The Last Hour of Gann

by R. Lee Smith

  They must be ready to move on at first light.

  So decided, Meoraq again took his lamp and went out into the darkness, this time to build a sled. He was so tired by now that he watched his hands cut and trim poles as if they were the hands of another man, feeling nothing of what he did. He didn’t know how he was going to walk all day, let alone carry Amber. The humans would be no help to him in that regard; their treatment in Praxas had not left them able to bear weight for great distances even if they could be made willing.

  Anger rose in him, bitter as bile. He swallowed it, but the taste remained.

  When he returned to camp, the fire had burned itself down to lightless red glints. He built it up again and when he could make out one human from another, he woke Eric (with a none too gentle nudge of his boot). “Take the watch,” he said, noting even as he gave the order the groggy glaze of healershand tea in the human’s eyes.

  But Eric nodded and sat himself up, rubbing at his flat, ugly face.

  “Wake me at first light or if Scott should return. Do not—” He pointed the whole of his hand into Eric’s face and immediately won the man’s full, frowning attention. “—speak with him. He has gone to Gann and so too have those who treat with him. How do you mark me?”

  Eric yawned and showed his fist, saying, “He won’t be back. He knows you’ll kill him. Hey. Is she going to be okay?”

  Meoraq glanced behind him, but of course saw only his tent. “I cannot answer, but that isn’t what you truly want to ask, is it?”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “If she dies, I will turn you out.” Meoraq glanced around and caught a shadow of dark thought in Eric’s eye before his human face closed. “There was a time I thought almost well of you,” Meoraq said with a thin smile. “But you have grown to like the taste of the poison S’kot fed you. Now you talk out of two mouths, the same as he. I have no use for you. If my wife insists on it, there will be a place for you in Xeqor. If she doesn’t—” His spines flicked. “—there won’t.”

  “You have no idea what we’ve been through.” Eric’s jaw clenched, but his voice did not rise and he bent his neck before he spoke. If his time in Praxas had taught him nothing else, it had taught him manners. “I don’t even think you can understand it. I don’t think there’s one thing in your privileged life that allows you to know what it’s been like for us since we crashed on this planet. Even Amber knows we did the best we could.”

  Tired as he was, Meoraq smiled an honest smile. “She said that, didn’t she? I can almost hear her say it. And if I had been there to see it, I would have seen no lie in her eyes and do you know why? Because she wants so much to believe it. Like S’kot and his fever-dream ship. She believes it because she has done the best she could every step of this road. Yes. Now. Look into my eyes, human, and tell me you have done the same.”

  “Why should I? I already know you think it’s a lie.”

  “I do know it’s a lie,” Meoraq agreed. “I want to know if you do. So speak, human. We’ll judge your words together.”

  “I think I’ll wait,” said Eric after a moment, “until you’ve slept.”

  “Is my sense of judgment in doubt?” Meoraq asked, blackly amused. “Is that what you’re telling me? Is that what you’re saying to the Sword and the Striding Foot of God?”

  “I’m saying when I’m tired, I’m not always as objective as I could be.”

  “Spoken like a priest. It’s easy to tell who had the keeping of you.” And that really was spiteful. Meoraq made himself stop talking, even if he couldn’t quite make himself apologize. A Sheulek was not required to be civil so long as he was honest.

  Eric made no reply, but his eyes in the firelight burned.

  “At first light,” Meoraq said again and was answered with a silent salute. He went into his tent where the scent of human blood was strong and lay down as far from his wife as he could. Her breaths in the dark were loud and not even; her face, if he could see it, would be strained. He listened, thinking he should pray for her once more so that those were the last words Sheul heard from his heart tonight and not the ones he’d given Eric, and so thinking, he closed his eyes and was deeply asleep at once.

