by A. J. Demas
Varazda gave a one-shouldered shrug. “No one saw Aristokles in the village or down at the factory—though there’s no one there but the fishermen now. The man who received the note to give to Nione said he got it this morning from one of the students, but he couldn’t remember which one.
“Oh, and a rowboat went missing last night and reappeared on the beach this morning, and the factory workers think someone broke into one of their outbuildings and moved things around without taking anything.”
“I see.” Damiskos didn’t like to spell out what that might mean in connection with Aristokles’s disappearance.
Apparently neither did Varazda. “It’s not much and may not be related, but it is what I’ve been able to come up with.”
“You’ve been very thorough,” said Damiskos, because it was the truth. “I think you have done all you can for today.”
“Mm. You may be right.”
“I’m going to ask Niko about getting a mattress for that extra bed in your room,” Damiskos said. It would look odd to the other slaves, but no one would protest; he was a free man and entitled to his eccentricities.
Varazda groaned. “Oh, First Spear.”
“You call me that to annoy me, don’t you?”
“If it’s not working, I’ll stop.”
Damiskos snorted. “Is there a lock on your door?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, then. I’m sleeping on that other bed. I’ll sleep there without a mattress if I have to.”
“No, no, I will personally find a mattress for you. I wouldn’t want you to enjoy yourself too much.”
“Good. So that’s settled.”
They stood for a moment in the yard. Varazda’s expression lost its mocking cast and became thoughtful.
“You haven’t told Nione the truth yet, have you?”
“No, of course not,” said Damiskos.
“It’s just that she said you are her friend.” Varazda shrugged. “And she was very understanding about … well, my alleged situation. When I went to tell her that Aristokles had left and sold me to you, she congratulated me on having a good master now. She seemed to think you would free me directly.”
“She’s probably wondering why I haven’t.”
“I defer to you, as you know her better, but I think we could trust her with at least some of this. And as it is all happening in her house, her assistance could be very beneficial.”
It struck Damiskos that what Varazda was really doing here was trusting him, and he was rather moved by it.
“I think you’re right,” he said after a moment. “But let me take some time to consider how best to talk to her.”
“Of course. On an unrelated note, how’s your leg?”
“Much better, thanks.”
“Do you fancy sparring a little?”
“Do I what?”
“Fancy sparring. With me. I expect you could teach me a few things.”
“I expect I could.”
He smiled, surprised. It had been a friendly overture, unmistakably. Even if his leg hadn’t been better—and it really was—he would have wanted to say yes.
“And they might come in useful.”
“What?”
“The things you might teach me. Or at least—it might be useful for you to be seen teaching me.”
“Ah. Yes. Can’t hurt to let it get around that you know how to do more with a sword than dance.”
“Exactly.”
Varazda fetched his swords, and they squared off in the slaves’ courtyard. They began with some easy exercises to warm up. Varazda already knew some of these, and the ones he did not know he picked up quickly. By the time they began fencing in earnest, they had an audience, loitering under the stairs and leaning over the railing above.
The two blades met, ringing with an unexpectedly pure note, like a bell. Varazda was caught off-guard by it; Damiskos was too, but he recovered more quickly. He slipped his sword free and brought it down on Varazda’s arm, in what would have been a devastating slash if the swords had been sharp and Damiskos had put power behind it. Varazda jumped back, startled, and laughed.
Then he recovered, meeting Damiskos’s next attack with a stylish little flourish and a precision that Damiskos had not expected. They fenced a few more passes, Varazda clearly giving it everything he had, Damiskos not remotely so—just observing, learning his opponent’s limits.
If his life had followed its first trajectory and he had grown up as the son of a noble Zashian household, Varazda would have made an excellent swordsman. But he had not, and the skills he had cultivated were not all ones that mattered in an actual fight. His instinct was to sacrifice speed and force for style, and he was used to thinking only about his own movement, not predicting the attacks of an opponent. He was beautiful to watch, but he was no match for Damiskos. When Damiskos began to really press him, he gave ground quickly.
He was very fair-minded, though—or perhaps ‘considerate’ was a better word for it. His biggest advantage against Damiskos was that he was much faster on his feet, but he refused to use it. He would dodge Damiskos’s attacks, but without moving more than a few steps, effectively neutralizing Damiskos’s weakness.
Damiskos had sparred with other men, in the years since his injury, who had done the same, but none that he could remember who had done it so gracefully—without saying anything about it, without seeming to have to work at it. If he hadn’t been having so much fun, it might have brought tears to his eyes.
He swung in earnest, hitting Varazda’s blade with his full strength, once, twice, three times, driving him back. Varazda actually shrieked.
It was put on—he obviously wasn’t really scared—but it was very funny, and Damiskos lost all form and composure and burst out laughing. Varazda seized his moment and swatted him on the flank with the flat of his blade, not hard enough to hurt. The watchers hissed and hooted.
Varazda had not been joking when he had suggested he could learn something, and after this he insisted that Damiskos teach him a couple of attacks, and put serious attention into learning them. Damiskos suggested techniques that would take advantage of Varazda’s strengths: his height, his speed, his dancer’s ease of movement.
