by A. J. Demas
Varazda’s shoulder tensed, then relaxed minutely as he looked down at Damiskos’s fingers. He lifted his own hand to Damiskos’s, interlacing their fingers, turning the gesture into something else, something intimate and emotion-laden. It told a completely different story than the proprietary brush of the hand that Damiskos had contemplated and baulked at. It suggested Varazda might be glad to have been bought by Damiskos. Maybe they had talked about it beforehand; maybe Damiskos had promised to treat Varazda better than Aristokles Phoskos. It was perfectly judged.
Varazda looked up at Damiskos through his lashes, and Damiskos thought he was awfully good at this. Much better than Aristokles had been.
“You’re the Boukossian agent,” Damiskos said, as it flashed into his mind. “Not Aristokles.”
Varazda looked shyly down at the ground. “Mm. Perhaps we could talk about that later.”
Damiskos looked up and realized they were the centre of attention. Most of the students were looking disgusted. Helenos was frowning deeply. Eurydemos looked ready to compose another poem.
Nione was the only one who was smiling, but she also looked ready to burst into tears.
Looking flustered and embarrassed was probably the best thing Damiskos could have done, and if so, he played his part admirably.
Nione stood up abruptly. “Damiskos! I meant to ask you if your—if Pharastes—could dance for us tonight? We’re having a bonfire on the beach. The men who run my factory follow Opos, and it’s Hapikon Eve tonight. I like to hold some celebration for them. You are all welcome to join us.”
Damiskos looked down at Varazda for guidance. He was smiling and looking shy again, so Damiskos said, “It is up to him. I’ve no objection.”
Varazda gave Nione his gracious agreement, and she beamed at him and Damiskos. After a strained silence, it was Kleitos who spoke.
“Why did you ask his permission? I thought the Sasian belonged to Aristokles?”
“Well, they, they came to an agreement.” Nione had sat back down again, but fidgeted as though she wanted to get up and leave.
“I bought him,” said Damiskos bluntly. He wanted to get this over with. “Yesterday afternoon.”
“Really?” Kleitos looked surprised. “Yesterday afternoon? Huh.” He glanced around at Helenos, who showed no reaction.
“What for?” one of the new students asked, with a rather unpleasant, half-lidded smile.
Damiskos raised his eyebrows. “I need workers for my olive farm.”
CHAPTER VII
IT WAS LATE afternoon by the time Damiskos was able to get down to the shore again. The students had quickly recovered from their shock at learning that he had bought Varazda. Gelon and Phaia still looked slightly disgusted, and Helenos was inscrutable, but the others seemed to have decided that if Damiskos, who was obviously very manly, had done this, then it must in some way be a very manly thing. They had discussed the question at length.
By this time, Damiskos was reasonably sure that Gelon had already been down to the shore—he had lost track of him at some point in the afternoon, to his annoyance—and whatever had been hidden in the undergrowth would be gone. But he had told Varazda, when they had managed to snatch a moment alone together, that he would go down and look, so he did. Varazda had gone back to the slave quarters, ostensibly to practice for that night’s performance.
Damiskos made his way back down to the beach and began methodically searching the bushes where Gelon had been hiding earlier.
At first he thought he wouldn’t find anything. He made it all the way down the stretch of brush where he remembered seeing Gelon—he was reasonably certain of the general area—and there was nothing hidden in among the bushes.
Then he retraced his steps, looking for something that wasn’t there, and he found it: an area of broken branches and disturbed leaves, and a sharp-cornered depression in the sand where something heavy had rested. Something square or rectangular, a couple of feet in length. About the size of a sea chest.
He could see a faint trail of disturbed undergrowth leading away from the spot, showing where Gelon had crawled down with the object, and when Damiskos had struggled to follow it for a few paces, he was rewarded with a glint of metal in the sand. He bent and dug out a leather belt with a round gold buckle, chased in a typical Zashian style.
