Page 88 of Sword Dance

Damiskos let Eurydemos go, and the lead student swung immediately on Damiskos, a powerful, hacking blow. Damiskos parried left-handed, soundly turning the blade aside, and felt the surprise in his opponent’s reaction. Here, Damiskos judged, was someone who could really fight, but was accustomed to thinking that his enemy couldn’t.

Eurydemos had broken away from the other students, who had made a grab for him, and at last had the sense to turn and pelt back down the jetty. Three students set off after him.

There was a scream and the thud of a falling body. Damiskos risked a glance down the jetty. One of the pursuing students had fallen, and Damiskos caught of a glimpse of Varazda, framed in the factory door, bow in hand, like a warrior in a Zashian epic.

Damiskos and his opponent traded a series of quick blows. The student was about Damiskos’s size, a little heavier, slower with his arm but of course nimbler on his feet. Military trained. It would have been a satisfying bout if Damiskos hadn’t had to worry about what was happening behind him.

He heard another shout from down the jetty, and managed to manoeuvre his opponent around so that he could look. Varazda had come between the remaining students and Eurydemos, who stood watching, stunned, as his delicate work of art lacking the whatever-it-was of a man knocked the knife out of one attacker’s hand and broke the nose of the other with a blow from his blunt-edged sword.

It was at this point that one of the sword-wielding students decided their leader needed some assistance and stepped forward to stab at Damiskos’s open left side. Damiskos dodged. The lead student howled something about honour and fairness but didn’t stop attacking Damiskos, and neither did the fellow who was trying to help, who bawled back something about ends justifying means.

The fight became chaotic, a series of fragmentary impressions like lightning flashes. Blood spraying from a slashed wrist, Damiskos’s sword punching through a flapping fold of someone’s mantle. The students shouting back and forth. There was no space to think about whether to kill or wound or spare lives; they were fighting him in earnest, in blood-drunk elation, eager to kill for their cause, whatever it was. He grabbed viciously at a mantle, bringing its wearer heavily to the ground. He parried and dodged the blows that might have struck home, tried to ignore the ones that wouldn’t.

Varazda came running down the jetty, swords in his hands, to join Damiskos. A couple of the students who hadn’t been able to get within striking distance of Damiskos peeled off to meet the barbarian. Their weapons rang against his, and someone—not Varazda—yelped. The sailors had cast off and were rowing hard back toward their ship, and Damiskos could hear the soldiers on board shouting to them, though not what they were saying.

He felled the lead student finally with a low cut across the thigh. The man went down with a howl, and his sword skittered across the stones. Another student lunged after it, grabbed it, and tripped one of his fellows in the process.

Varazda was bleeding. He had taken a cut to his upper right arm; Damiskos had missed the moment when it happened. Locking swords with his new opponent, Damiskos shoved him back so hard that he stumbled and fell off the jetty into the water. Damiskos swung around and caught the blade of Varazda’s opponent, knocking it up and away.

He risked a glance at Varazda, but Varazda was already eeling around to his opposite side to batter away at the next oncomer with his blunt swords. If he was favouring his injured arm at all, Damiskos didn’t see it.

They fought back to back for what seemed an age, but was really just the length of time it took the sailors to row back to their ship and return with a boatload of soldiers. They couldn’t have been said to be holding the jetty, because they were surrounded, but they kept the students busy.

Damiskos slipped in under the next student’s defence and ran him through. The man Damiskos had knocked into the water had hauled himself out, but he had lost his sword, and Varazda easily knocked him back in. Another swordsman gave Damiskos a decent fight before Damiskos disarmed him. Varazda kicked a man in the groin and knocked him on the back of the head with the hilt of his sword as he doubled over. Of the ten young men who had piled out of the boat, three were left standing by the time the soldiers arrived on the jetty. Several had gone into the water and dragged themselves or been dragged out; at least two were dead.

“Put up your swords!” the officer leading the small group of men bellowed.

There were six of them, in tooled and gold-chased breastplates, with red-crested helmets and bronze-studded sword-belts. An honour guard of some sort.

The remaining students, formed up three abreast across the jetty, seemed to think the command directed only at Damiskos and Varazda, and ignored it.

“Get me through to speak to their captain?” Varazda asked breathlessly.

“You’re sure?”

Varazda nodded.

It wasn’t easy to hack through a line of men—even a line of only three men—without a shield. But he only needed to provide Varazda a ridiculously narrow opening, and Varazda slid through it, ducking hair-raisingly under Damiskos’s sword-arm, and stopped short in front of the captain of the honour guard. He raised his hands and let his swords clatter on the stones of the jetty.

An impossibly long moment passed, during which Damiskos dodged and parried by pure instinct, and then the captain of the guard said, “Pharastes the Dancer?” in a disbelieving tone, and time flowed again.

“I knew I recognized you,” said Varazda, as cheerfully as if he were paying a social call. “Autarches, isn’t it? Who are you escorting?”

Damiskos gave ground by a few steps, deliberately, to draw the enemy away from Varazda, and as a result he did not hear the name, which would have meant nothing to him anyway. But it seemed to mean something to Varazda, and the gist of the ensuing conversation, as far as Damiskos could make it out, was that if the guardsmen wanted to know what Varazda was doing there, they should ask their boss.

The captain dispatched one of his men in the boat, and in the meantime took Varazda’s word that the students who remained alive should be disarmed and held under guard. Surrounded and outnumbered, the men gave up their weapons without much further resistance. The guards took Damiskos’s sword away too, and he made no protest. Varazda’s swords they did not confiscate.

Damiskos found himself gripped by an odd feeling, as if Varazda was receding from him into his own world, the world to which Damiskos did not belong, and the understanding that they had shared just now in the fish-sauce factory, that had seemed to unmake and remake Damiskos’s world, that was receding too.

He wanted to get to Varazda now, to touch him, see how he was; he remembered the bad reaction Varazda had the night before after they tangled with the porters in the villa. What they had just been through here was much worse. He wanted to check that Varazda’s arm wasn’t too badly injured. But he couldn’t get close to Varazda. As far as the guards were concerned, Damiskos was another suspicious, ex-military-looking character—in fact, the one who had struck the first blow and the only one who had killed anyone (the man Varazda had shot was badly wounded in the shoulder but not dead). Damiskos hung back, trying to look as cooperative as possible. The least he could do for Varazda now was not cause trouble.

One of the guardsmen was looking at Varazda’s injury and wrapping a makeshift bandage around his arm. The blood had soaked all down his sleeve. He would probably need stitches.

The other injured men were being attended to as well. The captain of the guard addressed the unhurt men.

“What was this all about? You told us when you boarded our ship in Boukos that you were philosophers. This isn’t what philosophers usually do, is it? And what would possess you to fight Pharastes? He’s a—um—dancer.”

The man whose nose Varazda had broken moaned at this addition of insult to injury.