Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 64 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

Meoraq hissed and rubbed at his throat, which felt disturbingly warm already. ‘Patience, Uyane. Patience is not a word to a warrior, but a way of life. Honor Him and show patience.’ “How well do you know this land?” he asked.

Onahi tipped his head toward him without taking his eye from Scott. “I have been all my life within those walls, sir, save for one summer spent with my mother’s people in Chalh.”

Meoraq grunted morosely, poked at the fire…and then looked around with a frown. “Chalh?”

“To the south, sir, and eastward. Just out of the shadow of the mountains, in the lie of the road that leads out of Yroq.”

There was a question, scarcely hinted at, in those last words. Meoraq supposed he had an accent. “We didn’t come by road,” he said. “You have kin in Chalh?”

“My mother’s kin. In service to House Ylsathoc.”

“Ylsathoc,” he echoed. The name was oddly familiar to him…and then he placed it. “I knew an exarch of that name. Exarch Ylsathoc…ah…Hi-something. Hilesh?”

The watchman of Praxas betrayed dumaq emotion at last with a snort, taking his eyes off Scott just long enough to roll them. “Hirut. Exarch, is he?”

“You know him?”

“I knew a swaggering little sprat who seemed to think the wind itself would stop blowing if he didn’t point it in the right direction. How did he turn out?”

“He’s taller.”

Onahi snorted again.

“Would you know the way to Chalh well enough to guide a man?” asked Meoraq.

“There’s little enough to know, sir. Three days of brisk travel would take us to the Prophet’s Crossways. From there, the southward road will lead us directly to the gate. It should be in fair repair,” he added. “There’s a shrine at the Crossways, popular with the priests and blade-born pilgrims.”

“But no road from Praxas.”

Onahi grunted and flexed his spines in a shrug. “The city of my father gave its love to Gann long ago. I always had a mind to make the journey to Chalh, but never won release from the warden.”

Small marvel, that. Warden Myselo would not be quick to let another man free to speak of what he may have seen, certainly not to the sort of city that birthed exarchs.

“You never stood a watch without the walls?”

“Many times.”

“You could have left.”

“I suppose so.”

“You never wished to?”

Onahi grunted and spared him half a glance before Scott redrew his attention. “It never felt like the right thing to do.”

“You left tonight.”

“Tonight, it did.”

“Sheul’s hand is ever upon the hammer,” Meoraq mused, looking around at his Amber, safe again within his keeping, and at her Nicci, safe again beneath her arm.

Onahi acknowledged this politely and quiet passed between them for a time. At length, it was the other man who broke it, raising a hand first in salute. “Forgive me, honored one, for my boldness. Is it your will to travel on to Chalh?”

“It would appear to be Sheul’s will,” Meoraq answered, taking another skewer off the coals. “How does that find you?”

“I obey Him in all things.” He paused. “It will be a relief to settle there, sir. Chalh is a good place.” He paused again, his eye drifting from Scott to the fire, and to the slave who crouched there at Amber’s side, suckling Gann’s child. “A good place for a family.”

“Perhaps you will have one someday,” Meoraq said, as if this were not an absurd suggestion to make of a Sheulteb’s bastard. He liked the man.

Meoraq took the skewers off the fire and, ignoring the immediate outstretched arms of Scott and his humans, gave them out to his brothers under the Blade.

Onahi watched Scott stomp and swear his way back over to the edge of camp while his skewer cooled, but when the human finally quieted, his attention drifted. He took a small bite, swallowed quickly, then stood up.

Meoraq prepared more kipwe to roast, watching without seeming to watch as Onahi crossed around the fire and went to one knee before Xzem. “Mother,” he said, respectful as a man at prayer. “It is Onahi Chasa before you.”

The slave ducked her head and rocked the child of Gann, giving Amber short sidelong glances until she realized who it was the man addressed. Her next wary glance was to Meoraq, but he kept his own eyes on the roasting meat and let whatever was happening here happen without him.

Onahi waited. Patience was not a word to him. Meoraq felt a little envy stinging through his grim amusement as he let this scene play itself out.              He did like the man. He was a bit of a fool, but a good man, and after the unpleasantness of this day, even a foolish sort of goodness was a soothing thing to see.

It was obvious Onahi had no experience with servants, let alone with slaves. One did not directly address them unless one were giving orders. The slave knew this even if Onahi did not. If he had simply dropped the skewer in her lap and walked on, she would be eating now, not cringing in confusion under the weight of his gentle gaze. But this was no proper household, no more than it was a raiding nest, and it seemed neither of them knew the rules of conduct.

