by A. J. Demas
Instead Varazda had just responded honestly. He wasn’t in love with Damiskos; he didn’t know how to be, didn’t know what to do with the fact that Damiskos was in love with him.
“I’m not asking anything of you,” Damiskos said. “Don’t think that, please.”
“No, I understand. There isn’t really anything you could ask that I’d say ‘yes’ to, is there? Ah, God, that sounds harsh, but you know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I like you a lot. If I’m honest, I’ve liked you since you got here. You’re my type, in any number of ways. That’s probably why my clever schemes to get myself out of trouble all involved kissing you, much as I told myself that was the last thing I wanted. But … I do have to go back to Boukos.”
“I know. I know. You have a life and a family there. It’s your home, your republic. I’m glad you have all that.” Tears stung behind his eyes and in his throat.
Varazda smiled rather sadly. “You must have … What do you have to go back to in Pheme?”
The pressure of the tears eased after a moment. “Uh. Well. My job. It’s not a bad job. It’s interesting. But I’ve been doing it almost five years, and I haven’t been promoted. There’s nowhere to be promoted to, until my commanding officer retires. And I was fucking First Spear of the Second Koryphos. I don’t care about the status, but I’m capable of doing more than bargaining for olive oil and fish sauce contracts. I just—I like to feel useful, and at one time I really was.” He drew a deep breath and let it out shakily.
He went on: “And there’s my family. My little brother’s serving in the colonies now, and my parents and I don’t see eye-to-eye anymore. I try to keep my distance—to be filial, you know, but not … not be in their lives too much, because it just makes everyone upset.
“I spent my savings outfitting Timiskos—that’s my brother—when he went into the legions. Our parents couldn’t afford to do it. They could when I enlisted myself, but that was before they lost all their money. Not in any kind of tragedy—they just began living beyond their means. They still do, even though they lost the house and live in a rented place now. I try to help out, but I don’t live with them—I couldn’t stand it any longer, watching them dig themselves deeper into debt. I had to move out and rent a place by myself. It’s one room, all I can afford. I’d like to m-marry—or I thought I did, before I met you—but I haven’t got the money.” His voice gave out, and he stopped speaking.
“Shit, Dami. What a shambles.”
“Oh, no. Other people endure much worse.”
“Yes, that’s always such a comforting line to take.”
“I shouldn’t complain of these things to you, Varazda.”
“You’re not complaining of them, you’re just dispassionately listing them. It actually makes it worse.”
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I intended. I meant … you’ve—you lost so much yourself, and … the strength it must have taken to build the life you have now … ”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t be sympathetic. I think … you’ve seen a side of me that’s not usually much in evidence these days.”
“Um … yes.”
Varazda laughed. “I don’t mean the, um, the sex. I mean the anger. I’m not usually so angry any more. It was having to pretend to be a slave again—which, let me hasten to add, was my own idea—that was harder than I would have expected. That’s why I was so prickly when we first met. In truth, I’m generally much happier these days.”
“I do admire the angry Varazda,” Damiskos said, feeling a little shy about it, “but I think … it’s mostly the happy one I’ve fallen in love with.”
Varazda gave no response in words, but he leaned over and kissed Damiskos softly.
CHAPTER XX
THEY LAY QUIETLY under the stars on the grassy gravel of their little corner of the vineyard. Soon they would need to get up and return to the women’s camp. It was plain no one was coming after them from the villa; the students were probably still too busy fighting among themselves.
Varazda seemed in no hurry to get up and dress, which Damiskos had expected he might be, embarrassed after Damiskos’s confession.
“Do you ever think about going back to Zash?” Varazda asked presently. “It sounds as if you were happy there.”
“Yes, I was. But no, I don’t. Zash was done with me. I miss it, though. Do you?”
