to be taking. How could he go there now, with Gann’s corrupted own in his keeping?

  “Sheul, my Father, You have been with me and led me well to this moment,” Meoraq said, searching the skies through eye-stinging rain. “I pray You guide me now. What am I supposed to do? Where am I meant to be?”

  “Meoraq?”

  Amber’s voice, low and hesitant upon the wind. Truly, the sun was rising, because it only took a few moments of searching before he could make out the pale shape of her a short distance away. She could not see him as well, it seemed; she was not quite facing him and did not stop squinting into the black until he was nearly close enough to lay his hand on her.

  She startled, but didn’t cry out. She knew the enemy might be close as well. Which meant she wouldn’t have risked calling out his name without a reason.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I…Can you come back to camp? Xzem’s baby is…I need you to talk to her.”

  He could have nothing comforting to say to the mother of a clay-born child, but grief was raw in Amber’s voice and the other infant was there in her arms. With an uneasy glance heavenward, too aware of Sheul’s watching eye, Meoraq went back to camp with his woman silent at his side.

  Gann’s child was dead. Its mother knelt, still holding it, still gazing into its empty face. Amber had called the slave a name, but in a human mouth, the sound could be anything. Meoraq paced unnecessarily around the other women, deeply uncomfortable with what he was about to do, but finally went to stand before and speak directly to a slave.

  “How are you called?” he asked tersely.

  Amber stared at him, her soft mouth opening a little.

  “Xzem, sir.” The slave looked up at him, heaved a tearful sigh, and raised the dead clay in her hands for him to take.

  Meoraq did not want to touch it, but Amber was watching, so he did.

  It felt like a real baby, too.

  “Can we…” Amber came a small step forward, interrupting his uneasy inspection of the thing. The infant-shaped creature she held yawned and scratched contentedly at its snout, too sleepy to open its eyes. The slave-woman at his feet shifted her eyes from her dead child to the living one and then looked down at her empty arms. “Is there any way at all to have a fire?”

  “A fire?” Meoraq echoed, alarmed. “You mean…for a funeral?”

  The slave looked up.

  “Please,” said Amber softly.

  He reached out and took her sleeve, meaning to pull her aside and explain that if Gann’s children received any funeral at all, it was to be returned to the clay that had spawned them, but as soon as he actually touched her and felt her warmth beneath his hand, all reason left him. His loin-plate restrained him, but if it weren’t for that, he would be extruded, he knew. He would be on her and she beneath him…and whether Gann’s or Sheul’s, he had a dead child in his arms.

  In that moment of sickened confusion, a hand touched at his boot. Meoraq looked down, first at the body in his hands and then at the slave who had mothered it.

  She did not ask. She shivered on her knees, her eyes like open wounds, and did not dare to ask.

  The weight of the lifeless clay dragged at him, far heavier than it had been. ‘It only looks like a baby,’ he reminded himself and, as if in answer, suddenly found himself thinking that Amber looked nothing like a woman and yet he had believed that at once.

  The children born of Gann’s corruption were soulless. They were abominations of living flesh. They were sins incarnate and Sheul did not see them. They were clay.

  They were clay…and this one’s mother had carried it all through the night knowing it could only die in her arms.

  “I…need to pray,” said Meoraq. He turned away and realized only after he had done so that he still held the child’s clay in his arms. He could not think of a good way to turn around and pass it back, so he carried it with him into the trees and set it before him where he ultimately knelt.

  He was not quick to speak Sheul’s name or to invite His eye. Meoraq knew the word of Sheul and it was absolute. The child before him, however pitiable in its seeming, was a child born of Gann. To give it a funeral as if it were a true dumaq—

  He would have given Amber one once, he recalled, again without conscious deliberation. When she lay in her stupor and her treacherous people could not be troubled to care for her, he had been ready to give her a gentle end and see her to Sheul’s halls. She had not been his woman then. She hadn’t even been dead. And if he would be honest, he would have to admit that when he thought of her fellow humans at all, he thought of them as animals. They might walk as dumaqs. They might have speech and wit and reason. They might have in every way the look of people, but they were no more than animals, and a venomous, brutal breed at that.

  Yet Amber had a soul and her soul was hammered at Sheul’s forge just the same as Meoraq’s own. Her clay was Meoraq’s clay, shaped upon Sheul’s wheel. Her light was the light of any dumaq, shining from Sheul’s lamp. And where it was true of her, surely it must be—

  Meoraq put a hand to his brows and rubbed the rest of that thought away before it could come to some sacrilegious ending. Sheul’s word was absolute. The children born of Gann’s corruption had no soul to find welcome in Sheul’s halls. A funeral would be blasphemous.

