Page 1 of The House of the Red Balconies

CHAPTER 1

“By the gods, Hylas,” said Governor Loukianos, leaning back on his couch and raising his wine cup, “you are going to love it here. This island makes Boukos look like a jurist’s funeral.”

Hylas, on the other side of the governor’s dining room, tried to smile as if that idea did not alarm him. Boukos, he had always been told, was a place of extreme decadence. And the island of Tykanos was worse? He clenched his fingers over the wet collection of olive pits in his palm and watched Loukianos drink. The man did not look decadent himself: his raised right arm was tanned and muscular, his greying blond hair further whitened by the sun. His high spirits seemed exaggerated, as bright as the colours in the frescos of his summer dining room.

“I–I will do my best to appreciate all that Tykanos has to offer,” Hylas said seriously.

“Splendid!” Loukianos grinned at him. “I’ll show you around all the tea houses myself.”

“That is very kind of you, sir.”

Hylas had heard of tea; it was a kind of eastern drink that kept you awake. That did not sound very decadent either. He felt relief.

“Let me think,” Loukianos went on. “Where should we start? There are six of them: the Jewels of Tykanos, that’s what we call them. The Bower of Suos, that’s my usual haunt, though some of my friends prefer the Amber Lily, and it does have its charms. We go to the Sunset Palace and the Peacock from time to time, because one has to, and Myrrha’s is good for a laugh.”

Hylas wasn’t paying much attention to this. He was debating whether to put the olive pits in his hand on the table or drop them on the floor. He had accumulated so many of them now that he was concerned either action would call attention to itself. There were no empty dishes on the table, so he had been waiting to see what Loukianos would do, but Loukianos had not eaten any olives.

At home—in the place he tried not to think of as home anymore—Hylas would have spat the olive pits on the floor without a second thought. In Pheme, where he had lived for most of the last five years, the rules were more complicated, and you would get dirty looks when you discarded bones or pits or rinds in the wrong way.

“I’ll take you to the Red Balconies,” Loukianos was saying, “for the sake of completeness, and because it’s the oldest house on Tykanos, though these days it’s known mostly for its food and music.”

Hylas nodded as if any of this made sense to him. So the tea houses also served food and hosted musical performances; he supposed that made sense.

“I am … I am sure it will be a pleasure to visit them all, sir,” he said, “after working hard every day on your aqueduct.”

“Excellent, excellent.” Loukianos reached for the dish of olives. “Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of spare time. Perhaps more than you’d like. There are always delays on this island. Sourcing the stone, finding the labour.” He spat an olive pit over his shoulder, making the gesture somehow elegant, like everything about him. “Negotiating with the Gylphians.”

“Oh. Yes,” said Hylas. He should have spat the pits after all. Damn. Now it was too late and he had to do something else with them. “There are always delays everywhere.”

“Mm. Here especially. It’s its own world, Tykanos.” Loukianos gazed into the middle distance for a moment, then recovered his cheer and went on: “One of the things you’ll realize quickly is that everyone on the island is from somewhere else. Gylphians, Sasians, Kossians, people from places you’ve never heard of. Myself, I’m Phemian enough to be appointed governor, but I’ve never lived more than a few years in the city of Pheme in my whole life.”

“Is that so?” Hylas hoped this was not going to turn into an exchange of biographies where he would have to talk about his own upbringing.

But Loukianos was one of those people who was content to talk about himself. “I was born in the colonies,” he said, “and grew up in my father’s household moving around Sasia—he was an engineer like you, worked for the army. In my twenties I even spent some time in a royal household, one of the King of Sasia’s palaces in the north-east. That was something! The gossip, the court intrigue, the forbidden women’s quarters—it’s all real, all much like the stories you hear. Went back to Pheme to further my career, as one does, and now—here I am. Come have a look around my gardens,” he finished abruptly, swinging his legs down off the couch. “I’ve had them largely redone since moving into the governor’s mansion.”

