Page 54 of Sword Dance

He resumed struggling in earnest, bracing his numb shoulder against the edge of the tank and kicking at the lid as hard as he could. He managed to shift it a fraction, so he kept at it, pausing between kicks to gather his strength and make each one count. It didn’t do much good; his position in the tank was too awkward, his lame leg too weak. He coughed and whimpered with frustration.

He was not going to die upside down in a fish-sauce tank. Except it seemed like he probably was.

Then he heard a voice—a voice he would have known anywhere—still distant, but calling his name.

“Here!” he shouted. “In here!” He kicked the stone slab again, trying to make as much noise as possible. He had his boots on, so this worked fairly well.

“Damiskos?” Louder this time.

“In! Here!” He broke off to cough violently, choking on smoke and the miasma of fish-sauce.

“Holy God.”

There was an agonizing pause, and Damiskos wondered what kind of hell-scape of smoke and flame Varazda was having to traverse to get to him, pictured him collapsing on the factory floor, overcome, wanted to shout at him to save himself—and then there was the scrape of stone from above him.

He imagined Varazda’s beautiful hands and slender arms struggling with the heavy slab, and only realized how hard he was biting his lip when he tasted blood. But in fact it didn’t take Varazda long to move the stone, and there he was, leaning down over the hole where Damiskos was wedged, eyes wide above the wet cloth that he had tied over the lower half of his face. Smoke billowed behind him.

He lay on his stomach and reached down to grab Damiskos under the armpits, which he was only able to do by slithering half over the lip of the tank, until Damiskos was convinced he was going to fall in too. But he didn’t; somehow he managed to brace himself so that he could haul Damiskos up, and dragged and manoeuvred him out of the tank onto the floor of the factory.

Varazda produced another wet cloth, one of his ubiquitous handkerchiefs, and held it over Damiskos’s nose and mouth. Together they made their way, shuffling awkwardly on their knees, with Varazda half-pulling Damiskos most of the way, across the room to the door, under the worst of the smoke.

Wordlessly, Varazda tugged the rope off Damiskos’s wrists, and they both filled foul-smelling buckets from the pier with sea water and forged back inside.

The fire was not the inferno that Damiskos had imagined. It had produced enough smoke to fill the factory and billow impressively out the door, but the flames were confined to a pile of oily rags and crates under the window. They were easily doused. It looked as though someone had started the fire by throwing a lit lamp in the window.

Damiskos focussed numbly on these details, and Varazda had to take his arm and draw him coughing out of the smoky building once more.

Outside again, Varazda hauled Damiskos across the dock and down the steps onto the sand. He didn’t stop until they had walked right out into the shallow surf, where he let Damiskos sink down to sit in the water, and knelt with him, pulling the wet cloth—it was his sash, Damiskos noted irrelevantly—down from his face.

Then he leaned forward, taking Damiskos’s face between his hands, and kissed him once, hard.

Damiskos collapsed against him as if his bones had all suddenly dissolved. He realized distantly that he was crying—sobbing—in Varazda’s arms, and he couldn’t stop. The amazing thing was that Varazda didn’t seem embarrassed or even surprised.

“You’re all right,” he kept saying calmly. “You’re all right. This isn’t then. This is different. I’m here.”

Varazda somehow, miraculously, understood.

It was such a relief that Damiskos felt he might choke on his tears. He buried his face in his hands. Varazda scooped up water to wet Damiskos’s hair, gently scrubbing through it with his fingers. It felt so good.

“I’m here,” he repeated. “This is not then.”

“No,” Damiskos managed. “I know. Thank you.”

He wiped his eyes, splashed water on his face, wiped them again, and finally managed to sit up. “Thank—”

Varazda held up his hands. “Please. It’s what one does.”

“So is saying ‘Thank you,’” said Damiskos.

“Right. So … what happened?”

It took an effort to remember the starting-point of the story. “I found Aristokles’s body.”

Varazda nodded. “I saw him in one of the beach huts when I was looking for you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.