by A. J. Demas
He remembered Varazda catching him the night before, bolstering his weak side as Damiskos bent over him on the bed. He remembered the sword fight earlier in the afternoon, the way Varazda had given ground only in slow steps, refusing to dart around and put Damiskos at a disadvantage. It hadn’t struck him before how much courage it must have taken to do that, to resist the urge to flee from a stronger, more experienced opponent.
Gods, what was he going to do when Varazda went back to Boukos? He would miss him like fury.
A shadow fell across the threshold of the beach hut, across Aristokles’s body on the floor. Damiskos looked up. Helenos was standing in the doorway.
He must have been down on the beach already when Damiskos was dragging the body. Perhaps he had followed Damiskos down.
“Damiskos from the Quartermaster’s Office,” he said, his voice as calm and uninflected as usual. “And … is it Aristokles? How awkward.”
Damiskos got to his feet, regretting that he had left his sword in his bedroom, and wishing once again that he’d asked Rhea for a walking stick. In a pinch, a good stick served as a pretty effective weapon.
Helenos came into the hut, stepping around Aristokles’s body, and Damiskos saw he was not alone; Gelon and Phaia stood on the threshold behind him.
“Ugh!” said Phaia, pointing in at the body. She turned to look at Gelon. “I thought you got rid of him.”
“You stupid cow,” Helenos barked, his tone suddenly so violent that Damiskos was genuinely shocked.
“What?” Phaia rounded on him, obviously not as surprised herself. She gestured at Damiskos. “He obviously knows everything.”
“Now he does,” said Helenos, looking at Damiskos, calm restored to his voice. “The question is, what is he going to do about it.”
“Not really your question to ask, is it?” said Damiskos. “I’ll do whatever I see fit. Of course if you want to tell me truthfully how this happened”—he pointed to Aristokles’s body—“it could influence my decision.”
Helenos gave him a pained look, like a reasonable man reluctantly tolerating someone else’s unreasonableness. “We know that your friend here was working for the Boukossian government,” he said. “He told Phaia so, in the course of bragging about his own importance. Apparently the Boukossians harbour unfounded suspicions about Master Eurydemos.”
“Rubbish,” said Damiskos. “They know that you and your cronies started a riot and killed men in Boukos.”
Helenos’s eyebrows rose. “Is that what he told you?” He poked Aristokles with his foot.
“He didn’t know which of you was the ringleader,” Damiskos embroidered. “I worked that part out for myself.”
“You didn’t, by any chance, hear it from Aristokles’s—pardon me—from your eunuch?”
“Him? I doubt he knows anything about it.”
Helenos frowned. “Giontes says last night when he went to the eunuch’s room, the Sasian chased him off with a sword.”
“Yeah? I’m surprised Giontes was willing to admit to that.”
“Where did the eunuch get the sword?”
“You saw him dance the other night. He’s got swords.”
“It was a Phemian sword.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you say? That was probably mine.”
“What was he doing with it?”
“Chasing Giontes, apparently.”
“Were you in the eunuch’s room?”
“Yes, of course. I thought we’d maybe have some privacy out there. I’m sleeping with him, remember?”
“But you’re not.”
Damiskos spread his hands hopelessly. “I don’t know what to tell you. That is what I was doing in his room last night. Look, you saw him kiss me on Xereus’s Day, you saw us making out in here on Hapikon night. Last night, we were in his bedroom making love. I don’t know what’s so hard to fathom about all that. Do you think that because I was a soldier, if I’m not fucking somebody up against a wall half an hour after meeting him, it means I’m not interested?”
Helenos was giving him the look of distaste that he had been hoping for. It was really very satisfying.
“I tell you who I feel sorry for,” Damiskos added, looking at Phaia, “is you. His idea of seduction seems pretty piss-poor.”
“That’s enough!” Helenos snarled. “You have no idea what I’ve done for her.”
“You mean trying to clean up her mess after she murdered Aristokles Phoskos?”
“You see,” said Phaia, “I told you he knew.”
“What?” said Gelon, sounding affronted. “You didn’t kill him—I did. All she did,” he added to Damiskos, “was lure him to the garden for me.”
Helenos pinched the bridge of his nose and made an exasperated noise.
“Oh,” said Phaia lazily. “Look.”
Damiskos turned to see the rest of the students standing in the open front of the beach hut.
He took a step back, but Aristokles’s body was behind him, and he couldn’t move any further without tripping over it. The students stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the wide entrance, their stance casual, their faces sneering. They were unarmed, but then so was Damiskos. They were tall, athletic young men, soft compared to Damiskos, but there were five of them, plus Gelon, Helenos, and Phaia behind him, and none of them were lame.
He opted to pretend he didn’t notice any attempted threat, and simply shouldered his way through the line of students. They were too surprised to stop him, and he knocked one of them down and was walking quickly away from the beach hut when he heard Helenos’s voice behind him: “Stop him, you clowns.”
Damiskos took that as permission to fight. He swung at the first student to catch up to him, hitting him in the stomach. The student staggered, but he was a big fellow and did not fall. Damiskos grabbed him by the hair and the front of his tunic, and pushed him backward into the man coming up behind him, and they both went over together.
