Page 10 of The Hymn to Dionysus

9

Knights train for four hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired and stars or gods are falling out of the sky and someone’s gone mad. It’s four hours a day, every day, unless you go into battle.

The young knights were learning how to turn as a unit. It’s difficult. If you’re marching straight, but then the order comes to form a shield wall on the right, everyone has to swing their shield right, not knock out the person next to them, and come to terms with the idea that they aren’t where they thought in the battle order. The person who was ten ranks back on the right side is now in the middle of the front line. Today, they were practising it again and again, and after ten tries, I jumbled them all up so that nobody was ever in the same position for long.

“Come on, again,” I said, as shields clattered and tangled, again.

“Sir, we’re just so tired,” Jason tried. “And that thing in the parade ground ...”

There was an unhappy agreeing murmur from the others.

I let my shield thunk down. “All right. Tell me what you’re worried it was.”

“A sign from Apollo,” Amphitrion’s sister said, sounding dull and strange. “He’s angry with us.”

“Stars fall sometimes,” Jason said, with a good effort at knightly unconcern only slightly ruined by the worried crack in his voice. I was glad see to some things did worry him. “My commander says they’re just rocks.”

“It was Zeus punishing us,” someone else said. “The drought’s happening because the lost prince is supposed to be on the throne and it won’t break until he is.”

“It was an actual god, who came down from Olympus. They can look like people, what if someone in the crowd ...?”

Footsteps in the glass. There had been footsteps.

“What if it was him, what if it was the lost prince?”

I put my hands up to say quiet, because they were all talking at once and I couldn’t hear anything. Lately I couldn’t hear, I’d started to use signs, unconsciously at first, but we were developing a kind of code now. They knew my signs for form up, turn, thank you, put that down, where the fuck is Jason.

I looked between them all once they were quiet. “All right. Lots of ideas. It could be any of those. It could be none of them. All of us: we’re much too stupid to know. That’s what the royal prophet is for. Until Tiresias tells us what it means, it means nothing. We have our own duty. Which is?”

“To train no matter what,” someone mumbled.

“Wrong,” I said, “it’s to fuck up the fucking Athenians. Which,” I added, motioning at the corpse of the dead pomegranate tree at the gate, almost mummified from the drought, “we will shortly have the pleasure of doing.”

They laughed, and there was a little cheer.

“Form up.”

I picked up my shield again too and tried to take my own advice. It was true: there was no point guessing. It was easier said than done, though, and as I counted them through their steps and walked through the turn with them again, I couldn’t stop thinking about those prints in the glass, and the smoke from my prayer going up into the sky.

Because I was expecting the Guards to come and interrogate me about Amphitrion, I kept watching the gates. No Guards materialised, though, and after an hour or so, I realized there were no more people moving between courtyards at all, even though it was about lunch time. Plenty of people came to eat in our yard and watch the knights train; it was a nice way to spend an hour. Nobody was here.

Just as I was wondering what was going on, two Guards closed the courtyard gates and stopped a slave going through.

Then an alarm gong rang, and a clear-voiced herald shouted that the Palace was in lockdown: everyone needed to stay exactly where they were.

Lockdown. What?

Maybe some important slaves had run.

Fuck, another Hidden ride in the space of twelve hours, if it was slaves. That was going to be unpleasant.

Wanting them to get some rest now if they did have to ride again soon, I called an end to the drill. The little knights broke ranks gratefully and made for the shade and the fountains. From the next courtyard, someone was shouting: I thought I recognised Amphitrion’s commander’s voice. He must have wanted to get to Ares. Someone was saying no.

The Guards opened the gate just enough to let a Palace scribe slip through. She was important: she was dressed in blue and silver, and she had that amazing, rounded gleam you can only get if you have enough food and you don’t have to exercise all day; though there was ash in her hair. We all went quiet as she looked between us. Her eyes settled on me, running over the scar on my face.

“Are you Phaidros Heliades?” she asked.

Odd that a royal scribe had come to ask me about Amphitrion. That was well below her. “Yes.”

“The Queen wants to see you.”

The little knights all looked at me like kittens who had seen a ball of flax swing by.

“It’s all right, I’ll be back,” I promised. My oath snagged as I said it. “I expect.”

