by A. J. Demas
A rather sad smile flickered over Varazda’s lips. “You’ll get promoted after all.”
“No. I think I’ll retire. Draw my pension, such as it is, and look for some other kind of work.” He hadn’t realized until he said it that this was true, but it was. “I’ll make enemies if I take this thing on—I couldn’t have much of a career in the army after that. Anyway, I think it’s about time I moved on.”
“Ah,” said Varazda. He looked at Damiskos for a moment with an expression that Damiskos didn’t understand. A kind of uncertainty. “Dami … if you’re going to quit your job, can you afford to take a proper vacation before looking for a new one?”
“Yes, barely—but yes. You’re thinking that I should take some time off to recover from all this.”
“No. I was thinking that you could come to Boukos and stay with me.”
“Oh.” That was all he could manage. He seemed to have lost his power of speech.
“I’d very much like it if you would.”
“Yes. I’d like that too.”
The world seemed to have gone quiet around them.
“I have room in my life for you, Dami. Of course I do. You’d be a part of my life I never expected to have—I wasn’t sitting around waiting for you—but there’s room. Honestly, I’d—I’d promise you more right now, but I do have a family, and you’ll have to meet them and they you before I can say, ‘Come live with me.’ But I’ve wanted to take you home with me since … I suppose the first time I thought about it was that night you fell asleep in my bed. Last night when you said you didn’t know what you’d do without me, I—I panicked, I didn’t know what to say. But I wasn’t trying to say I could never love you.”
“You mean you think you could?”
“That’s just what I mean.”
Varazda smiled and opened his arms, and Damiskos scooted the short distance across the floor to fold him in a tight embrace. He had to fight to allow himself to feel Varazda’s lithe body in his arms, Varazda’s hands pressed against his back, without a pang of anticipatory regret. Could this really be only a temporary parting? He couldn’t quite believe it yet.
He said into Varazda’s hair, “And you don’t … don’t think that I’m just infatuated with you because of some, some idea of how you’re like a thing?”
As an explanation, that was quite incoherent, but Varazda seemed to understand.
“Oh, please. Believe me, I know that when I see it. The way you make love to me—you don’t think of me as a thing.”
Damiskos laughed. “No, I suppose not. Come to think of it.”
“You’ve been ‘more than decent’ to me too, Dami.”
“Someone should have been years ago,” said Damiskos with sudden heat. “That is—I’m sure people have been good to you before—”
“But not in quite the way you have.”
Damiskos drew back just enough to kiss Varazda, but a slight sound carried across the water made him stop before their lips met. He pushed himself up onto his good knee, letting go of Varazda reluctantly, to look out the window.
“They’ve dropped anchor.”
The ship stood broadside to the shore, some distance out in the bay. They had begun to lower a boat.
“What? Oh. May their mothers all get the mange,” Varazda said, in his best court Zashian, so Damiskos could understand it.
Damiskos laughed and laughed, far more than the quaintly coarse insult deserved. Everything he felt for Varazda and had tried to suppress seemed to bubble out of him in laughter. He slid down the wall to sit next to Varazda again.
“I know, I’d forgotten all about them too,” Damiskos said when he got himself under control. He wiped his eyes. “But after all, they are only philosophers. It’s not as if we’re going to be dealing with armed men.”
Varazda’s eyes widened. “I’m not sure of that.”
“Why? Did you see weapons?”
“No, but it’s a military ship. Isn’t it? I’d have thought that was your area of expertise.”
“What? Is it not the postal ship from Boukos?”
Damiskos hauled himself up to look out the window again. It was a smallish, thirty-oar vessel, not a warship, with a red sail and a distinctive prow, a goat’s head, the emblem of Boukos.
“Only military ships carry a red sail,” Varazda explained.
“I see. It’s not a warship. If that’s what you were thinking.”
“Ah. Well, it has got a red sail.”
“It looks more like a large yacht. If it is meant to be a warship, the Boukossian navy is in worse shape than I realized.”
“Shut up.”
“I expect it’s an attaché or a commander’s personal vessel or something. I do see men in breastplates on board, actually, now that I look. But they’re not the ones disembarking. It’s a bunch of young men in mantles—I count ten, not including the sailors. Why do these philosophers always insist on keeping their mantles wrapped around themselves all the time? Eurydemos couldn’t even take his off to jump out of a window.”
“The general Pseuchaian affinity for mantles has always puzzled me. If you cut all that cloth up and sew sleeves in it, it’s so much more convenient.”
“You don’t have to convince me.” He let himself down to the floor again.
“All right,” said Varazda, “so it’s not the postal ship, but it does seem to be disgorging a lot of philosophical types. Enough to make a material difference to our plans?”
Damiskos frowned. “Maybe not. But if we let them get up to the house, the others will know this wasn’t the postal ship, and we won’t be able to pretend that it brought our crack Zashian troops to surround the villa.”
“Right. So what should we do?”
“I’ll go out and stall them. I’ll pretend to be one of them—they’ve no reason to think I’m not—and tell them they can’t go up to the villa yet because … ”
“The slaves have retaken it. You got out before it happened, and you don’t know what the situation is now, but you think they’d better let you go back in and scout things out before they come up to the villa.”
