Page 22 of Something Human

“Oh. What do you suppose it means, when someone else makes the offering?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think that it ever happens, ordinarily.”

“No, I suppose not. Well … as you say. It is probably a good omen.”

Rus cleared his throat. “Usually it is not Kahait that they offer to, of course—she is too stern.”

“Well, that and chaste. At least, Anaxe is, in our tradition.”

“Kahait has a faithless husband. I always forget that your Anaxe is chaste.”

“It’s weird, if they’re the same goddess.”

Rus waved a hand. “It is religion—it doesn’t have to make sense like that.”

“Riiight. Do you know the story of Anaxe’s mortal friend, Aradne?”

“No. Tell me.”

Adares sat down on the bed, leaning against the wall. “Well, she was a weaver.”

“Was? She died? Anaxe let her mortal friend die?”

“No, no. Stand down—let me tell the story. Aradne was a weaver, while she lived on earth, and Anaxe came to her house, at the time when she was fleeing from her brother Nepharos, who had gone mad and was chasing her through the realms of gods and men. Aradne helped her, turned Nepharos’s men away from the door, without knowing who Anaxe was—just because she felt sorry for her. They became friends.

“Over the years, Anaxe would come down to earth to visit Aradne, and Aradne grew older, and married a good man, with Anaxe’s blessing, and bore many children—and her friend never changed, as the years passed. No one needed to tell Aradne that the woman she loved so well was a goddess—that was obvious enough. But Aradne never asked any favour of Anaxe. She always welcomed her into her home just as if she had been an ordinary woman, and their friendship endured, until Aradne was an old woman and her husband an old man, and their children were all grown men and women themselves.

“Then when Anaxe saw that her friend could not live much longer on the earth, she took her up into the Heights with her, and made her an immortal by her side. Some people say that she did the same for Aradne’s husband and her children, too—because divine Anaxe is not one to be jealous of the other loves of the one she holds dear.”

Rus was silent for a while. Finally he said, “They are the same, the gods, but we know them imperfectly. It may be that Kahait, when she was Anaxe, was chaste, but it was because she did not yet know how to love. And then she met this friend, and she learned what it is to love another, and after that she became Kahait, and she wanted a husband. Because this had been awakened in her. But then she married Denhath, and he broke her heart with his unfaithfulness.”

“Do you think so?”

“I don’t know. It may be. You tell that story well, and I am glad to have heard it. Ah, and I am glad you chose my kilt pin and not my necklace—but if the goddess wanted that, it does come off. You have to twist it.” He demonstrated how the ends could be forced apart with the right motion, because the solid-looking band of the torque was actually made of tightly twisted gold wires.

“I’ve always wondered about that,” Adares admitted. “All the Karhan tribes wear those, and no one ever explained to me how they get them on.”

“I don’t usually take it off. It is from my family. A coming-of-age gift. This is their … what do you call it? Their symbol.” He fingered the stylized eagle’s heads at the ends of the torque.

“This is mine,” said Adares, holding up his left hand and pointing to his signet ring. He slid it off his finger. “It comes off like that.” Rus swatted him.

They ate the last two oat biscuits and both agreed that they were still hungry.

“I could go out and catch us something, if I had a bow,” said Adares. “But I don’t. I doubt your spear would be much use against rabbits—and I don’t think I can hunt down a deer on my own. Still—I suppose I had better try something.”

Rus lay with his hands clasped behind his head, his wet hair spread out on the pillow to dry. “You know, there are other things in the woods besides animals.”

“Berries and mushrooms, you mean?” Adares shook his head. “No good. Some of them are poisonous—and I don’t know which.”

“Yes, but I do. There’s not a lot ripe this late in the year, but I can tell you where to look.”

So Adares set out into the woods, armed with an empty jar and an elaborate description of which elements of the local flora and fungus were edible. Rus had even drawn him a sketch, scratched on the whitewashed wall of the storeroom, of one particularly poisonous mushroom, which he said it was better not even to touch.

Adares had never walked in the woods around Tios before, only ridden through them, and he was slightly apprehensive about getting lost. Fortunately, since the woods behind the temple complex were sparse and open, and sloped uphill, it was not too difficult to keep the honey-coloured walls in view.

He ranged further afield than he had at first thought would be safe, seeking out the scattered bushes and clumps of mushrooms. Except for a few birds chirping, and the sound of water dripping from the branches, it was quiet among the trees. All the undergrowth was wet from the rain, and after crawling and wading through it in search of the berries and mushrooms and edible plants that Rus had described, he was soaked to the skin, but the weather was still warm enough that this was not unpleasant.

Getting to his feet after stripping a low-lying bush of its fruit, Adares realized that he had climbed almost all the way to the crest of the hill behind the temple. A short distance ahead, a bare, grassy ridge surmounted the hill. His jar was nearly full by this time, but he forged on a little further through the trees, for the sake of the view from the hilltop. One was always repaid, he found, for the effort of climbing to the top of a hill in Kargania.