Page 15 of The House of the Red Balconies

“Oh.” That made more sense.

“They were damming a river down from the mountain,” said Pani, picking up the story, “and there was a fatal flaw in the construction⁠—”

“It would have flooded the whole town⁠—”

“Village.”

“It would have flooded the whole valley, only he caught it in time.”

“Wasn’t it his job to catch it, if he’s an engineer?” Theano spoke for the first time. She was older than the other companions, and the one who usually said things like this.

“Yes,” said Pani, “but he wasn’t the engineer in charge of the dam, you see, he was just an underling, and at first the chief engineer wouldn’t listen to him, and he had to go over his head, which got him in trouble—only in the end, they all saw he was right and had saved the village. Town, whatever. A bunch of people who lived in that valley.”

“He became quite famous for it, apparently. They gave him an official commendation in Pheme.”

“If I weren’t so busy, I’d cultivate him,” said Chrestos. “But Captain Themistokles takes up all my time.”

“The tenants aren’t here to be ‘cultivated,’ Chrestos,” said Theano. “They’re here to pay rent.”

“It’s true,” said Menthe. “What if you got involved with him and then wanted to break it off, but he was living here? Ugh.”

It was a good point. You wouldn’t want to try to negotiate an affair with someone who was living in the same house. The potential for awkwardness was too great.

Not that Zo had been having much luck getting a lover from outside the house, either. He’d had hopes of Djosi, who was perhaps not as much of a prize as Chrestos’s never-ending Captain Themistokles, but was personally much more interesting and to Zo’s eye better-looking. He’d even thought their first night together had gone reasonably well—as well as these things usually went, with a minimum of awkwardness. But then Djosi hadn’t been back, hadn’t written a note or sent a gift or anything, and it didn’t look good.

“It’s nice to have you join us, Zo,” said Menthe tentatively. “It seems … it’s been a while since you’ve eaten lunch with us instead of in your room.”

“I suppose so,” said Zo.

He wasn’t sure why he had felt like coming out to join them today. Perhaps it was having breakfasted with someone—a totally novel experience—that had made him want company now.

Hylas sat at the desk that he had politely commandeered in the corner of the Tykanos government office, sketching on a fresh leaf of his tablet. He was at loose ends.

He’d borrowed several idle men from the government office and done a rough-and-ready survey of the spring on the little island. He’d written a report about it which he did not think the governor had read. He had finished a preliminary assessment of the town’s water supply, identifying several places where he suspected broken pipes, but no one could tell him who was in charge of digging them up to find out. He’d visited the bath house near the Red Balconies that was always closed, and after asking several people found out that the reason was something to do with the water intake, which kept filling up with sand and having to be laboriously dredged. No one knew who was supposed to fix that, either. Mutari, the quartermaster’s mistress and key to assembling a proper survey team, was due back from Gylphos with the next supply ship, tomorrow or the next day. It didn’t seem worth coming up with another project to occupy himself for so short a time. Perhaps he should go fishing, he thought, or sea-bathing, or …

He’d delayed too long, because Loukianos had come into the office—he could hear the governor’s voice in the anteroom—and that meant that once his state of idleness was discovered, he’d be invited out to a tea house. Poetry would be recited. Women would try gamely to flirt with him. Could he invite the governor out fishing instead?

“There you are, Hylas!” came the inevitable greeting. Loukianos wove through the desks to lean over Hylas’s. “What are you drawing there?”

Hylas looked down at the tablet, which he’d forgotten was open. He’d been sketching a plan for completing the terraces in Zo’s garden. “Oh, just something I’m building. In my spare time,” he added hastily, though why he still had that instinct with Loukianos, given the man’s approach to leisure, was beyond him.

“Good, good! Let me know if you need anything. I take it you’re not busy this afternoon?”

“No, I am not. I was thinking of taking a walk down to the beach.”

“Ah. That’s an idea. I haven’t visited the beach lately. I used to go pretty frequently at one time.” Loukianos looked almost perplexed for a moment, as if he’d forgotten why he used to go, or why he had stopped. “Yes, I know a good place,” he went on, warming to the idea. “The Eastern Beach. I could take you there if you like.”

Hylas would have been happy to go by himself, but he wasn’t craving solitude, and so long as they didn’t end up back at the Bower of Suos or—worse—the Amber Lily, he would be happy to have Loukianos’s company.

And he was. They walked down through the town, past the fort on a footpath that led to a sheltered, sandy beach. They strolled in the sun and bathed in the sea, then sat on a rock to dry off, and Loukianos told stories about his time in Sasia. It was a good afternoon.

“I haven’t done this in far too long,” Loukianos remarked as they dressed on the shore. “I used to come here pretty often with … Well. Once upon a time.”

It had occurred to Hylas to wonder if Loukianos was mourning someone. He often seemed like a man filling time that had maybe in the past been taken up by the presence of someone else. There was no wife in the governor’s mansion, that Hylas had noticed. Maybe he was a widower.

It would have been a reasonable moment for Hylas to confess that he enjoyed the beach more than the tea houses. He could have phrased it tactfully and probably avoided offending. He was used enough to Loukianos by now that he thought he could have managed that. But he decided it would be kinder to say nothing about that. Maybe part of his job here was to be the governor’s friend, after all.

“Thank you for accompanying me,” he said instead. “I’ve enjoyed myself.”