Strong Wine

by A. J. Demas

  They had got some distance up the street, and she was beginning to gasp for breath, when he finally slackened his pace and let go of her arm. Feeling guilty, he stopped altogether.

  He was glad she was with him. Having someone more volatile than himself to control had helped him stay calm himself. He wondered how long he would be able to keep it up.

  “Helenos—that’s—” She paused to catch her breath. “That’s the goat-fucker from the summer, isn’t it? So he’s dead! I wish I’d had the chance to kill him myself. Do you think Damiskos did it?”

  Varazda shook his head. “No. Helenos isn’t—wasn’t—the fighting type, and Dami wouldn’t kill anyone unless it was a fair fight. Or an accident—but you don’t accidentally kill a shit like Helenos. What was he doing in Pheme?”

  “No idea. Orante’s tits, what if Phaia is here too?”

  “‘Don’t sheathe your sword too soon,’ is what they say where I’m from. But no, I don’t see Helenos springing her from Choros Rock and coming back to live in hiding in Pheme. They didn’t part very well.”

  “Pharastes, what are we going to do?”

  He grabbed both her hands. “Thank God—or Orante, or whoever—that it’s not worse. He’s not—” He almost choked on the word. “—dead, or sick, or even sentenced yet. We’ll figure this out.”

  She nodded resolutely. “You’re right. Wish we were a bit more discreetly dressed, the two of us.”

  “Mm. We might be able to use that to our advantage, actually.” He scanned the street and pointed to a shop opposite the Temnons’ building, selling cheap-looking lamps. “Are you dressed like a woman who might shop in a place like that, do you think?”

  She considered it. “Yeah. It looks like stuff for freed slaves with more money than taste. I could pass for that.” She flashed him a crooked grin.

  “Well,” he said sceptically, “if you’re sure. You go see if they know anything there. I’ll try to strike up a conversation with the assistant at the barbershop, the one who’s just emptied his dustpan in the street over there.”

  He watched her go into the shop, and reminded himself sternly that he had a mission now. It was no time to fall apart. No time to worry about what Damiskos was—what he had—

  He turned toward the barbershop. It always helped to have a mission.

  When he rejoined Aradne in the street a few minutes later, she had a tacky lamp to show for her errand and an incoherent story about how one of the young men across the street was a murderer, and maybe he was the one who had killed that fellow in Bridge Street last week, you know the one who’d had his throat slit, but which of the young men was it now anyway? Varazda had learned something more to the purpose.

  “Let’s walk,” he said, “before that fellow at the door notices we’re still here. Around the back of the building, if you don’t mind—I want to get a look at the walls. So the barber’s man was full of information—some of it irrelevant. For instance, the building’s owner is trying to sell, and it’s felt this scandal will drive down the price. Some of it was more to the point. It turns out Helenos is the son of a fairly powerful family, and the guards his people have set on the Temnons’ door are very chatty. One of them told the barber that Helenos was found dead in a seedy part of town, that he was poisoned—”

  “Poisoned!” Aradne repeated in disbelief.

  “Yes, and as far as Dami having killed him, ‘There are witnesses.’ Our man didn’t know quite what that meant.”

  “I’d say it meant they were seen drinking together, except—Damiskos, drinking with that goat-fucker?”

  “No,” Varazda agreed. He looked up at the windows of the second and third stories of the Temnons’ building. “They have good wide sills and quite solid-looking cornices. The trouble is, I don’t know which floor his family’s on.”

  Aradne looked at him sharply. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking. Are you?”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Probably.”

  “They’re at it again,” Philion Temnon announced. “Moving the statuary around. Look.” He stood in the open door of the balcony at the back of the apartment, beckoning to his wife.

  “Close the door, dear, you’re letting in a draught,” said Myrto, not looking up from the game of robbers she was losing to Korinna. “We’ll have the boys go down and put them back where they were later.”

  “I can’t leave the house, remember?” Damiskos called from the doorway of the kitchen, where he was picking over lentils while Gaia went to bring back water.

