Page 31 of Something Human

“Save some for me,” said Rus, wheeling his horse around and lifting his spear. “I will drink afterwards.”

The bull came out from among the trees at a loping run, the muscles of his shoulders and haunches rolling under his sleek black hide. He was a huge animal, a nightmare, half again as big as the largest specimens of Pseuchaian cattle. A mane of shaggy hair fringed his massive head, and curving horns as long as hunting bows stood above his small, mad eyes. What had Rus said? That the spirit of Nepharos, the death-dealer, the god of insanity, inhabited the bulls when they were exiled from the herd. Adares could believe it.

He held hard to the mare’s reins, trying to calm her, trying to stay calm himself so that his own panic would not infect her and make her bolt or throw him. He watched Rus with a trancelike fixity.

Rus rode out to meet the bull, calling to him in his own language, in a strange, low voice that Adares had not heard him use before. The bull stopped in his tracks, pawed the earth, swinging his head around and then turning his body in a slow circle toward the blue and white pair of horse and rider.

He lowered his head, horns aimed like weapons, and gave a menacing snort. And he charged.

There was a horrible grace to it, and a malign purposefulness far from the practicality of predator and prey. Adares had time—in those frozen moments of fear-heightened perception—to notice this, and to see that Rus was no longer sitting astride his horse as the bull bore down on him. He had drawn his feet up and was crouched on the saddle. The horse, incredibly, stood her ground as the bull charged, until, almost at the same moment as Rus loosed his spear, he turned his mount aside and gave her the signal to leap out of the way.

The spear had lodged shallowly, almost harmlessly, in the bull’s shoulder. Maddened, the bull thrashed his head, snorting, slewing around to follow the pair that had eluded him. But horse and rider had already separated.

As the horse took off, fleeing at the last moment so that it passed perilously close to the side of the bull, Rus had leapt from the white beast to the black. He landed on his hands, drew his legs under him, and slid down to straddle the bull’s shoulders. One hand gripped a fistful of the bull’s mane as the animal pitched and twisted to get him off its back; the other hand wrenched out the spear.

He raised his arm, in a flash of blue, and drove the spear down through the bull’s neck once, twice, three times. Blood fountained out, and the beast sank heavily to its knees, lowered its great head, and died. Rus sprang free of the body as it subsided, and stood up, shaking out his hair, and looked across the clearing to Adares.

Their eyes met, and for a moment Adares found himself daunted, almost frightened, to be looking into the face of a man who could do what he had just seen. It passed, of course. Rus winced, and sank down onto the grass, to take the weight off his injured leg, and his expression when he looked up at Adares again was curiously wry, as if he felt he had been showing off, and was slightly ashamed. But Adares remembered that moment.

He was down off his own horse almost immediately and came to kneel in the grass beside Rus. He pulled the stopper from the wineskin and held it out. Rus looked up at him. Adares felt he could no more have touched him, in that moment, than he could have touched the goddess’s cult statue in the temple of Anaxe. Rus reached out and took the wineskin.

“It’s not full,” said Adares irrelevantly. “You drink it all—you deserve it.”

Rus held the vessel for a moment without drinking. He looked a little shaky, with spent energy and suppressed pain.

“Do you know,” he said, “we do not have wine, in the Luth lands—we have no grapes, so we make mead out of honey, and drink that. We know a god that you do not, I think—Nuthar, the god of honey, who is also the god of mead, and of revelry. Even so … ”

He was seeming more like himself now, with this pedantic detail that didn’t seem related to anything. In another moment, Adares thought he would feel like reaching out and kissing him after all.

Rus put the wineskin to his lips and drained it in one draught. He gasped slightly afterwards. Adares wasn’t surprised; he had tasted Karhan mead, and Boukossian wine was a good deal stronger.

“That’s a shocking way to drink good wine,” Adares said.

Rus turned the wineskin upside down and shook the last few drops out onto the grass. He said something in his own language that sounded to Adares like an invocation. He thought he recognized the word “Tios” in it.

“Are you going to tell me what that was about?” Adares asked after a moment, when Rus did not explain or translate.

Rus looked up at him. “Maybe. I am deciding.”

CHAPTER X

THERE WERE PRAYERS that Rus said he needed to chant over the body of the bull. He did it in a low voice without inflection, kneeling in the grass and looking drained and exhausted now. He explained, pedantic again, how a much longer ritual would have been needed if he had killed the bull as part of one of the Luth’s divining ceremonies, but this was different; only he did not feel he could omit all of the prayers, because the bull’s state of madness was still the result of being captured and used by his people. It was his bull, he said, the one he’d ridden into battle. He’d know it anywhere.

Adares wanted to kneel beside him and put an arm around his shoulders, at the very least, but he felt awkward about it, unsure it would be welcome, and so he didn’t.

His prayers finished, Rus wanted to get going. Adares suggested he should rest, but he shook his head. He was at least willing to wait while Adares fetched his horse for him from where she was placidly grazing by the edge of the clearing, looking as though she had already put the encounter with the bull from her mind. Rus mounted more laboriously than before, and from the look on his face, it was painful.

Adares fetched his own horse, and they rode out of the clearing, leaving the body of the bull lying in its blood in the grass. There was a spatter of blood on the edge of Rus’s kilt, but he had wiped off all that had got on his bare skin, and he hardly looked like someone who had recently slaughtered a large animal.

They rode in silence again, while the day brightened around them. Eventually, because that was just the way it was between them, they fell to talking of small things again, in the same easy way that they had talked ever since they dropped to their knees laughing by the fountain that first night. Adares challenged Rus to identify varieties of trees and flowers that bordered the path, and couldn’t tell whether he was bluffing when he answered. Rus made fun of Adares’s horse-trappings, which he called impractical, and then apologized to Adares’s horse in Luth and petted her nose. And so on. Adares thought if they couldn’t find the Daine at all and had to ride through the forest like this for days, he would be happy.

“I think we must be getting close,” Rus said, much later, when the sky was clear blue above the treetops, and they could see the slopes of the hills between which the Daine were camped, rising up on either side before them. He reined in his horse, and Adares did the same.

“I daresay I can find my way from here,” Adares said. “I suppose you had better turn back. You don’t want to meet the Daine, after all.”

“Ah, no!” Rus smiled. “I would not miss this for the world, Adares. Besides, I think I will be safe with you. I am stopping because I want to tell you something.”

“Yes?”