Strong Wine

by A. J. Demas

  “Of course we will also emphasize that Damiskos had no reason to wish to kill the deceased—we will need to tread a little carefully there, as I understand there is a complex history, which, by the way, I will need to understand much better than I do at present. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, we will want to bring witnesses to Damiskos’s good character. Nione will be able to fill that role admirably—her status as a former Maiden allows her to testify, of course—and I presume we may find a few of your fellow soldiers in the city who will do as well?”

  “Oh. Yes, I expect so. I can give you some names. But what about the letter that Varazda found? It may not incriminate Eurydemos, but it’s relevant, surely. Someone wrote to Helenos to lure him back to Pheme under false pretences—isn’t it likely that the same person killed him? I know we don’t know who that was, but it would help my case to show that there was something like that going on, wouldn’t it?”

  Varazda was already shaking his head.

  “I’m afraid we can’t introduce the letter,” said Chariton.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not entirely happy about the circumstances under which it was found.”

  “I climbed in a window,” Varazda elaborated. “After having already been chased out of the building once. And I’m your weird eunuch boyfriend. You don’t want me testifying—if I’m even allowed to. The other lawyer was offensive about it, but it doesn’t mean he was wrong. I’m a liability.”

  “Varazda!” said Damiskos miserably. “No, you—”

  Chariton cut him off. “I would by no means characterize you as a liability. Is that what the family advocate said? That is offensive. You are obviously not a liability—you are the one who has been working to find the true perpetrator of the crime. You have uncovered a great deal of useful information. If you are a citizen of the Pseuchaian League, and a freedman—which I believe you are?—then you would be permitted to testify. However, as you have realized, your connection to the accused, combined with the irregular manner in which you obtained the evidence, makes me feel that we should leave it out.”

  “Sorry,” said Varazda, looking at Damiskos. “If I’d known what it was when I found it, I’d have put it back so someone impartial could have found it later. As it was, I hoped I could get Eurydemos to confess with it, so the whole thing would be moot.”

  “Right,” said Damiskos. “Yeah. I wish that had worked.”

  Dami spent most of the afternoon working on his defence with Chariton. Varazda milled about the house, waiting to see if he could be of use, but there were lots of other people to be sent on errands, all of them better qualified than he by virtue of knowing their way around the city.

  He might have gone out himself, chasing down one of the other, increasingly unlikely suspects, but he thought about how he would have felt if he’d had to have the kind of conversations Dami was having with Chariton all afternoon—trawling through his past trying to think of people who could say nice things about him and dark secrets that might be used to the advantage of the other side—and he thought he would stay close by.

  He was rewarded, when Chariton left, by Dami coming out into the atrium, rolling his shoulders, and saying, “Gods, that was exhausting. Want to go for a swim?”

  They went to the baths in Dami’s old neighbourhood, where they saw several men Dami knew. Dami introduced Varazda casually, and his acquaintances were all friendly—obviously curious but not in an overt way, nothing that Varazda found at all offensive. After their swim they walked through the city, past the local temple of Terza, a long, low building with green-painted columns and Zashian-looking statues in the porch. There was a much more Pseuchaian frieze of scorpions and leaves across the top. They crossed a long bridge, five arches leaping over the slow surge of the Phira, with statues of stern river-goddesses standing at attention on the parapets at either end.

  In the middle of the bridge, Dami pulled Varazda over to the parapet, and they stood side-by-side looking out. The sun was beginning to set over the harbour, apricot- and lemon-coloured light gleaming on the water and making the sleek shapes of boats look black. Dami tucked his arm around Varazda, and they stood like that for a while, not speaking.

  “Do you think it’s beautiful?” said Varazda at length. “The city, I mean.”

  “Beautiful?” Dami repeated, as if it was not a word that had occurred to him.

  “I do,” said Varazda. “So many people in one place, living together, like parts of a whole. I was surprised to find it so beautiful.”

  Dami looked at him for a moment. “You continue to surprise me, you know that?”

  Varazda frowned at him. “Oh yes? Well, I suppose that’s a good thing.”

  “Is this your first time seeing Pheme?”

  “Yes.”

  Dami tsked. “I wish it was a better occasion. Come on,” he said after another silence. “I’ll take you to my favourite restaurant. It’s on the island.”

  The island in the middle of the Phira, at the heart of Pheme, was another surprise. It was mostly a sacred site, grassy humps of hills capped with stones that were supposed to have been part of something-or-other—Dami was frankly vague on the details—and around the edge a very old retaining wall with a broad walkway on top, and small, strangely rustic shops on the land side, all showing stains on their front walls from previous seasons of high water.

  “They’re built too close to the river,” Dami explained. “But you’re not allowed to build any further up the hill, and the water only rises high enough to really flood them out every ten years or so. Here we are.”

  They had arrived at one of the most rustic-looking of all the shop-fronts on the island, a wooden building so weathered it looked to Varazda like something that belonged in a derelict shipyard, but with braids of garlic hanging in the low windows and a delicious smell of fried fish curling out the open door. Varazda had to duck to step inside.

