Dessert was custard, which Nikias had left cooling in individual moulds (borrowed from Pyke) in the kitchen. To his satisfaction, both unmoulded perfectly when he turned them out into bowls. He poured warm honey over them while Kallion broached the new bottle of wine he had brought out from the pantry and refilled their cups. They ate in the kitchen, Kallion perched on the counter, Nikias leaning against the sink.
“So … writing contracts for people, is that what you spend most of your time doing?”
“Most of it, yes. I’m studying the law texts in the hope that I’ll be able to work as a jurist eventually.”
“You don’t want to be an advocate? Stand up in court and defend people? I’d have thought you’d be good at that.”
“I would. I have the training. I don’t want to do it.”
“Got it.” And he did. It had probably been a stupid question.
“This is delicious custard,” Kallion said, changing the subject.
“I’m glad. You were right about the wine—I do like it.”
“It’s Pyrian, like you.” Kallion looked embarrassed. “Though that’s not actually why I thought you’d like it.”
Nikias laughed. “Sure it is! Pyrian wine is what you bring out at the end of the party when everyone’s too far gone to tell what they’re drinking. Even I know that.”
“Ah—most Pyrian wine is indeed pretty insipid, but this is from the Skodatis Mountain, and they only make it after an exceptionally cold autumn, when the grapes have frozen on the vine. That’s what makes it so sweet.” Kallion ran his spoon carefully around the inside of his dish, scraping up the last of the custard and honey, and licked it thoroughly. “Shall we go out and sit on the balcony? It won’t stay warm enough to sit out for long, but … ”
“Good idea!” Nikias put his bowl in the sink. “Should I get chairs?”
“There’s one out there already.”
Of course there was one. Nikias was getting the idea that he wasn’t just the first person to cook in Kallion’s kitchen but maybe the first—certainly one of the first—to visit his apartment at all. And it looked lived-in, like Kallion had been moved in for a while.
Nikias fetched a chair from the atrium, and Kallion opened the shutters onto the balcony.
The sun was setting spectacularly into the harbour. Nikias whistled appreciatively. He had been expecting another woodland view like the one Kallion had shown him outside the window, but of course the balcony was on the front of the building. It didn’t overlook the park at all. It overlooked the city.
The Tetrina was the highest hill in Pheme, and they were almost at the top of it. The buildings in this neighbourhood were older, few more than two stories high, none blocking the sight lines from Kallion’s balcony.
The balcony ran the whole width of the apartment, and there was an awning that could be pulled down to shade it. A wicker chair and a small table stood under the kitchen window.
Nikias wondered again, as he had at intervals since seeing the inside of Kallion’s apartment, how a recently freed slave who worked as a clerk could afford all this.
They sat on the balcony, chairs angled toward the sunset and not quite facing each other, their cups topped up with more of the sweet, frozen-grape wine, and Kallion spontaneously started talking.
“The thing that you have to understand about my family—my household, but they always called it ‘the family’—is what Old Photis was like. He was … I think people thought he was spectacular. And he was, in a way. He was completely immoral, but he managed to make everyone around him love him—worship him, almost. It’s hard to explain. I suppose it was a mixture of fear and gratitude, because he was very generous, and he looked after people—but he could also be brutal. You saw that side of him more if you were one of his slaves, of course.
“He was self-made, the son of a freedman, and he was proud of it. His first business, the one he inherited from his own father, was providing security for gambling houses and brothels—not exactly illegal, though on the shady side, since of course some of those places aren’t licensed. And the way Old Photis ran it, he turned it into—do you know what a protection racket is?”
“Uh … no.”
“It’s where you charge people to not smash up their shops, basically.”
“What? Why would anybody … ”
“Is everybody in the mountains this innocent, or is this just you?”
“I don’t know if that was a real question, but of course it’s not everybody in the mountains—we’ve got all kinds of bandits up there, but they usually just attack you on the roads and steal your stuff, maybe hold you for ransom.”
“Well, think of the protection racket like holding businesses for ransom, then. You pay, you stay safe. It’s all couched in this language about ‘security,’ as if there are other threats that they might be protecting you from—and, I mean, sometimes there are, because there are other gangsters in the city, but for the most part it’s just paying not to get your place trashed by your own personal gangsters.”