Nobody knows who built the Marvel Throne. Maybe King Kadmus himself, a thousand years ago, after he defeated the dragon and planted its teeth. But it is a miracle. Built into it, still gleaming even after a millennium, are two dragons. Beneath it somewhere is a hypocaust. The steam powers up and up, through the mechanism inside the throne, until the dragons breathe it into the throne room, masking everything in a weird haze. They move, too, the dragons, turning their heads, shifting their wings, sometimes retracting or baring their claws like lions do. Thebes is full of sacred machinery, but the throne is the nearest I think anyone in my lifetime and many after will ever be to the artifice of the gods.

I’d never been so close to it. The steam was everywhere, and to my surprise, it was cold—not steam, but vapour, somehow. I tried to see through it, worried I was close to the Queen, and I jumped when just up the steps, one of the great dragons slid its claws inward and folded its wings, as if it had decided I was safe. I had to stare at it, because there’s a strange twofold thinking that happens when you’re near holy devices. On one level, you know that people made them: there was a human smith, once. But on another, you know that that smith was guided by a god, and what you’re seeing, what you’re really seeing, is an echo of what Hephaestus could make for Zeus—a shadow of something divine.

Then there she was, Queen Agave, coming out of the haze, and all my insides twisted, because she could have been Helios’s ghost. For all she could have afforded to clad herself in wonders from Africa, she dressed well but plain, her hair long like a knight’s, even though married ladies—even widows—usually had it short. It made her look like a man from behind. I could only look at her in little snatches, so that she wouldn’t burn onto my eyes.

“Pentheus spoke to you this morning,” she said, without preamble. She sounded exactly like Helios, her voice strong from making herself heard over halls and crowds. Like mine, his had been light, but hers was low. If I’d closed my eyes, she could have been him. It was unearthly. A kind of sorrow-joy came up through the flagstones. “What about?”

“He mentioned his coming marriage, lady,” I said from on my knee on the floor.

“Why you?”

“I was sworn to your brother.” To either side of the throne, four Guards were watching me hard, the hems of their cloaks vivid purple on the stone floor. The dragons breathed vapour again. For the first time all year, my hands were cold. “The prince asked me if I would talk to you. I said I couldn’t, since you don’t know me.”

She came down from the steps and took my elbows to guide me upright. She did it gently, as if she was worried about being careful of me, not anxious that I should be careful of her. She was much taller than I’d thought: my height. Taller than Helios had been. Of course she was. She had grown up in the plenty of the Palace. He had grown up in sieges. “I know you, knight. You came here once with Helios when you were little. We played in the fountain. You probably don’t remember.”

“No, I do, lady, I just thought you wouldn’t.”

She was quiet at first. I thought she would tell me why I was here—I suspected it was because Pentheus had complained about me, and she was about to tell me I needed to apologise to him before I was flogged or sent to be a galley slave. I got ready to say that time was, people had been encouraged to tell princes the truth. I had a distinct recollection of a polemarch years ago calling Helios an ungrateful little fuckwit. Helios had not had anyone flogged or enslaved. Helios had thought it was funny, because Helios was a real knight and not an unpleasant little weasel that just thought it was.

“Come and see where the star fell,” she said.

She took me towards the open colonnade. The Guards followed, flinty. As we passed outside, everything had the fever brightness reflections do in a bronze shield, and the air shimmered. Away from that cold vapour from the marvel dragons, the heat rammed us. Ash wavered in streams above the flagstones. From the lower city, the columns of sacrifice smoke rose black and huge. It was what the architecture of Hades must have looked like. Everything smelled of burning bone.

Then we were in the courtyard, the courtyard, where we had played in the fountain with Helios, and Semele had been there with the baby and the King. I hadn’t realized where it was: my memory of the Palace was a child’s, everything all gigantic and inexplicable. It hadn’t occurred to me it was even possible to find the same place again.

It was empty now, and overgrown with ivy, which was madly green and bright, in spite of the drought. There was a new shrine there, a marble statue of a woman holding a baby; everything else around it was ruined, the old columns still saw-toothed, the flagstones smashed. To the side of the shrine was a twisted mess of bronze that must once have been the Poseidon fountain.

