by A. J. Demas
He turned and looked up at the wall. “These are impressive. Want to give us the tour?”
Ariston did want to, and it took his mind off the assassination plot for a little while to show Dami and Varazda around the perimeter of the library, explaining the subjects of the reliefs and giving exhaustive details of their production. He’d had a lot to do with the project, it seemed, and Varazda glowed with pride in him as he listened.
The frieze was beautiful, though viewing it up close was a little odd. The central carving of each panel showed a scene of culture and learning: gods and goddesses and mortals whose stories Varazda did not know, and Ariston did not explain clearly, playing musical instruments, poring over scrolls, writing on wax tablets, and sketching on walls. In between these scenes were decorative motifs, plants and animals real and legendary, repeated in a regular pattern with naturalistic variations in the Pseuchaian style. It was Dami who first noticed the significance of one of them.
“That’s a lassa,” he said, stopping in front of a brightly gilded figure in the frieze.
“I carved that,” said Ariston proudly. “What’d you say it is?”
“A lassa,” said Varazda. “A winged lion. It’s an ancient symbol of kingship in Zash.”
It was a magnificent piece, naturalistically worked in a way that was quite different from Zashian sculpture.
“It’s a slightly odd thing to have in a Pseuchaian library,” said Varazda.
“It is?” Ariston squeaked, dismayed. “I didn’t know that! It wasn’t my idea to put them in.”
“Them?” Varazda repeated, looking along the frieze. The winged lions were indeed repeated at regular intervals. There were also pomegranates and stylized saffron crocuses. Varazda pointed to a cluster of these. “I suppose these weren’t your idea either?”
“Well … ” Ariston looked uncomfortable, as well as confused. “They were, sort of. I found that design on one of those little tables in your sitting room, and I sketched it and showed it to Themistokles, and he was the one who wanted to use it on the frieze. I thought it would look good, and, you know, you’re always reminding me to embrace my origins and that, so … ”
“I like it a great deal,” said Varazda, touching Ariston’s shoulder. “It was well thought of.”
“Obviously,” Ariston added stiffly, “I was mainly thinking about the volume of the shapes balancing the flow of the forms in the main panels, and the colour of the crocuses echoing the purple on the wings.”
“Obviously,” Varazda agreed.
They followed Ariston around the rest of the frieze, listening to his exhaustive explanation of how the marble panels were fastened to the walls, and descended by the ladder at the far end, leaving Ariston to check the knots of all the rope railings that had been secured for the safety of the party guests.
“Hard to believe it isn’t a political statement,” Dami remarked when they were on the ground again.
“The lassa and crocuses? Yes, that’s what I was thinking. Mind you, I believe Ariston when he says he was mostly concerned with volume and whatnot, but I get the impression Themistokles is a different kind of character.”
“We know he has political ambitions.”
Varazda nodded. “Do you think he’s really in danger?”
“Of falling to his death from the scaffolding? Maybe. It certainly wouldn’t be hard to sabotage it so somebody would fall—though perhaps not with eagle-eyed Ariston on the job—but I’m not sure how you would make sure it was Themistokles who fell.”
“True. I’m not sure why Leto told us it was the sculpture that was going to fall on him, either.”
Dami scratched his stubble. “We’ve tried to warn him, Ariston has checked everything beforehand, and we’re going to keep an eye on him all evening. I think we have it covered.”
“I hope so,” said Varazda.
The sound of flute music drew their attention to the performance area beyond the couches and tables. The doors had been opened and the first guests were beginning to arrive.
“Safflower,” said Varazda suddenly.
Dami looked at him. “Yes?”
“Kallisto told me Lykanos has a lucrative business involving safflower. And he’s in the spice trade. Safflower can be used to adulterate saffron.”
“Hah. Is that … ”
“Relevant? Yes, I think so. Adulterating saffron is a serious fraud in Zash—punishable by death.”
Dami gave a low whistle.