The third student was the one with the broken nose. He didn’t give Damiskos time to get in a blow before he kicked him, with devastating accuracy, in the right knee.
His leg buckled under him in an explosion of pain, and he landed on his side in the sand. He managed to pull the broken-nosed student down to join him, and they grappled inelegantly. By that time the rest had arrived, and the two he had felled earlier were getting up, and at another irritable order from Helenos, they gave up all pretence of fighting fairly and simply piled onto him.
He was winded, kicked in the head, spots dancing before his eyes, his knee a red-hot agony. Four of the students hauled him up from the sand between them, grasping his wrists and ankles, and began carrying him across the beach.
They dumped him down on a warm wooden surface that he guessed from the smell was one of the docks outside the fish-sauce factory. Most of them sat on him again—the only effective way they had of containing him—while one of them went into the empty factory.
Why was the factory empty? It clearly was; he could tell from the stillness all around them. But shouldn’t the fishermen, the ones who weren’t celebrating Hapikon, still be there, receiving extra pay while the slaves were on holiday?
The student who had gone inside—the broken-nose fellow again—returned with a coil of rope. Damiskos felt his stomach clench with nausea.
They rolled him over, and he fought again, was kicked and sat on, had his shoulders nearly dislocated, and finally his hands were bound behind him. And he was back in Abadoka’s stronghold on the Deshan Coast, naked and shivering and bloody, with Abadoka’s torturer standing over him. It was the last time he’d had his hands tied behind his back.
“The fight’s gone out of him,” he heard a woman’s voice say, with a mocking laugh.
In Abadoka’s stronghold, the fight had never gone out of him. He had struggled against his bonds, attacked the jailers every chance he got, snarled obscenities at Abadoka and his men even when he was too far gone to be sure what language he was swearing in. But that was five years ago, and he’d been a di
fferent man. He lay slumped on the warm wood of the dock, trying to stop shaking.
He couldn’t go through it again. It couldn’t happen again. It couldn’t. It couldn’t. It couldn’t.
“Let’s drown him in a vat of fish sauce,” a voice suggested. Others laughed and murmured agreement.
“We don’t need any more corpses,” someone snapped coldly. “It’s bad enough that you had to kill all those people in Boukos.”
“They were Sasians—the world is better without them.”
There was some more discussion after that which Damiskos’s mind was racing too frantically to follow. In the end they dragged him inside the factory, pushed him head-first into an empty fermenting tank in the floor, and dragged a heavy stone slab over it.
He was left in thick darkness. The fall had stunned him, and a fiery pain in his right shoulder suggested it might really be dislocated now. He lay huddled, half upside-down in the tank, with no room to move in any direction. And the smell. The overwhelming, sickening stench of fish left to rot in the sun for weeks. The stone under his cheek was slimy with it; the walls pressing in around him had soaked it in for years.
He couldn’t breathe properly, couldn’t move, could barely think. He focussed all his remaining strength on not throwing up, because some shred of memory told him that if he did, he might choke on it.
Time passed. He knew where he was now, knew that this was going to be different. It was not happening again. But still memories of the Deshan Coast washed over him. He knelt in front of Abadoka, hands tied, two guards holding him down because that was the only way he would stay on his knees.
“They are going to think you are my man one way or another, Damiskos Son of Philion. Why not make it so in truth, and gain the benefits?”
He hadn’t known what that meant until later.
His shoulder hurt, but it was not dislocated. There was a faint line of grey around the rim of the tank where the stone slab did not fit tightly. He couldn’t move enough to put his good shoulder to it, but he could kick it with his sound leg.
It wasn’t enough to move the slab, and on the third try his shoulder slipped in the slime on the bottom of the tank, and he cracked his head against the side. He clenched his teeth and breathed shallowly until the pain faded.
He wasn’t going to get out that way. Better to conserve his energy until he heard the fishermen returning to the factory, when they would hear him and let him out.
If Helenos and his followers had chosen this place to leave him, they must have some reason to think the fishermen were not coming back.
Time passed. The arm he was lying on was becoming numb, which was an improvement over the throbbing of earlier. Every so often he would imagine he was getting used to the smell, and then he would take an incautious breath, and another wave of nausea would hit him. Tears ran out of the corners of his eyes.
At first he thought he was imagining the change in the air, the hint of a new smell. But it grew slowly stronger, and he knew it was real. It was smoke.
CHAPTER XIII
HE RESUMED STRUGGLING in earnest, bracing his numb shoulder against the edge of the tank and kicking at the lid as hard as he could. He managed to shift it a fraction, so he kept at it, pausing between kicks to gather his strength and make each one count. It didn’t do much good; his position in the tank was too awkward, his lame leg too weak. He coughed and whimpered with frustration.
He was not going to die upside down in a fish-sauce tank. Except it seemed like he probably was.
Then he heard a voice—a voice he would have known anywhere—still distant, but calling his name.
“Here!” he shouted. “In here!” He kicked the stone slab again, trying to make as much noise as possible. He had his boots on, so this worked fairly well.
