THE INTIMIDATING STEWARD, or overseer, or whatever she was, appeared at Damiskos’s door the following morning while he was dressing. She was unapologetic—and apparently unembarrassed.
“The mistress would like you to join her in the garden for breakfast. I’m sure you won’t want to keep her waiting.”
He finished pulling his tunic over his head. “Of course not.”
She gave him an approving nod and graciously waited for him to buckle his belt and fasten his sandals before marching him out into the garden to report to her mistress. He barely restrained the urge to salute when he arrived.
“Here he is,” she said, presenting him as if he were a dish that the kitchen had worked hard on but that she privately thought unappetizing.
“Thank you, Aradne,” said Nione, smiling at her. “Damiskos, will you join me?”
She was seated for breakfast at a table in a little secluded nook on the far side of the garden, with a beautiful view out over the bay. She was alone, and there was only one other chair pulled up to the table. Damiskos sat, a little stiffly, stretching out his right leg. His knee was sore this morning, though not as bad as it had been last night.
“Your garden is beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you. It is the one part of the house I have completely redone to my satisfaction so far.”
“One thing more, ma’am,” said Aradne. “You asked me to tell you how Gion was doing—she’s much better this morning.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. Tell her to take it easy the rest of the day, and I’ll visit her in her room later this morning. What about Niko? How is he coming with his lessons?”
There was a short conversation about Niko’s lessons, the progress of someone else’s pregnancy, and an account of how a dispute among the vineyard workers had been settled. Then the servant departed, and as she left Damiskos suddenly had a memory of a sturdy little girl with topaz-brown skin.
“There was a slave named Aradne in the Maidens’ House when you were a girl.”
Nione smiled. “The very same. She belonged to the House, but she purchased her freedom three years ago—at around the same time that I retired. I offered her the job as my steward. She’s splendid.” She passed Damiskos a dish of fruit from the table. “How long has it been since you and I met?”
“Since we first met? Fifteen … sixteen years. Immortal gods. Yes, it must be. I was sixteen when I started in the Honour Guard.”
“Were you really? Only sixteen?”
He nodded. He had been young for a recruit, a rising star, beginning his glittering ascent.
“I miss the Maidens’ House,” Nione said.
“Yes.” He should have asked about that rather than waiting for her to mention it. That was surely what a good friend would have done. “You always loved it there.”
“So many of the other girls didn’t. Some of them were almost … in mourning, for the women they could have become if they lived in the world. Wives and mothers, normal things. Well, they can still have some of that, if they want—men line up to marry ex-Maidens—but I suppose it is a long time to wait for the life you want.” She spoke as if making an earnest effort to understand something that made no sense to her.
“But you never wanted that life.”
He had known this about her for—well, sixteen years, more or less. She had been so happy in the Maidens’ House, wearing her regalia as if born to it, performing all her duties with zeal. It was why she had risen to be Speaker of the Maidens, almost inevitably. It was one of the things that had made Damiskos like her.
“I never did,” she said. She glanced at him with an unreadable expression. “And so I’m doing my best to spend my retirement allowance as quickly as I can, repairing this old place and setting myself up in business.”
Damiskos wasn’t quite sure how that followed, but he didn’t ask.
Someone had come out of the house into the colonnade at the edge of the garden. It was Aristokles’s eunuch slave, already painted and decorated for the day, in spite of the early hour. His hair was in one thick braid today, and the long jacket he wore over his tunic was sleeveless, perhaps a concession to the heat, but everything else was much as the night before. He moved with a precise grace, and his figure under the close-fitting layers of his clothes was wasp-waisted and effeminate. He squinted slightly in the sunlight as he came out from under the colonnade.
“Oh, it’s Aristokles’s servant,” Nione murmured. “He danced for us yesterday, Damiskos, before you arrived—I’m sorry you missed it. He’s very good.”
