Page 45 of Something Human

“They said, ‘The Luth will never see us coming,’ my lord. They spoke of moving before dawn, and one of them wished they had an extra day’s rest, which made me sure they meant dawn tomorrow.”

“Mm,” said Gunthanaruth. “We’ll be ready for them whenever they come, but if it’s to be tomorrow, I’ll summon the men back from the watchtowers and have a full force waiting for them.”

“If you think it wise, my lord,” said Rus doubtfully, and felt almost dizzy with his own daring.

The headman gave him an indulgent look. “You stick to your bulls, kahar, and leave the strategy to me. I’ll have an answer out of Gundurus about those horses, but I suppose that will have to wait now.”

Rus sat a little longer by the headman’s fire, but now that his message had been delivered, his work was done, and he found all the strength ebbing out of him. The mead and food in his belly made him suddenly very sleepy, and he excused himself to stagger back to the tent of the kahar, where he flopped down on a rug and was asleep almost at once.

If the Daine had truly been attacking before dawn, there was a real possibility he might have slept through it. It was certainly well past dawn when he woke. One of the votive boys was shaking him by the shoulder and telling him to come look at something.

“It’s the Daine, kahar! They’re inside Tios!”

And they were. In the sunlight, the walls of the city were bristling with them, their yellow banners snapping in the wind. They were parading, showing off their numbers to the Luth, not just patrolling the defences.

“How did they get in?” Rus asked innocently.

“Who knows?” someone replied. “Witchery!”

He went and made an unnecessarily abject apology to Gunthanaruth, who accepted it with an equally unnecessary benevolence and said nothing about the abandoning of the watchtowers. Later that day, a few survivors from the tower that had not been fully abandoned returned to the camp to strengthen the rumour that the Daine had used supernatural powers to get inside the city. They had come up from the harbour, these men reported. They must have swum.

That afternoon, amid speculation about the Daine raining poisoned arrows down on the Luth camp, Gunthanaruth ordered the tents taken down and the camp relocated into the eaves of the wooded hills. It was an awkward place to camp—the biggest of the tents couldn’t be pitched, and the hearth headmen worried about losing their horses to raiders. Most people seemed to hold the opinion that the campaign was over, and the Luth force should cut their losses and turn homeward. The autumn was wearing on, and they had a long journey back to the winter pastures ahead of them.

They camped there for a week. The hearth headmen got more and more impatient. It began to rain steadily, and there was nothing for anyone to do but hunker in their tents and pick fights. Even Suthus was heard loudly quarrelling with Gunthanaruth. Rus spent as much time as he could on patrol, guarding the horses. He needn’t have done it at all—as kahar he was exempt from regular patrol duty, and he could have pleaded injury, too—but he wanted to be out, even in the cold rain, rather than mewed up in the cramped travelling tents with the remaining kahar.

There had been six bull-riders when they left the summer villages, and there were three left now. Suthus’s deputy, the second-in-command of the kahar, had also been killed. There were six votive boys and twice as many of the lower ranks, as well as Suthus, so the loss of three riders didn’t diminish their numbers too starkly. To lose half their riders on a campaign like this was no more than might be expected. But it cast a gloom over the rest.

Suthus in particular was unhappy about it, and his mood infected the rest of the kahar. Buth, Gorus, and Sul had been experienced riders—Sul had been very nearly as good as Rus—and of those who were left, Hath was past his prime, and Dudun had yet to make a kill. Neither of them had ridden in the assault on Tios, and both of them were clearly eager to go home.

Then one morning, Suthus himself rode out through the grey rain to the pasture where Rus was riding on patrol.

“My lord?” Rus pushed back the hood of his cloak respectfully, but Suthus waved away the gesture, so he tugged it back with a grateful smile. “Is there something you need of me?”

“I don’t know, Rusanarath.” Suthus called all his kahar by their proper names, though among themselves they always used short forms and nicknames. The stathan was formal and old-fashioned in other ways, too. “I wish there were not, but I am afraid there is.”

Rus looked at him, thinking, for some reason, of Adares and that expression he made with one eyebrow raised. But he spent a lot of time thinking of Adares these days.

“Gunthanaruth is unhappy with the outcome of this campaign,” Suthus went on. That hardly needed saying, Rus thought, but he kept quiet. “He is losing face with the hearth headmen—that is, he may—he fears … ” Suthus frowned. He was trying hard not to show disrespect, but there was really no other way of putting it.

Rus nodded. “They want to be moving. They’re restless.”

“Yes.”

And what does this have to do with me? Rus wondered. Surely Suthus wasn’t trying to recruit him to wheedle or reason with the headman. That would never work.

The stathan cleared his throat. “Gunthanaruth has it in mind to show the hearth headmen a sign, to convince them that we must press the Phemians harder. He wants to stay on through the winter, to resume the siege or find some way into the city … ”

Suthus shook his head, his expression pained. Rus knew how he felt. The prospect of the campaign dragging out through the winter, with the current state of their forces and with the Daine inside Tios, was awful—even if you didn’t have a lover inside the city whom you wanted to protect.

“I have tried to argue with him,” Suthus said, “but it hasn’t done any good. You have seen how it is.”

“My lord.” Rus tried to sound sympathetic and respectful. He had indeed seen how it was—he’d known how it was for a long time—but Suthus had never spoken so candidly to him before.

“He wants a bull ceremony,” Suthus said.

For a moment Rus couldn’t quite take it in, what that meant.

“Ah, I see,” he said finally. “He wants to show the hearth headmen that the gods favour his plan to stay through the winter.”