Page 47 of Something Human

“Nothing, really. That was—partly—what made it so spectacular. You threw beautifully, as always, landed with perfect form, had a good seat—I would have said—but then the animal bucked hard, and you must have lost your grip, because he just pitched you off. You went flying. You almost managed to turn in the air and make a clean landing—which would have been the first time I’ve seen that, if you’d done it—but you couldn’t quite, and you hit the ground hard. Still, I understand you’re not as badly hurt as you might have been—though I doubt that’s much consolation to you now.”

“What happened to the bull?” Specifically, why had he not trampled Rus or tossed him on his horns and finished him off?

Suthus shifted a little where he sat, looking away from Rus for a moment. “We let him go. The fight went out of him. That was the other remarkable thing. You hit the ground, and he … shook himself and turned away, quite calmly. We felt certain that meant you were dead already—your neck broken or some such. We were astonished to find you were still alive. Gunthanaruth thinks … ” He cleared his throat and looked embarrassed. “It seems to him a definite message from the gods. He gave the order to strike camp almost immediately. I think, myself, that the bull was tired, but … we cannot know the whole shape of Heva, and the gods are the gods.” It was a saying, less pious than resigned. “And you remember none of this?”

“No, not even when I hear you tell it. It’s as if it never happened.”

“It can take you that way when you hurt your head, I believe. And it may be for the best. It would be a bad thing to remember—all the more since it was … the merest fluke, that it happened. Nothing you did wrong.”

He was giving Rus an interesting look, and Rus thought, He knows I did it on purpose. Or he suspected, anyway. But he wouldn’t speak of it. Perhaps he thought Rus didn’t remember that part. Perhaps he just felt too guilty to say anything, because if he thought Rus had fought to lose, he must have thought he, Suthus, put him up to it. I wish I could tell him the truth, Rus thought. But he knew he could not.

“It may be for the best,” he agreed.

The journey back to the summer villages took more than a month. It should not have taken so long. The distance was not so great, but they had to take a meandering route, to avoid territory held by hostile tribes—allies of the Phemians—and they travelled slowly through the wooded hills, a miles-long train of horses and men and a few light vehicles. The big siege wagons—the surviving ones, the ones Adares had not ridden his horse into—had been dismantled, the heavier pieces abandoned, the rest packed up and loaded on horses.

Rus rode for the first week in a litter that jolted uncomfortably over the rough forest tracks. He swilled down theraka like mead and spent as much time as he could asleep. He got back on a horse as soon as Kaman would let him—sooner than Suthus would have let him, if Suthus had been in charge of the matter, but he wasn’t. It was more comfortable in some ways to ride, but he seemed to tire very easily, and would have to go back to the litter before the end of each day, some days while the sun was still high in the sky.

His head hurt, in a low, draining ache, almost all the time, so that he noticed as a novelty the times when it briefly stopped hurting. The broken arm didn’t trouble him nearly as much; he understood what was wrong with it, and could avoid the worst pain by keeping it still. The pain in his head was more mysterious. There was nothing broken there, and no evidence that anything was healing, either.

He felt low and irritable much of the time, and couldn’t quite say why. Sometimes he could lift his spirits by thinking about his lover—just picturing his face, or recalling some moment from their days together. Sometimes that didn’t work and would bring him close to tears instead. One day, when he was feeling particularly low, it finally dawned on him that it was only in his own mind that Adares was still his lover. That day he actually did shed tears, and after that it became harder and harder to escape the sadness.

He knew he had meant something to the Phemian, maybe even something like what the Phemian meant to him. But Adares never expected to see him again. Adares might very well—would surely—think Rus was dead. Adares would have heard why the Luth abandoned the siege, and he would know what it meant—what Rus had done. Wouldn’t he?

When Rus had known, beforehand, that he was going to do it, there had been no doubt in his mind. Adares would know what he had done. Now, turning it over endlessly on the long ride north, he was less sure. He thought Adares probably knew, and of course he had wanted that—selfishly, he had wanted that—but if Adares knew what he had done, then Adares thought he was dead.