The slave ultimately seemed to realize that the man before her would not leave until he had an answer of some sort. Short spines shivering, her neck bent so far that her chin touched her chest, Xzem finally managed a wordless mewl of feminine inquiry. The little sound cracked in her mouth, uncertain.

“It is Onahi Chasa,” he said again. And when the slave continued to shrink away, he looked back at Meoraq.

‘O my Father, why are You including me in this?’ he thought. Aloud, he grunted only, “Xzem,” as he fussed determinedly with the meat.

“Xzem,” the slave whispered and rocked the baby a little faster, as if she feared a beating to go along with the introductions. Not an unreasonable fear, all things considered.

Onahi relaxed, believing himself to be on firmer ground, rather than further out in the mire. “Mother,” he said, offering the skewer of his hunter’s portion of kipwe to a Gann-born raider’s slave. “Take and be fed.”

Xzem hesitated, but only for a moment. She gave Amber the baby. Without a word, she rose and moved to the wall of the windbreak, gripped a post, and bent. She stood her legs well apart; the wind flattened the folds of her worn shift to her body so that she might as well be naked there, and every man’s eye was on her. She waited.

Onahi stared, as all the watchmen of Praxas stared, at the rounded curve of her hip and the shallow valley beneath her shift where her sex must be (and worn well open, all things considered). Meoraq had seen many women bend for him this way and even he stared for a short time before running his brooding and distracted eye over Amber. She still wouldn’t look at him. Which was just as well, he supposed. The fires of Sheul were burning—they had not cooled completely since he’d found and reclaimed his wife—but there were twenty other people in this camp now. Meoraq was not ashamed of Amber, but he hated the thought of other people listening in while he had sex.

‘Not tonight, Uyane,’ he thought bitterly, turning the skewers. ‘Not while she sits there with her damned Nicci under her arm. Not unless you want the whining little pest in the tent with you.’

Onahi stood. He went to Xzem and, just as Meoraq was reluctantly opening his mouth to order him back, he took her arm and stood her gently up. He placed the skewer in her puzzled hand and released her. “Take and be fed, mother,” he said.

The other watchmen of Praxas exchanged glances. One of them picked at the remaining portion of his own meal and looked at one of the slaves.

Onahi turned around and came back to the other side of the fire. He knelt. His fingers brushed at the buckle of his loin-plate, testing, before he set his hands on the ground. He closed his eyes and prayed in grim-faced silence.

One by one, the watchmen of Praxas offered food to the slaves. Thanks were spoken by some, softly, uncertain of propriety. Meoraq let them be, even when one of the watchmen sat boldly at a slave’s side and ate with her. He didn’t care if they ate together, scandalous as that was. He didn’t care if they spoke to one another. At the moment, he didn’t care if they all stripped to their scales and formed a dip-ring. His battle-wounds were a constant ache in every part of his body, like the anger and resentment throbbing in his throat or the heat of Sheul’s fires churning in his belly, and he cared about nothing and no one else.

And he was tired. All at once, the sleep he had not caught in the past several days seemed to drop into his bones. He doubted he had the strength to do what the fires demanded. He didn’t even have the strength to pray. So he gave the next set of skewers to the humans, including another for his wife and one for Nicci (who did not, he noticed, share it out with Amber), and ordered the rest cooked and held until morning. “I want to leave at dawn,” he said, addressing all of them together, but Onahi most of all. “Keep a strong watch and let no one enter or leave this camp unless they do so under my eye.”

“I hear you, sir,” Onahi said, his brow still pressed to the ground in prayer.

Meoraq grunted and stood up.

Amber lifted her arm from her blood-kin’s shoulders and began awkwardly to rise without disturbing the sleeping baby at her breast.

Meoraq’s selfishness let her gather her feet beneath her, but he was only so much a selfish man. She would be tired and sore as much as he. He knew he would not be able to lie beside her without taking her and he could not take her gently, not yet. So Meoraq stopped her with a raised hand before Amber could stand. “Not tonight,” he said sourly, and went into his tent before he could change his mind.

2

Amber slept on the ground by the fire. She didn’t have to and she knew it. They had plenty of tents—one for the lizardmen, one for the lizardladies, one for the humans…and the one where she knew she wasn’t welcome.

