Page 48 of Something Human

“I haven’t. We were riding the whole time. In the rain. Camping in the forest. It was miserable.” He levered himself up on one elbow and looked around for his clothes.

“Who looked after you? Kaman?”

“Mm.” Rus pulled his shirt and kilt in under the furs with him. It was too cold to get out from under the covers to dress—too cold for the kilt, really, but his winter trousers were packed away. He would have to go looking for them as soon as he had some breakfast inside him, and some more theraka. His head was hurting already. He didn’t understand why Kuth wasn’t being nicer to him.

“What’s he been giving you for pain? Theraka?”

“Yes, of course.” Rus pulled his shirt over his head and shook out his hair. He wrapped his kilt around his waist under the covers, awkward with his still-healing arm. “What’s all this about? What happened to, Hello, Rus, old friend—it’s good to have you back?”

“How much theraka?”

“I don’t know!” Rus felt around the edge of the bedclothes for his kilt pin. “He just lets me have as much as I want.”

“That’s what I thought!” Kuth looked triumphant. Rus glared at him. “You’ve all the signs of it. That idiot”—lowering his voice a little, since Kaman was technically his elder—“has been giving you too much for too long—and after a blow to the head? Tcha! He’s lucky you didn’t die on him. I mean you’re lucky. You know what I mean.”

Rus looked at his friend for a moment. Then he sighed. “I know what you mean.”

“It is good to see you, of course. But I’m worried about you. Here, were you looking for this? Wait, what is this?” He held up the thing in his hand, looking at it with wide eyes.

“A Phemian officer’s rank badge.” Rus took it out of his hand and slipped the sharp point of the pin through the folded layers of his kilt.

“Trophy of war?” Kuth said, with a trace of distaste that he couldn’t quite conceal.

“Something like that. Am I going to have to stop taking theraka altogether?”

“You are, yeah. Sorry.”

Kuth was a healer, a better one than Kaman, the most knowledgeable man Rus knew on the subject of drugs. He could read Firhat Kosoth, because he had been brought up with the kahar before his marriage, so he had all that knowledge too. If he said Rus needed to stop taking theraka, it was true, and there was no use arguing with it. Rus tossed back the covers but didn’t get up.

“Why were you still taking it, anyway?” Kuth asked. “You can’t be in much pain by this time, surely?”

“My head still hurts,” Rus admitted. “Not much, though. It’s not the pain, exactly, it’s just … I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I get tired when I shouldn’t, and I don’t feel like myself sometimes. I get … just sad.” It was a surprising relief to tell someone even this much.

Kuth looked at him for a moment, and Rus thought he could tell there was more to the story that he wasn’t being told, but he didn’t ask.

“Well,” he said finally, “you are going to have to stop taking the theraka. In the long run, you’ll feel better for it, though in the meantime you’ll feel worse for a bit. But as for the other, hitting your head can do strange things to you. Some men lose their memory altogether, forget their own names even. Sometimes they can’t walk, or they limp, or they can’t do things with their hands. Sometimes it’s like they’re different people. I suppose this might be something like that—only not so bad, obviously.”

Rus gave him a horrified look. “They’re different people?”

“They act differently, is all I meant. And this is right after they hit their heads. It’s not going to happen to you now. You’re probably going to get better.”

“Ah. Probably.”

“Well, no one can say for sure. But one of the Kosoth medical men made a study of it. That’s where I read all this. I can find the book for you, if you want.”

“No, thank you,” said Rus hastily. He generally liked to learn about things, but this sounded like something he might be better off not knowing too much about. But after a moment he added, “Maybe you can read it again yourself and tell me if there’s anything I can do. To get better, I mean.”

“Of course. I had it in mind to do that.” He clapped Rus on the shoulder. “It is good to have you back.”

CHAPTER XVII

WINTER IN THE summer villages was hard: the weather bitter, the food monotonous when it wasn’t scarce, the loneliness of the empty fields and closed-up houses depressing to the spirit. It suited Rus, in a way, that winter. He would have been unhappy wherever he was, and there was some solace in seeing his mood mirrored in the bleak, wind-scoured landscape of the highlands and the deserted silence of the headman’s village.

He was lucky, too, that Kuth and his wife Genet were staying the winter—had been planning to stay, they claimed, even before he turned up—so he did not lack for sympathetic company. He slept in the kahar hall but spent most of his time in their house close by. Their eldest child, a boy, had ridden with the departing herds for the first time this year, but the two girls, Meret, who was six, and Gil, the baby, were at home with their parents.

In the kahar hall, the company was not so good: just two of the votive boys and one senior kahar, Unumus, whom Rus had never liked. There was work to be done over the winter, but not much, and the two boys were both very keen, so Rus was idle much of the time.

At first this was just as well. After the village emptied out, he spent the first weeks of the lonely winter being wretchedly sick when he stopped taking theraka. If he’d known it was going to be like this, he thought he wouldn’t have started taking it in the first place; he couldn’t believe that the relief it had given him could have been worth this. He had chills, ran a temperature, threw up everything he ate—he hated throwing up—and couldn’t get a night’s uninterrupted sleep for weeks. Kuth and Genet looked after him, coming over to the kahar hall every day and taking turns sitting with him at night for the first little while because they had no faith in the votive boys, keen as they were.