Sword Dance, Book 1

by A. J. Demas

  “That would be great,” said Damiskos. “We should—if we can—we should do that.”

  He knew he was going to think about that for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER XVI

  VARAZDA’S PLAN WAS to booby-trap the stairs from the villa with jars of fish sauce. By the time they had hauled a sufficient number of full jars halfway up the narrow stairs and piled them precariously on the steps, it had been long enough that Damiskos thought they could safely rejoin the women.

  Nione met them outside the fortifications. “I want to have a funeral for Aristokles,” she said without preamble.

  “Yes, of course,” said Damiskos. “Wait. You mean right now?”

  She nodded. “You said yourself it was important to keep up morale.”

  “You want to have a funeral to keep up morale.”

  “Yes, I realize it sounds absurd,” said Nione patiently. “But it isn’t good for morale to have him lying in the beach hut uncremated. And it is impious.”

  That was undeniably true. And Damiskos had gone out of his way to try to convince Nione that she was the ranking officer.

  He nodded curtly. “We will make it work.”

  The women of Nione’s household knew exactly what to do, and were amazingly calm about doing it. Nione had clearly been right to think that preparing for the funeral of a man none of them had liked much would take their minds off their situation. They had already seen to the washing and laying out of Aristokles’s body, and gave Damiskos quizzical looks when he was surprised to learn this. Now a small party set off to walk to Laokia to ask for the local pyre-maker. The village would be deserted, as most of its residents had gone to the Tentines for Hapikon, but the pyre-maker was not an Oposite and so should still be there.

  The rest of the party, while not on sentry duty, began gathering firewood. Nione went into the empty beach hut to say some preliminary prayers. Once her mistress was gone, Aradne said that she knew how to build a pyre and that they needn’t wait for the pyre-maker from the village. She directed the others to pile the wood and deflected questions about where she had learned how to do this.

  They waited for the pyre-maker anyway, because she would bring with her the necessary spices for the fire. Aristokles’s body was brought out, wrapped in a couple of the household women’s mantles that had been sacrificed to make a shroud. Nione emerged and did not ask how Aradne came to know how to build a pyre.

  The women who had gone to the village returned in a cart, with the pyre-maker and her tools, along with some supplies: bread, cheese, fruit, and blankets. The pyre-maker looked at Aradne’s amateur effort and seemed impressed.

  Nione, as a former Maiden of the Sacred Loom and priest of Anaxe, led the funeral. The women joined in the choruses of lamentation around the pyre, singing as strongly and respectfully as if Aristokles had been a member of their household or a departed friend. Varazda joined in. He took the torch from the pyre-maker and lit the kindling to start the fire. He said something in Zashian after the pyre was lit that sounded like a short prayer; Damiskos was not close enough to hear.

  No doubt there were people in Boukos who would have given Aristokles a more impressive funeral, where there would have been more weeping—genuine and feigned—and fewer of the guests would have been wearing grubby, soot-stained clothing. But Damiskos did not think that anyone could have asked for a more respectful ceremony than the one they performed on the beach that afternoon.

  There was no sign of the students. Varazda went back to the stairs to check on their booby-trap and reported that several of the jars had been knocked over and broken, but the others were still in place. It suggested that someone had come down, tripped over them, and given up rather than attempting to clear the rest away. That fit with Damiskos’s theory that the students would send another emissary before returning in force.

  While Aristokles’s pyre burned brightly in the late afternoon sun, the women prepared a funeral meal with olives and wine from the villa’s warehouse, bread and cheese and apples from the village, and fresh fish from the bay.

  “It’s too bad you don’t have your lute here, Midina,” Nione said to the Gylphian musician from her household.

  “I am worrying about it,” Midina admitted. “They will break it, you think, the crazy men?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nione with a sigh. “Can anyone remember whether music was supposed to be good or bad in the Ideal Republic?”

  No one could.

  “I would like to hear you play again, sir, the Zashian music,” Midina said to Damiskos.

