Sword Dance, Book 1

by A. J. Demas

  “It must have been difficult for you,” Helenos said, “serving in Sasia, the land of our ancient enemies, and having nothing more to do than to keep the peace between warlords.”

  “It was rather like bailing out a leaky boat without plugging the holes, sometimes.”

  Helenos laughed. “I saw you looking at the eunuch last night.”

  “Looking at him?” Damiskos repeated, unsure where this was going. He remembered Gelon railing against unmanly love the night before, and didn’t want to get into any of that. “I—I noticed him, I suppose. It’s hard not to.”

  Helenos nodded. “Disgusting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes! That’s just what I was thinking.”

  He was relieved to find someone agreed with him about the poor fellow’s situation. He had been under the impression that none of the other guests cared.

  “Mm,” said Helenos. “I guessed that.”

  “I hope it wasn’t obvious.”

  “No—but I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you. The creature might as well know what we think of him, might he not? In my view, he epitomizes the evils of his race.” Helenos’s tone had not changed at all; he spoke amiably, as though proposing something obvious that Damiskos would be sure to agree with.

  Damiskos realized that it sounded as if he already had agreed with it.

  “That’s—not what I meant by disgusting,” he said stiffly.

  “Oh?”

  “I find the practice of making eunuchs repellant, and I cannot approve of a Pseuchaian owning one, but … ”

  But what? A moment ago he had felt sure Helenos meant something specific by “epitomizes the evils of his race,” something that Damiskos didn’t agree with at all, but now he wasn’t so sure. It would be rude to jump to conclusions.

  “Well, it’s not his fault,” he finished lamely. “The slave’s, I mean.”

  Helenos smiled. “The sentiment does you credit, First Spear.”

  “I don’t hold that rank any more,” said Damiskos. “You should not call me that.”

  “Ah. No such thing as a First Spear in the Quartermaster’s Office, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Our hostess said you were here on business. Is that true?”

  “She owns a factory that makes fish sauce. I’ve come to see whether she may be able to supply the legions.”

  “You’re joking,” said Gelon from above them.

  “Not at all. The legions go through a great deal of fish sauce, and our current suppliers are not adequate to our needs.”

  “You must admit it is a little bizarre,” said Helenos equably.

  “I suppose so,” said Damiskos, though he didn’t see it.

  “A little bizarre?” Gelon protested. “A retired Maiden of the Loom runs a fish-sauce factory, and a retired First Spear of the Second Koryphos is her customer! It’s like something out of one of those modern novels that everyone wants to ban for corrupting the youth.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Damiskos stiffly.

  Helenos laughed warmly. “Indeed not. Shame on you, Gelon.”

  “What? You know what I’m talking about. Petris Akrotis and that. There was one where the hero’s patron had made his fortune buying houses that were on fire, or about to catch fire, or something. Absurd.”

  Damiskos gave him an unfriendly look, and Helenos said, “Just leave it, Gelon,” as the younger man opened his mouth again.

  In the afternoon, most of the male guests trooped down to the fishing pier with rods and nets. Damiskos excused himself, pleading sleepiness. The truth was that he didn’t fancy the walk. The fishing pier sounded as if it was a good distance away, and in some fit of vanity he hadn’t brought his cane.

  He had seen the villa’s library: an airy and well-lit room on the ground floor near his bedroom. He was looking forward to it as a place of solitude as much as anything. He returned to the house and found of course that the library wasn’t empty.

  “I don’t know how you could ask it, after the way I suffered on the voyage over,” Aristokles was saying when Damiskos entered the anteroom.

  When he stepped through the inner door, he saw that the other person in the room was Aristokles’s eunuch. He looked as though he had been about to say something before he saw Damiskos, and he dropped his gaze instantly to the floor. The snatch of conversation which Damiskos had overheard struck him as odd for a master talking to his slave.

  Aristokles made a huffing noise. “I am going to take a nap,” he announced, and brushed past Damiskos on his way to the door.

