Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

“Life sure as hell isn’t going to get easier,” she was saying. “Right now, the only thing standing between us and a horrible death is you. And you’re leaving. So, no. No, I am not going to stand around all damn day waiting for you to come home in one of your pissy moods because you’re doing it all yourself. If you don’t want me with you, that’s fine, I’ll figure things out by myself, but you don’t get to tell me to stay home and just…just wait to die.”

And she’d done it again. She forbade him to give her orders. Unbelievable.

“I am tending to you, human,” he said, trying very hard to sound reasonable. “It is not an easy task and requires my full attention. Do you think you can just stride out into the wildlands at my side and be anything but a hindrance? Your intentions may be good, but I can’t afford to indulge them and if you truly believe it is not an indulgence, that only proves you don’t understand how desperate your circumstances are.”

“I think you’re the one who isn’t getting it, lizardman.” She paused and raked a hand through the mess of her hair, snagging all four fingers before she had even reached her ear. She swore, disentangling herself, but the distraction quieted her some. “Listen,” she said, frowning. “Just listen, okay?”

Meoraq rubbed his brow-ridges and gestured for her to speak.

But she didn’t, not right away. She searched his face, her human mouth opening and closing, and finally she said, “There were these stray cats that lived under the building where I lived, and the lady three doors down would feed them, you know?”

Meoraq leaned back with a frown. What was she saying now? Was the argument over? Had he won or lost?

“The super kept threatening to evict her for it, so what would happen is, she’d sneak out in the middle of the night every few days and dump this bag of food out on the ground, and if you looked out the window, you could see them all together and purring as they shared it. It must have made her feel real good, like she was saving them.” She paused to frown at him uncertainly. “Are you…Are you getting any of this?”

“I mark enough. Go on.”

“Well, she wasn’t saving them. She was just feeding them. And eventually, she disappeared. I don’t know, maybe she died. My point is, she was gone and do you think the cats started catching all the rats and roaches that were absolutely infesting that building? Do you think they started taking care of themselves just because they had to?”

Meoraq glanced over at the other humans. They looked curiously back at him as they ate the food he had provided and warmed themselves at the fire he had built.

“No, they stood outside where the old lady used to feed them and yowled all day and all night, because that was what they knew how to do. And when they got hungry enough and desperate enough, what they started eating was each other. Every time you looked out there, you could see them, all those cats, with their bones showing and their fur falling out and blood all over them like…like zombie-cats, still yowling and fucking…and eating. Finally the super put out some poison. He was picking up dead cats for weeks and the moral of this story is, feeding someone isn’t saving them. You want to talk to me some more about luxuries now, lizardman?”

The hand of Sheul was heavy on his shoulder.

“I need to pray about this,” he said at last.

Her glare deepened. She folded her arms like a warrior, gripping at her slender biceps where a Sheulek’s honor-knives should be. “I’ll wait.”

He grunted and closed his eyes, finding stillness with just a few breaths. ‘Sheul, O my Father, guide me, I pray,’ he began silently, but then stopped and just sat quiet. He was not ready to know Sheul’s mind just yet. His own knew too much unrest.

There was nothing in Sheul’s Word to specifically forbid a woman from carrying a spear or standing a watch. The goodly virtues of a woman—to be invisible and chaste while in her father’s House, to show her husband meek obedience and loyalty, to be fruitful and to raise her children in the sight of Sheul—did not seem to apply to Amber’s present situation. If it dishonored her father that she was wandering the prairie in the company of so many human males, it was no concern of his. It was disgraceful behavior, perhaps, but not criminal.

You’re already sick to death of us…feeding someone isn’t saving them…

He’d felt something when she said that. He felt it again now, clarified in the quiet. He didn’t like to call it hurt…an itch, perhaps. He had fantasized many times, in much detail, during each day’s walk and each evening’s patrol about the end of this interminable journey. He had imagined walking across the courtyard of Xi’Matezh with the humans at his back and seeing the doors that had stood fast against so many travelers open wide for him. He had imagined kneeling before the holy forge at which Prophet Lashraq and the rest of the Six had met with Sheul Himself and hearing His voice spoken aloud and perhaps, just perhaps, feeling His hand with warmth and living weight upon his shoulder, looking up and seeing the very face of God looking down at him.

Ah yes.

But afterwards? If Sheul gave him no command regarding the humans who presently plagued him, what would he do with them? He could not leave them at Xi’Matezh to desecrate that holy place. Surely God would lead him to some other place. Some secluded valley, perhaps, with a slip of a stream and a few trees. He would help them build a smokehouse and fleshing pit and then he would go and let their fate fall into their own hands.

