Page 13 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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I’d never seen so many people in the cells. Each one was made for five or six prisoners, but the Guards crammed twenty into each one, all of us dusty and sweating from the long slog at sword-point back into Thebes, and covered in a fine layer of ash from the sacrifice smoke that still rose from every temple in the city. When I pushed my hand across my forehead, it felt like cement.

I slumped back against the cell wall. Everyone knows that fortunes turn, but I’d always thought I’d have more warning than this. Enemy soldiers would be camped outside the city for ten years. I’d have time to get used to the idea. I’d never thought I would just come home one evening and an hour later I’d be staring slavery in the eye.

It was all very underwhelming. Still; at least it would be cold in Hades.

Someone recognised me.

“Really, Heliades? You’ll go to the galleys for this.”

I nodded once. There was no point trying to say why I’d been there. Helios had always told me to be like Persephone, always negotiate, but Death is much more open to debate than the Guards.

“So he should. He was there from the start, I can’t believe he isn’t more drunk,” Dionysus said cheerfully.

Maybe he thought it was funny. Witches have a dark sense of humour. I heard about one who turned some sailors into pigs when they were rude to her. Well; actually that is quite funny.

The Guard looked at me again. “You aren’t drunk.”

“No,” I agreed.

“And ... he’s trying to stitch you up.” She turned to Dionysus. “He was there to tell you to stop, wasn’t he?”

No; he didn’t think it was funny. He was helping me. I wondered if it had any chance of working.

“What are you talking about?” Dionysus demanded. He was a wonderful actor. “I never heard a word from him.”

“Come out,” she told me wearily. “Why didn’t you say?”

I watched her, half certain she was joking. This was very irregular behaviour, for a Guard.

“No, you’re right, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said as if I’d answered.

She cast a wary look at Dionysus. If he had been someone else, I could see she would have punched him, but the red tattoos on his hands stopped her. He could curse her. Perhaps he would anyway. Without even a glimmer of the ordinary, sensible fear normal people have for the Guards, he met her eyes and studied her too, but not in the way she was studying him. He was smiling a little, like he was waiting for other people to understand a joke, and I had an overpowering feeling he had only let himself be sent into the cells to keep the other prisoners company.

She slammed the cell door.

The noise was chaos; people were shouting to be let out, it was just music and some wine, most of them too drunk to see what a stupid idea it was to shout and swear at Guards. The air smelled of hot stone and alcohol and sweat, and it was like trying to breathe through a wet cloth. I moved through it feeling dislocated. I’d been sure I was going to end up in the slave market, and I like to have a solid itinerary: I felt indignant that things weren’t going as expected, for all this was much better than I’d expected.

I ghosted after the Guards. The one who had let me out smiled at me and then looked alarmed, and twisted the tips of my hair around her fingertip to show me a stray spark in it. I crushed it out.

“Gods, these sacrifices,” she muttered, suddenly a normal person now that she didn’t have her duty face on. We were moving through a haze of smoke, even just in the corridor.

I brushed another spark off her purple cloak and she nodded, and when we met each other’s eyes, there was one of those strange floating moments where we both realized we would have got on brilliantly if not for the circumstances, because we were the same age, and she seemed like the kind of person who probably had a pet chicken called Cassandra and a cracking sense of humour, and we could have been friends. But Guards and knights aren’t meant to be friends.

One of the officers hung the keys up outside the main door, which was solid bronze.

“The law says three days,” he said, sounding grimly pleased with himself.

In this heat, everyone would be dead in three days.

I looked at the other Guards, waiting for someone to say something, but no one did.

So I lurked in the corridor till they’d gone to their mess room, then stole the keys and looped straight back around above ground, at the edge of the market square, to the low, thin windows that were designed to let all the heat of the day into the cells, but none of the air. I counted along, then knelt down at the fifth one. It wasn’t difficult, and I didn’t have to be stealthy. The square was empty except for a few people sleeping rough at the far side so that, probably, they could be here first thing when the attendants of Sown lords and ladies came to the market in the morning.

