Page 73 of Something Human

CHAPTER XXIII

RUS DIDN’T IMAGINE he would sleep at all that night, and he was genuinely surprised to find himself waking up with the first light of dawn, feeling refreshed and alert. The rest of the kahar hall, and indeed the rest of the village, seemed sleepy and slow by contrast. He rose and went out to the village well, and the only person he encountered there was Genet.

For a moment she looked as though she was going to greet him, but then her expression hardened, as if she had just remembered what he had told her the night before.

“Good morning, Genet,” he said.

She nodded. “Good morning.”

He leaned against the stone wall of the well while she lowered the bucket.

“I understand,” he said after a moment, “why you would be disgusted with me. But you seem angry as well, and that I am not sure I understand.”

The bucket rattled in the well, and she said nothing.

He went on: “Is it that you feel responsible—you think you should have known, somehow, and not done my tattoos?”

“No. I just feel a fool. I didn’t know you.”

“You didn’t know me as well as you thought—and that’s my fault, not yours.”

She gave him a sour look. “I know it’s your fault. That’s why I’m angry with you.”

“Right.”

“You made me feel a fool. You ate at my hearth and slept under my roof and kept secrets when you should have trusted me and Kuth with them.”

“I know,” he said, although he wasn’t quite sure that was true. “I’m sorry.” That at least he could say honestly.

She nodded and began to haul up the bucket.

“Do you think you shouldn’t have done my tattoos?” he said. “Do you think I shouldn’t have been initiated into the kahar?”

She seemed to consider that as she pulled the bucket up over the edge of the well and emptied it into her pitcher. “No. No, there’s no reason. Not at all. I don’t even see what’s so terrible about two men … I mean, it is a little odd to think about, but … ”

“Ah, you know.” He took the rope to lower the bucket in his turn. “Makes me less of a man.”

“Tcha! Less of a man—could anything be worse?” She hefted her pitcher. “Less of a man is more of a woman, and there isn’t anything wrong with that.”

The bucket rattled down into the well again. “Exactly.”

She rested her pitcher on the edge of the well and looked at him for a moment. “You don’t think you’ve done anything wrong,” she said, and he thought there was a note of admiration in her voice.

“Ah, no! I wouldn’t go that far. I am ashamed that I acted as a traitor and lied to my headman. But … at the same time, I am not sorry, and I would do it again. And the rest?” He shrugged. “I’m not even ashamed.”

And he realized that was something new. He hadn’t felt overwhelmed with shame before, but it had been there, lurking in the back of his mind, for a long time. Now it was gone.

Genet gasped suddenly. She looked at Rus. “That story about the Luth girl who drew the snake for him!”

Rus laughed. “He never said it was a Luth girl. I drew it. He had it inked after he thought I’d died.”

“Ah.” Genet nodded as though she’d personally approved of the whole thing at the time. “It is a good snake. Less of a man, indeed.”

They rode out to White-Water Valley later that morning. Only five of the Phemians were in the party: Adares, the old soldier Kleisios, the secretary Doros, and two others whose names Rus could not remember. The hapless Kagieros and Glaukos were still in bed, and the others, Rus guessed, were not interested in coming out to see a whole herd of the animals that they had last encountered charging at their troops during the Luth attack on Tios.

Adares looked as though he hadn’t much wanted to come himself, although he was putting on a good face. In fact, he looked to Rus as though he hadn’t slept. Suthus, in spite of his anxiety about talking to Adares, rode beside him most of the way down to the valley, chatting easily.

Rus rode with the other kahar, the bull-fighters Hath, Dudun, and Kam, three of the omen-readers, and a couple of the votive boys. Except for the boys, they were all tattooed alike, swirls of blue from head to foot, and in their summer kilts with their sleeves rolled up, you could see it clearly. He had become used to being among men who looked like him, who wore this uniform in their skin, where everyone else knew what it meant. He wondered what it would be like to live somewhere where he was the only one, where his tattoos were a pattern that no one knew how to read.