This part was less entertaining to watch, and their audience gradually melted away so that by the time they were both tired and the light was fading, they were alone in the courtyard.
“Thank you,” Varazda said, taking back Damiskos’s sword and making a crisper, more military version of his usual courtly bow.
“My pleasure,” said Damiskos sincerely.
They stood there for a moment, and it struck Damiskos suddenly that if they had still had an audience he would have had an excuse to lean in and give Varazda a kiss. But they didn’t.
It was time for Damiskos to be going in for a bath before dinner, time for Varazda to rejoin the slaves as they prepared for the evening. Neither of them moved from where they stood.
Varazda said, “It has been five years since you left your command, I think you said?”
“Five years in the autumn.”
“You must have been superb.”
Damiskos shrugged and looked at the ground in the middle distance. “I was good.”
“You’re very good now, even with a foreign blade.”
“Well, it’s a style of fighting I’ve always liked. And I liked to challenge myself.”
“I’m sorry they took that from you.”
Damiskos looked up, surprised. “What do you mean, ‘they’?”
Varazda’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “I don’t know. I must have misspoken.”
But Damiskos was pretty sure he hadn’t.
“Well,” said Varazda after another moment, “I must let you go in. I don’t think you want to join me in the slave baths—they’re one of the unimproved parts of the house. Rather ghastly.”
Damiskos chuckled, as he was obviously meant to do. “I am glad to be spared that.”
“I’ll see you
later, then,” said Varazda.
Damiskos watched him walk away toward the door into the slave quarters. He felt a pull, somewhere in his soul, strong as a river running downhill, an urge to follow Varazda. He didn’t care how ghastly the slave bath was, what the slaves were having for dinner, or when they got to eat (he was used to a soldier’s life, after all). He just wanted to be near Varazda.
He hadn’t felt that pull, that helpless yearning, in years. But he had felt it before, often enough, when he was younger, and he knew well enough what it was. He could stop pretending to be in love with Varazda now, because he really was.
CHAPTER X
WHEN DAMISKOS IMAGINED a lasting love, it had always been in the context of marriage or the army. If you had asked him five years ago what he wanted, he would have said he wanted both. If he had to choose, he would have chosen the wife, as the more respectable option and the one that came with the comforts of a settled home. That was why he had got into the habit of saying that he “preferred women.” If he didn’t have to choose, if he could have exactly what he wanted, he had always thought he’d want a kind and loyal wife at home, and a lover in the army, so that no matter where he was, there would be someone who was uniquely his, someone with whom he could share a deep companionship of body and soul.
He’d had lovers in the army, on and off, but they had all been taken from him, one way or another, by battle or illness or promotion and transfer to different legions. He had twice almost been married—once in Pheme, a match that fell through when his father’s debts were revealed, and once in Zash, at what had been nearly the end of everything. It had been a long time since he thought in terms of having exactly what he wanted.
Varazda wasn’t anything that he had ever imagined wanting.
More than that, he didn’t even know what loving Varazda could mean. One couldn’t marry him, and he wasn’t a soldier. What his life in Boukos was like, Damiskos had no idea. Perhaps he already had someone to share it with; perhaps he didn’t want anyone.
These thoughts occupied Damiskos in the bath, so that when he emerged, clean and dressed for dinner, he was in something of a fog of misery. He nearly collided with Nione in the corridor outside the bath.
“Oh! I beg your pardon,” they both said at the same time.
He looked at her. She was trying to take control of her expression and smile at him, but it was clear she was seething with anger, almost in tears with it.
“What is it?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
She struggled with herself for a moment before unclenching her hands from her skirt and letting out a shaky breath. “It’s the students. I can’t stand them. I want them out of my house. I’m only putting up with them because Eurydemos is family and was disinherited and all that—I’m beginning to think I can’t even do that much longer.”
“Oh, Nione, I’m so sorry. And—I have to admit I’m … relieved.”
She stared at him for a moment, and then her eyes widened. “You thought maybe I’d been seduced by their … their poisonous twaddle?”
“I didn’t think you could have changed that much,” he said hastily. “But then, I suppose people sometimes do.”
“You’ve changed a lot,” she countered, but not unkindly. “You were always serious, but not always sad.”
He couldn’t think of anything to say to that except, eventually, “You’re right.”
She gestured him into a room on the other side of the hallway and closed the door behind them. It was one of the rooms being decorated, empty except for a rough bench spattered in paint and plaster. She dusted this off a little, and they sat down.
“No,” she said, “I haven’t taken up philosophy, or—or horrible notions about Phemian purity. Blessed Anaxe. Not at all. I just had the bad judgement to allow myself to fall in love with a philosopher’s student.”
He looked at the patterns sketched on the floor by the mosaicist, curling vegetation around the edge of the room, below the newly painted walls.
“Phaia?” he guessed.
“Yes. You’ve known that about me all along, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
She let out a breath of what sounded like relief. “Oh, Damiskos, I was so afraid you were another one here hoping to marry me. I know you’d make a wonderful husband for someone, but I’ve never wanted a man, and we would be miserable.”
