Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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“There’s another one for that list…”

“But he reserved his fires for my mother. Even at inconvenience to himself.” Meoraq lapsed into quiet, but tucked his arm around her shoulders. “I think he loved her.”

“Oh. Well…that’s sweet.”

He didn’t answer. That dark thing in her stomach shifted again, lifting its head.

“Isn’t it?”

“There must have been a reason…something I never saw. Did she talk to him when they were alone together? Comfort him?” His fingers flexed lightly on her arm. “Argue with him?”

“Wouldn’t that be a weird world?”

‘Goddammit, Bierce, shut the fuck up.’

“She was special to him,” said Meoraq. “I could never understand why.”

“I’m sure she knew you loved her,” said Amber after an uncomfortable silence.

“No, she didn’t. Because it wouldn’t have been true. I saw every private touch they shared, touches no less than these—” Meoraq squeezed her shoulder, his thumb running lightly over her scars. “—as a personal affront to the dignity of our House. It embarrassed me to see them together and it embarrassed me even more after she died to see my father mourn her. I feel…”

She waited, but in the end, he only blew out a rude snort and said, “I don’t even know what I feel, Soft-Skin. It was his own House, and I made it impossible for my father to share an honest touch with his wife without fear of consequence. What an insufferable little prick I was.”

“Okay, what’s that mean?”

“What?”

“Prick. That wasn’t your language, that was mine. What’s it mean?”

“In dumaqi? Eh, it’s the thing…the two things that fit together that make it possible for a door to swing open and closed. Why? What does it mean in your speech? I’ve never been able to puzzle that out, exactly. I only know that it’s a curse.”

“It’s another word for this.” She gave the smooth mound between his legs a pat.

“Another one? How many words do you need for that?”

“This from the man who can say gann eight different ways,” Amber remarked, gently kneading.

“Twelve. You are amazing,” he said seriously.

“Hey, I’m just getting started, lizardman.” She rubbed her thumb along the moist edge of his slit, cupped the hard bulge she felt just below the surface, and squeezed. “But hold that thought, because I’ll want to hear you shout it a few times.”

Meoraq arched his neck and grunted. “Woman, I was just speaking of my father. This is hardly appropriate.”

It wasn’t, was it? But that thing was in her gut and if she didn’t do something to get back to normal, it was going to eat its way out of her right through her mouth. “A woman should always be ready to receive her man’s fires,” she reminded him.

“To receive, yes, but not kindle them.” He caught her wrist up and pinned it to the bed above her head, rolling atop her in the next moment to nuzzle aggressively at her neck. “And I’m not the one who does the shouting, am I?”

“You make your share of the noise.”

He hissed at her, but the teasing light of his eyes suddenly died, replaced by an unnerving somberness. He frowned at her, his face very close to hers, all that she could see. After a few false starts, he suddenly said, “I love you, you know.”

Her stomach clenched once, hard enough to hurt, and then slowly, finally, relaxed. She told herself it didn’t matter, she wasn’t one of those girls who needed to hear flowery shit like that, but…but he said it. He said it to her.

“I can’t believe I’m saying that to a woman,” he remarked, looking at the wall of the tent above her in an unfocused way, just like there was a window there to stare through. “But there it is, and it is the only word. I love you. Huh.”

She gave him a few uncomfortable moments to come to terms with that, and when he only continued to lie there on top of her, staring at the wall and keeping her wrists pinned above her head, she finally put on her best state-paid counselor’s voice and said, “And how do you feel about that?”

“Bitterly ashamed.”

She stared.

His spines flicked as he gave her a sheepish sort of look. “Not of you. Of myself. It can be nothing less than a gift of God to know love…and I made my parents hide it. I would give anything…” He thought, frowning. “Almost anything,” he amended, “to go back to just one day, one hour, and unmake the insufferable little prick that I was.”

“Almost anything, huh?”

He met her smile with another of his terribly serious looks and brushed his knuckle across her brow. “I would not give you. My blood. My blades. Even my name, but not you, Soft-Skin. You are mine. I will give you up to our Father and no one else.”

Amber sighed and patted the side of his snout. “Say that again, but try not to sound like such a stalker when you do it this time.”

