Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 69 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

The next time Nicci came for him, he was ready. He caught her in one hand and dragged her with him as he flipped athletically from the cupboard onto the floor, and from there across the room to the water bucket, where he dunked her head repeatedly.

Nicci’s screams turned to sputters. Amber’s went on, but they were dying in spite of her, torn to hoarse shreds by their own violence. No one else was making a sound.

Meoraq turned in a full circle, hauling Nicci with him, to face off against the rest of them. “Are you all mad or is it just your women?”

“Hey, do what you want with them,” said Crandall, holding up both hands as Amber howled for help.

Meoraq tossed Nicci in a heap by the hearth where she curled herself up small, sobbing, and returned to the cupboard. He studied Amber while she struggled in her bondage, then reached out and laid his hand over her mouth.

She stared up at him in weepy dismay, unable to believe he could be so calm when there were bugs eating her.

“I have Gann’s own headache,” he informed her after a moment’s meditation. “So I am going to ask just once what is wrong with you and you are going to answer quietly. Now. What is wrong with you?”

He removed his hand.

“I’m rotting,” she whispered, and felt tears drop hotly out of her even though she couldn’t blink. “I’m rotting! There’s maggots in me!”

Behind him, the others recoiled and immediately began to mutter at one another. None of them looked very upset, only a little wary and a lot disgusted.

Meoraq, on the other hand, just kept staring at her. After a while, he closed his eyes and went someplace private with his God. He was gone a long time. His eyes opened. His head cocked, demonstrating resignation and some small amount of humor. He took a deep breath and said, “I know there are maggots in you, insufferable woman. I put them there.”

And as Amber still reeled from that, he bent down and began to put them back.

The panic was gone and the adrenaline with it. She could do nothing but sob out wailing, incoherent pleas as he scraped up all the disturbed maggots and placed them carefully back in the wound. He put the compress back on. He loosely tied the bandage. Then, in that same calm, deliberate, God-alone-knows-how-hard-it-is-not-to-slap-you-woman voice, he said, “The maggots eat only dead flesh. They will clean your wound and at day’s end, I will wash them away.”

Amber cried harder.

“They will eat the beetles as well, but—”

“Beetles?!”

“—but you have had many good days of healing, and—”

“You put beetles in me too?!”

“—and I think the wound will not reopen if you are careful.” He gave the bandage a final light tug and glared at her. “Being careful means you will lie still. Agreed?”

Still weeping, she made herself nod.

He unbound her arms. She had to keep clutching her elbows to stop herself from immediately grabbing at her side. She could feel him looking at her, his stare almost as physical a thing as his irritation.

His thumb brushed at her cheek. That was all for a while.

“Get out,” he said, adding crossly, “Not you,” when she tried to sit up. “The rest of you. Get out.”

“It’s raining.”

Meoraq clamped both hands suddenly to his brow-ridges and bellowed, “I don’t care!”

Dag wisely shut his mouth and backed away.

After a minute and several deep breaths, Meoraq began to speak in the tight, rapid way of the kind of anger he usually reserved for dealing with Amber herself: “God has given me the strength thus far not to knock the head off your skinny neck but don’t try His patience, human, because mine is gone!” he finished at a shout and had to stop for some more deep breathing. “I suffer your presence as a gift to my woman’s gentle heart and for no other reason, so get up and leave my camp one damned hour or be turned out for all time at the point of my blade! Don’t whine at me! Go!”

A shuffle of feet and murmurs marked their obedience, but sniffling told her Nicci, at least, had stayed.

Meoraq let her. He sat down on the edge of the bed, prodded broodingly once at his brow-ridges, and then put his hand on Amber’s thigh and waited.

What was she supposed to tell him? Knowing intellectually that the maggots served a useful and even necessary purpose meant nothing compared to the feel of them crawling and writhing inside her own body. Inside her own meat! It wasn’t just a bunch of maggots, it was a premonition of her own mortality in a universe without a God—a playful sampling of an afterlife in which she was nothing but food for the lowest forms of mindless life—and Meoraq could never begin to comprehend that. Oh no, he rode around in God’s back pocket all the damn time!

“I dreamed of you,” he said suddenly, softly. He continued to gaze out into the main room and not at her, but his hand again brushed back, this time along her shoulder. “I dreamed much. Awake and asleep.”