  “Surely you’re allowed out into the garden, though. It’s our garden.”

  “It’s a shame it’s such a small one,” said Korinna, taking another of Myrto’s tiles off the board.

  “Myrto,” said Timiskos wearily, from where he slouched on one of the couches, “it’s not your garden. That’s why your neighbours keep moving the statues—they’re not your statues.”

  “Ridiculous.” Philion was still standing in the open doorway watching the activity below. Dusk was falling outside, and the air coming through the door was bitterly cold. “That’s a ridiculous place to put that Soukos and the Dolphin.”

  “It’s a ridiculous statue,” Timiskos muttered.

  Korinna glanced up from her game and gave Damiskos a suspicious look through the kitchen door.

  “He spends a lot of time with your slave girl,” she remarked. “Do you think it’s quite tasteful, Philion? Oh, that’s not a legal move, my dear. I’m so sorry.”

  Philion laughed uncomfortably. “Oh, you know. Boys will be—I mean, haha, men, you know. Gaia’s a pretty girl. I can tell him to tone it down if you’d like.”

  “Slave bastards are expensive,” said Simonides out of nowhere. “Better to expose them.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Philion. “Absolutely.”

  “He’s sorting lentils,” Myrto remarked dryly. “Gaia is not even there.”

  Philion looked in through the kitchen door, frowning. “Couldn’t Ino be doing that?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure she could, but she’s out visiting a friend.”

  Korinna gave a loud sigh. “I tried to forbid her, but you know how she is. Everything has to be exactly the same, or … ” She waved a hand dismissively. “There we go, that’s the game. Poor Myrto! I expect you couldn’t concentrate for worrying about your poor son. But I know this will all be resolved soon. They’ll find him not guilty, and then we’ll sue them for slander. Won’t we, Philion? You come have a game with me now.”

  “Ah yes, good idea. Yes—it’s a disgrace, but it will be sorted out soon.” Philion had said this easily a dozen times in the last four days. “When my friend Olympios gets back from Anthousa, he’ll sort it all out. He’s a first-rate advocate, and we won’t have to pay him much, because he’s a friend.”

  “Oh, that must be a relief!”

  “Most advocates are crooks,” Simonides put in.

  Damiskos picked out the last bit of debris and swept the lentils off the counter into a bowl. In the last four days, he had moved from feeling desperation to being almost amused by the grotesqueness of his situation. He felt as if his heart had taken too much and simply gone numb. It was a bad state in which to be making tactical decisions; he remembered that from his army days.

  He’d expected Korinna and her family to melt away at the first sign of trouble, and perhaps if the trouble had not arrived so suddenly and spectacularly they would have. Instead they seemed to feel—Korinna, the decision-maker of the family, seemed to feel—that they were stuck here and that their best gambit was to “stand by” Damiskos for the duration of the trial and its aftermath. She wasn’t happy about it, and was doing her best to make the Temnons feel that she was doing them a favour, not to say martyring herself for their benefit. No doubt when it came to dividing up the profits from the Karganian fertilizer, this would be taken into account.

  The day after the guards from Helenos’s family had arrived to deliver the charge, Ino had knocked on the door of D
amiskos’s room and said, “If there is anything I can do to help, I hope you will tell me. I don’t believe you did it. You have always been a good friend to me.”

  He had wanted to give her a hug—in that comfortable way that everyone in Varazda’s family was always hugging each other—but he knew she didn’t really like that kind of thing, so he just nodded and said, very seriously, “Thank you.”

  Damiskos retired early and fell asleep while the rest of the household was still up, and he could hear their voices buzzing in the atrium. When he woke, it was full dark, and the house was still.

  He had a bedroom to himself, the one which was normally Timiskos’s. This was not by choice. The first night, he had set up a camp bed in a corner of Timiskos’s room, as the house was already overfull of guests, with Ino sleeping in Gaia’s room and Gaia evicted to the dining room. The second night, he had found the camp bed moved out to a storage closet, Timiskos ordered to sleep there, and Timiskos’s room freed for Damiskos’s sole use. He tried to protest but got so many significant looks that he stopped, afraid that Korinna was going to say, in front of Ino, how she expected her to make use of his newly private sleeping quarters.

