Page 1 of Something Human

Part One

Adares

CHAPTER I

THE LETTER PROBABLY still lay on the desk in his study, half finished. That is, if the archon’s palace had not been burned to the ground by this time. It did not matter very much, since the news that the letter would have conveyed was old now. But at this rate, if it had been sent, it would have been the last communication his parents ever received from their eldest son.

Dear Mother and Father, the letter had said,

I hope this finds you well, and Chares and Leta too. I am well myself, though my new duties are of course keeping me very busy still. I hope you are having fine weather in Pheme. Here the autumn rains have not yet set in, but are expected any day.

It may be some time before I am able to write again. We are once again threatened with war by one of the local tribes. The Luth have begun moving south, and they will soon reach the coast. There can be little doubt that they will attack Tios. As I write this, our troops are preparing to defend the city in the event of an attack, and we are readying ships to evacuate as much of the civilian population as we can. We are still hoping that it will not come to that, but it is as well to be prepared.

In your last letter …

That was where he had stopped writing, because he had realized that he did not remember a thing his mother had written in her last letter. There had been too much to think about since he read it for the details of Leta’s engagement party and Chares’s progress in school to stick in his mind. Then he had gone looking for the letter to reread it, but an urgent message from the First Spear of the legion had interrupted him before he ever found it.

Now he wished that he had not bothered trying to explain the situation, had not made light of the threat, had not delayed finishing the letter in order to reply to whatever his mother had written before. He wished he had just scribbled a few lines of uncomplicated love for his parents and his younger siblings, and sent them off before the Luth began pouring down out of the wooded hills around Tios, blowing their shrill war-horns and trailing their blue snake pennants from upraised spears.

Dear Mother and Father, the letter should have said,

Be well, now and always, and Chares and Leta with you. Long before you receive this letter, I will have breathed my last, in a muddy ditch in a field outside Tios, joining scores of my comrades who fell alongside me. Forgive me for breaking your hearts, but know that I loved you.

Your son,

Adares

That would have been accurate enough, and then they could have pictured him prone like a hero in a vase-painting, a barbarian spear through his chest, his armour gleaming in the sun. They did not need to know that he was going to die of thirst, or possibly of asphyxiation, trapped under a Luth siege-cart along with a dead horse that was beginning to attract flies. They would be better off not having to picture that.

The horse had been his own, and it had been killed by the impact with the cart, so it was really his fault it was dead. He had not been thrown clear when it fell, and one of his legs was still trapped under its body—if it weren’t for the mud, he would certainly have broken bones. As it was, he was largely unhurt. By this time, that hardly mattered. A dent in his breastplate made it painful to breathe, but he could not move either arm to reach the buckles at his shoulders. His muscles burned with cramp. He was sick with the stench of mud and dead horse and half mad with thirst.

Though he had missed the conclusion of the battle, he knew how it had ended. He had heard the Phemian officers sounding the retreat, and the battle-cries of the Luth chasing them, soon after he went down. It had been a rout. He just hoped some remnant of the legion had made it back into the city to defend it, because the Luth had come prepared for a siege.

The Phemians had known what they were in for, but it hadn’t helped. They had one infantry legion and one-and-a-half hastily-drilled cavalry units, but the Luth were horse-breeding people from the northern steppes, and they had brought the cream of their mounted warrior class. Armed with spears and heavy swords, impressively fearsome with their flying fair hair and their tattoos, they had hurtled down the hill toward the Phemian lines like they had been born on horseback.

They had brought superior numbers, they had brought siege equipment—big hide-covered carts in which warriors could approach the city walls under cover—and they had brought wild bulls, huge as monsters from some ancient legend, charging at the head of their attack. The Phemians stood firm in their orderly lines, in their burnished greaves and freshly bleached military tunics, but they hadn’t stood a chance.

Adares had tried, as soon as he regained his senses, to heave the weight of the cart off himself, but from where he was lying it was impossible even to make it budge. He had no idea how long he had been there by this time; he barely even remembered the details of how he had got there. He lay and wept with exhaustion and with grief for the pointlessness of it all.

It was the crying that saved him. Sounds in the world above the collapsed cart had long ago ceased, and the darkness of Adares’s shallow grave was beginning to deepen. He heard, but did not quite understand, a soft noise of something moving on the boards above him. Then there were more noises: a slow dragging, and then a soft scratching and scrabbling. It was not until he felt loose dirt falling in a shower across his forearm that he realized someone outside was digging to try to reach the place where he was trapped.

Hope gave him new strength, and the location of the sound gave him a new place to focus his efforts. Everything depended upon straining towards the source of that sound, wriggling painful inches through the mud, trying to move his trapped arm to clear away the dirt that was falling down inside.

After what seemed a very long period of this, the boards above him creaked and shifted, and he froze, terrified again, certain that the full weight of the cart was going to settle and crush him at last. But it didn’t, and in a moment he realized that the cart was not falling, but had been lifted. His rescuer had heaved up one edge of it and propped it on something, and between that and the hole that had been dug, Adares could see a distinct sliver of light. Better still, he discovered that his arm was no longer trapped, and he could move.

He dragged himself free of the dead horse at last, tugging his numb leg out from under the saddle, and pushed and clawed and wriggled his way up towards the light. The mud slithered under him, and he slipped back, whimpering with frustration.

The cart’s boards creaked again, and the opening between it and the ground widened a little more. As he pushed himself forward one last time, a pair of hands reached in, grasping his arms above the elbows, and hauled him upwards, his dented breastplate scraping agonizingly between the wood and the earth, until he lay half out of the hole, his face on the cold grass, his eyes screwed tight shut against the low, slanting light of early evening.

Opening them finally, he saw clearly for the first time the hands that had drawn him back into the world. They were long, pale hands, marked with curling blue lines of tattooing. Adares managed to push himself up onto one elbow and raise his head, and he and his rescuer stared tensely at one another.

The Luth warrior was very young—certainly a few years younger than Adares—and smaller than Adares, lightly built but all taut muscle, like an athlete. He wore a short blue kilt of subtly chequered wool, a gold torque around his neck, and soft leather boots. His hair was a mass of long, fair curls, falling down his back, and his bare skin was patterned all over with the same intricate, alien blue lines that marked his hands. There were even twists of blue on his cheekbones, almost the same colour as the eyes that stared out of his pale face at Adares, the olive-skinned, black-haired Phemian he had just pulled out of the earth.

The Luth was the first to move. Still kneeling in the grass where he had bent down to haul Adares out of his grave, he gestured with one pale hand toward the Phemian’s sword and pointed to the ground.

Adares, understanding, reached down and fumbled to undo the clasp of his sword belt, then let the sword, scabbard, belt and all fall down into the hole behind him. His rescuer put a hand on a long, light Luth spear that lay on the ground beside him, and with a decisive motion, pushed it from him, so that it rolled away across the grass. He gestured again to Adares: go!

Adares scrambled unsteadily to his feet, staggering because of the numbness in the leg that had been trapped under the horse. Words of gratitude failed to come to his clouded mind. The Luth warrior’s mercy was too unexpected, too sudden, after all the ugliness of the battle and the misery of the muddy hole and the dead horse and the immoveable cart, for him even to react. He tried to wipe the tears from his face with a grimy hand.