Although Helios had told me the story a thousand times—or maybe because he had told it to me a thousand times—the wrecked courtyard looked unfamiliar. I couldn’t remember the open end of it giving way to the balcony; I couldn’t remember being able to see the parade ground from here, and even the colour of the stone seemed wrong.

With an uneasy shift, I wondered how much I really remembered, and how much I just thought I did.

We reached the balcony slowly. The sun was high over the plains now, and the light was that violent kind that hammers off armour and crowns. Anyone looking up from the lower city would probably be able to see us lit up here.

The crater, much bigger than I’d thought, was still steaming, though the glass in it was solid now, cracked in shards that had been forced upward into spikes. Some had formed into weird, person-sized loops. The whole parade ground was full of slaves shovelling up the blasted flagstones, loading them into wheelbarrows, sweeping up the dust, cleaning the public stands and the walls.

“Half the Palace thinks that was the Lost Prince coming down to take his crown,” the Queen said. “Which is odd, because you’d think that if you could howl down from Olympus in a ball of fire, you could see your way to climbing up to the royal balcony and shoving me off it.”

Ah. Maybe she had found out I was the one who had taken the baby, and then she was going to have me strapped to a table until I explained what I’d done with him. What a rubbish way to die.

Completely stupidly, I found myself scanning the people down by the crater in case one of them looked up and he had blue eyes. He wasn’t coming, and this thing, the star, the whatever, wasn’t him—it couldn’t be or I’d be dead now—but I wanted him to be there all the same.

The more I lost my hearing, the more I could hear my own heart. It was loud now.

Where are you, where are you, where are you.

“I was trying to make you laugh but I’m worried I’m less witty than I think,” the Queen reported frankly.

I breathed in deeper. No table with straps then. “I was thinking about how odd it is to hear people saying you’re a god’s aunt. Do gods have aunts?”

“I suppose they must do. Or perhaps the aunts tend not to survive the process. I’m sure if I could incinerate people at will, then family Harvest dinners would have looked different. Do you have aunts?”

That, I thought, was a real knife-edge joke, given that she had incinerated people.

Behind that, I thought: She doesn’t care if you have aunts. She’s trying to hear you talk over more than a couple of monosyllables. This is an interview.

Hm.

Even though the sensible thing would have been to grunt and pretend I’d been hit over the head too often to manage sentences any more, I couldn’t. I could almost see Helios, standing here with her. It didn’t matter about what she had done to her sister. This was dangerous, but dangerous with Helios’s twin was much better than safe with the Nothing, and his old helmet sitting beside my bed, dull on the far side and bright on the nearer where I touched it every night and every morning.

Where are you, where are you, where are you.

Not coming.

“Not blood relatives, lady,” I said. “But I had plenty of Helios’s legion sisters.” I paused. “I don’t think I would have dared try to incinerate them. They were terrifying. They’d say, Oh, Phaidros, how nice to see you, you haven’t grown at all, bring Helios honour or we’ll behead you behind the curing shed. ”

“Did you? Bring him honour.”

I thought about it. “Briefly,” I said, and waited to see if that was enough, and if she would decide to ask me whatever it was she had brought me here for, or send me away.

“What did you tell Pentheus to do?” the Queen asked me.

“Negotiate,” I said, then glanced down, because I’d put my hands on the stone balcony rail and brushed something alive. Ivy, more ivy—growing up around the bannister, which was crazy, because even up here, everything was parched. I’d called him Ivy. He—no. Fuck’s sake. Ivy is just ivy. It grows everywhere and it never dies. “With you, about the marriage.”

“You told him to challenge me.”

(Penalty for treason: twenty years of slavery.)

“Yes, lady,” I said.

She smiled and lifted her eyebrows at the crater. Unlike Pentheus, she let all kinds of things skim over her expression, but I had clear feeling it was because she had such perfect control over her own face she could tell it to do whatever she wanted, whereas all he could do was keep it blank.

“No one can find him,” she said.

I lifted my eyes properly for the first time, trying to search her for some sign I’d misheard, but I hadn’t.

“You will not repeat that to anyone. Officially, the prince is well and cloistered at the Temple of Athena for a short while. Find him, please.”