  “Yes,” said Nione. “He’s very good, isn’t he, Pharastes?”

  “He is,” said Varazda.

  “I remember when you were a boy you used to sing, too,” said Nione. “Do you still?”

  “Well, I—I can, yes.”

  “Oh, sing for us!” exclaimed Rhea.

  “Sing us something in Sasian,” Nione suggested.

  “I—I—My pronunciation will offend Varazda’s ears, but … ”

  “He can cope,” said one of the other women. “He’ll laugh at you. But he does it with love—don’t you, Phari?”

  Varazda flashed her a grin. This was a level of awkwardness that Damiskos felt quite unequal to dealing with. The household women—who apparently had taken to calling Varazda by a jaunty nickname—still thought that the two of them were a couple, while Aradne knew that they were not but that Damiskos wished they were. The gods only knew what Nione thought was going on at this point.

  “This is a song from Rataxa,” Damiskos found himself saying. “It’s a very famous one. The words are by Zash’s most esteemed poet.”

  He sang. In spite of his modesty, he knew he was a good singer. Playing and singing came easily to him, and he could lose himself blissfully in the music. He didn’t lose himself now. He heard the words as he sang them, as if he was hearing them for the first time. He would have kicked himself for choosing this song, except that it seemed somehow inevitable.

  It was a song of unrequited love, of yearning for a beloved who was distant and yet nearby, who gave joy and sorrow in equal measure. Damiskos had learned to sing it in Rataxa, with the style and accent of the region, courtly and elegant—but he was neither of those things, and he sang it with an inflection of his own, transposing it into something different. For him it had always been about his love for Zash, complexly tinted as it was by a centuries-old enmity and the fragile peace of the colonies on the Deshan Coast. It was still about that, partly.

  He finished singing and risked a look at Varazda, who was watching him with uncomplicated pleasure. Plainly he did not think Damiskos had been singing about him.

  Everyone complimented Damiskos, and then someone said, “You sing one for us, Phari!”

  “Absolutely not! I’m a dancer. I don’t sing. Definitely not like that.”

  They pestered him until Aradne spoke over everyone to say, “Leave him alone. I’ll sing.”

  There was cheering at that. By coincidence, Aradne sang a Phemian song with a similar theme to Damiskos’s. She too gave it a unique inflection, making the words of longing sound almost belligerent, like a challenge: why don’t you love me? haven’t you got the guts?

  After that, other members of the party were persuaded to sing. The little boy, Chari, was a talented singer, with a clear, piping voice. They sang all together, popular songs that everyone knew, clapping in time. One of Varazda’s friends convinced him to sing a duet with her, and everyone berated him afterward for saying he couldn’t sing, and told him his voice was lovely. It was, Damiskos thought: light and precise and obviously trained. But his singing lacked the passion of his dancing. It was a little remote, almost cold. Damiskos would bet it was something he had learned to do in the king’s household at Gudul.

  When the sun had gone down completely and the women and children were all settling down inside the barricaded beach houses, Damiskos and Varazda slipped out the gate. Aradne set in place the barbed hurdle that blocked it after the
m and nodded a soldierly farewell.

  They walked up the beach toward a path cut through the brush halfway around the sheltered cove. It led up through the terraced vineyard to the front of the house, bypassing the cliff stairs at the back of the garden. The path was not very well maintained, and it was slow going pushing through the shrubs and plants that crowded its edges. They walked single-file with Varazda in front.

  He looked back at Damiskos as they reached the gate in the stone wall bordering the lowest terrace of the vineyard.

  “I wish we were sneaking away for something more enjoyable than breaking into Nione’s house,” Varazda whispered.

  Damiskos gave him an exaggerated frown which he hoped would be readable in the moonlight. “I don’t know what you mean. We have a duty to do.”

  “I, uh … ” He looked momentarily stricken. Then he melted into laughter. “Bastard,” he hissed.

