Page 14 of The Hymn to Dionysus

13

I didn’t sleep. It doesn’t matter how exhausted you are: if it’s hot even at night and the god of sleep doesn’t like you anyway—his favourite thing was the just-before-dawn nightmare—you just have to learn to function without. I hadn’t really got the trick of it.

“Ugh,” I said to the ceiling as the sun prised open the horizon.

The just-before-dawn nightmare had been worse than normal. I got up to get away from bed, which didn’t feel like a nice place to rest but a horrible horizontal prison cell, and nudged the shutters open. Just outside my window was the little shrine with my wine and honey offering to the god. I wondered bleakly if the ants having the time of their lives on the cup now were some mechanism of transubstantiation, but I was pretty sure they were just ants. Sacrifice , the priests said. You’ll be sleeping wonderfully in no time . I hoped they were all eaten by ants.

I pushed my hands against my eyes. The dream had been horrible. I’d been hunting in a forest. I was chasing something that might have been a lion, but sometimes, when I caught a flash of it through the trees, it didn’t seem like a lion at all but a man, but somehow that didn’t matter and I was full of joyful bloodlust anyway, and so was everyone else, and through the trees was a weird, awful song, and drums, and drums.

There was a gasp from further into the olive grove, and three sets of eerie grey eyes met mine through the low branches.

I had three slaves in the way you can have toothache, or a family curse. They were princes from Troy: triplets, about fourteen years old now, and easily the creepiest, most unnerving humans I’d ever met. I’d spent an awful lot of the last six months trying to get them to run away. I’d been leaving gates suggestively open and coming home reliably late from the garrison, and saying things like, Oh, no, I’ll have to be gone all night again . But no. Here they still were. I’d thought they were afraid at first, but I was coming to the conclusion that in fact they didn’t want to escape. That was concerning, because more and more, I was worried that what they did want might be something to do with harvesting my organs and sacrificing them to Zeus for a return to their previous good fortune.

“What are you doing?” I said slowly. They never talked to me, so speaking to them was pointless, but I was in the habit of trying anyway.

They stared at me for another second, and without any discussion at all, they all bolted in different directions. I shuddered.

The windows of the house were low, so I could just step out. When I found the place where they’d been standing, I could see why they had paused. There was a dead wolf there. It had been killed just like the fox last night: neck broken, no other wounds. I stood looking at it for a while. There was no way the triplets could have killed a wolf.

Eventually, I picked it up and took it behind the house, to the forest border. Men couldn’t cross, because it was sacred and dryads are territorial, but I left the carcass in the roots of an oak tree. Other things would be grateful for it. Trees are people, just slower, and ever since I’d come to the maze, I always had a feeling I was living right on the edge of someone else’s city, great and ancient; it was probably a good idea to show it some honour.

From just inside came the snick of a broken twig. I looked up, very still. I couldn’t hear anything else, but there was a pressure along the back of my skull that said something was watching me, something big, and it was very, very close. Nothing was moving. The forest looked dead: the trees were parched, there were no birds or rabbits, and even the insects had died. Slowly, and I couldn’t tell how, because I wouldn’t have heard it even from someone leaning right over my shoulder, I started to feel sure that something was breathing.

Probably someone who had run away from slavery last night, after the rations were cut.

The Hidden couldn’t ride into the woods, or rather, more than half of us couldn’t and the other half didn’t like it. If you could make it as far as the forest, you were safe, provided you were able to negotiate with the dryads.

Or it was something else.

I stepped back gradually, two paces, five, then walked fast back to the house, just in time to see the delivery cart from the Palace coming along the road. Usually it was the driver and his assistant, but today, it came with four guards, all in armour despite the warm morning. Frowning, I went down through the olive grove to meet them.

“Morning,” the driver called, sounding relieved. “Sorry about the parade, but we keep getting attacked on the road.”

He wasn’t joking. One of the guards had blood on his face.

I helped them bring everything inside, then sat them all down at the table to bring them some water and some food, because this was my fault. If I’d lived in Thebes, this wouldn’t have happened. The driver had been coming every week since I’d been given the house—supplies are how knights are paid—and this was the first time I’d heard of any trouble. They all looked disproportionately grateful to be sitting down.

As they always did, the triplets emerged to help, terrifyingly, silently efficient as always. They understood that I couldn’t sell them, I knew they did, because I’d told them that in five languages; which left me bewildered about why they did anything in the house at all. They knew I wouldn’t hurt them; maybe someone at the Palace had put the fear of Ares into them, but if that was the case, it had lasted a long time now. I didn’t think so. More unnerving mysteries.