“Miss Zash? Of course.” He smiled faintly. “I miss the palace at Gudul. I miss my friends there, and riding in the mountains, and trivial things, food that you can’t get in Boukos, that kind of thing. And I miss my childhood home, which was burned to the ground, and my mother and brothers, who are long dead. Even if there were a way for me to go back to Zash without losing my freedom—and there isn’t—I wouldn’t want to. Boukos is home now.” After a moment he said, “I guess you could say Zash was done with me too, though in a different way.”
Damiskos felt he ought to explain. “What I meant by that … ”
“Oh, I know what you meant by it. That is—if you want to tell me about it, I will be happy to listen, but if you don’t … I was the son of a Deshan warlord. I know how you get a limp like that. I’ve seen it done.”
Damiskos absorbed that piece of information. Varazda knew, or at least had suspected. Whatever regard he had for Damiskos had included that truth already—for good or ill.
“And that first night, when you arrived here,” Varazda added gently, “one of the idiots was talking about Zashian punishments, and I thought I saw something in your face for a moment.”
Damiskos linked his fingers behind his head and looked up at the dark sky. “You probably did. But I don’t find it all that difficult to talk about. Sometimes I want to tell people, because they all assume it’s a battlefield injury and that it was all very heroic, and … it wasn’t.”
“Were you actually enslaved?”
“No. I can’t claim to understand what that’s like. What happened to me was … It was in the year ’93—you’d already have been in Boukos by then.”
“Yes.”
“That was when I made First Spear. I replaced a man who deserted. This was just after I broke off my engagement—it felt like a consolation prize from the gods, to be honest. But I inherited a mess. We were in the middle of the worst clan fighting the Deshan Coast had seen in decades.
“Most of my first year—my only year—in command we spent dealing with this one warlord, Abadoka. He gave us so much trouble. Burning farms, harassing our allies, breaking treaties for no reason. We had a couple of skirmishes with his men and finally hit him hard enough that he agreed to sit down for a parlay with me. At least … I thought we’d hit him hard enough. It turned out he was nursing a grudge—our former First Spear, the man I’d replaced, had been in Abadoka’s pay, and Abadoka didn’t understand why I hadn’t come to bend the knee to him yet. When I said I didn’t plan to, he violated the terms of our truce, slit the throats of the men who had come with me, and took me prisoner.
“He tried a bit of persuasion … You don’t need me to tell you about that. I’m reasonably stubborn, so that was a dead end. Then he decided to make an example of me, to show my commander that I’d been his creature and betrayed him. Breaking my legs like a runaway slave was meant as some sort of symbolism.”
“Angels of the Almighty. It didn’t work at all, did it? Nobody believed you’d been in his pay?”
“No. Everyone knew what kind of a vicious shit Abadoka was. It was a shameful failure on my part—my men were killed, and we lost any advantage we’d had with Abadoka—but I wasn’t turned off in disgrace. I was able to retire with honour. I felt it was more than I deserved. I felt … like a jilted lover. As if this country I’d come to love had rejected me. I’d no right to feel that way—it’s not my country, I was there as part of a barely-tolerated foreign army, but … ” He trailed off hopelessly.
“Oh, Dami. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m lucky I can still walk as well as I can. My left
knee healed completely—it hardly ever hurts.”
Varazda turned on his side again, laying his hand lightly on Damiskos’s arm. He made no more contact than that, and Damiskos wondered if that was because he was wary now that he’d realized how attached this man had become who’d slept with him all of twice.
It was true that Damiskos didn’t find it difficult to speak about what had happened. In some ways it helped to rehearse it in clear, unemotional terms. The things that would plunge him back into the memories were different: sounds or smells or the feeling of having his hands tied behind his back.
He thought back on some of the things that didn’t bother him. He remembered Abadoka’s stronghold—the first one, the one they had taken, not the one where he had been held prisoner—with the dark forest of the Vanesh encroaching on two sides. Suddenly something slid into place in his mind.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position. Varazda came with him, startled, hand clasping his arm.
