Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 33 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

But maybe he did, because in the end, he grunted and set Scott on the ground. “So. I consider the matter closed, and I will hear no more about it,” he warned, sheathing his sword. “I will not allow you to preach at me all the way to Gedai. If I am present, you are silent.”

Scott straightened out his jacket (too briskly; one of the sleeves tore a bit up at the shoulder when he tugged at the cuff, exposing the slightly deeper crimson of the other jacket he wore beneath it) and nodded once, in a commanding way. “I have to admit that I am disappointed.”

“I am present,” Meoraq said curtly. “You are silent. And we are leaving.”

He proved it, walking away up the street without even a backwards glance to see if people obeyed them. They did, drawing off in little groups to whisper and giving him plenty of distance, but they did. Amber lingered, wanting to run after him, to walk beside him and soak in his confidence until she could wear it like a coat and let all these ugly stares just bounce off. She thought he might let her, even if he wasn’t too happy about it, but she also knew how it would look. Not just like she was running off to hide under Meoraq’s skirts after he’d gone waving his sword around again, but like she’d put him up to it in the first place. They might already think so—and if they didn’t, Scott would have them thinking it before long—but she wasn’t going to show them they were right.

“Come on, Nicci,” said Amber, reaching out her hand. “The sooner we get out of here, the better things will—”

“Leave me alone,” Nicci said, anger thinning her voice into a caricature of their mother’s. “Just leave me alone. I’ll talk to you later, but right now, I’m so sick of you that I can’t even look at you!”

“Nicci—”

“I’ll take care of you, Nicci!” Nicci spat, screwing up her face in a horrible sing-song sneer. “We don’t have a choice, Nicci! I know what I’m doing, Nicci!” Each name was another bullet and when the chamber was empty, Nicci threw the gun. “I wish Mama was here instead of you.”

And as Amber stood there, stupidly gaping, her baby sister deliberately raised her arm and slapped her in the face. The blow mostly caught her on the cheek, a little on the nose. Heat flooded her wind-chilled face. Amber didn’t move.

Nicci turned around and left her. She ran to catch up with Scott (i was going to do that wasn’t i but it was meoraq i wanted meoraq i want now O god to catch his arm the way she does and have someone to walk with) and they all walked away.

“She didn’t mean it,” said Amber, alone in the street. “She always comes back and we’ll say we’re sorry and it’ll be fine.”

“I have to believe that,” the recording in the kiosk hissed. “I have to. I do.”

Amber looked at him. The lizardman in the screen looked back at her through a haze of static. Then the image blipped once, hard, and the whole kiosk went black and silent. A thin plume of smoke rose out of the speakers and the wind took it away.

She started walking.

4

Meoraq viewed the time spent in the ruins as time lost and it took some hard driving over the next few days to make it up. Without the distraction of the ruins to stop and stare at, they moved themselves along much faster, faster even than they had moved before they had ever seen the damned place. Scott used his lies as a cattleman used a bait-stick and the humans were just as happy to trot in pursuit as any mindless beast. Truth, as long as it kept them moving at this pace and he didn’t have to listen to it himself, Meoraq was content to let Scott make all the promises he liked, although he knew it upset Amber.

As it should upset him. “To let a lie stand is to speak it with your own throat.” That was in the very first verse of the very first chapter in the Book of Admonitions. Meoraq could remember learning to make his letters by that self-same verse, and how his hand had cramped in the practice because he could not make them perfectly at first undertaking. And now he stood, twelve years gone in the service of Sheul, willing to close his eyes to the sin in his own camp for the false peace that masked it.

Meoraq meditated on this—once they were well-gone from the ruins and he had some leisure to do so—but an hour’s prayer at his fireside with all the humans milling nearby in their clumsy, complaining way proved too much a distraction. His thoughts kept turning from the failings of his character to places he had no desire to explore: the image of the ship set in tiles on the wall; House Uyane and whether Nduman had been called home from his own circuit (or from the woman and bastard children he covertly kept) to manage its households while Meoraq took this pilgrimage; Amber throwing herself against him, frightened by the storm.

That was the image that hooked on him and he found himself opening his eyes to study her where she sat now. He thought she looked thinner. He couldn’t be certain of it, but he thought so. He hadn’t really paid that much attention to her body until the night she’d bathed beside his tent and cast her shadow over it…and crawled in to him afterwards…and he knew that filthy, ragged clothing such as she wore had a way of making the body beneath seem smaller, but he didn’t think she looked right.

