Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 39 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

Relieve me of this burden.

He touched the back of his hand to her smooth brow. Amber did not know he was there.

Meoraq rose and left the tent. He would speak slowly, he decided. He would not be hostile. He would draw no blade. He would say only that he had done much for their (miserable worthless wretched cowardly) lives and he would ask one of them to tend to Amber in his absence. And if they refused, he would politely and without drawing weapons, observe that he could not look after them while tending to a sick woman himself. And if that failed to sway them—

Nicci’s tearful voice cut across his thoughts, bleeding meaning before he consciously translated the words: “We can’t just leave her!”

Meoraq stopped walking. His head cocked. He had not heard that, he decided. Or if he had, it held some other meaning.

Their backs were to him, black shapes in the night, flames making night-terrors of all their ugly faces, making them all strangers. All but Scott. Scott he knew at once.

“The fact that she’s sick at all, in spite of the Vaccine, means we can’t just assume what she’s got isn’t catching,” he was saying in that calm, urgent way he thought hid his mind so well.

“Then why aren’t we all sick?” someone asked. “If the Vaccine doesn’t work—”

“No one’s saying it doesn’t work,” Scott said quickly. “I’m just suggesting that maybe it only works up to a point. If someone keeps putting themselves in contact with a potential contagion…” Scott paused to let those words work on his murmuring people, then gravely said, “She spends a lot of time with the lizard.”

Meoraq’s head tipped further. He felt his spines flattening.

“Talking to him. Sharing his food. Touching him. Whether or not they’re doing anything…intimate,” said Scott, as his people’s low whispers grew louder, “my point is, they’re always together. Who knows what kind of germs he could be carrying? If she’s caught something from him and it jumps to the rest of us…” Scott paused yet again to survey the effect of his words. He liked what he saw enough to let his thought go unfinished. Instead, he said, “The safety of the colony matters more than any one individual. Miss Bierce and I may have had our differences, but I know she’d say the same thing no matter who was in her place.”

Nicci put her hands over her face and cried harder. She did not protest, not even when Scott came and put his arm around her shaking shoulders.

“I can’t agree to this,” said Dag suddenly.

Meoraq looked at him, curiously unrelieved, waiting.

Dag said, troubled, “How are we going to find this temple-place without the lizard? We need him.”

“We can keep the lizard,” Scott assured them as his humans murmured. “We just need to be more careful about coming into direct contact with him.”

“Hey, I’m all for that,” said Eric, shrugging his arm up around his woman’s shoulders. “Particularly when he gets into one of his slappy moods. But you need to consider the possibility that he might not want to keep tagging along after Amber dies.”

And that was too much.

“After?” said Meoraq with a furious hiss. “Not even if, but after?”

They turned with satisfying leaps and cries. Scott took his arm off wailing Nicci and put more of the fire between them. He was a coward, but not a fool. “This isn’t personal. Everyone here appreciates what you’ve done, uh, Meoraq.”

His spines flattened with a slapping sound. “I do not like the way you say my name,” he said. He did not raise his voice. He did not draw a weapon. He was a Sword of Sheul and he was his own master. “I don’t like much of anything I hear you saying.”

“How is she?” Scott asked, backing up again.

His spines began to hurt. His throat was already throbbing. “She rests in Sheul’s sight tonight. Tomorrow, I go to find a surgeon in the city.”

Surprise in every human face and then unease. “Is there one around here?” Dag asked.

“No,” Meoraq admitted. “I will be away many days. Twelve at the least. Perhaps more.” And as alarmed noise began to whisper through their mouths, he said, “You must tend the woman while I am gone. I will have your word on this!”

“Twelve days? You can’t leave us for twelve days!”

“Anything could happen!”

“What about those monsters? What if they come back?”

“She’s not going to make it anyway!”

Meoraq whipped around to aim his hand like a knife at that one, the female Maria, hissing, “You shut your poison mouth!”

She did, shrinking back while her man shielded her, and all the humans quieted for a time. Again the hateful Scott gauged his people’s mood. Then, with all apparent concern, he said, “Do you really think she’s going to last another twelve days? Really?”

“I think she’ll die if no one cares for her. Or is that your intent?” he hissed.

Scott’s ears pinked and his mouth tightened, but not for long. “Are you calling me a murderer?” he demanded in a very loud, fast, oddly-pitched way.

