Page 83 of Sword Dance

“By all the gods,” the broken-nosed student growled, “I wish we’d drowned you when we had the chance. You’re a disgrace to the legions, consorting with barbarians and slaves.”

One of the remaining fishermen lost his nerve completely and turned to pelt back along the beach. The porters, to show they were made of tougher stuff, swaggered closer.

“I’m sorry,” said Damiskos, “did you come to parlay, or … Because you don’t seem to be doing anything else.”

“I’m here to speak to ex-Maiden Nione Kukara.”

After a moment, Nione peeked out from among her women, doing a lovely job of appearing cowed and terrified.

The student jerked his chin disdainfully. “Hiding behind your slaves, I see. You’ve every right. But you’re lucky they’re loyal. It would be a shame if anything happened to shake that loyalty, wouldn’t it? I can’t guarantee it, though. The longer you hold out here, the more chance something might happen that you’ll regret.”

Varazda leaned toward Aradne to whisper something, and she lifted Damiskos’s bow, pointing the arrow up, hauled back on the bowstring, and released it, sending the arrow soaring up and tumbling down in a sharp arc on the other side of the barricade, narrowly missing one of the porters.

Their bravado dissipated quickly after that. “Where the fuck did she learn to use a bow?” one of them yelped as they backed away from the stronghold. A couple of women emerged from the beach huts to fling stones, and the men hurried away.

“What was that about?” one of the women asked scornfully.

“Just bluster,” said Rhea. “That’s all they have.”

Damiskos turned to the others.

“We need to act right away. I was wrong. They are going to use the male slaves as leverage. That’s what he meant about shaking your loyalty. He’s thinking you might be induced to switch sides to save your fellow slaves.”

A hush, and then a murmur of alarm ran through the group. Some of the male slaves were the fathers of the female slaves’ children. Some of them were their sons.

“I will not let that happen,” said Nione fiercely. “What do we have to do?”

“All we can do,” said Damiskos. “Get everything set up, and pray the postal ship arrives on time.”

“Better go out and pick up that arrow,” said Aradne, handing Damiskos back his bow and quiver. “Did you know you’ve only got two good ones in there? The rest are broken.”

“I know.” He had checked his equipment after arriving at the camp, and guessed that the arrows had been broken in their escape from the villa, when he fell on the saddlebags on the roof. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask where you learned to shoot?”

“Oh, you know,” she said vaguely. “Looking at frescoes and things. Not that I could hit anything. Pharastes told me what to do just now.”

As he retrieved his arrow and helped gather up the thrown rocks from outside the fortifications, Damiskos tried to recollect how he felt about Varazda that morning. He had confessed his love, and it hadn’t gone as badly as he had feared—or as well as he had hoped. Varazda had been very nice to him afterward, and that might have felt insulting, but it hadn’t. And then Eurydemos had sown that horrible seed of doubt in Damiskos’s mind, and that was why this morning everything felt slightly off, like a melody played on a badly-tuned lute.

He could not talk to Varazda about this. It would not be fair. What could Varazda say to him? He would have to offer reassurance, no matter what he really felt. Besides, there was unlikely to be an opportunity any time soon. There was work to be done before the postal ship arrived.

And maybe there was no point in trying to discuss his feelings with Varazda anyway, because the term of their acquaintance was drawing to a close. Varazda would go back to Boukos on the postal ship, and that would be the end of it.

The postal ship could arrive any time between dawn and the fifth hour, depending on the conditions of wind and sea and when they left Boukos. The plan was that Varazda and Aradne would go down to meet it and explain what they needed. Meanwhile, the women would be hidden throughout the woodland around the villa, with articles of flashy Zashian clothing—Damiskos had made sure to tease Varazda about this while explaining the plan—and every vaguely weapon-like shiny object they could lay their hands on. Nione and Damiskos would wait by the front of the house for a signal from Varazda, and then would ride through the gates on horses supplied by the grooms and smuggled out through the stable’s back entrance. The other horses would be in the woods with the women.

At Varazda’s signal, the women would begin making noise in the trees as if they were a troop of soldiers advancing to surround the villa. In the meantime, the sailors from the Boukossian ship—provided they agreed to help—would come up from the shore to make a real barrier on the garden side of the house. Damiskos and Nione would demand the students’ surrender, telling them that the house was surrounded. Aradne would go in search of the imprisoned slaves while Varazda waited in the garden with the sailors to take the students into custody and bring them back to Boukos.

The morning was spent assembling imitation weaponry—Varazda offered his swords, and there was fierce competition over who would get to wield one, before Damiskos suggested that Varazda should probably keep them—dividing up Varazda’s clothes, and finding lengths of rope to tie in the trees to create the illusion of movement through the branches. Everything else would have to wait until the ship was sighted. And the day was still and hot, the water of the bay glassy. The sun climbed overhead, and there was no sign of the ship.

“Could we do it without the sailors,” Aradne wondered, standing with Damiskos by the water’s edge, hands on her hips.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“We don’t know they’re even going to help.”

“If they won’t, Nione can get on board and go to Pheme for help. In a few days the factory workers and the villagers will be back anyway. If it weren’t for what that bastard said about shaking the women’s loyalty, I’d have said we’d be better off waiting.”

“This will work,” said Aradne stoutly. “If not today, then tomorrow.”

Damiskos turned to look back up at the villa, shading his eyes with his hand. He would have liked to know what was going on inside. How many dead bodies were there by this time, and whose? The fishermen and the porters seemed to have stuck with the students so far. But there had been a clear rift among the students themselves, and it was anyone’s guess how that would have played out by now.