“Dionysus.”

He was close to the window already. I gave him the keys through the bars.

He didn’t take them. “No,” he said. “They’ll know it was you.”

I made a not very patient noise at him, because it was boiling and I was so tired now I would have cheerfully murdered someone in exchange for an extra hour’s sleep. I caught his hand to put the keys into it. The red tattoos looked black in the moonlight. “Make it look like witching. And hurry up, I’m not sitting here all night arguing with you.”

He thought about it. “Will you want to see some magic?” He said it with a joyful sparkle that I’d only ever seen in small children before. Will you want , I thought to the side of everything, in the part of me that spoke what felt like a thousand languages. Why did that sound so ancient?

I didn’t know what to make of that sparkle in an adult man. It should have looked juvenile, but it didn’t. I didn’t like it: it was a lie, for a start. He didn’t know me. He wasn’t enjoying me, or the cell, or whatever mummery he was about to perform. “No,” I said. “But you’re going to do whatever the fuck you want anyway.”

I still have no idea how he did it. Even though I was watching, I didn’t see him pass the key around. He didn’t talk to anyone else, he didn’t explain what they had to do. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps he knew that I would take the key, but even so.

He started to spin. At the end of each turn, he knocked the manacles together, so they banged. It was an eerie thing to see, one slim figure with tattooed hands, the thin light catching on the chains. Maybe because he was tall, maybe because he looked so stark and so different, he didn’t quite seem like a person any more, but a thing who happened to have taken the same shape.

In that small room, I thought the other people would just look confused, or tell him to stop moving, there was no space, but that wasn’t what happened. Instead, they began to spin too, and to crack the manacles together. With ten people doing it, rather than one, the noise was loud. I glanced to my left, anxious, because someone would hear, but that was clearly the point. It spread to the next cell; I could just make out people beyond the bars. Turn, bang , turn; it was louder with every spin, more people doing it, until I could feel ground under me shaking where the cells extended beneath the square. It was marching pace, but getting faster.

A shout came from inside the Guards’ garrison, and I saw lights hurry back towards the prison doors, and then inside the corridor through the barred window. The torchlight hurled monster shadows everywhere, and still, everyone spun.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

All the drunken confusion was gone now. Everyone was silent, except for that ribcage-deep thump of the manacles.

“Get in there,” someone else said tightly. “If we have to whip them, we do.”

The manacles started to fall. The key must have been going around, it must have been, but even I couldn’t see it. One pair after the next, the manacles opened and slammed onto the floor, and still they danced.

Somewhere deep in the cells, some people started to sing. Even though it was impossible, even though there was no earthly way everyone here could have known it, it didn’t take me much by surprise that it was the mad knights’ song.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance

Thunder-wrought and city-razing

King, king of the holy raging,

Rave and rise again.

The cell door opened, and everyone inside paced out. Then the next cell door, and the next. The Guards looked at each other, and I saw them realize they couldn’t do anything unless they wanted to start killing people. The dancers looked like they were sleepwalking, just like Amphitrion had looked. The song was shaking the whole square; it would be waking up people in the lower city. The would-be slaves had come to see, and there was already a little crowd at the edge of the marketplace. I went to the middle of the square so I could see the prison gates.

When the first prisoners came out, there was a ragged cheer. I felt it too, a brilliant lift to see the Guards lose, for once. It couldn’t last: the Guards were going to be furious the moment they stopped feeling so confused, and the gods knew what they would do next if they caught anyone they recognised, but just for now, it was fantastic.

Once people were out, the eerie song stopped and they ran and scattered, and then I was straining to try to find Dionysus in among all the deep moon-shadows and the smog of sacrifice smoke, and someone knocked me against the wall, but then he was there and we were running much too fast down the steps to the lower city, and struggling to breathe and coughing, and laughing, because it was so stupid.