  * * *

  His dreams were tangled things, impossible to put in meaningful order. It seemed to him it began in Tothax, because his cousin Nkosa was there and the two of them spent some measureless time together on the rooftop before the edges blurred away and he was walking with Amber across the plains of Yroq. She was limping, falling behind, and when he finally turned around in a senseless kind of dreaming rage to yell at her, it was not Amber any longer but Nicci instead. Her shoulder was bleeding, fresh blood in the shape of toothmarks, and he knew with all the certainty of dreams that her father had bitten her, to force Meoraq to take her in. She held out her arms to him, her face cold, mewling at him after the manner of a dumaqi woman and hating him with her eyes. Then he was somewhere deep in ruins, slaughtering raiders as they came for him, slaughtering their slave-women as they cowered and ran, slaughtering their screaming children. He thought he must be looking for Amber, to save her, but when she came out of the darkness, his sword went before him and the roar that tore from him as she fell was not grief, but rage. He turned around, surrounded on every side by blood and death, and found himself trapped behind a wall of glass and there were Ancients on the other side, standing over their unknowable machines, watching him. One of them came down from the dais and reached out to him, reached right through the glass that Meoraq beat his fists raw against, and put his hand on Meoraq’s shoulder.

  Meoraq awoke with a violent start, seeing first the figure from his dream looming over him and then Scott and finally, truthfully, Eric.

  “You said dawn,” the human reminded him, withdrawing. “I made some tea.”

  “Stay out of my tea box,” Meoraq muttered uncharitably and rolled over to have a look at Amber’s wound in the dim morning light.

  She came awake with a high cry as he lifted her blanket, then slumped back and stared at him blearily from deep in her sunken sockets. “What is it about the second day that makes everything hurt worse?”

  “Swelling,” he replied, peeling away her poultice. The flesh beneath was deep red and swollen, but not so badly as he feared. Blood stained her bandages, but not pus. Not yet. He grunted, then carefully pressed it down again. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I have a fever.”

  He moved closer and lay his chin briefly over her brow. “You don’t,” he said, relieved. “But you have lost a great deal of blood. It must be—”

  Her arms slipped around his neck and weakly held him. He shut his eyes, feeling only her trembling embrace, and wished with all his bitter heart that they had never come to Gedai.

  “I want you to drink a little tea,” he murmured at last, gently pulling away. “And then we have to go.”

  “Oh, Meoraq, I don’t think I can.”

  “I’ve made a sled to carry you.”

  Her face twisted, dismayed, even as she tried to laugh. “It’s one slice of shit-cake after another with me, isn’t it? Why did you marry me?”

  “God gave you to me.”

  “Did you keep the receipt?”

  He didn’t know what that meant, although he knew it wasn’t worth a response. He lifted her, ignoring her sounds of pain and the obvious strain of not giving them full voice. Shouldering his way out of the tent, he found Nicci and the other humans by the fire, warming up cold meat for the morning meal. “Leave that,” he ordered. “You can eat as we walk. N’ki, fill the flask and pack the food. The rest of you, take down the tents and the walls.”

  “Please,” called Amber, white-faced with pain.

  “You don’t say please to servants,” he said crossly, setting her on the sled.

  “Yeah, I know what you people do with servants. Leave them alone.” Her brows furrowed in an expression something like embarrassment. “Feels like I’m bleeding again.”

  He chec
ked. She was. He didn’t have much healershand left—it was surprising enough that the provisioner in Chalh had thought to give him any—but he chewed half of what he had and painted it onto her wound, careful not to crush the beetle heads.

  “You want to hear something funny?” Amber asked in a muffled voice. She’d shut her eyes as soon as he’d lifted her bandages and now had her hands firmly pressed over her face, as if to stop herself peeking.

  “Not really, but go on.”

  “This would be no big deal where I’m from. I could just go to the clinic on the corner and get patched up. They’d give me back all the blood I lost, slap on some syntheskin and send me home with some pain pills and if it had happened on a Friday, I’d be back to work on Monday. Do you believe that?”

  He grunted, re-affixing her compress. “I believe you are not lying. I have no idea what you’re saying. You can look now.”

  She lowered her hands—they trembled—and opened her eyes—they were glassy. “When are you going to tell me that this is what I deserve for doing such a stupid thing in the first place?”

