Chapter Text
Darius’s victory feast was Ryou’s first formal function in the Outlands and in Sura, a mere ten days after his arrival in the city. Assyrian etiquette was foreign enough at the best of times, so he went to the festivities determined to keep a low profile and not make any faux-pas.
But the officer from Halicarnace really was insufferably rude.
"Hey Ghan! Why d’you always turn down my dice games? Bastards are supposed to be lucky!" Hyeronemon shouted from across the packed room (Hyeronemon the Halicarnacean, what a stupid mouthful, thought Ryou.)
Darius just shrugged with the air of one who did not give a damn. It was probably all the answer the ape deserved. Ryou approved of such restraint. It was just...if Hyeronemon cracked one more joke along those lines-...Darius really did not care about his parentage, and as a rule his friends and his brother had no problems teasing him about it, but this was not teasing. Hyeronemon was a loudmouthed idiot who was spoiling for a fight. At a towering six foot for well over a hundred and fifty kilos, he had the frame for it. Most men in the Pariya regions did not top five foot six, making the Halicarnacean a giant by comparison. A really loud obnoxious one.
The victory party was noisy and full of drunk army officers. Ryou had been given something to drink and then he’d retreated to the background from where he watched Darius, clearly in his element, salute allies and old comrades. But not everybody here was a friend...Peistrasos, Darius’s servant and quite the gossip for a burly ex-soldier, had told Ryou that Nineel the Tezalian had refused to attend this celebration on some flimsy excuse. It was rumored he'd been insulted by Darius questioning his handling of Sura's garrison. There were others too who did not like this illegitimate commander with his weird ideas about warfare that broke with tradition. Ryou spotted what he suspected were a few of those ill-wishers, a sullen group at the far table, lurking near the cheese wheels and huge flatbreads.
Hyeronemon wasn't a part of that old-Assyrian clique, though. He was one of the Alliance officers whose troops had helped Sura get rid of the last of the Roman legions after Leyam had taken over command of the country a few years back. The big bear hadn’t left with the others once Sura was made safe; he’d married an Assyrian woman and made Sura his home. His current post was as an officer for a siege engine unit, unrelated to any partisanship in the ranks of the Sura homeguard. It wasn't clear what bone he had to pick with Darius. Maybe they had some bad blood between them, or maybe, from the jocular way Hyeronemon was looking for a fight, he just thought Darius needed a beatdown for some stupid reason that must seem blindingly obvious to a person from Halicarnace with the IQ of a billy goat and the manners to match.
"Though I don’t know why they say bastards’re lucky", said Hyeronemon loudly. “When you’re born nothin’ but some woman’s son, the Fates decide that’s enough bad luck right there to last you? S’at it?”
Some of the men around him laughed, which was clearly going to egg him on. Partying Assyrians got righteously drunk, which a Japanese man like Ryou respected, but they got a little wild too, which was not quite so proper. Some of those who laughed were glancing at Darius to see if the jibe had hit home, and others were clearly waiting with some anticipation for the moment Darius would have to pick up the gauntlet and punch this ugly brute in the face.
Ryou finished his wine and chewed on some tiny olives, half listening to Dionosydoros and his friends. Dionosydoros had spent most of the evening with these men; they were officers from Kalicee, heading a mercenary band hired by Assyria. They were talking about an old campaign they'd fought in together, going over all the ins and outs in terribly long details. Ryou kept his expression set to 'polite interest', but most of his attention was on the party, picking out similarities and contrasts between this victory celebration and similar revels after Ujie Standard & Trade's better business deals.
