The House of the Red Balconies by A.J. Demas

Author:A.J. Demas [Demas, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sexton's Cottage
Published: 2024-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Winter came the way it often did on Tykanos, in a sudden blast of cold rain, lashing out of a grey sky that hung over the island for weeks. At the Red Balconies they lit braziers and huddled indoors. Theano succeeded in getting one of the good sitting rooms opened up, even in its half-furnished state, and she and the other women began entertaining in there. Their loyal guests made jokes about how they would endure worse for the food and entertainment on offer. Zo divided his time between the public sitting room and his own room, where Timon of Kos had become a fixture.

It was a delicate dance, keeping Timon interested enough that he might be willing to commit to offering a garland, while also making it clear to him that he wouldn’t get enough of Zo to really satisfy him until he did. Taris, who was engaged in a similar dance with a First Spear of the resident marine legion, remarked one morning at chores that she sometimes felt envious of prostitutes.

“I wish I could just write him an invoice, you know?”

Once Zo would have argued with her; he’d loved the way nothing was taken for granted, nothing specifically owed in exchange for payment at the Red Balconies. It had felt like home to him, a place where he could deploy all the skills he had learned in his precarious, pampered boyhood. But that was before he’d been obliged to single-mindedly pursue a patron. Now he knew exactly what Taris meant.

None of them had secured a garland yet. Chrestos was still doing fine with Captain Themistokles, and Taris had hopes of her marine First Spear, but the other three were completely without prospects.

Most of the guests who had at first been put off by the switch to entertaining in the companions’ rooms had started to come back, but the winter was always a slow time, with no ships arriving in the harbour, and it was an open secret that the house’s finances were in a bad way. Hylas told Zo he’d overheard Theano arguing with Mistress Aula about buying cheaper tea and olives—insanity, Theano had said, when the quality of the food and drink were among the Red Balconies’ few remaining attractions.

Now that it was too cold to sit in the garden, Zo and Hylas ate breakfast in Hylas’s room. They had never talked about it; it just happened naturally on the first rainy morning. Hylas knocked on Zo’s door, cloak pulled up over his head, and said, “Tea’s in my room. Come over when you’re ready,” and Zo came. Hylas had a little table he’d built himself out of a couple of old shutters and a barrel, and he brought in Zo’s chair from outside and seated himself on top of his sea chest.

“Now we’re at the same height,” Zo remarked, wanting—and at the same time not wanting—to ask if Hylas had built the table to chair-height instead of cushion-height for his sake.

Hylas’s eyes were on the tea he was pouring.

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