  Damiskos looked at the eunuch, surprised that he wasn’t following his master. It was the first time Damiskos had looked closely at him in daylight.

  He was very striking, something between pretty and handsome, the intermediateness of it entrancing as a complex melody. He had very white skin and very dark eyes above high, sculpted cheekbones and delicately shaped lips, and—well, he was attractive, in a way that Damiskos found rather interesting, that was all.

  He was looking at Damiskos now with a flicker of curiosity, and Damiskos realized to his embarrassment that he must have been obviously staring.

  “I—er—I hear that you dance,” he said. At least that was what he hoped he said; on some impulse of the moment he tried saying it in Zashian, which he had barely spoken in years. “What kind of dance … uh … do you do?”

  The eunuch’s eyebrows went up, but the rest of his face remained neutral, and Damiskos thought at first he was just surprised to hear a Phemian speaking his language. But the pause before he replied was long enough to suggest that actually he was trying to decipher what Damiskos had said. Or at least that he wanted Damiskos to think that he was.

  “Vishmi kokoro,” he said finally, a dialect term which was unintelligible to Damiskos. He had a cultured, courtier’s accent, and his voice had a timbre that Damiskos associated with sophisticated older women. He reverted to Pseuchaian: “Sword dance. You know it?”

  “Ah,” said Damiskos. “No.”

  “Well,” he said after a moment, his expression still neutral, “it’s a dance with swords.”

  His Zashian accent was strong, but he seemed to have a surprisingly good grasp of idiomatic Pseuchaian.

  “Hm,” said Damiskos.

  There was a moment’s awkward pause. Damiskos couldn’t think of anything polite to say about dancing with swords. That was not what swords were for.

  The eunuch tucked a strand of hair behind his ear with a hennaed fingertip and gave a little nod before turning to depart the same way as his master. Left alone in the library at last, Damiskos wandered to one of the book-cupboards and stood staring aimlessly at the scrolls for a minute before he could collect himself enough to pick one.

  He had looked on the Zashian strictly as an object of pity before, but now he felt the stirring of a personal dislike. He’d been trying to be friendly, and the eunuch had just been very demurely rude to him. Which was fine. You could pity a fellow perfectly adequately without liking him.

  CHAPTER III

  CONVERSATION AT DINNER that night was much the same as the night before. Gelon ranted about effeminates destroying the republic, and Aristokles and Kleitos spouted their different flavours of ignorant nonsense about Zash.

  Eurydemos read aloud a poem of his own composition about a man in love with a beautiful tree without fruit. That struck Damiskos as an obvious non-starter. Nione might not have children, but it was because she had spent most of her life serving in the Maidens’ House, and anyway she was only in her thirties; if she had wanted children, the option was surely still open to her.

  After that, the philosopher and his students became very animated on the subject of something they called “Phemian purity.” Damiskos honestly could not work out what it was supposed to mean. Pheme was a huge, cosmopolitan city, the biggest in the world. It was the centre of a web of conquest and influence and trade that had long ago filled its streets with almost every race and languag
e and religion. All of that wasn’t some kind of accretion; it was Pheme. What did “purity” have to do with any of that?

  He didn’t speak up; he knew better than to get involved in a conversation where they were quoting philosophers he had never heard of and talking about the Ideal Republic as if they had spent their summers there growing up.

  He left them still debating and went in to bed early, fidgeted about for a while, rearranging his portable shrine and oiling his sword belt, then lay staring at the moonlit ceiling and listening to the subdued night sounds of the villa around him.

  He heard voices in the atrium outside his room, a man’s and a woman’s.

  “It’s a disgrace, isn’t it?” said the woman’s voice. “The way the master drools over him.”

  “It’s a disgrace, and it’s a godsdamned fucking nuisance,” the man replied angrily. “Where did this fucking Sasian-lover come from, anyway, and why have we got to contend with him now of all times?”

  Damiskos fell asleep eventually, though he didn’t feel as if he’d been asleep long when something woke him. The house was very quiet now, but there must have been some noise. He heard it again: low voices from the atrium, these too quiet for him to make out the words, and then the slight creak and thump of a heavy door opening and shutting.

