by C. S. Pacat
A cheer went up, and even Damen, whose standards in these situations were exacting, found he was satisfied with the outcome, considering the quality of the troop and the fighting conditions. This was a job well done.
When the lines were formed and heads were counted it turned out they had only lost two men. Apart from that, a few slices, a few cuts. It would give Paschal something to do, the men said. Victory buoyed everyone. Not even the revelation that they must now dig out their supplies and see about making camp could dampen the happy spirits of the men. Those who had ridden with Damen were particularly proud; they hammered each other on the back and boasted to the others about their escape from the rockfall, which, when they returned to the site to see about unearthing the wagons, everyone agreed was impressive.
In fact, only one of the wagons was smashed beyond repair. It was not the one that held the food or the mouth-rasping wine, another cause for cheer. This time the men hammered Damen on the back. He had achieved new status among them as the quick thinker who had saved half the men and all of the wine. They made camp in record time, and when Damen looked out at the neat lines of the tents, he found himself smiling.
* * *
It was not all revelry and relaxation, as there was inventory to be made, repairs to be started, outriders to be assigned, and men to be set on guard. But the campfires were lit, the wine was passed around, and the mood was jovial.
Caught between duties, Damen saw Laurent speaking with Jord on the far side of the camp, and when Laurent’s business with Jord was done, he made his way over.
‘You’re not celebrating,’ said Damen.
He leaned his back against the tree beside Laurent, and let his limbs feel heavy. The sounds of merriment and success drifted over to them, the men drunk on the euphoria of victory, sleeplessness and bad wine. It would be dawn soon. Again.
‘I’m not used to my uncle miscalculating,’ said Laurent, after a pause.
‘It’s because he’s working at a distance,’ said Damen.
‘It’s because of you,’ said Laurent.
‘What?’
‘He doesn’t know how to predict you,’ said Laurent. ‘After what I did to you in Arles, he thought you’d be—another Govart. Another one of his men. Another one of those men today. Ready to mutiny at a moment’s notice. That was what was supposed to have happened tonight.’
Laurent’s gaze passed calmly, critically over the troop, before it came to rest on Damen.
‘Instead, you have saved my life, more than once. You have made fighters of these men, trained them, honed them. Tonight you handed me my first victory. My uncle never dreamed you’d be this kind of asset to me. If he had, he would never have allowed you to ride out of the palace.’
He could see in Laurent’s eyes, hear in his words, a question that he did not want to answer.
He said, ‘I should go and help with repairs.’
He pushed away from the tree. He felt an odd dizziness, a sense of displacement, and to his surprise he was prevented from moving off by Laurent’s hand clasping his arm. He looked down at it. He thought for a strange moment that it was the first time Laurent had ever touched him, though of course it wasn’t; the grip was more intimate than the flutter of Laurent’s lips against his fingertips, the sting of Laurent striking his face, or the press of Laurent’s body in a confined space.
‘Leave the repairs,’ said Laurent. His voice was soft. ‘Get some sleep.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Damen.
‘It’s an order,’ said Laurent.
He was fine, but he had no choice but to do as he was told; and when he tumbled onto his slave pallet and closed his eyes for the first time in two long days and nights, sleep was there, heavy and immediate, drawing him down past the strange new feeling in his chest into oblivion.
CHAPTER 9
‘So,’ Damen heard Lazar say to Jord, ‘what’s it like having an aristocrat suck your dick?’
It was the evening after the rockfall at Nesson, and they were a day’s ride further south. They had set out early, after assessing damage and repairing wagons. Now Damen sat with several of the men, sprawled by one of the campfires, enjoying a moment’s rest. Aimeric, whose arrival had prompted Lazar’s question, had come to sit beside Jord. He returned Lazar a level look.
‘Fantastic,’ Aimeric said.
Good for you, thought Damen. Jord’s mouth quirked up a fraction, but he lifted his cup and drank without saying anything.
