Page 8 of Sword Dance

There was a moment’s awkward pause. Damiskos couldn’t think of anything polite to say about dancing with swords. That was not what swords were for.

The eunuch tucked a strand of hair behind his ear with a hennaed fingertip and gave a little nod before turning to depart the same way as his master. Left alone in the library at last, Damiskos wandered to one of the book-cupboards and stood staring aimlessly at the scrolls for a minute before he could collect himself enough to pick one.

He had looked on the Zashian strictly as an object of pity before, but now he felt the stirring of a personal dislike. He’d been trying to be friendly, and the eunuch had just been very demurely rude to him. Which was fine. You could pity a fellow perfectly adequately without liking him.

Chapter 3

Conversation at dinner that night was much the same as the night before. Gelon ranted about effeminates destroying the republic, and Aristokles and Kleitos spouted their different flavours of ignorant nonsense about Zash.

Eurydemos read aloud a poem of his own composition about a man in love with a beautiful tree without fruit. That struck Damiskos as an obvious non-starter. Nione might not have children, but it was because she had spent most of her life serving in the Maidens’ House, and anyway she was only in her thirties; if she had wanted children, the option was surely still open to her.

After that, the philosopher and his students became very animated on the subject of something they called “Phemian purity.” Damiskos honestly could not work out what it was supposed to mean. Pheme was a huge, cosmopolitan city, the biggest in the world. It was the centre of a web of conquest and influence and trade that had long ago filled its streets with almost every race and language and religion. All of that wasn’t some kind of accretion; it was Pheme. What did “purity” have to do with any of that?

He didn’t speak up; he knew better than to get involved in a conversation where they were quoting philosophers he had never heard of and talking about the Ideal Republic as if they had spent their summers there growing up.

He left them still debating and went in to bed early, fidgeted about for a while, rearranging his portable shrine and oiling his sword belt, then lay staring at the moonlit ceiling and listening to the subdued night sounds of the villa around him.

He heard voices in the atrium outside his room, a man’s and a woman’s.

“It’s a disgrace, isn’t it?” said the woman’s voice. “The way the master drools over him.”

“It’s a disgrace, and it’s a godsdamned fucking nuisance,” the man replied angrily. “Where did this fucking Sasian-lover come from, anyway, and why have we got to contend with him now of all times?”

Damiskos fell asleep eventually, though he didn’t feel as if he’d been asleep long when something woke him. The house was very quiet now, but there must have been some noise. He heard it again: low voices from the atrium, these too quiet for him to make out the words, and then the slight creak and thump of a heavy door opening and shutting.

Probably Nione’s household slaves, working late and headed back to their quarters. Damiskos turned over in bed and tried to go back to sleep.

Once more, he couldn’t settle. Very soon he found himself sitting up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, and searching in the shadows for his sandals. He would get up and take a walk, and hopefully that would help him fall back to sleep. He left his room, crossed the moonlit atrium, and went down the short passage toward the garden.

From the colonnade, he saw that there was someone already there, sitting by the fountain. The moon was almost full, and he could identify Eurydemos by his mane of grey hair. Damiskos had no desire to be drawn into a philosophical discussion or listen to soggy poetry in the middle of the night. He headed back through the house toward the front door.

The yard in front of the house was a wide, gravelled space, with the slave’s quarters along one side, the kitchens and other domestic workshops along the other. Between the kitchen range and the paved path leading to the gate stood a well with a waist-high stone coping and a pulley. As soon as Damiskos stepped through the front door, he saw the two figures on the other side of the well.

He saw the glint of moonlight on a knife-blade, and he was running—or doing the closest thing he could to running these days, ungainly and not very fast—across the gravel and around the well. He collided with the Zashian eunuch, pinioned his arms from behind, and caught hold of his right wrist. The knife dropped to the gravel. Gelon, backed up against the coping of the well, gave a startled grunt.

Sword-dancing probably demanded some strength as well as grace. The body Damiskos had hold of was more wiry than he had expected, and twisted in a very determined effort to escape. This took up enough of Damiskos’s attention that he almost didn’t notice Gelon stepping forward and snatching up the fallen knife until it was too late, and the young man was lunging forward with it.

Damiskos swung his captive out of the path of the knife and felt the blade catch in the sleeve of his own tunic and graze his upper arm. He let go of the Zashian to push Gelon back, catching him across the throat with his forearm and slamming him into the coping, unbalancing him enough to threaten him with a fall into the well. He wrenched the knife out of Gelon’s hand and stepped back defensively.

“What’s going on?” Damiskos demanded, glancing between the two of them. The eunuch was leaning with his hands on his knees, catching his breath.

Gelon coughed and pushed himself off the well.

“He knows what he was trying to do with his unnatural Sasian ways!” the student rasped. “I wasn’t going to kill him—I was only going to frighten him, the chicken-hearted dog that he is.”

Having delivered this speech, Gelon fled, thudding away over the gravel toward the house. Damiskos let him go, mostly because he couldn’t have hoped to catch up to him.

He flipped the knife around, point down, and looked back at the eunuch. His eyes looked black in his bone-white face, and the hand that he lifted to push back his hair was shaking badly. His hair was loose, dark strands sticking to his face and throat, the eye-makeup washed off for the night, his only remaining ornament the little flower-shaped stud in his nose.

“I take it this knife was his?” said Damiskos.

The Zashian nodded.

“Are you all right? He didn’t hurt you?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m extremely sorry. If I hadn’t interfered … You had the situation under control.”