Like Fire Through Bone

by E. E. Ottoman

  “The master wants to know if you’re done?” Bröndulfr asked, and Vasilios nodded, picking up his bag.

  “Yes, I’m ready.”

  “Are you all right?” Bröndulfr asked as Vasilios followed him out into the hall. “I saw you bolt out of the blue receiving room earlier like you were being pursued by restless spirits.”

  “I’m fine.” Vasilios looked away, not wanting to talk about it, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bröndulfr shrug his large shoulders.

  “All right, then.”

  They went down the hall toward the front entrance where Markos stood talking quietly to one of the house guards. When he looked up and turned toward them, Vasilios bowed low, and kept his eyes firmly down.

  “I’m ready whenever you are, my lord General.”

  “Good.” Markos’s voice still lacked its usual warmth. “We should be going, then.”

  Vasilios pulled his scarf up over his head. Bröndulfr threw him one more questioning glance before Markos led the way outside and across the courtyard. There were two horses tethered by the gate with Markos’s young aide—Patros, Vasilios thought his name was—standing by them.

  “You….” Markos hesitated as they drew closer to the horses. “You ride with Patros, all right?”

  “All right.” Vasilios gave the horse a wary look. He’d never been good at riding. Patros came over to them, took Vasilios’s bag, and attached it to the back of the saddle.

  “Come on.” Patros mounted the horse with apparent ease and then smiled down at Vasilios. He held out his hand, and Vasilios grasped it and tried to remember everything he knew about riding. He fumbled and slid a little, trying to get onto the back of the horse behind Patros, and was a little proud of himself for not falling.

  Beside them, Markos mounted his own horse. Vasilios slid his arms around Patros’s waist, and held on tight as they started to move. The guards pulled the front gates open for them, and then they were on the street. It appeared slightly different from this vantage point.

  They arrived at Markos’s house quickly enough. Markos dismounted, and Vasilios slid down off his horse as well, stumbling a little in the process.

  Markos led the way inside. They entered the little receiving room, and Markos sat on the couch with a sigh.

  “First, I need to apologize for taking you away at such short notice,” Markos said as Vasilios stood by the door. “The Bishop performed the exorcism last night and was not able to cast out the demon, although we did encounter it and managed to enrage it quite a bit.” Markos smiled without humor, dragging his fingers through his gray curls. “The Bishop’s physicians are seeing to his wounds even now.”

  Vasilios’s head jerked up at that, and he stared at Markos. “Is the Bishop all right?”

  “He’ll be fine.” Markos shook his head. “It’s not a serious wound.”

  “And the creature? It’s still out there?”

  “Yes.” Markos clenched his hands. “Which is why I need your help again. I’m going out into the desert to find this hermit Theofilos spoke of and beg her to come and help us before another child is killed. I would like you to accompany me in this.”

  “Why?” Vasilios asked without thinking and then flushed. “I mean, of course. If I am needed, then I will go.”

  “I need you because you are the only one with direct presage of this thing, and it is your story that I believe will be the most compelling,” Markos said. “And of course, you could say no. I’m not going to drag you into the desert against your will.”

  Vasilios looked at him. Markos’s gaze dropped away.

  “He’s right, you know,” Markos said abruptly. “Panagiotis, what he said.”

  Vasilios’s heart almost stopped, then it started again double time, and he could feel the palms of his hands sweat. Markos must have seen some of Vasilios’s shock because he shook his head.

  “About me being able to buy you easily,” he said. “And just to be clear, I would never force anyone to my bed.” He gave Vasilios a long and serious look. “I know, given your position relative to my own, you would never be able to say no.”

  Something inside of Vasilios that had clenched painfully since Panagiotis had made the offer of Vasilios’s body back at the villa, loosened slowly.

  “As far as the buying you, though,” Markos said, “I could do it. I have the money, even as expensive as you are.”

  A totally new kind of cold dread knotted in Vasilios’s stomach, and he opened his mouth to say something—he wasn’t quite sure what—when Markos overrode him.