He wrapped the belt around the buckle and hid it in the fold of his tunic for safekeeping, then he made his way back to the beach and up the stairs to the villa. He seemed to spend all his time here trudging up and down these gods-cursed stairs.
He made a token search around the house for Varazda, without result. He didn’t like to go to the slave quarters, as that didn’t seem like something Varazda’s master would do, or to send for him, as that very much did. What an absolutely ridiculous situation this was.
Like many Phemians, Damiskos had never personally owned a slave. There had been slaves in his parents’ house when he was a boy, so he had grown up taking the concept for granted, and there had been slaves attached to the Second Koryphos to whom he had given orders, but he had never owned another person, certainly never purchased one. The pretence made him surprisingly uncomfortable.
By this time, his knee was throbbing fiercely, and when he sank onto a bench in the garden, he could not move from it for some time.
As the sun was setting, the guests trooped down together to the beach, where the factory workers and many of Nione’s slaves were already assembled and preparing the bonfire. They were on the sheltered stretch of beach that Nione had shown Damiskos and Phaia the day before, happily out of range of the smell of the factory. Some of Nione’s women were putting down blankets and cushions, and the guests settled themselves comfortably.
Cups were passed around and filled, though most the students had been drinking steadily all afternoon. Only Helenos seemed quite sober.
Nione sat with Tyra and got up frequently to play host to the larger gathering. All the women and the few men from Nione’s household were there, along with the factory slaves and people from the nearby villages.
Varazda appeared from somewhere, wearing a long, thickly embroidered black coat over his green silk from the morning. He served Damiskos his wine and then went to talk to the musicians.
Since they were there to witness a ritual in honour of Opos, the students took up the subject of foreign cults in Pheme. Of course they were opposed to them. They wouldn’t go so far as to criticize their host, whom they held in the same sort of overdone reverence as Damiskos because she was a retired Maiden. But they clearly thought she shouldn’t be encouraging her slaves in their worship.
Damiskos, himself a follower of the “foreign cult” of Terza, like most cavalry men, kept quiet. He watched Varazda standing on the other side of the unlit fire, taking down his hair while he chatted easily with the musicians, smiling and laughing. How did he do it? He wasn’t unconcerned or careless of the danger of his position at the villa; when he’d spoken to Damiskos in the garden, it had been clear that he took the situation very seriously. Damiskos had even thought he sounded a little afraid. But he was able to carry on playing his role as naturally as if he weren’t in a house full of fanatics who had murdered his countrymen and in all probability his … whatever Aristokles had been. His colleague?
The conversation had moved on from foreigners to women. One of the students, Phaidon, began to expound an unpopular opinion. The others shouted him down with appeals to reason and virtue.
“No, no, no!” Gelon cried. “In the Ideal Republic, since all cosmetics would be forbidden, women would lose their power to deceive men, and so what you say is absurd! Don’t you agree, Phaia?”
“What? Oh, yes, quite absurd. In the Ideal Republic.”
“Fuck the Ideal Republic,” Eurydemos growled, flinging himself to his feet. He strode off into the crowd of revellers.
There was a shocked hush among the students, as if someone had just cursed a departed kinsman.
“What did he mean by that?” one of the
newcomers asked finally.
“Perhaps, in a sense, our master is still wise,” said Helenos. He had everyone’s attention. “The Ideal Republic is a fairytale for children. This is the real world, and in the real world Pheme is beset on all sides by barbarians, degenerates, half-men—there is too much at stake for us to indulge in idle talk. We must become men of action and do things we have never thought possible. ‘Fuck the Ideal Republic’ indeed. It will become our new watchword.”
This was met with the kind of approving laughter that acknowledges that what was said was only partly a joke. Helenos looked directly at Damiskos for a moment and raised his eyebrows slightly. Damiskos looked stonily back at him.