‘What’s it like having a prince suck your dick?’ said Aimeric, and Damen found that everyone’s attention was on him.
‘I’m not fucking him,’ he said, with deliberate crudity. It was perhaps the hundredth time he had said it since joining Laurent’s troop. The words were firm, intended to shut down the conversation. But of course they didn’t.
‘That,’ said Lazar, ‘is one mouth I’d love to ream out. A day of him ordering you around, you’d get to shut him up at the end of it.’
Jord gave a snort. ‘He’d take one look at you, and you’d piss your pants.’
Rochert agreed. ‘Yeah. I couldn’t get it up. You see a panther opening its jaws, you don’t get your dick out.’
That was the consensus, with a breakaway dispute: ‘If he’s frigid and doesn’t fuck, there’d not be any fun in it. A cold-blooded virgin makes for the worst ride.’
‘Then you’ve never had one. The ones that are cold on the outside are the hottest once you get in.’
‘You’ve served with him the longest,’ said Aimeric to Jord. ‘Has he really never taken a lover? He must have had suitors. Surely one of them talked.’
‘You want court gossip?’ said Jord, sounding amused.
‘I only came north at the beginning of this year. I lived at Fortaine before that, my whole life. We don’t hear anything there—except about raids and wall repairs and how many children my brothers are having.’ It was his way of saying: yes.
‘He’s had suitors,’ said Jord. ‘Just none who got him into bed. Not for lack of trying. You think he’s pretty now, you should have seen him at fifteen. Twice as beautiful as Nicaise, and ten times more intelligent. Trying to tempt him was a game everyone played. If any of them had landed him, they’d have crowed about it, not kept quiet.’
Lazar made a good-natured sound of disbelief. ‘For real,’ he said to Damen. ‘Who gets a leg over, you or him?’
‘They’re not fucking,’ said Rochert. ‘Not when the Prince took his back off just for feeling him up in the baths. Am I right?’
‘You’re right,’ said Damen. He stood up then, and left them to the campfire.
The company was in peak condition after Nesson. The wagons were repaired, and Paschal had patched up the cuts, and Laurent was not smashed by a rock. More than that. The mood from last night had carried over into the day; adversity had drawn these men together. Even Aimeric and Lazar were getting along. After a fashion.
No one mentioned Orlant, not even Jord and Rochert, who had been his friends.
The pieces were all set. They would arrive at the border intact. There would follow an attack, a fight, much as there had been at Nesson, but probably bigger, uglier. Laurent would either survive, or he would not, and after that Damen, having discharged his obligation, would return to Akielos.
It was everything Laurent had asked for.
Damen stopped on the outskirts of the camp. He leaned his back against the trunk of one of the crooked trees. He could see the whole of the camp from here. He could see Laurent’s tent, lamp-lit and streaming flags; it was like a pomegranate, its rich excesses on the inside.
Damen had woken from a cocoon of sleep this morning to the sound of a lazy, amused, ‘Good morning. No, I don’t need anything.’ And then: ‘Dress and report to Jord. We ride out when repairs are done.’
‘Good morning,’ was all Damen had said, after sitting up and passing a hand over his fa
ce. He’d found himself simply gazing at Laurent, who was already dressed in riding leathers.
Laurent had raised his brows and said, ‘Shall I carry you? It’s at least five paces to the tent flap.’
Damen felt the solid bulk of the tree trunk at his back. The sounds of the camp carried in the cool night air, the sounds of hammering and the last of the repairs, the murmured voices of the men, the raising and lowering of hooves to earth from the horses. The men were experiencing camaraderie in the face of a common enemy, and it was natural that he was feeling it too, or something similar, after a night of chases and escapes and fighting alongside Laurent. It was a heady elixir, but he must not get swept up in it. He was here for Akielos not for Laurent. His duty only extended so far. He had his own war, his own country, his own fight.
* * *
The first of the messengers came the next morning, solving at least one mystery.