“Ah,” said Damiskos, unable to think of anything else. He had seen many different kinds of dancing in Zash, but found it hard to picture any of them taking place in Nione’s old-fashioned Pseuchaian villa. The idea of the Zashian being put on display like that was distasteful, but not surprising.
“Hello, my dear,” said Nione as the eunuch came around the fountain to approach their bench. “Does your master need something?”
Aristokles’s slave gave a slight, elegant bow and presented something in his open palms over the table. It was a small, round box, carved with stylized flowers: probably another product of the trade agreement, like its bearer. Nione’s expression clouded slightly.
“Oh. How lovely. Do convey my thanks. Tell him … he needn’t have, but I’m sure I will like it.”
She set the box down on the table without opening it. The eunuch bowed again and retreated.
Only when he was gone into the colonnade did Nione lift the lid of the box. She looked into it for a moment, then pushed it across the table to Damiskos with a miserable expression. A pair of earrings lay jumbled inside. Zashian style, with long pendants of enamelled beads.
“A generous gift,” Damiskos said neutrally. “But you look as thought you’re not happy with it.”
Nione sighed. “No—though they’re lovely.” She lifted one earring out of the box, then dropped it back with distaste.
They weren’t the sort of earrings that a respectable Zashian woman would have worn; the colours were flashy, and, in Zash, would have been considered masculine. Damiskos did not say that, but he thought of Aristokles’s slave with his nose-ring and henna. Clearly the Boukossian knew nothing of the kingdom he professed to admire.
“I am trying not to encourage him,” Nione said, “but … I don’t seem to be very good at it.”
“Perhaps you need to go so far as to discourage him.”
“Well, one cannot insult a guest … ”
“Of course.” That was an iron law, and one a woman as sweet-natured as Nione would have a hard time even bending.
“But he isn’t really in love with me. He’s only been here a few days.”
“You don’t believe one can fall in love in the blink of an eye?” He said it with a smile, because he didn’t suppose it was something she would even have formed an opinion about.
“No,” she said, more seriously than he had expected, “no, I wouldn’t say I don’t believe it, exactly—I think sometimes one can … can develop an attachment very quickly, but only if you come to know the other person intimately in a short space of time.”
“Yes,” he said, feeling the need to back away from this topic now, though he wasn’t exactly sure what he feared. “Yes, I expect you’re right.”
“And Aristokles doesn’t know me at all.”
“Right.”
He ate a couple of spoonfuls of yogurt and said, after what he hoped was a suitable pause for a change of subject, “So your factory is down by the shore, I suppose?”
“Oh. Yes. I’ll take you on a tour later.”
They finished their breakfast and talked business, but Damiskos’s mind kept wandering from the discussion of prices per barrel and volume discounts and fish varieties.
“Men line up to marry ex-Maidens,” she had said. He could believe it. If nothing else, the retirement allowance they received could serve as a generous dowry. Damiskos would have pitied Aristokles Phoskos, pressing his embarrassing and futile suit, if he hadn’t already felt such disgust with the man. And an uncomfortable thought occurred to him. What if Nione thought Damiskos was here now, on the pretext of business from the Quartermaster’s Office, because he secretly harboured the same hope as Aristokles?
He had changed in the years since they had known one another; perhaps she thought his understanding of their friendship had changed too. Perhaps she thought it might have included this all along, that he had been waiting for her to be free from the Maidens’ House so that he could ask her to be his wife.
She knew he had been engaged to another woman, but she also knew he had broken it off. What if she thought that had been for her sake? What if she was planning to accept his inevitable proposal out of pity?
He was no kind of a match for an ex-Maiden, though, and she had to know that. She knew his family’s fortune was gone along with their reputation, sacrificed to his parents’ lavish lifestyle and bad business decisions.
Damiskos himself had risen to command of one of the most famous legions of the Republic by the time he was twenty-six, but he had only held the position for a year, and well as he liked what he did now—and he did like it, despite what everyone thought—he knew he no longer cut an impressive figure in the world.
