The Last Hour of Gann (45 page)

“Okay, well, he’s obviously decided to freak out,”
Scott began, rolling his eyes. “So as soon as you figure out what he’s saying, come and get—”

“
Stand and be judged!
” Meoraq roared. “I am not Uyane Meoraq but the Sword in His hand and I will cut you down if you do not answer just as if you answered for Gann! Did you build the fucking machine?”

“Meoraq, what’s wrong?”

Her voice, so timid that it might have been Nicci’s instead, somehow fell on him as a hammer, knocking the wind from his lungs and the bones from his body. He dropped his arm limp at his side and stared at her, his thoughts in such storms that even he didn’t know what he was thinking.

Perhap
s they had only stolen it. They weren’t using it, after all. It had been crated all this time. He’d never even seen anyone near it, except to sit on it. A man could pass through the old ruins without offending Sheul, open those doors, fill flasks at those pumps. He had himself read by the light of those ancient lamps without a twinge of conscience. The only unforgiveable sin…

“Did you build it?” he asked her. “Say truth.”

“No, but why?”

“Why? How can you…” He backed away from her, shaking his head harder and harder. “How can you ask? H
ow can you pretend not to know?” He fought with words and his temper, then lost both and shouted, “How can you bring that…
thing
into my camp? How dare you stand against the Word of God
in a Sheulek’s camp
!”

“This is exactly what I was afraid he’d do,”
Scott said from the distance he had taken during this distraction. “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing so he…he thinks it’s a demon or—”

“I
think it’s a
machine
!” hissed Meoraq, never taking his eyes from Amber’s. His chest hurt. He wished he’d killed her the day she’d first dropped gasping at his feet in the thornbreak than come to this moment, this betrayal. How could she dare to look at him like this, as if she did not know what he was saying? “And you must tell me the truth. Is it one of the Ancients’ making or your own?”

“It’s ours,” she said. “But no one here made it, if that’s what you keep asking. It was m
ade clear back on Earth. That’s kind of my whole point,” she added, directing herself to Scott. “It’s broken and no one here knows how to fix it, so why are we still hauling it around?”

He seized on those words. “It cannot be restored?”

“No, and before you say one stupid word, Scott, look at it! What, are you going to chisel a solar panel out of stone? Make wire out of grass? It’s dead. The only reason we’re dragging it around with us is because it came from Earth.”

“From…your homeland? You carry it…as a keepsake?”

“Something like that. But if you honestly expect us to start putting the miles behind us, we are going to have to drop the dead weight.”

“I can think of some weight we can drop,” said
Scott.

“Quiet, all of you. I must pray.” Meoraq bent his head and closed his eyes, shutting away the immediate whispers of the humans around him. The Second Law forbade the children of Sheul from seeking to remake the machines or to master them as the Ancients had done. In the Word, it was written that the man or woman who removed those devices from the ruins to be restored or put to use had broken faith with Sheul and could not be redeemed. He could think of no passage that forbade the keeping of a dead machine, but he certainly was not easy with the idea of carrying it about in a closed litter like an unholy relic.

Meoraq opened his eyes and there were Amber’s, impossibly green, unafraid. They showed him no guilt, no stain of sin. They were the very eyes of innocence.

But even a child could touch a naked blade in innocence and go to Gann for it. The machine was here, dead or not, and
Scott at least spoke as if restoring it for use were part of his ultimate goal, this thing he called colony. Amber did not seem to think that possible, but still the humans were carrying it, revering it, and if it was not a working machine, what did that make it but an idol to Gann?

“Get your things,” he told her. And turned around. “I share no camp with the trophies of Gann’s age of dominion. We move on, humans.”

“We are not leaving our—” Scott began, and for a wonder, Meoraq did not have to say a word. One of his own men reached out and caught his arm. Meoraq could not hear what was said, but Scott looked hard at his samr when it was done and made his face change colors. He had no more objections.

“How far do you want us to go?” Amber asked. She had gone only as many steps as were necessary to take her Nicci by one hand and the strap of her pack in the other, but both dragged behind her. “Because
I know you don’t think we were trying very hard, but…but I just don’t have a whole lot more left in me.”

Some of the other humans agreed, softly at first, but adding more and more voices until it seemed they were all whining at once. They were hungry. They were tired. They had
walked all day. Their feet hurt and their backs and their shoulders and every other part of their malformed bodies—a growing litany of complaint that scraped and scraped at him until it finally stabbed itself in.

“
Damn it, why can’t just
one
of you do what you’re told without whining at me?” he exploded, and turned on Amber. “You tell these bawling calves that I am slapping the very next mouth that opens!”

The furry stripes above her eyes rose in arches. “Wouldn’t I have to open my mouth to do that?”

He tipped his head back and took a deep breath, letting it out very slowly.

“What did he say?”
Scott asked after a moment.

“And why would he want her to open her mouth?” asked Crandall.

Amber started to turn toward them. Meoraq caught her chin and made her look at him instead. “I am a Sword of Sheul and I honor Him always. Always. To see His laws broken and do nothing is to break them myself. Do you mark me?”

“I think so.”

“If the land of your birth makes such machines, then your land is lost to Gann. But you have left it, and that, at least, may be some sign that you can be redeemed. Perhaps this is why you were set in my path. Tonight, I choose to believe so. But not even for one hour will I tolerate Gann’s corruption among us now that I know of it. Do you mark me?”

She stared at him for a long time while her people whispered at each other behind her. “Are you telling me the Devil built our solar generator?” she asked at last. “Because I’m all for leaving it behind, but that’s just stupid.”

