Sword Dance

by A. J. Demas

  Damiskos stopped to think. “Helenos said he didn’t want any more bodies. He wasn’t happy about the Zashians in Boukos being killed—perhaps he felt it reflected badly on the school, I don’t know. The others think any dead Zashian is a blow struck for their cause, but Helenos focusses on the big picture, which I suppose is hundreds and thousands of dead Zashians. The others wanted to drown me, but Helenos wouldn’t let them. I don’t remember if they discussed what they were going to do with me. I was … ”

  Varazda put a hand lightly on his arm. “Don’t go back there if you don’t want to.”

  “I … Thanks. I don’t think I was really there at the time, so I can’t … But they dumped me in that tank, and I was there for … ” He looked up at the sky. It had been early morning when he came out here, and the sun was past the zenith now; it was mid-afternoon. It hadn’t just felt like hours inside the fish-sauce tank. “Hours. Hours before somebody set that fire—it hadn’t been burning long when you found me. One of the students must have come back and set it. They must have thought the fishermen weren’t coming back.”

  “They know they’re not. The fishermen are up at the villa, demanding extra pay for working while the Opos-worshippers are on holiday. It was the students’ idea. I heard them talking about it on Hapikon Eve.”

  “Terza’s balls.” Too late, the oath struck him as tactless. “Oh—sorry.”

  Varazda shrugged expansively. “Presumably he has them. I’ve never heard that he didn’t.”

  Damiskos felt a strong urge suddenly to hug him. He resisted because it didn’t seem the time or place, and he wouldn’t have wanted it to be misinterpreted. Or correctly interpreted, maybe.

  “Anyway,” said Varazda, “it wasn’t the students who set the fire—it was the fishermen. They were threatening to do it—to let the place burn unless their wages were increased.”

  “Huh. Clearly a bluff. That fire wasn’t going to burn the place down.”

  “Might have damaged the merchandise, though. Does fish sauce burn?”

  “I couldn’t say. I don’t want to think about fish sauce right now.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Damiskos’s attention had been caught by figures on the path down from the villa. It was a number of Nione’s slaves, six or eight of them, led by the steward, Aradne, hurrying down the path with shovels and buckets in hand.

  “They must have taken the fishermen seriously,” Damiskos said. “Good for them.” He wasn’t sure about the other women, but Aradne he thought might be capable of putting out a burning building all by herself.

  “Planning to sit here and watch while the mistress’s factory burns?” Aradne demanded as the group of women approached.

  “It’s not burning any more, actually,” Varazda replied brightly.

  “We put it out,” Damiskos added.

  The steward gave him an impatient look. “That is not smoke coming from a fire that has been put out.”

  Damiskos and Varazda looked back at the factory. There was indeed still smoke rolling out of the window.

  “Let me guess,” said Aradne, “you just threw a couple of jars of water over it and called it done. I suppose you’re sure there’s no one inside?”

  “There’s no one inside now,” Damiskos clarified. “Varazda got me out.”

  Aradne cast him a look which suggested that getting trapped inside fish-sauce factories without his clothes was about the level of competence she would have expected of him, and pushed a bucket into his hands.

  The fire was mostly out. It was smouldering more than it had been when Damiskos and Varazda left it, but Aradne admitted that it probably wouldn’t have rebuilt into a serious blaze. The women, who were well-muscled slaves from the vineyard, made short work of dousing the pile of debris thoroughly and spreading out the charred remains with their shovels.

  Their job finished, they came back outside and lounged in the sand. Damiskos lay flat on his back, one hand tucked under his head. Varazda dropped down elegantly beside him and spent a minute taking his hair down, shaking it out, and combing it through with his fingers, then putting it up again. Damiskos watched him with a kind of stupefied fascination. His whole body hurt, and he was beginning to feel hungry.

  “Why don’t you put your head in my lap and sleep for a bit?” Varazda rearranged his legs in the sand and patted his thigh indicatively.