  The interior of the restaurant was cozy, an herb-scented fog filling the air, the tables plain and freshly scrubbed and the benches mostly full. At the back, louvred doors opened out onto a small terrace, nestled at the foot of the green sacred hill in the island’s centre. Dami found a table for them outside, and ordered the only thing that the restaurant sold, which was indeed fried fish, greasy and delicately seasoned, with fresh white bread and salty olives and a bottle of pungently resinated white wine.

  “Do you know,” Dami said, as they ate, “this is the first time I have taken you out to dinner?”

  “What? No, we’ve … Hm. I suppose you could be right.”

  They had been out to dinner several times in their month together in Boukos, but of course that had always been at restaurants that Varazda had suggested, where they might see people he knew, and he would recommend the best dishes to Dami. More often than not he had paid for their meals, too, without thinking about it, and Dami had never made a fuss about that.

  “Well,” said Varazda, “thank you. You should do it again some time.”

  “I’d like that,” said Dami dryly.

  Their meal finished and wine drunk, they walked around to the north side of the island, looking across at the lights of the city’s north shore.

  Dami’s mind must have returned to their investigation, because he said thoughtfully, “Eurydemos’s sister saw Phaia on Choros Rock, but that was some time after the murder—do you think it’s possible Phaia left and went back?”

  Varazda considered that for a moment and shook his head. “No. If she got out, why would she go back? She wasn’t to know Eurydemos’s sister would be visiting with a patronizing ‘present’ to give her an alibi.”

  “Oh.” Dami winced. “No, you’re right. And if she did make it to Pheme, it’s easy enough to get lost here—just like Helenos did.”

  “I don’t know why they bother to exile people at all, honestly.” He was silent for a moment. “I wonder if she really did repent? I was surprised to hear she didn’t throw the book in Eurydemos’s sister’s face with
a cutting remark.”

  Dami laughed. “You have to remember these people worshipped at Eurydemos’s shrine at one time—perhaps she thought he’d actually written something worth reading.”

  “When I went to the Marble Porches to look for him,” Varazda said, as the thought occurred to him, “I heard one of the radicals talking. Arguing that slavery should be abolished.” It felt a little shocking actually to say it. Like suggesting one might dispense with hunger, or darkness at night, or some other inconvenient but basic fact of life. “That’s a philosophy I think I … well. I’d like to hear more of it.”

  Dami looked at him, and his expression was hard to read in the dark. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I always used to think the best you can do is be kind personally, if you have to own slaves—you know, be a good master, because we can’t do without slaves altogether. If you own a big farm or a mine or something, how else are you going to get the work done?”

  “You used to think that.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t know anybody who’d actually been in that position and freed all their slaves.”

  “But now Nione has.”

  “I know.”

  “Because she’s in love with a freed slave.” Varazda poked him with an elbow. “Hey, so are you!”

  “I know,” said Dami seriously. “So if you want to go listen to the radicals, invite some to dinner, whatever—it’s not much, but I’ll do whatever I can.”

  “Thanks,” said Varazda, slightly surprised. “I wasn’t even thinking of anything so concrete. I’ve a ways to go before I can really make sense of the proposition that slavery could be abolished. Of course I know it’s wrong—but I only know that from the inside. It’s wrong to be a slave … it’s a wrong state to be in—you feel that, especially if you were born free. But to think of its being wrong from the outside?” He spread his hands. “I don’t think I know where to begin with that.”

  Dami had his arm around Varazda’s waist already, and now he drew him closer. “Let’s go to the Marble Porches when all this is over, and see what we think.”

  “How much exactly do your parents owe?” Varazda asked that night. He was already under the covers, and Damiskos was getting undressed.

  “Continuing our habit of extremely romantic conversations at bedtime, I see,” said Damiskos.

  “I have to play to type sometimes, First Spear.”

  “Right.” He sat on the edge of the bed and stretched. “Two thousand that I know of. That’s the money they borrowed in Timiskos’s name. I’ll be able to pay off the rest when I can draw on my pension and—”

  “I’ll pay it. Don’t even think about selling your horse. That is what you were thinking about, I know it.”

  “But—where are you going to get the money for that?”

  “From the treasurers at the temple of Kerialos—that’s where I have my money. It’ll only take a couple of days for them to contact their counterparts in Boukos. They’re very efficient. It was Chereia who put me onto them.”

  He was relating all this as if it were incidental details instead of a revelation. Damiskos looked down at him. He lay with his hands tucked comfortably behind his head, wearing his warm pyjamas, made of a soft blue-and-white check fabric.

  “You have money in the treasury of Kerialos,” Damiskos said. “Two thousand nummoi.”

  Varazda’s eyebrows went up. “A great deal more than that. I thought you knew this was part of the package.”

  “What was?”

  “That I’m rich. Were you just thinking that I live beyond my means? I don’t—I’m actually quite careful with my money. But I do have a lot of it.”

  Damiskos thought about the careless way that Varazda seemed to live, working here and there at different jobs, guests coming and going at his table, his house always a mess, his gorgeous clothes flung over pieces of furniture. He did not live lavishly, but he also did not give the impression of someone who had enough money saved to be able to casually pay off his lover’s family’s debts.