  Probably Nione’s household slaves, working late and headed back to their quarters. Damiskos turned over in bed and tried to go back to sleep.

  Once more, he couldn’t settle. Very soon he found himself sitting up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, and searching in the shadows for his sandals. He would get up and take a walk, and hopefully that would help him fall back to sleep. He left his room, crossed the moonlit atrium, and went down the short passage toward the garden.

  From the colonnade, he saw that there was someone already there, sitting by the fountain. The moon was almost full, and he could identify Eurydemos by his mane of grey hair. Damiskos had no desire to be drawn into a philosophical discussion or listen to soggy poetry in the middle of the night. He headed back through the house toward the front door.

  The yard in front of the house was a wide, gravelled space, with the slave’s quarters along one side, the kitchens and other domestic workshops along the other. Between the kitchen range and the paved path leading to the gate stood a well with a waist-high stone coping and a pulley. As soon as Damiskos stepped through the front door, he saw the two figures on the other side of the well.

  He saw the glint of moonlight on a knife-blade, and he was running—or doing the closest thing he could to running these days, ungainly and not very fast—across the gravel and around the well. He collided with the Zashian eunuch, pinioned his arms from behind, and caught hold of his right wrist. The knife dropped to the gravel. Gelon, backed up against the coping of the well, gave a startled grunt.

  Sword-dancing probably demanded some strength as well as grace. The body Damiskos had hold of was more wiry than he had expected, and twisted in a very determined effort to escape. This took up enough of Damiskos’s attention that he almost didn’t notice Gelon stepping forward and snatching up the fallen knife until it was too late, and the young man was lunging forward with it.

  Damiskos swung his captive out of the path of the knife and felt the blade catch in the sleeve of his own tunic and graze his upper arm. He let go of the Zashian to push Gelon back, catching him across the throat with his forearm and slamming him into the coping, unbalancing him enough to threaten him with a fall into the well. He wrenched the knife out of Gelon’s hand and stepped back defensively.

  “What’s going on?” Damiskos demanded, glancing between the two of them. The eunuch was leaning with his hands on his knees, catching his breath.

  Gelon coughed and pushed himself off the well.

  “He knows what he was trying to do with his unnatural Sasian ways!” the student rasped. “I wasn’t going to kill him—I was only going to frighten him, the chicken-hearted dog that he is.”

  Having delivered this speech, Gelon fled, thudding away over the gravel toward the house. Damiskos let him go, mostly because he couldn’t have hoped to catch up to him.

  He flipped the knife around, point down, and looked back at the eunuch. His eyes looked black in his bone-white face, and the hand that he lifted to push back his hair was shaking badly. His hair was loose, dark strands sticking to his face and throat, the eye-makeup washed off for the night, his only remaining ornament the little flower-shaped stud in his nose.

  “I take it this knife was his?” said Damiskos.

  The Zashian nodded.

  “Are you all right? He didn’t hurt you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m extremely sorry. If I hadn’t interfered … You had the situation under control.”

  He gave a shaky laugh. “I’m not sure that I did.” He fumbled in the folds of his broad sash. “You’re bleeding,” he said, holding out a patterned handkerchief.

  “Oh.” Damiskos took it and hitched up the sleeve of his tunic to press it to the shallow cut which was dripping blood down his arm. “Thank you.”

  Damiskos looked him over assessingly. The elaborate Zashian clothes were disordered but not actually torn or pulled off, which could mean that Gelon hadn’t attacked with rape in mind, or only that he hadn’t got very far with his attempt.

  In the pale moonlight, with his hair down and his face unpainted, Aristokles’s slave was lovely in a way that seemed somehow basic and elemental, as if he were a being of his own unique nature, with a beauty that had no relation to anything male or female.

  Which was of course nonsense. He was a young man who had been deliberately mutilated as a child, who had survived, and was obviously tougher than he looked.