“It’s escaped slaves,” the driver explained, after they’d all told me what had happened. Some men had jumped them from some bushes on a narrow stretch of the mountain path, only three or four, but enough to be scary. “Their rations have gone down so much it’s nearly nothing. Well. Field slaves, anyway,” he said, watching the triplets, who were healthy and round. “People are running away all over the place. You’ll have a fuck of a time keeping up with it, sir, even with the Hidden.”

“Running where?” I asked. The next nearest city was Athens, ninety miles away, or Sparta, over a hundred.

He shrugged. “Into the forest? Towards Lake Copais? Dunno if there’s still water in it, but ...” He trailed off and looked worried, and I realized he had been going to say, that’s what I’d do . He must have thought about it. All civil servants are slaves, from royal ministers and scribes right down to the stable boys and the delivery drivers. His rations were being cut badly too.

I pushed some apples towards him. “Come on, you’re spurning my hospitality here. I haven’t got the madness, or the fucking plague. Take some things for the road, all of you.”

They all laughed but nobody took anything except a few olives.

“Are you sure?” the guard who had been washing his face said. “Your rations are half of what they were a few months ago, sir.”

“And I still have most of what I had a few months ago. It’s just me here, and the boys. I haven’t got a secret legion of ravenous wives locked in the maze.”

“Even so,” he said, looking excruciated.

“This is a lot of dentistry you’re doing on the gift horse,” I said.

The driver’s little assistant burst out laughing. She was just getting her new teeth, and they were still too big for her.

The guard grinned too. “You’re a true knight, sir.”

Finally, they all helped themselves properly.

“You should come back with us,” the driver said to me. “We can take you round to the garrison. The way it’s looking ... even in broad daylight, I wouldn’t like to think of anyone on the road alone. Even a knight,” he said over me when I took a breath to say I’d be fine.

Nothing happened on the road, but when we reached the High City on the zigzagging, laborious way for carts and horses, the main square was much more crowded than it had been yesterday. A huge slave market had appeared, hundreds of people selling themselves, clay signs around their necks, sometimes whole families. A tiny little girl with a ribbon in her hair had a sign that said I CAN POUR WINE!

A garrison unit was out, making sure there was a way through for traffic, and so were Palace stewards—they were buying fleets of people at a time, paying relatives with invoice tablets. The preference was always for women, in the Palace: nobody wanted a big angry man who might lose it one morning and stab someone, but it meant the men were struggling, the prices lower than what I’d normally expect to pay even for one very unwell ox. I tried to keep my eyes front, not looking at faces, not reading the lips of people yelling at me that I could afford fifty of them, and not saying that I couldn’t afford to feed fifty, even with a knight’s allowances. The noise was so much that I couldn’t hear anything particular inside it, just the roar of bartering and crying and sudden, explosive rows, the ones that always happen when it’s too hot and nobody’s had enough to eat. And everywhere, over and through it all, the endless smoke of the sacrifice altars.

Getting in through the garrison gates wasn’t any relief. The Knights’ Court was heaving too, a mixture of units all going to and fro, bringing horses, asking things of harassed-looking clerks bringing armour. Black armour. Before I could find anyone to ask what the fuck was happening, someone caught my arm and yelped when I smacked them off.

“Gods, man, you’re too quick for your own good,” the general told me.

“Sir—I’m so sorry—”

“No, no, I’m the same, just not quite so—alacritous,” he said, shaking his head. I felt terrible. He was the same age as Helios, and so small he only reached my shoulder, maybe just over five feet tall. He had been a general for about ten years: he was one of those courteous, brittle-seeming people who nobody ever wants to upset, the same way everyone is at the mercy of wise kittens. Of course he used it brutally. “Heliades, I’m glad I caught you—can you explain why I’m signing you off to Palace service and giving your unit to Polydorus just as a hundred and forty slaves have run from the Temple of the Mother’s estates and I have to call the first all-units Hidden run in ten years?”

“ A hundred and forty! ”

“It’s the rations,” he said, balancing a tablet on his arm while he peered at a half-peeled pomegranate. It looked off, the rubies going brown. “This tastes ... distantly of naphtha.” As if he hadn’t interrupted himself, he went on, “For field slaves they’ve gone down to almost nothing.”

Field slaves become field slaves because they’re rapists and murderers, so the conditions for them were pretty shocking even in good times, but it was still a crazy number. Usually the only people who risked running were career criminals with something to run to and a fast ship waiting.

“Yes, and so I have this transfer order for you because ...?”

“I’m sorry, sir, the Chamberlain called me in yesterday. It’s ...” I lunged after the first true but boring word I could think of. “Administrative rubbish I inherited from Helios.”