Since the palace, Laurent had dispatched and greeted riders in a steady stream. Some bore missives from the local Veretian nobility, offering resupply or hospitality. Some were scouts or messengers carrying information. This very morning Laurent had sent a man flying back to Nesson, with money and thanks, to return Charls his horse.
But this rider was nothing like that. Dressed in leathers with no sign of crest or livery, riding a good but plain horse, and most surprising of all—pushing back a heavy cloak—she was a woman.
‘Have her brought to my tent,’ said Laurent. ‘The slave will act as chaperone.’
Chaperone. The woman, who was perhaps forty and had a face like a crag, did not look at all amorous. But the Veretian distaste for bastardry and the act that sired it was so strong that Laurent could not speak with any woman in private without an escort.
Inside the tent, the woman made obeisance, offering a cloth-wrapped gift. Laurent nodded for Damen to take the parcel, and place it on the table.
‘Rise,’ he said, addressing her in a dialect of Vaskian.
They spoke briefly, a steady back-and-forth. Damen did his best to follow. Here and there, he caught a word. Safety. Passage. Leader. He could speak and understand the high language spoken at the court of the Empress, but this was the common dialect of Ver-Vassel, broken down further into mountain slang, and he could not penetrate it.
‘You can open it if you like,’ said Laurent to Damen when they were once again alone in the tent. The cloth-wrapped parcel was conspicuous on the table.
In memory of your morning with us. And for the next time you need a disguise. Damen read the message on the parchment that fluttered out of the parcel.
Curious, he unwrapped another layer of cloth to reveal more cloth: blue and ornate, it spilled out over his hands. The dress was familiar. Damen had last seen it open and trailing laces, worn by a blonde; he’d felt that embroidered ornamentation under his hands; she’d been halfway in his lap.
‘You went back to the brothel,’ said Damen. And then the words next time tapped him on the shoulder. ‘You didn’t wear—?’
Laurent sat back in the chair. His cool gaze didn’t answer the question one way or another. ‘It was an interesting morning. I don’t usually have the chance to enjoy that kind of company. You know my uncle doesn’t like them.’
‘Prostitutes?’ said Damen.
‘Women,’ said Laurent.
Damen said, ‘He must find it difficult to negotiate with the Empire.’
‘Vannis is our delegate. He needs her, and he resents that he needs her, and she knows it,’ said Laurent.
‘It’s been two days,’ said Damen. ‘The news that you survived Nesson won’t have reached him yet.’
‘This wasn’t his end game,’ said Laurent. ‘That will happen at the border.’
‘You know what he’s going to do,’ said Damen.
‘I know what I would do,’ said Laurent.
* * *
Around them, the landscape started to change.
The townships and villages that they passed, speckling the hills, took on a different aspect: long, low rooftops and other architectural hints that were unmistakably Vaskian. The influence of trade with Vask was stronger than Damen had expected. And this was summer, Jord told him. The trickles of trade swelled in the warmer months, drying up in winter.
‘And the mountain clans ride these hills,’ said Jord, ‘and there’s trade with them too. Or sometimes they just take things. Everyone that rides this stretch of road takes a guard.’
The days were getting hotter, and the nights were hotter as well. They rode south, making steady progress. They were a neat column now, the front riders efficiently clearing the road, leading the occasional wagon to one side to let them ride by. They were two days out from Acquitart, and the people in this region knew their Prince, and sometimes came out to line the roads, greeting him with warm and happy expressions, which was not the way that anyone who knew Laurent greeted him.
He waited until he saw that Jord was alone, and approached him, sitting beside him on one of the scooped-out logs near the fire.
‘Have you really been a member of the Prince’s Guard for five years?’ Damen asked him.
‘Yes,’ said Jord.
‘Is that how long you’d known Orlant?’
‘Longer,’ said Jord, after a pause. Damen thought that was all he was going to say, but: ‘It’s happened before. The Prince has chucked men out of the Guard before, I mean, for being the eyes for his uncle. I thought I was used to the idea that money trumps loyalty.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s hard when it’s someone you know—a friend.’