There was a sad logic to it. Either the Phemian hadn’t loved him enough to guess what Rus had done—or he had, and so he thought Rus was dead. He would mourn him, no doubt, but after all they had been together for a couple of days, and Adares was fall-off-your-horse beautiful, liked women as well as men, and ruled a city. He would find someone else.

Even if he had known Rus was alive, he would still have found someone else. They must be lining up.

Drinking theraka helped. At first he took it strictly for the pain, and it did continue to help, somewhat, with the lingering ache in his head. But after a while he was taking it mainly for the way it made him feel as if nothing mattered. Time was just passing; nothing bothered or worried him very much. He took just enough to be able to stay awake and keep on his horse, and the days slid by more easily. He kept the sadness at bay.

He might not have been able to get away with dosing himself like this for as long as he did, but the mood of the whole horse-train was low by this time, and no one was paying much attention. The Luth warriors had ridden down to the coast in high spirits, full of confidence in their own strength, ready to besiege the Phemians in their walled city and drive them out of the Karhan. Now they were slinking back with their boast unfulfilled. Once they reached the summer villages, most of them would have to journey still further north, to the lowland pastures, or risk losing large portions of their herds to the harsh winter. It was a lot of riding, even for men accustomed to spending half the year on horseback.

To make matters worse, the weather was unrelentingly wet. Water dripped off the trees and sprayed and sprinkled out of the undergrowth even when it was not, strictly speaking, raining. Their clothes would be drenched by the end of the day and still damp when they emerged in the morning after an unsatisfactory night in a poorly-pitched tent—the best they could do in the cramped spaces of the forest. Sickness laid many men low. Fights broke out, and rumours spread quickly up and down the train. It was a miserable time. At some point during those weary, wet weeks, as Rus realized later when he reckoned up the dates, he turned twenty.

The one good thing was that nobody blamed him for losing his last fight. In fact, he was viewed as a kind of a hero, not only because everyone had wanted to go home, but also because they seemed to feel that his defeat had somehow restored the bull ritual to its ancient purity—as if there was no way it could have happened except by the hand of a god personally reaching out and flipping him off the back of that bull. And then, presumably, cushioning his fall and calming the animal so that a decisive result could be achieved without a kill. The warriors had a lot of time to talk on the long ride north, and this was what they came up with.

Rus didn’t believe any of it himself, but if it left his honour intact, even enhanced his already high status a little, he would not quarrel with it. He expected that at least Gunthanaruth would be annoyed with him, but instead the headman seemed to regard him with a kind of pious awe. Rus would have been embarrassed if he could have mustered the energy to care enough.

Finally they rode out of the dripping gloom of the forest and began to ascend the grey, wind-scoured slopes that marked the edge of the Luth lands. It was the wrong time of year to be riding up to the highlands, but spirits lifted all the same. The moon was full, so they rode late into the night to make up time, and singing echoed up and down the train as they went up the trails carved by their ancestors. Rus had a splitting headache that night, and everything that suddenly spoke of home—the familiar songs, the taste of the air, the stars spread across the clear sky above them—all of it seemed to be reminding him how far he had travelled from the coast, from Tios, from Adares. He slid down from his horse, stiff and exhausted, curled up in the litter, and fell asleep as the train moved on through the night.

“Rus. Wake up. You look like shit.”

He opened his eyes, blinked, and squinted against the sunlight, so much brighter up here in the highlands. A familiar, beak-nosed face, framed by faded red curls, looked down at him.

“Kuth. Good to see you too.”

They were in the kahar hall, where Rus had apparently slept late after arriving late the night before. It was empty but for themselves. Kuth squatted by the side of Rus’s pallet, frowning at him.

“What happened to you?”

Rus rubbed his hands over his face. He badly needed to shave. “You haven’t heard? Ask anyone—they’re all still talking about it.”

Kuth made an impatient gesture. “Yes, yes, you flew off the back of a bull and landed on your head, and it was a miracle wrought by the hand of Kahait—I know all that. What happened after that?”

“After that? After that we rode for a month in the rain. What do you mean?”

“I mean, you look like shit. Like you were thrown off a bull yesterday, not like you’ve had a month to recover.”