“Hm. Make sure the Queen doesn’t expect you to inherit too much from Helios,” the general said with a seriousness I didn’t understand. “Duty is honour, but there was a reason he was Helios Polytropos.” Polytropos, “many-turning”; it means tricky fucker. I’d forgotten the nickname. Remembering was like a little punch in the stomach and just for a flash, there Helios was, laughing, playing the three-cup game with me. Round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows . I’d never been able to find the ball under the right cup even when I was much older. “You can’t be straight down the line and survive the court. Either find a way out, or develop ...” The general mimed spirals.

“It—is not a permanent thing,” I said, not sure what he was saying.

“I should hope not. Those feral little fuckers are going to eat Polydorus alive in forty-eight hours.” He lifted the seal bead from its cord round my neck and rolled it along his tablet, which made me stoop forward. He was wise-kittening me. “Well. Good luck, and do hurry the fuck back, would you please.” He made the bull sign and waved me away.

I had to wait at the Chamberlain’s office for nearly an hour before there was space for the Queen to see me. Helios had always said that most of life in royal service is just about waiting uselessly, but I’d thought he was doing that thing noblemen always do, which was complaining pointedly about glamorous connections so everyone would know they weren’t starry-eyed about it. He was right, though. I sat on the steps of one of the pretty inner courtyards, watching a little flock of parakeets. They were perched on a marvel and sometimes it moved, and they’d be startled and fly away, but someone had put grain in its hands, and so they always came back. After a while, I scooped up some grain to see if they’d come to see me too. They did, all soft and green and interested. I laughed and then stopped, because the Nothing was there next to me. I shut my eyes, wishing I could just fucking enjoy something instead of moping around like some twat in a poem.

A Guard appeared, the same one I’d spoken to in the cells yesterday. We stared at each other and then we both pretended not to know each other.

“The Queen will see you.”

In the throne room, the Queen was talking to a very tall Egyptian man. I hung back, wary. He must have been with the trade delegation. He was wearing gold around his wrists, and there was gold filigree on his belt, and his broad neck piece was so heavy with turquoise it was forcing him to stand with his shoulders back, as if he were waiting to start a drill. I thought she would ignore me until he was gone, but she tipped her head to invite me over. I went, thinking that it was her way of telling the Egyptian man to move on because now she had other business, but I was wrong.

“Prince Apophis, this is Phaidros Heliades. He was sworn to my brother,” she told him in exquisite Egyptian.

I wanted to ask why she was introducing an Egyptian prince to an inconsequential knight, and the man looked like he wanted to ask that too, but he seemed willing to give me the benefit of the doubt.

“Sworn, what does that mean?” he asked.

Egyptians are annoying for the following reasons.

One, they think they’re the best educated people in the world, so they ignore most things told to them by people who are not Egyptians, on the reasoning that you must be a moron who lives in a pigsty.

Two, they lisp. It’s their bread. There’s a lot of sand in Egypt and therefore a lot of sand in their bread, and so the better they eat, the more worn down their teeth tend to be. Noblemen train themselves to speak like that even if their teeth are perfect, because to them it sounds wealthy. To the rest of the world, it sounds like they’re all trying to impersonate a five-year-old girl, and it is therefore difficult to not hit them with a rock.

“Married,” I said.

“To her ... brother?” He said it like he thought I must have got the Egyptian word wrong. As though all long-distance shipping doesn’t happen in Egyptian; as though you could know how to say “I know it’s fourteen per cent port tax but call it twelve between friends and I won’t show you your own spleen,” but not “married.”

“Yes,” I said gradually, starting to suspect he might have been so cloistered as to be inept at life beyond Memphis.

The Queen, I couldn’t help noticing, looked suspiciously like a person who was just settling down to watch an especially bloody wrestling match.

“Can I ask what the function of a marriage is, if not ... children?” he asked, still sounding certain that I’d got the word wrong.

I’d forgotten how much translation you really needed, talking to Egyptians; even if you could speak fluent Egyptian. I took a deep breath. I hadn’t had enough sleep for this. Maybe I could still find a rock. “To hold the front lines of heavy infantry units in combat.”

“Ah—I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

“The line doesn’t break,” I said, “if no one wants to run away. There’s nothing to run to if your family is on the line.”

He laughed. “How unique.” He thought I was joking. He’d said it in the tone of piss off .

“Unique for who?”

“Humans?”

I nearly asked how many humans he had met. Probably it was only about eight. Probably seven of them were slaves, one was his wife, and probably he didn’t like any of them because humans are grubby and annoying. Probably his favourite person was a pet hippopotamus called Moses. It seemed better not to take him up on it. Once people are rich enough, they lose their grip on the rest of the world. “If you say so.”

“I do,” he said, more firmly than he’d said anything else. “In fact, what you’re talking about would be quite forbidden in Memphis.”

I thought he was joking, then realized he was smiling because he thought I was joking. “Seems militarily counterproductive?”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Egypt commands the finest fighting force in the world.”