  “I’m not,” he said, bringing out the first of the binding straps and passing it beneath her legs. “I know you acted only to save the lives of your…” He paused to let a few unspoken adjectives blow away in the wind, then finished, “people.”

  “Yeah, but not getting yelled at is making me think I’m a whole lot more hurt than I thought I was. Level with me, lizardman.” She grabbed at his arm, missed, and finally caught him. “How bad is this?”

  “Lesser wounds have killed,” he said. “Greater wounds have healed.”

  He could tell that wasn’t much comfort to her. Truth, it wasn’t much comfort to him either.

  He fetched what tea was left in his stewing pouch after the humans had been at it and poured it into his new metal flask, then brought it back for her to drink. She managed only a few sips, grimacing at the taste, which was a perfectly good winterleaf blend. “For now, know that you are in His sight.”

  “Like I was when He let me get on the ship?”

  “The ship that brought you to me, yes.” He grazed the backs of his knuckles gently across her brow. “He set you on this path, Soft-Skin. Have faith that He will see you reach this journey’s end.”

  She looked up at him with her weary, pain-dull eyes and said, matter-of-factly, “He doesn’t love me like He loves you, Meoraq.”

  It hurt his heart.

  “Even if that were true, and I say it is not…” He knelt down beside the sled and lay his hand over hers. The only warmth in it came from the flask she held. “If He loves me, He will never let you die.”

  “And nobody believed me when I said they were doing it,” Crandall remarked, helping Dag roll up one of the walls. “That shit’s just embarrassing.”

  Meoraq grunted, still looking only at Amber, who offered him a crooked sort of smile. “You’re not going to let me hit him, are you?”

  “You really shouldn’t.”

  “Opinions differ.” He tapped the flask in her hands meaningfully and left her to help his humans finish breaking camp. As he passed Crandall, he glanced back and, seeing Amber’s eyes shut tight against the taste of the tea, delivered a swift slap to the back of the human’s hairy head.

  * * *

  They made terrible distance that day, but Meoraq comforted himself with the knowledge that every span gained was another he put between them and Praxas and that, at least, was something. And it wasn’t as bad as it could have been because in spite of his sour prediction, the humans did volunteer themselves to carry the back end of Amber’s sled when the terrain made pulling impossible, which was often. There was far less complaining than there had been herding them across Yroq (he could not remember much of their nature in the few days he’d had them after Praxas. Truth, all his memories from the moment Sheul had taken him in the raider’s nest until his arrival at Chalh were stained dark and remained largely beyond recall) and they kept quietly to themselves whenever he stopped them for rest. It could never be a good day, given the circumstances, but it was tolerable.

  Yet as the hours wore on, Amber visibly weakened. She remained cool to his questing touch and her wound did not worsen, but the unavoidable rocking of the sled caused her such pain that she could not bear to travel more than a quarter-span at a stretch. He urged tea on her until the single waterskin S’kot had left to them was dry, trusting to Sheul to fill them, but the only water they met with on their travels was the rain, which was just heavy enough to soften the ground, not enough to fill their flasks.

  The sun had scarcely begun its descent when Meoraq ordered the walls up and while his humans made his camp for him, he ran on ahead to scout this inhospitable land. He found no free water, but in a murky fen half a span away, he did find an abundance of wild healershand just out of the bud, as well as some iseqash herb, which would help her to sleep. Meoraq knelt in the mud and gave thanks, took what Sheul had given him, and ran with it back to his camp, arriving just after nightfall to find Amber and Nicci asleep in his tent, the rest of them asleep in the other tent, and a small pack of ghets making an easy meal of their provisions.

  Meoraq’s roars brought the humans out of their tents (except for Amber, although by the sound of it, she tried) and chased off the scavenging beasts, but the damage was done. The mouths of ghets were the mouths of Gann himself; every scrap of meat they’d touched must be presumed to be poison now.