  “I wouldn’t, though,” Markos said, staring directly at him now. “I don’t want to own you, Vasilios.”

  They were quiet for a moment, and Markos finally looked down at his hands with a sigh. “I could buy your freedom, though,” he said softly.

  “No.” Vasilios shook his head, speaking before he could stop himself. “Panagiotis will never sell me. I am too great an asset to his family.”

  “Well, I will try,” Markos said. Vasilios felt a spike of anger. He did not want to hope, especially since he knew Panagiotis would never let him go. His freedom was ultimately a false hope. How dare Markos act as if it could be anything else?

  “No,” he said sharply. “I do not want you to try. I do not want you to hand me the possibility of freedom only to have it taken away again.”

  “What am I to do, then?” Markos’s voice was hard. “I cannot simply let you remain owned and used. To see you this way is killing me. You are far too precious to me for that.”

  Vasilios noticed the dark circles under Markos’s eyes and lines of strain around his mouth. His anger slowly drained away. He was overwhelmed by tenderness for Markos, who had, over these last few minutes, been so honest and open with him. Vasilios struggled to find something to say in return. He clasped his hands in front of him. “I do not think it is possible. Panagiotis will never agree to sell me. But—” He licked his lips and felt his throat go dry. “—I would like us to be equals,” he said, voice barely above a whisper, hoping he wasn’t saying or doing the totally wrong thing in this situation. “I would like to be able to say no.”

  Or yes, hung in the air between them.

  Markos was looking at him now with an expression Vasilios had never seen before—open, tender, and hopeful all at once.

  “Yes,” Markos said after a long moment. “I would like that too.”

  Vasilios took a long, careful breath, feeling too full of emotion and too close to breaking.

  “We need to go now,” Markos said, smiling back at him, a small, soft smile full of light. “We have a desert holy woman to find.”

  “Yes.” Vasilios couldn’t stop smiling. “Is there something I can do?”

  “No, just wait here while I change into something more practical and get my bags,” Markos said as he stood and headed for the door.

  Vasilios sat on the couch as soon as Markos was gone. Too much had happened too soon, and he was still trying to process it. His head felt light and slightly disconnected from everything around him. He’d admitted to having feelings for Markos, wanting him, wanting to be his equal. Markos hadn’t gotten mad, hadn’t struck or beaten him. Not that he’d thought Markos would, but he couldn’t even imagine what someone else might do if they’d known he’d even thought such a thing. More than that, though, Markos had admitted to wanting Vasilios too, and not as a slave, not as Panagiotis had offered him.

  He told himself sternly to calm down and not get excited. He was still owned, still part of Panagiotis’s property, with no way of obtaining his own freedom.

  To think about what they could have if things were different, to dwell on what Markos had said to him, would be torture. Better to put it out of his mind now, and move on.

  Markos pushed back open the door. Dressed in a heavy wool tunic, heavy Northern-style trousers, with a cloak and heavy boots, he carried a travel bag over one shoulder.

  “Let’s go.”

  Vasilios stood, and Markos turne
d and led the way back through the house. “How well do you ride?”

  “Not very well,” Vasilios admitted. “I generally don’t have much reason to.”

  “All right. You can ride behind Patros, then,” Markos said and headed over to his own horse where he tied the packs to the back of the saddle, like Patros had with Vasilios’s. Patros walked over to them, also dressed in dark nondescript trousers, short tunic, and cloak like Markos. He mounted and helped Vasilios back up into the saddle. They rode southeast through the city, heading for one of the many gates that led out into the countryside.

  Vasilios watched the streets as they passed through them. There were large, sprawling villa complexes and clean, tiny stone-paved roads, changing into hard-packed dirt streets with small houses built so close together they were almost touching. They passed merchants’ stores and traveled through marketplaces with their open-air stalls shaded by brightly colored awnings.

