Page 66 of Sword Dance

Varazda gave him a curious look. “Is that modesty, First Spear, or a compliment to my dissembling ability?”

“I don’t know … both?”

“Fair. I will take the compliment, but I reject the modesty as unwarranted.”

Damiskos snorted, but he couldn’t help feeling a little glow of pleasure. He still had a soldier’s body, hard with muscle, marked with the scars of battle, curly dark hair on his chest and belly and legs because it was the fashion in the colonial legions not to depilate. He pretended not to be proud of what he had left of his physique, but the truth was he worked hard on it.

Varazda looked as if he wanted to say more but didn’t know what. Damiskos imagined picking up one of Varazda’s hands and laying it on his own chest, drawing it down over his pectoral muscles to his abdomen, inviting Varazda to explore if he wanted to. Damiskos thought he did want to.

Varazda moved briskly, getting his feet under him. “I’ve had a thought too. Something that might slow them down a little when they do come to hector us again.”

He stood and held out a hand to help Damiskos up. Damiskos took it and was pulled smoothly upright, though it couldn’t be said that Varazda made it look easy.

“It’s not exactly light,” said Varazda, looking him up and down ostentatiously. “All … that.”

“We can’t all be water-nymphs.”

Varazda shouted with laughter, in that way that was becoming delightfully familiar to Damiskos.

“Perhaps,” Varazda said as they were dressing on the shore, “later we’ll find another chance to be alone, somewhere where it doesn’t smell like burnt fish sauce.”

“That would be great,” said Damiskos. “We should—if we can—we should do that.”

He knew he was going to think about that for the rest of the day.

Chapter 16

Varazda’s plan was to booby-trap the stairs from the villa with jars of fish sauce. By the time they had hauled a sufficient number of full jars halfway up the narrow stairs and piled them precariously on the steps, it had been long enough that Damiskos thought they could safely rejoin the women.

Nione met them outside the fortifications. “I want to have a funeral for Aristokles,” she said without preamble.

“Yes, of course,” said Damiskos. “Wait. You mean right now?”

She nodded. “You said yourself it was important to keep up morale.”

“You want to have a funeral to keep up morale.”

“Yes, I realize it sounds absurd,” said Nione patiently. “But it isn’t good for morale to have him lying in the beach hut uncremated. And it is impious.”

That was undeniably true. And Damiskos had gone out of his way to try to convince Nione that she was the ranking officer.

He nodded curtly. “We will make it work.”

The women of Nione’s household knew exactly what to do, and were amazingly calm about doing it. Nione had clearly been right to think that preparing for the funeral of a man none of them had liked much would take their minds off their situation. They had already seen to the washing and laying out of Aristokles’s body, and gave Damiskos quizzical looks when he was surprised to learn this. Now a small party set off to walk to Laokia to ask for the local pyre-maker. The village would be deserted, as most of its residents had gone to the Tentines for Hapikon, but the pyre-maker was not an Oposite and so should still be there.

The rest of the party, while not on sentry duty, began gathering firewood. Nione went into the empty beach hut to say some preliminary prayers. Once her mistress was gone, Aradne said that she knew how to build a pyre and that they needn’t wait for the pyre-maker from the village. She directed the others to pile the wood and deflected questions about where she had learned how to do this.

They waited for the pyre-maker anyway, because she would bring with her the necessary spices for the fire. Aristokles’s body was brought out, wrapped in a couple of the household women’s mantles that had been sacrificed to make a shroud. Nione emerged and did not ask how Aradne came to know how to build a pyre.

The women who had gone to the village returned in a cart, with the pyre-maker and her tools, along with some supplies: bread, cheese, fruit, and blankets. The pyre-maker looked at Aradne’s amateur effort and seemed impressed.

Nione, as a former Maiden of the Sacred Loom and priest of Anaxe, led the funeral. The women joined in the choruses of lamentation around the pyre, singing as strongly and respectfully as if Aristokles had been a member of their household or a departed friend. Varazda joined in. He took the torch from the pyre-maker and lit the kindling to start the fire. He said something in Zashian after the pyre was lit that sounded like a short prayer; Damiskos was not close enough to hear.

No doubt there were people in Boukos who would have given Aristokles a more impressive funeral, where there would have been more weeping—genuine and feigned—and fewer of the guests would have been wearing grubby, soot-stained clothing. But Damiskos did not think that anyone could have asked for a more respectful ceremony than the one they performed on the beach that afternoon.

There was no sign of the students. Varazda went back to the stairs to check on their booby-trap and reported that several of the jars had been knocked over and broken, but the others were still in place. It suggested that someone had come down, tripped over them, and given up rather than attempting to clear the rest away. That fit with Damiskos’s theory that the students would send another emissary before returning in force.

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