‘He tried to put you out that one time,’ said Jord. ‘He probably figured that with you out of the way it would be easier to get to the Prince.’
‘I’d wondered about that,’ said Damen.
There was another pause.
‘I don’t think I realised until the other night that this was a killing game,’ said Jord. ‘I don’t think half of the men have realised it. He’s known, though, this whole time.’ Jord pointed his chin in the direction of Laurent’s tent.
That was true. Damen looked across at the tent.
‘He keeps close council. You shouldn’t blame him for that.’
‘I don’t. I wouldn’t fight under anyone else. If there’s anyone alive who can strike a blow that will bloody the Regent’s nose, it’s him. And if he can’t—I’m angry enough now that I’m well pleased to go out fighting,’ Jord said.
* * *
The second Vaskian woman rode into camp the following evening, and this one did not come to deliver a dress.
Damen was given an inventory of items to retrieve from the wagons, wrap up in cloth and place into the woman’s saddlebags: three finely detailed silver drinking bowls, a casket filled with spices, bolts of silks, a set of women’s jewellery and finely carved combs.
‘What are these?’
‘Gifts,’ Laurent had said.
‘You mean bribes,’ he said, later, frowning.
He knew that Vere was on better terms with the mountain people than Akielos or even Patras. If you believed Nikandros, Vere maintained these relations through an elaborate system of payments and bribes. In exchange for funding from Vere, Vaskians raided where they were told. It was probably done exactly like this, thought Damen, eyes raking over the packs. Certainly if the bribes that flowed from Laurent’s uncle were anything like this generous, they could buy enough raiders to henpeck Nikandros forever.
Damen watched as the woman accepted a king’s ransom in silver and jewellery. Safety. Passage. Leader. A lot of the same words were exchanged.
It was dawning on Damen that the first woman had not come to deliver a dress either.
The next night, alone in the tent, Laurent said:
‘As we draw closer to the border, I think it would be safer—more private—to hold our discussions in your language rather than mine.’
He said it in carefully pronounced Akielon.
Damen stared at him, feeling as though the world had just been rearranged.
‘What is it?’ said Laurent.
‘Nice accent,’ said Damen, because despite everything, the corner of his mouth was beginning helplessly to curve up.
Laurent’s eyes narrowed.
‘You mean in case of eavesdroppers,’ said Damen, mostly just to see if Laurent knew the word ‘eavesdroppers’.
Steadily: ‘Yes.’
And so they talked. Laurent’s vocabulary hit its limits when it came to military terms and manoeuvres, but Damen filled in the gaps. It was of course no surprise to find that Laurent had a well-stocked armoury of elegant phrases and bitchy remarks, but could not talk in detail about anything sensible.
Damen had to keep reminding himself not to grin. He didn’t know why listening to Laurent pick his way through the Akielon language had him in good spirits, but it did. Laurent did indeed have a pronounced Veretian accent, which softened and blurred consonants and added a lilt, with stresses on unexpected syllables. It transformed the Akielon words, gave them a hint of exoticism, of luxuriousness that was very Veretian, though that effect was at least partially combatted by the precision of Laurent’s speaking. Laurent spoke Akielon as a fastidious man might pick up a soiled handkerchief, between thumb and forefinger.
For his own part, being able to speak freely in his own language was like having a weight lifted from his shoulders that he had not realised he was carrying. It was late when Laurent called a halt to the discussion, pushing a half-drunk goblet of water away from himself, and stretching.
‘We’re done for the night. Come here and attend me.’
Those words rattled around in his mind. Damen stood, slowly. Responding felt more servile when the command came in his own language.
He was presented with a familiar view of straight shoulders that tapered to a narrow waist. He was used to stripping Laurent of his armour, his outer clothes. It was a normal evening ritual between them. Damen took a step forward, and put his hands on the fabric above Laurent’s shoulder blades.