“Me,” I said, confused. She would have people for secret things like this. She didn’t need me.

“You. You’re his uncle by oath.” She lifted her hands, precise and slight and marvel-calibrated. “He went to you. He might come with you willingly when you find him.”

Willingly. “You don’t think he’s been taken?”

“No, or we would have had a ransom demand and a trail of distressed slaves reporting being knocked out by now. I’m sure someone could successfully abduct him from the Palace, but not secretly. And significant timing too, don’t you think, just when it’s on his mind to escape his marriage and everyone was distracted by a fallen star?”

I did have to agree.

“He’s hiding with someone. You will ask your questions quietly. If this spreads through the city, I will execute you.” She was looking away from the courtyard now, over the lower city, and towards the Amber Gate and the road to the sea. I wanted to ask if we could go back inside. The heat was punishing; sweat was creeping down my back, sticking my tunic to the inside of my armour. She seemed not to feel it. “The Egyptians are here bringing grain, and in return, they’ll take Pentheus. No Pentheus, no grain.”

Finally I understood the marriage. It wasn’t a real marriage. Pentheus was going to Egypt as a hostage.

“The Pharaoh is willing to disguise it as a marriage to save the dignity of a royal house,” she added wryly, and I could imagine very well what the Pharaoh thought about Achaean royal houses. Queen of what, was it? Oh. Yes. That’s a lovely rock, with really excellent huts—temples?—I see, temples. And that’s a wonderful ... hat? Crown. Apologies. Of course.

She finally turned back for the cloister. “Thank you, Sown. Speak to my chamberlain. She’ll gather up Pentheus’s slaves. He doesn’t particularly have friends.”

She stopped then, and looked at me for a long time, her eyes tracking over my armour, which was Helios’s armour. It was beautiful; in the sun, the filigree Ares blazed across the chest, and the rubies that dripped from his shield shimmered. On the back, stark and silver against the bronze oxidised to look much darker than the ordinary tone, Persephone would be bright on the throne of the Unseen. It was armour made for a prince only a few breaths too young to be king. I tried to get ready to hear her ask for it back.

“I should have spoken to you before now,” she said.

The way she was looking at me was the way Helios had on the evening he had finally agreed to swear his oath to me and let me fight on the front line with him, four whole years after the legion had expected him to do it.

Arranged marriages, which those battlefield unions are, sound like they should be straightforward. Ours never was. Helios was hammered out of old-fashioned chivalry, and he had always hated the age gap. In the old days, he said, commanders were only five years older than their wards, and young knights didn’t even enter the army until they were twelve. Then, it made sense for them to swear to each other once the ward was fifteen. It wasn’t an equal partnership—it wasn’t meant to be, it was meant to control insane teenagers—but it wasn’t ludicrously unequal. Ours, he insisted, was. Constant wars and emergencies meant the legion wasn’t using the system properly any more. He was ten years older than me and I’d known him since I was tiny. That was sticky, at best. Saying I loved him didn’t matter: his position was that I only thought I did, because I’d grown up with everyone around me insisting it was the right way to live. On my nineteenth birthday I’d cracked and snapped that that was patronising. He hid in the officers’ mess for a month. At my end, a lot of crying and rebellious drinking with the Athenians ensued.

It wasn’t until the Athenians said he must have sustained some kind of penetrating cranial injury and gone mad (what sort of man wouldn’t tear like a hound after a handsome nineteen-year-old?) that I realized he had a point. You’re never on the moral high ground if Athenians are agreeing with you.

So I went home at last and knelt in the cold sand outside his tent, where he was polishing his armour in the extremely silent way he had when he was upset, and said I’d stay off the front line until I found someone my own age to swear to if it meant he would be happy, and then he would be free of me. Listening to the Athenians had made me realize how trapped he probably felt. I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in an arranged marriage to one of me: I was a mix between Feral Jason and a truffle pig.

When he came out, he had looked at me like he’d been expecting a child and found a man he didn’t know.

The Queen might have been him, just then.

“Why?” I asked, trying not to let her hear the lump in my throat. “I’m no one.”

“You’re family.” She smiled Helios’s smile. “Go and find your nephew, Heliades.”