“Well, so many things are. But most of the saffron you can buy in Boukos is adulterated, or so Yazata tells me. We get ours as a New Year’s gift from the embassy, so I wouldn’t know. But one of the things they’re discussing in the Basileon is inspecting the saffron for sale in the markets to make sure it meets Zashian standards.”
“Which, if you’d built your business selling adulterated saffron, would be bad news.”
“Quite.”
“That would give Lykanos a reason to want Zash out of Boukos. Also a reason to turn against Themistokles, do you think?”
“I suppose it depends how pro-Zashian Themistokles really is.”
Dami cast his eyes up in the direction of the hidden frieze. “Maybe he just thought the winged lions and the crocuses looked good.”
“Maybe,” said Varazda.
After what they had learned of Themistokles’s politics and what they had seen of the frieze, neither Varazda nor Damiskos was surprised to see the Zashian ambassador and his entourage arrive at the party.
The two of them were sitting on the floor in an alcove at the far end of the atrium from the door, knees and thighs gently touching on one side. It was a kind of moment that Varazda was used to: the entertainers waiting discreetly for their turn to perform, watching the guests come in, talking among themselves and ignoring the slaves who hovered around them. It was probably a strange experience for Dami. He had put out a hand to touch the skirt of Varazda’s embroidered gown where it lay over his knee.
“I feel as if I’m having a tryst with a respectable Zashian girl,” he whispered.
Varazda replied with a stifled laugh. A couple of the other entertainers waiting nearby gave them curious looks. I don’t mind being envied either, Varazda thought, and that was a bit of a surprise.
“Oh, look,” said Dami, pointing out into the atrium. “Is that who I think it is?”
Varazda looked, and saw Narosangha, with Babak, Shorab, and a couple of others in his retinue. He remained sitting in the alcove for a minute, watching the Zashians greet their hosts and the other guests. Some of them were conspicuous in their embroidered clothes and hats; some had adopted elements of Pseuchaian dress. All of them wore beards.
The first Zashian ambassador to Boukos, before Varazda’s time, had been an embarrassing buffoon, who got himself kidnapped and nearly set off a war. There was a story at the embassy that he had paraded around the agora stark naked during the Psobion festival, but it was hard to know whether to credit that. He had been the king’s cousin, though, so when it came time to establish a permanent embassy, the Zashian court felt that they could not insult the Boukossians by sending just anyone to head it.
Narosangha, the current ambassador, was a very distant relative of King Nahazra’s mother, which satisfied that requirement, but he was also a superb diplomat, ideally suited to the job. Varazda liked him. Narosangha wasn’t exactly his patron—the concept was unknown in Zash, and in any case the ambassador had never actually owned Varazda—but he treated all the freed slaves of the embassy rather the way a Boukossian nobleman might treat his clients.
“I should go say hello,” said Varazda, reluctantly moving Dami’s hand from his knee and gathering up his skirt. He paused. “Come. I’ll introduce you.”
Dami gave him a slightly wide-eyed look, as if he wanted to ask, “Are you sure?” But he got to his feet.
Babak saw them first, and waved to Varazda. He was one of the Zashians who had adopted local dress, along with much else. (His Boukossian mistress was an op
en secret at the embassy.) He wove through the tables with a grin on his face to tell Varazda in Pseuchaian that he looked “delectable” in his women’s clothes. Varazda gave him the kind of look that a respectable Zashian girl would have given anyone who said such a thing to her, and Babak howled with laughter.
“Varazda!” said Shorab, coming up behind Babak. “We get to see you dance tonight? Excellent! Oh, but you’re in what do they call it? Drag? So I guess you won’t be using the swords tonight.”
“Wait and see,” said Varazda with a coy smile. “Babak, Shorab, this is Damiskos. My accompanist for the night. Dami, these are my friends Shorab and Babak of the Zashian embassy.”
For a moment the two Zashian men looked at Dami with polite confusion. They recovered quickly to exchange greetings. Then Babak looked at Varazda and said, “Accompanist, eh? Is that what they’re calling it now?”
Shorab gasped and shoved Babak in the shoulder, looking to Varazda with an apology obviously rising to his lips.