“Right.”
“I’ll watch your back.” He patted the hunting bow. “Kiss for luck?”
“Divine Terza. Of course.” Damiskos leaned in and gave Varazda a soldierly kiss, brisk but passionate, then pushed up to his feet and strode toward the door, leaving Varazda wide-eyed and rather pink-cheeked in his wake.
As Damiskos swung around the corner of the factory, the boat with the new contingent of philosophers had reached the jetty, and the sailors who had rowed it were making it fast to a mooring ring. The young men in mantles began climbing out. Damiskos stood by the factory wall, watching while they still had not noticed him.
He saw swords and knives clumsily concealed under mantles. This group had come prepared for violence.
Damiskos had opened his mouth to hail them when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked. Eurydemos was running down the beach from the direction of the hidden cove, his own mantle flopping and flapping around him, heading for the jetty and the boatload of students.
What in Terza’s name was he playing at? Damiskos was too far away to intercept him before he reached the jetty.
“Halt!” Damiskos bellowed at a parade-ground volume. “Halt there!”
Eurydemos glanced around wildly and then stumbled on. Damiskos ran to cut across his path, but it was hopeless.
“The gods be thanked!” the philosopher called to the students. “You’ve come to rescue me!”
For a moment Damiskos faltered. Was it possible Eurydemos was right? Had they come to rescue him?
No. They hadn’t. They were fumbling their weapons out from under their mantles and coming down the jetty toward Eurydemos.
“Master,” one in the lead called out, “the time has come for you to step aside. The old order must give way! Pheme must be restored to greatness, that Boukos may follow in her footsteps.”
Eurydemos was o
n the jetty now, the students halfway down. They had stopped, standing across the width of the jetty, swords and knives out, in stances ranging from “would pass muster in the Sixth Koryphos” to “knows which end of the knife to hold.” Eurydemos slowed but continued to walk toward them.
“Boys, what are you saying?” he called.
The students replied with something about purity and barbarians. Damiskos reached the end of the jetty himself and started down it. Eurydemos had stopped finally, within striking distance of the students, but the students had not struck. They were waiting, Damiskos realized, for him to come up behind Eurydemos and take him unawares. They had heard Damiskos shout at Eurydemos and thought he was one of them.
If he could just keep Eurydemos from flinging himself on his students’ swords, this might all work in Damiskos’s favour.
He came up behind Eurydemos, who was in full flight with some nonsense about virtue, and caught him around the throat with his right arm, drawing his sword left-handed at the same time and flipping it around to grip it loosely. Eurydemos made a startled noise and then turned a baleful glare on Damiskos.
“What are you doing now?” he demanded, his tone more irritated than alarmed.
“Good work,” said the leader of the students, who was the one who wouldn’t have disgraced the Sixth Koryphos. “You must understand, Master. On the battlefield of the intellect, as you yourself have said—”
“No, no, no!” Eurydemos interrupted impatiently. “He’s not on your side.” He twisted around in Damiskos’s hold, which was not very secure only because Damiskos hadn’t thought it needed to be. “You’re not on their side. I cannot allow this subterfuge.”
“I see why you think he needs to be replaced,” said Damiskos to the students, getting his hand over Eurydemos’s mouth, which he should have done sooner.
He didn’t know how much of this exchange would be audible in the factory, and he could only pray that Varazda wouldn’t show himself. No one could be confused about whose side he was on.
“Who are you, anyway?” one of the students asked with a doubtful frown. “Are you from the Marble Porches? Whose student?”
“I was at the Marble Porches,” another one spoke up. “I’ve never seen him.”
“I’m not a student,” Damiskos answered while Eurydemos struggled uselessly in his grip, making affronted noises. “I’m a soldier. I’m here to talk to Helenos about the documents he stole from the Sasian embassy.”
He felt rather clever as he was saying this, but when the words were met by stunned silence, he realized he’d made a tactical error. They hadn’t known about the theft.
“Are you calling Helenos Kontiades a thief?” a voice in the back demanded.
“Whose side are you on?”
“Your side, of course.” Damiskos tried to brazen it out.
“Let him go,” said the lead student, gesturing with his sword at Eurydemos. “If you are not trying to protect him from the consequences of his folly and intellectual corruption, let him go.”
Ah, what the hell. When you put it like that.
Damiskos let Eurydemos go, and the lead student swung immediately on Damiskos, a powerful, hacking blow. Damiskos parried left-handed, soundly turning the blade aside, and felt the surprise in his opponent’s reaction. Here, Damiskos judged, was someone who could really fight, but was accustomed to thinking that his enemy couldn’t.
Eurydemos had broken away from the other students, who had made a grab for him, and at last had the sense to turn and pelt back down the jetty. Three students set off after him.
There was a scream and the thud of a falling body. Damiskos risked a glance down the jetty. One of the pursuing students had fallen, and Damiskos caught of a glimpse of Varazda, framed in the factory door, bow in hand, like a warrior in a Zashian epic.