At first, it was impossible to talk, because the smoke was too thick. With no lamps, we had to go slowly, and when we hit squares rather than roads, we kept losing each other. There was a brief negotiation in which he suggested we hold hands and I explained that I would rather walk into a furnace and explode, thank you, and so as a compromise, he tied our wrists together.

“Where do you live?” I asked, when we were finally on the path up the mountain. The air wasn’t clear exactly, but it wasn’t choking any more either.

“Along by you, where we were before. It was empty, so.”

Witches could live anywhere they wanted to, as long as nobody else was living there first. Anecdotally I’d heard that some witches didn’t take that last part too seriously.

I wished he could have chosen somewhere other than next door. It was a quarter of an hour’s walk back even from here and I couldn’t very well say, You go on ahead by yourself in the dark, I’ll sleep in this tree so I don’t have to talk to you any more. Now we were safe and I didn’t think he was a god who wanted to kill me, I was feeling more and more grumpy about having to waste most of my night on blasphemy and then being wrongfully arrested for blasphemy and breaking the sodding blasphemer out of sodding prison, and ashamed that really, the arrest had only been half wrongful.

“That was fun,” he said. He sounded genuinely cheerful, the prick.

I looked for a ravine to shove him into. “No, it wasn’t. Do not do that again,” I told him, pulling off the cloth that bound our wrists together.

“No, I saw you laughing.” He paused. “Actually that’s the first time I’ve seen a knight here laugh. You all go around looking like it’s worst day of your life; why?”

It was, in fairness to him, not a stupid question.

“Theban manners,” I explained. “The best compliment you can pay someone here is to say, you’re a marvel; as in a clockwork marvel. It means you function the same no matter what’s happening. We don’t smile much. It isn’t rude, but it’s ... crass.”

He was looking interested; not, I realized, in the information, but that I’d told it to him. “You’re good at talking to foreigners,” he said.

I studied him, and he held my eyes, frank and unembarrassed, and very un-Theban, but still ... “You aren’t a foreigner. You’re from here.”

He smiled slowly. It was increasingly bizarre to meet a grown man who let all his feelings go straight across his face. When I’d seen it before—on Athenians—it was flamboyant, but he wasn’t that at all. Just—honest. “What makes you say that?”

“Achaean,” I said, more and more sure the more I heard him speak, “is impossible to learn fluently as an adult. You were born here.”

“Or I’m half as clever as you and I made an effort.”

I shook my head. There are geniuses, and probably somewhere there was a foreigner who, with twenty years of pig-headed and unreasoning dedication, might learn an Achaean dialect as fluently as he spoke Theban, but the only people who had to learn Achaean from scratch were slaves, and a slave was rarely in a position to learn it well. “Why don’t you want people to know?”

“It’s part of the Witches’ Vow.”

“You have a vow?” I asked, intrigued despite everything.

He nodded. The air was finally clear. It smelled of green and pollen and moss, which was wrong, because for months it had smelled of dust. “ I swear no living soul shall know me true. I swear to leave behind my family and my home, never to return .”

“Why?” I asked, because that was much harder than the Knights’ Vow.

He gave me an apologetic look. “ I swear never to tell why I swore this vow. ”

“That seems deliberately irritating,” I said. It came out more hostile than I’d meant it to.

He seemed not to care and answered what I’d meant, rather than the way I’d said it. “Witching doesn’t work if you know how it works. If I told you why I can’t tell you my real name or where I’m from or the rest, most magic would fail for you.”

I glanced up at him, wondering where he had learned to translate from Knight to Civilian, because he was doing it very well.

“The next time you’re wounded, the legion witches wouldn’t be able to take the pain away.” He looked down at me, and even in the starlight I saw his eyes catch on the scar on my face. Like before, he did it for too long. If he had been a knight, I would have pushed his temple to make him stop, but I could see already he would probably take that as a hilarious challenge and lick me. “And that seems shortsighted.”

I let that roll around my head for a few paces. “So it doesn’t work for witches?”

