Read SGA - 14 - Death Game for Free Online Page A

the flame burning low. Teyla sat up.
    “Does your head hurt?” she asked quietly.
    John shrugged. “It’s not awful. I just can’t sleep.” He was under a mound of covers against the chill of the desert night, his back to her.
    “I can’t sleep either,” Teyla said.
    “Sorry.” He rolled over again and sat up, the bandage drooping down over his eye.
    Teyla put her hand to his forehead. “You don’t seem feverish.”
    “I’m fine. It just hurts.”
    “I think I have some Tylenol,” Teyla said. “Can you take that?”
    He nodded. “Should be ok. It’s not very strong but it’s better than nothing.” She fetched the Tylenol and the remains of the tea, and he gulped the pills down. “I’m sorry to keep you awake.”
    “Well, I can’t very well throw you out, since we’re locked in,” Teyla said. “So I suppose I have to put up with you.” She sat back down on the edge of the bed, propping up against the headboard and pulling the covers over her feet. “We could tell stories.”
    “Tell stories?”
    “That is what my people do when keeping watch,” Teyla said serenely. “And since we must pass the cold hours of the night together, it is better to do so in companionship.” She folded her hands across her stomach. “I have suggested it, so you may request the story.”
    “I don’t know any Athosian stories,” John said, settling back down, the firm pillow like a bolster beneath him. It would take some little time for the pills to help, she thought, but perhaps then he would sleep.
    “Still, you must pick one,” she said. “It can be anything. About a person or a place…”
    For a moment he looked thoughtful, his eyes shadowed by the bandage. “How about the first time you went through a Stargate?”
    Teyla looked up at the dim lamp swaying. “You do not pick an easy one,” she said.
    “If it’s a bad idea…”
    “No. You chose fairly.” Teyla smiled at him. “I will tell you of my first gate.”
    ***
    I am springborn, so I was already weaned my second summer when my mother walked through the Ring of the Ancestors and never came back. My mother was Tegan of the Gate Field, of Emege That Was, and she was beautiful and wild both. My father loved her, and how not, when she was like the storm on the mountains or the wild birds in flight? Four years they lived together, four years they dreamed, and my second summer she walked through the gate and never returned, a smile on her lips and her pack on her back. She was Tegan, and nothing could hold her. She was meant for walking away.
    My father never loved again, never chose another, and so in my childhood it was just the two of us. My father, Torren, was a trader. He was a mild man with keen blue eyes and a quiet way, the kind of man who misses nothing but says little. He represented us when people came to buy our wares, and sometimes he walked through the gate himself to sell the things we had made on other worlds, to trade them for things we could not make.
    And there were many things we could not make. Plastics—these things you use so freely, even throw away—we prized them for their durability, their lightness, and most of all because we could not make them. The best came from Sateda, but we had nothing they wanted so anything manufactured by them must come through layers of middlemen, traded again and again before it was sold for Athosian grain or the furs of animals we had trapped. An energy pistol like Ronon’s would have been worth a year’s harvest. And so we knew what they were, but we had none.
    I was six years old and a bit when I walked through my first gate. My father had business on Narara. We traded with them fairly often, for they were a good market for our furs and our pottery and in return we bought from them the richly loomed cloth that they are famous for, raw silks in all the hues of the rainbow. I loved their cloth even as a child. I could not imagine how they made such bright dyes colorfast, russets and