The musicians nobody was listening to started a new song. Slaves appeared bearing yet more lambs on spits and other large dishes, despite the fact that it was obvious nobody was eating anymore, just drinking. People lounged on couches, some of them passed out. Others had company. From where he sat, Ryou could see one of those companions, a young fellow who would not be able to get so much as a light beer back in Japan, sitting to the left of an older soldier who had his arm looped around the young shoulders, a hand toying with a tunic fastener. That would not be legal in Japan either, though the kid looked old enough to be in high school and would probably be doing it anyway. Just not flaunting it...Another big difference between this affair and a party back home was the absence of women, except for the four that'd been dancing earlier to some extremely lewd comments from the peanut gallery. Apparently most Assyrian or Greek parties, particularly a soldier's drinking affair like this, was considered to be a man's evening out. Curious, Ryou has asked several people about this and gotten a different answer each time as to why this was, from 'it's too crude for proper women to attend' to 'the boring tarts would get in the way of our fun' and every variant in between.
Ryou stole a glance at his lover. Darius was reclining on a couch on the other side of Dio’s mock battle, now being reenacted with pieces of bread (cavalry units), pickled onions (infantry), lamb skewers (the four cannons that'd been used, to the pride of all who'd been there) and the bowl used to rinse one's fingers (the enemy high command). Darius had followed the lively discussion for awhile with the faint smile of a man who liked to see his friends enjoying themselves. Now he was looking out at the crowd, lifting his cup to salute old acquaintances or exchanging a few words with those who walked over to talk about new battle plans and old campaigns. Since neither he nor anybody else was paying Ryou any attention, Ryou redirected his people-watching back to his favorite subject.
Darius, who usually wore either armor or the kind of clothes worn under armor, looked very different tonight. He was dressed in a short tunic and a longer fawn-colored overcoat, open down the front and belted with silk. His clothes were sown with embroidered decorations down the sleeves as well as on the front and sides, vibrant green silk and thick gold thread in geometric patterns. He was wearing a golden bracer on the upper part of his forearm, a golden torc around his neck embedded with multicolored pieces of stone, lapis and carnelian, and hoop earrings - to Ryou's surprise, not having noticed his lover's ears were pierced. Part of his dark hair had been gathered back into a knot wrapped in gold ribbon. Every time Ryou caught sight of him, an unworthy little part of his brain had to contemplate the effect if Darius went strolling into Ujiie S&T’s front lobby in that getup and asked for Ryou to be paged. Here, the effect was mitigated, since everybody else of Assyrian descent was dressed pretty much the same. But the eyes beneath the lines of khol applied by the slave who'd dressed him - Peistrasos had insisted upon that - were sharp and watchful as they studied the people around him, like a lion lounging in the shade but not losing one iota of the surrounding savannah. Ryou only got a few seconds to drink in the sight before, sure enough, his lover looked over his shoulder to see who was watching him. By then Ryou was once more immersed in the terribly interesting battle of somebody-or-other against the Kalicean’s First Army. An olive had just decimated a piece of bread and was heading towards a strategically important wine goblet.
A slave appeared next to Ryou with a frothy pitcher extended, Ryou shook his head with a quick and automatic smile of thanks. This wasn’t one of the Noble Quarter slaves; the latter were used to just about anything, utterly blasé after years of dealing with Lord Ghan, his battlefield of a room, his soldiers and his dogs, whilst rubbing shoulders with Leyam's servants who got to see even more eccentric behavior. This young man, a flat-faced, warty specimen in his late teens who’d probably been shanghaied from the kitchen personnel to make up the staffing numbers, gave Ryou a startled and slightly nervous look as if suspecting some ulterior motive. He gave the guest a deep bow and beat a hasty retreat. Ryou stifled a sigh, keeping his features impassive, and brought his attention back once more to the battlefield.