She’d had a pot of tea with him this morning before their travels, and a largish share of his cut of the gruu he’d found last night, but his share had been a spare one to begin with. Before that, there had been only bites of cuuvash for him and her both. The last real meal she’d taken had been days before coming across the ruins.

So. He would meditate later. His obligations came first.

Meoraq found his feet and beckoned to Amber. She looked at him, but did not move from her place at his fire. “Keep your people close until I return,” he ordered.

She didn’t ask where he was going. Neither did she take up her spear and try to join him. He wouldn’t have allowed it in any case, but she didn’t even try. She only bobbed her head in silence. She was watching Scott’s fire, so he watched it too, but saw nothing unusual about the throng of humans that surrounded it.

A thought struck.

“Where is your N’ki?” he asked.

“Over there, somewhere.” Amber turned away to prod listlessly at Meoraq’s fire with a bit of burnt stick. “She’s still mad at me.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Well, that wasn’t strictly truth: He could have easily told her that Nicci was a mewling little pest whose opinion ought to matter about as much as the mud on which Amber sat, but he knew it wouldn’t help. He often found it incomprehensible that the same Amber who dared to strike him with her naked hand and shout insult into his face could be so beaten down by a single scornful glance from the wretched sack of flesh that was her blood-kin. He didn’t say that either.

“Stay here,” he said instead and was further troubled when she gave that same silent acquiescence, enough to say against all wisdom: “Or come with me, if you wish.”

She glanced toward her spear, but touched it only with her eyes. Her head turned side to side, a human refusal, wordless. Spiritless. “I don’t want to leave her.”

“I’m not running you on into Gedai, just out for a short hunt. I thought you wanted to learn how,” he added, trying to prick at her.

“I do, but…” She looked up at him and away. “When she comes looking for me, I need to be here.”

He snorted.

She did not respond.

‘She’s dying,’ he thought suddenly, and was alarmed to find how swiftly and completely he believed it. The flesh was not the only part of a man that could die. The soul was eternal, not immortal. Whatever circumstance had brought her here (even if that circumstance was not a flying ship from another world, which was still flatly impossible) had left deep wounds in Amber. Now Nicci was carving more, and over what?

Scott. Scott and his talk of ships in Xi’Matezh.

He could do nothing for her (although the thought of dragging Nicci out of her nest of mewling friends and slapping some respect into her was appealing on some base level) except leave without pressing her further, so he did.

The wind was strong and sharp with the first of winter’s teeth. He could see rain on the horizon, but not moving this way, not yet. Still, there was a heaviness in the air that said the season’s storms were in the brewing and he was not surprised the game was in hiding. Night was coming on and unless he wanted to lose himself in the open plains after dark, he needed to find something quickly. Even another patch of gruu, bitter as it had been, would be welcome. His eyes were always open, tracking without conscious direction every small sign of life the wildlands gave up, but his mind wandered. Amber. It should have been all of them—Amber wasn’t the only one who hadn’t had a full belly in days—but no matter how often he set the aim of his inner thoughts, they always came back to Amber.

“Sheul, O my Father, hear Your son,” he muttered, his voice no louder than the wind that stirred the dead grass. Yes, he wanted God to hear him, but not the game, if there was any. “Raise up Your lamp and show me what I am meant to do. You have given me the charge of these humans and I have labored mightily in that appointment, O Father, but it is not enough. They are growing weak in my care, great Sheul. Weak in flesh and weak in spirit. Grant me Your wisdom, I pray, that I may strengthen them in turn and do Your will by them, whatever that will may be.”

Sheul walked with him, he was sure, but was silent.

Meoraq kept moving, pausing often to inspect each patch of spoor, but found nothing fresh enough to follow. There might be a few rogue males about for another brace of days, too weak or too unwelcome to join their herds in their seasonal migration, but after that came the true test. After that, he must either hunt tachuqis or corrokis—one, a vicious sword-footed predator; the other, an armor-plated club-tailed behemoth. Neither were likely to be solitary at this time of year. Both were dangerous even to seasoned warriors, invariably lethal to the inexperienced. If he could just get by until he reached the mountains, there would be other game—woolly xauts and burrows filled with mimuts, just right for two to share. Even the thuochs who preyed on them were said by some to be tasty. And once over the mountains…well, Meoraq had no idea what there might be for hunting in Gedai, but it had to be better than this. It would be warming up again by the day of his return, when the herds would come back, and it would be an easy road to Xeqor, if that was how Sheul directed him. In the meantime, he was here with all his humans and they were hungry. Amber was hungry.

