Page 55 of Something Human

THE MASKED DANCERS formed up in a circle, stamping and swaying, and Hath took a seat on the steps of the dais with his drum. The bull mask narrowed Rus’s vision so that he could only glance up at the dais when he was facing in the right direction. He saw some of the Phemians watching the dance with unease, others with polite interest. He saw Adares lean toward Gunthanaruth, pointing out at the dancers, asking for an explanation, a smile on his face.

He looked just as Rus had pictured him every day for the past seven months—he hadn’t changed—and he looked like a stranger. He was not dressed in warrior gear now. He wore a short, pure white tunic with no sleeves and a border of gold thread, simple and princely, so he sat there with his beautiful bronze limbs all bare, one knee drawn up, one arm wrapped around it.

The dancers circled around, and Rus lost sight of Adares. The bull mask and the heavy, shaggy Genhath costume were intolerably hot in the warm hall, and the movements of the dance felt ponderous and silly. It no longer felt as if it meant anything, and he wished he had not insisted on doing the whole thing. It was only a spectacle, after all, put on to amuse the Phemians. No one was taking it seriously but him.

Of course that wasn’t true. Hath, drumming away on the dais steps, took it very seriously. The other dancers took it seriously too, if only, in some cases, because Rus had insisted they do, and they respected him. And he remembered sitting in the temple of the horse god with Adares, and how Adares, who seemed not to be particularly pious himself, had been charmed by Rus’s serious questions—as if Rus’s piety was something he found attractive.

He had to hold these things in tension: he had to live his life of service to the gods at the same time as loving Adares. The dance shifted again, and Rus caught another glimpse of the dais.

Adares still wore his hair very short, and he was clean-shaven like all his companions, who were dressed much as he was. Still, anyone in the hall could have recognized him as the Phemians’ headman. There was a gold arm-band of Karhan design around his right upper arm—and on the back of his right hand, and curling twice around his wrist, a tattoo of a coiled serpent in the Luth style.

He was talking to Gunthanaruth without an interpreter.

Rus wanted to fling off the mask of Genhath there on the dance floor and shout. “Look, it’s me! Did you guess? Did you know?” The drum beat began to quicken, and he brought his mind back to the dance with a huge effort.

They made the transition cleanly enough, reformed for the second part of the dance, and now Rus had to pay attention to what he was doing and had none to spare for the watchers on the dais. The boy in the gold mask somersaulted nimbly onto the shoulders of his masked steed, and Rus circled them, faster and faster, in the character of crazed Genhath.

Ordinarily, he would have found it easy to lose himself in the story of the dance, to feel a faint echo of Genhath’s rage flowing through him. Not enough to be really frightening—it wasn’t in his nature to lose control like that—but enough to set the experience apart, to make it feel like ritual. But up to this point, tonight, the dance had just felt like a chore.

He was hot, his costume was uncomfortable, he wanted the dance to go well but doubted whether he should have agreed to do it in the first place. He wanted the rest of the kahar to respect him, but he believed Unumus was wrong in his ideas, and wanted not to care what the man thought about anything. And beneath it all, he was queasily, paralyzingly terrified of meeting Adares again.

All of this was swept away, unexpectedly, in the second part of the dance, by the spectators’ reaction. Something about the mock battle must have struck the Phemians as familiar, reminded them of some entertainments they enjoyed at home, perhaps, and they began to applaud and cheer.

It was not the done thing, of course, but how were they to know? They were at a feast, and this looked like entertainment, and they liked it, so they clapped. Hospitality was an iron-clad law of the Luth, and the Phemians were guests, so after a moment or two the men and women in the rest of the hall began to clap too. Before long there was whooping and stomping and laughter. The Luth, who knew what the dance was about, began shouting encouragement: “Ka-hait! Ka-hait! Fight, fight, fight!”

It worked on the dancers like a frenzy-fuelling drug. Hath drummed as though his life depended on it. Some of the dancers in the outer ring took up the cheers. All of them stamped and shouted. Rus and the boy representing Kahait threw themselves into their roles, their gestures becoming bigger and bolder, drawing out the fight, and the spectators loved it.

Rus didn't feel like Genhath, exactly. He felt like himself, caught up in the dance, conscious of his lover watching him, having fun. He didn’t know whether it was right, but it was at least an improvement. At the climax of the dance, when the boy Kahait leapt onto Rus’s shoulders and flourished his spear, someone on the dais whistled. Rus made a production of his death, staggering and reeling, to the delight of the crowd.

And then the dance was over, and the time had come to face Adares. The other dancers were forming up to process out of the hall, and Rus could have pretended not to see the headman beckoning to him from the dais with big hand gestures. But that would have been stupid.

He parted from the others, who were heading out to return their costumes to the kahar hall, and mounted the steps toward the headman's hearth, still wearing his costume and mask. The Phemians looked faintly alarmed by this, but the headman grinned and slapped his thigh, obviously delighted. Gunthanaruth’s wife, sitting on his left, moved over to make room for Rus.

“This is our deputy stathan,” Gunthanaruth told Adares, shouting as if at a deaf person, and waving his hand in an unhelpful gesture. “That’s … hum.”

“Yes, yes,” said Adares eagerly. “I know it. The stathan is your high priest.” He used the Pseuchaian word. “The headman of your kahar. This is his second-in-command.”

“Ah, you know! Good, good.” Gunthanaruth clapped him heartily on the shoulder.

Rus had seated himself, by this time, in the place vacated for him. Adares leaned forward to look at him past the headman.

“You dance well,” he said, smiling into Rus’s eyes.

Rus pushed the bull mask up and off, tugging it free from his sweat-damp hair. “Thank you,” he said in Luth.

There was a moment’s silence like the crash of a cymbal. Adares’s eyes were wide, his face a frozen mask, expressionless. When he moved, leaning back and bringing his drinking-horn to his lips, he had the look of a man woken abruptly from sleep.

Gunthanaruth noticed nothing.

“Your mead is stronger more than I thought,” said Adares. “I am a little … suddenly … ” He touched his forehead with a rueful laugh.

“Hah?” said Gunthanaruth. “Nonsense! Have some more, have some more.”

Rus realized he had not introduced himself. He tugged on the ties that held his costume closed at the neck and shrugged it off onto the cushions behind him. He was wearing only his kilt underneath, the same as when he had first met Adares. He shook out his hair.

“Lachan Rusanarath,” he said, reaching out a hand past the headman.

It took Adares a moment to register what this was about, and to switch his mead-horn to his left hand to offer Rus the right. They clasped hands briefly, let go—nothing out of the ordinary.