He leaned in to nuzzle her, scraping the end of his snout forcefully and deliberately up one side of her neck and down the other, inhaling slowly the whole time. He finished with a hard bite to her scarred shoulder, not quite hard enough to break the skin. “You belong to me,” he murmured. “You will always be Soft-Skin under Uyane. In life, in death, and in the Halls where we reside after. You are mine.”

She couldn’t help smiling any more than she could help saying, “You don’t know what a stalker is, clearly.”

“You try so hard to convince me you are impossible to please, but I know better. Hold still.” He pressed his rough mouth carefully against hers, then withdrew and flicked his spines playfully forward. “Do you want to have sex yet?”

“Oh boy, do I.”

He grimaced and started undressing her.

“Wait. I…”

I what? I love you? Why? Just because he said it first? Sure, it seemed like the right thing to say, polite and expected and non-threatening, and who knew, maybe even a little bit true, although she refused to look at that too closely. Not right now. God, he was looking at her. Waiting, just like she’d asked him to. And she had no idea what she wanted to say, except that she knew it was still choking her out from the stomach on up.

And then she knew what she wanted to say, felt it whole and burning in her mind. It was just a question of whether she was too chickenshit to say it.

Amber Bierce had been a lot of things in her life. Chickenshit was never going to be one of them.

She reached up and caught Meoraq around his snout. He let her, although his spines came slowly all the way forward and just as slowly all the way back.

“When we get home,” said Amber, “you keep your hands off the servants, you hear me?”

His head cocked. She kept her grip on his snout and even squeezed a little.

“I’m your woman. That makes you my man. You better not make me fight for you unless you’re damn sure you want me fighting-mad.”

Balancing easily on one hand, he closed the other over her wrist and freed his snout. He studied her as she lay beneath him for several long, expressionless seconds. “I do,” he said at last. Then he grinned and dropped, rolling onto his back. He slapped his chest once. “You can even be on top.”

3

So in the end, it took six days to cross over into Gedai, which was, as Meoraq made a point of reminding her, exactly what he’d said it would be at the outside margin. She did not appreciate the observation.

There wasn’t much in the way of foothills on the other side, just a short series of long plateaus and steep slopes, almost like stairs. Meoraq took his time scouting each descent, which made them relatively painless once he’d finally settled on a path, although Amber still managed to go down two of the slopes on her ass. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), they went from the snowline to the ground in just one day.

When the sun came up the next morning, Amber and Meoraq were awake and watching from the top of the next hill over to see sunrise over Gedai for the first time. Holy Gedai, as Meoraq called it. Birthplace of the Prophet. The land where, in just a few more days, they would find the temple where Meoraq thought he was going to talk to God. Her first impression was that it looked a lot like the same brown grass, the same windy sky, the same open plains as they’d left on the other side of the mountain. Maybe a little more wooded, a little less flat, but that was all.

“What do you think?” she asked, studying Meoraq’s inscrutable face in the thin morning light.

“Looks like your hair first thing in the morning,” he replied. “Only it’s everywhere instead of just in my face.”

She didn’t appreciate that observation either.

They started walking again, but even though they were out of the mountains at last, their speed did not improve. The ground under their feet was hard, frozen, stone-riddled grass, which while indeed much easier to walk on than boot-deep snow and slush, made pulling sleds absolutely hellish. Meoraq took the heavy one with all the meat and he still went faster than Amber and the hides. He didn’t complain in so many words, but his spines got lower as the day wore on. When Amber inevitably hit the rock that tipped her sled and spilled all their gear to the bottom of the hill they’d spent easily twenty minutes climbing, he just patted her on the head and picked everything up.

“I think we’ll camp early,” was all he said, slipping back into his sled’s harness.

“Oh come on! I hit one rock! I missed a billion others, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t say we were camping now,” he countered. “I said it would be early.”

“Yeah, but you meant now.”

“I did not.”

“When then?”

“When I judge it necessary.”

“And why would it be necessary early?”.

His glance was cool and uncompromising. “Because you’re tired.”

She couldn’t argue, so she did what anyone would do. She switched targets. “You chew with your mouth open.”

“I’m allowed to breathe when I eat,” he replied, glaring. “And you growl in your sleep.”

“It’s called snoring and I do n—”

She hit another rock, tipped the sled, and spilled its contents down the other side of the hill. They stood together and watched until the last bundled hide had finished rolling. When she finally nerved herself up to look at him, he was already looking at her.

