Sword Dance

by A. J. Demas

  The stairs had a railing with an upper and lower rail on their open side. He grasped the hand-rail, stepped up onto the lower rail, and managed to pull himself clumsily up past the crockery-strewn steps. After that the rest of the flight was easy.

  He reached the gallery at the top that ran around three sides of the atrium, giving access to the upstairs bedrooms. Looking down, he established which room was directly above his, and went to its door. He wished they had thought to arrange some signal so that he wouldn’t have to surprise Varazda, but at this point it couldn’t be helped. He eased the door open a crack, relieved to find it wasn’t locked, and looked in.

  The room was a fantastic mess, with clothes, books, and dirty dishes on the floor, and two large sea chests under the window. Varazda was up to his elbows in one of them. Damiskos tapped lightly on the door to get his attention, and he looked round, wide-eyed and wary, before his face broke into a smile. He held up one hand, and in the moonlight from the window Damiskos could see the bundle of small, tightly-rolled parchment scrolls that he held.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  “THOSE ARE THE documents?” Damiskos whispered. He had been picturing something larger, somehow, more impressive-looking.

  Varazda nodded. “It was as I suspected—there was a false bottom in one of the chests, and they were in there. I didn’t have time to pry it up when I was searching before. And I was trying to keep them from noticing their things had been searched, which made it take longer.”

  Damiskos looked around at the clutter on the floor. “You’ve given up on that, I see.”

  Varazda made a face that Damiskos thought he might have learned from his three-year-old daughter. He tucked the small scrolls away in his sash and gathered up an armload of debris from the floor to dump it back in the open chest.

  “What? That’s what it was like when I came in.” He closed the chest, closed and latched the shutters, and gestured to Damiskos: let’s go.

  Finally they turned to their principal reason for entering the villa: the raising of the signal flag from the tower in the north-east corner. They made their way around the gallery, still moving stealthily although Damiskos at least was convinced that the second storey of the villa was more or less empty. Varazda, walking in front, indulged in a couple more elegant, improvised hand signals, and Damiskos nudged him playfully in the small of the back, making him look round with an innocent shrug.

  Damiskos had met men in the army who genuinely enjoyed danger, who were at their happiest when facing the enemy with the odds against them. He wasn’t really one of them himself, and he felt sure Varazda wasn’t at all. This heady mood of joking and teasing between them was something else, something specific that Damiskos couldn’t quite name. It might have threatened to be distracting, but instead he felt his instincts sharp and ready, his senses keen.

  They found the narrow door in the corner of the gallery that led up to the tower. Varazda indicated that he would go up, and Damiskos nodded. He positioned himself behind the half-open door, where he could command a view of the gallery in either direction, and see part of the atrium below, without being too obviously visible himself. Varazda padded off up the stairs.

  He hadn’t been gone more than a minute—not long enough to have found the signal flag and raised it—when he came flying back down the stairs and out the door. He beckoned Damiskos to follow him as he ran down the east side of the gallery, scanning the doors and picking one halfway along. He pushed at it, hard, but it was locked.

  Damiskos didn’t know what this was about, but he didn’t need to. He stepped past Varazda to put his shoulder to the door and shoved sharply. The lock gave with a splintering crack, and the door swung open.

  The room was lamplit, and Tyra was sitting on the bed with a comb in her hand, her hair loose over her shoulder. She froze, wild-eyed, and let out a startled scream.

  “Shit!” Varazda cried. “I’m so sorry! I got the wrong door.” He grabbed Damiskos’s arm. “It must be that one.” He pointed to their left along the gallery. “It’s Eurydemos—he’s hanging out the window. Can you—”

  “On it.” Damiskos made for the left-hand door while Varazda apologized again to Tyra.

  It took Damiskos two tries to break down Eurydemos’s door, which must have had a stronger lock than Tyra’s. Charging inside, he saw that the bed, a delicate piece of furniture, had been pulled diagonal under the window and lifted at one corner by a torn sheet tied around its leg and stretching taut over the windowsill. He squeezed past the bed to assess the situation outside the window.