“Father, I’ve no resistance to sharing out my cuuvash,” he said, crouching to investigate the long-dried track of a ghet—many ghets—in the thin layer of mud that had washed over this slice of earth in the last storm. Ghets, too, would be plentiful in the plains during the cold season. They would also be poison, in their meat and in their mouths, so if there were any nearby, he wanted to know it. “I will even share it out with all of them, although it would cost me all I have left, damn their greedy mouths, and they will be crying at me again tomorrow.”

But not Amber. Her mind was so full of Scott’s poison and Nicci’s pettiness that she might not even feel hunger anymore. He wanted to do something for her. A full belly would be a fine start, but it ought to be more than that. He fed all the humans, regardless of personal feeling. He wanted to set Amber apart in a way that she could see, to show her that he did believe she was ‘different,’ that they were still ‘good.’

Now if only he had some idea how to do that.

“It is a silly thing for one of Yours to trouble over, my Father,” admitted Meoraq aloud. “But what strengthens the heart, strengthens the whole. So if You have no other will in this small matter, I pray You inspire me, because I haven’t the dimmest spark of an idea how to make a human happy.”

The wind sighed. The sense of a watching eye, a listening ear, had never been stronger outside of the arena. Meoraq grew still, straining with all his soul to receive his Father’s word, but there was nothing.

So never mind humans. What did women like? Amber was a woman.

His mother had been fond of sweets, not that she’d ever said so in Meoraq’s hearing, but Rasozul had almost always brought her a little pot of honey or a tin of fancies if he left the house, and she’d always received it with embarrassing enthusiasm. Meoraq still had most of the honey he’d been given in Xheoth and he didn’t mind making a present of it, but it seemed wrong somehow to just hand over something he already had and wouldn’t much miss. He didn’t know what to do, but he wanted it to show some effort. Besides, Amber would only feed the honey to her blood-kin anyway.

If he had a better idea of where he was, he might make a run to the nearest city and find something there. More tea and cuuvash—that was only practical—and something special just for Amber. Pretty clothes? But no, she’d give them all to her Nicci and go on wearing hers to rags. What else did women like? A new wristlet, maybe; hers was rather plain.

But it was a long way to go and a great risk to take over something she couldn’t really use. What he wanted was something she wanted. Something that would make her happy. Something…

The wind gusted again. Meoraq turned his head, just to get the sting of it out of his eyes, and there before him saw a clean saoq track in the only patch of ground nearby soft enough to take one.

He smiled. “Yes, my Father,” he said. “I hear You. Necessity before desire.”

He readied his kzung, put the thoughts of wristlets and fancies from his mind, and returned himself to hunting.

The tracks led him to a small pile of saoq droppings, still warm. Shortly afterwards, Meoraq had the beasts themselves in his sight, a small herd of males banded together against the coming winter. He killed two of them and they landed in their death-throes atop a cluster of lhichu…

Lhichu! The stalks of the plant were strong and supple enough to let him truss the saoqs together, but it was the roots he thought of, the roots he had been meant to see.

Sheul’s hand rested briefly on Meoraq’s shoulder and took itself away, but not far. Never far. Meoraq prayed his thanks and knelt to gather in his blessings.

Amber came to help when he returned with the saoqs, carrying Scott’s share over to his fires and keeping the rest of the humans out of his way until Meoraq was done with the butchery. When she came back, he gave her a sabk and the offal and put her to work making the skewers that would be their own meal, and while she was busy with that, he set the two saoq heads down on a sturdy patch of ground and cracked their heads open. Then the heads went on the fire—not without some regret; the meat wouldn’t be near as tender with the skull open and empty—and Meoraq put the brains in his stewing pouch with water, hot stones, and the chopped lhichu root. He mixed this into a thick paste with his hands, shook them clean, more or less, and then turned to her and said, “Take off your clothes.”

Several of the nearer humans twisted around to stare at them. The one called Crandall let out a loud whooping sound and began to laugh.

“No,” said Amber, plainly startled.

“Just your breeches then, at least.” He unfastened his own harness and shrugged out of his tunic.