  The gate was stuck, the latch pinned in place with tendrils of vine. Varazda grasped the top rung of the gate, drew his legs up, and was over in one neat motion. He turned and was probably about to reach out to help Damiskos, but vaulting a gate was something Damiskos could still do. He braced one hand on the top rung and swung himself easily over, landing on his good leg.

  “I’ve practiced that,” he admitted.

  Then he found himself backed against the gate, Varazda’s slim arms trapping him on either side, Varazda’s dark eyes soft in the moonlight. Varazda paused.

  “May I?”

  “Please.”

  Varazda leaned in and kissed him, very gently, his body swaying forward against Damiskos in a seductive motion that was just the way he always moved. Damiskos leaned back against the gate, boneless and melting, catching Varazda’s upper arms as Varazda’s hands came up to cradle his face, and Varazda’s tongue stroked over his. As gentle as the kiss was, it was also full of command. Damiskos surrendered to it wholeheartedly, resisting the urge to take control, relishing the fact that Varazda wanted this enough to venture to take it. When Varazda stepped back, Damiskos let him go—regretfully but without fuss.

  “The situation seemed to call for that,” said Varazda lightly. He shrugged, touching the back of his fingers to his lips. “A moonlit vineyard, and you so … so you. Besides, I have been wanting to do that all day.”

  Damiskos drew in a deep breath and let it out. “You could go on doing it all night, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “If we did not have a mission in hand. Come. I’ve distracted you—distracted myself. I should know better.”

  He held out a hand, and after a moment’s stunned hesitation, Damiskos took it, and they walked along the corridor of grapevines together, hand in hand, as if it were a normal thing.

  Damiskos wished he could achieve the same kind of coolness about all this that Varazda evidently had. Just enjoy the time they had together rather than yearning preemptively for more before they had even parted. He resolved to try harder.

  They traversed the length of the first terrace and reached the stairs in the stone retaining wall leading up to the second level. The flights of stairs after that were all slightly offset, zigzagging up the hillside. They were short flights with shallow stone steps, easy enough for Damiskos to climb, especially since Varazda casually gestured for him to go first so that he could set the pace.

  Divine Terza. Had he ever, in the last five years, met anyone so effortlessly considerate? Or was it just that he appreciated Varazda’s consideration more because it came in such a beautiful package?

  No, he reminded himself sternly. That was exactly the sort of thought he had to expel from his mind. Varazda was a very decent fellow, certainly. No need to make too much of it.

  As they climbed to the topmost terrace, they went over the details of their plan. The general idea was that they would get into the house and raise the signal for the postal ship from Boukos, due tomorrow, so that it would stop at Laothalia on its way down the coast. The signal was a nondescript flag flown from a pole on the villa’s squat tower; it was unlikely the students would notice that it had been raised.

  That much was straightforward; Nione had described the location of the flag, and Aradne had even drawn them a map of the house. After that, they would have to improvise a little. They would take up the search for the stolen documents where Varazda had left off, but they wouldn’t know until they got into the house how they might best go about that. It all depended on where the students were when they went in.

  There had been some negotiation about who should go back into the house. Varazda had been very prepared to do it by himself, but both Damiskos and Aradne had been adamant that he should take one of them along. Damiskos had been on the point of suggesting they draw straws, because he could see that in some ways Aradne, who knew the house and the servants, might be more useful than he, when she had folded her arms across her chest and said, “You’d better go, Damiskos. Neither of us can move fast, but you know how to use a sword—that might come in handy. I’ll stay here and guard the camp.” So it was decided.

  “So,” said Varazda as they climbed one of the flights of stairs in the moonlit vineyard. “Plan of attack. I say we go in over the kitchen garden wall—it’s low and out of the way. We can check the kitchen for any knives the students may have overlooked. Then across the yard to my room, in case my swords are still there.”

  Which they might well be, if the students, like Damiskos, assumed that the weapons were purely decorative.

  “Take the picture of your daughter, too,” Damiskos suggested. “You don’t want to leave that behind if you have to sail for Boukos in a hurry.”

  Varazda smiled. “No, I won’t forget that.”