“I thought you might have been afraid of that. I should have said something sooner.”
“Oh no, it’s too awkward a thing to say, isn’t it?”
He didn’t disagree. “So what happened with Phaia?”
“Well, she’s the real reason I invited the students here. I met her in the city when I visited Eurydemos at the Marble Porches, and she … she was very charming, and I liked her.”
“Of course.”
“I thought it would be really enchanting to have her here, with her fellow students, talking philosophy.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t as I’d imagined it, even in the beginning, and then … ” Her voice trailed off. “And I’m awfully worried about Aristokles, because—Damiskos, you weren’t to know this, but he was here on a secret mission.”
Damiskos looked up in surprise. “I did know that. I didn’t know you knew it. He told you?”
“No, the friend who asked me to invite him explained that it was important state business—to do with Eurydemos’s school in Boukos. They suspect his students of being involved in something criminal. I didn’t like the idea of inviting someone to spy on my kinsman while he was a guest in my house—it sounds almost blasphemous when I put it like that, and perhaps it was, but by the time the letter with the request arrived … ”
She stopped, pushed her hands back over her hair. “Eurydemos and his students had been here a week by then, and were talking about setting up a school in my house, as if they had a right to it, and … I wrote back saying Aristokles could come, and sent it on the postal ship on its return journey, the same day.
“Then of course I couldn’t tell the students to leave, because Aristokles had to do his job—but he was behaving so suspiciously. I actually had to encourage him to court me, Damiskos, so people would think that was what he was doing here. I didn’t actually tell him to do it, but I might as well have—the idea certainly came from me—and of course that quickly got out of hand.
“I suppose I had some thought of getting Phaia away from these awful men—which was wrong of me, because she’s no more their dupe than I am. She has her own mind and her own conscience, and she’s chosen her path. She chose to deceive me, too. She’s really Helenos’s girl.”
“Oh, Nione, I’m so sorry.”
“I overheard them talking the other night. She probably thinks of me as a stupid old woman only good for getting them a free holiday in the country.”
“I’m sorry.” It was all he had to say, but it was heartfelt.
They sat in silence for a moment before he reached out and took her hand. He was glad to be able to do it now, to know it would be understood as a gesture of friendship. She squeezed his hand in return.
“And now Aristokles has gone missing,” she continued, “and his poor servant … I am glad you bought him, Damiskos, for his sake, but please tell me you mean to free him. It isn’t a love affair if one person owns the other.”
“Ah,” said Damiskos. “About that.”
He told her everything he knew, and then they went to dinner with the students who had, quite possibly, murdered Aristokles and hidden his body, who had certainly killed men in Boukos, and who might intend harm to Varazda as well. They pretended that all was well and everyone was enjoying a lovely house party with a heavy emphasis on discussions of the Ideal Republic.
What else could they do? Nione had a houseful of mostly female slaves who could not be asked to subdue and imprison a group of dangerous young men. Of the few able-bodied male slaves in her household, several were away in the Tentines. There seemed nothing to do but rely on the veneer of civility that everyone was st
ill preserving. Damiskos thought that aside from times when he had been held captive or in terrible pain, he might never have passed a worse evening.
Everything that the students said sounded fatuous, even grotesque, as if their words came to him eerily distorted. They were discussing slavery now, debating the views of the radicals in the city who wanted to abolish it. The argument was between two of the new students, who would allow that the radicals might be morally right, though in practice their ideas would never work, and everyone else, who thought that slavery was a natural human institution which could not morally be abolished.
Damiskos had taken it for granted that everyone thought slavery was an evil, and that the only argument was between people who thought it a necessary evil and those who didn’t. At any other time he thought he would have been shocked to learn there were people who could argue it was a moral good, not an evil at all. But after what he had already heard about Eurydemos’s students, it didn’t even surprise him much.
He felt duty-bound to stay at dinner with Nione, now that she knew who she was harbouring under her roof, but fortunately she did not want to linger over dinner herself, and he was able to excuse himself as soon as she quit the dining room.
He went to his room for his sword and hurried to the slaves’ courtyard. He found Varazda sitting on a bench with his arm around the shoulders of one of Nione’s women, who was drying her eyes. She looked up guiltily as Damiskos approached, but Varazda gave her arm a squeeze.
“It’s all right, he’s harmless.”
The woman gave a watery laugh. “He’s your new master, isn’t he?”
“That’s right,” said Varazda dryly. “And he’s a good one.” He looked up at Damiskos. “One of the students has been giving Dria trouble.”
“It’s was nothing, really,” Dria murmured, with a miserable face that belied the statement. “I only wish I’d been braver and not given in and told him what he wanted to know—we’ve all heard how he tried to attack you.”
“So you were scared,” said Varazda. “Of course. I’d’ve been too. Well. I was.”
He had a different way of talking to women, Damiskos thought, his mannerisms subtly more feminine, his voice a little bit different. Damiskos wondered if he did it on purpose or if it was just something he slipped into naturally.