“In my defense,” she said, lifting her chin, “there are a lot of rocks.”

He sighed and untethered himself from his sled to start picking hers up. Again.

When he decided it was time to stop for the day (early) and set up camp, he left the actual setting-up for her. He needed to make a patrol, he said. A lengthy, far-reaching, thorough patrol. Alone.

She made a token protest, just to let him know she was tough enough to do it, but he pulled out his You’ll-do-as-I-say-woman act and she let herself be bullied. Her feet hurt and she was hungry. If he wanted to crawl around for another mile or two after hiking up and down hills all day, he was perfectly welcome to do it. Still…

“And you expect me to just do all the work while you’re taking it easy on your evening stroll?”

“It is a wife’s duty and pleasure to lessen her husband’s burdens.”

“Says who, lizardman?”

“Prophet Lashraq, as written in Sheul’s true Word.”

“You mean a man wrote it.”

“But God spoke it.” He came to stroke at her forehead and she turned her face away. Undaunted, he nuzzled at her throat instead and patted her on the head. “Have food ready when I return. Use lots of meat. It’s not as cold here as it was in the mountains.”

“Okay. Put up the tent, gather poop, start a fire, make dinner. Anything else?”

He caught the sarcasm and paused long enough to pick up his pack and toss it to her. “Wash my clothes,” he said and cocked his head, daring her to challenge him.

Amber cocked her head back at him. “How about I leave the laundry for tomorrow and wash you instead?”

He grunted smug assent and started walking. “I’ll be back before dark. Be ready for me. And be rested.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She waited until he’d put a little more distance between them before adding, “Sexist scaly jerk,” but she said it quietly. He didn’t hear her, which was good. She didn’t really mean it. Well, she sort of meant it, but not in a bitchy way. And she did like the idea of having the camp to herself while she took a bath. Privacy was something they’d had all too little of up in that cave.

So she put his tent together, started a fire and cut up some kipwe to warm on it, filled the flasks at the little stream nearby and put the heat-stones in the coals, then sat on the hide-cushioned sled to watch the clouds roll by while the water got hot. She had no itchy feeling between her shoulders or that prickly sensation at the back of her neck that people talked about when they said they ‘felt watched.’ And if she had, she would have only thought it was Meoraq, swinging by to look in on her before continuing on his patrol. After all this time, even hearing Meoraq talk of cities and other traveling Sheulek and even the various sinners who had been exiled to die in the wildlands, it simply never occurred to her think she was anything but alone.

She wasn’t.

It really wasn’t very windy today. The smoke from her fire made a strong, obvious arrow in the sky, pointing right at her camp. These raiders had come a long way from their usual route to investigate. There were only five of them now; the other six remained with the slaves they had acquired at the nearby city of Praxas, where they had traded bundles of dried phesok for the cast-off daughters of those who had them to spare. The raiders were certainly not above attacking Praxas (two of their number even now had been taken as young boys during such raids), but when trade was good, it behooved them all to use diplomatic measures.

Now they had spied a potential new target and so they came, crawling on their bellies as soon as they were near enough to see the lone silhouette at the glowing coals, blades out and ready. They had expected a warrior—it was always wisest to expect the worst, although far more common to find instead some fool youth who fancied himself a hunter or, ha, a raider—and they were ten body-lengths from the fire before they realized, almost in unison, that they had no idea what sat at camp before them.

They stopped, exchanging questioning glances in the silent way of pack predators. The man who was their leader considered for perhaps eight heartbeats. Then he gestured with his sword and the crawl resumed. The essential meat of the matter had not changed. Regardless of what form it took, this was prey. That it was also strange might or might not mean greater profit, but one could only know that once the prey was taken.

So they took it.

Amber didn’t hear them; the light breeze hissing across the grass covered what nominal sound they made on their approach. She didn’t see them; the fire before her occupied all her attention. She had no warning whatsoever…and yet, for no reason, she looked back over her shoulder.

Her eyes locked at once and without immediate comprehension on the eyes of the raider’s leader. Her first thought, after the eternity of the split-second that followed, was that he had all Meoraq’s same features and still really looked nothing like him.

Then she dove for her spear, snatched it and a handful of skin-slicing grass off the ground, and swung to face him.