Amber pressed her palms over her eyes and made herself take deep, slow breaths until she finally quit leaking. The maggots rolled and wriggled and dug themselves around under the compress; knowing what they were, she could no longer feel them as anything so benign as a tickle. She’d probably never feel a real tickle again quite the same way, either. She had god-fucking-damn larvae crawling around inside her and he was talking about his dreams!

“They’re in me, Meoraq,” she said shakily. “They’re eating me like I’m already dead.”

He sighed. “I know. And I suppose it is terrible. Yet you live, Soft-Skin. You live and will be well.”

“For how long? God! Why are you trying so hard to save me?”

She meant her outburst for him, but he apparently took it for a prayer, because after a respectful silence, he grunted and said, “What does He tell you?”

“He? What, you mean God?” Momentarily unpinned, Amber erupted into giggles just as fantastically inappropriate as her hysterics had been. “He tells me I’m going to need saving for the rest of my stupid life, that’s what He tells me!”

And Meoraq nodded, either oblivious to her sarcasm or pretending to be. “Then I will always be there to save you.”

“Oh for—Leave me alone, lizardman! Let me die already! I’ve done nothing but get hurt from the moment we got here. This isn’t fair!” she burst out, once more on the brink of hateful tears. “I don’t get hurt! I’m the strong one!”

“Yes,” he said, with no trace of irony.

The dam was good and broken now. It all came flooding out of her—not tears, but words—in a hot sluice of emotion as bitter as bile: “I hate this! I hate lying here day after goddamn day staring at the top of this goddamn cupboard! I hate riding around in your stupid sled and watching you have to carry me! I hate that every single fucking creature on this planet wants to eat me and half of them have tried! And I hate you telling me it’s all God’s will!”

“His will is great, Soft-Skin. There is room for all things in His eye.”

“If God actually wants me to lie here with maggots in my guts, I want no part of him. I hate your God!”

It was the worst thing she could think of to say to him—the most vicious, blasphemous, mean thing to say—and she did it half-hoping he would walk out and give the tears struggling inside her an easy way out. Instead, he snorted, as if she’d told a joke that was perhaps in poor taste but still very funny.

She stared at his back for a long time as anger was replaced by exhaustion. The itch in her side just grew and grew with every passing helpless second.

“And I hate you,” she whispered.

“Lies.”

“What can I say?” Amber asked at last, her voice raw and shaking. “What can I say to make you leave me?”

“Try insulting my father,” he suggested.

“Stop making fun of me! I can’t do this, Meoraq! I can’t spend the rest of my life being your God-given burden!”

“Your trials are mine, Soft-Skin. As you learn from them, so do I.”

“Bullshit.”

“Truth.”

“What are you learning right this second?” she demanded.

“Patience.” He glanced upwards. “I learn that a lot when I’m with you.”

Amber clapped her hands over her face again. “You’re a zealot.”

“And you hate me,” he prompted.

Again, he waited. She did not reply, but her hand went to the bandage at her side, wanting to scratch but tortured by the image of crushing their disgusting little bodies into slurry right inside her.

He did not look at her, but must have been able to track her hand regardless, because he said, “It will heal.”

“But there’ll always be something else. Something worse.”

“Such is life.”

“I don’t want to live like this.” Her hand went to her side again, rubbing sickly at the skin around the bandage since she didn’t dare touch the actual site. Her stomach cramped; she might survive the maggots, but honesty had turned toxic and there was nothing she could do but keep on puking it up. “And don’t feed me that what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger bullshit! What doesn’t kill me just makes me worse! I don’t want to be ugly like this!” She scratched miserably at the places that didn’t itch, scratched until she felt blood wet beneath her fingernails, until he reached back his hand and stopped her.

“No warrior should be ashamed of the scars he carries. Each one is proof of courage. Even this one.” He touched the pink marks of his teeth he’d left her with on the night they’d first been together. “Perhaps particularly this one.” His eyes shifted to meet hers. “You are mine.”

“Because God gave me to you.” She tried to say it in her old tough-Amber voice, but it came out in a lost crybaby-girlie way instead, all the sarcasm lost in a quaver. “Thanks a lot, huh?”

He grunted, gazed at her for a long moment of silent thought, and just when she thought he was about to speak, he bent down and kissed her.

His rough mouth scoured across her lips as gently as she supposed he could do it, considering he couldn’t feel what he was doing. His breath, warm and dry and tasting faintly stale, blew in to mingle with hers. His tongue, hard and smooth as wax, nudged into her, inviting at first and then demanding.