“Ease up, man,” said Eric, catching at his leader’s arm. “I’m sure he didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“Do not tell me what my meaning is, human!” he snapped. “If she dies in spite of your care, that is Sheul’s will and I honor it, but if she ails and you let her die, that I call murder and I will see every Gann-damned one of you judged for it!”

“Easy,” said Eric, his eyes huge and orange in the firelight. “Easy, Meor—”

“Stop saying my fucking name like that!”

Humans scattered back all around him, some with their hands held up and empty, some darting behind others, all staring at him. Meoraq clapped his hands to his face and breathed, battling the killing rage that wanted so badly to take command of him. A Sword of Sheul is a master over his emotions. Six breaths, just as he had trained from boyhood, six breaths deep and slow, like winding steps to peace. Always, he had envisioned Sheul at the last riser, His arms outstretched in welcome. Now, he saw Amber, lying still as death at his feet.

He lowered his arms to his side, calm again, and looked at them. ‘I hate you all,’ he thought, but he thought it calmly.

Scott waited, letting the silence stir at fears, then said, “You’re right. Whatever happens to Amber is God’s will. None of us can change that. But regardless of what happens, the rest of us need to take care of ourselves. Sentimentality has no place in this decision. You knew that when you saw her holding that knife and you have to know it now. I know you don’t like me—”

Meoraq passed a hand over his eyes again, trying to shut out the human’s voice, to seek Sheul’s behind it.

“—but you must know I’m right. Say you do go off to the nearest doctor. Are we really supposed to just stay here and wait for you? We don’t have the resources to wait twelve days without you.”

“There is water at the stream and, if you are sparing, enough meat to last until my return.”

Scott glanced towards the sleds, where slabs of corrokis meat had been wrapped in some of the humans’ packs and stacked in anticipation of the next day’s journey. “I’m sure it would be, if we were moving. But if we’re just sitting here, that much meat in one place is nothing but an invitation to all this planet’s hungry animals to come get an easy meal. How are we supposed to defend ourselves?”

Several watching humans voiced uneasy agreement.

Scott nodded at them in encouragement before turning gravely back to Meoraq. “I have to weigh the risks here and the fact is, Amber Bierce is just one person. It’s difficult to admit this, of course.” He paused and, although his expression remained as grimly serious as ever, something about him smiled anyway, invisibly and fanged. “But a leader has to make difficult decisions.”

“You will not take her in,” Meoraq said. It was not a question. He could feel the color throbbing in his throat, but his thoughts were calm. Black, but calm. “You would let her die to stab at me.”

“She’s not dying!” Nicci shouted before Scott could answer. “Don’t you even say that, you…you…She’ll be fine in the morning! She’s always fine!”

“Will you look after her then?” Meoraq asked her.

Nicci fell at once to a sniffling silence.

Scott patted her shoulder. “If you were offering any kind of real solution, that would be one thing. But to be brutally honest, I’m not sure how we could take care of her for twelve days. She was choking on her own spit a few minutes ago. How are we supposed to give her food and water? I’m sorry, Nichole, I know this is difficult for you. It’s difficult for all of us, but I really think it would be best to let nature take its course. Or let God’s will be done, if you like that better.”

Meoraq’s hand came back to his brow-ridges, rubbing hard enough to hurt. Six breaths, he told himself, and counted them off with his eyes shut. Six breaths, deep and slow, six breaths to Amber.

“I’m not enjoying this—”

“Lies! You’d fuck this moment if you could!” he spat, and took several stabilizing breaths while Scott stood very quiet. At last, Meoraq raised his head and faced them. “I will meditate upon your words and give you my answer in the morning. I don’t want to see any of you until then.”

No one had any reply to that, which was just as well.

Meoraq turned around and went back to his tent, where Amber lay on her side on his mat, just as he had left her. He undressed, placing his clothing in a thin layer atop the blanket before joining her beneath it and pulling her unresisting body against his to warm.

“Father, this world itself moves as You command it,” Meoraq said, pressing his palm gently to her brow. The words were bitter in his mouth, bitter as the bile on Amber’s wet breath. “And whether You choose to heal her or take her into Your halls, I will thank You and love You no less. Only hear the prayer of Your son, I beg, and let Your will be done swiftly, whatever it must be. The hateful little Gann-bastard is right.”