“The hell I will!”

“Please yourself,” said Meoraq with a shrug of his spines. He took Amber’s shoulder and shoved her firmly to the ground, then picked up one of the saoq hides and dropped it in her lap.

She let out a startled cry, trying unsuccessfully to scoot out from under it.

“Be quiet and learn something.” He removed his breeches and sat down facing her wearing nothing but his loin-plate, which, being metal, was easily washed. He handed her one of the scrapers from his pack, pulled the second hide over his folded legs, and went to work. “You will find it tempting to stroke along the grain, but it is far more effective to cut against it,” he told her. “Start at the neck, like this, and work your way down. Let the weight of the unfinished hide pull against your grip and keep it as taut as possible. If we had trees, I would show you how to build a frame, but that will have to wait for a future lesson. How do you mark me?”

“I’m covered in blood! Damn it, lizardman, I’ll never wash this shit out!”

“I told you to take your clothes off.”

She scowled at him, then picked up her scraper and hunted out the neck of the saoq’s hide. Her first clumsy pass only smeared the bloody fat across the membrane, but before he could correct her, she leaned over to see what he was doing and copied it with a fair amount of success. As he’d hoped, having something to do had brought her back to life. Having something to prove would liven her even more.

“Just throw it in the fire,” he said when she had her first handful of scrapings. “Try not to get blood on the cleaned area.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He showed her his work. “This is what it should look like.”

“How the hell are you…? Okay.” She bent, yanking at the hide to try and keep it taut, and scraped harder. “Like this?”

“Keep your wrist straight and the pressure of your hand even as you stroke. Go slowly until you know how the tool wants to move in your grip.”

“That sounds so dirty and you don’t even realize it. You’ve done the whole neck already,” she said, eyeing it with hot disbelief. “How are you doing that so fast?”

“Practice. This is not a contest. Mind your own work.” He took a moment to roll some of his excess cleaned hide, noting as he did so that the other humans were still watching them. No one looked particularly interested in the work itself. They appeared to just be watching him and Amber…and some of them were smiling.

“You understand these people,” he said crossly. “What are they staring at?”

“The guy who told me to take my clothes off.”

“What does that have to do with—” He broke off and looked her, then at himself in his loin-plate only, and then at her again. Bizarrely, the first words that came from his throat were no heated denial, but merely, “What, here in front of them?”

She rolled one shoulder. “Dinner and a show.”

“Is that what you thought?”

“No.” Firelight could be deceptive, but her face seemed pinker than it was. “I don’t know…No!”

Meoraq’s spines twitched. “How can you not know what you were thinking?”

“The same way you can not know what it looks like when you start stripping and tell a girl to take her clothes off,” she replied. “Nice panties, by the way.”

It was a joke, although its meaning eluded him. “And when I began to cook the brains?” he inquired, pointing back at the satchel with his scraper.

“Soup.”

“You thought I meant to feed you brains?”

“How is that more disgusting than what you always feed me?”

“Example!” he demanded, laughing through his incredulity.

“How about all the heads?” she shot back, pointing at the two in the fire.

“The head is the best part,” he replied. “I save it for myself and allow you to share it.”

“Okay, marrow. Marrow is horrible.”

“The food of lords and abbots,” he countered. “Delicious.”

“Liver.”

“Ah, well. Liver is good for you.”

She finally gave him a smile, even if it was a pale effort. “So yeah, brain soup. Mmm-mmm, good.”

He gave her a teasing hiss and went back to work on his hide. “The Book of Oyan forbids men to eat either brain or bowel, so you need never fear that particular dish be set before you. Besides which, I’ve put lhichu in that, which is probably poisonous.”

“Put what in it?”

“Lhichu root. To preserve the hide and soften it some. These will never be quality leathers, of course, but they would be utterly unworkable without lhichu.”

“Yours will be okay,” she told him, tossing another handful of scrapings on the fire and taking a moment to change out the stone in the simmering brains for a hotter one.

“You don’t mark me. I mean that we are merely curing these, not tanning them.”

“Why not?” she asked and immediately rolled her eyes and answered, “Takes too long.”

“I would not begrudge the time if you learned something from it, certainly not something as useful as tanning, but we don’t have a fleshing pit. A brain-cure and smoke will be sufficient for our needs until Sheul provides the means for better.”

“I didn’t catch that one word. We don’t have a what?”

