Page 17 of Something Human

“Indeed you are.”

“Adares,” said Rus, folding his arms behind his head, “do you think me ugly?”

“Do I what?”

“Ah, you don’t.” He started to blush. “I just thought … What you said about artifice … ”

“Oh, you mean the tattoos? Immortal gods, no. They’re gorgeous.” He reached out a hand, intending just to smooth down the fabric of the white tunic so that the blue lines would show through clearly. But he stopped and did not complete the action. “Really, honestly. I think they’re beautiful.”

They were unlike any art that Phemians used to decorate their belongings: curling, twisting lines that flowed into each other, intersecting, diverging, breaking up, and trailing off into patterns of individual dots, not describing any particular shape, just covering the surface of his pale skin with pattern. But he hadn’t needed any artifice to be beautiful.

“What do your local girls think?”

Rus gave him one of his blank looks, this one apparently sincere. “What do they think about what?”

“About … ” Adares started to make a gesture, indicating Rus’s appearance, tattoos and all, when something suddenly occurred to him. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t thought of it before. “Oh. This business of being ‘set apart’—would I be right in thinking it involves a vow of celibacy?”

“A vow of … I don’t think I know that word.”

“It means not marrying, or … ”

“Or getting children—yes, that is it, of course. That is what it means to be kahar. It is not a vow, that is something you speak—this is written in my skin. For me to do what is forbidden to us would be to make myself a lie. Ah, I see! You were asking, do the local girls think that my tattoos look good—but of course they know what they mean, so … ”

“That was like asking if a Maiden of the Sacred Loom gives good head or something. Yeah, no, you don’t know what that means either—never mind.”

“I can roughly work it out.” Rus frowned disapprovingly. “Of course, many of the girls at home have died of heartbreak … ”

Adares shouted with laughter. “Yeah?”

“Ah no, I don’t know, Adares. They might have—I have not paid attention. I don’t pay attention at all to girls.”

“I suppose you can’t, can you?” A sobering thought.

“No, you see I … I never did.” He said no more, and he put his hand over his mouth as though he wished he could stuff the words back in or was afraid of others escaping. “You understand?” he said finally, from behind his hand.

“Of course,” said Adares. “Lots of fine men are like that, you know. At home … ” He stopped. He realized Rus was way ahead of him here.

“Yes.”

“You know all about it, don’t you? They do as they like, for the most part. Of course there are still some difficulties—people think you’re not fully a man if you don’t marry, and they don’t like an ‘unmanly’ man running for public office or leading the army or things like that. But nobody thinks twice about a good, manly man with a wife doing what he likes on the side. I don’t think that’s right, personally—I’d rather reward a man for faithfulness in love and honesty about what he wants.”

He shrugged. “That doesn’t make me a radical—you could find plenty of people to agree with that sentiment today, but the traditions are strong, and that’s how it is. Of course, things are a bit different in Kos, which you probably … ”

“Which I know,” Rus finished for him. “Which I have read about, and wished that I could go there. I have never told anyone that.”

“I guess not.”

The whole thing made him suddenly very sad. Rus was such a fine person. Why should he have to resign himself to a life of loneliness? Adares realized he had not thought about how the taboos of the Karhan tribes would affect men like Rus.

“I used to think, before I read about the Kossians, that I was the only one in the world like this,” Rus said. He smiled ruefully. “I learned so much when I learned to read Firhat Kosoth. But I did not think that Kos was a paradise—most of what you have just told me about Pheme is familiar to me, although, as you say, it seems it is a little different from one city to another. Just as from one tribe to another in the Karhan. None of them would harbour a man who polluted himself with other men, but I hear that what they would do to him would be different. Some would put him to death, some would only exile him. The Luth would do both, in a way—they make you an outlaw, which means no one will take you in, and you most likely starve or freeze alone in the mountains when winter comes.”

Adares wanted to ask, without quite knowing how, whether Rus had chosen the set-apart life, the tattoos and the initiation and riding bulls into battle, strictly because he thought it was the only course for someone like him, and whether he regretted it. From the way he spoke, he seemed not to. Adares hoped that was true.

“What I did not know,” Rus went on, “until I heard you speaking the language of Kos yesterday, was that the Phemians we were attacking belong to the same civilization—I did not know I would be fighting the thing that I admired.” Oh, of course, Adares thought. Of course it got worse. “I am not sure what I could have done if I had known—the stathan, the leader of the kahar, had already spoken against the campaign, called it needless.”

That was unexpected—and interesting. “Did he really?”

“But he was overruled by Gunthanaruth. The headman’s word is law, even over the kahar.”