Page 11 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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The slaves were all frightened. They also had no idea what was going on. Some of them even said they needed to hurry because they would be late for the prince. I sat them down one by one, separate, and made sure the steward saw them away through another door so they couldn’t talk to each other on the way out.

The scribe who monitored Pentheus’s spending said nothing unusual had moved from his accounts. That seemed more ominous than a great haul of silver missing from the treasury. If he had been running away, he would surely have made some provision for himself. To just vanish, with nothing; it was possible, but I couldn’t see that Pentheus would have known how.

Even though I asked upwards of twenty people, from personal attendants to tutors, none of them could think of anyone he knew well enough to run to. No older man at the garrison, no Sown lady with an estate outside the city walls—everyone laughed at that and said he was too young for women—nothing.

So I sent people out to the lower city brothels to check if there were any new additions. I could well imagine someone snatching a worried-looking boy dressed too nicely: they’d be delighted with the opportunity to ransom him if they thought he was from a Sown family, but if they realized he really was the prince, they could have sold him on to Sparta or Athens. He was definitively not sensible enough to lie about who he was.

In case the Queen was wrong and he had been taken somehow, I sent the Hidden. Not my unit, but Polydorus’s, with the blessing of the general, who put it about that we would be doing daytime rides now too, since so many field slaves were risking the full heat of the day as a kind of cover.

“Have we found the witch he spoke to at the ceremony?” I asked finally, watching the black-armoured unit split up outside the city walls, fifteen or so knights each riding down the seven roads out of Thebes. The dust billowed in their wakes. “He could be the last person to have seen him.”

“Nobody knows who he is,” the Chamberlain said. “I’ve enquired already.” She was chilly, and annoyed, I thought, that the Queen hadn’t asked her to do this. She managed to project the suspicion that there was no witch, I’d made him up, witches were never men anyway, I was battle mad and unqualified, and if I wouldn’t mind too terribly, would I perhaps bugger off to a temple to convalesce or die at my convenience?

“Sir?” someone said, and when I turned around, he pointed to the garrison. I thought he looked nervous. “A witch sent me to find you? He’s waiting for you at the garrison.”

I smiled at the Chamberlain. “Would you like to come?” I said, with evil in my heart.

“No,” she said coolly. “And be polite to him. It will be administratively inconvenient if he turns you into something sticky.”

Usually, you wouldn’t just know if there was a witch in the barracks. You’d Know. Knights are superstitious and witches are lucky, and so generally, all the little knights would be asking for amethyst charms or well-meant-but-actually-quite-sinister spells to set on whoever they’d fallen in love with lately, and people would be bringing her things, and being uncharacteristically inarticulate because of nerves, and all in all, it would look like the Queen was visiting.

The witch who had saved me from the bulls was sitting alone at our Herakles fountain, unnoticed, in the shade of the dying pomegranate trees. People were walking past him—little knights, kitchen slaves, another polemarch—as if they had no idea he was there. It was like he had magnetised all his matter a certain way and now, to most people, from most angles, he was only fractionally more there than the shadows.

Even doing something ordinary, leaning over the water and holding the fountain edge like anyone else, he looked eerie. Maybe it was the red tattoos that cut off at his knuckles, as if he had dipped his hands in blood and not water, or maybe it was the fineness of that black veil, writhing in the hot wind, which he seemed not to feel; or maybe it was the black snake lying across his knees, watching me.

“Sir?” I said.

He looked back, but he didn’t stand or bow. Witches don’t bow to anyone. “Hello again.” Slight accent, one I couldn’t trace properly over two words. “Someone said you were looking for me.”

It was odd to be recognised. He could only have seen me for a few seconds by the crater, in all that pouring smoke. “Yes. My name is Phaidros Heliades, I’m a polemarch here. I need to ask you some questions about the prince.”

He was very still for a second. I wished witches would wear their veils like desert people did, showing their eyes. If you can see someone’s eyes, you can see the whole human. Not witches, though.

“Yes,” he said. He had one of those voices I could hear very well, even though he wasn’t loud; it was low and strong, all smoke and embers, the kind of voice that could sing, or call over a battlefield. “After what he said, I’m not surprised.”

“Would you mind telling me what that was?”

Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t what he said. “He asked me whether there is magic that could make someone forget everything.”

I sat down beside him to make certain I was hearing properly. “Is there?”