Varazda just shrugged. Babak shoved Shorab back.
“Well, uh, this is,” Shorab stammered, “this is just—well, I’m happy for you both.” He nodded encouragingly at Dami.
“You’re a lucky dog,” said Babak to Dami. “Is what he means to say. You know she’s broken a few hearts around here over the years. Between you and me, we didn’t think that ice was ever going to crack. Well done!”
Dami was giving Babak a tolerant look—not unfriendly, but not conspiratorial either—rather like the looks he had given Ariston when Ariston began exclaiming over women’s legs and describing brothels on the Asteria.
“Is it public?” Shorab cut across whatever Babak was going to say next, gesturing between Varazda and Dami. “Can we tell people?”
“Honestly, Shorab,” said Varazda, “do you really think I’d be confiding in Babak if it were a secret?”
“Hey!” Babak protested. “You didn’t ‘confide’ anything, you close-mouthed bastard. I guessed! And it had better not be a secret, the way the two of you look at each other. Not that I blame you,” he added to Dami. “If I didn’t know what she’s got under that gown, I’d fight you for her.”
Dami folded his arms. “You wouldn’t win.”
At that point the ambassador himself appeared at Babak’s elbow, and Shorab quickly assured him that they were both on their way to talk to the person he had sent them to talk to, and they melted away.
“Varazda,” said the ambassador with a friendly nod. “God guard your coming and your going. I hope you are well?”
“Very well, Your Excellency. Your Excellency, may I present to you my friend Damiskos Temnon. Former First Spear of the Second Koryphos Legion of Pheme.”
Narosangha gave Dami an openly intrigued look as he clasped his hands, Zashian-style.
“I am honoured,” Dami said in Zashian.
“As am I,” said the ambassador, “since I know at least a little about the Phemian army.”
“Damiskos served on the Deshan Coast for several years and has travelled extensively in Zash. He speaks Zashian fluently.”
“Indeed?” Narosangha was looking even more intrigued. “And you have retired from the military and settled in Boukos, then?”
“Yes,” said Dami promptly.
“You must come share a cup with us at the embassy one day. You are here to see the new frieze?”
Dami smiled. “I’m here because Varazda needed an accompanist at the last moment, and I offered my services. But I have sneaked up to look at the frieze, and it’s wonderful. Have you seen it yet, Your Excellency? There are elements of it that I think you may find very interesting.”
“Hmm, I wonder why you say that!”
The ambassador went on talking to Dami like an equal, which pleased Varazda. He wasn’t listening, though; he was thinking about how quickly Dami had said yes when Narosangha asked if he had settled in Boukos.
Chapter 18
The couches had filled with guests, Eudokia had sung, and someone from the Committee for the Promotion of Letters in Boukos had given a speech. Varazda stepped out of the alcove and walked demurely out into the performance area. His hair was loose down his back; Dami had unbraided it for him and combed it gently through with his fingers, making Varazda’s scalp tingle.
Dami sat on a stool at the far side of the dance floor with his lute. He watched Varazda walking out, and there was such a smile in his eyes, as if he was right where he wanted to be.
Varazda glanced discreetly over the audience on their couches. He had already spotted a few familiar faces, besides the party from the embassy. Lykanos was there, reclining on a couch near the front of the room, looking more bored than anything. But as Varazda looked in his direction, Lykanos’s eyes darted across the hall to the blonde girl who was sitting, with the utmost propriety, beside Shorab. It was Leto.
That was interesting. Varazda missed the expression on Lykanos’s face as he looked at her, which he regretted, as it might have told him much. But he had no time now to study the audience. He had to dance, and even if this one still would not be solely for Dami, Varazda wanted it to be good.
The sword dance of the clan Kamun, vishmi kokoro, was a men’s dance. There were women’s sword dances in other regions of Zash, but Varazda had never learned any of them. What he danced now was a pure invention of his own. He had learned to dance like a woman at Gudul, because that was the sort of thing they had wanted there, and it was a skill that had served him well since. He also enjoyed it.