She felt nothing at all for a second or two, and then something inside her seemed to erupt and she was kissing him back the way a drowning woman drinks air. Her hands dug at the back of his neck, pulling him closer even as their mouths mashed painfully together, and closer was never close enough. She sucked and bit and ground at him, making all the semi-mute, unlovely sounds of carnal desperation, and for God’s sake, Nicci was still sitting right over there, but as soon as his hand skimmed beneath the blanket to grip her bare breast, she didn’t care and wouldn’t have cared if they’d been center-stage in front of thirty thousand people.

“You are my—” He snapped his bone-hilted knife out of its sheath and stabbed it down over the head of the bed. “—insufferable—” His mouth scraped at hers, licked away a bead of blood, and came back for another kiss. “—senseless—” The hand at her breast rasped over her skin in a sudden, urgent journey to delve between her ready thighs. “—faithful wife.”

“Don’t!” she moaned, even as she bucked up against his questing hand. “I wasn’t! You know I wasn’t and you don’t want me anymore!”

“Shall I swear it before God?” His hand moved, stroking steadily and with embarrassing ease in and out. He looked down at it, his eyes smoked and hungry. “Upon this altar, all vows are surely made sacred. Let Him hear me. Let you hear me.”

She cried, clutching at him.

“You are always for me, Soft-Skin. Though your nearness and infirmity are a terrible trial upon my years of discipline, I will stand fast with the aid of God against my natural lusts. And when you are whole again, I will fill you. Between those hours, and for every other hour from now until the end of Time, you are for me.” He paused to watch with grimacing, lizard-like satisfaction as she came to a swift, violent climax. His hand stilled, but stayed where it was, cupping and not quite caressing her. “This day will end,” he said, softly. “You and I will go on.”

She caught his hand as he withdrew it, clutching it in both of hers and holding it to her heaving chest. He waited, but she couldn’t find the words to fit the storm of thoughts howling through her, and at last he pulled from her grip.

“Rest now, Soft-Skin,” he told her, standing up and away from the cupboard. The first thing he did was to cinch his belt even tighter, which she guessed meant he was concerned about protruding. The thought made her smile, and he ducked back inside to claim that smile with another of his harsh kisses. “When you wake, I will have tea for you. It will be bitter and unpleasant and you will drink it all.”

“Meoraq—”

He put his hand over her mouth, his eyes sternly narrowed. “And you will drink it all, woman. Give me your obedience.”

She rolled her eyes and raised her fist.

He tipped his head and gave her a warning hiss, then removed his hand.

“Yeah, fine. I’ll drink it all.” She sighed and lay back in the cupboard, rubbing at her side.

He glanced at her hand, then stepped away. He didn’t tell her not to remove her bandages. He didn’t have to. The maggots itched and ate at her every bit as much as they had before, but she guessed she could handle it. She hated it…but she could handle it.

He dressed, muttering to himself as he strapped on weapons and buckled things. The words she caught were enough to tell her it was one of his many prayers, this one on her behalf. When he was done, he came back to tap her shoulder briefly in a parting salute, and then he left. Her man, off about his manly business.

Amber pulled her blanket up with a sigh and tried to get comfortable. Her side itched. Her stomach still hurt from all the emotional craziness. She had a huge pot of bitter tea to look forward to and plenty of cupboard ceiling to stare at until then. It was going to be a long day.

‘Yeah, but the day will end,’ she thought, and smiled.

“I thought he was hurting you.”

Oh yeah. Nicci was still here. Amber felt herself blush a little, but only a little. Mostly, she just felt sexy and quiet and tired and good.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I flipped out completely.” Yeah. Flipped out. Right before she made out. Could you still call it making out when someone rubbed you into cumming from your toenails? Probably not. Sheesh, what a sleazeball she’d turned into.

“He’s different with you,” Nicci said.

“Is he?” She really didn’t think so, but upon reflection, she decided it might seem that way. He was himself with her. He was different with the others.

“You’re different with him.”

“Am I?” That was less surprising. She’d been different since she first set foot on this planet. Nicci just wasn’t used to the whiny, weepy, hysterical Amber yet.

Nicci got up and came over to the cupboard, looking down at her with an expression that was disturbingly lifeless. “I want to go home.”

Amber stared up at her, more than a little thrown by this statement. What did she honestly expect her to do about it?

“Do you?” Nicci asked.

She still had no answer.

“If we get to this temple and there’s a ship there and someone can fly it and we can go back to Earth, are you coming with me?”