  Eurydemos was dangling at the end of the hopelessly short length of sheet, holding on with one hand, legs thrashing feebly, tangled in his trailing mantle. He had evidently been trying to get to the top of a window below and to the right of his room, but he dangled several feet away from it, far enough above the rocky ground sloping away from the villa’s wall to be seriously hurt if he fell. The sheer, bone-headed idiocy of the man. Damiskos gritted his teeth.

  “What was that?” he heard the fishermen calling from below. “Somebody screamed.”

  Damiskos gave a tug on the sheet to get Eurydemos’s attention. “I’m going to pull you up,” he hissed. “Grab on with your other hand and turn toward the wall.”

  The philosopher stared up at him with a mulish expression, and for a moment Damiskos was afraid he was going to let go and drop rather than allow himself to be pulled back into captivity. He wouldn’t be killed by the fall; he’d just break a limb or two, and then they’d have to deal with that, and oh, immortal gods.

  “We’re going to get you out,” Damiskos said firmly, trying to sound reassuring rather than massively irritated.

  Eurydemos grasped the torn sheet with both hands and made a pathetic attempt to twist around to face the wall. Damiskos hauled him up gingerly, wary of overtaxing the already fraying sheet. Eurydemos bumped and scraped against the wall, unable to get his feet out of the coils of his mantle to help his ascent.

  What kind of imbecile climbed out a window wearing his mantle?

  “I heard a crash,” one of the fishermen was saying from the atrium.

  “Leave it—it’s not our business.”

  “What if it’s the prisoners getting out?”

  “They’re not our prisoners.”

  “Do you think they know that? What if they attack us?”

  Damiskos had just got Eurydemos over the windowsill and into the room when there was another crash, this one from the back of the house, in the portico or the garden, as if something large had fallen and shattered.

  “What was that?” Eurydemos yelped.

  “What was that?” the fishermen cried from below. “That was out back! Come on!”

  Footsteps slapped on the tiles in the atrium as the fishermen ran toward the garden. Damiskos seized Eurydemos’s arm and dragged him, clutching his mantle, out the door into the gallery. At the same time, Varazda emerged with Tyra from an open door at the back of the house, above the portico. Damiskos hurried toward him with Eurydemos in tow.

  “Dropped a big vase out the window,” Varazda reported breathlessly. “Diversion. You take these two downstairs and out. I’ll finish setting the signal and meet you in the kitchen garden.”

  “Understood.”

  Varazda took off for the tower stairs again while Damiskos herded his charges toward the stairs to the ground floor. Tyra was eager and quick enough to scurry ahead of him, but Eurydemos had got tangled up in his mantle again, and was staring confusedly after Varazda.

  “Move,” Damiskos ordered him. “Now.”

  Somehow he got the philosopher downstairs and out the door before the fishermen came back into the house. The three of them hurried across the dark yard to the kitchen building. They unlatched the back door and went out into the garden.

  “Poor Nione,” said Tyra. “What they’ve done to her house!”

  “At least she got out safely,” Damiskos said. “That’s thanks to you.”

  “I wish I had be
en able to do more,” Tyra said. “I thought I would stay and talk to Kleitos, and between us we would be able to persuade the students not to do anything foolish. They’re quite intelligent, really—I thought surely they would listen to reason. But when they found out that I’d warned Nione, they made Kleitos lock me in the bedroom. They said if he didn’t, they’d—they’d think of something worse to … ”

  “Brutes,” Damiskos growled, to keep her from trying to finish the sentence. “But no one did hurt you, did they? Aside from scaring you, I mean.”

  She shook her head. “I think Kleitos was as scared as I was—he’s a good man, really.”

  “They were planning to kill me,” Eurydemos announced, sounding a little bit like a small boy who felt he had been ignored by the grown-ups for too long. “They were waiting for the right moment, to make it appear that I killed myself. I heard them discussing it.”

  Damiskos spent a moment trying to dredge up some sympathy. “Must hurt,” he said finally. “Coming from your own students.”