“I just had a thought,” Damiskos said. “Were you old enough to remember the capture of Sumuz?”
Varazda let go of his arm and gave him a mystified look. “Sort of. I remember riding past Sumuz with my brothers shortly after it changed hands and seeing red flags flying. But the details I didn’t hear about until years later. The subterfuge with the … ” He stopped, closed his mouth for a moment, then said, “Dami. You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking. Are you?”
“I don’t know. What do you think I think I’m thinking?”
“That we could pull off something like the capture of Sumuz at Nione’s villa. You are thinking that.”
“I’ve actually done something like it before. It was one of the first blows I struck against Abadoka—that’s what made me think of it. I took great pleasure in using one of his countrymen’s famous tricks against him. The terrain here is different, but that would actually make it easier—and we don’t have a legion, which would make it harder—but we’re not trying to take a stronghold garrisoned with trained men-at-arms, we’re trying to retake a country house from a bunch of fishermen and philosophers. I likely killed their best fighter, and their second-best has a broken arm. They’ve lost their two high-status hostages, and I’d bet they wouldn’t even think to use the slaves as leverage—they put too low a value on slaves’ lives themselves to think that they could make worthwhile hostages. I think we could do it.”
“Look at you. This is what the poets mean when they say someone has ‘a glint in his eye,’ isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“I think if anyone could pull this off, Dami, it’s you.”
They dressed, Damiskos in a clean tunic from his luggage, and retraced their steps. When they finally came back, loaded with the items they had returned to pick up, they took the rest of the stairs down through the vineyard and the path to the beach at a leisurely pace. Damiskos felt easier now, almost content. He was glad he had told Varazda how he felt, even if in the long run it wouldn’t make any material difference.
Varazda was treating him a little differently—with a touch of a kind of careful affection—but it was a subtle thing.
“When I told Aradne that we are not a couple this morning,” Varazda said from behind Damiskos, as they neared the end of the path, “that must have hurt you. I am sorry.”
“Oh, that’s all right. It is true, after all.”
“Not because we want it to be true, though—and I needn’t have made it sound as if I did.”
The camp was still half-awake when they returned, the children and some of the women asleep inside the beach huts while others sat around a small fire they had built inside the fortifications. Aradne and one of the vineyard workers hurried to open the gate for Damiskos and Varazda to enter, and Nione got to her feet and came around the fire to embrace them both. They set down their bundles and returned her embrace.
“We were worried about you both when you were gone so long,” she said.
“We had some difficulty getting out,” said Damiskos. “And then we went back for some things.”
“We dawdled,” said Varazda at the same time. “I’m—we’re—sorry.”
He shot Damiskos a guilty look, and Damiskos felt like a bad influence.
“Damiskos has had an idea,” Varazda went on. “You’ve got to hear it. It’s utterly mad.”
“Here’s what it is,” said Damiskos, when they were all sitting around the fire. “We’ve set the signal for the postal ship from Boukos, so it should stop here some time tomorrow morning. They may well see that from the villa—it works to our advantage if they do, because I propose we go up and knock at the door and tell them that a band of crack Zashian mercenaries has arrived from Boukos on that ship, has the villa surrounded, and demands their immediate surrender.”
“And,” said Aradne into the stunned silence that followed, “they’ll believe this because … ”
“Because when they look out from the signal tower, they’ll catch glimpses through the trees of riders in Zashian clothes, they’ll see the glint of sun on weapons, they’ll hear strange, unintelligible shouts and signals, see foliage swaying as the Zashian forces marshal just out of sight.”
“Oh!” Aradne cried, all but bouncing up from the sand with a girlish delight that was equal parts endearing and alarming. “It’s a ruse! It’s like how they captured that place, Sou … Sou-something, in Sasia.”
“Sumuz,” Varazda supplied. “How do you know about that?”
“Someone told me the story. Oh, we must do it, Nione. It will be such fun.”
