Sword Dance Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  List of Places

  Acknowledgements

  Also Available

  About the Author

  Sword Dance

  A.J. Demas

  © 2019 by A.J. Demas

  Published July 2019 by Sexton’s Cottage Books.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Aud Koch

  Cover design by Lennan Adams

  CHAPTER I

  THE LAST LEG of the journey down to the villa would indeed have been easier on a mule. The man at the inn that morning had said so. If he hadn’t followed that up with a frown and a little up-and-down flick of the eyes, and if he hadn’t said, “You might find it easier, sir,” with the emphasis in just the wrong place—just a little too sympathetic—Damiskos might have listened to him and left his horse behind.

  Instead, as the sun began to set over the water, he was descending the steep track toward the coast on foot, limping badly, and leading Xanthe, who had refused some hours ago to proceed in any other way.

  “This is embarrassing for both of us, you know,” Damiskos remarked, reaching up to pat the mare’s neck as they stopped for a break. “I hope you feel it as I do.”

  Xanthe gave a shudder which might have been agreement.

  Damiskos looked down the hill toward the villa that was his destination. It perched on a heavily terraced green promontory cantilevered out into the bay below, white walls gleaming pink in the fading light. It was a smallish, old-looking place, with nothing smart or fashionable about it. From here, you couldn’t see any sign of wharfs or boats or the factory that must be somewhere nearby.

  It looked like the kind of place where you might be greeted by a bearded gentleman-farmer wearing a homespun mantle with no tunic, offering you a dish of salty cheese and a cup of his own wine, and congratulating himself on not being interested in your news from the city. But, as Damiskos knew, the current owner of the villa was about as different from that type as it was possible to be.

  It was full night by the time he and Xanthe reached the front gate, though with a bright moon. He had stopped to eat the last of the bread and smoked sausage he had brought with him from the inn before making the last of the descent, and when the road levelled as it ran out onto the promontory, Xanthe condescended to let him ride again, so their arrival was dignified enough.

  The gate was opened promptly; they had obviously been expecting him. The slaves made no comment on his lateness or his inappropriate mount. One took Xanthe to the stables, another carried off Damiskos’s saddlebags to the room where he would be staying, and a third told him that the mistress of the house and her other guests were in the summer dining-room if he wanted to join them after he had bathed.

  “Thank you,” he said, and winced inwardly at how grim he sounded. “I’ll just wash quickly and see her directly.” He should have tried to feign enthusiasm at the prospect of other guests, but the truth was, his heart had plummeted as soon as he heard them mentioned.

  The slave, a lanky boy with curly hair and a crisp, white tunic, trotted ahead of him through the yard and into the house. It was a warm night, and windows and doors stood open, the moonlight supplemented sparsely with lamps burning in brackets.

  How many other guests? Damiskos wondered. The villa had no near neighbours, which meant anyone at dinner would presumably be staying the night, or longer. Had Themistos sent him here in the middle of a house party?

  He realized he should have been prepared for the prospect. “Think of it as a working holiday,” his commanding officer had told him. “Less work and more holiday—fishing, hunting, country air, and good company—you could use it.” Damiskos disliked being told things like that, but he had kept his feelings to himself.

  In the atrium, the slave boy was met by a woman, big and intimidatingly beautiful, in the plain dress of a household servant. Her skin was topaz-coloured, and she wore her hair in an exuberant cloud framing her broad, strong-featured face. She gave Damiskos an unimpressed look.

  “Damiskos Temnon, I think? So you’ve arrived after all. Thought you might. We’ll put him in the yellow room, Niko,” she told the boy.

  The yellow room was on the ground floor, off the atrium, and Damiskos tried not to assume that this was because the intimidating woman thought he couldn’t manage stairs. He shed his sword belt, changed his hobnailed boots for sandals, and unpacked a few items from his saddlebags before shoving the bags themselves to the back of the closet. Then he followed the waiting Niko to the bath. The woman—she must have been a steward or overseer—had disappeared.

  The bath was an ancient, austere set of rooms to which a few modern comforts had been added. Damiskos bathed efficiently, towelled off, and emerged sooner than Niko had been expecting, to judge by the way the boy started and jumped to his feet. Damiskos gave him a smile that he meant to be reassuring. It probably just looked tired.

  Niko led him out into a torchlit garden, the first sign of real luxury in the villa. Symmetrical paths were laid out between beds of flowers and herbs, black and white and rose-coloured gravel twinkling in the torchlight as though sprinkled with gold dust. In the middle of a large square pool, water trickled from a fountain beneath bronze figures of female dancers, delicate and enigmatic in the darkness. The summer dining room was set into a vine-covered arbour on the far side of the walled enclosure of the garden. Light and laughter spilled out like honey from a comb. It was full of people.

  For a moment Damiskos felt a strong desire to turn around and simply leave. Mutter an excuse to the slaves, retrieve his horse and his belongings, make camp somewhere at the base of the mountain trail, and be on his way back to Pheme in the morning.