  “Of course it hurts,” said Eurydemos condescendingly. “You can have no idea.”

  “No,” Damiskos agreed. “Never had any of my men mutiny on me.”

  They waited in the kitchen garden until Damiskos could no longer ignore his unease. Eurydemos fidgeted and kept trying to talk and needing to be shushed. There was no sign of Varazda.

  “I’m going back in to look for him,” Damiskos said abruptly, cutting short something Eurydemos was starting to say.

  “What? Look for who?”

  “Varazda.” Damiskos gave Eurydemos a sour look. Wasn’t the man supposed to be in love with Varazda, to the point of poetry?

  “And leave us here? Surely you don’t expect us to come with you?”

  “If you think it’s best,” said Tyra quickly, looking embarrassed for Eurydemos.

  “He’s been gone a long time. I don’t know what might be happening in there. But I don’t think you should stay here. I’ll show you the route down to the beach.”

  He took them to the bottom of the kitchen garden, explained how to get down through the vineyard to the path to the beach, and helped them over the wall. Tyra thanked him; Eurydemos gave him a baleful look as if Damiskos were abandoning a sacred trust. Damiskos walked briskly back up the garden.

  He slipped back in through the now-unlocked kitchen and out into the yard. The house looked dark and still, but he knew that meant nothing. He pushed the front door open cautiously.

  Loud, angry voices met his ear immediately.

  “Yes, of course!” That was Helenos’s voice. “What did you think we were going to do, mount an attack on the kingdom of Sasia ourselves? Of course we’re going to sell the documents.”

  “But if we do that, how are we any better than common thieves?” That was Phaia.

  “She’s right,” someone else cried. “I say, and have always said, that we must keep them for ourselves.”

  Clearly they had not yet discovered that the documents were gone.

  “—the fuck you’re doing, and anyway—”

  “Don’t you tell me I don’t fucking know what I’m doing, who was the one who had to haul your ass out of the Sasian embassy when you—”

  “Shut up, all of you! Shut up!” That was Phaia again, shouting furiously over the men, who ignored her and went on arguing.

  A high level of philosophical discourse there. Damiskos risked edging into the narrow opening of the door to look into the atrium. There was no one visible on the ground floor, and he thought all the voices that he had heard were coming from the gallery. That was why Varazda hadn’t come down, then; he was trapped, his route out of the house cut off by the students.

  “—got to do something about those goat-buggering fishermen anyway—”

  “Of course we are better than common thieves—0ur cause is just!”

  “Exactly! Our cause is just!” Gelon bawled. “Fuck the Ideal Republic!”

  “Shut up, you bleating moron!”

  “You leave him alone, Helenos. No one has done more for our cause than Gelon.”

  “I dispute that!”

  Helenos growled, “You two have caused me enough trouble already, killing that Boukossian imbecile when you did. You forced us to move much sooner than I meant to, and this mess is the result.”

  “The Boukossian spy had to die, Helenos. Sometimes I think you’re a coward at heart. You were squeamish about killing those Sasian dogs in Boukos, too.”

  “You whore! How dare you insult Helenos like that?”

  “How dare you call her a whore?”

  “You called me a thief!”

  “I will make you eat your words!”

  By this point all the hells had broken loose in the gallery, with Phaia shrieking and the men shouting. Someone—probably Gelon—evidently had a weapon, and others were trying to confiscate it. It struck Damiskos as a good moment to slip in through the half-open door. Pressing himself to the wall, he crept around the corner into the atrium, ducking back into the shadows on the far side from the action.

  No sooner had he done that then the fishermen came back into the house.

  “We’ve decided—” one of them began, then broke off as they looked up and saw the chaos on the gallery.

  Two of the male students had succeeded in subduing Phaia—to an extent, though she continued to scream—but Gelon was still at large, and several people, including Helenos, were bleeding. The fishermen started toward the base of the stairs, reconsidered, and stopped, looking at one another desperately.

  Something small flashed past Damiskos’s peripheral vision to drop to the floor a short distance in front of him. He looked down. A small gold earring winked up at him from the tiles.

