Chapter 13

"Pani and Menthesay they have a surprise for everyone, and we've all got to come to the best winter sitting room," Chrestos said, hanging off the doorframe to look into Zo's room. "Where's Aqueduct Man? I knocked on his door, but there was no answer."

"He's out doing aqueduct things—he doesn't actually work here, you know."

"Oh. I just got used to him being around most of the time. He's like a member of the family, you know?"

"All right, I'll be there in a minute. Tell them, will you?"

Pani and Menthe had been busy with something for weeks that they had been trying to keep secret from Mistress Aula. Zo had no inkling of what it was, though he thought Theano and Taris were in on the secret and had been helping to keep it quiet.

He had breakfasted with Hylas that morning as usual, the part of his day that he wouldn't have missed for worlds, no matter how tired he was. They had talked as usual, though Zo had been distracted by picturing Hylas's strong, straight back and trim ass. He wondered what Hylas had been thinking about.

Zo made his way upstairs to the best winter sitting room. The rest of the household, save Mistress Aula, was gathered in the gallery outside the door, wrapped in shawls and looking sleepy—except for Menthe and Pani, who were holding hands and looked nervously excited.

"What is it?" Chrestos groaned. "I'm dying to know!"

"You'll find out when Mistress gets here," said Pani.

"Oh, I hope she likes it," said Menthe.

Mistress Aula came up the stairs a few minutes later, enveloped in a patterned red mantle. She looked suspicious.

"What's going on?"

"We have a surprise for you, Mistress," said Pani. Zo noticed that she moved to let go of Menthe's hand, but Menthe held on.

"Come inside and see," Menthe said.

She opened the door to the sitting room, and she and Pani stepped inside. The rest of the group held back to let Mistress Aula follow them. She stopped just inside the door and gasped.

"Who did this? Who did you get? It must have cost a fortune!"

"We did it ourselves," Pani said. "Menthe and I."

What they'd done, Zo saw when he finally got to look in through the doorway, was painted frescoes in the best winter sitting room, all over one wall and part of another. Frescoes of garden scenes with birds in the trees, a favourite decorative scheme of Mistress Aula's, and domed buildings in the distance suggestive of Zash. It was breathtaking. You hardly noticed now that the cushions were threadbare and the floor needed waxing.

"Pani did all the drawing," Menthe was explaining, "and I helped put in the colours. We're not finished?—"

"But we thought the guests would like to watch us work," Pani completed her sentence.

"We needed to do this much to perfect our technique before we showed it to you," Menthe went on.

"But if you like it, we can do other rooms in the house, too."

Mistress Aula had begun to cry. "It's so perfect. No one in town has anything like this. It will—it will set us apart. And I thought none of you liked me!"

There was an awkward silence. Menthe was the one who broke it.

"We don't want the Red Balconies to fail, Mistress. We …"

"It's our home," said Pani. "We wanted to do what we can to help."

"It was a triumph," said Taris, hugging Menthe, after Mistress had gone.

"I didn't know you could do frescoes," said Chrestos. "I mean, I knew you draw, Pani, and you're both good with colours in your weaving and that, but painting frescoes?"

"We had to learn some techniques. Do you remember that man Pamphilos who was our guest a bunch of times back in Eighth Month? He's a fresco painter from Boukos who's here for the winter, doing work at someone's house on the mountain. He agreed to teach us for free drinks and food. It was very kind of him."

"We're hoping Mistress won't make us go after garlands from men if we can do something else to help the house," Pani explained. "We don't want patrons."

"Your hearts are already bestowed," said Taris with a romantic sigh.

"What?" said Chrestos, looking around as though he'd missed something. "On who?"

"On each other, you giant dimwit." Taris rolled her eyes.

That made sense, and Zo felt rather a giant dimwit himself for not having realized it. He couldn't wait to tell Hylas and find out if he had.

As luck would have it, and much to Mistress Aula's delight, they were able to show off the frescoes that afternoon, and without any expenditure on lamp oil. A group of guests arrived during tea hours, something that hadn't been happening much recently.

They were a random assortment that worked surprisingly well together, a pleasing thing when it happened. There were a couple of regulars who had stopped coming some time ago, a pair of jurists who knew the Red Balconies only by reputation and said they had heard it talked about favourably the other night, and a young Zashian, bearded and trousered and looking fresh from Suna, a stranger to the Red Balconies and to Tykanos tea houses in general.

They were all enchanted by Pani and Menthe's frescoes. The jurists and the regulars loved the idea of watching them prepare the next section of the composition. The Zashian gravitated rather shyly toward Zo and Taris.

"You must be from the Parkan," he said to Zo, speaking in a tentative mixture of Zashian and Pseuchaian, as if unsure which language Zo would understand best.