He hesitated, long enough for me to wonder if I’d accidentally asked about something that was sacred or forbidden. “There is,” he said eventually, “but it’s brutal. I lied, I told him no.”

I wondered if Pentheus had hoped to do something to the Queen. He was exactly the right kind of sulky little spider to resort to something terrible the second he didn’t get what he wanted.

“What did he say then?”

“He left. But he might have had a different answer from another witch.”

Or been kidnapped and sold to a foreign power. If he had stolen out to speak to an unscrupulous witch who’d recognised him, then he could be halfway to Sparta by now, drugged and chained in the back of a wagon. Maybe the Hidden really did have a chance of finding something.

They would have had a much better chance if the witch had said something an hour ago.

“Why didn’t you report it straightaway?”

“You mean because the garrison is so reasonable and helpful, and so unlikely to imprison or murder people who interrupt at the wrong moment?” he asked, unflustered.

“Careful,” I said, because I had to, though he was right.

He actually laughed. He had a laugh like a campfire in winter, smoky and welcoming. “You be careful.”

I caught myself smiling and stopped, because even if it weren’t unseemly for a knight, it was fairly horrible on me personally, given that half my face wasn’t the way Apollo had made it.

“Well, thank you,” I said, having one of those moments where I could hear, in contrast to his, my own accent. It was Sown, which is different from general Thebes: flatter than the full dialect you’d hear in the markets, because we sailed and we had to be understood everywhere. His was something I still couldn’t place. It sounded— old. I couldn’t trace why I thought that. “And thank you for what you did earlier, sir. I owe you my life.” I held my hand out.

He tipped his head slowly, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was getting a long stare through the veil.

“Be careful of offering your life to a witch,” he said. “You never know what we might do with it.”

“It’s all right, I’m hardly using it,” I promised.

When he took my hand, a static shiver went up my arm. He was cool despite the sun. The tattoos on his fingers looked even stranger next to my skin. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was looking down at the difference too. The way he was holding his head now, the light was coming through the veil on one side, and I could see the shadow of his cheekbone. I looked away: seeing him without permission was a kind of trespassing. I tried to take my hand back, but he caught my wrist and looped something round it. Red string, the same red as his tattoos, with a silver charm on it in the shape of a bee.

“Do not,” he said, “take that off.”

“Why?” I asked, uneasy.

“So that if you stray, another witch will know who to return you to.” He waited for me to look at him again. “No matter how far that might be.”

It should have been sinister, but it wasn’t. Instead I filled up with a strange of sort relief. What he was saying, really, was that if I vanished, he would look for me. I hadn’t expected it to be such a good feeling, but it was, and so good that for a ridiculous second I thought I might cry. Mortified, I got up and bowed and said something about being busy. He stayed where he was, motionless except for the wind coiling ghost shapes in the veil. The wind gusted black sacrifice smoke between us and I half expected him to have vanished by the time it cleared, but he hadn’t.

“Look after it, knight,” he said after me.

“The charm?”

“Your life. It’s mine now.”

We didn’t find anything: not in the brothels, with any other witches, nor on the road. By the time we had finished the search, the sun was setting. On the steep steps down from the High City to the low, the smoke was so dense that even in the blazing gold of the sunset, it was dark, and half the people going up and down were carrying lamps. The other half clapped when they reached corners, so people coming the other way could hear that someone was there. People were wearing cloth masks. I couldn’t tell if that was just because of the smoke, or if it was because news about the madness had already spread beyond Ares.

I was going deaf, but I wasn’t blind, and after I’d reached the lower city, I was sure: someone was following me. He wasn’t making a particular secret of it. I didn’t recognise him, but he was from the Guards—you didn’t look that healthy otherwise. He saw me notice him and motioned for me to carry on my way. I didn’t, and went back to him.

“Why?” I said, once I was close enough.

“You work for the Queen now,” he said. “You can expect some scrutiny. On your way, Sown.”

I bowed, and decided to take him on a lovely long walk to the night market for the honey I’d been meaning to buy all week. I was tired, but being able to spite an annoying person is an amazing source of energy.

A lot of traders were opening their shops at night now, because the day was too hot. Apollo Square was starry with their lamps, and full of people and steam from cooking stands. Normal traders weren’t allowed to sell sacrifice meat, so I had a feeling that this had something to do with how there were suddenly no stray cats or dogs left in town. People were selling all kinds of things: the last of the olive crop, kittens, wax tablets, bolts of cloth, even ice from the mountain. It was chaotic and strange and sometimes you were chased by an angry goat.