Damiskos and his opponent traded a series of quick blows. The student was about Damiskos’s size, a little heavier, slower with his arm but of course nimbler on his feet. Military trained. It would have been a satisfying bout if Damiskos hadn’t had to worry about what was happening behind him.
He heard another shout from down the jetty, and managed to manoeuvre his opponent around so that he could look. Varazda had come between the remaining students and Eurydemos, who stood watching, stunned, as his delicate work of art lacking the whatever-it-was of a man knocked the knife out of one attacker’s hand and broke the nose of the other with a blow from his blunt-edged sword.
It was at this point that one of the sword-wielding students decided their leader needed some assistance and stepped forward to stab at Damiskos’s open left side. Damiskos dodged. The lead student howled something about honour and fairness but didn’t stop attacking Damiskos, and neither did the fellow who was trying to help, who bawled back something about ends justifying means.
The fight became chaotic, a series of fragmentary impressions like lightning flashes. Blood spraying from a slashed wrist, Damiskos’s sword punching through a flapping fold of someone’s mantle. The students shouting back and forth. There was no space to think about whether to kill or wound or spare lives; they were fighting him in earnest, in blood-drunk elation, eager to kill for their cause, whatever it was. He grabbed viciously at a mantle, bringing its wearer heavily to the ground. He parried and dodged the blows that might have struck home, tried to ignore the ones that wouldn’t.
Varazda came running down the jetty, swords in his hands, to join Damiskos. A couple of the students who hadn’t been able to get within striking distance of Damiskos peeled off to meet the barbarian. Their weapons rang against his, and someone—not Varazda—yelped. The sailors had cast off and were rowing hard back toward their ship, and Damiskos could hear the soldiers on board shouting to them, though not what they were saying.
He felled the lead student finally with a low cut across the thigh. The man went down with a howl, and his sword skittered across the stones. Another student lunged after it, grabbed it, and tripped one of his fellows in the process.
Varazda was bleeding. He had taken a cut to his upper right arm; Damiskos had missed the moment when it happened. Locking swords with his new opponent, Damiskos shoved him back so hard that he stumbled and fell off the jetty into the water. Damiskos swung around and caught the blade of Varazda’s opponent, knocking it up and away.
He risked a glance at Varazda, but Varazda was already eeling around to his opposite side to batter away at the next oncomer with his blunt swords. If he was favouring his injured arm at all, Damiskos didn’t see it.
They fought back to back for what seemed an age, but was really just the length of time it took the sailors to row back to their ship and return with a boatload of soldiers. They couldn’t have been said to be holding the jetty, because they were surrounded, but they kept the students busy.
Damiskos slipped in under the next student’s defence and ran him through. The man Damiskos had knocked into the water had hauled himself out, but he had lost his sword, and Varazda easily knocked him back in. Another swordsman gave Damiskos a decent fight before Damiskos disarmed him. Varazda kicked a man in the groin and knocked him on the back of the head with the hilt of his sword as he doubled over. Of the ten young men who had piled out of the boat, three were left standing by the time the soldiers arrived on the jetty. Several had gone into the water and dragged themselves or been dragged out; at least two were dead.
“Put up your swords!” the officer leading the small group of men bellowed.
There were six of them, in tooled and gold-chased breastplates, with red-crested helmets and bronze-studded sword-belts. An honour guard of some sort.
The remaining students, formed up three abreast across the jetty, seemed to think the command directed only at Damiskos and Varazda, and ignored it.
“Get me through to speak to their captain?” Varazda asked breathlessly.
“You’re sure?”
Varazda nodded.
It wasn’t easy to hack through a line of men—even a line of only thre
e men—without a shield. But he only needed to provide Varazda a ridiculously narrow opening, and Varazda slid through it, ducking hair-raisingly under Damiskos’s sword-arm, and stopped short in front of the captain of the honour guard. He raised his hands and let his swords clatter on the stones of the jetty.
An impossibly long moment passed, during which Damiskos dodged and parried by pure instinct, and then the captain of the guard said, “Pharastes the Dancer?” in a disbelieving tone, and time flowed again.
“I knew I recognized you,” said Varazda, as cheerfully as if he were paying a social call. “Autarches, isn’t it? Who are you escorting?”
Damiskos gave ground by a few steps, deliberately, to draw the enemy away from Varazda, and as a result he did not hear the name, which would have meant nothing to him anyway. But it seemed to mean something to Varazda, and the gist of the ensuing conversation, as far as Damiskos could make it out, was that if the guardsmen wanted to know what Varazda was doing there, they should ask their boss.
The captain dispatched one of his men in the boat, and in the meantime took Varazda’s word that the students who remained alive should be disarmed and held under guard. Surrounded and outnumbered, the men gave up their weapons without much further resistance. The guards took Damiskos’s sword away too, and he made no protest. Varazda’s swords they did not confiscate.
Damiskos found himself gripped by an odd feeling, as if Varazda was receding from him into his own world, the world to which Damiskos did not belong, and the understanding that they had shared just now in the fish-sauce factory, that had seemed to unmake and remake Damiskos’s world, that was receding too.