So after Xzem took the baby and went into her tent with the other ladies, she just lay down where she was. She felt awful. Not just sad, but sick, as if his rejection were a poison she could swallow over and over the longer she lay there. She didn’t think she’d sleep, but eventually she did, and dreamed of Zhuqa, who was sometimes with her on the Pioneer or in the ruins of that lizardman city with the metal spiders scuttling forever on their empty web, and even her mother’s squalid little apartment back on Earth. “This is Zhuqa’s House,” he kept telling her, through all the confusion of that nightmare. “And once you enter Zhuqa’s House, you never really leave.”

She woke up crying, which was bad enough, and rolled over to discover one of the strange lizardmen just staring at her, which made it humiliating as well. She sat up, using the excuse of looking for Nicci in the empty place beside her to wipe at her cheeks, and felt her stomach flip ominously over. It didn’t surprise her, as miserable as she’d been, but she’d only rolled onto her knees when that small warning became irrelevant and she puked right into the ashes of the fire. Her empty stomach had nothing to give up but a little bilious slime, but it kept trying until she could feel herself trying to pass out as well as throw up. Not her usual post-trauma puke-session, but it did ease up eventually, thank God. By then, she only had enough strength to heave herself onto her side instead of dropping face-down in the stinking mess of it.

The lizardman got up and walked away, leaving her to gasp and spit weakly where she was. After a moment, footsteps returned.

“Are you dying?” Nicci’s voice, not very interested.

“I kind of want to,” Amber muttered and then had to make her aching stomach force out a laugh because it sounded so true.

More footsteps, several sets. A scaly hand gripped her shoulder—Meoraq’s hand, she knew it even before he rolled her over and she could see his frowning face—as somewhere in the world, Scott said, “Do you have to do this now, Bierce?”

“Hit him,” said Meoraq curtly, and someone did. “Show me your eyes, woman.”

She looked at him and saw his spines flat with annoyance and not forward with concern. She scooted back out of his grip and sat up, fixing her burning eyes on her knees as she brushed them off. “I’m fine.”

“She’s fine,” said Nicci. “It’s just something she does when she gets upset.”

Meoraq looked back and forth between them, then at the other lizardmen, and then over the windbreak at the wall of the city. He stood up. “Break the camp.”

Lizardmen moved at once to obey. Meoraq took two steps toward his tent and paused. He looked back. Then he turned around and came back, passing Amber and Nicci without a glance to seize Scott by the hair. He dragged him over to the tent where the humans had slept (Eric and the others got out of his way and the lizardmen didn’t even look at them) and threw Scott into the side of it. “If you want to sleep in it,” Meoraq hissed, “you pick it up and carry it! No one in my camp serves you, S’kot!”

“Jesus, fine!”

Meoraq’s head tipped. “You speak to Uyane Meoraq, a Sword of Sheul, and you had better do it with more respect than that if you want to walk away from this.”

“He’s in a mood,” Nicci remarked.

Amber did not reply.

“Thanks for the tent,” said Scott, flushed and scowling.

Meoraq grunted and took Scott by the wrist. He lifted Scott’s hand, hissed to make him stop struggling, and forced it into a fist. “This is a salute,” he said, thumping that fist against Scott’s chest. “And when you speak to me, you salute.”

Scott was about as close to openly gaping as she thought he’d ever been.

Meoraq released his wrist and got a fisthold in his hair again, pushing Scott’s head down and holding it there. “When I speak to you,” he said, “you bend your neck in respect.”

Scott still said nothing, but he was breathing pretty hard.

Meoraq released him and stepped back. “We will practice once, because this is new to you. Break your tent and make the other humans ready to travel.”

Scott kept his head down and lifted his fist slowly to his chest.

“Fair for a first effort. Now hear me, S’kot. These men are born under the Blade as well and you owe them the same respect. You do not speak to them unless they address you first or unless you have something damned important to say. Am I heard?”

“Yes,” said Scott, glaring at the ground. He touched his chest again.

“You do not walk in the shadow of my House, human. You are a burden I endure. Do not interrupt me for any reason. Do not give orders in my camp to anyone. Do not take what you are not offered. Do not offend me, S’kot. You have none of my forgiveness. Do you mark?”

“Yes.”

“Good. So. To be clear. When you speak to me, you speak with respect. When you speak to my brothers under the Blade, you speak with respect. And when you speak to her—” Meoraq pointed at Amber without looking at her, shoving his snout kissing-close to Scott’s face. “—I cut your fucking head off.”