Amber’s mouth moved. No sound came out.

“If there isn’t a ship,” said Nicci, “are you going to take care of me?”

“Nicci—”

“Or do you think you’ve done enough? After you brought me here, after you made me come with you, are you just going to wash your hands and say you’ve done enough? You got your man who loves you and will take care of you and save you forever, so maybe you don’t care anymore, but I’m still here, Amber. I still need you.”

“I’m here,” said Amber, reaching out to touch her arm. There was no answering touch, not even a glance in that direction. It was like touching a corpse. “And I’ll always be here for you, Nicci. We’re sisters. Nothing’s going to change that. Look, I know it’s hard, but you can do it. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to sit around. I can teach you how to make hides and clothes and stuff.”

“You said you’d always take care of me.”

“I am.”

“Not like you used to.”

Amber nodded, accepting this, then shook her head, and then just sat there and stared at the cupboard ceiling. “I don’t think I did either of us any favors hovering over you like that back home,” she said at last. “Mama wasn’t much of a mother…and neither was I. I love you, Nicci, I do…” She sighed and rubbed her eyes, then made herself turn around and face her expressionless sister without flinching. “…but I’m not going to carry you for the rest of your life. The ship crashed and I’m sorry…but it’s time to move on.”

Nicci said nothing, did nothing, just let the minutes tick out. At last, she reached out and gently closed the cupboard door, leaving Amber in the dark to listen as her baby sister walked away.

* * *

The remainder of the day passed in relative peace, although given the chaos surrounding his awakening, anything short of a direct attack could be considered relative peace. The humans kept their distance, wisely. Meoraq’s headache had lost its sharp edges over the course of the day, but it still sat heavy behind his eyes. He had drunk four pots of tea and his throat still felt scratchy and tasted like a long lick up Gann’s slit. He was aware that all these things made a light penance for the sin of chewing phesok, but it still made for a deeply unpleasant day.

He meditated as much of it away as possible, rousing only to attend his or his woman’s most basic bodily needs. When he wasn’t meditating, he sat at the table and stared at his humans, making a game of herding them from one wall to the other by his looks alone. He made no patrols, no hunts. When he decided he was hungry enough, he ate half of the previous day’s stew, cold. If Amber had asked, he would have stirred himself to heat the rest for her, but she claimed a weak belly and took nothing but tea all day. As for the other humans, they could eat cold stew or starve for all that Meoraq cared.

All days end, as he had reminded his wife that morning. In the last quiet hour before dark, his day’s idleness bit back at him in an entirely foreseeable manner: He was not in the least tired.

His humans were already settling in for the night, sharing out the remains of the stew and throwing sullen glances at him. That cheered him somewhat, but it really was a poor show of his true character and he’d ought to pray about it. In the meantime, however, there was Amber.

Although she had been dozing most of the day, she did not share his restlessness now. She was sleeping soundly when he woke her to tend her wound. The maggots had done their work well; the flesh looked pink and had a strong knit going where the beetle heads had been placed. He washed the wound twice with tea and licked it thoroughly, ignoring Amber’s informative mutterings as to how ‘gross’ he was.

But with this done and the wound wrapped again, he had nothing else to do. If he were in the city, Meoraq could simply light a lamp and read the Word or take the rooftop or find some other way to entertain himself, but he was loathe to waste what little lamp oil he’d brought with him out of Chalh. In their winter’s camp, when he had spent days on end confined to a cave, he’d always had the option of rigorous sex to exhaust himself before bed. He didn’t know what he was going to do with himself tonight.

“Are you tired?” he asked, without much hope.

“Yeah. Why? What’s up?” She visibly rallied herself to appear alert. A good woman was always thinking of how to lessen her man’s burdens and see to his needs. Meoraq’s selfish heart burned a little, but not enough to keep him from undressing and crawling into the cupboard with her.

“We going to fool around?” she whispered when the door was shut. Her hands were brazen on his back. Her little teeth nipped at his shoulder.

“No,” he said. “That would be unforgiveable.”

“Oh.” She drew away and nestled herself into the bedding. “Good. Because in all honesty, I had maggots in me all day and I’m feeling about the most unsexy I’ve ever felt in my life. Want to talk?”

He did, but she was so obviously weary and he didn’t have anything to say anyway. “Just sleep.”