  As they drew closer to the wall that surrounded the city, the buildings they passed began to get taller, closer together, and more run-down. They were now three to four stories high with flat roofs. Each building was packed with more families than Vasilios wanted to think about, usually each to a single-room apartment. Sewage ran through deep gutters dug on either side of the road.

  Markos rode ahead of them, and Vasilios tried not to watch his back and how he moved fluidly with the motion of the horse. The stone wall loomed in front of them, huge and high, with a walkway along the top on which soldiers patrolled. Behind the southeast gate were sandstone foothills that quickly turned into desert. Vasilios remembered reading that at one time, the great River Lethe had kept the whole valley lush and fertile when she ran her banks every year. When the great Emperor Alexarthos had built the Golden City, its massive walls had blocked the river from fertilizing the land to the south and east of the city, causing the desert to quickly claim them.

  The soldiers posted at the huge iron gate signaled them to halt.

  “State your purpose,” one soldier ordered.

  “Traveling out to the desert on business,” Markos told them, and after conferring with each other, the soldiers waved them through.

  “You are free to pass.”

  “Thank you.” Markos inclined his head to them and waited as the huge gate slowly rose with a deep, creaking sound of metal against metal. It boomed to a stop, and Markos clicked to his horse so they could pass under. Patros followed.

  The land the road cut through outside the wall was not as immediately barren as Vasilios had thought it would be. Small, wooden, shack-like houses had been built leaning against the outside of the wall, and people, mostly vagrants and beggars from the look of them, wandered around outside them. The land was not as green and lush as it was to the northwest of the city, but it was not devoid of plants either. There was some sort of stiff grass growing along the edge of the road, and Vasilios could make out spindly, spiky trees with light-gray bark growing together in groves. A small boy, who wore only a rather ragged piece of cloth tied around his waist, pulled a goat on a rope along the side of the road. He stopped and stared at them, openmouthed, as they rode by.

  Markos slowed his horse, then drew up beside them. “I think we’ll make the foothills by this evening and camp there,” he said. “And we can travel into the desert tomorrow.”

  Patros nodded, and Vasilios shifted a little but kept quiet. He was unused to traveling on horseback and had a nasty feeling he was going to be sore all over when they stopped for the night.

  By the time roughly an hour had passed, the landscape around them had noticeably changed. There was less grass and more light-brown earth that was not quite sand, but far from fertile. The small copses of thin, thorny trees that still dotted the landscape had small buds of new dark-green growth among the thorns. The land was flat enough that Vasilios could make out the dark-brown-and-red sandstone foothills ahead yet quite a ways off. Vasilios knew from his study of maps of the Empire that the hills formed the tail end of the great mountain chain that ran along the edge of the desert.

  His legs were starting to cramp as were his wrists where he had them locked together to keep his grip on Patros’s waist as the horse trotted over the rough ground.

  “You all right?” Patros asked.

  “Yes.” Vasilios shifted a little again. “I’m just not used to riding on horseback.”

  “Didn’t you grow up riding?” Patros sounded surprised.

  “No.” Vasilios snorted. “I was born on Nisii, the largest of the islands in the Southern Sea, but even so, we didn’t have horses there—sheep and goats but not horses.”

  “Oh.” Patros seemed to think about that.

  “Where were you born?” Vasilios asked, simply because speaking, even if not strictly appropriate, was better than riding in silence again.

  “Not far from here, actually,” Patros said. “My father was a financial minister up at the Imperial Palace. My mother and I lived in one of his country villas west of the city.” He laughed. “Which means I’ve been riding pretty much since I could walk.”

  Vasilios turned Patros’s statement over in his head. The way that he had said it made Vasilios suspect Patros was illegitimate. That made sense, since military service was the best choice for an illegitimate son of a well-placed family. At the moment, Vasilios didn’t remember Patros’s father’s name, although he was sure he’d been given it when they were introduced.

  “It must be nice,” he said, “to have known how for that long.”

  “I suppose.” Patros laughed lightly. “It is a skill that has come in handy.”