  “Where—how?” was all Damiskos could manage.

  “Where did it come from, you mean? When I was freed, I had a lot of very valuable jewellery, and I sold it. Most of it was given to me by men I didn’t care to remember. I put all the cash in the treasury, in case I was ever out of work, but I never have been. People pay me anywhere from fifty nummoi to a couple of gold tyroi for an evening’s dancing, and there’s the money from the school and the shop, and I get a retainer from the Basileon and occasional sums and gifts and things from the embassy.”

  “I see,” said Damiskos. “This was all out in the open, wasn’t it? I could have figured this out.”

  “I wasn’t keeping a secret of it, no. Were you worried that I couldn’t afford to keep you?”

  “What? No! Divine Terza, I—”

  “I’m joking, Dami. The point is, I can afford to pay your brother’s debts, and we’ll be fine. And yes, I am expecting you to get work in Boukos. Marzana’s said he has work for you to do with the watch.”

  “Chereia has said she’d hire me in the sweet shop, too. But in all seriousness, I could see myself working with Marzana. I also thought … I might teach swordsmanship somewhere?”

  “You could use my school! What a good idea. You’d be brilliant. Though I might have to insist that you tone down your, er, magnetism if you can.”

  “My what?”

  “You’re very attractive when you fight, First Spear.” Varazda was blushing. “I should know.”

  “Hm,” said Damiskos. “I guess you should.”

  Chapter 16

  “You will not be surprised to learn that Demos the pickle-seller was a dead end,” said Varazda, flopping down into a chair in Aradne’s atrium the following day.

  “What?” said Aradne, looking over from where she was arranging a large vase of autumn foliage on a table. “You mean my message from the spirit world led you astray?”

  “Believe it or not. I found the man, and he remembered arguing with Helenos at the wine shop, but that was after he sold Helenos pickles, not before—the argument was about whether or not Helenos had given him a debased coin when he paid for the pickles. And Demos was at a meeting of the Rhina Market merchants on the evening Helenos died, where he spoke at length—about the problem of debased coinage, as it happens—and was remembered by several other merchants. And frankly I couldn’t imagine someone so obviously devoted to the art of pickling using poisoned pickles to murder someone. Are they still busy in there?” He nodded toward the door of the office where Dami and Chariton had been working.

  “As far as I know. I’ve told them if they don’t come out for lunch at seven bells, I’m going in and dragging them out.”

  The pickle-seller was not the only dead end Varazda encountered that day. He also failed entirely to track down the exiled student Giontes, even with all the resources of Aradne’s household at his disposal. He found students at the Marble Porches who remembered him vaguely, but said they hadn’t seen him in months and didn’t know why. He also learned, discouragingly, that plenty of people had access to documents written by Eurydemos, because he was a voluminous letter-writer and well known for writing his own correspondence rather than using a secretary, and for frequently using parchment or paper for things that other people would have scribbled in the less permanent wax of a tablet. That was particularly annoying to hear, and it was another mark against the authenticity of the letter to Helenos, which had been written on a tablet.

  And then, that evening, Giontes turned up on Aradne’s doorstep. He’d heard that someone was asking around for him at the Marble Porches. Varazda had left an address for anyone to contact him if they remembered or learned anything, and Giontes had come plainly hoping there would be money in it for him. Unlike Helenos, it seemed, he had been entirely cut off by his noble family. He was alarmed when he recognized Dami and Varazda and realized that he was in Aradne and Nione’s house, but by then it was too late for him to get away.

  “Of course I was a
different man back then,” he said earnestly.

  “There’s a lot of that going around,” said Dami.

  “I, er—yes?”

  “Eurydemos said more or less the same thing,” Varazda explained. “Though it has only been a couple of months.”

  “Ah, you’ve been in touch with the master, have you?” Giontes didn’t appear to know what to say about that. “And, er, Helenos?”

  “Helenos is dead.”

  The colour drained out of Giontes’s face, and he murmured an oath. “They got him so quickly?”

  “Not executed,” said Varazda. “Murdered.”

  “Oh.” Giontes looked relieved. “Oh, I see.”

  His story, which he eventually told, was that he had fled to Pyria with Helenos after escaping from Boukos. They had split up once there, but he had known where to find Helenos, so that when a messenger arrived looking for Helenos, Giontes had taken the letter to Helenos himself, apparently as an excuse to renew the acquaintance. He could say nothing about where the message had come from, just that it had been delivered by a girl, and Helenos had seemed pleased by its contents. Boasting that his fortunes were about to improve, he had invited Giontes to return with him to Pheme, which Giontes had done, but he had been waiting in vain for the promised word from Helenos since they parted on the docks.

  They were up very early on the day set for the beginning of the trial. Varazda had not been able to sleep much, but for Dami this was a perfectly ordinary time to be up. He was acting as though it were an ordinary morning, too, and Varazda did his best to play along.

  “We will have to try to keep you away from my family as much as we can,” Dami said.

  He ran the comb gently through Varazda’s hair, and Varazda shivered at the tingling sensation that this sent across his scalp and down his neck.

  “Mm. Yes, of course.”

  “Did I hurt you?” Dami’s hands stilled.