Page 3 of The House of the Red Balconies

“It’s not going to be a problem, is it?” Taris lifted her chin slightly. Without waiting for an answer, she added, “You just pay us your rent every week, and we leave you to yourself. If you want anything else, you buy a stick of incense, and you get our company until it burns down—that’s how it works for everyone, and you’re not special just because you live here.”

No doubt their last tenant, in between trying to use their bath and stealing their furniture, had made a pest of himself in other ways.

“Of course,” said Hylas forcefully. “It will certainly not be a problem.”

Left alone, Hylas sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at his clasped hands. Life on Tykanos was going to be very different from what he had imagined.

He had seen himself, in his mind’s eye, reporting occasionally to a busy and aloof governor, directing a crew of subordinates, and otherwise spending his time alone, returning after long days of work to a solitary room in some lodging house where he would trouble no one, talk to no one, and no one need know how thin a veneer of civilization he had acquired even after five years.

Instead of that, Loukianos was a gregarious person who obviously didn’t have enough work to do and looked on his newly hired engineer as a potential friend, and the lodgings were in a pleasure house where he was expected to have communal meals with companions. The work seemed likely to proceed in fits and starts, so he would be spending some of his time touring other pleasure houses and meeting other companions with Loukianos. Companions, who were renowned for their wit and sophistication, who could recite poetry and probably expected you to be able to recite poetry back at them, or at least to know whether or not to spit olive pits on the floor.

There were probably some men—there were certainly plenty of men—who would find this whole situation enviable. Hylas wished he could trade places with one of them.

Well, he had been hired to build an aqueduct, not to be a drinking buddy for the governor, and surely he wouldn’t lose the job just because he wasn’t very good company. He would finish the work and move on. If he disgraced himself, it would not be for the first time, and if he had to pick himself up and repair the damage and carry on as best he could, it would not be the first time for that either.

He got up from the bed and went to slide open the lattice screen that covered the door to the courtyard at the back of his apartment. His first thought, as he looked out, was that they should have been charging twice as much rent. The “courtyard” was a small formal garden tucked in between the corner of the tea house and the bare limestone of the cliff face. A high wooden fence, its red paint weathered like the balconies on the front, closed off the space on the left-hand side. On the right, the house was built right up to the cliff, as if it had emerged or been carved from it. Another lattice-screened doorway in that wall stood half-open to admit the breeze.

In the middle of the lawn was a gnarled old olive tree. Around the edge was a gravel path, lined with plants of different kinds that Hylas couldn’t identify. A row of neatly trimmed ornamental trees in pots stood along the fence. Someone had started building a dry stone wall—rather sloppily—under the cliff, perhaps with an eye to making a terraced section of the garden, a clever idea. There were heaps of stone and earth, overgrown with weeds, as if work had been suspended for a few months. The lawn needed attention, too—Hylas didn’t think the ragged plants poking up in places were meant to be part of the effect. Still, it was a beautifully planned space.

Fresh from his tour of Governor Loukianos’s garden, Hylas felt newly equipped to appreciate this one. It was a Sasian formal garden in miniature, the layout and proportions reflecting something to do with Sasian cosmology that Loukianos had not explained very clearly. He had wanted to make his own garden over in this style, he’d told Hylas, but had been hampered by its pre-existing features. Whoever designed this garden had been able to commit to the design scheme much more fully. The air carried the scent of rosemary.

Hylas walked around the garden, following the gravel path, taking the long route to arrive at the other door. Thinking to introduce himself to his neighbour, he looked tentatively inside.

There was a couch just inside the door, and a young man was sleeping on it. He lay half curled up in the shadows, his long blue robe covering his feet but open at the throat, his sleeping face soft with repose. The green glass beads of his earrings glittered in the spill of black hair over the cushions.

Hylas took a step backward, startled. This person’s beauty, glimpsed in the dimness of the room, seemed of a piece with the hidden garden, surprising and almost magical.

He had better manners than to stare at a sleeping woman, but the opportunity to stare at a beautiful young man in his sleep had somehow never arisen. Of course, there were reasons not to do that, too.

A bird cawed on the mountain above them, a long, raucous sound, and the sleeper woke with a start. Suddenly in motion, sweeping back loose hair with a long-fingered hand, draperies shifting around a supple figure as he sat forward into the sunlight, he looked out at Hylas.

His narrow eyes were as black as his hair, their depths emphasized with smoky kohl. His skin was fawn-coloured under a dusting of paler powder, his cheekbones high and broad, his lips full. His eyebrows, perfect black slashes, rose unsmilingly.

“Were you looking for me?” he said.

“N-n-no.” How could he have been, when he hadn’t known such a person belonged to the waking world?

“Then … ” the young man prompted impatiently. He had a voice as dark as his eye-makeup, inflected by some accent that was a complete mystery to Hylas.

“I … was looking at the garden.”

The young man gave this explanation the unimpressed look it deserved. “How did you get in?”

“Through the … ” Hylas twisted to point vaguely behind him. Finally it occurred to him what detail was lacking here. “Through my apartment. I’m the new tenant.”

“You’re the new tenant. I see.”

He relaxed slightly, and only then did Hylas realize that his pose as he sat on the bed had been full of tension. He had, of course, been alarmed to wake up and find someone looking at him; he’d just done a good job of hiding it.

“I—I’m sorry, I⁠—”

“Fortunate meeting,” the young man cut him off brusquely, with a little gesture that suggested this was a formulaic greeting. “I’m Zo.”

Hylas saw that he wasn’t going to be allowed to apologize for scaring his neighbour. Fair enough.

“I see,” he said instead. “Are you—I mean, I am Hylas.” He cleared his throat. “Hylas. Are you—also—a tenant?”

“No. I am one of the Red Balconies’ companions.”