Page 2 of Sword Dance

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 stud 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.