  He had emergency rations and a hunting bow in his pack, and plenty of experience sleeping out of doors. He’d actually made a move to reach out to the boy on the path ahead of him, to alert him to his intention, before it struck him how insane all of this would sound if he tried to explain it to anyone. To Themistos, for instance, when he arrived back in Pheme to report on the success of his journey.

  Actually, I didn’t even meet with her. I arrived there all right, but she was entertaining a lot of other guests, and they were drinking and having a good time, so I turned around and came home. And what would Nione herself say if she found out he had been here and turned around without seeing her?

  Instead, he let himself be led up to the glowing dining room full of people, still limping worse than usual, wishing he’d taken the time to comb his hair with something other than his fingers and to put on a better tunic.

  “Damiskos Temnon of the Quartermaster’s Office,” the boy announced, into a lull in the talk and laughter among the couches.

  “Damiskos!” said a sweetly warm voice from the far side of the dining room. “I had almost given up on you for the night.”

  Damiskos looked across at his host. He had not seen her in more than ten years, and she looked older, as must he too, but he would have known her anywhere. Of course, most people in Pheme might recognize her, if not from seeing her officiate at a ceremony then from her portrait in the Civil Palace. Nione Kukara, retired Maide
n of the Sacred Loom: she looked the part, even three years after leaving the Maidens, in a country villa surrounded by worldly guests.

  She wore her hair uncovered now, its dozens of braids swept up into a knot on top of her head. Her gown was demure and pale blue, her only jewellery a necklace of large white pearls, gleaming against her richly dark brown skin. She was tall and thin, striking without being beautiful, poised between youth and middle age. She had been not only a sacred Maiden but the chosen Speaker of the Maidens, representative of the goddess Anaxe, the only woman invited to speak before the Citizens’ Assembly. She retained an air of simple holiness imparted by two decades in the most sacred temple of Pheme. In some ways her house suited her very well.

  Damiskos wondered how he looked to her. Older, broken-down, with new scars and a new defeat in his eyes. And of course the lame leg.

  He waited tensely for the pity to appear on her face, but she kept it well hidden. She had always been better at sparing others’ feelings than guarding her own vulnerabilities. Damiskos spoke some words of apology, which were waved away with a gentle smile, and in a moment he found himself on the vacant end of a couch, a wine-cup being filled for him.

  “And what brings Damiskos Temnon of the Quartermaster’s Office to Laothalia?” one of the guests asked. Damiskos could not see the speaker past the woman who was serving him.

  “Business,” Nione answered for him. “Which of course will keep until tomorrow. And old ties of friendship. Damiskos served in the Honour Guard at the Maidens’ House when he was a youth.”

  She left it at that, not offering any further explanation or apology for a friendship that must have struck most people as unusual, even shocking. That too was how she had always been: so secure in her own honesty that she forgot to consider how things looked to suspicious people. And sometimes her conviction made itself felt. There were no obvious raised eyebrows among her guests.

  Damiskos felt a sudden sense of loss for the years that had separated himself and Nione. There had been letters now and then, and he had never ceased to think of her as a friend. But the truth was that he knew as little of what her life had been during those years, and who she was now, as she did of him. He had last known her as a consecrated virgin serving the gods; she had last known him as a soldier.

  “Let me introduce my other friends to you, Damiskos.”

  Damiskos sipped his wine and surveyed the guests on the couches as she named them for him.

  “Eurydemos, on your right, you will know by reputation,” she said. “He is a kinsman of mine, and I have known him since I was a child—long before he began teaching at the Marble Porches.”

  Damiskos looked at the man whose couch he was sharing. He had heard the name. The philosopher was a tall man with a mop of silver hair, a sparse beard, and an untidily wrapped mantle. Heavily lidded eyes swung toward Damiskos for a moment before drifting knowingly away, as if they had seen all they needed for Eurydemos to form an opinion of the man from the Quartermaster’s Office.

  “He has just come from founding a school in Boukos,” Nione went on, “and now he is on his way home to Pheme. Helenos and Gelon here are among his current students.” She indicated the young men sharing the adjacent couch, one thin and olive-skinned and handsome in a scholarly way, the other sturdier, younger, with a snub nose and freckles.

  “Kleitos is a former student of Eurydemos’s, and his wife Tyra a friend of mine.” They were a couple of about Damiskos’s age on the opposite side of the dining room. “And this is Aristokles Demotiades Phoskos, from Boukos.”

  For a moment, Nione’s gently graceful manner faltered, as though she had to search for something to add to her presentation of Aristokles. He was a man in his mid-forties, dressed in a sumptuous dark red tunic, his thick dark hair streaked with grey, several rings on each of his large hands. He was alone on his couch, directly across the dining room from Damiskos.

  Obviously unable to come up with anything else to say about Aristokles, Nione moved on to the last member of the party, the young woman who sat with her feet tucked up at the end of her own couch, whose name was Phaia. She was another of the philosopher’s students, the only woman currently among them, Nione said, the admiration clear in her tone.

  Phaia was remarkably lovely, dark-eyed and intense-looking, her masses of black curls pulled back haphazardly from a pale face. She looked like she could have posed for a wall-painting of a nymph—and might have done it, too, just to shock the sort of people who would have disapproved.

