Page 53 of Sword Dance

* * *

He took a step back, but Aristokles’s body was behind him, and he couldn’t move any further without tripping over it. The students stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the wide entrance, their stance casual, their faces sneering. They were unarmed, but then so was Damiskos. They were tall, athletic young men, soft compared to Damiskos, but there were five of them, plus Gelon, Helenos, and Phaia behind him, and none of them were lame.

He opted to pretend he didn’t notice any attempted threat, and simply shouldered his way through the line of students. They were too surprised to stop him, and he knocked one of them down and was walking quickly away from the beach hut when he heard Helenos’s voice behind him: “Stop him, you clowns.”

Damiskos took that as permission to fight. He swung at the first student to catch up to him, hitting him in the stomach. The student staggered, but he was a big fellow and did not fall. Damiskos grabbed him by the hair and the front of his tunic, and pushed him backward into the man coming up behind him, and they both went over together.

The third student was the one with the broken nose. He didn’t give Damiskos time to get in a blow before he kicked him, with devastating accuracy, in the right knee.

His leg buckled under him in an explosion of pain, and he landed on his side in the sand. He managed to pull the broken-nosed student down to join him, and they grappled inelegantly. By that time the rest had arrived, and the two he had felled earlier were getting up, and at another irritable order from Helenos, they gave up all pretence of fighting fairly and simply piled onto him.

He was winded, kicked in the head, spots dancing before his eyes, his knee a red-hot agony. Four of the students hauled him up from the sand between them, grasping his wrists and ankles, and began carrying him across the beach.

They dumped him down on a warm wooden surface that he guessed from the smell was one of the docks outside the fish-sauce factory. Most of them sat on him again—the only effective way they had of containing him—while one of them went into the empty factory.

Why was the factory empty? It clearly was; he could tell from the stillness all around them. But shouldn’t the fishermen, the ones who weren’t celebrating Hapikon, still be there, receiving extra pay while the slaves were on holiday?

The student who had gone inside—the broken-nose fellow again—returned with a coil of rope. Damiskos felt his stomach clench with nausea.

They rolled him over, and he fought again, was kicked and sat on, had his shoulders nearly dislocated, and finally his hands were bound behind him. And he was back in Abadoka’s stronghold on the Deshan Coast, naked and shivering and bloody, with Abadoka’s torturer standing over him. It was the last time he’d had his hands tied behind his back.

“The fight’s gone out of him,” he heard a woman’s voice say, with a mocking laugh.

In Abadoka’s stronghold, the fight had never gone out of him. He had struggled against his bonds, attacked the jailers every chance he got, snarled obscenities at Abadoka and his men even when he was too far gone to be sure what language he was swearing in. But that was five years ago, and he’d been a different man. He lay slumped on the warm wood of the dock, trying to stop shaking.

He couldn’t go through it again. It couldn’t happen again. It couldn’t. It couldn’t. It couldn’t.

“Let’s drown him in a vat of fish sauce,” a voice suggested. Others laughed and murmured agreement.

“We don’t need any more corpses,” someone snapped coldly. “It’s bad enough that you had to kill all those people in Boukos.”

“They were Sasians—the world is better without them.”

There was some more discussion after that which Damiskos’s mind was racing too frantically to follow. In the end they dragged him inside the factory, pushed him head-first into an empty fermenting tank in the floor, and dragged a heavy stone slab over it.

He was left in thick darkness. The fall had stunned him, and a fiery pain in his right shoulder suggested it might really be dislocated now. He lay huddled, half upside-down in the tank, with no room to move in any direction. And the smell. The overwhelming, sickening stench of fish left to rot in the sun for weeks. The stone under his cheek was slimy with it; the walls pressing in around him had soaked it in for years.

He couldn’t breathe properly, couldn’t move, could barely think. He focussed all his remaining strength on not throwing up, because some shred of memory told him that if he did, he might choke on it.

Time passed. He knew where he was now, knew that this was going to be different. It was not happening again. But still memories of the Deshan Coast washed over him. He knelt in front of Abadoka, hands tied, two guards holding him down because that was the only way he would stay on his knees.

“They are going to think you are my man one way or another, Damiskos Son of Philion. Why not make it so in truth, and gain the benefits?”

He hadn’t known what that meant until later.

His shoulder hurt, but it was not dislocated. There was a faint line of grey around the rim of the tank where the stone slab did not fit tightly. He couldn’t move enough to put his good shoulder to it, but he could kick it with his sound leg.

It wasn’t enough to move the slab, and on the third try his shoulder slipped in the slime on the bottom of the tank, and he cracked his head against the side. He clenched his teeth and breathed shallowly until the pain faded.

He wasn’t going to get out that way. Better to conserve his energy until he heard the fishermen returning to the factory, when they would hear him and let him out.

If Helenos and his followers had chosen this place to leave him, they must have some reason to think the fishermen were not coming back.

Time passed. The arm he was lying on was becoming numb, which was an improvement over the throbbing of earlier. Every so often he would imagine he was getting used to the smell, and then he would take an incautious breath, and another wave of nausea would hit him. Tears ran out of the corners of his eyes.

At first he thought he was imagining the change in the air, the hint of a new smell. But it grew slowly stronger, and he knew it was real. It was smoke.

Chapter 13