* * *

It was a terrible night that followed. Amber lay silent and cold beside him through every endless hour. He was afraid to give her water, afraid to drown her right there in his arms, but as the day dawned, in a kind of desperation, he did attempt it. She only drooled it out. He tried to imitate the cattle-hands he had seen, who sometimes gave their livestock medicines by stroking their throats to make them swallow. Amber only lay there choking under the weight of his hand. Twice, he brought out the knife of his fathers and held it over her. Twice, he sheathed it again, but he didn’t know if that was the right thing to do. He had dealt deaths beyond counting in his life, but he had never had to wait this way, had never borne the silent struggles of some fragile life his witness and felt so damned helpless and useless and alone as he did now.

He prayed, because that he could do. He said the Healing Chant until the words became as mechanical as any construct of the Ancients. He said the Prayer of Appeal and all forty-three verses of the Bridge of Men. Mostly, he prayed in the words he might use with his father, speaking as thoughts came over him. Sheul might have heard him; Amber never did. He knew long before the dawn showed him her slack face that there would be no surgeon, no medicine, no run to the city. She did not have twelve days to wait for him. She would be dead in three, if she could not rouse to drink. The hope that she might awaken and be miraculously whole had brought him through the night, but when he could see her again and see what those long hours had done to her, he felt even that stubborn hope strain.

The sun rose and Meoraq did not stir. He watched Amber’s clay struggle to hold life within it and listened as the humans outside gathered their goods and made ready for the day’s journey. If they were quieter than usual as they went about these tasks, this was the only sign of their concern. It was as if she were already dead to them—dead and burnt, her memory so far distant that grief was just another word, if they had ever known it at all.

He could not be angry with them, although he wanted to be. Grief, like so many things, was a luxury in the wildlands. And as the first hour of the new day stretched into the second, Meoraq’s heart began to understand what his head had been telling him all night: It may be within his power to prolong Amber’s life, but he could not prevent her death. The longer he tried, the more she—and all the rest of her people—would suffer for it. Between the hated living and the beloved dead, said the Prophet, look to the living, for the dead have done their service and rejoice in Him, but the living may have long roads yet. How many loved ones had Lashraq burnt and left behind him before he came at last to Xi’Matezh and saw his Father’s face?

It was surprisingly little comfort to him, but still Meoraq knew what he had to do. “Take her then,” he said, stroking the smooth curve of Amber’s brow. “Take her, O Father, and receive her well. She is a good woman.”

Then he left her and went out into the bitter cold of Gann’s world.

The humans were waiting for him, all of them clustered around Scott’s fire to share its warmth and whatever was left of the previous night’s meal. They’d struck their tents and taken up their beds, filled the flasks and were even now loading their packs onto the sleds. Scott came to meet him, as he had known he would. “How is she?” he asked, pretending deep concern.

Meoraq looked past him to Nicci, standing small and pale at Scott’s side. “Do you wish to speak to her?”

“Is she talking?” Scott asked, looking so surprised as to seem alarmed.

“No. But perhaps she will hear you.”

“I…” Nicci looked at Scott. He put his arm around her. She bent her head and trembled. She did not go to Amber’s side.

So be it.

Meoraq drew the knife of his fathers from the sheath over his heart. It was the best he could offer her. “Gather fuel. As much as can be carried. The fire will have to burn all day.”

“What are you going to do with that?” Nicci asked, staring at his father’s knife.

He looked at her, knowing that even she couldn’t really be so ignorant as to ask that. And she was crying already, so yes, she knew. “It will be quick,” he promised. And, as much as he detested her, his heart thawed a little, enough to give her an honest tap at her smooth brow with the hand that did not hold a killing blade. “Don’t grieve. She will see her true Father’s face soon and I believe His arms will be open to her.”

“Don’t let him do it!” Nicci begged, clutching at Scott’s arm. Water ran out of her eyes in fresh streams. “Please, make him stop!”

Scott nodded, patting at her back. “You’re not going to kill her,” he told Meoraq.

The words should have carried some hope to him, but Scott’s look of somber joy never faltered. “I don’t mark you,” Meoraq said, sheathing his father’s knife.

“We’ve discussed it.” Scott put Nicci aside and, as she sought out another chest to support her, put his hand on Meoraq’s arm and led him a short distance from the others. A very short distance. He still wanted to be seen. He still meant to be heard. “We’ve decided to leave her here with a few supplies…some water…maybe a blanket…In case she wakes up.”