  Meoraq sat up through the late hours to burn it, counting six breaths whenever he felt the color coming to his throat and giving God thanks at each one that the ghets had fed out of his packs and not the tent where Amber lay helpless. He had most of a brick of cuuvash left from that given him in Chalh and it would have to last.

  It was the first of seven days’ travel, but each was essentially the same, trapping him in one endless hour for as long as the sun shone behind the clouds. He led them well around Chalh—not without misgivings—and picked up the thin trail of the Crossways in the east, following it through the hilly forests of Gedai and along the crumbling streambanks where they drew their bitter water. He did not seek for Scott and his cattle in their shadow. He tended only Amber, spoke to no one but God.

  On the seventh day, as his cuuvash was down to its final bites and Amber’s swollen wound had begun to show the yellow crust of infection at last, the road brought them to the open mouth of an underlodge—old, but not too long empty or at least not overgrown. Uyane’s steward in Chalh had mentioned there were many of these along the way to Xi’Matezh. Heartened, Meoraq called a halt and pried open the door to investigate.

  The short stair opened on a large round room, equipped with a fair-sized hearth and separate smoke-room, various pots and basins, a table and chairs, even a proper cupboard to sleep in. It would hold all his humans comfortably and provide them sturdy shelter against both the beasts of Gedai and the weather while Amber recovered.

  When he went back to the surface and told the humans of his decision, they all looked at Amber and then gave Meoraq the same unquiet glance.

  “What?” he snapped, glaring at Eric, who seemed to have made himself their leader in Scott’s absence.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then take the gear and get below.”

  They took him at his word, each man carrying the sheets and poles of the wind-break into the store-house and then going down into the underlodge, where they stayed. Only Nicci lingered beside the sled, although that was most likely to avoid having to carry provisions, since she made no move to help Amber up. Meoraq unloaded alone, dropping blankets, packs and bundled tents down the opening (and perhaps on some lazy human’s head, he thought peevishly), before unfastening Amber from the sled and gathering her into his arms. She slung her arm around his neck to help support her weight, but she did not open her eyes. Seven days of rest in a moving sled in the wildlands was no rest at all; she looked even paler and more strained now than when he’d first seen her and her only response to his nuzzling was a weary
pucker of pain.

  “Is she going to be all right?” Nicci asked.

  He didn’t know and his uncertainty sparked at once to anger. “Why are you asking me?” he snapped at her. “I am not Sheul, to close wounds and purify flesh! I end life, I don’t make it.”

  In his arms, Amber frowned. “Should I be worried that you seem to think making life is going to be necessary?”

  “Hush,” he told her.

  They went down into the darkness, which was not as dark as it could have been, since Eric had done him the astounding service of rifling through his pack to light his lamp. Dag had brought out what remained of Meoraq’s wrapped cuuvash and the little pot of honey he’d been using to sweeten Amber’s tea, and Crandall was even now pouring himself a drink from Meoraq’s flask into Amber’s cup.

  “What—” Meoraq began, almost conversationally, then changed his mind. “Get back, you parasites!” he roared, and they all scattered to the walls.

  “Six breaths,” Amber murmured in his arms.

  “I’m calm. A Sheulek is always calm.” He sat her carefully at the table and gave her her cup. Grumbling, he hauled his mat to the simple cupboard and opened it violently enough to pull its neglected door off its runner. It took some time to shove it back into place, but soon enough he had it on and the interior slapped clean of beetle-husks and grit. “Great Father, give me healing for my woman’s wound,” he hissed, as he unrolled his mat and made up his bed within. “And if You cannot give me that, give me the strength not to kill the rest of her people in front of her.”

  “You’re in such a cheerful mood,” Amber remarked.

  “Lies.”

  “All right, you’re being a bitch.”

  “I told you to hush.”

  He put her in the cupboard and set a blanket over her. The humans watched him warily as he unpacked the rest of his gear and put the lodge in order. It didn’t take long; he didn’t have many things. “We stay here until I give the order to move on,” he announced, snatching up the empty waterskin to sling around his shoulder. “My kills are not yours. Hunt for yourselves or go hungry. My woman is resting. Do not disturb her.”