The bonfire was lit as the light died from the sky. Grilled fish and fruit and spicy-sweet Hapikon cakes were passed around, along with more excellent wine. There was music: several musicians, some from Nione’s household and some hired from the villages, alternated reels and popular songs for the crowd to join in with accomplished solos and ensemble pieces. Nione’s steward sang, in a big, rich voice of amazing range and sensitivity, a song from a popular new tragedy. It should all have been quite enjoyable; in other company, it would have been.
Some of the students were mixing with the villagers now, and one had brought back some of the free fishermen to join their party. The fishermen did not themselves worship Opos, and were complaining that they were expected to take on extra work for the next week while the Oposite slaves and their foreman went to a shrine in the Tentines. The students sympathized as heartily as if any of them had ever done a day’s labour. Surely, Damiskos thought, these men couldn’t be dangerous. They were too ridiculous.
Since people seemed to be moving about now, Damiskos got up and left the blankets where the villa’s guests were reclining to go sit closer to the fire and watch the entertainment. That was just before Varazda got up to dance.
It was fully dark by this time, but the beach was warmly lit by the bonfire. A space had been cleared in the sand for dancing, and the amateurs retired from it to sit around the edges in expectation. Damiskos had a good view.
There were no Zashian musicians, but there was a Gylphian drummer with a big, hide-covered drum, and she now took up a slow, familiar beat. The sound seemed to catch and twist at something in Damiskos’s gut. He had never seen Varazda’s style of dancing in Zash, but he knew its rhythm well.
Varazda stepped out of his shoes at the edge of the cleared area and walked out barefoot into the centre of it, his long coat swinging around his ankles. He had unpinned his hair and wore it loose as he had that morning.
He laid one sword down in the sand and began dancing slowly, almost lazily with the other, spinning it lightly as if exploring its properties, like a graceful visitor from another world who had encountered a sword for the first time. Then the drummer sped up, varying the rhythm in a way that stabbed Damiskos through again with familiarity, and the dance quickened, Varazda’s bare feet flying over the sand as he twirled and swung the sword.
He was a constellation of beautiful details in the firelight: bronze and henna and embroidery and long hair flying. He slowed his steps just a fraction, swooped down with his free hand, and added the second sword to the dance. His audience erupted in an awed cheer.
He ended with the showpiece that Damiskos had seen in the yard, spinning the two swords as one, then dropping to his knees, his coat fanned out like a peacock’s tail, while the onlookers shouted and clapped.
“That was marvellous, Pharastes!” Nione cried, emerging from the fire-lit circle of watchers with hands clasped raptly. “Oh, will you dance another for us?”
Varazda had stripped off his coat already and twisted his hair around his hand. The night air was cool on the beach, but dancing in the bonfire’s warmth in all those clothes must have been sweaty work.
He bowed assent. Nione looked delighted, and there were murmurs of approval from the audience. Whatever the philosopher’s students thought of it, the workers and the slaves were enjoying it.
“What a shame we don't have more music for you,” Nione said. She appealed to the crowd of factory-workers. “I don't suppose anyone knows any Sasian dance tunes?”
Damiskos cleared his throat. “I do.”
Heads turned in his direction as he got awkwardly to his feet in the sand. He had noticed that the Gylphian musician had a stringed instrument that was more or less the same as the Zashian long-necked lute; he didn’t remember what they called it in Gylphos. He approached and asked the musician’s permission, and the woman handed her instrument over.
“Do you mind if I retune it to the Zashian mode?”
“Please.”
It was a light, well-made instrument, more like the one Shahaz had played than those that the men had brought out around the watch-fires on campaign. It was easily retuned to the scale of the Zashian lute. Finding a comfortable position in which to sit to play took longer. Sitting cross-legged in the approved style was no longer feasible, so at home when he played he generally sat on a stool. He arranged himself as best he could in the sand, with the instrument cradled in his lap.
Now that he had committed himself to this, he had a moment’s panic when he couldn’t think what to play. He strummed a few experimental chords and then began the first thing that came to mind, hardly even knowing what it was. He looked at the drummer, who nodded and picked up the beat readily. The tune was a lively, cheerful one, one of Damiskos’s favourites, and now he remembered what it was and wished he had picked something else.