  The introductions finished, the other guests resumed their conversation, most of them content to ignore Damiskos, who was content to be ignored.

  Kleitos had been in the middle of a story, which he now resumed, about his neighbours in the city and a dispute over the upkeep of a communal garden. Somehow, by a process Damiskos wasn’t paying enough attention to follow, this topic led not to a general discussion of bad neighbours but to a debate about whether or not “unmanliness” would be the death of the Republic. The philosopher and his students all seemed to agree that it would.

  “You see,” said Eurydemos, in a sonorous, schoolroom tone, “we may understand Order as the masculine principle, Chaos as the feminine. On the one side, the light of civilization—on the other, primordial darkness. And so the Republic cannot function, cannot order itself, if the masculine principle is not ascendant.”

  “How can you suggest,” said Nione mildly, almost laughing, “that ‘the masculine principle is not ascendant’ when men everywhere control everything and always have?”

  “But are they actually men when they allow themselves to be used like women?” This was Gelon, the younger of the two male students, speaking rather loudly.

  “Practitioners of Kossian love, as they call themselves,” Kleitos scoffed. “Could anything be more unmanly?”

  “Our master speaks of abstractions,” said Helenos, with a tolerant sidelong glance at Gelon. “Not individuals.”

  “Exactly,” said Eurydemos, smiling at his students. “And we must understand that both the masculine and feminine forces are necessary. Just as the antithesis of the wise ruler in the masculine order is the fearsome tyrant, so the feminine principle contains both destruction and creation.”

  “In the Ideal Republic,” said Gelon, who had possibly had too much to drink, “I maintain that unnatural half-men would be deprived of citizenship.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Eurydemos sighed. “But we must distinguish between unmanly vice and pure affection.”

  Here he launched into a long anecdote about the heroism of the lovers Tinandros and Phoros to illustrate his point. Helenos caught Damiskos’s eye and gave him a humorous look which Damiskos found somehow flattering. The whole discussion was the purest gibberish as far as he could tell. He thought Nione looked as if she had stopped listening to it.

  “Well,” said Phaia, rearranging herself on her host’s couch and looking at Nione, “since women are not citizens in the first place, I don’t suppose any of this applies to us.”

  There was a little awkward laughter at that, and then someone else tactfully changed the subject to sea travel, and everyone began swapping stories of storms and seasickness. Damiskos waited for this to somehow turn into a political discussion too—perhaps someone would suggest that the postal ship from Boukos to the north coast of Pheme was a threat to the Republic—but mercifully it did not happen.

  He sipped his wine. It was a strong, straightforward red, probably from the villa’s own terraced vineyards, which he had passed on his way in. He liked it. He looked across the dining room and noticed a slave sitting on a cushion at the foot of Aristokles’s couch, obviously his personal attendant, not part of Nione’s staff.

  The slave was a Zashian—a eunuch, to judge by his beardless face and the smooth column of his throat. He was dolled up in a way that would have made him stand out even in Zash: hands painted with henna; eyes rimmed in kohl and winged with glittering turquoise; long drops dangling from his ears. A gold st
ud in the shape of a flower winked in the side of his nose. Even in the warm night he wore layers of lushly decorated clothing: close-fitting trousers and silk tunic and long jacket, all patterned and embroidered. His long black hair was pulled back into half a dozen braids, threaded with beads and held together by a gold clasp on top of his head so that they fell down his back like the strands of a scourge.

  Damiskos looked back up at the Boukossian aristocrat who had bought such a slave and brought him to be stared at in the home of a retired Maiden. He felt a scalding contempt for the man.

  There was nothing astonishing in a Boukossian owning a Zashian slave. The trade agreement between Boukos and Zash was eight years old now. But it had not occurred to Damiskos—just because he hadn’t given it much thought—that the trade agreement might include slaves, and those slaves might include Zashian eunuchs. He wanted to ask the man on the other side of the dining room, who lay propped comfortably on his elbow, complaining about how long it took to sail from Boukos in the height of summer, what he knew about how they made eunuchs in Zash.

  Had he heard how many of the boys died of infection or killed themselves afterward? Did he know that under Zashian law, eunuchs, unlike other slaves, could not earn their freedom, that they were considered neither male nor female but some other, null category, unworthy even of a name, that they were sometimes referred to in legal documents with the pronoun used for animals?

  Damiskos doubted that Aristokles had travelled to Zash; the man sounded as if he could barely stand the voyage through the Tentines to the north coast of Pheme. He had probably bought the slave who sat at his feet in the market of his own city, picking him up as an expensive, exotic luxury to grace his aristocratic home, like a piece of imported carpet or a box of incense. He had outfitted the eunuch ignorantly in a half-female style, with the nose-ring and the hennaed hands that only a woman would have displayed in Zash. Though in truth the combination was not unattractive.

  Damiskos reached for a dish of olives on the table in front of him. The female half of the couple on the couch beside Aristokles asked how he had found his journey around the coast from the city.