  It looked like a baby.

  Its looks were a lie.

  The blood that stained its thin scales looked like the blood of any dumaq.

  Its blood was the blood of Gann.

  Its mother grieved for it.

  The grief was a
lie. Its mother was as soulless as her spawn and had no true heart.

  Then why did she carry it so far?

  Meoraq hissed as the futile circle closed itself around the same arguments. He didn’t know why he was tormenting himself like this in the first place. A funeral fire was out of the question. The raiders were surely in pursuit. He could give an honest answer to his wife that they could not risk such a thing being seen. He would offer to bury it, since he knew that what distressed Amber the most was the thought of abandoning it to be scavenged by beasts, and even that was surely more than its mother expected.

  It occurred to him—not all at once, but slowly, like the light of dawn even now revealing the empty world to him—that there was nothing in the Word that expressly forbade funeral fires for Gann’s children. Priests had, yes, but not the Prophet.

  It was an uneasy thought, but now his eye was moving over the newly-illuminated plains, seeing the thick copse close on his sunward side where a fire could be better hidden as well as fueled. The wind would thin the smoke and perhaps even carry it away from the raiders so that it could not be seen at all. It would mean holding to this camp all day, but he’d been considering that already, hadn’t he?

  Meoraq tried to shake the thought away, but it stayed, growing until he could see just how the fire would be laid. So now it was not a thought at all, but a plan. And perhaps a sin.

  He reached out to tap the back of one finger against the misshapen head. It felt like skin, soft as only a yearling’s could be, sticky where its blood had dried and been wetted again by the rain. There was no avoiding it.

  “Sheul, O my Father,” he said heavily. “See me now, I pray. Before me, there is one of Gann’s getting and I mean to give it Your final rites. I know it is a terrible thing I do and I must answer for it when I stand before You, but it is too much like a true child, Father, and that is surely how my woman sees it. I will not ask Your blessing, only Your forgiveness, and if there be a sin in what I am about to do, let it all be mine, great Sheul, because my woman knows no better, but I do.” He gathered up the limp body and held it. “And I mean to do it anyway.”

  Sheul had no answer for him, which only seemed fitting as he’d asked no questions, but the rains slackened. By the time he’d returned to his camp with the child, it had stopped entirely. Amber watched him come from where she knelt on the ground with her arms around the slave-mother, comforting her. Xzem stared at the ground, her hands clutching at one another and every muscle tensed.

  “There will be a fire,” Meoraq said, fully aware that those five words might well have damned him. “We will go to that thicket and there remain until—”

  That touch on his boot again. Meoraq felt his spines twitch, but did not allow them to flatten. He looked down, ready to be as patient and sensitive as a man could be while ordering a slave to stop grabbing at him, and found her with both hands on either side of him, palms to heaven. The touch he felt was the top of her head as she pressed it to his mud-caked boot and silently wept.

  “Thank you,” Amber said, hugging the other infant even closer. Her shift, overlarge, slipped down at the subtle movement to expose her bare shoulder and the mark of his teeth. Thoughts entirely inappropriate to this moment briefly clouded even the unpleasant sensation of the slave sobbing on his foot. His spines did flatten then, and there was nothing he could do about it. He turned his face away.

  Xzem raised her head as Amber stepped back. “Her name was Nali,” she said tremulously. “But I never told her so. Will she…know it? When you pray for her, sir? Must you call her Rosek even then?”

  The order to stop touching him burned hot in his throat, and his belly, but it did not touch his voice. “Sheul knows His children.”

  The frantic light in her eyes did not dim. “But will He know mine?”

  There were no magical answers to that and he could see his troubled silence crippling her with every passing moment, until finally, and for no reason at all, he looked at Amber.

  Seeing her, the will of Sheul became vast beyond the imagining of any man. To say that it could be captured in anything so finite as written words suddenly seemed fantastically arrogant. Even the Prophet’s own great work must pale beside His will.

  “We were all lost to Gann once,” he said. The words did not come easily, but they felt like truth. “What is lost can be found.”

  She searched his eyes, her own bleeding despair and hope so long damaged she didn’t even seem to know it was there. “Swear it, sir,” she whispered finally. “Please, swear it and it is true.”

  “No man speaks for Sheul,” said Meoraq. “But I will observe that the child lived through a long night to die here, where it…where Nali was not a slave.”