“I don’t…” Meoraq stared for several breaths, uncounted, then shook his head clear and tried again. “I don’t mark you, human.”

“She could still pull out of this,” Scott said, and actually patted Meoraq on the arm as if he were a damned child in need of comfort. “I wish we could wait for her, I truly do, but she could be contagious. I have to think of the greater good.”

“The good? How…How can it be good to leave her to die?”

“We don’t have a choice,” Scott said. “It’s not just about her slowing us down, although she would. Right now, the way she is, she’s a health hazard. You may not understand that, but you have to accept it.”

“I accept that I can do nothing for her but to send her to our Father gently and give her a decent funeral.” The terrible truth in that sank into him until it found something even more terrible and without thinking, he suddenly spat, “Isn’t that enough for you, S’kot? Can’t you just be happy she’s dead? Do you have to see her damned before you feel like you’ve won?”

His flat, ugly face first paled, then flushed a dull red. “This has nothing to do with me. This has to do with common human decency, something you clearly can’t comprehend. Because she is a person, like you said, she’s one of my people and I am not going to let you murder her when there’s a chance, however slim, that she could recover from whatever this is and rejoin us. No,” he said, turning his back on Meoraq to address the pack of animals that had made him their abbot, “we can’t afford to sit around and wait for her to die. I wish we could. I wish we had doctors and a hospital or even just a safe, dry place to hold our vigil over her, but the fact is that she’s sick and she’s potentially contagious. Nobody wants to leave her, but this is our reality.”

“Piss on your reality!” Meoraq said, loudly enough that many humans looked uncomfortable, but still none of them spoke. “I won’t expose her on the fucking plains like a…a runty calf! This is a person! This is one of your people! How can you even speak of leaving her body to…to rot like an animal’s! To be scavenged and…and lost to the grey hells of Gann? That is worse than murder! That is obscene!”

“If she wakes up, she can rejoin us and be perfectly welcome. If not, at least we’ll know we did our best by her, right?” Scott nodded at his people expectantly and they nodded back at him, even as they shuffled on their feet and cast Meoraq uncomfortable glances. Scott turned back to him and took Nicci again under his arm. “So we’ll leave her some supplies. A blanket, some food…I’m sure she’d appreciate it if you left one of your water flasks.”

“I want no part of this murder.”

“No, the murder you want is the one where you slit her throat. Or the one where you hold us here until we all become infected with whatever she’s got. I understand your feelings, Meoraq, but what it comes down to is, you can’t put her life above all of ours.”

The urge to stab him right through his profaning, poison-dripping mouth was strong, but on the slim chance that it came more from Meoraq’s clay than from his higher spirit, he restrained himself. He bent his head. He breathed. He cleared his mind of all emotion. He looked up and said, “I have seen many deaths, human. I can imagine none worse than to be torn open, alive and helpless, by wild beasts. I will pretend to believe you when you say you do not wish for her to suffer,” he added acidly, and Scott’s pink face flushed a darker red. “So I will give her an easy death and I will see her soul to Sheul’s halls with an honorable funeral. You need not witness it if you do not wish to show respect we all know you do not feel.”

“I have plenty of respect for her,” said Scott, staring him down. “Too much to stab her in her sleep and call it kindness. You talk like a religious man. Now act like one. If you really believed in God, you wouldn’t hesitate to leave her in His hands.”

Many humans had gathered by now. Meoraq looked at them, these people, these children of Sheul. He gave each face the weight of his stare. He watched each eye drop away from his. He gave each mouth a chance to speak. He listened to each silence. Last of all, he turned his head and looked at the sleds, stacked deep with the humans’ provisions. Amber’s distinctive saoq-hide pack was there, along with her bedroll and her spear.

“You will leave water,” Meoraq said, studying the sleds. All of his flasks were there, excepting only the small metal flask given to him by the gatekeeper of Tothax, which hung around his neck.

“Yes, of course.”

“And provisions.”

“Yes.”

Now Meoraq looked at Scott, although he had to clench his hands into fists to keep them from his swords. “Show them to me.”

Scott half-raised a hand to gesture vaguely at the empty ground around the ashes of Meoraq’s fire, where Amber had last been sleeping. His gaze wavered toward the sleds, but did not quite reach them. The pink tentacle of his tongue peeked out to slick his lips, but he said nothing.