  They had not spoken about what would happen once Varazda had finished his business at the villa, successfully or not. But obviously it would involve him returning to Boukos, perhaps on the very postal ship they were now going to signal. There was really nothing to talk about.

  “Then we’ll go to my room,” Damiskos went on, “get my sword and my bow. Maybe a clean tunic, too, while we’re there.”

  “I wouldn’t discourage that.”

  “Then upstairs to the tower to set the signal. You can go up while I stand guard. Then on to the students’ rooms, same procedure. If it turns out they’re not drinking or arguing about virtue in the garden, contrary to expectations, we’ll play it by ear.”

  They had reached the topmost terrace. Damiskos stopped here, and Varazda looked at him questioningly.

  “I was just thinking. We should probably have gone over this earlier, but there are a few hand signals we might want to have sorted out before we go in. So we can communicate if we can’t risk speaking aloud. Here, I’ll show you the ones I think we’re most likely to need. This is for ‘stop,’ obviously.” He held up a hand, palm-out. “And for ‘come.’” He beckoned with his whole hand. “This is for ‘message received.’” He held up his hand with fingers and thumb pinched together. Varazda imitated, beautiful hennaed fingertips held together.

  “Uh. If you’re ahead of me and you see someone coming and want to alert me, you do this.” Damiskos made a rolling motion with his hand. Varazda copied it elegantly. “Then hold out the appropriate number of fingers to tell me how many enemies—well, how many philosophy students or fishermen or whatever—there are.” He demonstrated. “You’d probably be doing this while facing away from me, so you’d just hold your hand out to the side.”

  “Had we better have signals to distinguish philosophy students from fishermen, or indeed from household slaves?”

  “Yes, good thought. The one I showed you normally means ‘enemy combatant.’ We’ll say for our purposes that’s just the students.” He made a different gesture, twirling one finger instead of his whole hand. “That’s for ‘civilians.’ Should we consider the fishermen civilians? We don’t really know where they stand.”

  “How about this for them?” Varazda made a delicately undulating, fishy motion with his fingers. He grinned.

  Damisk
os snorted. “I’m not sure I can make my hand do that, but sure.”

  He demonstrated a few more—danger, listen, switch places, look—and then he began to get the impression that Varazda was humouring him, and said, “We'll, that’s probably enough for our purposes.”

  “Probably,” said Varazda with a smile. “It was well thought of. Where did you use these, in the army?”

  “Reconnaissance work. Scouting near enemy lines and that sort of thing. Sometimes silence is crucial.”

  “Indeed it is. Listen, First Spear, I wanted to say something. I wouldn’t have asked you to come with me, but I’m very glad to have you along. I wouldn’t want you to think otherwise. I have done roughly this sort of thing before—sneaking about someone else’s house looking for something—but the stakes have never been quite so high for me. I’ve never been in a situation where if I were caught—and I hasten to add I never have been caught—but if I had been, I could always have passed off what I was doing as being lost, looking for the privy, admiring the view from the upstairs bedroom, or what have you. That’s very much not the case here. I’d be much more nervous about this if you weren’t coming with me.”

  “You’ve no need to be nervous. You will do fine. I’ve seen clearly that you can defend yourself.”

  It was the sort of thing he would have said to a new recruit on the eve of battle, and it came out of his mouth, in exactly the tone he would have used then, before he stopped to think whether it was appropriate now.

  Varazda smiled with a little shrug, the most unsoldierly thing imaginable. “Nevertheless.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE WALL OF the kitchen garden was higher than the vineyard gate, but Damiskos was still able to boost himself up and vault over without too much difficulty. Varazda, of course, went over with a sinuous slither as if he vaulted higher walls every day.

  The garden was deserted, the barred windows of the kitchen dark. They picked their way down between rows of onions and rosemary bushes to the back door of the kitchen. It was latched from the inside, as they had rather expected. They went around the building to the side, ducking behind another, lower wall that fronted the garden. On the other side Damiskos could see the roof of the well in the yard. He heard nothing, and it was dark.