Page 38 of Something Human

“What happened to your hand, sir?” Kleisios asked, seeing the bandage.

“Nothing. I’ll tell you about it some time—later.”

Gunthanaruth was a small man. Short and wiry, he moved with a restless energy, and it was hard to tell from a distance how old he was. At close quarters, Adares saw that although he dressed and carried himself like a young warrior, his face was lined, and there were streaks of dead white in his pale curls. His hair fell far down his back; the scandal of his second wife was many years in the past. Between his thick gold torque and his scarlet kilt he wore an embroidered wool jacket, open down the front to display the huge blue snake tattooed on his chest.

Following the chieftain out to meet Adares came a soft-faced man in white, with curls of blue on his round cheeks. Adares guessed that he was a priest even before he spoke, translating Gunthanaruth’s greeting with a half-Kossian, half-Luth accent that was painfully familiar. Though he met the gaze of the chieftain’s fierce blue eyes as they talked incomprehensibly back and forth, Adares was more interested in the interpreter, whose soft voice filled the pauses during which he and Gunthanaruth stared warily at one another. This was a man who had known Rus, who might even be grieving his death. He would have liked to be able to talk to him.

What Gunthanaruth said amounted to little beyond a confirmation of the peace proposal made in the letter of the night before. This, of course, was monumental enough in itself. Adares found he had to work to remain as lordly and nonchalant as he thought he ought, in order for Gunthanaruth to take him seriously. It might have been partly because he had not got any sleep, but the temptation to give way to relieved laughter was greater than he had imagined it would be.

It was true, even if the Luth had attacked that night, the Tians, with the Daine reinforcements, might well have been able to drive them off, or at least keep them from retaking the harbour watchtowers. But the women and children had been back in the city, with nowhere to escape to, and if the Luth had chosen to settle down for a siege after all, that winter would have been worse than hard.

When they had finished talking, Gunthanaruth held out his hand for Adares’s and gave him a stern smile as he took it. Adares smiled back, and the Luth chieftain looked frankly surprised. Releasing Adares’s hand, and turning to go, he said something to his interpreter, gesturing to Adares.

Finally Adares looked the priest in the eye.

“My lord says: ‘I thought before that you were lucky. Now I think that perhaps we are lucky as well.’”

They remained looking at one another for a moment. There was no way for Adares to ask about Rus—Was it a quick death? Did he suffer? Will he be remembered for the three fights he won, or only for the one he lost?—without disgracing his memory and jeopardizing the peace he had died to secure.

But the priest himself had more to say. “My lord,” he said, “feels that he has been rebuked by the gods for waging war on your people. He takes these matters very seriously. You may be sure he will abide by his decision.”

“He feels?” said Adares. “You don’t think it’s true?”

The priest looked startled, then smiled faintly. “Ah—he has been rebuked, indeed.”

“Went well, then, did it?” Kleisios asked, as Adares returned to his waiting councillors by the city gate.

“Very well. We will have peace, for this winter at least.” He looked up at the carved gate that arched overhead, the yellow limestone glowing in the noon sun, which had emerged from the clouds to light his meeting with Gunthanaruth. “Strange to say it,” he said aloud, to all the assembled councillors, “but we are not Phemians any more.” When he looked up at the walls of his city, it was as if he had known this for a long time.

“Oh, Pheme will take us back, eventually,” someone said.

There were murmurs: assent and disagreement.

“I expect,” said Adares, “that they will try to. Eventually. It may be that by the time that happens, we will neither need nor want to be taken back. And it may not. In the meantime, we are one tribe among many in the Karhan. It is time we started acting that way. I think we may find that we get along pretty well. We are, after all, a tribe with stone walls, a gold mine, and a defensible harbour. And an alliance with the Luth.”

Who knew how many lives that would save, in the end? Certainly Rus could not have known, when he laid down his life to make it possible, how many people in Tios, aside from its young ruler, stood to benefit from his sacrifice.

Part Two

Rus

CHAPTER XIII

“THIS IS WOMAN’S work,” Rus said cheerfully as he put the finishing touches on the snake’s tail that curled around the Phemian’s wrist. “But then, I have been like a woman with you already.”

Lying under him in bed, moaning and crying out. Sobbing afterward, overcome. Strangely, he found he wasn’t ashamed of it, even now.

Adares held up his hand to the light, examining the snake with a trace of a frown between his perfect eyebrows.

“Not strikingly like a woman—not from my perspective.”

“Ah. Well, you would know.”

“Yes, I would.” He smirked. Rus smacked him, not hard.

In Luth poetry, there was a formula used to indicate a very beautiful woman: you would fall off your horse trying to keep looking at her, as you rode past. That was what the Phemian Adares was like. He had a face like one of the gods painted on the Kossian urns that stood in the summer hall of the kahar—except that unlike them he was always breaking into a smile. And such a smile. You would fall off your horse.

His skin was dark, even for his people, an incredible colour like old bronze, all over, and smooth as bronze too. He was tall, long-limbed, almost willowy, his body only lightly muscled, his hands barely calloused. His hair was absolutely black and cut absurdly short, so that you could see the shape of his head. His eyes were narrow and very dark and fringed with beautiful long lashes.