The Nothing that used to be Helios came too. It had a weird alchemy. It didn’t make bad things or annoying things any worse; but if I came across something that should have been good, or funny, the Nothing warped it. I didn’t feel happy. I felt more lonely than I would have if there had been no good things, because I had no one to tell. The worst thing was festivals. I turned into a properly miserable prick at festivals.

It would have been better to just go home, but I wanted the honey, and I wanted to irritate the Guard. When I glanced back for him, I was pleased to see he was looking much more grumpy than he had earlier.

The honey seller knew me quite well now and asked me how I was while she rolled my ration bead onto a tablet smoothed over with warm wax, so she could use it as an invoice for the Palace, which would reimburse her from my account in equivalent goods. The print from the bead showed my name, as well as the sigil of my combat lineage, which was a tiny image of Persephone leading Hades by the hand, all etched mirrorwise onto the bead, which was about the length of the first joint of my forefinger. I still liked using it: you don’t get one until you’re eighteen, when you come off your commander’s accounts, and it still made me feel important and grown-up, even though I was still half convinced I was only pretending about being grown-up. She put her seal over my tablet too, as a receipt. Behind the trader, in tall vases, were bundles of iron money, each spar as long as a javelin. Not for the first time I felt glad I didn’t have to lug those around.

“So no luck yet?” she said.

Ever since I’d come home from Troy, I’d been trying to make the honey cakes Helios had used to hide on battlefields for me. I still couldn’t do it. It was bothering me a lot more than it should have, because it wasn’t really about the cakes. It was that I couldn’t remember what he looked like any more. Taste makes you remember.

“Not yet. Are there different kinds of honey?” I asked. “He was using something ... richer.”

“Plenty of different types. Maybe it was something Hatti, if you were at Troy? I can see what I get from the port?”

“Yes please.”

“I will investigate,” she said solemnly, handing back my tablet and the new honey in its ceramic jar. Her eyes slipped past me towards the column of lights that was the High City. “Were you up there when the god fell? People are saying that anyone who saw it went mad.”

“Six people who were close to it went mad,” I said. I hesitated. “Just be careful about saying it’s a god.”

She laughed. “Of course it was a god! What do we think, lads: the business up in the High City, god or lump of rock?” she said more loudly to the stall-owners around us.

“God,” they all chorused.

“See?” she said. “It’s the lost prince come to put things right.”

“Well. I’ll see you soon,” I said.

As I walked away, something made me look back. At the stall, the man who had been following me, and another who I hadn’t known was with him, ghosted up to the honey seller, said nothing at all, and dragged her away. Everyone saw; studiously, everyone pretended not to have seen.

The way home was lined with people begging. Not the people you usually see begging; there were whole families, not ragged yet. As I passed by, not looking at the clay signs they were wearing, I caught a snatch of a song. A woman was dancing in a strange vacant way by the window, singing to herself. I had an instinctive surge of repulsion to hear that, and hear it inside the city from someone who should have known better, but under that, my real thoughts said: She isn’t choosing to do that .

Just like you do if someone else yawns, I felt the hollow need to sing along with her opening up in the back of my throat. I clamped my teeth shut, disgusted.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance ...

Someone tapped my shoulder, and without any intervention from any part of my mind which might have said, Hold on, it’s probably just a flower seller , my fist shot out, automatic as a broken marvel.

There was an awful crunch as I broke the man’s nose. He screamed and collapsed. I put my hands over my face. People were giving me shocked looks, as if I’d chosen to do it. I wanted to yell that of course I fucking hadn’t, any more than you choose to jerk your hand away from something that’s burning you. But if it’s your fist, it’s your fault.

I bent to help him up. “I’m so sorry. Will you let me take you to a—”

“Get away from me!” he snapped, frightened.

I stepped right back from him.

He scrambled up and staggered away from me, and it wasn’t until he was gone that I realized he had left something behind. It was a mask. I picked it up, meaning to go after him to give it back, but I’d already lost him in the throngs of people going home for the night. I looked down at the mask, wondering what to do with it. Maybe hand it in to the nearest bar, in case he came back for it. I turned it over in case there was a maker’s mark on it, then stopped dead in the middle of the street. There was no maker’s mark, but there was writing across the inside.

For Phaidros Heliades,

Regards,

Dionysus