Page 54 of Something Human

“No, I don’t see that you did. But you’re right, it’s not the season … ”

“And Unumus won’t like it,” Rus finished for him. He set down the spear he had been working on. “Well, let’s see what he’ll say.”

The mask dance was a ritual in honour of Kahait, usually performed in the autumn—it could be done at other times, but there was supposed to be a reason, and that reason was not generally, “Because a guest wants to see it at dinner.” Rus didn’t much like the idea of putting it on as an entertainment, but he knew Unumus would like it even less. And the mask dance was Unumus’s specialty.

Unumus flatly refused to do it.

“We do not perform the mask dance as an entertainment at a feast,” he said, as if he thought that Rus might not know this.

“No, and I do not mean that we should—we’ll go to the standing stones and do an invocation, and we’ll perform the whole thing, and it may be that the guests will be bored, and we won’t be asked to do it again.”

Unumus looked at him haughtily and said nothing. You fucker, Rus thought. He hardly ever swore even in his head.

“It isn’t unlawful for us to do the mask dance whenever we want,” he went on. “It isn’t impious. It’s just a nuisance.”

Unumus’s nostrils flared. “It is more than a nuisance. It is—”

“Well, we’re doing it.”

“You will do it without me.” Clearly he thought that was impossible.

“Yes,” said Rus. “We will.”

Preparations for the stupid dance took up the rest of Rus’s day. First he had to recruit six kahar who knew the dance but weren’t so staunchly Unumus’s men that they would refuse to participate. He probably could have ordered them to do it, but he didn’t want to test allegiances so openly just yet, and not over something so silly.

Then they had to find the masks and costumes, which had been packed away, without any help from Unumus or his partisans, who had probably been the ones to pack them, and who were now making it known that they were insulted at not being asked to dance. Some of the masks had to be repaired, which Rus got Genet and one of her apprentices to do while they rehearsed outside the hall.

Hath drummed for them, and they ran through the steps of the dance. They formed up into a circle and moved in swaying, stamping steps to a slow beat, symbolically tracing out parts of the Great Pattern.

The costumes they would wear for the dance were heavy and enveloping, the masks dramatically oversized, so that their movements would be exaggerated. After a while the drum beat quickened, and the dance changed. Here they ran into difficulties, as a couple of the younger dancers forgot the transition, and they had to rehearse it several times to get it straight.

The circle broke up, and the dance became a reenactment of the battle between Kahait and Genhath, which was at the same time a kind of mock bull-fight. It was a fine spectacle, when performed well, and Rus could not really blame Gunthanaruth for wanting to show it off to his guests.

One of the votive boys, the best dancer among them, wore the gold mask of the goddess and leapt on the shoulders of a horse-masked dancer. Rus wore the bull mask of Genhath; it was the heaviest and most uncomfortable mask, and no one else particularly wanted it, but he was also a good dancer, and Genhath was a demanding role. The others circled around, stamping and shouting, while Kahait on her horse faced down her crazed brother and felled him with a blow from a wooden spear hung with clusters of bells. Then it was time to make their way to the standing stones, located several miles outside the headman’s village, to perform the invocation to the goddess.

“I wonder who the guests are,” Hath remarked as they rode back up toward the village in the twilight.

“Southerners, I suppose,” said Rus. “Who else would want to see a mask dance done out of season?”

They were laughing about that when they came up the slope behind the headman’s hall, and in the fading light Rus saw the horses in the nearby paddock. Among the whites and greys and duns of Gunthanaruth’s herd, the sleek, dark Phemian horses stood out clearly.

Rus counted six of them, an inconclusive number: more than a scouting party or a messenger, but surely not the whole entourage of the archon. Besides, it was too soon to expect him. It hadn’t even crossed Rus’s mind that it could be him. He would have had to leave almost the moment the train of horses and jars of soap arrived in Tios in order to be here by now.

Perhaps it was someone from the southern tribes after all, who had bought horses from the Phemians—though why you would do that and then bring them on a visit to the Luth headman, unless you intended a deliberate insult …

In any case, it wouldn’t be him.

The dancers marshalled outside the hall, adjusting their costumes, and at the signal from Rus, all ducked their heads and settled the heavy masks over their faces. The masks were attached to hoods over wicker frames, so that they rested on top of the wearers’ heads, and long manes of horse-hair hung down over their shoulders. Rus pulled his own hair up and twisted it on top of his head to provide some extra padding before pulling on the Genhath mask with its curving bull horns. He signalled Hath to begin the drum beat, and they processed into the hall.

If they had really been doing this as entertainment for the headman and his guests, they should probably have waited outside and sent one of the boys in to ask for a signal to enter. But they were not performing an entertainment, so they didn’t wait. It was a compromise, in Rus’s mind. It probably didn’t matter, as the effect they created by striding in to interrupt the feast was quite spectacular.

Gunthanaruth’s hall was a large, long building with one rounded end, in the middle of which, raised up on a stone platform and surrounded by furs and cushions, was the headman’s hearth. Below it were several smaller hearths, laid out down the length of the hall, where his retainers and lesser guests ate and drank, and between the first of the lower hearths and the steps up to the headman’s dais was an open space of packed earth for dancers and other entertainment.

As Rus and the rest of the dancers entered the hall, the lower hearths were full of the usual members of the headman’s household, and around the fire on the dais sat the Phemians. There were more than six of them—perhaps twice that number, though Rus didn’t have time to count them—which must have meant that some of them had ridden Luth horses. They sat awkwardly around the headman’s fire, looking like they didn’t know what to do with their legs. Some of them held their mead-horns in both hands and peered suspiciously into them; others, more relaxed, were trying to flirt with the girls serving food.

And on Gunthanaruth’s right, leaning back against the cushions propped against the wooden rail behind him, mead-horn held loosely in one hand, deep in conversation with the Luth headman, was Adares.

CHAPTER XIX