Page 13 of Sword Dance

After breakfast, the three of them walked down from the villa to the complex of buildings by the shoreline that housed the fish-sauce operation. The path descended the cliffside with the aid of several steep flights of stairs. Damiskos was embarrassed by how slowly the two women were forced to go for his sake.

“Will you be staying long?” Phaia asked him coolly.

“At least a fortnight, I hope,” said Nione before he could answer.

“Really?” said Phaia. “That seems a long time to spend buying fish sauce.”

Nione laughed.

“My commanding officer thought I needed a holiday,” said Damiskos, “after … There was a lot of trouble with the grain shortages in the winter. I hope I hadn’t complained, but I suppose I must have been looking tired.”

Once he’d been able to lead troops into battle after days of hard riding through the hostile coastlands of Zash, but these days apparently a few late nights in an office were enough to make him look like he needed a holiday.

“I see,” said Phaia. “Well, for my part, I’m sure I shall never want to leave.” She smiled, intimately and dazzlingly, up at Nione.

“Oh, come,” said Nione, but she looked as if she was suppressing a smile of her own.

Damiskos wondered if that was what it looked like—women had different ways of behaving with one another, so it didn’t do to make assumptions—and whether Phaia had been glaring at him after all because she thought he was trying to flirt with Nione too.

He also thought that he was going to need another holiday after this one.

The fish-sauce factory was set on a white sweep of shoreline below the promontory that held the villa. The buildings, of whitewashed stone, stood near the waterline, and a pair of neat fishing boats were moored at the end of a stone jetty. Workers were busy processing the morning’s catch at a long table on the shore.

The smell hit them almost as soon as they arrived on the beach: a wave of fishiness, with undercurrents of decay and fermentation and salt. It got stronger as they approached. Damiskos tried to think what to say about it, but couldn’t come up with anything polite.

“Occasionally, when there’s a stiff wind, you get a whiff of that in the garden,” said Nione. “But only occasionally.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t be out in the garden much in a stiff wind,” said Damiskos.

“No,” said Nione, “that’s true.”

Phaia looked nauseous.

Inside, the factory was a model of efficiency, everything well-appointed and clean. There were outdoor tanks, a fermenting house, a smaller building where the finished sauce was bottled, and a warehouse which contained jars of sauce ready to ship, along with some wine and olives and other products of the estate.

Nione introduced her foreman, who proudly pointed out the improvements they had made, all the new work that had been done to the buildings since Nione bought the operation. The work of the factory was done by a small staff, six slaves under the oversight of the foreman, while the crews of the two fishing boats that supplied them were free contractors who leased their vessels from Nione and also sold fresh fish up and down the coast.

“The factory didn’t belong to my family,” Nione explained, as they came back out of the bottling house onto the sunlit shore. “It just happened to be for sale at the same time that I moved back to the neighbourhood. We haven’t changed the recipe or the method of production at all. My focus has been on improving distribution.”

“Very sensible,” said Damiskos.

He was envious, actually. She seemed to have found a new passion after leaving the Maidens. He wished he had something similar. He would have loved to run a business, to renovate an old house, to live quietly in the country—though to tell the truth he liked the city just as well. But his father had sold the family home years ago, and his parents lived in rented rooms. Damiskos had forfeited his pension by going back to work, and there had been no dowry for him when he left the Second Koryphos.

The foreman reappeared, followed by a boy carrying a tray with several small cups. Damiskos hoped fleetingly that this wasn’t what it looked like.

“I thought you would like to sample our product,” said the foreman.

“Of course,” said Damiskos neutrally.

The factory made three different grades of fish sauce, and the foreman had brought samples of each. Damiskos dutifully sipped them all. Phaia declined, not very politely.

Damiskos wasn’t picky about food; he didn’t mind a dish strongly flavoured with fish sauce, but he wasn’t one of those people who liked to slop it on everything. He certainly had never felt inclined to drink it straight, and the experience didn’t change his mind.

“Let’s walk a little further down the beach,” Nione suggested, after her foreman had departed.

“Yes, let’s,” said Phaia.

She tucked her hand through Nione’s arm, murmuring something about how hard it was to walk on the soft sand. She wore stout sandals, and Damiskos doubted that she was really having difficulty. They made a striking pair, Phaia wispy and delicate and pale, Nione tall and lean, with her braids and her dark brown skin.