Page 90 of Sword Dance

Gelon was there, with his arm in a sling, and Phaia was sitting on a bench, hollow-eyed and tragic-looking. Evidently they had decided to throw in their lot with Helenos after all. Damiskos didn’t like that much; they were both volatile, not to say crazy, and having them added to the mix could not be good.

There were fewer of the porters than Damiskos remembered from the fight in the atrium, and more were missing than just the one man he had killed. That might mean that some of them were guarding the male slaves, prepared to use them for leverage as needed.

One of the fishermen was the first to notice Damiskos and the two women approaching. He pointed and shouted to get the others’ attention. Damiskos gestured to his companions to stop, a safe distance away, on one of the quartz-gravelled garden paths.

He stood with his hand on the hilt of his sword. There was blood on his tunic, none of it his. He knew that he looked grim. He looked to Aradne.

“It’s time for this little game to end!” she bellowed. She had a magnificent voice for bellowing.

The men stared at her. A few laughed.

“Surrender yourselves now, and you may leave alive,” Aradne continued. “Give us any more trouble, and you’ll suffer the fate of your friends who just arrived from Boukos. Half of them are prisoners—the other half are dead.” That was an exaggeration, but Damiskos approved of it.

“You expect us to believe that?” one of the porters blustered.

“It’s true,” someone else said. “I saw what happened. There was blood all over the place.”

“Quiet, everyone!” That was Helenos. He stepped forward from the crowd, hands tucked casually into his mantle. “This is an unfortunate business,” he said coolly, looking at Damiskos rather than Nione or Aradne. “You have killed some men, and I don’t doubt you are very skilled. But can you take on all of us? Is that really what you propose?”

“Are you talking to me?” said Damiskos blandly. “Because I didn’t speak to you.”

Helenos was actually momentarily stymied by that. He gave Damiskos an ugly look, then transferred it grudgingly to Aradne.

“Well, slave?” His voice dripped contempt. “You seem to speak for both your mistress and this pitiful excuse for a soldier. I’m surprised you didn’t bring the Sasian gelding along to complete the picture. Which of you is going to kill us all, then? You, maybe? Smother us with your—”

“Since you ask,” said Nione loudly, stepping forward from beside her steward, “it is the men who are now in the forest surrounding my villa who will kill you if you do not surrender to us.”

There was a pause. She had spoken in a ringing voice, angrier than Damiskos had ever seen her and yet totally in control of herself. No one could have failed to hear her; no one could have failed to take her seriously.

“The what?” said Helenos finally.

And on cue, the rustling of leaves in the trees around the edge of the garden. The men glanced wildly around. Branches swayed. Sunlight flashed on something that might have been a spearpoint. (It was a marlinspike tied to the end of a wooden spoon.) A figure in Zashian clothes could be seen moving behind the screen of foliage, then another, and another.

The women must have moved back to surround only the garden, Damiskos thought, since all the men were clustered here. It had been a shrewd variation of the plan. The woods looked menacingly full of figures.

A horse neighed and stamped on one side. Hoofbeats sounded from the yard at the front of the house, echoing oddly so that it was hard to say how many animals were making them. Low shouts in—well, in gibberish, but it might have sounded like Zashian to the ignorant—rang out from the same direction.

The men by the fountain drew closer together, a subtle but telling movement.

“We’re surrounded!” Gelon yelped.

Phaia leapt to her feet. “They’re Sasians! Daughters of Night curse you, Helenos! You’ve brought the Sasians down upon us!”

“Where did they come from?” one of the fishermen quavered.

“From Boukos!” a student answered, doing Nione and Aradne’s work for them. “The city is lousy with Sasians.”

“That’s right, and the ship this morning came over from Boukos!”

“I didn’t see any Sasians on the beach.”

“They must have been sneaking up here already.”

“They know we stole from them.”

That last sentence rang out into an unexpected silence.

“Stole from them?” a fisherman repeated, voice high and unsteady. “Stole what? Do you know what they do to thieves in Sasia?”