Page 51 of Sword Dance

Varazda rubbed his eyes. “Yes, I think I might. I’m not good for much else.”

“A two-man watch is hard,” said Damiskos, giving in to a yawn himself. “At least we don’t have to march anywhere this morning.”

“Ugh.”

They remained standing there for a moment, leaning on the railing side by side.

“Last night—the earlier part—was very enjoyable,” Damiskos said finally.

“I’m afraid my contribution was rudimentary,” said Varazda, making a wry face. “I’m … I have been accustomed to being given orders, and I may not have done very well without them.”

“No! No, it was … ” It was you, Damiskos wanted to say. That was what mattered. “It was great. The whole thing.”

Varazda nodded. “It was. If we get a chance to do it again, I’d like that.”

Damiskos didn’t reply at first, afraid that anything he said would sound too eager. There was an awkward pause. Varazda yawned again and turned toward his bedroom door. Damiskos finally thought of something to say.

“If I had a copy of The Three Gardens, I’d study it for you.” That didn’t have the lightness that he had been striving for.

Varazda looked back. “It’s only a few pages from the Honeysuckle Garden that truly appeal to me, First Spear. And, I must say, you’ve got Training the Vine down quite well already.”

* * *

Damiskos toiled down the stairs from the gallery, greeting the few women whose names he knew as he passed them, and returning the rather knowing smiles of several others. It was a little odd to think that he now legitimately had something to be embarrassed about. They might well have heard him and Varazda last night; goodness knows, Varazda especially had been making enough noise. But even the knowingest looks of the slaves were friendly.

It was still too early for any of the guests or their host to be up. Damiskos returned to his room, put his sword, along with his hunting bow, away carefully at the back of an upper shelf in his closet, took a clean tunic, and went to the bath. He still smelled of sex and Varazda’s perfume.

Clean and dressed, he made his way through the quiet house to the garden, assured Rhea when she asked that he didn’t need anything, and then as an afterthought asked her to tell the mistress, when she was awake, that he had gone down for a walk on the beach.

He took his time climbing down the track to the beach, thinking that he should have swallowed his pride and asked Rhea if there was such a thing as a walking-stick in the house. Reaching level ground, he strolled at an easy pace. The sunrise was at his back, casting long shadows out over the white sand. He passed the fish-sauce factory and rounded the spit of land into the sheltered cove with the beach houses.

He was looking for something that he hoped very much not to find, but as soon as the sheltered beach came into view, he knew that he had. The body lay at the fullest point of the beach’s gentle curve, half in and half out of the surf, a dark, wet heap.

Damiskos made his way over to it, grasped the sodden tunic, and turned the body over to be sure it was Aristokles. It was. He had been in the water some time; the corpse was bloated and ugly, but it was quite recognizable.

Nobody could claim that he had died by drowning. The front of his tunic was torn in several places, the blood washed away by the water but the stab wounds still visible beneath. A frayed rope trailed from one of his ankles; evidently the weight used to sink him had come loose, letting his body bob to the surface.

Damiskos stood looking grimly down at the corpse for several minutes before he roused himself to action.

He had to get the body out of the surf and find Nione and Varazda. He bent and grabbed the wet clothing again, and heaved the corpse up so he could grasp it under the armpits and drag it along the beach. It was awkward work; Aristokles had been a big man, Damiskos’s height, and with wet clothes he was very heavy. Damiskos’s knee was protesting by the time he reached the beach hut—the same one where he and Varazda had put on their show for the students on Hapikon Eve—and rolled the body onto the dry stone floor. He collapsed onto one of the benches and rubbed the throbbing joint.

He remembered Varazda catching him the night before, bolstering his weak side as Damiskos bent over him on the bed. He remembered the sword fight earlier in the afternoon, the way Varazda had given ground only in slow steps, refusing to dart around and put Damiskos at a disadvantage. It hadn’t struck him before how much courage it must have taken to do that, to resist the urge to flee from a stronger, more experienced opponent.

Gods, what was he going to do when Varazda went back to Boukos? He would miss him like fury.

A shadow fell across the threshold of the beach hut, across Aristokles’s body on the floor. Damiskos looked up. Helenos was standing in the doorway.

He must have been down on the beach already when Damiskos was dragging the body. Perhaps he had followed Damiskos down.

“Damiskos from the Quartermaster’s Office,” he said, his voice as calm and uninflected as usual. “And … is it Aristokles? How awkward.”

Damiskos got to his feet, regretting that he had left his sword in his bedroom, and wishing once again that he’d asked Rhea for a walking stick. In a pinch, a good stick served as a pretty effective weapon.

Helenos came into the hut, stepping around Aristokles’s body, and Damiskos saw he was not alone; Gelon and Phaia stood on the threshold behind him.

“Ugh!” said Phaia, pointing in at the body. She turned to look at Gelon. “I thought you got rid of him.”

“You stupid cow,” Helenos barked, his tone suddenly so violent that Damiskos was genuinely shocked.