  He’d been woken by a noise, a small, stealthy noise. He felt muzzy, and his mouth tasted sour. He pushed himself up on his elbows and tried to locate the source of the noise.

  There was a window near the foot of his bed—Timiskos’s bed—and as Damiskos looked at it, one shutter swung noiselessly inward, and a figure appeared poised on the sill, ready to spring down into the room. Even in the dark, it was a figure Damiskos would have known anywhere.

  Varazda hung there for a moment, half-in and half-out of the window, as if making sure Damiskos had seen him and that it was safe to come inside. He was dressed in black trousers and a plain black shirt, with his hair pulled back in a knot. Dressed, in fact, for breaking into second-storey windows.

  He made a little gesture, visible in the moonlight, drawing an arc with one finger, down into the room, and raising his eyebrows questioningly. In answer Damiskos just sat up and opened his arms. In a moment Varazda had dropped down onto the bed and scooted up into Damiskos’s lap, straddling his thighs and wrapping Damiskos in his arms. His hands were cold through the fabric of Damiskos’s pyjama shirt.

  “Are you all right?” Varazda whispered. “More or less?”

  “More or less. Much more for seeing you.”

  Varazda tightened his grip. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I, uh.” Damiskos loosened the embrace to lean back a little and look at Varazda. “How are you here?” he whispered. “What is this? Are you really here?”

  “Yes, I am, my darling. This is what I do.”

  “Rescue me?”

  Varazda shook with silent laughter. He was in Damiskos’s bed, in the middle of the night, when Damiskos had thought he was far away and maybe lost forever, and he was laughing.

  “Sneak about people’s houses without being caught,” he said. “Usually I don’t have to scale walls, but I’m pretty good at that, too.”

  “You are.” Damiskos remembered. “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I didn’t. I just found you. It was a lot of work.” He grinned.

  Damiskos drew Varazda’s face down and kissed him, harder than he intended. Varazda kissed back just as fiercely, but then he drew back and laid his fingertips on Damiskos’s lips.

  “Tell me what happened. I know Helenos died by poison, I know his father brought charges against you, and you’re confined to the house—I assume because you couldn’t raise money for a bond?”

  “Mm,” said Damiskos from beneath Varazda’s fingers. Varazda took them away. “They wanted 600 nummoi.”

  “That’s a lot. Why do they think they have witnesses?”

  “Well, they do. Not to me killing Helenos, because I didn’t—”

  “Obviously.”

  “—but I did meet him in the street the day he died. Shortly before he died, I guess. I was seen by several people, we had an altercation—”

  “As you would.”

  “—and he shouted out my name in the street. I knocked him down—”

  “Good.”

  “Well, not good, because he fell harder than I expected—he was at least half-drunk—and for some reason, which I’ve kicked myself for ever since, I felt the need to see him safely home. People in the building where he was staying saw us there, too.”

  “Hm. Awkward. And then he turned up dead.”

  “Apparently. Poisoned with something called thorn-flower. I was able to find that out by talking horses with one of the more friendly guards. But that’s about all I got. Most of the guards are not at all friendly.”

  “Thorn-flower,” said Varazda thoughtfully. “I believe that’s the same thing they call Nepharos’s Bell in Boukos. You know they use that for executions?”

  “Huh. I didn’t know that.” After a moment, he added, “In Pheme, er, people of my station are often exiled instead of … you know.”

  Varazda nodded, expressionless. He probably knew that didn’t apply in cases of deliberate murder—certainly not the murder of a fellow aristocrat by poison.

  “Well,” he said, “since you didn’t commit the crime, why don’t we focus on proving that, and it will be immaterial.”

  “I think the defense will hinge on my character, and how strange it would be for me to poison someone when I was carrying a sword at the time.”

  “What? No, the defense will hinge on finding out who really killed Helenos, and bringing them to justice.”

