Page 10 of Sword Dance

Damiskos said no more, but he wasn’t at all convinced he had heard the whole story. Their explanation wasn’t unbelievable, but it was a little thin, and it didn’t account for how alarmed Aristokles had looked when he realized he’d let this bit of information slip.

They reached the front door, and the Zashian, to Damiskos’s surprise, did not follow his patron inside to his room, but saw him through the door and then turned back.

He must have seen Damiskos’s puzzled look in the moonlight, because he gestured toward a building on the other side of the yard, and said, “I’m headed back to my own room,” rather dryly.

“Oh,” said Damiskos. He hoped it wasn’t obvious that he had assumed the eunuch shared Aristokles’s bed. But if he didn’t, then Damiskos was at a loss all over again. He realized the building on the other side of the yard was the slave quarters. “Why did you let them put you out there?”

The Zashian sighed in a way that seemed somehow very genuine. He looked at the ground for a moment, and then he shrugged, looking up. “It is what I’m used to.”

“I see.” That was rather sad, but it made sense. “Let me see you safely there?”

“That’s … unnecessary, but thank you.” He made a gracious, automatic gesture, something between a nod and a bow, which Damiskos had seen often among Zashian courtiers.

Pharastes, his master had called him. It was the Pseuchaian rendering of an old and dignified Zashian name that meant “warrior.”

“Your name is Varazda, isn’t it?” Damiskos ventured.

“Varazda son of Nahaz son of Aroz of the clan Kamun.” He made a more studied version of the same courtly gesture. “In Boukos I generally go by Pharastes.”

Son of Nahaz son of Aroz. He had been an aristocrat. He was probably from one of the warring clans in the southeast, whose territory and conflicts Damiskos knew well. Many of their women and children ended up as slaves when their men were massacred in raids. Damiskos’s throat felt suddenly painfully constricted. Whatever he had meant to ask after that—and he wasn’t at all sure what it was—went unsaid, and they crossed the yard to the slaves’ quarters in awkward silence.

At the bottom of the exterior stairs that led up to the second-storey rooms, Varazda turned and bowed once more.

“I—am very grateful, truly,” he said in a subdued voice. “For your intervention. I cannot thank you enough.”

Damiskos shook his head. “I am sorry I couldn’t have done it in a more … couldn’t have intervened without causing you more distress. I’m sorry I misinterpreted what I saw.”

It must have been awful, especially for a civilian, to think you’d got the better of your attacker only to find yourself seized from behind by someone who might easily have been his accomplice. Worse still if you had ever spent time in slavery.

Varazda looked slightly surprised. “You sorted it out,” he said. “That’s the main thing.” He looked down rather ruefully at the raisin cake Aristokles had given him, then held it out on one decorated palm. “By any chance were you going to the kitchen for a snack yourself? Because I don’t think I’m going to eat this.”

Chapter 4

When Damiskos woke the following morning, the first thing he saw was Varazda’s floral-patterned handkerchief on the table by the head of the bed. He propped himself on one hand and lay looking at it and recalling the events of the previous night. Gelon’s knife was on the table too. Damiskos had eaten the raisin cake.

He wondered what he should do about last night’s incident. His instinct, born of a career in the army, was to report it to someone. But who? If Aristokles hadn’t been there at the time, it would have been appropriate to report it to him, as involving his slave—or his freedman, or whatever Varazda was. But Aristokles had been there, and frankly his response had been one of the more peculiar parts of the incident.

He should tell Nione—though Aristokles would no doubt do so himself, perhaps already had. Aristokles might also complain to Eurydemos about the behaviour of his student. That would be very appropriate.

Damiskos got out of bed and went to the portable shrine to Terza that he had set up in a suitable corner of his room the previous morning. It was a day for burning incense, but he had used up all his small supply on the journey over the mountains. The rubrics specified only a sweet smell, so it was possible to use something other than incense. His eyes fell again on the handkerchief by the bed.

On impulse, he picked it up and brought it to his nose. It smelled of perfume. He had rinsed out the traces of blood the night before, and it was still slightly damp. He shook it out and draped it over the incense burner in his shrine and made his customary brisk and unemotional morning prayer.

He heard voices from the winter dining room on the other side of the atrium as soon as he emerged from his room.

“Gelon says your slave attacked him last night—and I say you should have him beaten for it!”

“I suppose it’s my business what I choose to do with my own slave, sir.”

“Not when he begins attacking free Phemians, sir! Then it’s everyone’s business to see he’s punished.”

“Some of us”—here Damiskos thought he recognized the voice of Helenos, calm and reasonable as ever—“wonder that you would see fit to bring such a slave into a Phemian household.”

Damiskos stepped through the dining-room door. The men inside looked up at his arrival.

Along with Aristokles and Helenos, Gelon was there, looking distinctly shifty and rather sick, his white face decorated with a livid bruise under one eye. Kleitos was there too; he was the one who had been remonstrating with Aristokles. Varazda was not present, and Damiskos did not know whether to think this a mercy or not.

“First Spear,” said Helenos smoothly. “Ah, my apologies—Damiskos, I mean. You and I were speaking yesterday of the matter.”