“Tell me your name,” said Meoraq quietly, “and the name of your father.”

Scott blinked several times, glancing around at the others, but his people defended him no more than they defended Amber. “Uh…Everly Scott? My father’s name was Richard? Why?”

Meoraq closed his eyes and counted six breaths. He was calm. A Sheulek is always calm. He said, in the darkness, “Var’li S’kot, son of Var’li Reshar, you are a liar and a thief.”

“Hey!”

Meoraq opened his eyes, swung his arm and slapped Scott as hard as he could. As Scott sprawled in the mud with blood beading up over the side of his staring face, Meoraq walked through the silent crowd to the sled he had himself built and took back one of his flasks. Just the one. He slung it over his shoulder and moved to the other sled, where he tossed packs roughly aside until he had uncovered Amber’s things.

“Xi’Matezh lies to the east,” said Meoraq as he claimed them. “Hold to the path of the sun until you reach the mountains. Cross through and hold your course. You will come to the end of all the world. Go north along the Ruined Reach and you will find the temple. Go now and go with God, if He will have you. I will not.”

Now they protested, these creatures who would not even give her a gentle death but who would leave her to be savaged alive in this strange, cold fever by tachuqis, by ghets, by beetles! And when it was done, what next for her but to be left lying in the mud, screaming for all eternity unheard as she rotted back into the clay. Her own kind would do this, her own blood-kin!

“You can’t do this!” Nicci pushed through the crowd to catch at his arm. He slapped before he could stop himself, but she only fell at his feet and clutched his boot instead. “You promised to take us to the skyport! You can’t leave us here!”

“Take your hand off me, you clay-fucking monster! I am done with you! All of you! Go! And especially you!” He shook Nicci off his boot, but managed with Sheul’s aid not to raise Amber’s spear in his hand and drive it through her hateful, ice-filled heart. “Wailing, useless…she-bastard! You do not deserve her! And she did not deserve you!”

“Go ahead and kill her,” said Scott, scrambling to his feet and out of Meoraq’s easy reach. “I mean, if it’s that important to you. Shut up, Nichole. Go on. We’ll wait.”

“Start walking, human.”

“But you can kill her now!”

“Get out of my camp.”

Scott backed away, hands up, licking at his mouthparts. “Okay, but you’re going to catch up with us after she dies, right? We…Come on, you can’t do this! She’s already dying! If you leave us, you’re killing us!” He looked wildly around, his eyes coming at last to the tent where Amber lay, and Meoraq saw the very moment that Gann whispered. “At least pray about it first,” Scott said suddenly, pointing a shaking hand out into the wildlands. “You go pray and we’ll wait here and we’ll…we’ll just let God decide what to do.”

Meoraq studied him as the humans around them offered their own promises, bargains and pleas. Their voices meant nothing to him. There was a blackness inside him and he thought that if he closed his eyes and let it out, he might open them again to find an hour gone and every human dead, and that was, in this moment, a very fine thought. Instead, he took six breaths with his eyes open and Scott as full in his sight as Meoraq himself was in the sight of Sheul, and then said, calmly, “I should have killed you long before this.”

Scott said nothing. What was there to say?

“I’ll pray,” said Meoraq. “And so should you. Hear Uyane: If Sheul tells me to end her, I will build the pyre and see her to His eternal embrace.”

Scott nodded once, his face straining with the effort of showing so much concern.

“And then I will kill you,” Meoraq concluded thoughtfully, “and leave you to lie on the open ground with your blood rotting in your veins. But I will take your people on to Xi’Matezh. For her sake.”

Scott’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

“However, if Sheul allows me the hope of her life, I will give you yours and let you lead your people out of my camp. And if she dies, so be it. I will not follow you. I will take no more vengeance. I will go to Xi’Matezh alone and if I see you there, I will not even draw this blade—” He patted the hilt of his beast-killing kzung. “—and gut you like the ghet you are. So. I will pray.”

He turned around and immediately Scott retreated, hissing at his people to get away from here before the crazy lizard started killing them. Some obeyed. Some protested. Some even followed Meoraq away, but he ignored them all. He entered his tent and knelt in the darkness there and picked up Amber’s limp, heavy hand. He shut his eyes on the sight of her white, waxen face. He counted off six breaths listening to the thick, laboring sound of her own. He prayed.