Dio, currently retelling his part in the skirmish, was dressed in his homeland's garb, more sober than Assyrian formal dress: a white tunic fastened at the shoulders with gold brooches, golden cords knotted around his head to keep his hair back, and a thick bracelet, booty from some campaign, on his wrist. It flashed in the light of the torches as Dio explained the cutting thrust he’d used on some enemy cavalryman. Ryou amused himself by a mental comparison with UST's tie-and-suited business exec recounting details of hostile takeovers. Dio was as exotic as you could get by comparison, and also very lightly dressed. Then again, the heat from the day was lingering in this room, battling the firepits for dominance. Ryou was sweating even though he was wearing much the same getup as Dio, clothes that had been provided by the Sura tailor who’d dressed him in Leyam’s quarters that first night. A kind of tunic/toga with brooches as fasteners, in an Assyrian color scheme of dark green and brown, with more decorations along the hem than the Ionian format. These were somewhat casual clothes, the ones he wore when he walked around the streets of Sura. Earlier in the evening, he'd been about to put on the only truly formal outfit he had when Peistrasos, moved by some foresight, appeared at his doorstep to 'help the noble lord dress'. Ryou had found it odd, Peistrasos not being known for overly zealous service. Something in the old soldier's eyes had suggested Ryou would be wise to listen, and he was glad he did. Though he was privileged to by special decree, it would have been a gaffe to wear royal purple when the guest of honor was not allowed to...
As it were, he fit right into the crowd, the only difference being the lack of plunder adorning his person. Ryou’s sole decoration was the bracer on his right arm. Maybe it made him look a little down at the heels, but Ryou preferred it that way. When he’d rejoined Darius outside his rooms on their way here, his lover had said Ryou looked nice in a sober kind of way, and that was the only opinion that mattered.
“Hey, did you guys hear this good one this guy from…from somewhere told me? They’ve got a saying in his town: “All dogs are bastards.” Dogs! Get it?! Ha ha ha hah!”
Dio and his friends went to crowd around another part of the battlefield on the floor, leaving Ryou on the margin of the group. Ryou got up, walked around them and sat down on the edge of Darius's seat. "Is that big man over there a friend of yours?" he asked, leaning forwards to speak to Darius privately.
"No. But if you're wondering why I'm ignoring him, I simply choose battles that have meaning," Darius responded dryly. "And Hyeronemon, for all he's a pain in the ass, has a small claim on my patience as a friend of a friend of mine."
"Your friend could choose his friends better," muttered Ryou, alcohol loosening his tongue.
"My friend is dead, and can no longer choose his friends," Darius answered calmly. "Hyeronemon wasn't quite so bad in his younger days, though he and I were never close. I put up with his antics out of respect for he who is gone. Hyeronemon’s adjutant over there, his half-brother on his mother’s side, is considerably different in temperament, and he keeps an eye on him and stops him before he says something I would have to kill him for. I just think of it as a chance to practice my forbearance."
Darius had a lot of friends, dead or otherwise, so there was no reason for Ryou to jump to any conclusion. But something, a nuance in the way Darius said 'friend' perhaps, or the fact he was putting up with the loon, made Ryou wonder if this wasn't a significant friend. Hyeronemon, for all his juvenile behavior, was in his late thirties, so that might make it an older significant friend- Ryou wondered where his mind was going with this.
Ryou looked around, just in time to see the boor himself fall heavily onto a nearby couch, his long-suffering half-brother at his shoulder with the gloomy look of one who knew full well this was not a wise move. Their eyes met before Ryou could look away, and a thought process started its glacially slow path through Hyeronemon's brain. Damn.
"Say, Ghan, whozat sitting beside you?" Hyeronemon said jocularly, sloshing drink on the floor as he jabbed a finger in Ryou’s direction. "I thought it was a boy."
The lighting, provided by torches, braziers and the firepit, was bad, but it wasn't that bad. Ryou could have ignored the implied insult to his manhood, considering the source, but he wasn't the only one it'd been aimed at. And from the momentary frown that crossed Darius's features, its intended target had not appreciated it. Ryou felt a surge of warmth quite unlike himself (even if he was slightly inebriated by now) when he realized that Darius could shrug off insults flung at him, but did not like the same addressed to Ryou.