  It was a lovely thought. He could even have done it without embarrassment; everyone here already thought he was Varazda’s master. It was his own stubbornness that kept him from succumbing to the temptation.

  “I’m all right,” he said, sitting up and doing his best to look it.

  Varazda tipped his head to one side and gave him a sceptical look, but he did not try to argue.

  “How,” said Damiskos suddenly, “how did you know what to say? Earlier. ‘This is not then.’”

  Varazda looked surprised. “Did I say that? It just slipped out, I guess. I’m so used to comforting friends whose memories have got the better of them. I grew up in a household of eunuchs. Everyone I knew had things that would sneak up on them like that and set them off. Stick around long enough and you’ll find out what mine are, I suppose.”

  Damiskos didn’t know what to say. “I’d like that,” would have sounded ghoulish, though in a way it was true. He didn’t like to think of Varazda feeling the helpless panic that had gripped him when the students had tied his hands behind his back, but if it was a thing that happened, he absolutely wanted to be there to do what he could to help.

  They were all still sitting in the sand when Nione and the rest of the women of the household, some with children in their arms or holding their hands, came down the cliff path to the beach.

  Nione gathered up her skirt and ran from the base of the path to where the women were clustered. Her braids had come down and swung wildly about her shoulders as she ran. Her gown was torn at one shoulder, the clasp dangling from the frayed fabric. Damiskos, suddenly alert again, raked his eyes over the rest of the women. Some of them were crying. The ones with children were clutching them protectively, their expressions fiercely focussed. A few were carrying objects—a rolling pin, a broom, the lid of a basket—that they had either brought away in their haste or perhaps grabbed to defend themselves.

  “Something’s happened up at the villa,” Damiskos said unnecessarily.

  “There you are!” Nione cried, reaching out to Aradne with obvious relief. Damiskos thought she looked as if she wanted to hug the steward but didn’t quite dare.

  “We have things under control here, ma’am,” said Aradne. “The fire was small and didn’t really pose a danger to the building.”

  Nione looked as though she wasn’t really taking all this in. The other women reached the bottom of the stairs behind her. More than one child was wailing.

  “Wait,” said Aradne. “What’s happened?”

  It took Nione a moment to collect herself, but she replied calmly enough. “The students have taken over our house.”

  “Terza’s—” Damiskos censored himself with an effort.

  Varazda said something under his breath in Zashian about goats and ancestral tombs.

  “Taken over the house,” Aradne repeated. “What does that mean?”

  “They have Eurydemos locked in his room,” Nione said, her voice shaking a little, “and they were going to do the same to me. I didn’t know where you were—you hadn’t told me where you were going.”

  “I was in the vineyard, and you always tell me I don’t need to inform you every time I’m leaving the house,” Aradne retorted. “Why are they locking people in their rooms?”

  “I don’t know. I gathered up as many of the girls as I could find and got out. It was Tyra who warned me, but I don’t know where she is now. I looked for her, but there was no time. I had to get everyone else out. Everyone who would come—the men insisted on standing their ground, to help us get away.”

  “There’s been fighting?” said Damiskos.

 
; Nione nodded. “Two men have been killed. Gelon stabbed Tionikos, and one of the fishermen pushed Demos down the stairs. Neither of them had a weapon.” She spoke bitterly.

  “I wish I had been there,” said Aradne.

  “I’m glad you weren’t.”

  Damiskos turned to Varazda. “Let’s get everyone inside the warehouse,” he said. “Sit them down and pass around wine.”

  “Good thought.”

  To Aradne he said, “You know these women. I’ll take my lead from you. I think the first thing to do is keep everyone calm.”

  “Uh. Yes.” She wasn’t looking particularly calm herself. “That is very important.”

  Varazda began helping gently to lead the women and children toward the shelter of the warehouse, where Aradne brought out an amphora of the villa’s best wine, and they handed around cups of it. Someone else went to the cove with the beach houses, where there was a freshwater spring, and brought back water to drink as well.