  He stepped forward and looked up, and Varazda, crouched in the shadows of the gallery above him, gave a little wave. Damiskos couldn’t keep a stupid smile off his face. Entirely unprofessional. Of course one could be happy to see that a comrade had come through unharmed, but a curt nod of acknowledgement should be enough; you didn’t stand smiling fondly up at the fellow.

  Varazda pointed to himself and gestured up, over the balcony rail, then pointed at Damiskos and made a catching motion. Now Damiskos nodded, but it still couldn’t have been called curt. The idea of catching Varazda when he dropped from a railing suggested midnight assignations and romantic fiction more than escape from a reconnaissance mission gone wrong.

  Varazda swung himself lithely over the railing, glanced over his shoulder, and let go with a nicely-judged little jump so that he fell clear of the floor of the gallery. Damiskos caught him by the waist and set him lightly on his feet.

  Damiskos’s senses were full of Varazda for a moment: the scent of his perfume, the soft fabric of his clothes, the muscles of his little waist under Damiskos’s palms. The twin swords still tucked through his sash at his back, their bronze blades whispering over the fabric of Damiskos’s tunic.

  It took him a moment—much longer than it should have—to realize that Varazda had been spotted from the other side of the atrium when he jumped.

  “Get the Sasian! Block the door! Don’t let him out!” Helenos was leaning over the railing opposite, shouting wildly to the fishermen below.

  “To your room?” Varazda suggested, looking across the atrium.

  Damiskos nodded.

  The fishermen were moving reluctantly toward the entrance; Damiskos was confident he could have ploughed through them, but likely not without injuring or killing one of them.

  He strode out into the atrium, drawing his sword, keeping his eye on the fishermen. Behind him, Varazda darted across the room, leaping over the pool in the centre, and drew up short as something fell from the gallery and thudded on the tiles in front of him.

  Damiskos glanced over. It was Gelon. He lay stunned on the atrium floor, and Varazda stood frozen in front of him, looking like he’d come within a hairsbreadth of being hit.

  “Move!” Damiskos called. “Leave him!”

  Before Va
razda had a chance to comply, Gelon had recovered enough to roll over onto his side, clutching his arm and howling in pain. Damiskos whirled around at the sound of footsteps in heavy boots tramping in from the portico.

  It was the porter, Sesna, a bald, bronze-skinned man with ropy muscles in his arms, and his cronies, all built much the same way. They were all armed. The underlings had clubs in their belts, but Sesna had a blade, a broad, heavy cutlass of the type equally good for hacking through brush and felling your enemies.

  “The Sasian!” Helenos shouted again. “Get! Him! Now!”

  The porters wheeled toward Varazda. Damiskos changed course, caught his right foot on the lip of the pool, and stumbled. Varazda turned and drew his swords.

  Sesna swung at him, artlessly but forcefully, with the cutlass. Varazda parried beautifully with one blade, swung the other in the same direction, stepping to the side, and hit the porter hard across the ribs. It might have been a killing blow if the sword had been sharp.

  Damiskos plunged forward in time to catch the raised club of one of the flunkies against his own sword, throwing the man backward to trip over Gelon, still writhing and groaning on the floor.

  Sesna was still on his feet, Damiskos saw out of the corner of his eye. Varazda dodged another heavy slice from the cutlass, but missed when he swung at Sesna in his turn.

  One of the fishermen splashed up through the pool behind Varazda with a big rope-splicing spike in his fist. Damiskos swung away from the porters to lunge at the fisherman, catching him in the shoulder. He heard the spike clatter onto the tiles of the pool and the man howl in pain, but he had turned his attention back to the porters. One of them was swinging a club at Varazda from the far side. Damiskos shouted a warning, and Varazda dodged. His hair had come down, falling around his face.

  Damiskos stepped past him to slash at the wrist of the porter, making him drop his club. There was a crash and a ringing clang as Sesna knocked one of Varazda’s swords out of his hand, and it hit the floor.