"My friend is from a far off land," said Darius, swirling the beer in his heavy metal goblet. "They have different customs there, as we do in Sura where a man is at liberty to sit where he chooses without disparagement." There'd been a slight stress on the 'man'. So this gibbering boor had just suggested Ryou was on par with one of those awfully young men sharing the couches of other revelers.
Hyeronemon laughed, a great booming noise. "Is that so? But the way I heard it, he was your booty at Essin."
"You heard wrong," said Darius, still not looking up as if attempting to give Hyeronemon a hint that this was not a good direction to go in. Further off, Dio had looked up from the condiment battle and was listening with a frown on his face. He got to his feet and sauntered over. The half-brother put a hand on Hyeronemon’s shoulder, but the big bear didn’t seem to notice.
"Well then all to the good. Does he understand our language?"
"Yes," said Ryou who had no intention of hiding behind Darius.
"Oh, all to the good," Hyeronemon repeated. "No offense, stranger. Though you know what they say, if you lie down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas!" And he laughed hugely at his own joke, a laughter that urged others to share it, including Ryou.
This guy...was an aggressive lout, but there wasn’t much meanness to him, not really. He was like a drunken and obnoxious bull in a china shop, but one that would not gore, only prod a bit and then sit back and laugh until he puked. Others of the same kind were giggling like apes behind him. And behind those tittering drunkards, and possibly egging them on, were the ones with the agenda, who were watching Darius and Ryou with amused smiles full of poison. Ryou, who was not looking for trouble, was not about to toss out any hasty words into this volatile atmosphere, so he just shrugged.
Hyeronemon laughed as if Ryou had given him an adequate comeback. "Come, let us drink together then! No, no, not like that," he added when Ryou curtly lifted his cup in salutation as he'd seen men do all night, "Ghan claims you to be a man, even if you're sitting at his side with a boy's beardless face, so you won't turn down a drink from a man's cup, will you?"
"Hyero, go drink on your own, Ryou has no interest in your games," Darius told him, at the same time as Garalgexes, one of his friends seated nearby, said pretty much the same thing. That just gave Hyeronemon fuel, and there was loud laughter as the 'man's cup' was produced. Ryou had spotted it on a pedestal earlier; it was a ewer of fine wood with gold pipings, the length of his hand and forearm, full of beer by the looks of it, in the rough shape of a crouching bull. The animal’s tail formed a handle on one end and the bull’s snout ended in a corked spout. To hold it up and drink from it, one had to hold it at arm's length. Hyeronemon did so one-handed, biceps bunching like coconuts as he uncorked the spout and aimed the jet of beer at his mouth (and chin and beard and chest). A slave with a pitcher stood poised nearby to fill it again once Hyeronemon had finished.
Of course Ryou would not be able to lift that with just one hand, must less drink out of it without showering in liquor. He wasn't even going to try. He had nothing to prove to the likes of Hyeronemon and his friends. Though he did want to refuse in a way that would not leave Darius to suffer more slings thrown his way. It was for this reason and this reason alone that Ryou said, "Oh, is that what that’s for? I thought I saw it used as a urinal earlier- but I must have been mistaken."
His last words were drowned in a geyser of beer barreling out of Hyeronemon's mouth.
General laughter. Darius gave Ryou a dry look that said he knew full well that'd been deliberate, and that he was going to tell Ryou off for picking up the gauntlet tossed down by idiots once he'd finished enjoying the result.
For a moment, it seemed the bear-like Hyeronemon was going to lose his temper as he wiped himself down, but then he decided it had been a good hit and he roared with laughter, rising by a tiny increment in Ryou's estimate of both his intelligence and sense of fair play.
"He's built like a girl and he fights like one, but I think I like him! Say, my pretty friend, let me get my own back with a man's game."