“A fleshing pit. A lined hole or even just a basin where we would soak the raw hides in rending matter so that they could be more easily defleshed. If we tried to take the scales off without one, we would tear the hide to pieces.”

“Oh, I get it.” She started to scrape again, then paused and looked sharply up. “Wait, soak them in what?”

“Rending matter,” he repeated patiently. “Stale urine, mostly. And various other ingredients to bate and soften skins. The hides would soak several days, depending on whether the beast has scales or hair—”

And then he realized why she’d stopped him. ‘Rending matter,’ he’d said, using the single dumaqi word which loosely summed up all the unpleasant materials used in the process, and that word, of course, was s’kot.

He glanced around at the other humans, but watching hides being cleaned was tedious work and they had returned to their own side of camp to watch the saoqs cook. Scott was there, too far away to hear his name in Meoraq’s mouth and learn its meaning (the low part of him that heard Gann’s whispers felt a short pang of disappointment), but Amber heard, Amber understood. He raised his eyes to her, braced for the eruption.

She was smiling. “You know, I always wondered why you said it like that, with that little hitch in the skuh-part.”

“It seemed fitting.”

“Extremely. What does human mean?”

“Eh?”

“Don’t play dumb. Human. You say it weird. Like yooo-mont. What is it?”

“It refers to a kind of beetle.”

“A good kind?”

“Not…particularly.” And because he knew the question was inevitable, he added, “This is n’ki,” as he drew a careless loop in the air with his scraper. “The form of it, you mark? The…eh…the roundness.”

Her brows creased. “I don’t get it. Nicci’s not fat.”

“I didn’t need a word with true meaning. I just needed a word.”

She watched him work. Her brows stayed wrinkled. “Why?”

“It is one of the laws of Sheul. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word and your name cannot be spoken in dumaqi.”

“Seriously? It’s a sin to speak another language?”

“Not one of the unforgiveable sins,” he admitted. “But even the smallest flecks of shit will eventually flavor the stew.”

“Gross, Meoraq.”

“Mud, then. My point is, even the smallest sins can weigh heavy with repetition.” He hesitated, his hands slowing, and said, “Did you never wonder why I have never called you by your name?”

“Well…yeah.” She rolled her shoulders, keeping her attention on her hide. “I figured it was just your way of telling me to keep my distance. Like when Scott calls me Miss Bierce and I call him Everly, you know?”

“No. I have never understood why either of you did that.” He glanced at her, then glared fixedly at his hands and pretended to care what they were doing to the hide. “I assumed they were human endearments.”

“What? No! My God, man, why would you even think that?”

Taken aback, he could only gesture with his scraper toward the other humans, attracting some attention, but only some. Scott’s sermon had spread to include a larger crowd. “I thought that was what you people did.”

“Why, because of Eric and Maria and all their kissy-baby talk?”

“They aren’t the only ones who do that and it always seems affectionate.”

“Trust me, when it’s Scott, it’s not us being cute. We genuinely hate each other.”

Meoraq grunted, unaccountably pleased, and then looked up again. “You think I don’t use your name because I hate you? I don’t hate you.”

“Yeah, yeah. You don’t hate me.” Even though she was smiling, the words struck at his Sheulek’s ears as a lie. He saw her again, sprawled in the mud with her bare foot thrust through the torn bottom of her boot, shouting that he hated her, that she was nothing to him but a nuisance, or words equal to that meaning. She might smile now, but there was something in her that believed it, something he knew he was to blame for, because he didn’t know what else to do but push her away…or bring her in closer.

“I don’t hate you,” he said.

“Okay, whatever. We can drop it now.”

He should. All the good feeling that had nested in him since receiving the lhichu had dimmed to coals and he could see the shadow creeping in again over Amber. He could shut the door, find something new to talk about, and maybe it would feel the same…but he didn’t think so.

“Look at me,” he ordered.

She did, with exasperation and defiance, and that was so damned incredible and she was so damned ugly, it seemed to go right around the wheel of funny and turn into something heart-breaking instead.

“It is Uyane Meoraq before you,” he said. “Son of Rasozul, who was son of Ta’sed, who was son of Kuuri, who was the forty-third son of the line descended of the Prophet’s Uyane Xaima. I am my House, that which champions the city of Xeqor in the state of Yroq, in the hour and the land of Gann. I am the Sword and the Striding Foot of Sheul. I am all these things and I say to you, I do not hate you.”