He looked up at Varazda, half-expecting to see him glaring. The tune was a wedding-dance from the Zashian coast, danced at the marriage banquet by the young women of the village.
Varazda was giving him a quizzical look, but it was not exactly a glare. He had already laid aside the swords and the embroidered coat. After a moment he raised his hands above his head, palms out, long fingers poised, the gesture flawlessly feminine. He swayed his hips, and someone in the crowd whistled.
It wasn’t the way the village girls danced; it was more like the dance of a Suna courtesan, although by Pseuchaian standards it was very demure. It would have been a fine show even if he had actually been a woman, but in the sword dance he had moved like a man, and now it was hard to believe that the delicate hand gestures and swaying hips belonged to the same person. The audience ate it up, and Damiskos could have sworn that Varazda was enjoying himself. What a mass of contradictions the fellow was. Who would have imagined he would voluntarily dance like this in front of an audience of labourers? He could have done a different dance; no one but Damiskos would have noticed.
Damiskos wrapped up the wedding dance and segued into another tune with a slower, more delicate rhythm, to let Varazda wind down his performance, which he did amid wild applause. Nione got up to entreat Damiskos to play some more for them while Varazda retreated from the fire-lit stage. He obliged her with a couple of tunes he had learned in Suna. They were well received, though nothing like so popular as Varazda’s dancing.
He considered singing, but didn’t quite feel up to it. Besides, Varazda had disappeared into the shadows, and Damiskos was anxious to keep him in sight.
Fortunately, by this point it was nearly midnight and time for some ritual related to Hapikon, from which Damiskos excused himself. Many of the other non-worshipers did the same, drawing back from the fire a little while the followers of Opos joined in a hymn and threw incense-laden logs onto the flames to produce clouds of fragrant smoke that billowed up into the dark sky.
Damiskos looked around for Varazda, whom he would have expected to join him by this time, and spotted his shoes and swords and folded coat abandoned on the edge of the firelight. He gathered them up and went looking for their owner.
He found Varazda, at length, at the back of the crowd, looking like he was trying to think of a polite excuse to get away from Eurydemos, who was just taking a seat beside him in the sand.
Varazda had taken off his shirt and sat with it bunched up in his
lap, his hair pulled forward over one shoulder. As Damiskos approached, the philosopher offered Varazda his wine cup. Varazda waved it away delicately. He looked up and saw Damiskos as Eurydemos leaned in close to say something to him, and, for reasons which escaped Damiskos, he glared.
It was a pointed glare, as if he was trying to tell Damiskos something. Damiskos stopped, looked round, and saw the students approaching.
Whether their intention was to mock their master or to rescue him from the clutches of his new favourite, Damiskos didn’t care to find out. They looked drunk enough—still with the sinister exception of Helenos—that it would probably amount to much the same thing either way. They came up behind Damiskos and circled the pair on the ground, looming over them, threateningly close. Eurydemos looked up, frowning, and Damiskos thought he could see the question forming behind his eyes: was he still in control of these young people at all? Damiskos felt sorry for him, but didn’t feel that the philosopher’s problems were his responsibility.
“Do you usually fetch and carry for your slaves?” said someone at Damiskos’s shoulder.
He looked down at the bundle of Varazda’s belongings he was holding. Of course. That was what Varazda had been glaring about. Damiskos managed a laugh.
“No, but I never owned a slave before.”
“Really?” said Helenos. “And yet you could afford to purchase such an exotic specimen.”
“Perhaps he saved up,” Phaia suggested with a snicker.
“I beg your pardon,” said Eurydemos belatedly to Damiskos.
The philosopher hauled himself to his feet, spilling wine from his cup onto the sand. He offered a hand to Varazda, who accepted it lightly and uncoiled himself from his seat in the sand. Eurydemos presented him with the air of a father handing over his youngest daughter to her groom on their wedding day. Damiskos tried not to grimace too obviously.