“I see. And this is what Old Photis did?”
“Oh, only part of it. The way he made most of his money was piracy. He wasn’t a sailor at all—he outfitted a crew and remained safely on dry land himself the entire time.
“That’s the origin of the Dodeki. They started with one ship and a crew of twelve. Their edge was that the ship was the best of its kind in the water, maintained like a nobleman’s pleasure vessel, the crew hand-picked for their skills. They were so successful that before long they were a fleet.”
Nikias took a swig of wine, feeling he needed it. “So … the pirates aren’t just friends of the family—they’re employees?”
“Independent contractors, really. And they’ve changed a lot in recent years. Since Hesteus inherited the family business. He’s—he was—a different sort of man.”
“I remember Pyke telling me that, too. People sort of loved Old Photis, but they were just afraid of Hesteus.”
Kallion nodded, looking out over the city for a moment. “You wouldn’t have heard the old stories about the Dodeki, growing up in the mountains, but they had a reputation for gallantry. They ransomed all their prisoners and treated them well. They never sold anyone to the slave merchants. They challenged ships’ captains to single combat. They rescued shipwrecked mariners—and then robbed them or ransomed them, of course, but with the utmost graciousness. At least that’s what everyone said. And Old Photis encouraged all this. Insisted on it, in fact. He basked in the legend—he loved it.
“Hesteus and his father used to argue, when I was a boy, with Hesteus claiming that his father was too soft, took sentimental risks, things like that. I think he envied his father, but never understood the source of his magnetism. Almost as soon as he took over, ten years ago, there was a revolt in the Dodeki. Hesteus tried to change the terms of their profit-sharing arrangement—tried to do what he’d always thought his father should have done and bring the captains under tighter control, and four of them just took their ships and left.”
“Ouch. He must have lost face over that.”
“He just hired another set of men. Men Old Photis would never have chosen for the original Dodeki. He had them lay an ambush for the four defectors. It worked. They sailed right into the trap, and the new men massacred them and took back the ships, one by one. Well, except for the last one … They got away, but they were the only ones, and Hesteus’s men caught up with them eventually, years later, and brought them back into the fold.
“So that was the end of the Dodeki as gallant pirates. Now their main business is slaves—they raid all up and down the Deshan Coast and around the Pseuchaian Sea. They still have the fastest, best-maintained ships in the water. Hesteus was willing to pour money into expanding the fleet, too. They have eight ships now.
“They’re not as loyal as they used to be, though. Before he died, Hesteus was vying for control with Gorgion Pandares—no, you wouldn’t have heard of him. Another gangster.
“Anyway. Old Photis died when I was twelve. Hesteus kept up my education because he said I could be useful to him as a lawyer.” Kallion shook his head. “I couldn’t ever have been a lawyer as a slave, of course. I couldn’t even have testified in court … Of course he knew that.”
“What was he like as a master?” Nikias asked.
“He was … ” Kallion hesitated, his expression looking oddly blank in the fading light. “He was a hard master. His first secretary tried to escape and was captured and killed. I was not happy to be chosen to replace him, and no one congratulated me.”
He fell silent after that. The sun was a bright sliver on the edge of the ocean, the sky almost dark overhead. A breeze had picked up, and it was growing chilly on the balcony.
The darkness half concealing Kallion’s face seemed to mirror Nikias’s thoughts. He could see Kallion, but not quite. He could see that here was a man who had suffered as a slave, in ways that had shaped him, damaged him somehow, but Nikias could not yet see how.
But he didn’t need to, in order to know what to say.
“I go to the radicals’ meetings, sometimes,” he said. “They have debates and things—you might like that.”
“What?” Kallion had drawn back in his chair. “No, I don’t think I would like that.”
“Oh. I just thought, because of the oratory and everything … ”
“No, thank you, I don’t want anything to do with radicals. Not—not that I don’t think you and I can be friends.”
“Oh. I—” It took Nikias a moment to untangle that. “You mean you do? Think we can be friends.”
“If you like. I—know we got off to a bad start, but I find you good company, and … ”
“All right,” said Nikias. “Friends. I can live with that.”