"I am," said Zo in Zashian. "My name is Temar."

The Zashian beamed gratefully, his smile white in his dark beard.

"And you," he addressed Taris even more shyly, "are from my mother's homeland, I can tell by the way you wrap your headscarf."

"Your mother is from Shavadi?" said Taris delightedly. "I so rarely meet anyone from there. I was not born in Shavadi, but my master moved there from Seleos when I was a little girl. I served in the household of a Shavad mountain lord for a while."

"Truly? My mother told me stories of them when I was a boy! What are they really like?"

Zo, who had heard stories of the mountain lords of Shavadi when he was a boy too, listened with interest as Taris described her former life. Their Zashian guest already seemed perfectly at ease.

"What name did you give Nahaz?" Taris asked later, after the early guests had left. "Temar? Is that your real name?"

"Oh. No, but it's a typical Parkan name, and ‘Zo' isn't." He shrugged. "I thought it would confuse him if I didn't have a Parkan name." He'd put on a slight Parkan accent when speaking Zashian to Nahaz, too, but Taris didn't seem to have noticed that.

She frowned. "Well, he seemed to have a good time, so he may come back. You'd be better off giving him your real name then."

"He'll think I did give him my real name, and that Zo is a nickname. This isn't my first chariot race, you know."

That seemed to satisfy her, and she laughed and let the topic drop.

Hylas did not expect to see Loukianos at the government office that day. But he came in, late in the afternoon, looking grey-faced and worse for wear. He shuffled some documents about and talked to a few people before finally coming over to Hylas's desk.

"Hylas," he said grimly. He leaned against the desk, arms folded.

Hylas held his breath. Clearly the governor remembered what had gone on the night before and was embarrassed by it. And a man in his position could easily make such a problem go away. Dismissing Hylas would be simple—logical, even, with the aqueduct project stalled and perhaps moribund.

Of course he didn't want to be dismissed, but equally he found he didn't want to see Loukianos abuse his power in that way. It would be unworthy of him.

"I have to apologize for last night," Loukianos said, and Hylas breathed again.

"It's all right, sir," he said easily.

"No, no, it isn't. I can only imagine what you must think of me."

There were other people in the office, though none very near them.

"I think you were upset and grieving, and I'd never hold that against you. As … as for the other …" He lowered his voice further. "You know, it's not really anything I know much about, but I'm sure you can make it happen. Not—not with me, that wouldn't work, and probably not with that young woman at the Peacock, but I daresay there are people on the island who would quite like the idea."

Loukianos had been staring fixedly down at the desk, but now he looked up at Hylas. "You're probably right. It is Tykanos, after all."

"Exactly what I was thinking."

But in fact, when he thought about it more, after Loukianos went off to another part of the office to speak to someone, he thought that Tykanos wasn't quite what everyone made it out to be. It was more complex, more difficult to grasp—like a person with many sides to their character.

The garden door rattled open briefly and shut again, a breath of cold air wafting over the bed, and Hylas was in the room; Zo could feel his presence even if he wouldn't open his eyes.

"Zo, it's mid-morning. You should get up."

"I'm tired," Zo snarled from the depths of his pillow.

A pause. Then Hylas's voice again, gentle and sympathetic but somehow also implacable: "I know. But you told me that lying in bed all day doesn't help and that you often feel better when you get up. So I've come to remind you that you should try that."

"I don't want to."

"I know. I'm here to help, though. What if I get you some fresh tea?"

"Mph." Zo finally opened his eyes and peered at the chair beside his bed. There was the tray which Hylas must have left earlier, the tea bowl full but obviously quite cold by now. "Was I awake when you came earlier?"

"I thought you were, but perhaps not."

"Fresh tea would be nice."

Very briefly, Hylas touched his shoulder—just the slightest tap of his fingers through the blanket.

"I'll be right back." Another pause. "Is it all right if I come in through your front door, from the hall?"

"Why wouldn't it be?"

"Um, I don't know. Sorry. Never mind."

Zo thought about that while Hylas was gone, instead of falling back to sleep as he'd planned. Maybe Hylas had been afraid someone would see him going into Zo's room if he went in from the hall? It was more or less a secret that they visited each other so much. They were never together outside their corner of the house.

He closed his eyes but wasn't asleep when Hylas returned. He pushed himself up onto one elbow in bed to show his intention of following Hylas's advice.

"Sorry I took so long," Hylas said, setting the fresh pot of tea on the tray.

He picked up the bowl of cold tea and drained it in a couple of gulps instead of tossing it out. Zo winced, but Hylas didn't seem to notice that. He refilled the bowl from the pot and offered it to Zo.

"Elpis was telling me all about Pani and Menthe's frescoes."

