The Last Hour of Gann (90 page)

Between the hated living and the beloved dead…

But she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead!

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

Amber needed him, of course she did, but so did all the rest of them, and while it was true that Amber might recover with his care, it was also true that the chance to spare one life did not and ne
ver could balance the risk to forty-seven other lives. If he did this solely because it was Amber, then he would carry every death of every other human as if it were murder. He would be Sheulek no longer. He would be damned in the eyes of God.

I do not want to leave her,
Father
.

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

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

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

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

His woman retreated.
Eric lingered,.

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

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

“She started it,” said
Eric.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she had opened her eyes.

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

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

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

Nothing. She did nothing.

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

BOOK
VI

GANN

T
hunder, falling like a hammer into her brain, knocking her out of her nice, safe sleep and into reality. She heard screaming, her own, and then felt hands, not her own. She fought them, but the hands were thunder, inescapable, pressing her down and holding her fast in this world of cold and fear and hunger.

It hurt.
Amber tried to scream, but she couldn’t find her voice and didn’t have much breath anyway. She managed a hoarse groaning sound, utterly swallowed by the pound and roll of the thunder, and after that had to just lie there under the hands and feel her heart racing in terror because she didn’t know where she was or why or even who.

Flapping. The world was made of leather walls close around her and those walls were flapping. The wind had its jaws around the world and was shaking them, shaking them. The thunder was its voice and its fists. At each new crash and roar, she screamed and struggled, but the hands owned her. They pushed her down, they held her, and the thunder opened its throat and breathed her back inside it.

* * *

The second time Amber opened her eyes, it was calmer, both inside the tent, where the wind still steadily shook the walls, and in her mind, where the storm had mostly ended. She rolled and kicked her way onto her side, then lay weakly panting, wondering where in the hell she was.

She could see. The air in the tent was an unhealthy, mottled yellow—the color of daylight filtered first by clouds and then by skins—but she could see, and by an exhausting process of elimination, she eventually realized that the only reason she could possibly see Meoraq’s leather tent on every side of her was if she was in it. Why was she in the lizard’s tent again? Why did everything hurt? And why was she so dry?

The dryness was worse than the hurt, actually. Her tongue felt swollen and sandpapery and stung when she tried to lick moisture out of her mouth. Her lips were unfeeling things, cr
acked and scaled—Meoraq’s mouth. Even her eyes felt dry. All of that, and yet she was soaked in wetness. The leather mat she lay on squished at her every feeble movement; she could feel beads of moisture tickling over her belly, her breasts, the hollow of her throat, her thighs. Her hair was plastered against her cheeks and neck, ugly to feel and probably pretty damn rank. Rain? Sweat? Did it matter?

Amber found a gripping place on the itchy
blanket lying like lead over her body and fought it off. It was not a fight of just one battle. This was ridiculous. She had not been that damn sick. No one could be that damn sick!

She sat up. Her head swam and then hit something. The mat. She’d fallen over?
Yes, she had. She sat up again.

Light. She warded it off with one raised hand, then promptly hit her head on the ground again because she apparently needed both hands to hold herself up. Two sudden dives to the mat in as many minutes was too much for her; she dragged her fists up under her chin and lay shivering, wishing the light would go away.

It did, but suddenly Meoraq’s huge black body was coming at her, and even though she knew it was him,
knew
it, panic still rolled its own thunder over her and she wheezed out a little scream. That was stupid. She frowned, gasping in the aftershocks of that pointless terror, as Meoraq’s scaly hands dipped impersonally beneath her armpits and hauled her up.

She couldn’t remember ever being carried before. Ever. No
t even as a little girl. It was an odd feeling. Her legs dragged bonelessly across the mat until he got an arm under her and she flopped against the plates of his chest and then she was up. Carried.

“T
oo heavy,” she mumbled, embarrassed. “Don’t.”

He grunted in the space above her head and shouldered the tent-flap open. Out they went into the unbelievably cold air, air so fresh and clear it seemed to cut her brain when she breathed it in. The light was blinding. She slapped some of it off and then just rested with her hands over her face, rocking limply back and forth as Meoraq walked, wishing he’d put her down. She didn’t want anyone to see her being carried like this. She especially didn’t want anyone to see it when Meoraq dropped her fat ass on the ground.

But no one was saying anything. It was pretty windy, but she still ought to be able to hear them murmuring and snickering at each other. If nothing else, Crandall should be making a few comments. Especially since…oh for Christ’s sake, she was completely naked.

“Put me back!” Amber wailed, pressing her hands even harder against her face because now it made perfect sense that no one was talking and if she had to see them struck speechless by the sight of her naked body, she was going to die right on the spot. “Damn it, lizardman, put me down!”

He did. She felt herself swoop downwards, bump up against his bent knee, and then finish out the slow fall in a heap over the hard, frozen ground. She curled miserably around herself, knowing she couldn’t cover everything, and finally made herself face the horror head-on.

Only no one was there.

She kept stupidly staring, right on over nothing, nothing, and more nothing all the way to the horizon. She could see the blackened rings where the campfires had been. She could certainly see the wide path where all their tromping feet had flattened the prairie grass. But the places where the bivies and tents should be poking up out of the ground were empty.

Meoraq’s leather teepee was the only one left.

Anywhere.

Something nudged her arm. She blinked around at the mouth of a
small, shiny flask, then followed it up Meoraq’s arm to his face.

“What happened?” she croaked.
“Where is everyone?”

He took her wrist, put the
flask in her hand, and made her take it to her mouth. She needed his help to hold it while she drank. The warm water cut her mouth all to hell. She choked and he let her choke, but after she was done, he made her drink again. She had maybe half a dozen swallows before her stomach cramped, and then had just enough instinct to shove the flask back and bend forward before puking it up.

It came out as smooth and tasteless as it had gone in. That made her want to throw up again, but a froggy belch was all she could manage. She groaned and started to cup protectively at her stomach, but Meoraq took her
wrist and put the flask back in her hand.

“I can’t,” she said, trying to push it away.

His spines flattened.

So she drank
and even though he made her take twice as much, it stayed miraculously down. Her mouth, wet, throbbed with hurt, but she could feel the rest of her sucking the moisture in, and at the end of his third silent urging, the flask was dry.

He took it back with a grunt of satisfaction, then got up and left her there. She looked after him as he went back inside his tent, and kept right on looking because it was still the only one around.

Meoraq came back with his blanket and draped it around her shoulders, tying the corners together so the wind couldn’t blow it off. It was warm, but so heavy. So ridiculously heavy.

“I’m not supposed to get sick,” she told him. “I got the Vaccine. We all got it. I can’t get sick anymore, they said so. They promised. What happened to me?”

“What do you remember?”

“Everything!”

“Tell me.” He hesitated, then gestured toward her stomach. “Had you…been having pains? Were you hurting…all that time?”

“Huh? No, I was fine. We were talking. We…” She thought about it, reaching up to rub at her thick head as if she could comb out a clearer memory with her fingers. It seemed to help, actually. “You told that horrible story about your father.”

He drew back a little. “Horrible?”

“And then…and then I was banking the fires and packing the food. I don’t…I don’t remember going to bed. I don’t…” Something tugged at her, just a flutter of sound, an impression more than a real thought: Snake
bite. “I think something bit me.”