How horrible did a person have to be when hearing something like that made her feel a fluttering of hope? Amber rubbed her eyes and looked at her knees some more.

Scott must have saluted even though he didn’t say anything because Meoraq said, “Good. This is the last time we have this conversation, human. Get moving. We eat as we walk.”

And that was all. Meoraq crossed the camp and took his own tent down. Eric and Dag went over to help Scott, who didn’t seem to know what to do. Crandall took Nicci by the arm and led her a little ways off to whisper at her. The other humans huddled up and just tried to stay out of everyone’s way, the same as the lizardladies were doing on the other side of their dead fire.

Amber sat, alternately rubbing her stomach and her eyes, and finally got up. She headed for Xzem, because she couldn’t think of anyone but the baby who’d want to be with her after that, but she’d only taken a few steps when Nicci caught at her.

“Come on,” she said, turning Amber around and taking her by the hand. “Let’s go pee while we still can.”

Meoraq glared at them as he dismantled his tent poles, then used one of them to point. “No further than the ravine. Go and come back.”

Nicci showed him a salute. After a moment, so did Amber.

Meoraq, bending to pick up another pole, straightened up to give her a second look. “Don’t do that,” he said and went back to work.

They walked to the ravine, hand in hand. The wind was warm and light. It was about as sunny as it ever got on this planet, which meant that it was visible as a smudgy disc behind the clouds. A nice day.

They peed, then climbed back to the top of the ravine and sat down. “Funny how girls can never go to the bathroom alone,” said Nicci, plucking absently at blades of grass.

“What did Crandall want you to tell me?”

“He wanted to know if you were pregnant.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“Are you?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

Nicci shrugged and tossed some grass away. There wasn’t enough wind to carry it far. Most of it landed on her leg.

“It isn’t funny,” said Amber.

“I told him you throw up a lot when you get upset. At least you used to.”

It was Amber’s turn to pick at the grass. “I didn’t know you knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“You don’t like it when people think you have…you know.”

“Problems?” Amber offered with a listless smile.

“Feelings.”

That was ugly. The wind stayed warm.

“I used to figure that if you were bulimic, you’d be losing weight,” Nicci said after a little time had stretched itself out to the snapping point. “But you weren’t, so I figured you were fine. And then, at the end, when you were losing weight…I just didn’t care that much. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure it was.

The walls of the windbreak were coming down. Nicci twisted around to watch, plucking more grass. “Mom used to get morning-sick,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.” Most of the time, it was how she knew to go to the aborters.

“So did I.”

Amber closed her eyes and pressed at them.

“Want to see where they took it out?”

She didn’t, but Nicci leaned back and opened up her tunic to show the raised pink dash of the scar over her belly. It was surprisingly neat.

“They had something so I didn’t feel it,” Nicci said, rubbing at it. “And it kept me pretty high afterwards, too. It was nice, while it lasted. I don’t know how they knew I was pregnant. I wasn’t showing. But I guess they were doing these exams almost every day…and they’re not, you know, cavemen. They know what they’re doing. It’s amazing, really, what they can do without a real hospital. But when you stop and think about it…scalpels and needles and things…none of those are machines. Anyway, I guess they might have heard the heartbeat or something. I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry, Nicci.”

“I’m not. I didn’t want it. It was one of them.”

Amber watched her little sister close her tunic and tie up her belt again, trying to make that make some kind of sense. “What do you mean?” she asked at last. “That…That it would turn out like…like Scott?”

“That would be pretty bad, too,” Nicci agreed with another careless shrug. “But I mean it was one of them. One of the dumaqs.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Whatever. I saw it come out of me. I know what it was.”

“But…But they’re aliens!”

Nicci picked some more grass and dropped it.

“It’s not possible!” Amber said, louder.

“Commander Scott said it was probably the Vaccine.”

“What?”

“It mutates, remember? So that we don’t catch any alien viruses. We just sat there in the Sleeper for God knows how many years, soaking in that Vaccine, letting it change…whatever it felt like changing. You know the only thing that stops us from catching pregnant from any old…you know? Stuff? It’s that our bodies don’t know what it is, so it doesn’t take. Everything has to match up, you know? All these, I don’t know, millions and millions of connections.”

“But—”

“But we had the Vaccine,” said Nicci in a thoughtful way, “and here’s what I think. You know how regular vaccines work, right? They’re little teeny tiny pieces of the virus that makes you sick, just enough so that you make the, I don’t know, the anti-virus. But our Vaccine works on all of them. How is that possible, Amber? You went to the seminars. You remember all this. How can one shot be made up of billions and billions of different diseases, even alien ones?”