His mind conjured the fleeting impression of Amber alone with her spear in her hand, receding as with distance. He pushed it away, but now found himself thinking…If Sheul led him to that gentle valley, of course he would leave the humans there as Sheul willed. But if Sheul instead gave him his own will in the matter…what would he do then? With her?

Timeless stretches of unquiet passed and left him with no answers.

‘Well, it is very simple,’ he told himself abruptly. ‘Will you kill them?’

No. Not all of them, anyway. Scott had a way of getting under his scales, but the rest of them were only minor annoyances in a large group and once they were behind him, he thought he would forget easily enough. He didn’t need to kill them to have peace.

‘Then you will abandon them to the wilds and let them find death at the hour Sheul decides. It is not your responsibility to hold watch over all the people of the world. Besides, if they are still unable to provide for themselves after you have carried them all the way to Xi’Matezh, it can only be because they are meant to die.’

Then he would leave them to their fate, but he would take Amber with him.

‘Why?’

Why not? He would not be the only one ever to take mementos home from his pilgrimage.

‘Most people settle for bits of broken temple bricks.’

It would be as long a journey home as it was to reach the shrine and Amber made better company than a broken brick.

‘Only sometimes. She’s far more often a profound annoyance. And she’s ugly.’

He was uncomfortable with that, however true it was. Surely her flat face, furry patches, and clay-soft body would be gruesome aberrations to any dumaq, but she was human. And for a human, she was…agreeable.

‘And what will you do with your agreeable human and her agreeable pet? Because even if you convinced her to leave the rest behind—unlikely—Amber would pull the heart from her breast before she left her Nicci. Will you wander the wildlands for the rest of your days tending the two of them?’

No. With Amber, that was at least only a foolish thought. Add Nicci and it became lunacy. He would have to take up stewardship of House Uyane just to give them a place to safely stay. Even in the depths of his meditations, he could feel himself wanting to laugh at that, but before he could, the image abruptly fell on him of how it would really be to bring Amber into his House. If humans were people, then she was a woman. He would be bringing a woman into his House. His woman. And he, the steward of his bloodline.

‘At least until your brothers challenge you on the grounds that you have bound yourself to a monster.’

He’d best them.

‘You sound very sure.’

He was very sure. Even if he could be persuaded to abandon his woman and bastard children, Nduman fought with favor to his left arm ever since the judgment at Riqar and Salkith was an idiot. A well-trained idiot, but still an idiot and no match for a true Sheulek. He’d best them easily, both together if necessary, and then he’d put Nicci away in his mother’s old rooms and give her a servant or something so he wouldn’t ever have to deal with her. He could spend the rest of his life waiting to defend Xeqor and all the households of Uyane’s protection, a portrait of domesticity to do his father’s memory great honor.

‘And what will you do with Amber?’

This was disturbing for one or two short moments, and the most disturbing thing about it was the apparent ease with which his imagination was able to provide him with suggestions for how the two of them might sexually combine. Too many of his thoughts were turning in that direction lately. He accepted that for the distraction that it was, embraced it, owned it, and finally fought it down to a place where it could be ignored. Sex was not the issue. Amber was, in herself, not the issue. What was to come of the humans once he was away from them was not the issue, although it was bordering. The issue was and remained whether it was permissible or wise to set a human female at watch while he slept.

But he found he trusted Amber.

‘You don’t trust her, you just want to fuck her,’ he told himself cruelly, but the thought, although unsettling, did not sound like truth. Amber was weak and she was ignorant. She would not know every danger if she saw it. But if she did know it, by Sheul, she would defend him.

Meoraq opened his eyes on Amber, watching him with predictable exasperation and impatience. It really was the most amazingly ugly face, if one stopped to think about it. Strange, how often he simply didn’t see it.

‘She would never be boring,’ he thought, and snorted.

“That better not mean what I think it means,” she said, scowling at him with mud on her face and grass in her hair. Pinned to Gann four times, and not defeated yet.

His hand went out without his will to brush at her flat, smooth, pallid and generally disgusting brow—the second time he had done so. They both recoiled a little.

He recovered first, frowning. “So be it,” he said briskly. “We will hold watches between us at night and I will take you to hunt with me whenever possible.”

“Tomorrow?”

He hesitated, then shrugged his spines. “I could spare an hour in the morning if you rise early, although the only thing we’re likely to spear is more gruu.”

“At least it won’t run far,” she said with a crooked smile. “Maybe I can actually catch a limping potato.”