  By speaking to Nione and several other women, Damiskos pieced together an account of what had happened at the house. Nione had decided to tell Eurydemos what his students were accused of doing in Boukos, and Eurydemos had then rashly confronted Helenos and the others about it. That was what had pushed them into action.

  They had shut Eurydemos in his room, gone looking for the mistress of the house, encountered resistance from some of the slaves, and violence had broken out. Nione, warned by Tyra of the students’ intentions, had been able to get away with most of her women—all her women, in fact, once the ones who had already been down on the beach were accounted for. She downplayed her own role, of course, but from what the others said, it was clear she had placed herself in considerable danger—been seized and threatened with a weapon and nearly pushed down the stairs herself—in making sure as many of her slaves as possible could flee the house. She bitterly regretted that she had not been able to save all of them.

  The fishermen were still up at the house, being whipped into a frenzy by the students. Some of the household men had been suborned, either with threats or rhetoric. Looting seemed imminent, if not already in progress.

  “I think I have a good grasp of the situation now,” Damiskos said to Varazda after summarizing all this. “Except for one thing. The documents the students stole from the Zashian embassy. When you told me about it before, you were pretending to be Aristokles’s servant, and I took it for granted you didn’t know what the documents were. But you were never Aristokles’s servant.”

  Varazda nodded. “And in fact I know all about it. Yes.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  “VARAZDA HAS TOLD you that Eurydemos’s students planned and carried out an assassination in Boukos,” said Damiskos.

  Nione nodded. Aradne shook her head but did not look surprised. They stood together with Damiskos and Varazda on the beach outside the warehouse, having left the rest of the women inside. Damiskos had almost forgotten to be tired; the old, familiar feeling of pushing himself past his body’s limits to plan the next phase of the campaign returned to him, and it felt something like joy.

  “The murdered man was a diplomat from Zash, carrying details of troop deployment and fortifications on the Deshan Coast,” Damiskos said. “Those documents were stolen after his death.”

  Aradne gave a low whistle. “That sounds bad. I take it that’s bad.”

  “Yes,” said Varazda, “it is bad.”

  “The Deshan Coast is a mess,” Damiskos explained. “There’s been a tenuous peace for the last couple of years, but it’s been heating up again recently.”

  “But it’s civil war there, isn’t it?” said Nione. “It’s Zashians against Zashians.”

  “It is now,” said Damiskos. “But for anyone who wanted Pheme to go to war with Zash again, it would be an ideal spot to strike—the power of the king is already weak in the region.”

  “But no one wants Pheme to go to war with Zash again,” Aradne protested. “Do they?”

  “Plenty of people do. Helenos has told me himself he thinks the republic needs war to be great, or some nonsense, and there are men in the military—men in high places—who would agree with him. I don’t know that any of them would do business with murderous philosophy students hawking state secrets, but I wouldn’t rule it out.

  “I had a feeling, when I put the pieces together, that Helenos must have some information like this. In fact, it’s more dangerous than I’ve explained. Officially, Zash keeps no secrets from us on the Deshan Coast, because we’re there—we have legions permanently stationed in the colonies and collaborating with the Zashian crown in the region.

  “But of course the king of Zash does have secrets—so do we. Whatever’s in these documents, there is bound to be something we don’t already know, something politicians and power-hungry officers in the legions can point to and claim Zash has been lying to us and breaking the peace of the colonies. It’ll be all the pretext they need to start another war.”

  “That’s why,” Varazda added, “it doesn’t matter whether the king of Zash knows about the theft or not—it won’t help just to rearrange the troops so the documents are no longer accurate. That’s not the real danger. So we persuaded the embassy staff to delay reporting the theft until we’d tried to recover the documents.”

  “You mean you’re lying to your king?” Aradne looked impressed.

  “No, because he’s not my king. I’m a Boukossian citizen. I don’t work for the embassy—I’m here on behalf of the Basileon of Boukos.”