  “I learned how to tie a fishing net when I was six. My father was a fisherman, you see,” Vasilios told him, unsure why, and then laughed a little. “Though that’s hardly been helpful for most of my life.”

  They rode in silence again for a little while, and then Markos, who’d been riding slightly ahead, slowed and came to ride beside them.

  “Maybe we could stop soon for a minute or so,” Patros said to Markos. “Let Vasilios stretch his legs a little.”

  “I don’t need to—” Vasilios began, but Markos had turned to look at him now, his brows furrowed before smoothing out in realization.

  “That would be fine.” He smiled at Vasilios, who looked down, a little annoyed that he didn’t have the stamina of the other two, even though he would be glad for a chance to get off the horse.

  They stopped after a little while, and Markos swung down off the horse and then led the way into a small grove of the thorny trees. Patros dismounted, then helped Vasilios down. Vasilios stretched, then began trying to work the kinks out of his shoulders. He was grateful for the scarf protecting his head and shading his face. It had kept the worst of the sun off. He suspected he would be even more grateful for it the next day when they started through the desert.

  Vasilios sat on the sparse grass and looked over at Patros and Markos, who stood close together over by the horses.

  “I still don’t like you being out there essentially unprotected,” Patros said. “You should have a full guard detail. If one of your enemies were to find you….”

  “Who is going to find me?” Markos asked. “This close to the capital?”

  “An agent of the Flower Empire,” Patros said, and Markos made a disbelieving noise.

  “Or one of your enemies at court. I would not put it past some of those young commanders to send someone for you in the hopes that the Emperor would promote them to fill your post.”

  “That’s why I have you,” Markos said, and Patros snorted and rolled his eyes, but his expression was still wary.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you talk to Xêgodis Aetia before we left?” Markos asked, and Patros nodded.

  “Yes.”

  “And did he say the house was still being watched? Because I thought we took care of that problem already.”

  “No sir. According to Xêgodis, no one’s been watching the house,” Patros answered. “But one of the guards at the g
ate could have recognized you, or we could have been followed from some point in the city.”

  “I think we need to be watchful and prudent,” Markos said, “but I don’t feel like the danger is imminent.” He turned and saw Vasilios watching them.

  Vasilios’s gaze dropped away quickly, embarrassed to be caught listening in to a conversation that had obviously not been meant to include him. He heard Markos sigh, and then boots came into his view.

  Markos knelt down, and Vasilios looked up at him slowly, trying to gauge how angry he was.

  “I owe you an apology,” Markos said. “I’m sorry for not talking to you about this before we left, but you see, I have many enemies, some of them at court, and Patros thinks there might be a very small chance that they would have found out about this trip, and be planning to attack me while I am relatively unprotected. Now, I do not think this likelihood is particularly great or I would not have brought you along, but the chance does exist, and I should have explained that to you before now.”

  Vasilios took a minute to think about that, then reached out and lightly touched the back of Markos’s hand. “I trust you. If you think the risk is not great, then I trust that you know what you are doing. Also I am willing to do whatever is in my capability to make sure more children do not die.”

  Markos’s hand turned slowly under his until their palms pressed together. Markos curled his fingers around Vasilios’s in a gentle squeeze. “Thank you.”

  Behind them, Patros cleared his throat, and when Vasilios looked over at him, Patros grinned back at him. With a regretful sigh, Markos let go of Vasilios’s hand and stood.

  “Why doesn’t Vasilios ride with you for a little while, sir?” Patros asked, a smile still turning up the corners of his mouth.

  Both Markos and Vasilios froze, and then Vasilios turned to look up at Markos. “I… wouldn’t mind,” Vasilios said, and for a moment Markos seemed on the verge of saying no. Then he shrugged and swung up into the saddle. He held out his hand to Vasilios, who struggled to swing up as well.

  Getting back in the saddle after his brief respite was torture, and his back, legs, and buttocks complained bitterly. He ignored them and wrapped his arms around Markos’s waist, feeling the solidness of him, the way the muscles in his back moved where it pressed against Vasilios’s front.