Page 2 of The House of the Red Balconies

Hylas looked around the courtyard uncertainly. Was this a lodging house? It didn’t look particularly like any of the apartment buildings he had seen in Pheme, but then, he was far from Pheme here, in a town where the population was as mixed as the architecture. He stepped in under the arcade to get out of the sun, scanning the seated group to see if there was anyone who looked like a landlady.

There was a thin, olive-skinned woman of about his age, wearing a lot of gold bracelets, but she was asleep, leaning inelegantly on a cushion propped against the wall. Someone else, seeing Hylas and misunderstanding his intentions, kicked a spare cushion in his direction and waved indicatively at a spouted vessel and a stack of bowls on a small table. Hylas nodded with a spasmodic smile but did not move. He started to feel a ridiculous, rising panic. Was he in the wrong place? How was he going to find his lodgings?

A young woman noticed him after a moment and got to her feet, gathering up her heavy skirts.

“Welcome to the House of the Red Balconies, good sir,” she murmured, stepping away from the musical group and making a startlingly graceful curtsey.

“Th-this is the Red Balconies?”

Was that not the name of the tea shop Loukianos had mentioned? The one that you visited only for the sake of completeness? The small bowls and the spouted vessel could certainly contain tea. But the place did not otherwise resemble a restaurant.

And he wasn’t looking for a restaurant. He had been careful to arrange everything beforehand, writing to the agent whom Loukianos had recommended to secure lodgings in the town. He had followed the directions given in the agent’s letter, but this was clearly the wrong place.

“Are you here to see anyone in particular?” the young woman asked with a smile. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face, and her hair was entirely concealed under an elaborately wrapped red scarf, balanced on top of her head like a big red flower.

Hylas cleared his throat. There was no need for panic. “Actually, I believe I may have mistaken the directions. I am new to the island. I’m looking for my lodgings.”

“Oh, are you our new tenant?” Her manner changed just slightly, a fractional lowering of formality. “I did hear someone was coming.”

“I … really?”

“Oh yes.” Her smile was now wide and genuine. “We’re a tea house, but we have a spare apartment that we let out. It’s quite nice. I can show you to it. What’s your name?”

“Hylas Mnemotios.” The surname was coming more readily to his lips now, feeling less like a lie. It was only a couple of months since he had started using it again.

“Nice to meet you, Hylas. I’m Taris. Follow me.”

She padded away under the arcade, barefoot on the flagstones. Hylas followed doubtfully.

“What are you doing on Tykanos?” she asked, glancing back over her shoulder.

That at least was an easy question to answer. “I am an engineer. I have been hired by Governor Loukianos to direct the building of a new aqueduct.”

“Really?” She sounded delighted. “I’ll have to introduce you to everyone—you’ll be a sensation. The water situation in town is quite bad—I hear the aqueduct will be a tremendous improvement. It’s certainly made Governor Loukianos very popular since he announced it.”

Taris pulled aside a curtain in an arched doorway tucked in the very corner of the arcade, and Hylas followed her down a couple of steps into a small, dark, oddly shaped anteroom with bare walls and a flagged floor and two doors opening off it. She unlatched one of them and pushed it inward.

“Here you are,” she said. “This is the apartment.”

Hylas looked into the room, still half-sure this must all be a mistake. But no, it wasn’t, because there under the window was the sea chest that he’d had sent ahead to his new lodgings.

“Ah,” he said. “There are my things.”

“Yes, we had the porter put them in here for you.” Taris strode through the front room and opened an inner door. “There’s two rooms, and a little courtyard at the back, which you share with Zo—and the bath you share with Zo and Chrestos, though you’ll have to fetch and heat your own water, so you may prefer to go to the public baths. Our last tenant did. The one by the Sunset Palace is decent, I hear. The brand new one around the corner is usually closed, for some reason. And you’re not allowed to use the girls’ bath, so don’t even ask.” She laughed, but there was an edge to it which made him think that the last tenant had asked. “And you may want to buy some more furniture. Our last tenant took away everything that was in here when he left, although it wasn’t really his. We did our best to fix it up for you, but you may want some nicer things. I don’t know if you’ll find the bed big enough for you—you are tallish.”

“It all appears perfectly satisfactory,” said Hylas, as he would probably have said if she had shown him to a corner of a dirty stable instead of this airy, pleasant suite of rooms.

“Excellent.” She headed back toward the outer door. “You get to take your meals with us, if you like, but if you want to take up any of the girls’ time, you have to burn incense like everyone else.”

“Of course,” he said, since she was looking back at him as if expecting an answer, though he had no idea what she was talking about. “Where is the … where is the tea sold?”

Taris’s eyebrows went up. “What?”

It was obviously not the right question. He tried again. “I–I understand that this is a tea house … ”

“Oh, but we don’t sell tea. That’s just what it’s called on the island. We’re a house of companions. There’s four of us girls, and Zo and Chrestos, though he’s accepted a garland from Captain Themistokles.”

Hylas felt an unpleasant sensation like being splashed with cold water. He had been misunderstanding this basic piece of vocabulary all morning. Of course when Loukianos talked about showing him around the island and said it made Boukos look tame, he hadn’t been talking about places to buy tea.