She met this declaration with a huffing breath and went back to scraping at her hide with considerably more force and less precision than before.

“You don’t believe me,” Meoraq realized.

“Actions speak louder than words, lizardman. Especially the ones you don’t say.”

“That ought to be my argument,” he shot back. “Who am I sitting with right now? Who am I teaching to cure a hide? What does a name matter? And if it bothers you, why haven’t you said anything until now?”

“Because I thought it was all of us!” She yanked the hide, half-done, further over her knee and went to work on the bloodier side, her arm jerking and slashing. “And then when you started saying people’s names, I figured I’d be next eventually. But now I know that, thanks to your stupid God, I get to be ‘Hey, you,’ for the rest of my life and you don’t even think there’s anything wrong with that!”

“Mind your work. If it upsets you this much, I’ll give you a dumaqi name.” The offer was bitter in his mouth. Naming was the work of a father; he didn’t always know exactly what he felt about Amber, but he knew none of those feelings were fatherly.

“I don’t want a new name! I have a perfectly good name! I want you to use it!”

“It is not a word,” he replied, stubbornly scraping at his hide and refusing to look at her. “It cannot be spoken.”

“I speak it just fine! Amber! Say it with me, lizardman!”

“No. Mind your work.”

“I am!” she snapped, but she put her glaring eyes back on the hide. “You have the most ass-backwards religion I’ve ever heard of. You’re perfectly okay with killing people but my name is some huge sin. My name sends you straight to Hell. That’s where you draw the line.”

“The line is not for me to draw.”

“Well, that’s just stupid.”

“There is no Word but the Prophet’s Word and I am done with this discussion. Mind your work!” he snapped, pointing, but it was too late.

The scraper slipped in Amber’s careless hands, narrowly missing her fingers, but cutting a gash right through the hide. Embarrassment lent new fuel to anger and she let out easily the most vulgar variation on a timeless epithet he had ever heard in all the years of his warrior’s life.

“That had better not have been addressed to me,” he said blackly. “My mother was a virtuous woman.”

“It had nothing to do with you,” she snapped, inspecting the damage to the hide with deep disgust. “I’m just a foul-mouthed bitch. Damn it, it’s ruined!”

“Hardly,” he said, taking it from her before she could finish shoving it off onto the ground. He arranged the hide across his own lap, going back over the places she had too hurriedly finished. “You should have stopped if you weren’t going to give it your full attention. It is better to do half a hide well than all of it poorly and teach yourself habits you will have to unlearn.”

She started to stand, flush-faced and tight-lipped.

He caught her by her bloody wrist and seated her again, perhaps with more force than was necessary. He did not release her right away, at first because he could see that she was just going to get up again, then because he was busy counting off six breaths, and finally because he could look at her calmly and see that beneath her senseless anger was embarrassment and unhappiness and exhaustion and everything else he had been hoping the gift of his hide-making lesson might soothe away for just one night.

He opened his mouth to tell her she was acting like a child and heard himself say instead, softly, “Do you think I would not call you by your name if I could?”

She looked at him and away, trying to pretend she was not attached to the arm that ended in his grip. “I guess you think it doesn’t matter. I guess you figure as long as I still answer to ‘insufferable human,’ it’s fine.”

“It’s honest, at least.” He sighed, opened his hand and rubbed at his brow ridges instead. “There are three words I could call you that come close to the sound of your name. Taambret, a disease we have that causes festering sores of the mouth.”

She blinked, her brows puckering.

“Mb’z, a vulgar term for one weak of mind,” he continued. “Amyr, the name of a kind of swimming creature that lives and feeds in the mud. And I will not call you by these names.”

“You said…You said it didn’t matter what the word meant as long as—”

“Not for you.”

She looked at the fire.

Meoraq picked up the scraper and continued cleaning her hide. “Take this one I have finished and make ready with the brains,” he ordered. “Pour half of them out—like that, yes, in a line—and let them cool.”

She obeyed, silent.

“Now use your hands to rub them in. This is why it is so essential that the hide be completely cleaned. Any fat or blood left behind will prevent the cure from absorbing well. I despise S’kot and I don’t care what I call N’ki,” he said, still scraping. “I will not offend God, but I will not insult you either, whether or not you know it is an insult. Any pieces of lhichu that have not softened can be disposed of now.”