She did—the only command he’d ever given that she’d followed without question—and he lay with her in the cupboard for a time, resting in the hopes that he might sleep as well, but it was not to be. He could hear the humans bedding down, their low chat giving way to grunts and shuffling, and then to the growling breaths of heavy sleep. Meoraq tried to meditate, but his mind was as restless as his clay and in the end, he rose and pulled his breeches on, then climbed to the surface where he couldn’t disturb anyone.

The night was warm and windy, but dry yet. He basked a short while in the pleasant sensation of standing against the wind and what a fierce, masculine picture it must make, and then heard the clumsy tread of a human footfall on the stair behind him. Nicci, he saw. He reminded himself to be polite.

“How is she?” Nicci asked quietly.

“She rests in Sheul’s sight,” he replied, moving aside in case she wished to go past him and out to the fleshing pit to urinate.

She joined him at the doorway, but that was all. Her eyes went to the horizon, to the distant black line before the mountains that was Praxas. She gazed on it in silence and without expression.

Meoraq groped for something to say as the moment stretched itself indefinitely outward. “What do you want?” he asked at last.

“Nothing. I can’t sleep.”

He grunted, thinking she might manage a better effort were she lying down with her eyes closed. Of course, so could he.

“I’m sorry I, um, attacked you. Earlier.”

He glanced at her, then back into the trees. “I forgive you.”

He waited for her to leave. She didn’t.

“Am I bothering you?” she asked.

Meoraq tipped a brooding eye upwards at the heavens where Sheul sat in judgment over every lie and told one anyway. “No.”

“Can I stand with you?”

He grunted again.

She moved a little closer to him. There was no polite way to step back, so he stood there and did his best to ignore her. After a very long, suffocating silence, she said, “You saved our lives. All of us. I thought I was going to die in that cage.”

He was uncomfortable responding to this in any way—to agree was to take the credit for Sheul’s hand upon him, to deny seemed to dismiss her suffering in that place—and so he said, “Sheul’s judgment shall fall upon Praxas in His own time,” and tried to leave it at that.

“I know.”

There was an answer he had never anticipated. “Do you?”

“If He hadn’t been with me, I never would have survived at all,” she told him, and watched his face closely.

He turned into the wind, aware that he was frowning, unsure exactly why. It had certainly been a good answer…but he could not shake the feeling that it had not been an honest one.

“Will you take a walk with me?” she asked after another grueling silence.

“Why?”

“I’m restless and I don’t want to go anywhere alone.”

Sensible answer. He did not want to agree, but this was Amber’s blood-kin, and if blood ran true in no other manner, doubtless it would do so now and she would stride out into the wild without him upon his refusal.

“A short walk,” he said, and set a course for the stream.

She followed obediently, beside and a little behind him, with head bent and hands meekly clasped before her. It was deeply disturbing to him, and after a moment’s thought, he knew why: It was the respectful walk of a well-bred dumaq woman at the side of her man. Realizing that, he tried to put some distance between them. She reached out and caught his hand. It took all his will not to pull out of that flimsy human grip, but only to walk, staring straight ahead and leaving his hand limp and unfeeling in hers.

It had never been so long a distance to the water. He had actually begun to think he had somehow lost his way when he heard it ahead of him in the same place it had always been. He checked for tracks out of habit, but no sooner had he hunkered beside the muddy bank than she was kneeling next to him, resting her hand upon his thigh. A light touch, surely. A thoughtless touch, perhaps. He could think of no good way to throw it off and so he stared fixedly into the ground with his damned thigh on fire under her unwelcome hand and wished he knew what the hell she was on about.

Of all his wishes, that was the one Sheul chose to grant.

Nicci kept her hand where it was, then turned toward him and placed the other with deliberate intent into his breeches and beneath his loin-plate. The tip of her wind-chilled finger slipped along his slit, seeking entry, but only for a moment. The world crashed back into focus; Meoraq shoved her violently away, slapping one hand to his groin and actually rubbing, as if her touch came with some polluted grease. Such was his horror in that moment that if she’d come at him again, he would have drawn and stabbed her.

But she didn’t. She sprawled across the bank of the stream and began to run water out of her eyes. “It’s okay,” she wept, trying to smile at him. “It’s okay. I won’t tell. I know you want to. It’s fine.”

He took two swift backwards steps, well out of her reach. “I don’t want this! I don’t want you!”

“I’m just the same as she is!” she pleaded, wiping mud onto her face with every swipe of her hand. “We look the same! We sound the same! You can do anything you want to me and you can…you can take care of me!”