"No thank you," Ryou replied distastefully, but Hyeronemon didn't hear him since he'd been bellowing for two cups and a flask. The idiot only meant a drinking competition. Ryou glanced at Darius. That small frown was still there, but when he caught Ryou's look, he shrugged and said softly, "We can leave if you wish to ignore him." Wish to ignore him. That meant that Ryou was free to defend himself; Darius was leaving him the choice, old dead friend notwithstanding.
The wisest course would have been to take the out and leave. Ryou had gotten in a small blow, he could depart with his dignity intact. He was not going to drag Darius out of his own party, though, he could damn well leave on his own. Right. He wanted to keep a low profile, after all. There was absolutely no reason to- oh, screw it.
Ryou leaned far over and picked up the bottle that'd been left nearly intact at Dio's feet. He ignored the Ionian's startled, “Hey, watch it, that's that stuff” and swung his legs around and over the end of the couch so that he was facing Hyeronemon across the low table a slave had produced.
"I take it this is a game where we match drink for drink? I've not played this since I was a boy," Ryou said - lied, actually, he'd never played this as a boy or any other game requiring friends. But it was a way of clearly stating his opinion on this puerile game, which Ryou thought was important for the other, more sober men listening.
"Good, good! Here!" Hyeronemon brandished a cup Ryou's way.
Ryou heard a couple of people making bets behind him. With his lighter frame and lack of muscle, it wasn't hard to figure out who the odds were favoring, even if Hyeronemon was much further down the road to ethylic coma than Ryou.
"Oh, go ahead, you have the beer," Ryou said kindly. "It's too weak for me. I prefer something stronger.”
That way, nobody could say the idiot did not get a fair warning, though of course it was obvious how Hyeronemon was going to react to that statement.
The Halicarnacean managed three tumblers of the reinforced liquor before falling over like a felled tree, to the amusement of most of the people around them. As Ryou watched, the bear was dragged out by his half-brother and a couple of friends. He had a happy smile on his face. It would probably not be there tomorrow morning. Fortunately his fall and exit had distracted the revelers, and Ryou was once more unnoticed by the majority of the crowd; only Dio and his buddies were looking at him, a little wide-eyed.
"I did warn him it was a bit stronger than beer," Ryou said apologetically.
Dio snorted and picked the bottle out of Ryou's hands, giving the liquid a suspicious sniff as if he suspected Ryou of performing some kind of switch. "This stuff is poison. We only drink it in Kalicee. This ass here brought it as a gift." The ass being referred to, an officer named Mygon from Dio's hometown, was presently grinning like a split melon. "But we don't drink it like that, we water it with the juice of lemons like I showed you earlier. No wonder that ox went down. Though you don't look affected."
That wasn't quite true. The room was doing slow spins around Ryou. But he was too good a social drinker to show it, the president had made sure of that, since it was expected of someone of Ryou’s position. The inebriation would pass, more annoying was the growing heartburn from the sticky stuff. Ryou looked around discreetly for his plate and the bread he still had there.
"It's a question of habit, I suppose." The resiny liquor was no stronger than the cognac Ryou preferred. Strong enough, though; he knew from experience that men used to downing barrels of beer or liters of sake would keel over after a few glasses of anything stronger, even if the overall alcohol levels consumed were the same. Something about the lack of dilution.
Ryou ate some bread, hoping it'd stay down, then he tried to catch a look at Darius's face out of the corner of his eye, to see if his friend was amused, embarrassed or irritated at Ryou's interference.
"Don't look at me," Darius said, which was uncanny because to all appearances he was still watching the liquid slowly swirling around in his cup. "You are your own lion."
He'd spoken softly in the din, Ryou had had to lean forward on the couch to hear, and he wasn't sure he understood. "What does that mean?”
"It means you pick your own battles and your own tactics. I'll carry your shield for you, assuming you ever need it. And I'll be sticking to beer when I'm drinking with you from now on," said Darius with an odd smile behind the rim of his cup. Then Mygon knocked over a bowl of grapes while imitating a bear-like figure falling over backwards, which dragged Darius and Ryou into their conversation.