He didn’t think Nione would enjoy being married to him, either.
They had both completely finished their meal by the time the two women guests, Tyra and Phaia, came out to the table to remind Nione that she had promised them a game of Reds and Whites that morning.
Tyra asked if Damiskos would like to join them, and he restrained himself from replying that he hadn’t sunk quite that low yet. Playing a game of Reds and Whites with a trio of women, according to country villa rules and probably without betting, was no doubt exactly what Themistos had imagined Damiskos doing when he sent him on this trip. He politely declined, and the women left together.
He had not been left alone for more than a minute when the philosopher’s two male students came out into the garden from the house. They had hard-boiled eggs and were peeling them and scattering shells as they walked.
“Damiskos from the Quartermaster’s Office!” the younger student, Gelon, hailed him as they approached. “Good morning!”
Damiskos returned the greeting politely.
“We’re going out to admire the view,” Gelon said. “Will you join us?”
Since he had clearly not been doing anything else, Damiskos could not see an excuse to refuse. Nor did he particularly want to. Gelon seemed like a tiresome fellow, but Damiskos rather like Helenos. He followed them to a gate in the garden wall that led out onto the promontory beyond the villa.
The land here was wild, rock-strewn, and overgrown with shrubs, but there was a path leading out to the windy edge, and the students picked their way along it, eating their eggs and continuing some obscure conversation which Damiskos could not follow. They scrambled up and found seats on a large rock at the cliff’s edge.
Damiskos sat lower down and looked out over the water, shading his eyes with his hand. The wide bay into which the promontory of Laothalia jutted was calm and turquoise in the sunlight, scattered with a number of tiny islets. Further out, in the open sea, he could easily make out the beginning of the island chain of the Tentines, arcing away toward Boukos.
Helenos, the older of the two students, came slithering down the rock to close the gap between himself and Damiskos. He had finished eating his egg.
“Not exactly luxurious, this place, is it?” the student said conversationally, when he had settled himself on the rock and rearranged his mantle. “A bit ‘Ariatan,’ as they say.”
“I like it well enough,” said Damiskos. “But then, I was a soldier.”
Helenos smiled, and reached out to touch the wide bronze bracelet on Damiskos’s right wrist. It was an oddly intimate gesture. “You were First Spear in the Second Koryphos,” he said. “You were quite a soldier.”
To Damiskos’s relief, he didn’t follow that up with any expression of sympathy, just a thoughtful, sidelong look. He withdrew his hand.
“It must have been difficult for you,” Helenos said, “serving in Sasia, the land of our ancient enemies, and having nothing more to do than to keep the peace between warlords.”
“It was rather like bailing out a leaky boat without plugging the holes, sometimes.”
Helenos laughed. “I saw you looking at the eunuch last night.”
“Looking at him?” Damiskos repeated, unsure where this was going. He remembered Gelon railing against unmanly love the night before, and didn’t want to get into any of that. “I—I noticed him, I suppose. It’s hard not to.”
Helenos nodded. “Disgusting, isn’t it?”
“Yes! That’s just what I was thinking.”
He was relieved to find someone agreed with him about the poor fellow’s situation. He had been under the impression that none of the other guests cared.
“Mm,” said Helenos. “I guessed that.”
“I hope it wasn’t obvious.”
“No—but I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you. The creature might as well know what we think of him, might he not? In my view, he epitomizes the evils of his race.” Helenos’s tone had not changed at all; he spoke amiably, as though proposing something obvious that Damiskos would be sure to agree with.
Damiskos realized that it sounded as if he already had agreed with it.
“That’s—not what I meant by disgusting,” he said stiffly.
“Oh?”
“I find the practice of making eunuchs repellant, and I cannot approve of a Pseuchaian owning one, but … ”
But what? A moment ago he had felt sure Helenos meant something specific by “epitomizes the evils of his race,” something that Damiskos didn’t agree with at all, but now he wasn’t so sure. It would be rude to jump to conclusions.