And there it was. Shock died at once, crushed by the weight of his sudden disgust. “Take care of you.”

She crawled toward him in the muck, fumbling at her clothes, the shadows of her face in the moonlight such that it seemed a skull leered at him and it took every measure of his will not to draw his father’s blade and ram it through her throat. “I can be good,” she was saying. She might have been weeping or laughing as she said it, he could not tell which. “You can do everything you like that you’d never ask Amber. You can hurt me if you want to. You can—”

“Get away from me!” he roared, and that at last stopped her. She huddled at his feet, poised upon her knees with her bare chest exposed to him, motionless and watchful while he paced the urge to slap out of his body. When he wheeled abruptly and came back to her, she did not cringe, only lifted her head a little higher and reached out her hands.

He caught her by the wrists before she could touch him and pulled her roughly up before shoving her back. He eyed the growths on her chest with disgust and turned away. “Cover yourself.”

She did, silent and small.

“She is my wife and your blood-kin,” he said tightly, facing furiously into the wind. “This is incest! Blasphemy before Sheul!”

She uttered a high, shivery sound. He was fairly certain it was a laugh, but a laugh such as the damned must use, once death and eternity had driven them mad.

“Do you think you’re any different from them?” she asked, scorn like knives in her querulous words. “Do you really? God makes it happen, remember? It’s not a sin because God made them want me, right? So if it’s God’s will, what are you afraid of?” She came toward him, her mouth a black and ghastly crescent of a smile, to put her hands on him again. “What does Sheul want you to do with me?”

“Kill you.”

She flinched back, her smile lost at once. The wind smeared water across her cheeks. “I’m just the same as she is,” she said in her fragile voice.

“No,” said Meoraq. “You are not. And if you ever touch me again, I will see you judged for it. Hear me, N’ki, and mark the word of a Sheulek. It is for her sake alone that I do not cut you down right here. When she hears of this—”

“Don’t tell,” she whispered. “Please, don’t. She’ll hate me.”

“She should!” Meoraq spat, but then took a slow count of six and cleared his heart of Gann’s grip. “This once. Because she is weakened…and so happy to be with you again,” he added in a bitter rush. He breathed some more. “Go.”

She slipped away like a shadow on the grass. Meoraq did not watch her. He took six breaths and six more and then knelt on the wet bank to pray until peace found him. He stood, breathed, and knelt again, this time to ask for healing for his good woman and the strength and patience to tend the humans with whose care he had been charged. He stood, breathed, and knelt a final time, wetting his fingers with mud and painting his naked chest. He prayed, and in that silent prayer were thoughts of black gratitude that Sheul had held him fast against Nicci’s hand, because for a moment…

He stood, brushed the dried flakes of mud from his scales, then returned to the underlodge alone. He did not look for Nicci among the sleeping humans at the wall. He went to his cupboard. His woman roused halfway to raise the bedding and let him come beneath, then snuggled close and began to growl softly in her sleeping breaths, the way she claimed not to do. He held her, loving her, hating Nicci—Gann and Sheul each with a hand on his heart—and lay awake for hours.

7

Being hurt sucked.

It wasn’t the pain. The pain was extremely present, but Amber could handle pain. What she couldn’t handle, at least not with any good grace, was the boredom.

Amber knew how it felt to recover from whatever had bitten her that day back in the prairie. She remembered the weakness—needing to be carried, to be fed, to be tended like some…some sick person. But she also knew that it hadn’t lasted long. She’d been pretty out of it for a while, but once the fever broke, she was on her feet and walking in just five more days. Maybe not at her full speed, but walking.

But five days after Meoraq washed the maggots out of her side, Amber felt no better. She wasn’t walking, full speed or any speed; she still needed help just getting upstairs to pee. The pain gradually subsided, but she was always cold, always dizzy, always tired. She wasn’t getting better.

“Nothing’s happening!” she moaned as Meoraq carried her outside on Day Eighteen. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You lost a lot of blood,” he replied. “Sheul can heal your flesh, but blood takes time to renew.”

“It’s taking too long.”

“Stop whining. Try to see this as a time of leisure. Enjoy it.”

Enjoy it. Amber’s experience in the cave in the mountains should have prepared her for a lot of lying around doing nothing, but what she’d failed to consider was that, in the mountains, she’d hadn’t done much nothing at all. She and Meoraq had managed to keep busy most days, and on those rare occasions when they’d run out of busywork, there was always sex. These days, sex was as far out of the question as walking up the stairs.