Page 67 of Sword Dance

While Aristokles’s pyre burned brightly in the late afternoon sun, the women prepared a funeral meal with olives and wine from the villa’s warehouse, bread and cheese and apples from the village, and fresh fish from the bay.

“It’s too bad you don’t have your lute here, Midina,” Nione said to the Gylphian musician from her household.

“I am worrying about it,” Midina admitted. “They will break it, you think, the crazy men?”

“I don’t know,” said Nione with a sigh. “Can anyone remember whether music was supposed to be good or bad in the Ideal Republic?”

No one could.

“I would like to hear you play again, sir, the Zashian music,” Midina said to Damiskos.

“Yes,” said Nione. “He’s very good, isn’t he, Pharastes?”

“He is,” said Varazda.

“I remember when you were a boy you used to sing, too,” said Nione. “Do you still?”

“Well, I—I can, yes.”

“Oh, sing for us!” exclaimed Rhea.

“Sing us something in Sasian,” Nione suggested.

“I—I—My pronunciation will offend Varazda’s ears, but … ”

“He can cope,” said one of the other women. “He’ll laugh at you. But he does it with love—don’t you, Phari?”

Varazda flashed her a grin. This was a level of awkwardness that Damiskos felt quite unequal to dealing with. The household women—who apparently had taken to calling Varazda by a jaunty nickname—still thought that the two of them were a couple, while Aradne knew that they were not but that Damiskos wished they were. The gods only knew what Nione thought was going on at this point.

“This is a song from Rataxa,” Damiskos found himself saying. “It’s a very famous one. The words are by Zash’s most esteemed poet.”

He sang. In spite of his modesty, he knew he was a good singer. Playing and singing came easily to him, and he could lose himself blissfully in the music. He didn’t lose himself now. He heard the words as he sang them, as if he was hearing them for the first time. He would have kicked himself for choosing this song, except that it seemed somehow inevitable.

It was a song of unrequited love, of yearning for a beloved who was distant and yet nearby, who gave joy and sorrow in equal measure. Damiskos had learned to sing it in Rataxa, with the style and accent of the region, courtly and elegant—but he was neither of those things, and he sang it with an inflection of his own, transposing it into something different. For him it had always been about his love for Zash, complexly tinted as it was by a centuries-old enmity and the fragile peace of the colonies on the Deshan Coast. It was still about that, partly.

He finished singing and risked a look at Varazda, who was watching him with uncomplicated pleasure. Plainly he did not think Damiskos had been singing about him.

Everyone complimented Damiskos, and then someone said, “You sing one for us, Phari!”

“Absolutely not! I’m a dancer. I don’t sing. Definitely not like that.”

They pestered him until Aradne spoke over everyone to say, “Leave him alone. I’ll sing.”

There was cheering at that. By coincidence, Aradne sang a Phemian song with a similar theme to Damiskos’s. She too gave it a unique inflection, making the words of longing sound almost belligerent, like a challenge: why don’t you love me? haven’t you got the guts?

After that, other members of the party were persuaded to sing. The little boy, Chari, was a talented singer, with a clear, piping voice. They sang all together, popular songs that everyone knew, clapping in time. One of Varazda’s friends convinced him to sing a duet with her, and everyone berated him afterward for saying he couldn’t sing, and told him his voice was lovely. It was, Damiskos thought: light and precise and obviously trained. But his singing lacked the passion of his dancing. It was a little remote, almost cold. Damiskos would bet it was something he had learned to do in the king’s household at Gudul.

* * *

When the sun had gone down completely and the women and children were all settling down inside the barricaded beach houses, Damiskos and Varazda slipped out the gate. Aradne set in place the barbed hurdle that blocked it after them and nodded a soldierly farewell.

They walked up the beach toward a path cut through the brush halfway around the sheltered cove. It led up through the terraced vineyard to the front of the house, bypassing the cliff stairs at the back of the garden. The path was not very well maintained, and it was slow going pushing through the shrubs and plants that crowded its edges. They walked single-file with Varazda in front.

He looked back at Damiskos as they reached the gate in the stone wall bordering the lowest terrace of the vineyard.

“I wish we were sneaking away for something more enjoyable than breaking into Nione’s house,” Varazda whispered.

Damiskos gave him an exaggerated frown which he hoped would be readable in the moonlight. “I don’t know what you mean. We have a duty to do.”