Page 63 of Something Human

Adares laughed his beautiful laugh. Rus wondered if it affected Genet anything like the way it affected him. It might.

“Genet speaks Firhat Kosoth too,” said Rus, before Adares tried to say anything private.

“Clearly, then, we will not be able to discuss her beauty behind her back.”

Genet looked back in order to roll her eyes. But she looked a little pleased, all the same.

“You would not get Rus to do that, in any language,” she said. “Do you not know the kahar are set apart from women? This one takes it more seriously than some. The chastest man I know, he is.”

“Mm?” said Adares. He licked his lips, a tiny noise in the darkness. “Is he?”

Rus was suddenly very conscious that he was wearing nothing under his kilt.

They arrived at Kuth and Genet’s house. The hearth fire was banked for the night, but a Kossian-style clay lamp—filled with grease instead of olive oil, of course—lit the front part of the house. The baby and the elder son were already asleep behind the curtain, but Meret sat up with her father, anxiously waiting for news of the puppy. Kaily ran to her, tail wagging, and Meret scooped her up and hugged her, but the dog’s return was overshadowed by the appearance of the Phemian. Meret stared at him with wide eyes. Kuth looked almost as amazed himself. There was no real reason for that; he and Genet were from good skar families and on friendly terms with their own tribe’s headman and need not be shy to invite anyone to their fire.

Adares sat by the hearth and accepted a towel to dry his hair—which either had not got wet at all or had dried already, being so short—and a cup of milk, and smiled at Meret and said that when he was a boy he’d had a dog that used to run away too. She stared at him as though the fact that he spoke Luth—after a fashion, with lots of hand-waving—only made him more alarming. Kuth fetched a sleeping-robe for him to wear, and he managed to get into it without flinging off the cloak first, though perhaps even he would not have done that in front of a woman and a little girl. Rus wasn’t sure.

“You’ll stay with us tonight?” said Kuth, and winced as he realized the words sounded insufficiently hospitable. “Stay with us, my lord,” he amended. “We would be honoured.”

“I would be most happy,” said Adares.

Rus sat on the opposite side of the hearth, tugging on his kilt to make absolutely sure no one could get a glimpse under it, and said nothing. He was tired, and this felt dreamlike again: his friends and his lover sitting together, talking, in a mixture of Firhat Kosoth and Luth, as if it were normal, as if it might happen every day.

“Who did your tattoo?” Genet asked, pointing to Adares’s snake.

“A Getti woman who lives in Tios.”

She frowned. “No, no. It’s not a Getti tattoo. That’s a Luth snake. If she told you she was Getti, she lied.”

“I … don’t think so. But she didn’t draw the design. It was drawn by a Luth.” The word should have had a masculine or feminine ending when it was used of a person, but evidently Adares didn’t know that, and he used the form you would use for a house or a horse whose sex you didn’t know.

“Ah,” said Genet. “Yes. I knew it was. Why didn’t she ink it for you, too, this Luth? Why didn’t she ink it properly in blue?”

“Well, we lost touch, after she drew it for me. I didn’t know where to find her.”

“Hm.” Genet gave him a look as if she thought she knew what that meant. “You left her for the Getti woman. And then you had the Getti girl ink the Luth girl’s drawing? Tcha!”

“It wasn’t quite like that,” Adares said, in a way that managed to suggest that yes, it had been pretty much like that. “I thought it was a good snake, and I wanted to keep it, that’s all.”

“It is a good snake,” Genet agreed. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was done by one of my apprentices. But none of them have gone south and had their hearts broken recently. Do you have any other tattoos?”

Adares looked at her for a moment from under his lashes before he said, “No.”

It was long enough for Genet to have started to blush.

They talked a little longer before retiring to the sleeping-platform behind the curtain. By this time everyone was yawning hugely, and it was the most natural thing in the world for Rus to make a pile of rugs against the wall and stretch out there, not alongside Adares exactly, but close enough that he could have reached out in the dark and stroked the Phemian’s hair if he had dared. He didn’t, but he fell asleep thinking about it.

CHAPTER XXI

RUS WOKE BEFORE Adares, when it was only the two of them and the baby still on the sleeping platform. He lay looking at his lover for a while, watching him sleep, a little luxury. His lover? He wondered about that.

Meret came through the curtain to summon them to breakfast, and Rus shook Adares by the shoulder to wake him. Adares blinked confusedly, taking in his surroundings. He managed to collect himself enough to smile winningly at Meret, who hid her face and ducked back through the curtain.

“Shy, is she?”

“Not normally,” said Rus.

They ate a leisurely breakfast with the family. Adares flirted in a very harmless style with everyone except Rus. It was a marvel to watch. It didn’t take long for Meret to stop being afraid of him and begin peppering him with questions about Tios and its people and animals and their ways. When Genet sent Rus out to the valley to retrieve the Phemian’s clothes, Adares was playing with the baby.