Between the hated living and the beloved dead…

But she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead!

Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges, but they hurt, so he stopped. He looked at Amber and then he reached down and pulled her up onto his knee, holding her to his chest and forward some, so that she couldn’t choke on her saliva. He fit his hand to the flat place between her soft, swollen teats and just stared at the top of his tent for a while, feeling her heart struggle at its work.

Amber needed him, of course she did, but so did all the rest of them, and while it was true that Amber might recover with his care, it was also true that the chance to spare one life did not and never could balance the risk to forty-seven other lives. If he did this solely because it was Amber, then he would carry every death of every other human as if it were murder. He would be Sheulek no longer. He would be damned in the eyes of God.

I do not want to leave her, Father.

He might have said it aloud. He might have only thought it. Sheul heard all prayers, no matter how they were spoken, and this was the most fervent prayer of all his life. He asked for nothing, sought nothing. He was scarcely aware of thought at all, but Sheul burned in his mind and Amber burned brightest of all against his heart. He sat and stared and held her and might have remained so for hours had not the flap of his tent lifted.

There stood Eric, with his woman cringing against his side. Seeing shame in their ugly faces did nothing at all to cool the fires charring at Meoraq’s heart.

“The thing is,” said Eric after a long silence, just as if he were continuing an argument and not beginning one, “this is it for us. We’re all there is. We need this stuff and she…doesn’t. So you can hate us if you want to, man…I kind of hate us too…but what else are we supposed to do?”

“You are supposed to be people!” snapped Meoraq. “How dare you crawl in here and whine at me because I will not allow you to pick carrion from one who isn’t even dead! Get out! Get out and go back to your murdering master!”

His woman retreated. Eric lingered,.

“It’s nothing personal,” he said finally.

Meoraq was on his feet and face to ugly face with the man in an instant. “It should be!” he hissed. “It should be very fucking personal when you leave someone to be torn apart by wild beasts…her bones…scattered!” Rage briefly blinded him. He fought it back, but his color was up and throbbing in his throat, and he knew the blackness would take him if he couldn’t calm down. “You don’t even have your own hate to spur you to murder her! You use his!”

“She started it,” said Eric.

Meoraq leaned back on his heels and just stared at him.

“She’s the one that made us pick sides. She’s the one who wouldn’t just let anything go!” Eric backed up a step, his neck bent and his eyes in constant motion, looking anywhere but at Meoraq. “She was always on us about how we had to do this and we had to learn that…It’s her own fault no one wants to be around her.”

“She wanted you to live,” spat Meoraq. “And you let him punish her for it, you bastard son of Gann. Damn you and damn all of you.”

Eric’s face darkened. He mumbled something more, but Meoraq could hear no words in the sound. Perhaps there were none. The human let the tent-flap drop between them and Meoraq returned to the watch he kept over Amber and her terrible sleep. She gasped when he brushed at her brow, but lay still as clay even when he lay down beside her and tried in vain to press his living warmth into her. Only the fluttery feel of her failing heart, throbbing from her flesh to his, told him she lived at all.

They were leaving now. He could hear their many feet drumming on the wet earth, moving away into the east. It was not too late. He could make it quick and easy. She would never waken. He could build the pyre, pray while she burned, and catch the rest of them before nightfall.

“Are you with me, Soft-Skin?” he murmured, stroking at her cold, damp brow. “Open your eyes. See me.”

They did open, and Meoraq let out an unmanning shout of relief, but they only rolled back and shut again. She had not seen him, did not know him.

But she had opened her eyes.

“Uyane Meoraq is with you,” he told her, and put his hand over her heart. “Hear me where you are and follow. Sheul, our Father, has set you in my path. So did you come to me and so you belong to me. Do you hear me, woman? You are mine! I found you, I own you, and I forbid you to die!”

His voice, risen to a shout, was a thunder in the tent, a whisper in the world. She did not answer. The heart that beat beneath his hand beat no stronger.

“I won’t leave you,” he said softly. “Please don’t leave me.”

Nothing. She did nothing.

Meoraq curled around her as close as his separate clay could press and closed his eyes. “O my Father, I cry out to You. You gave her to me and if I have not been as grateful as a son should be, I am sorry. But You gave her to me. Now…please…give her back.”