Page 31 of The House of the Red Balconies

“What is it?” Hylas strode toward him, hands going up instinctively.

“Dizzy spell. I—get them all the time. Half the reason why I use the crutch. I shouldn’t—I was trying to do too much, and I didn’t sleep well.”

“Here.” Hylas offered an arm, and Zo took it and let himself be led back to his bed.

He sat, then drew up his feet and lay down, curled up, looking miserable. Hylas moved the tray with the tea and buns to the floor. He filled a bowl and stood waiting with it until Zo opened his eyes.

“I’m making a lot of trouble for you this morning,” Zo said unhappily.

“No. You’re in need of help that I’m well able to provide. That … gives me great satisfaction.”

Zo’s smile dawned slow and exquisite. “Well, you’re welcome, then.”

He reached out a hand. Hylas tried to offer the bowl of tea, but Zo reached for his free hand instead, and for a moment just clasped Hylas’s fingers. Zo’s fingers were slim and cold. Surely it was the first time their hands had ever touched? Hylas returned the grasp for an instant, as long as he felt he deserved, then let go.

“Your hands are cold,” he said. “You should drink some tea to warm yourself.”

In the end, it was an oddly good day. Zo spent most of his time resting, while Hylas came and went, bringing in things from the marketplace and from elsewhere in the house, putting up curtains and arranging furniture. He detached the screen from the garden door and built a kind of stand for it so that it could be positioned to divide the room into a sitting area and a sleeping nook. He enlisted Theano’s help, and they found cushions and a small table—it wobbled, but Hylas made it level with a wedge of folded paper, meticulously testing it until it didn’t move even a little.

At lunchtime he got Zo up, and they ate with the rest of the companions. Everyone made a fuss about having the aqueduct man join them for a meal at last, and Zo felt rather smug when he thought of all the breakfasts he and Hylas had shared.

In the afternoon, as Hylas finished working on the room, Zo read aloud from The Bronze Dolphin. When the room had been fully transformed, curtains covering the storage on the wall, screen dividing the space, a cozy seating area created, Hylas came and sat beside Zo on his bed and took over reading. He had a flat, undramatic delivery, and for some reason, when he was reading, his Ariatan accent became stronger. Zo didn’t mind. He lay back against his pillows, fantasizing about draping his legs over Hylas’s lap, which was bittersweet because he knew he’d never actually do it.

CHAPTER 11

Hylas drew up a strict budget for himself. He allowed himself two sticks of incense at the Red Balconies each week, provided he had no other extraordinary expenses. Over the weeks that followed he began taking all his meals at home, when he wasn’t dining out with the governor, to avoid expenditure on food. In this way he should be able to pay his rent for two more months with the money he had on hand, before having to beg more from Loukianos.

With Tenth Month came Dendreia, which Tykanos celebrated in the Phemian style, with gift-giving and feasts, not with the austere sacrifices and ritual combat that Hylas remembered from home. Loukianos felt the need to apologize for the small scale of the island’s festivities.

“There’s a very token procession, I’m afraid—it’s not a big town, and only about half of the residents actually observe the rites. Everyone being from somewhere else. Though if your feast is good enough, they’ll all come out to that, no matter what they observe. I’ve given some decent feasts in my time, but this year … well, ‘economy’ is my new watchword, you know.”

This was another worrying development; it was the second or third time Loukianos had said something like this. Hylas didn’t know what the problem was, and didn’t want to ask, but it had confirmed the necessity for him to husband his own cash. He hadn’t been fanciful in imagining that Loukianos would invite him to live at the palace to save on rent; the governor had made some passing remark to that effect already.

For Hylas, as long as he’d been able to choose for himself, Dendreia had been a time for staying at home. Attendance at the arena in Ariata was mandatory, but there was no fine; the only thing you risked was having the mark of impiety chalked on your door if the ritual patrol noticed. Usually they didn’t, and if they did, he’d try to wash it off before his mother saw. There was supposed to have been a fine for doing that, but in the neighbourhood where they lived, no one had cared.

Walking through the town on the Market Day before the beginning of Dendreia, he stopped to look at the array of gifts for sale in the special festival stalls: small statuettes of gods and animals, decorated lamps, candles, pieces of inexpensive jewellery and poems written on little scrolls. They were items specially made for the festival, and each had some symbolic resonance; someone in Pheme had explained it to him once, and he remembered the details vaguely.

He would buy a gift for Zo, he decided. He’d never bought a Dendreia gift for anyone—it hadn’t been a custom in Ariata, and in Pheme he hadn’t known anyone to give a gift to—so the thought was exciting. He pored over the gifts symbolic of Orante, goddess of beauty and patron of companions. He had it narrowed down to a choice between a painted pottery bird and a bronze bell meant to be hung as a wind chime, when it finally dawned on him that Zo was one of the people Loukianos had been referring to who didn’t observe the festival.

Zo was from … wherever people who looked like him were from, or maybe somewhere else—Hylas actually had no idea because he had never asked—but he was not Pseuchaian. He never swore by any of the Pseuchaian gods. Hylas didn’t know whether he even made libations at the household altar on Hesperion’s Day. He would have accepted a gift graciously, Hylas was sure, but it wouldn’t have been a thoughtful gesture to give him one. It wouldn’t have said, “I think about you all the time,” so much as “I don’t pay enough attention when you talk.”

So he didn’t buy anything, and then, on the first morning of Dendreia, the day for gift-giving, Zo came out into the garden with a smile on his face and a parcel wrapped in a twist of paper in his hands.

“Dendreia greetings,” he said, presenting it on both hands with a winsome little bow. “Oh, is something wrong?”

“I didn’t get you anything.”

“That’s all right.” He had withdrawn the parcel when Hylas hadn’t taken it and stood holding it uncertainly. “Do they do this where you’re from?”

“No, they don’t.”

“Oh. I see, I thought they did.” He held up his gift with a rueful expression. “They don’t do it where I’m from, either, but you may have worked that out. But I do think you’ll like this. I hope you will. I had Chrestos go to the market to buy it for me.”

“Thank you,” said Hylas, taking the parcel. He untwisted the paper carefully.

It was a painted pottery figurine of a donkey, symbol of the smith-god Telleros, whom Phemians considered the patron of engineers. It was the kind of gift anyone could have given him; but it hadn’t been given to him by anyone. It had been given by Zo. Hylas looked at it and felt an incredible happiness.

“I made Chrestos buy half a dozen of them so I could pick the one with the best expression,” Zo explained. “He took the others back.”