He grunted, then pointed sternly at her face. “But when I am not with you, you will stay within my camp. You go nowhere alone, do you mark me?”

“Okay, okay,” said Amber, rolling her eyes. “In the spirit of compromise, I promise to buddy up when I go to the bathroom.”

“Uyane hears your vow. You have the first watch tonight. Wake me when you begin to tire.”

“Got it.” She pushed herself onto her feet, but stayed bent awhile, brushing at dried mud and grass. This gave Meoraq the unlooked-for and not entirely unwelcome opportunity to watch her odd body in motion, so that when she finally straightened up and asked if he was going to sleep right away, the only honest answer was, “No. I think I have to pray.”

“Oh. Well…good night.” She backed up, then walked away across the camp, raising her hand as she went without bothering to look at him.

Meoraq watched her go until she took up her spear and a sentry’s position at the boundary of the camp, then resumed the assembly of his tent, trying to ignore the undeniable fact that he was profoundly, even painfully aroused. “Father,” he murmured, stabbing poles into the ground with more force than was usual. “See Your son in his ordeal and grant him the strength to endure it, because without Your hand upon me, O great Sheul, I do not know how I am going to survive this.”

Footsteps.

Meoraq glanced around, but it was Scott coming toward him, not Amber. He grunted dismissively and flattened the spines which had been flaring forward in greeting. “What do you want?”

“What were you two talking about?” the human asked, making a very poor effort to sound merely curious.

“If you wished to know, you should have come closer and joined us.”

A lengthy pause led Meoraq to silently congratulate himself on a scathingly civil retort, right up until Scott’s hesitant, “What?”

Meoraq sighed. He gave the tent-fasten under his hand a particularly vicious yank as he tied it to the pole and turned around. “I told her,” he said, speaking slowly, “to stand a watch.”

Scott stared at him and, after Meoraq had ample time to prepare a defense of this admittedly outrageous order, said, “What?”

“Go away!” snapped Meoraq and stomped past him to fetch up his pack and bedroll. “Why do you throw questions around when you cannot catch the answers? Swaggering idiot,” he muttered, ducking into his tent. “Sheul, my Father, grant me Your divine patience, and if You cannot grant me that, grant me the strength to knock his head off with one blow so that I don’t have to listen to him squeal.”

“What did he say?” called Scott, retreating.

Meoraq tied his tent shut and spread out his mat. He had the liberty to undress now, if he wished; if he opened his loin-plate the smallest degree, he would be out of it. He took his boots off, but left his clothes on and lay down. Eventually, Scott went away. The night was quiet. The wind was low. Amber was close and impossibly fierce with her pointed stick in her little hand. Meoraq prayed drowsily, indulged a few lustful thoughts of Gann’s devising, prayed some more, and slept.

* * *

He woke in his father’s room and did not, for some reason, think this was at all strange. He could smell breakfast in the making—bread baking, nai brewing, and something being fried in salty fat—which made the notion of going back to sleep considerably less attractive than it ordinarily might. His father’s cupboard-bed abutted the interior window, so he could see even without flicking the curtain aside that it was still early, not yet dawn.

He rolled over, rubbing the sleep out of his scales, and nudged the door open with his foot. The daughter of House Saluuk was there, her slender body broken into strange new alignment, but this was not strange to him either. She was pouring him a bath and she did it well, despite holding her silent, bloodied baby in one arm. Meoraq dismissed her with a wave and she went without speaking.

After washing, Meoraq opened his bedroom door and brought the first servant he saw to him. It was Shuiv, Sheulteb to House Arug in Tothax, dressed now in livery rather than a warrior’s harness, immaculate save for the small stain over his heart where his mortal wound yet bled. Meoraq gave the order for his morning meal to be brought and closed the door again, taking his father’s private stair to the roof.

His father was there already, seated on the ground with his back propped on a bench and a book balanced on one bent knee, reading. They raised hands to one another in the distracted, comfortable way they always had, but Meoraq kept walking. There were lamps lit behind the latticed wall that separated his father’s personal garden from that of his mother, and the sound of humming on the other side. Meoraq opened the connecting door without any sense of impropriety and went on in.

His mother was painting. He’d never seen her do that. She gave him an embarrassed sort of smile when he came to get a better look, turning the board so he could see the garden she had painted—a garden at night, mere suggestions of growth and blossom rendered in midnight shades of blue and black and silver, with three columns of brilliant orange fire rising at varying distance behind it. “I call it Blooms,” she said shyly.