Their need for stealth now moot, they rose and fanned out without speaking, flanking her, herding her from the fire so expertly that she didn’t even know they were doing it until they had her away and closed in a ring around her.

‘Woman, they’re going to have you dead in about three seconds,’ Amber thought, stunned and a little embarrassed by this development. She had to do something fast, something unpredictable.

She lunged forward with a howl, then spun around and blindly stabbed. Her first feint, she thought vaguely. A damned effective one. The raider before her—now behind her—had drawn up his arms and crossed his blades to block her strike; the raider behind her—now before her—had rushed right on to the point of her spear. A good thing, too. If it hadn’t been for his strength and the power of his swift attack, she never could impaled him so deeply.

They stared at each other with what was left of the spear between them for what felt like hours and could not have been more than a single second. He said something in a tight, confused voice, but even though they were words she surely knew, Amber’s shocked mind could make no sense of them. She twisted vainly on the spear to try and free it, but succeeded only in making him belch blood all down his chest and hers, so she snatched the short, hooked sword out of his hand instead and shoved him back.

He fell, but the others closed in even tighter, and she had been reduced to the reach of her own arm and the dying man’s sword.

They eyed her as the man on the ground groaned and kicked, and Amber stood with the point of the curved blade jerking from one target to another.

“Ease off,” one of them said, and that time her brain made the translation without effort. He sheathed his sword and unhooked a short length of cord from his belt, weighted at both ends with bell-shaped lumps of metal. He began to back up, swinging this fun new toy in tight circles at his side, watching her. “Weapons down. I want it alive. Aqizu, stay behind it.”

She snatched a glance behind her, slashing at the lizardman’s throat, but he was too fast for her.

“I think it heard you,” one of them remarked.

“I think it understood you,” another added, more meaningfully. “That’s no animal.”

“When was the last time you saw an animal in clothes?” their leader asked in his calm, intent way. Without taking his eyes off her, without even seeming to move, he suddenly interrupted the steady shush-shush of his weighted cord with a throw. Amber darted aside and back, slashing wildly, but she was not his target; the weighted bell on the cord’s end crunched into the groaning man’s forehead, leaving a sickeningly bloodless hollow where it had landed. He pulled the line back with a zip and a flick of his wrist, resuming its steady circles without any sign of effort or interest in the fate of the man he’d just killed. “Keep your guard up. Do not hurt it. Go, Vek.”

She sensed more than saw the attack and swung around to meet it, slicing at the grasping hands and the face behind them indiscriminately. The blade of her sword skidded along his scales, then came down just right between his two middle fingers and sliced his hand in half all the way to his wrist. He let out a shriek right about the same instant the weighted cord wrapped itself around her arm.

Amber grabbed the sword from her trapped hand and let his zip-flick-tug take her right to him, but he was as fast as Meoraq and caught her wrist with a good six centimeters between the quivering tip of the short blade and his throat.

“Easy,” he said, almost singing it, the way another man might try to calm a stray dog. One hand pushed her weapon aside; the other swiftly reeled in the slack on his weighted cord until the chance to break his hold was good and gone. “Easy, little one. No one here will hurt you.”

“I mean to fucking hurt it!” Mr. Split-Hand snarled, bent double over his gushing arm. “I mean to hurt the damn thing plenty!”

“Quiet, Vek. Don’t fight me, little one. Your tiny bones look easy to break. For the moment, I want you whole.”

She struggled anyway, fighting a losing battle for just one chance to stab…but with the first flagging of her strength, he suddenly swept her arm around and pulled, letting her momentum carry her stumbling forward into the space he had just been, and then she was on her knees with him swiftly tying her wrists to her elbows behind her back. So she screamed, as pointless as that was, but wherever Meoraq was, he wasn’t there to hear her.

Maybe they’d found him first.

“Fierce little thing,” the leader grunted, planting his knee in the small of her back for the necessary leverage to catch and hold her legs together. She heard the shu-u-up as he pulled his belt off one-handed, a sound that had always meant Meoraq in an amorous mood, and Amber screamed again, uselessly.

“What are you going to do with it?” someone asked, nudging at her with his boot.

“There has always been coin for oddities. This is odder than most. Up, little one.” He pulled; her shoulders creaked in their sockets and she arched instinctively backwards, helping him pull her to her bound feet. He bent, his grip firm and impersonal, and tipped her up and over his shoulder.

