Page 20 of Something Human

Rus laughed softly. “Ah yes, we do. Look.”

He hooked his thumb under the gold torque around his neck, to lift it off his collarbone a little. Underneath, three matching blue designs curved around the base of his throat, as if forming part of an unfinished torque of ink.

“I told you that all the tattoos were done at the same time. It is not quite true. These ones are newer. One for each bull.”

Adares hastily bit back an oath. “Not—really? You fight them, as well as riding them?”

Rus nodded. “It wasn’t always the custom. In the old days, they used to choose an ordinary man—a sakar, of course, a serf or a hearth-guard—give him a horse and a weapon, and set him against the bull. If he won, the gods were with us—if he lost, they were against us.”

Adares whistled. “That sounds … well, brutal. Like human sacrifice, almost.”

“Something like that. They didn’t do it often. But it was fair, in a way, when they did do it. The odds were even—the man was smarter, the bull was stronger, neither was trained in the best ways to kill the other—the outcome was in the hands of the gods. Now, the ceremonies happen all the time, and the men who do the killing are like me—trained bull-fighters. We rarely lose—we know all the tricks, and they don’t let us fight in a real ceremony until we are well practiced. So the odds aren’t even any more, and the fights don’t prove anything. It’s not that the gods are always with us these days—it’s that we’re not really asking for their allegiance any more.”

“Don’t your priests realize this?”

Rus’s eyebrows went up. “We do—it’s the skar and the headmen who don’t. Or they don’t care. The kahar began reading the Kosoth philosophy generations back, and said the bull ceremonies should stop, that they made us uncivilized, but the skar like them. Using the bull-riders in the ceremonies was … a compromise.”

“So you’ve killed three bulls.”

“Three for the ceremony—for divination. But we go out and take bulls down in the hunt, when they are with the herd and are not possessed by Genhath. It is good practice—and of course you get the meat. So I have killed many more than three. We are responsible for capturing them, too, for the ceremonies.”

“I see. So when I said hunting boar was too much excitement for me … ”

“They are a bit smaller, aren’t they? But I hear that they are fierce.”

“Oh, very fierce, yes.”

“Rabbits, now … ”

“Less so. But geese … ”

They sat a while longer in the sanctuary. Adares explained the subjects of the decorations, since Rus wanted to know about them. In exchange he got several interesting stories about the Luth horse god, Gurhat—that is, the horse god, whom the Luth called Gurhat—lengthily augmented with commentary.

At sunset, they went out to sit on the steps of the temple and look at the sky, where streaks of cloud stood out dark against brilliant orange and purple. Rus was wrapped in Adares’s military cloak again; Adares had brought one of the blankets from the bed. They did not talk.

When the sky was dark, they went into the temple baths, which were on the other side of the door that Adares had broken down earlier, and they bathed by lamplight, with considerable silliness. Rus had apparently never seen a grown man entirely without tattoos, and said he found the sight unnatural, which Adares said he found insulting. He wasn’t insulted. He thought Rus wanted an excuse to look at him, and Adares couldn’t see why he shouldn’t.

Dried and dressed, they returned to their room, where they sat on the floor and drank water, pretending it was unmixed wine. They began singing loudly. Rus taught Adares a Luth song with a very peculiar tune, full of sounds that Adares could not properly pronounce and untranslatably subtle synonyms for “honour.” Adares tried to teach Rus a pornographic hymn to the embarrassing Boukossian god Psobos, but Rus refused to sing it. Adares sang him another, much nicer hymn to Anaxe, and when he looked at Rus after he had finished, the lamplight showed what might have been a sparkle of tears in his eyes.

He put Rus to bed soon after that, and then he went outside for a while to look at the stars before coming back to join him.

He woke, some time later, because Rus had moved fretfully in his sleep. Adares turned on his side to look at him. In the moonlight, his face looked flushed, and not from embarrassment this time. Adares put out a hand and felt Rus’s forehead. He was feverish.

Adares sat up on the bed and rubbed sleep out of his eyes and tried to think rationally. At this point, it could not be the atropa poisoning. Could it? Fever was common after a wound—but of course it wasn’t a good sign. When he had changed Rus’s bandages that evening, he hadn’t noticed anything off. He wondered what medicines the Luth might have to treat fever. For that matter, there might be something in a jar in the priests’ pharmacy that would help, but he wouldn’t know what he was looking for. He got up from the bed and spread all the blankets gently over Rus. He went out to get some fresh water from the fountain and wet a cloth to lay on Rus’s forehead.

Rus woke and pushed the cloth away as he twisted restlessly on the pillow. He muttered something in his native language. He seemed to be aware that Adares was there, but he had forgotten who Adares was, or that he did not understand the Luth tongue. Adares felt frantically, monstrously alone in the dark temple complex.

The night went on and on. Adares fell briefly asleep, kneeling by the bed, and woke to find his knees cramped on the cold stone, and Rus not improved. He got to his feet, gave Rus some more water to drink, and wet his face. When Rus seemed to have fallen back into a fitful sleep, Adares found his cloak, pulled on his boots, and went out into the moonlit courtyard.

He had not been inside the temple of Anaxe yet, and now he did not know what he would have done if he had found the big gilded doors locked. He might have sat down on the steps and wept. But the handle turned under his hand, and the door creaked inwards.

The interior of the temple was dimly silver with moonlight from the high, narrow windows down its sides. Adares followed the brighter wedge of light cast on the floor through the open doorway down the outer hall and up the steps into the inner sanctuary. Behind the screen at the top of the second flight of steps, he could just glimpse the tall gold and ivory-clad figure of the goddess. He knelt on the lowest step, made an awkward, unpracticed prostration, and sat back on his heels.

“Divine Anaxe,” he said aloud, “I know that you understand friendship.”

His voice echoed in the empty sanctuary. He looked up at the shadow-masked face of the statue, barely visible beyond the screen.

“You had a friend in the mortal Aradne, and you took her into the Heights with you and made her immortal,” he said, following the formula of invoking the deity’s history before presenting his petition. “I don’t ask for that much. I only ask that he may live out a full life on earth. Think of how you love your friend and pity me, and let him live.”