Someone was watching him. Meoraq glanced around, not particularly troubled, to find a hooded man standing in the corner of the garden. He was dressed at first glance as an exarch, but his white robes were plainly made and worn about the hems. A priest of some sort, though. A familiar stranger.

“Do I know you?” Meoraq asked after a moment.

“I know you.”

The voice was also familiar, but only a little, as if he’d heard it in a dream.

“Where have we met?”

“We haven’t.”

“You’re in my house,” Meoraq said, but did not, oddly, draw a blade and cut him down for the invasion.

The stranger’s hood bulged as the exarch shrugged his spines beneath it. “You’re in mine. Am I not welcome?”

“I suppose so.” Meoraq returned his gaze to his mother’s painting. She was adding tiny points of white light to the dark sky there. “I think I’m dreaming.”

“Do you?” The stranger’s head tipped, curious. “Why?”

Meoraq looked down at his mother, then at the unnamed exarch. “My mother is dead,” he explained.

“So?”

“So she couldn’t really be here. This—” Meoraq waved at the garden. A few leaves fell. “—isn’t really my father’s House.”

“No,” the stranger agreed. “It is yours. Each man builds his own House and it will always be haunted.”

Most of that was nonsense, of course, but one thing did stab in deep enough to raise Meoraq from his mother’s paint-board. “Uyane is mine?” he asked, looking back at the stranger in surprise. “Am I back? Am I married?”

“Would you like to be?”

Behind him, footsteps, absurdly soft and light against the stone tiles. Meoraq straightened and turned as Amber came into his mother’s garden with Nicci trailing in her shadow. Surprised, he raised a hand in welcome. Amber smiled back at him, that grotesque human smile, and took her wristlet off. She held it out to him, saying, “I am a virgin of my father’s House.”

Nicci offered hers as well, silent, unsmiling.

Meoraq started to reach, then dropped his arm and looked back, scowling, at the exarch. “Must it be both of them?”

“It is her House also,” the exarch replied, a little sadly he thought. “And she brings her own ghosts.”

Meoraq took the wristlets, drew a sabk, pinned them both together to the flowering ribbonleaf tree that overhung his mother’s bench. A little blood welled up from the bark, trickled down the blade, let just one pregnant drop fall from the shivering hook of Amber’s wristlet onto Nicci’s.

“Now you are mine,” Meoraq told her—well, told both of them, but it was Amber he reached for.

She came, putting her hands on him in that fearless way, and there was no pretending he took her in his arms this time to bite her in some insane dream-way. He wanted exactly what he did and he wanted it with all the heat and surety that was in Amber’s bold embrace as well. Then they were naked—with his mother and Nicci and the white-robed exarch right there—and Meoraq leaned her up against the tree beneath the blade of conquest and he supposed he was inside her, although that didn’t seem important. They were face to face, and he could feel well enough her arms around him and her twinned teats pressed flat to his chest, but if there was sex going on below that, it happened without him. It was enough for him to just be with her, to see her, feel her, to need her and be needed by her, and everything that should have been wrong about that feeling—not the least of which was indulging it in this fashion while his mother sat right there on her bench and painted—was instead so overwhelmingly right that it broke the whole of the dream in two and woke him back into the world.

He lay with his heart pounding in his chest, staring without comprehension at the top of his tent until he had calmed down enough to realize two things: First, that the reason he could see the top of his tent was because he had overslept and it was a good hour after dawn, and second, his belly was wet.

Cursing, Meoraq yanked his blanket back, fought his belt open, ripped away his loin-plate, and stared in disbelief at the thin veneer of semen glistening over his scales.

He hadn’t done that in years.

He hadn’t done that in years and he’d just done it with his loin-plate on. Who did that? Who came in his sleep, fully constrained, dreaming of a…of a fucking creature?

What was wrong with him?

Meoraq fumbled angrily with his pack until he found his flask, using what little water it still held to wipe himself off. His slit felt very tender.

Outside, footsteps. The humans were awake, some of them at least, and Amber was surely among them. If he listened (he did not want to listen), he would no doubt be able to hear her particular voice among those rumbles and barks that made up the crude human speech. If he looked out, he would see her.

Meoraq buckled his belt back on, cinching it biting-tight, and dressed in furious silence. He strapped his blades on, all of them, like a Sheulek. He untied the tent’s fastens, threw back the flap, and stepped boldly out among the humans who were his trial upon this pilgrimage, and not a damned thing more.

Amber was there. She saw him. Smiled.

He felt again what he had never felt—the warm crush of her body naked against his—and felt with it some ghost of that lying emotion that was nothing but a part of this ordeal.