She bit him, her teeth grating over two or three scales before she found a gripping place and dug in, scissoring her jaws together with all the strength she had left in her. Hot blood gushed into her mouth. He barked and flung her forwards again, inadvertently helping her rip away a scale so that she could spit it defiantly at his knees when she landed at his feet.

“God’s teeth,” someone remarked.

“Sharp teeth, at any rate,” the leader answered dryly. He checked the damage, which was nominal but bled heavily without any scales to help seal it, and as soon as he was finished shrugging off his harness and cinching it tight again with a bandage beneath it, he hunkered down before her and smiled. It was a gentle smile, disturbingly sincere, and it stayed that way as he showed Amber his open palm, drew it deliberately back and then slapped her hard across the mouth.

She hit the ground, sucking dirt up her nose and into her throat, so that all the involuntary brays of pain she made after that were choked. Now she could taste her blood, too, and feel the great, spreading heat of hurt where her lips had been mashed. But when his hand came down to cup her chin and turn her toward him, Amber exposed her bloody teeth at him and hissed through them, just like Meoraq did whenever he was good and pissed.

Several lizardmen stepped back.

The leader glanced tolerantly down at his chest where her defiant hiss had sprayed him with blood. He touched a few droplets, rubbed his fingers, then put out his hand. “Give me your belt, Vek.”

Split-Hand glared at the leader, then at Amber, then stomped over to his dead friend and took that belt instead.

The leader accepted that (not without a dark and watchful stare), then made a loop of it, waited for Amber to stop coughing, then fit it over her tossing head. She clamped her teeth together. He pinched her nostrils shut. She bucked and flailed and finally had to breathe, whereupon he worked the belt between her screaming jaws and pulled it tight.

“Now we try this again, little one,” he said conversationally, sweeping her up and over his shoulder. “But you had ought to know that if I have to pull every fang out of your fierce little head to ensure your good behavior, that is exactly what I will do. Mind yourself. Let me see it, Vek.”

Amber could see nothing beyond the leader’s backside and the ground as Split-hand presumably presented his injury. She wriggled, chewing at the belt until her lips bled, and finally fell slack, gasping wetly around the leather. She was caught; she felt that she could keep fighting, at least for a few more minutes, but she knew she couldn’t break free. She wasn’t ready to give up yet, but she had to have a better goal than making him mad enough to kill her. She had to wait. Another chance to escape might come along, but until then, she just had to wait.

“No good,” someone was saying. “It has to come off.”

“I know it has to come off, cock-rubber! Fuck Gann!”

“Not here. I have no reason to think there is only one of these.” The shoulder she rode jostled with a meaningful shrug. “Get what there is and get away.”

The raiders got to work rifling through the packs around the fire. There wasn’t enough to occupy all of them. One of them came strolling around to look at her instead, fingering at her hair.

“This is easily the most bizarre thing I have ever seen,” he said.

The leader grunted—Meoraq’s grunt, the one that meant he acknowledged the comment but didn’t feel any strong need to converse.

“You mean to sell it?” the other man said once she was done. He was still touching her hair.

“Might.”

“To who?”

“To me!” Vek snapped. “Hear me, Zhuqa, if you put that thing on the block without telling me, I will put a hook on the wrist where my fucking hand used to be and put the hook in your fucking head!”

“If I sell it, I’ll give you due warning and a cut of credit besides. Now calm down and remember who you are speaking to.”

“It’s mine!” Vek spat, but he spat it without shouting. He came stomping around to the leader’s back to glare at her, holding the bandaged lump of his ruined hand. He flared his open mouth threateningly, then dove forward and cracked his forehead into hers. She heard him stalk off muttering as she swayed near the grey area of unconsciousness, and finally, with a mental sigh of defeat, she fell on through.

* * *

Just as the raiders had not been able to tell human from dumaq at any great distance by the full light of the fire, so Meoraq could not tell dumaq from human by moonlight at the hour of his return.