Loukianos beckoned for a slave to bring his sandals, and Hylas tried to seize the moment to reach out and open his hand over the table. Several of the olive pits stuck to his palm, and he had to brush them off with his other hand. Loukianos saw what he was doing and gave him a quizzical look, but he said nothing. Hylas felt his cheeks heating and stood up stiffly, clenching his jaw.

As the six bells marking the middle of the day rang at the fort down by the harbour, Hylas stood in the street outside the governor’s mansion. He had followed Loukianos on a long tour of the gardens, looking at fishponds and shrubs and statues, wishing that he had any context at all for appreciating such things. He wondered if forty was too old to learn.

He drew in a deep breath of the brisk sea air and let it out, looking around him. The governor’s mansion was at the summit of Tykanos, in the enclave of rich men’s houses that capped the rocky peak rising above the beaches below. The streets that he had climbed to get here from the harbour rose steeply, broken in some places by steps, and he’d seen the wealthy being carried by their slaves in chairs with long handles.

He walked along the top of the wall that surrounded this enclave, looking out over the island. To the north, he saw vistas far out into the sparkling sea, all the places he’d lived so far in his life hidden by distance. Coming around to the east, there were forested hills. He’d seen Tykanos on a map, and recalled that it was really a pair of islands, very close together and joined by a causeway. That forest would be on the larger of the two, if he had got his bearings right. Some of the trees had turned colour, their leaves flame-orange against the backdrop of the bright blue sea.

He kept walking and came around to the south side of the summit. Here the coast of Gylphos was a dark line on the horizon, the land in this area very flat. Hylas remembered seeing that on the map, too. He leaned on the parapet of the wall, his circuit of the summit completed, and looked down at the harbour.

The fortifications that surrounded the harbour dominated the view. Hylas’s gaze skittered away from their dark bulk. Beyond their walls, a long stone jetty ran out into the water, with several ships at anchor along it. Between the harbour and the residences of the upper slopes lay the small fortress town, with its pastel-coloured houses and shops, its water gardens and little avenues of painted statuary gleaming in the sun. It was beautiful; Hylas could understand why Loukianos loved it here.

He set off down the mountain in search of his lodgings. He’d been given directions and sent his sea chest on ahead while he went up to greet the governor immediately after arriving. Now he made his way to a shabby street nestled under the edge of the mountain road on the outskirts of the town, looking for a house with—he consulted the note in the letter he had brought with him—red balconies.

Hadn’t Loukianos mentioned some place with red balconies? One of the tea houses—Hylas hoped he wouldn’t really have to visit them all, though if he was to remain on good terms with the governor, he might. But surely the work on the aqueduct, a large and ambitious project, would keep him busy, even reckoning with the inefficiencies that might characterize island life.

The town was eclectic, as if it had been assembled from leftover bits of various cities. They must log the forest on the larger island, Hylas thought, because they seemed to build a lot in wood, more than he had seen in Pheme. Many of the houses had wooden balconies projecting from their upper storeys, shading the streets below.

He found the house he was looking for at the end of the street, right under the looming rock face of the mountain, which here was bare and sheer. The balconies, two of them on the house’s upper storey, had beautifully constructed wooden railings, but their red paint was faded and peeling. The narrow entry hall was empty, the sun hot in the courtyard beyond, unrelieved by vegetation or the splashing of a fountain. There was a fountain, but it was as old as the rest of the house and quite dry.

It was a Sasian-style house, centred on the courtyard, with an arcade below and a gallery on the second-storey level, wooden like the balconies on the front. The proportions were pleasing, the space harmonious in spite of its age and air of neglect. You could see the mountain, its sheer cliffside stooping over the house, capped with a fringe of gnarled trees.

The haunting voice of a bowed instrument emanated from the shadows under the arcade on the opposite side of the courtyard, where a group of people lounged on cushions with small bowls in their hands. The musician was a young woman in an orange dress. She swayed with the motion of her bow, eyes closed.