  “Pharastes?” said a querulous voice from behind Damiskos. “What’s going on?”

  Damiskos turned to see Aristokles standing in the kitchen doorway, absurdly frozen with a raisin cake in each hand, one with a bite taken out of it.

  “It was one of the students,” the eunuch said quickly. He pushed both slender hands into his hair, in what Damiskos suspected was an attempt to stop them shaking. It didn’t quite work. “He had a knife, which First Spear Damiskos took away from him. He has gone back into the house.”

  Damiskos opened his mouth to say something, but realized he didn’t know what. He wanted to protest that he had not been nearly as helpful as this explanation made it sound, but that seemed slightly churlish when the slave had gone out of his way to present him to his master in the role of a saviour.

  “He attacked you?” said Aristokles stupidly. “With a knife?”

  “He was not able to do any serious damage,” said Damiskos, feeling he ought to say something. “Fortunately.”

  Though who was he to say, really? There were ways to damage a man that didn’t involve blood or bruises.

  Aristokles ignored him and did not wait for his slave to reply. “Are they going to come after me next?” he quavered, looking around him.

  “I shouldn’t think so, sir,” said the eunuch. Damiskos had to give him credit for not laughing. He himself barely managed to avoid it.

  “I don’t know,” his master muttered fretfully. “I don’t know. Are we really safe here? Milos didn’t tell me that—”

  “Sir,” his servant cut him off with a surprising briskness. “We should return inside. And we should let First Spear Damiskos return to his bed also.”

  “Oh,” said Aristokles. “Yes.” He shook himself slightly, and only then seemed to remember the raisin cakes he was holding. He took another large bite out of the one in his right hand, and advanced out of the doorway, holding out the other. “I got you one, too. They’re very good.”

  “I’m not hungry,” the eunuch muttered, but he took the offered cake.

  Aristokles looked at Damiskos and gave a little gasp. “You were injured in the affray!” He pointed to the handkerchief which Damiskos was still holding to his arm, not so much because he was still bleeding as because he had
been rooted to the spot with puzzlement at the strange scene playing out between master and slave.

  “Oh. Not really. Slightly grazed.” He unclamped the handkerchief and then didn’t know what to do with it. He realized he was also still holding Gelon’s knife.

  Aristokles shuddered. “Ghastly business. I tell you, Pharastes, if I’d had any idea … ”

  “Yes, sir.” The Zashian put a hand on his master’s elbow and steered him toward the house door. Aristokles took another bite of his raisin cake and moved as directed.

  Damiskos followed them at a polite distance. That their relationship was something more than master and slave was obvious, but it only partly explained the strangeness of what Damiskos had just witnessed. Why had Aristokles not asked what made Gelon attack the eunuch? If he had made the obvious inference—that it was a rape attempt—why leap immediately to the conclusion that he might be in danger himself? And what had any of them been doing in the yard in the first place?

  Ahead of him, Aristokles was talking earnestly and not very quietly. “It’s shocking, Pharastes, absolutely shocking. If you really were my slave—”

  The eunuch drew in a sharp breath, but Aristokles had already stopped, seeing Damiskos behind him. Damiskos stopped too, looking at Aristokles with raised eyebrows.

  “I … that is … ” Aristokles floundered.

  “You will be surprised, First Spear,” his servant said smoothly, turning back to Damiskos. “On account of your familiarity with Zashian customs. In Zash, of course, a eunuch cannot be freed. But in Boukos it is not so. I was once Aristokles’s slave, but I am so no longer.”

  “Ah,” said Damiskos. “I see. My congratulations.”

  Aristokles gave an awkward laugh. “Yes, yes. You see, people often don’t understand, which is why we, er … ”

  The eunuch laid his hand on Aristokles’s arm again, a gently shushing gesture.

  Damiskos said no more, but he wasn’t at all convinced he had heard the whole story. Their explanation wasn’t unbelievable, but it was a little thin, and it didn’t account for how alarmed Aristokles had looked when he realized he’d let this bit of information slip.