  “And you’ve looked for these documents?” said Nione.

  Varazda nodded. “But I was only able to search Eurydemos’s and Phaia’s belongings thoroughly—and fruitlessly, I’m afraid. Helenos and Gelon share a room and have an extraordinary amount of luggage. I hadn’t been able to go through it all before Aristokles went missing. I think the documents could still be there.”

  “Right,” said Damiskos. He stood with his hands on his hips for a moment. He had put his clothes back on, damp as they were. “So. Holding the beach is a strong position. We have fresh water and plenty of food. We can afford to wait for the men to come back from the Tentines and strengthen our hand further. Or for the fishermen to quarrel with the students and come down to retrieve their boats—which, honestly, I might have expected to happen before now. It’s also a question how many of the male slaves they can count on to assist them—we know they’ve coopted a few of them, but we don’t know what’s happened to the rest.

  “Helenos, who’s currently in charge, is not as bloodthirsty as his colleagues. He wouldn’t let them kill me when they had the chance, and I don’t think he was pleased with Gelon and Phaia killing Aristokles. That works in our favour. Our other advantage is that he’s likely, given the way he see the world, to underestimate us because we’re a bunch of women, slaves, a cripple, a Sasian, degenerates—all the rest of it.”

  Aradne snorted.

  “Our disadvantages,” Damiskos went on. “We outnumber them, but we do lack able-bodied men, weapons, and experience—whereas we know that at least some of them are capable of planning and executing assassinations and spur-of-the-moment murders. We have children to protect. They have hostages. Eurydemos, certainly, Tyra probably, likely some of the household men. That weakens our position, because obviously we don’t want any hostages harmed.”

  “Obviously,” said Aradne.

  “We’re also weakened by the fact that we don’t know what the students’ endgame is or what plans they may already have in place. On the beach we’re vulnerable from the sea, which could be a problem if they’ve got more reinforcements on the way. That’s a possibility we have to consider. The other possibility we have to consider—and I think this one is much more likely—is that they’ll realize we can afford to wait them out, and they’ll try some sort of preemptive strike before the factory-workers come back. And right now, we’d be vulnerable to that. I think we can expect an exploratory party pretty soon, probably with an offer of some kind—we’ll let you back int
o your house if you do such-and-such for us—I’m not sure what it will be because I’m not sure exactly what their aims are. But when we refuse it—which we’ll do—they may lose interest in bargaining pretty quickly.”

  “Right,” said Aradne. “So what do you think we should do.”

  “I think we should fortify our position on the beach.”

  Nione blinked at him. “What does that mean, exactly? You don’t mean build, build defensive … um, defences … do you?”

  “I do, actually. With your approval. It’s your household, which makes you the ranking officer here.”

  She gave a startled laugh. “Oh dear, no. I defer to you.”

  “Well. I think we should dig a trench around the beach huts, extending back to the spring. Then what you do is, you build a rampart with the dirt you’ve dug out—sand, in this case, which isn’t ideal, but we’ll make it work—and erect a wall of stakes on top of that. There’s plenty of branches in the brush around here that will work beautifully for stakes, we’ve got the shovels you brought down to fight the fire, and the women from the vineyard will be familiar with this type of work. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours, given our workforce and the size of the area we’re dealing with.

  “Then when we’re done with the ditch and rampart, we stockpile whatever projectiles we can find, gather more brush to close up the beach houses and provide better cover—that should be plenty of work for the day. The most important thing is to look like we’re doing something and aren’t scared—the second most important thing is to do something, to keep from getting scared.”

  “I see,” said Aradne.

  “Will you make a speech to tell the women?” Nione asked Damiskos.

  “I think it would be better if you did. I’ll brief everyone on the plan afterward, but I do feel it’s best for you to maintain your authority as mistress of the house.”

  “Hm.” She looked uncertain. “Best for me, or best for the women?”

  “Best for everyone.” He smiled wryly at her. “Don’t worry—I’ll have your back.”