“Because it…it changes,” said Amber. “It finds the bug and it copies it so we can make our own cure before we ever get sick.”

“Right,” said Nicci, nodding. “It finds the bug. And it copies it. It takes our cells, with our DNA, and it changes them.”

Amber stared at her.

“Well…every new drug has unexpected side-effects, right? Headaches. Dizziness. Insomnia.” Nicci looked back into the sky to watch the sun climb higher. “Ours just may cause lizard-babies.”

Zhuqa. Zhuqa, over and over. It was impossible and she didn’t believe it and she didn’t care what Nicci thought or what she said she’d seen, but oh God, not with Zhuqa.

She looked back and saw Meoraq standing at the edge of camp with his arms folded, watching them while all the other lizardmen rolled the windbreak into bundles and shouldered supplies. Her heart ached once, as sharply as a stabbing, and then bled down into her belly.

‘He is never going to want to touch me again,’ thought Amber, almost calmly.

Then she bent over without warning and threw up again.

“Yeah,” said Nicci, watching her. “You’re just upset. That’s what I told Mr. Crandall. Come on. We’d better go.”

* * *

They walked the day out undisturbed either by men from Praxas or from Gann, not that there was much of a distinction. They had a stream to keep their flasks filled and good stony ground that would not show their tracks and always the cover of trees around them, so if that made a day good, it was a good day, but they made miserable distance.

Onahi’s men marched in pairs around the rest, relieving Meoraq’s burden considerably as he watched for the ambush that never came. The women were slow, still fearful of the open wilds and unused to so much walking, but they were obedient and not difficult to manage even so. The humans, now. Oh, the humans…

They walked as if they had only just learned how that morning, constantly staggering and catching at one another, constantly out of breath, constantly whining at his back. Meoraq wasn’t completely insensitive to their condition. He knew they had been penned all winter, ill-fed and ill-used. He knew they were trying. He let them rest an hour for nearly every hour walked and never said a word against it. Some muttered thanks, but not many. Some clustered around Scott and whispered, but not all. It did his bitter heart good to see that the polish was finally dimming on that gilded lump of ghet-shit, but he could still feel color itching in his throat all that interminable day.

So he halted them in the early evening after traveling less than two spans—less a call for camp than a cry of surrender—with plenty of good hours left in the day to hunt or patrol or just pray before night truly fell. The walls went up. Fires were lit. The women went to work brewing tea and heating cold kipwe, all but Xzem, who knelt with Amber in the mouth of a tent with the infant singing in her arms and Nicci close by to watch. Most of the humans rested by their fool abbot, but Eric went out to gather deadfall for the fires and Dag actually helped the women with the cooking.

Around the small camp, Onahi’s men—now men under Uyane, he supposed—kept watch. Their quiet talk eased him; not their words, which were exactly the sort of low garrison-talk one would expect, but just their speech. Dumaqi in male voices, relaxed and uncomplicated, with meanings he didn’t have to guess at. He didn’t think he was lonely and wouldn’t have believed it if someone told him he was, but the pleasure that came just to listen was almost enough to take even the ugliness of Praxas from his heart. How much better would it be, he wondered, to be home again in Xeqor, to hear not only familiar words but familiar voices? See his brothers’ faces? Sleep in his own bed?

He was ready, he realized. The fate that had been so damning when he first confronted it now seemed to him as welcome as Sheul’s own Halls. Home. Family. Rest.

Amber.

And there his gaze lay for some time, upon his wife and the infant she held to her heart. She sensed it, looked up. Their eyes met and Sheul’s fires, cooled but never entirely gone, surged at once to greater life.

Meoraq turned away and beckoned Onahi to him. He had to do it twice; the other man’s attention had been fixed and somewhat glazed upon Xzem. “Call your sentries in,” he ordered. “I want a private hour with my woman. No one is to leave this camp for any reason until my return.”

“I mark.” Onahi’s eyes traveled the camp, counting his men…but came back to Xzem. And lingered.

“These are women of my House,” Meoraq reminded him, trying not to sound as if he were also warning him.

“I will not dishonor your camp, sir.”

Meoraq grunted, now studying Onahi instead of Amber. The fires were insistent, but a Sheulek was the master of every impulse, even that one. “Have you seen women before?” he asked bluntly.