“No.”

“Then what happens if you’re hurt?” I said incredulously.

“Tough crackers really,” he said with a laugh under his voice, the same one I would have laughed if he had asked me if I thought it was unfair I wouldn’t live to see forty.

I didn’t mean to, but I looked up at him properly then, because hearing him say that, and say it like he had, made me think that knights and witches were more similar than either of us usually noticed.

The way was so quiet that even I could hear the trees creaking. No one seemed to be coming after us, even now. I wondered if actually, so many people had escaped that the Guards would pretend nothing had happened and never mention it again. It was better than admitting that over a hundred people had escaped, singing a forbidden song.

After a little while, because the road was steep here and we were both tired enough that it was difficult to climb and breathe and talk all at the same time, I said, “Why did you organise that dance? You knew it would end in the cells.”

Although his playfulness was still there, a veil of something like regret came down over it. “Witching.”

I gave up. I wasn’t going to try and wrestle a straight answer out of someone trained to tie answers in knots.

We were already at my side of the maze, by the gate under the lemon tree that never made any lemons. I bowed a little and meant to leave him to what was left of his night, but then stopped, because he was looking at something on the path through the gate, and his shoulders had just tacked back.

“What’s that?” he said.

It was a dead fox, in a fluffy heap on the ground just past the gate. It was the big vixen who I’d been feeding since the drought had begun; she’d been glossy and healthy yesterday. I looked fast to either side. There were wolves in the forest, but I’d not known them come onto my land before; they didn’t like humans any more than we liked them. But it was so dry. Maybe all the things they usually ate had died. I couldn’t think of anything else that could, or would, kill a fox. No tracks, though. I moved the fox, trying to see how it had been killed.

“That’s unusual,” I said slowly.

“What?”

“Its neck is snapped, but I can’t see any bite marks.”

Dionysus gazed up the steep dark path that led to his side of the ruin. Not afraid, but speculative. He should have been afraid, though. He was tall, but he was no knight.

“Walk you home?” I ground out, because duty is honour even when your duty is to keep an enraging witch alive after he’s landed you in a gaol cell for public debauchery.

The merry glow came back. “No, thank you. I think I’ll be better off with the wolves or wandering psychopaths.”

I sighed. He had made it sound like a joke, but it wasn’t. I was too near to the end of my tether. I had an unwilling spike of gratitude. No one had said it to me so politely before. “It probably isn’t psychopaths. It’s probably my slaves. This will just be the newest thing in their campaign of hexing me to death. You’ll be fine.”

He looked interested. “You don’t want to sell them to someone who they won’t hex, or ...?”

“Can’t. They,” I said, a little bit deliriously, draping the fox over my arm to take it in, because the fur would make some useful things for winter, not that I could imagine being cold ever again, “were a royal gift. Oh, you fought so well at Troy, Phaidros, nicely done, Phaidros, first unit over the wall and everything, here’s a present for you: the pedigree triplets from Hades who will spend the next twenty years plotting to fucking kill you, there you go, son, enjoy, and guess who has to live alone with the creepy little fuckers on a drought-stricken mountainside?”

“Well,” he said, once again deploying his frankly astonishing skill for taking things as I’d meant them and not how I’d said them—seriously, this time, for all I’d tried to phrase it as a complaining joke, “you’re mine now. You’re subject to no curses but mine.”

I looked down at the silver bee charm on its red string around my wrist, and realized I believed him.

He was maddening and shameless and dangerous, but it had been a strange day and all the strangest parts had happened with him, and it felt like I knew him, even though he wasn’t the boy from the sea. “Can I ask your opinion about something?”

He looked surprised that I’d want to hear his opinion about anything, but he waited.

“I’m trying to find someone who’s missing. It’s urgent. But I’m not allowed to make it known that they need to be found, so searching is difficult. How would a witch do it? Although if you say witching,” I added, “I will punch you in the throat.”

He gave it some thought. “Call a census,” he said.