“Hey,” said Amber, picking up her spear as she climbed to her feet. She came toward him, smiling. “Are you ready?”

He froze, just for an instant, and suddenly remembered their talk of the previous night. Hunting. She thought he was going to teach her the ways of hunting.

He put his back to her. It helped, but not much. He started walking. “Not today. Stay here.”

“Oh come on. I promise I’ll be quiet.”

“I said, no.” He walked faster. “You were supposed to wake me.”

“I wasn’t tired.” She followed him. “I’m totally ready to do this.”

“You are tired, whether you admit it or not. You are useless to me now. Stay.”

“I’m fine, for Christ’s sake. Come on, I won’t even do anything if you don’t want me to. Please, Meoraq, I just need to see how—”

She caught at his arm and nothing else she said mattered. There was no time, only a dark place between one beat of his heart and the next in which he had time to think, completely, that he could be alone with her. Just the two of them in the wildlands, with a tree, perhaps even a ribbonleaf tree, to lean her up against…

“Get away from me!” he roared, and swung around to shout it right in her face. Her ugly face. “Don’t you ever put your hand on me again!”

She drew back and stopped smiling, both so suddenly that he might have reached out and slapped the look right off her face. Around them, human heads turned and human eyes watched. Meoraq’s heart knotted; he gave it a strike with the haft of his hunting blade and snapped, “I told you to wake me and you ignored me! I told you to stay here and you argue with me! So now I see how you obey my orders! Why would you think I would want you with me after that? I don’t like you! We’re not friends! Stop pawing at me and go sit down!”

Someone—Scott, by the smirking look of him—uttered a fluttery sound through his closed mouth. Amber heard it, too. She shot a fiery glance that way, her face darkening either with embarrassment or anger, and then turned all the way around and started to walk away from him. Not deeper into camp. Into the wildlands.

Without him.

She’d be killed.

Meoraq lunged after her and snatched the spear out of her hands.

“Give it back!”

“Stay here, I said!” he roared at her.

“I don’t need your permission! I can go if I want to! Give it back, that’s mi—”

Meoraq snapped it over his knee and threw the pieces at the ground.

Scott let out a, “Whoa!” of happy surprise and laughed again.

Amber stared at the halves of her hunting toy. Her mouth was a thin line, pressed pale, shaking at its edges.

“I shouldn’t have to spend every hour of every damned day looking after you,” said Meoraq brusquely, pushing past her. He felt heavy, as if the hand of Sheul Himself were pressing down on him, body and soul, but the words kept coming, spitting out of him as bitter as bile. “Stay here and stay out of my way.”

A scraping sound.

Meoraq looked, his hand tightening on the hilt of his kzung, knowing she had picked up half of her spear and was coming to knock it against his head.

Only she wasn’t.

She was taking it into the prairie to hunt.

“Go on, then!” he spat after her. “If there’s anything left of you for me to find, I’ll find it when my hunt is done and not before!”

She kept walking.

“O Sheul, my Father, she is Yours,” Meoraq said loudly. “And if feeding the beasts of the wildlands is as much use as she can be to You, so be it!”

Sheul’s answer was a darkening across his heart, a terrible weight of censure in his very soul. Meoraq found he could not hold his eyes to Amber’s stiff back; they went instead to the dull half of her broken spear, and his blood crawled with shame.

‘She smiled when she saw me coming,’ he thought. ‘She had come to greet me.’

He had once seen his mother come to the outer courtyard to greet his father just that way after the battle at Kuaq. Meoraq remembered well his embarrassment that she had let herself be seen so publicly and with such effluence of emotion. And he remembered how Rasozul had reached out his arm to clasp her shoulder in passing, a gentle touch shared just between them in that one moment they had, and how she had bent her neck to brush at the back of his hand with her cheek, as if the touch were all she craved in the world.

Amber was a dark stripe in the distance—a foolish female with half a spear and no strength in the arm that carried it. None of the other humans moved to follow. Not even her Nicci.

Someone came to stand beside him. Scott, of all people. Scott, wholly ignorant of how deeply Meoraq wished to bury his blade in his smirking face, saying, “You better go after her.”

Meoraq looked at him, his spines flat and his pulse surely flashing yellow in his throat. “I do not like you either,” he said quietly.

The human’s happy grimace quickly wiped itself away as Scott retreated.

Meoraq looked again into the prairie, but Amber could no longer be seen. ‘Idiot,’ he thought, and felt the word echoed back at him.

He should go after her.