  Xzem stared at him, trying to believe him as the tears spilled endlessly from her eyes, but he had no more comfort to give her and Amber was too close, so he turned away and walked fast into the cooling wind.

  At the heart of the thicket where he took the baby was a clearing, abutted by a fallen tree, long dead and well-seasoned and protected enough by the living to be mostly dry. He built the pyre and lay her down. He still didn’t know what she was or how much sin adhered to him for the speaking of these rites, but when the hour came to make the prayers, he made them. And he made certain to call her by her name.

  13

  He took them to Praxas. He could have given a number of reasons if asked to do so (he was not). He had scant provisions and too many mouths. The raiders had every advantage in the wildlands if they ever decided to pursue. The…infant was far too young to travel indefinitely. And he had to take them somewhere, didn’t he? Surely Amber didn’t expect to keep them?

  He would have liked to ask her, but he was afraid of starting a fight. Not because of her moods, but because of his. To say truth, he couldn’t even claim to know just what her moods were, his own were so demanding. Gann’s corruption emanated from the slaves like smoke—invisible, odorless, but choking in his throat whenever he was among them. He kept his distance as much as he could, patrolling while the women rested, but as soon as he was among them, the fires began to burn in his belly and the blackness came creeping in at his mind. And Amber was always there trying to talk to him, touch him, come and sit beside him, unaware that it was Gann’s animal lust that lived in him now, Gann’s honeyed words that whispered in his ear to take her, revel in her, rut with her.

  When Amber tried to lie down with him at night, he got up and left. When he had to speak to her, he did it facing away, feeling her wounded eyes on his back like live coals. She was hurting and he did not dare embrace her. He could hear her crying softly at night, but the creeping blackness that took his words would not let him explain. She needed comfort, but until he was away from these women and cleansed of Gann’s taint, he could not give it.

  So Meoraq went back to Praxas for the very simple reason that he wanted to be rid of the slaves as soon as possible. The little time he’d spent in that city (not even the city, but at most ten paces down its Southgate tunnel) had given him the impression of an evil place, largely inhabited by men he was ashamed to call brothers under the Blade, but that wasn’t his problem. His entire intent had been to find and reclaim his wife. He had surrendered to Amber’s insistence that the raiders’ slaves had also been set in his path to be rescued solely because there wasn’t time to argue with her. Perhaps it had been Sheul’s will and so perhaps the slaves could be redeemed and brought back into the light of His lamp, but that was for the priests of Praxas to decide. Meoraq’s interests began and ended with Amber.

  At first light following the funeral for the…for Nali, Meoraq started them moving. It took too long, owing to the weakened and generally useless condition of the slaves, time which Meoraq spent as far away from them as possible while still keeping them in the shadow of his protection. With Sheul’s guidance, they reached their destination in four days and broke free of the woods surrounding the city close to dusk.

  Again, he met no sentries, but this time, it
was not for lack of them. He saw one almost immediately after leaving the treeline, but rather than come forward and challenge his party, or at least hide until he had reinforcements enough to make that seem like a good idea, the sentry took off at a run.

  Well, all right. Not a commendable act, but perhaps an understandable one. Praxas had sent away a single man and now came eight figures. The obvious conclusion? A raiding party, coming to find out who they had to thank for the visit from a Sheulek.

  Before long, the braziers were lit on the wall. In the growing dark, this sign of alarm only illuminated how much of the wall had been too heavily damaged to allow access to a brazier. Meoraq was not intimidated, but he was careful to begin hails at the soonest opportunity and to persist even when he was not answered. Their silence disturbed him far more than the lit braziers, yet they must have recognized him. No one fired upon them anyway, although he could see figures moving on the roof and behind the sealed gate. The Word forbade the use of all weapons which delivered death ‘not requiring the blow of a man’s hand,’ as the Prophet had written, but priests had ruled long ago that a man’s hand could deliver blows in a number of lawful ways—the cut of a sword, the throw of a spear…the tipping of a barrel. In defense of their cities, warriors of the walls kept flammable oils and acids or other volatile substances, not to mention hot coals in the braziers themselves, to repel attack. A city like Praxas, which commerced with raiders, might have anything…but they let him come.

  He continued to hail and they continued to ignore him. A body’s length from the gate, Meoraq halted his herd of women and went the last few steps alone. He would be calm. Threading his arms through the bars, Meoraq clasped his hands and leaned on the gate which Praxas boldly shut against him. He looked at each man who had perhaps come to fight him off. The only one who held his stare was Onahi.