“Fun?” Nione repeated, giving Aradne an incredulous look.
“Fun,” Aradne repeated. “What did you bring back with you from the house?” she asked, turning back to Damiskos and Varazda.
“Mostly Varazda’s clothes,” said Damiskos with a grin. “Fortunately he doesn’t travel light. We’ve got some of the grooms on our side as well—we talked to them about the plan.”
They had gone back into the slave quarters, ransacked Varazda’s room for anything useable, and done some plotting with the four remaining slaves, who had been nearly beside themselves with eagerness to help.
“So do we have your permission, Nione?” Damiskos asked.
“Wait,” said Eurydemos, holding up a hand. “What are you proposing to do?”
“We’re going to pretend to be Zashian soldiers,” said Aradne, as if addressing a child she didn’t like very much.
“But surely,” said Eurydemos, “it is nothing more than a cowardly trick. Can such a thing be compatible with honour?”
“Is that really of primary importance, Eurydemos?” Nione cut in before either Aradne or Damiskos could answer.
“No, no,” the philosopher conceded easily, but with a kind of superior tone that Damiskos found grating. “I merely raise it as an interesting point.”
“I’m sure it is,” said Nione, “on some level. But as this isn’t a philosophical debate, I think we can set that aside.”
“Of course, of course,” said Eurydemos.
“Actually,” said Damiskos, “let’s not. Because I have an answer for that question. Honour is a matter of deeds in the world—it isn’t something you can make up in your own head. You can’t take away my honour by thinking I don’t deserve it—that’s not how it works.
“Now. I led a manoeuvre very like the capture of Sumuz, in the Zashian year 993, when I was First Spear. I had my company of a hundred, and I was waiting for my subordinates to arrive with their men, but there’d been a rockslide and they couldn’t get through the mountain pass to reach us. The stronghold we were intending to besiege was fully garrisoned, and it was only a matter of time before they realized our reinforcements weren’t coming and made a sally to attack us.
“I massed most of my men in front of the stronghold, sent a couple of parties through the woods surrounding the other sides, making a lot of noise and hanging helmets on trees and so on—exactly the same strategy as Sumuz. The defenders fell for it, we captu
red the stronghold with minimal bloodshed, and—” He held up his right wrist, indicating the bronze bracelet of the Second Koryphos. “My honour is intact. It’s no more a cowardly trick than feinting in a sword-fight, moving left when you’re going to cut right.”
“Ah-yah,” said Varazda under his breath. It was what Zashians sometimes shouted instead of clapping or whistling. Damiskos flashed him a smile.
Eurydemos nodded serenely, his superior look still in place. Damiskos didn’t care; he hadn’t really expected to convince the man. He just thought Nione and Aradne and the other women deserved to know that what they were proposing to do was something even the Phemian army wouldn’t have thought dishonourable.
“Very well,” said Nione. “What do we need to do first?”
“I seem to spend all my time these days listening to you strategize,” said Varazda drowsily.
He lay in the sand with his head in Damiskos’s lap. They were alone at the nearly extinct campfire now. It was extremely late.
“Getting tired of it, are you?”
“No,” said Varazda. “I love it.”
He settled himself more comfortably against Damiskos’s thigh and mumbled something about getting up. After a minute or two Damiskos could tell that he was asleep.
Eurydemos, who had gone around behind the beach huts earlier, returned to the fire at that point, hitching up his mantle, dashing Damiskos’s hope that he had intended to sleep somewhere else.
“We are exiled out here, I take it?” Eurydemos said as he sat in the sand beside Damiskos.
Damiskos smiled politely, looking down at Varazda in a pointed way that he hoped would cause Eurydemos to be quiet.
It didn’t. Eurydemos just looked at Varazda and sighed. “I do envy you, Damiskos. You have achieved what I so desire. But do not worry—I would not dream of asking if you would be willing to share.”
“Good,” said Damiskos stonily. “Because that would be up to him, really.”