"Mm." Zo sat up, cradling the warm bowl. "It's the talk of the house. Who's Elpis?"

Hylas had taken a seat on the floor by Zo's bed. "The cook."

"Isn't the cook a man? Tio, Timo-something?"

"Timoto. He's the night cook. Elpis is the day cook."

"Oh. Shocking that I didn't know that, isn't it?"

"A little bit."

"You're friends with the kitchen staff. I remember you saying that, a long time ago, when I made a joke about how they must like you because they'd given you the good tea."

"I spent many years with no friends and am making up for lost time."

Zo looked down at Hylas. His own life hadn't exactly been full of friendship before he came to this place—and then he'd spent most of this year sulking in his room, ignoring the friends he did have because it was too much work to try to make them understand his suffering. And even then, to befriend the kitchen staff—that, he realized with shame, would never have occurred to him.

"I know you said you lost your status in your homeland. Do you think of yourself as a commoner?"

"Absolutely. That surprises you?"

"Well. Yes. It sounded unjust, the way you were treated by your people. I guess I'd imagined you would rebel against that in your heart, if nowhere else."

"I do think it unjust now, but for most of my life I haven't. And I wouldn't want that status back, not with what it means in Ariata. Though … I have started using my old surname again, which I'm not at all entitled to do." He shrugged. "That doesn't make any sense, does it? It was that business with the dam at Koilas. I was starting to be … well, talked about, and I felt I needed a double name—most people who are in the public eye have two names. I could have invented one, I guess, but I liked my actual family name."

"What is it?"

"My surname? Mnemotios."

"Muh-neh … "

"Mnemotios."

"Neh-moh … Mneh?"

"Yeah. Mneh. Motios."

"That's a tongue-twister."

"Don't be silly. You're an accomplished young man. You don't have any difficulty pronouncing names."

"All right, all right. Mnemotios. Hylas Mnemotios. It is a nice name."

There was a knock at Zo's front door. Hylas started.

"Message for you!" came Mistress Aula's voice, sounding unusually cheerful.

Hylas was already on his feet. He slid the garden door open silently and slipped out as Zo was calling, "Coming!"

Zo swung his feet out of bed and went to the door, aggrieved that Hylas had been driven away so abruptly. Of course he wouldn't come back.

Mistress Aula didn't open the door herself before Zo got there, a mark of how pleased she evidently was with Zo at the moment. She was smiling when he opened the door, although the smile dimmed somewhat when she saw him.

"You look like a wreck."

"Thanks. I feel great, too."

"You need to take care of yourself."

"I do. I was. I had to get up to answer the door."

She sighed. "Right. Well, there's a message for you from Timon of Kos." She presented a tablet tied with a red ribbon. "So, that's good. You, um, go rest or whatever you need to do."

He went to drop down onto his divan after she left, where he untied the ribbon around the tablet and flipped it open. It was just a note to tell him that Timon was busy and wouldn't be able to see him for a few days.

He hadn't finished his tea or touched the buns that Hylas had brought that morning, and now they were all the way on the other side of the screen at the far end of the room. He leaned his head back against the cushions and closed his eyes.

Another knock, this time Hylas's characteristic soft tap at the garden door. Zo's eyes popped open.

"Come!"

Hylas slipped back into the room.

"I thought you'd gone."

"I came back." He disappeared behind the screen by Zo's bed and reappeared with the tea tray.

"What would I do without you?" Zo sat up and accepted the bowl which Hylas had refilled with hot tea.

"Who's the message from? If—if it's my business. It's probably not my business."

"It's Timon. He's trying to play hard to get."

Hylas sat on the divan next to him, not very close. "Is that, um, how that's supposed to work?"

"No." Zo laughed. "It's a terrible gambit. I wish he'd just go away. I don't want to have to be the one to tell Mistress he's not a good prospect."

"I'll try to get the governor here before you have to," said Hylas, apparently serious.

"Is he still speaking to you? I thought we were afraid he was going to fire you for getting thrown up on."

"No, we're on good terms again, I think. He apologized."

"Good man. Well, invite him, then. By all means."

He was humouring Hylas, of course; he didn't really think the governor of Tykanos was likely to take up with him. A man like that would take a mistress from one of the big houses, someone with more status in the town than Zo would ever have. It would be foolhardy of him not to, no matter what his personal preferences might be.

"I have to go, I'm afraid," Hylas said, getting to his feet. "Do you need anything else?"

"No. I'm all right. I might go up and work with the girls for a while later."

"Good. I'm—I'm so glad you're doing that again. Well. I'm off."

Zo sketched a lazy wave and watched Hylas leave through the steam from his tea. He wondered if Hylas too had felt that it would have been natural for him to lean down and give Zo a parting kiss. No, probably not.