Page 28 of Something Human

They would have to leave the temple complex tomorrow, at the latest. There was so little time left—and they had wasted so much of the time they’d had, it seemed, misunderstanding each other. Adares felt he was to blame for that. If he’d known more about Luth customs, as he should have, he would have understood from the beginning what Rus was, what he was permitted and forbidden.

Rus rolled over onto his back and tucked his arm around Adares, resting his hand lightly on Adares’s shoulder. As if his own thoughts had been following the same track, but somehow arrived at a different place, he said, “I am glad we did not understand one another fully in the beginning, Adares. I cannot think that what we just did would have been as good if we had not come to know each other first.”

“No, probably not. That’s been my experience, certainly.”

“Has it.”

“Yeah, well … uh, we’re a bit sticky—do you mind if I get up and get a cloth? And maybe a drink.”

Rus leaned in and kissed him deeply, then made a face. “Pthh. Do get a drink.”

CHAPTER IX

THE REST OF that day felt dreamlike. Adares said as much, as they lay together on the bed later that afternoon. Their bodies were touching all down one side, as on that first morning when they had woken together, only now deliberately, both of them openly enjoying it.

“A good dream?” Rus asked, clarifying, a little shyly.

Adares nuzzled into the curve of his shoulder. “A very good dream.”

They had not spent the whole day in bed. They had explored the other buildings a little now that Rus was back on his feet in a limited way. They had gone to look at the horses, and Adares was strangely charmed to see that of course Rus had a way with horses—probably all horse-herding people did, but he hadn’t thought about it. Adares had tried horse milk for the first time, and it was entirely pleasant. He had found a way to climb over the wall into the priests’ garden, where the only things left in the ground were onions, and pulled up a couple.

They had played Adares’s game of censer bowling, and Rus was indeed better at it than Adares, though it was a close match. They had gone into the temple of Anaxe together. They’d had an argument—a discussion, Rus called it—about whether the word “virgin” could logically be applied to a man. They had done all the same sorts of things that they had done on their first days in the temple complex, with the same easy companionship, but with something added. It was nothing much, just the touch of a hand now and then (Adares’s hand, usually), a look that turned into a smile, a new honesty that had opened up between them.

Now it was late afternoon, and they lay in a pool of warm light slanting in from the open doorway.

“I thought,” Rus said, “when you first saw this bed, the way you pointed at it and said, ‘Look, a bed!’ I thought, ah, he is a Phemian, and he wants to go to bed with me—I know what that means. I was not unhappy about that. I had already begun to like you, and of course you are … you are … ” He waved a hand toward Adares, blushing.

“I’m not ugly,” Adares supplied easily. “I’m aware of that.”

“I—I felt sure that you were. So we sat on the floor over there and ate and talked, and I thought, we will go to bed together, and for him it will be like going to bed with a woman, because he is a Phemian. And he doesn’t know that it should not be that way for me—and I won’t tell him. I don’t know quite what I thought would happen, since we were both very tired. Then you spoke of sleeping on the floor, and I did not know what to think again.”

“And I didn’t know what to think when you said there was room in the bed and I should join you after all.”

“It is a great chasm that we bridged, each of us from his own side, to arrive here, isn’t it?” Rus said that with a kind of mock seriousness, and Adares laughed, but it was profoundly true for all that.

Adares had been fiddling with the sprig of inedible berries as they talked, but now Rus took it away from him and rolled over to lean on his elbows. The dish that had held the rest of the berries and the mushrooms still lay on the floor, and he reached over to pick it up. He dropped the sprig into it, found the piece of broken tile that he had used to sketch the poisonous mushroom on the wall that morning, and began crushing the berries, which burst in puddles of dark brown juice.

“What are you doing that for?” Adares demanded, lying propped on one elbow, watching him.

“You’ll see. Do you think there is anything here to write with?”

“I saw a dusty old tablet and stylus on the shelf with the jars. Do you want them?”

“Just the stylus.”

Adares climbed over him to fetch it and climbed back to his previous spot when he returned. As he settled down, Rus dipped the nib of the stylus into the dark brown juice in the bowl.

“Give me your hand,” he said with a little smile. “No, not that one—your right hand.” He drew the one he wanted towards him across the pillow.

“Rus … what are you doing?”

“It’s not sharp—see? It won’t hurt, and it won’t last, either. But this is dark enough to show up on your Phemian skin. You’ll be decorated, for a little while at least.”

“All right,” said Adares. “If it will make you happy.”

The design took some time to complete because Rus drew it meticulously, in tiny, precise dots, like his own tattoos. Unlike his tattoos, the design he drew on the back of Adares’s hand was not just a pattern; it was a snake, with a fierce, crescent-shaped head, a body made of intricately spiralling lines, and a curling tail that ran down to circle Adares’s wrist twice, like a pair of bracelets.

When Adares realized what it was going to be, he felt an unexpected squirm of discomfort in his gut. It was too much like the blue devices he had last seen on banners streaming from Luth spears charging towards his army. It surprised him that Rus would think to draw such a thing on him, but he said nothing. It was a beautiful snake, and the hand that drew it invested it with new meaning.