“Damiskos?” Louder this time.
“In! Here!” He broke off to cough violently, choking on smoke and the miasma of fish-sauce.
“Holy God.”
There was an agonizing pause, and Damiskos wondered what kind of hell-scape of smoke and flame Varazda was having to traverse to get to him, pictured him collapsing on the factory floor, overcome, wanted to shout at him to save himself—and then there was the scrape of stone from above him.
He imagined Varazda’s beautiful hands and slender arms struggling with the heavy slab, and only realized how hard he was biting his lip when he tasted blood. But in fact it didn’t take Varazda long to move the stone, and there he was, leaning down over the hole where Damiskos was wedged, eyes wide above the wet cloth that he had tied over the lower half of his face. Smoke billowed behind him.
He lay on his stomach and reached down to grab Damiskos under the armpits, which he was only able to do by slithering half over the lip of the tank, until Damiskos was convinced he was going to fall in too. But he didn’t; somehow he managed to brace himself so that he could haul Damiskos up, and dragged and manoeuvred him out of the tank onto the floor of the factory.
Varazda produced another wet cloth, one of his ubiquitous handkerchiefs, and held it over Damiskos’s nose and mouth. Together they made their way, shuffling awkwardly on their knees, with Varazda half-pulling Damiskos most of the way, across the room to the door, under the worst of the smoke.
Wordlessly, Varazda tugged the rope off Damiskos’s wrists, and they both filled foul-smelling buckets from the pier with sea water and forged back inside.
The fire was not the inferno that Damiskos had imagined. It had produced enough smoke to fill the factory and billow impressively out the door, but the flames were confined to a pile of oily rags and crates under the window. They were easily doused. It looked as though someone had started the fire by throwing a lit lamp in the window.
Damiskos focussed numbly on these details, and Varazda had to take his arm and draw him coughing out of the smoky building once more.
Outside again, Varazda hauled Damiskos across the dock and down the steps onto the sand. He didn’t stop until they had walked right out into the shallow surf, where he let Damiskos sink down to sit in the water, and knelt with him, pulling the wet cloth—it was his sash, Damiskos noted irrelevantly—down from his face.
Then he leaned forward, taking Damiskos’s face between his hands, and kissed him once, hard.
Damiskos collapsed against him as if his bones had all suddenly dissolved. He realized distantly that he was crying—sobbing—in Varazda’s arms, and he couldn’t stop. The amazing thing was that Varazda didn’t seem embarrassed or even surprised.
“You’re all right,” he kept saying calmly. “You’re all right. This isn’t then. This is different. I’m here.”
Varazda somehow, miraculously, understood.
It was such a relief that Damiskos felt he might choke on his tears. He buried his face in his hands. Varazda scooped up water to wet Damiskos’s hair, gently scrubbing through it with his fingers. It felt so good.
“I’m here,” he repeated. “This is not then.”
“No,” Damiskos managed. “I know. Thank you.”
He wiped his eyes, splashed water on his face, wiped them again, and finally managed to sit up. “Thank—”
Varazda held up his hands. “Please. It’s what one does.”
“So is saying ‘Thank you,’” said Damiskos.
“Right. So … what happened?”
It took an effort to remember the starting-point of the story. “I found Aristokles’s body.”
Varazda nodded. “I saw him in one of the beach huts when I was looking for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.
“Gelon killed him—Phaia helped. From what I can make out, he told her he was an agent of the Boukossian government to try to impress her with his importance.”
Varazda groaned. “That’s the sort of thing he would have done.”
“So she and Gelon killed him, and the rest of the students have been trying to cover it up. What made you come looking for me?”
Varazda shrugged. “Someone sa
id you had come down to walk on the beach, but you’d been gone a long while, and I had seen the students go down and come back. I was worried. Shall we get out of the water, and you can tell me the rest?”
“Good. Yes. I will.”
“Er, you might care to take off your clothes first. You smell a little fishy.”
“Divine Terza, that’s an understatement.”
Varazda helped him undress, tossed his tunic and boots back up onto the shore for him, and helped him wade further into the water to rinse himself off. By this time Damiskos was beginning to feel more like himself. In fact, he was starting to feel more like himself than he had felt in a long time.
He got to his feet, streaming water, but for a moment Varazda did not. Damiskos looked down at him. He was kneeling in water up to his waist, still fully dressed, looking up at Damiskos, who was naked but for his wet loincloth. Just looking at him.
It wasn’t a lascivious look. It was appreciative, but it was a little detached, almost wistful. It didn’t seem like the kind of look you would normally give a man you had slept with the night before. Damiskos didn’t know what it meant.
He held out a hand to help Varazda up, and Varazda accepted it and rose gracefully. His sodden trousers clung to his legs as they splashed up onto the beach. He pulled off his shoes and tried to wring some of the water out of his clothes.
They walked up the beach, away from the smoky, fishy smell of the factory. Damiskos was limping so badly that he did not refuse when Varazda offered him a shoulder to lean on.
“Did they put you in there to kill you?” Varazda asked.