Page 62 of Sword Dance

“There is danger,” he whispered back finally, answering the question he thought Varazda was really asking. “They’re armed and angry, they have killed before, and we have already refused an offer of amnesty. But we’re well fortified, and I don’t think they’re here to attack, just to intimidate.”

“You’re not intimidated.”

“Not at all, no.”

Varazda smiled, tense and beautiful in the shadows. “It’s the thought of those children being in danger … ”

Damiskos thought of the painted shell with the picture of the little girl, and felt heartless.

“We’ll protect them,” he said firmly.

“I know.”

The minutes crept by, and the students stood around on the beach, not coming any closer. Damiskos could not spot Helenos in the dark, but assumed he was there. This was an organized action, planned beforehand, not a spur-of-the-moment thing with shuffling and discussion. It bore Helenos’s stamp, if Damiskos had judged him right. It was just a matter of waiting them out.

Aradne moved quietly among the women, speaking a reassuring word here and there, and after watching her for a moment, Nione got up and followed her lead. The low murmur of voices was comforting. There was even a soft laugh from time to time. Inside the hut, the baby gurgled again, and one of the women began singing to it.

Damiskos was just wondering whether he should offer some gesture of comfort to Varazda, and what it should be, when Varazda reached out in the dark and slipped his cool, slender hand into Damiskos’s. Damiskos gave it a squeeze, and Varazda moved to nestle lightly against his side.

It felt so good to be trusted with this, to have Varazda turn to him, however subtly, for reassurance. To be able to give it.

“They don’t have any projectile weapons,” Damiskos whispered, because he could offer more practical forms of reassurance than hand-holding. “Any slings or bows.”

“No,” Varazda agreed. “You’re right. There aren’t any up at the villa.”

“There aren’t. How did you know that?”

“I made Aristokles try to put together a hunting party to get everyone out of the house on the second day we were here. It didn’t work. Apparently no one in the household hunts, and none of the guests brought their own bows.”

After a moment, in the interest of complete honesty, Damiskos said, “I did, but I hid it at the back of my closet along with my sword.”

“I doubt they’d be able to string it if they found it,” said Varazda. He ran his fingertips delicately up the muscles of Damiskos’s upper arm. Damiskos tried to suppress a shiver.

By this time the students, who had probably expected screaming and pandemonium to greet their appearance on the beach, had begun to get restless. A buzz of disagreement arose, from which Damiskos could separate out the voice of Gelon, and the voice of Helenos telling Gelon to shut up.

If they were going to approach the perimeter, Damiskos thought, they would do it soon. He looked up at the roof of the nearest beach hut, judging whether there was enough light for the tactic he had envisioned earlier in the day.

“You’re thinking of getting up on the roof to throw stones down on them?” said Varazda.

“I, ah. I couldn’t do it myself.” Gods. That was hard to admit. And he’d thought he was used to it by now. “The roof is too steep, I’d … ”

Varazda squeezed his hand, surprisingly hard. “I didn’t mean that—I meant are you thinking of sending someone. Because you could send me. I’m a terrific shot. I used to hunt deer in the king’s park at Gudul.”

“Of course you did.” Damiskos smiled at the image that flashed into his mind of his beautiful Varazda riding through the dappled woodland of northern Zash with a bow in his hand. Not his Varazda. Not his, he reminded himself sternly.

They crept over to the corner of the hut, Damiskos gave Varazda a boost, and Varazda slithered easily up onto the tiles of the roof. Damiskos handed him up a supply of the stones they had gathered earlier, tied in a sling made of one of the women’s shawls.

Presently, as Damiskos had expected, the students shuffled closer, and Helenos took a step forward as if about to speak. Varazda whipped a stone at his head. Helenos dodged by a hairsbreadth and jumped back. The women laughed. One of them whistled. They got to their feet, their own collections of stones at the ready.

Varazda was silhouetted against the sky, arm drawn back to hurl another stone, and Damiskos, exhilaration gone and actually feeling a little sick to his stomach, prayed that he had been right about the students having no bows.

Helenos, who was no longer in control of his troops, gave no order, but the students charged anyway, half-heartedly and with abysmal discipline. The women and Varazda launched a barrage of stones. Howls of shock and pain met the onslaught, and the students beat a ragged, piecemeal retreat. Some of them simply kept running along the beach, a couple lay down in the sand, clutching injured body parts, and the rest stood at a safe distance and had a shouted argument about what to do next. In the end, they gathered up their wounded and slunk away to the villa.

* * *

Damiskos woke with a feeling that he’d forgotten something. The tree-covered slopes beyond Laothalia stood out black against the slowly lightening sky. Varazda was sleeping in the sand nearby. The women were asleep in the beach hut, or in the sand outside its entrance, rolled up in their mantles.

Damiskos realized that he had fallen asleep where he sat after the students departed, before he had set up a watch rota—and of course he hadn’t kept watch himself. He would have earned well-deserved lashes if he had neglected his duty like that in the army, no matter how tired he had been. Of course, in the army he never had neglected his duty like that.