He had been in a fair mood most of the evening, wandering far and observing the animals of Gedai that were ostensibly his reason for this patrol with only half an eye. He prayed as he walked, silently at first, then aloud, and soon was singing some of his favorite hymns at full voice. Amber wasn’t there to mutter in her throat or heave her pained sighs or slap at her face. He loved his wife—more and more, that word felt true and right and real—but they had spent too many days this winter riding about in one another’s pockets. He liked her company, but he missed his solitude and he meant to enjoy it as much as possible while he could.

At length, even as he saw the sun low to the mountains and knew his time was ending, he found a friendly jut of stone and sat himself to meditate, but his first moments in that welcome stillness were unquiet. He could do this back at camp, couldn’t he? And truth, he supposed he could, albeit with Amber pacing restlessly somewhere at the outside edge of his perceptions. She’d want to talk at him or involve him in some way in the domestic things she did or maybe just pull him into the tent for sex. Meoraq was opposed to none of these things, but once in a while, a man just liked to meditate.

Still, that vague sense of unease persisted. A tickle of wind, the rough edge of the rock he sat on, the distant call of some unknown beast—every little distraction woke him wholly to his clay until he resorted to a child’s trick, lying flat on his back with an arm crooked over his eyes, chanting the Prophet’s Prayer over and over until meaning bled away and it was all just sound. Sound and blackness, yes, but still not peace. In its pursuit, he not only failed to truly meditate, but also entirely lost track of time. He believed that he spent perhaps an hour in that fruitless endeavor, but when he finally cried surrender and opened his eyes, it was full dark.

Amber must be terrified. No, strike that, she was furious. And in either case, she was just fool enough to come looking for him if she believed him lost or injured.

Cursing, he hurried back to camp, but ‘hurry’ was a relative term after dark. There was enough of a moon behind the clouds to show him his backtrail at first, but the wind which had been so calm all day now stirred itself up, soon erasing all sign of his passage until he followed nothing but a hope that this lesson in the cost of man’s pride would end at his camp and not in a nest of ravening tachuqis.

But it had been his own camp in the end, although he glimpsed it from well to the east of where he’d thought it was, and he thought it was Amber sleeping there when he finally came to it. There was no tent and no fire and this he at first presumed with a mixture of resignation and annoyance was her way of telling him he was a scaly son of a bitch for leaving her so long, which was spiteful and childish, yet he would apologize because he was Sheulek and a Sheulek took the higher path.

Then the clouds above him thinned so that the little light from the crescent moon grew stronger and all at once, what had been Amber became a dead man. It seemed Sheul gave him hours outside of Time to see this, to feel it, and only when he fully understood did the weight of the world crash back into his clay.

His feet took him forward without conscious thought. He reached only to stab the corpse—he had drawn his kzung, it seemed, how curious—then staggered away, staring wildly in all directions for Amber—where was Amber?—and seeing nothing, only the night—why had he left her so long?—and the wind whipping at Gann’s back.

He cupped his mouth and howled for her. Not with words, but just a cry, a dumb animal baying that he had never before imagined any dumaq could make. The wind alone answered, changing its course to drive him back. His boot struck the body. He looked at it and, with a sudden savagery he did not feel until it was upon him, he wrenched his kzung from the corpse and hacked at it again.

The head came free at his first blow. The chest cracked apart at his fourth. He took the left arm. Bisected the rib. The right arm. He struck until it was meat and bone and two legs. He struck until he had no wind and no moisture in his mouth but the clotted blood splashing up at him from the ground. He struck until he fell to his knees in splintery gore and leaned back, gasping.

He listened then, as he should have listened hours ago, but Sheul had nothing to say to him now.

Amber.

He dragged himself up, shaking on legs like water, and pulled his blade free of the mess on the ground. How long? The blood that touched his tongue had cooled, but was yet warm. The raiders might be close still. He looked and saw nothing, no sign but dumaq blood in spatters across the trampled grass. An hour ago, he would have seen their trail leading away, before the light failed and the wind grew strong.

An hour ago, he might have been here to stop it.

They had not left her body behind, only that of their companion. Perhaps she was alive still…or perhaps they had taken her corpse away as trophy. No, he must believe she lived! Lived and fought, as fiercely as the evidence here proclaimed, knowing he would follow.

“Sheul, O my Father, show me the way. Set me upon their path if she lives! Give me my right of vengeance if she does not!” He struggled with his fear and broke upon it, suddenly roaring, “How could You have sent her to me just to take her from me now?”