“Well, it’s not his fault,” he finished lamely. “The slave’s, I mean.”
Helenos smiled. “The sentiment does you credit, First Spear.”
“I don’t hold that rank any more,” said Damiskos. “You should not call me that.”
“Ah. No such thing as a First Spear in the Quartermaster’s Office, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Our hostess said you were here on business. Is that true?”
“She owns a factory that makes fish sauce. I’ve come to see whether she may be able to supply the legions.”
“You’re joking,” said Gelon from above them.
“Not at all. The legions go through a great deal of fish sauce, and our current suppliers are not adequate to our needs.”
“You must admit it is a little bizarre,” said Helenos equably.
“I suppose so,” said Damiskos, though he didn’t see it.
“A little bizarre?” Gelon protested. “A retired Maiden of the Loom runs a fish-sauce factory, and a retired First Spear of the Second Koryphos is her customer! It’s like something out of one of those modern novels that everyone wants to ban for corrupting the youth.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Damiskos stiffly.
Helenos laughed warmly. “Indeed not. Shame on you, Gelon.”
“What? You know what I’m talking about. Petris Akrotis and that. There was one where the hero’s patron had made his fortune buying houses that were on fire, or about to catch fire, or something. Absurd.”
Damiskos gave him an unfriendly look, and Helenos said, “Just leave it, Gelon,” as the younger man opened his mouth again.
In the afternoon, most of the male guests trooped down to the fishing pier with rods and nets. Damiskos excused himself, pleading sleepiness. The truth was that he didn’t fancy the walk. The fishing pier sounded as if it was a good distance away, and in some fit of vanity he hadn’t brought his cane.
He had seen the villa’s library: an airy and well-lit room on the ground floor near his bedroom. He was looking forward to it as a place of solitude as much as anything. He returned to the house and found of course that the library wasn’t empty.
“I don’t know how you could ask it, after the way I suffered on the voyage over,” Aristokles was saying when Damiskos entered the anteroom.
When he stepped through the inner door, he saw that the other person in the room was Aristokles’s eunuch. He looked as though he had been about to say something before he saw Damiskos, and he dropped his gaze instantly to the floor. The snatch of conversation which Damiskos had overheard struck him as odd for a master talking to his slave.
Aristokles made a huffing noise. “I am going to take a nap,” he announced, and brushed past Damiskos on his way to the door.
Damiskos looked at the eunuch, surprised that he wasn’t following his master. It was the first time Damiskos had looked closely at him in daylight.
He was very striking, something between pretty and handsome, the intermediateness of it entrancing as a complex melody. He had very white skin and very dark eyes above high, sculpted cheekbones and delicately shaped lips, and—well, he was attractive, in a way that Damiskos found rather interesting, that was all.
He was looking at Damiskos now with a flicker of curiosity, and Damiskos realized to his embarrassment that he must have been obviously staring.
“I—er—I hear that you dance,” he said. At least that was what he hoped he said; on some impulse of the moment he tried saying it in Zashian, which he had barely spoken in years. “What kind of dance … uh … do you do?”
The eunuch’s eyebrows went up, but the rest of his face remained neutral, and Damiskos thought at first he was just surprised to hear a Phemian speaking his language. But the pause before he replied was long enough to suggest that actually he was trying to decipher what Damiskos had said. Or at least that he wanted Damiskos to think that he was.
“Vishmi kokoro,” he said finally, a dialect term which was unintelligible to Damiskos. He had a cultured, courtier’s accent, and his voice had a timbre that Damiskos associated with sophisticated older women. He reverted to Pseuchaian: “Sword dance. You know it?”
“Ah,” said Damiskos. “No.”
“Well,” he said after a moment, his expression still neutral, “it’s a dance with swords.”
His Zashian accent was strong, but he seemed to have a surprisingly good grasp of idiomatic Pseuchaian.
“Hm,” said Damiskos.
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.