He walked to the middle of the dance floor with his swords held loosely at his sides, and then began with a flourish, because that was how Dami had told him epic poems were meant to begin, sweeping up his right arm and giving the sword a quick twist, stopping, holding it there, looking out at the audience. There were murmurs of appreciation.
He danced a scene of battle in a flow of feminine drapery, a goddess presiding over a field of death, but it was something else, too. It was a story of rising glory, of a career in the ascendant; and then, as the dance reached its most triumphant moment, there came the cataclysm. Varazda slumped, dropped the swords, wilted in a controlled fall to the floor. There were gasps from the audience, a little tentative applause—was it over? Did the story of the dance end in tragedy?
It didn’t. He rose to his knees, then to his feet, without the swords, and raised his hands, crossing his wrists, in the opening pose of the village wedding dance that he had danced on the beach at Laothalia a month ago. He glanced at Dami, who nodded and began the tune he had played that night.
He ended the wedding dance to delighted applause, and curtsied graciously. A couple of the men, presumably thinking he was a woman, beckoned him imperiously to share their couches, but Varazda just smiled. He did accept a drink from the ambassador, and shrugged off some ribald comments from Babak. Shorab had a few warm words of praise for him, but was too busy making almost comically proper conversation with Leto to say much.
The food began to be brought out, which provided Varazda an opportunity to make his exit. He could have stayed, of course; plenty of guests, from Babak to the head of the Committee for the Promotion of Letters in Boukos, would have been happy to have him share their couches. But Dami had disappeared back into the performers’ alcove, and Varazda had no desire to linger out here.
Leto glanced over as Varazda was getting up from Narosangha’s couch.
“Is it a ‘he’ or a ‘she’?” she asked Shorab, quite audibly. “I’ve never been sure.”
Shorab looked confused for a moment, then Varazda heard him say, “Oh. Oh, well, we always call them ‘he,’ you know, because—because, well, they used to be boys, so ‘she’ wouldn’t be quite right, would it?”
Varazda walked away without reaction. It was the sort of thing that barely ruffled the surface of his calm these days, though in truth he would have expected a little better from Shorab, whom he considered a friend. But he thought about Dami hearing things like that, and somehow that hurt.
“
I didn’t know you were going to do the wedding dance at the end,” said Dami. They sat eating together on a couch in the corner of the hall. Varazda’s swords and Dami’s lute had been stowed in the alcove with the other performers’ things. “Didn’t know you were going to flop on the floor like that, either.”
“I hope I didn’t alarm you?”
“No, I could tell you knew what you were doing.” After a moment he said, “Was that dance… ”
“Mm?”
“No, never mind. It was brilliant, and they loved it.”
“They were a good audience. You’re an absolute dream as an accompanist, you know that?”
“What? You’re just saying that because you like me.”
“I’m saying it because it’s true. You watch me so attentively.”
“Now that is because I like you.” Dami grinned.
“We’re a perfect team.”
Dami’s grin softened to something warm and intimate, but a little wistful. “Yeah. We are, aren’t we.”
Varazda leaned his forehead on Dami’s shoulder, closing his eyes. Something nameless ached inside of him. This isn’t right, he thought. Damiskos should be here as a guest, the equal of His Excellency Narosangha. A man from a good family, retired from a brilliant military career, shouldn’t be posing as an accompanist for a eunuch dancer in women’s clothes. He should have been commanding a person like Varazda, not staying in his house and doing favours for him.
Varazda felt Dami’s lips lightly brush the top of his head. “It’s warm in here,” Dami said. “Want me to braid your hair up for you again?”
“Would you know how?” Varazda sat up.
“No, but I’d love to learn.”
Ariston wove through the tables to present himself breathlessly in front of their couch.
“What is it?” Dami asked.
“Leto just spoke to me. She said she’s seen Lykanos giving somebody orders, and pointing up at the frieze. He must be about to go sabotage the platform—or the panels—or whatever it is he’s planning. We’ve got to get up there and catch him.”