“At a distance.” Onahi managed with effort to look at Meoraq. “But no mother…apart from my own.” He hesitated, clearly battling the urge to speak further, and ultimately defeated by it. “I have gone to Gann, sir. I submit myself to your judgment.”

Meoraq’s spines snapped up. “Eh?”

“I have gone to Gann,” Onahi said again, his words all but bleeding in the air. “I have tried to pray. I have begged our Father’s forgiveness all this day and all last night, but I…”

Meoraq waited, beginning to feel restless now that the first astonishment of this incredible confession was fading. The fires in his belly burned and Amber was watching him. “You?” he prompted impatiently.

“It is unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother,” Onahi said and seemed to break. Without moving, his strained body became soft as clay. “It is unforgiveable. The taint of my city is on me. I must submit to your sword.”

Meoraq took a moment to puzzle this out. “You want a woman,” he said at last.

Onahi closed his eyes.

So did Meoraq, before someone could see him rolling them. He rubbed at his brow-ridges, took six breaths (without sighing and that was nearly an ordeal in itself), and said, “I do not see Gann’s hand on you, watchman. It is the fires of our Father you feel. Take a woman.”

“It is unforgiveable—”

“Take another woman.” Meoraq beckoned to his own and started to turn away. Sheul’s hand fell on him at once; he turned back and yes, Onahi was staring at Xzem.

There was something in this, he was certain, something he was meant to see…but whatever it was, it would have to wait. Intellectually, he knew no man had ever died of lust, but his belly felt as if it were filled with molten lead and his thoughts had begun to slip toward the same killing black that took him in the arena. If he did not take his woman soon, he thought it very likely that Sheul would take her in his stead. As for Onahi—

“Go to my tent,” Meoraq ordered. “Make your prayers and be prepared to submit to my judgment upon my return.”

Onahi saluted and went without question as Amber came near, looking back over her shoulder either at the baby or at Nicci. “I’m really worried—” she began.

“Come with me,” he said and left the camp.

Onahi’s watchmen raised their fists as he passed by, but he was beyond acknowledging them. He strode swiftly out between the walls and as soon as Amber had joined him, he took her roughly by the arm and walked as far as he could stand to go. He refused to rut with his woman on the ground where anyone could hear them. He could see a sturdy-looking tree twenty paces away, maybe thirty; it may as well be a thousand.

“Wait,” said Amber, pulling at him.

He grunted and kept going, dragging her with him, seeing nothing but that tree.

“I have to talk to you! Damn it!” And with a mighty yank, her hand was gone from his grip. “This is important!”

He turned on her, hearing the hiss that spat out of his throat, but unable to feel even a spark of shame for it. She was his woman, his wife! Why could she not give him her obedience for one fucking day?

Blackness took him for a heartbeat, no longer, but when it faded, he had his hand on her throat and his face biting-close to hers. Confusion swelled, overshadowing rage but not killing it. He shut his mouth, leaned back, and finally released her.

She stared at him, trembling and furious even with tears welling in her eyes. It made him think of Nicci, which made him think of the watchman in Praxas fucking her through the cage, which made him think of the tree he may not reach tonight. He had to turn around, facing into the chill spring wind, and took several minutes to breathe himself calm. One for the Prophet…two for his Brunt…three for Uyane…

He was Uyane.

“Speak,” he said at last.

“Aren’t you going to look at me?”

“No.”

There was quiet at his back. He did not hear her crying, not until she spoke again. The tears were in her voice and they cut at him, but he did not look at her.

“You have to get the baby out of here. This is taking too long and it’s getting weaker.”

“The humans are at their limits. They can go no faster.”

“Then you have to leave us behind.”

Us, she said.

“It’s too cold,” Amber said. “We barely got anywhere today and I know it’s our fault—”

Our.

“—but I can’t make us go any faster and you can take that baby to Chalh.”

“No.”

“I heard those other guys talking. Even they know it’s going to die if…It’s just a baby!” she burst out. He could hear her slapping at her face, punishing the eyes that betrayed her with tears. “How can you not care about that? You said you forgave everyone! Didn’t you mean it?”

He glanced at her, but his troubled thoughts turned to flame and he faced back into the wind at once. “It is not for me to forgive the children born to Gann.”

“I don’t care whose it is!” she sobbed. “It’s just a baby! You can’t let it die because it’s Zhuqa’s! That’s not its fault! God, Meoraq, look around you! How can you even think of letting it die? In a world where so many of you have died, you should be doing everything you can to save it just because it’s alive!”