  Damiskos shook he head. “Darling, this isn’t Boukos. There’s no public watch here.”

  “I know that. I’m here.”

  He said it so simply, his bravado so matter-of-fact that it almost didn’t seem like boasting. Damiskos wanted to say, Don’t do this for me. I’m not worth it. But that wasn’t true; somehow, as wrong as it seemed, to Varazda he was worth it.

  “So,” said Varazda, “how long ago did this happen?”

  “Uh. It was last Xereus’s Day. So … a week? Six days.”

  Varazda nodded. “And you’ve been at your parents’ house since?”

  “Since Bread Day—the charge was laid that night.”

  “Is the trial scheduled?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Right. Well, let me know as soon as it is.”

  “How? I mean, how can I—you shouldn’t be—”

  Varazda put his fingers on Damiskos’s lips again. “I’m staying in Orchard Street, at Aradne’s house.”

  “You mean Nione’s house?”

  “No, I mean Aradne’s house—there’s a whole story there, and it’s a good one, but there’s no time. What else do I need to know? Where did you run into Helenos?”

  Damiskos told him, and answered several more questions about what had happened and who had been watching. Then Varazda withdrew a couple of tightly rolled scrolls from his sash and pressed them into Damiskos’s hand.

  “I wrote to you,” he said with a little smile, almost shy. “Your landlady kept them for you.”

  “I’m sorry—I couldn’t risk—even if I’d been able to get anyone to carry a letter—”

  “Shh. I know.”

  “But also,” Damiskos ploughed on, “I didn’t know what to say because there’s this whole other situation—”

  They heard a small sound from the atrium, a door opening and shutting quietly. Varazda made a face.

  “You’ll have to tell me about that later,” he breathed.

  He leaned in and kissed Damiskos one last time, lightly, then sprang back to the window. There was a soft tap at Damiskos’s door. When he looked back at the window, the shutter was swinging closed.

  He waited another moment, and tucked the two letters under his pillow, before he said sleepily, “Who is it?”

  The door opened. Ino stood on the threshold in her nightgown.

  Chapter 7

  Varazda couldn’t hear what the female voice said until
its owner had come inside the room and shut the door behind her. But he could tell she had come inside the room and shut the door behind her.

  Perhaps it was his mother.

  “What’s the matter?” Dami asked.

  “Mother was watching from the hall to make sure I came in. Sorry.” The woman’s voice was glum and affectless.

  Varazda clung tensely to the masonry outside Dami’s window, frozen lest he give himself away with the inevitable slight scuffling of descent.

  “Oh,” said Dami, obviously dismayed. “That’s—that’s all right. But, Terza’s head—watching from the hall, really?”

  There was someone passing in the alley below, pushing a wheelbarrow that rattled over the stones. It would have offered good cover for any noise Varazda might make, but the person might see him if he moved. He remained stuck where he was.

  “Mm-hm,” the woman was saying. “She found out about Kleisios. Photios’s son. I don’t know how. She doesn’t know about the smithy, yet—she thinks Kleisios and I are lovers. Lovers!” she repeated bitterly. “He’s my stepson.”

  “Shit. Sorry. I mean, I’m so sorry. Did she forbid you from visiting him, or … ”

  “Leaving the house. She’s forbidden my leaving the house. And made me come in here ‘to see if you wanted company.’ She said, ‘If you can’t win him back, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Don’t take no for an answer.’”

  The stupid wheelbarrow had got stuck in a crack in the pavement, and the person pushing it was kicking the wheel and swearing at it. The old-fashioned way? What was that? And win Dami back from what?

  Oh. Varazda felt a moment of unaccustomed vertigo. She meant win Dami back from him.

  On the other side of the window, Dami said, “Right, well—no is the answer, I’m afraid. I’m in love with someone else.”

  “Are you? Oh, that’s nice.” Varazda could hear the smile in her voice. “I was hoping maybe you were. And after all, if you do want to go into politics, you can marry this other person, can’t you?”

  The wheelbarrow unstuck itself and its owner trundled off down the alley.