“What I tell you is that I honor Sheul. And if you honor Him also, you will not require me to enforce His laws. You will obey because it is His word and you love Him.”

“
Because I what?” Her face puckered as if in pain, although she huffed out a laugh at him. “Meoraq, I don’t even believe in my own God, much less yours.”

“Jesus, Bierce, don’t tell him that,” said Crandall, more amused than alarmed.

“Well, I don’t. So please don’t ask me to haul my tired ass another two miles or even two meters because God hates our broken solar generator, because I won’t do it. I’ll stay here and take my chances with the smiting.”

“
I ought to let you,” Meoraq said, releasing her. “That would teach you a very brief, very profound lesson. But I won’t. If you will not go for Sheul’s sake, go at my command and I will honor Him for both of us. Nevertheless, we are leaving.”

“The hell you say.”

“I do say.” And despite the seriousness of the situation and the insult he surely would have taken had it been anyone else who stood against him in this way, he felt the stiff set of his body ease and heard his voice quiet. “And you will not defy me,” he told her, only her, “even though you are sore and weary, because you know I would not give that order without cause. Get your people ready.”

She pressed her hands to her face and shook her head
several times, but at last she sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

This was all that
Scott could stand. “Goddammit, Bierce, you are not in charge! You don’t have people here and you don’t give orders to any of mine!”

Meoraq caught Amber by the shoulder as she began an answer and moved her firmly aside. He advanced, and kept on advancing as
Scott retreated, until he’d backed the human up right against the machine’s shining carcass. He put his hand on the hilt of his samr and leaned over, face to ugly human face. “What are your orders, S’kot? Do you walk with me or go to Gann?”

Scott
glared at him, deeply colored in parts of his face and very pale in others. A paradox, like his mouthparts, which were tightly pressed together and yet trembled. “Someone, say something.”

“You’re a dick,” said Amber, somewhat less than obediently.

Meoraq snorted, stirring the hair on the human’s head, and tapped his samr. “If I draw this again tonight, it will be to strike the head from your skinny neck. Mark me, human, or do not mark me. My patience is gone.”

He did not see much of understanding in the sullen face that stared back at him, but when
Scott spoke again, it was to command his people to gather their things. The few tents and small packs they carried did not take long to set in order and soon the whole grumbling herd was following in Meoraq’s wake. Whenever they found air enough to whine at one another, Meoraq quickened his pace until at last they were quiet. He meditated as he drove them, thinking this was the first ordeal of his pilgrimage that he truly felt as though he’d conquered, and even if the humans were angry (or even if he cared if the humans were angry), it was still a far easier walk than it had been all the rest of that day. Tomorrow, they might even thank him, but even if they didn’t, they would walk. He was Sheulek; they were
his
, and it was long past time they knew it.

2

O
nce upon a time, Amber Bierce lived in a two-bedroom apartment. She shared a closet with her sister and had a shelf and two drawers for her other clothes. She had four pairs of shoes, two coats, a scarf she never wore, a new pair of gloves every year because she could never find the old ones, and socks. Once upon a time, Amber Bierce had her own bed, a mattress and boxsprings both, sheets and blankets and pillows that had to be just right or she couldn’t get to sleep. Once upon a time, food was nothing but a phone call or at the most, an extra stop on the bus ride home, and she could curl up on the couch and eat as much as she wanted even if she wasn’t hungry, just because it tasted good, and maybe even drink a beer or two before she took her shower…washed her hair…brushed her teeth…went to bed.

Once upon a time.

Now and then, as Amber lay on the rocky ground with the cold rain trickling in under the emergency blanket to warm against her reeking body, that apartment and that life seemed as hazy and unreal as the fairy tale words she used to invoke them. It was occurring to her more and more often these days that life wasn’t going to get any better. Easier, sure. Already, it was easier. They still hadn’t managed to walk far enough in one day to make Meoraq happy, but they were making a hell of a lot better distance without the concrete and crates. They ate almost every day, not a lot, but enough. No one was sick, no one had tripped over a rock and broke his head open, no one had found a thick limb on a short tree and hung himself. Perhaps even more impressively, no one had pissed Meoraq off to the point where he left. Bad enough when he stomped around, hissing and hitting people, and praying as loudly as he could for patience; it was so much worse when he got quiet and just watched them.

Watched her.

She could never tell what he was thinking on those nights, but she was often gripped with the fear that those were the nights he thought the hardest about leaving, and if he did, it would be her fault.

Because they weren’t friends. She wanted to be, tried to be, but she’d never been good at making friends and now that her life
actually depended on it, she had no idea how. He was gone in the mornings when she woke up and he didn’t walk with anyone on the daily hike, just kept moving around them, ever vigilant and increasingly pissed off. By the time camp was struck, he was rarely in the mood to be bothered by anyone, let alone her, but sometimes he sat with her when the time came to feed his whining humans and sometimes he stayed to talk while everyone else went to bed. On the nights he didn’t, she sat up alone. She had no friends and when she was stupid and girly enough to feel bad about that, she just told herself that Amber Bierce didn’t care what other people felt about her. Once upon a time, it had been true. Once upon a time and far, far away.

“Are you sorry you found us?” she asked one night, one of the good nights, when she’d been able to pretend that she wasn’t just some pest
he had to take care of.

And he said no, said it without even seeming to think about it first. But he also didn’t seem surprised by the question or her (not quite) teasing expectation that he might say yes.

“You think you’ll be sorry when it’s over?”

“That would depend on how it ends, but I doubt it.” The blunt bony spines on the top and back of his head flared forward and relaxed back in that shrugging way he had. “Right now, it’s too easy to imagine that it will never end.”