I waited. Egyptian humour is a bit different to Achaean humour. “I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“It’s true!” he said indignantly.

He wasn’t laughing. But he couldn’t really think so. “A hundred and fifty years ago it was, but you were fucking abysmal at Troy. We used to send our youngest units to fight your infantry for practise. We thought your soldiers must all be slaves or something. It might be time to consider a system that doesn’t encourage them to scatter if someone sneezes at them.”

“I’ve offended you.”

“No?” I said, confused.

“Oh.” He looked confused too. “Er ... indeed.” A pause. “Indeed,” he said again.

I hoped he was having some kind of serendipitous haemorrhage and I wouldn’t have to explain anything else.

“He isn’t being rude, he’s being Theban,” the Queen explained, looking unpromisingly happy about the whole thing. I couldn’t tell if I was the victim here or if Apophis was, or what either one of us had done to deserve the other. “Our knights vow to tell the truth.”

“Oh, goodness. Do you, indeed? That sounds—awful. Um. Indeed,” he said again, which he seemed to say when other people would say “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what’s happening any more,” and went away.

I watched him go. “Did you introduce us to annoy him?” I asked. Maybe if he was completely at sea then he wouldn’t be so strict with his grain, or something.

The Queen smiled, a controlled marvel-smile, but still a smile. “No, to see what you would say.” She didn’t explain any more, though I had an odd feeling I’d passed some kind of test. She was studying me. “What are you here to report?”

“I came to say we need to search the whole city without raising too many questions. I think the best way to do that is to call a census.”

“A census,” the Queen repeated.

I cringed inside, because it felt wrong to take the credit for Dionysus’s idea; but I couldn’t say, Actually I was discussing state secrets with a passing witch after we were both arrested. “Is it possible, lady?”

She breathed in deep, in the give-me-strength way Helios had used to do when someone told him to get the siege ladders. “This city has an administrative engine which frequently brings me to my knees. I’m certain it can be persuaded to bear the weight of a census.”

She was walking now, leading me towards the old ruined courtyard again, in the shade of the colonnade. Even there, the air was straight from a blast furnace. The red cloak was killing me. Like always now, a pall of sacrifice smoke veiled everything in grey; even buildings close to us looked hazy, and further away, the spires of the Temple of Zeus were ghostly. It was putting grey in my hair where it lay in its tail over my shoulder; the Queen’s too.

“I’ve told Apophis that Pentheus is spending some time sequestered at a sanctuary,” she said. “But he won’t believe that if it goes on for longer than a week.”

“If we send out heralds today to announce a stay-at-home order, we should be able to carry it out tomorrow or the day after.”

“Will people obey it or do we need to deploy the garrison?”

“I think they will,” I said. “If we conduct the census in the middle of the day, everyone will be at home anyway. The markets are only opening at night now ...”

An amazing bird landed just next to me. It was gigantic and pink, and it looked nearly as interested to have found a Phaidros as I was to have found a bird.

“Awk,” it told me.

“I’ll send them out,” the Queen said, her eyes going over the bird too. “And I want you to—sorry, how is anyone meant to concentrate when there’s a gigantic pink bird? Where did he come from? What is he?”

“I don’t know,” I said, in love with it already. “I’ve seen them before in the west, but never here. They live in water, out around the islands, and by Pylos.”

Looking pleased with itself, the bird did an excited shuffle to the fountain and sat down in it, studying the fish.

“It’s going to eat my pedigree fish, isn’t it,” the Queen sighed.

“But now you’ve got a fun bird,” I offered.

“I suppose.”

“Pedigree fish ,” I echoed, hearing it properly.

She gave me a severe stare. “Are you making fun of my fish, Sown?”

“Y ... es,” I decided, because a holy vow of honesty doesn’t go away just because the Queen might have you sewn into a bag of snakes and hurled off a cliff for being irritating.

She laughed, and the bird made an oinking noise that set us both off even more. Some of the slaves had come out to see what we could possibly be talking about, and now, there were appreciative murmurs and theories about where it might have come from, and whether it could be an omen. I could see it might be, but of what seemed a bit mysterious. Eagles I understood, but enormous pink joke-birds were less easy to interpret.

The Queen, though, was frowning over the heat-waving city, and the great plumes of dust rising from the western road. “What is that?”

The dust off the road wasn’t just the hot wind, but scuffed up by what must have been hundreds of people. I could see the sun glinting on the harnesses of oxen, and children sitting dreary on the back of big wagons, married women riding donkeys. Even from so far away, it was clear something was wrong. Merchant trains were normally alive when they moved, with people coming out well ahead to announce them and advertise, and usually the wagons were bright colours. This didn’t look like that.

The bird. It must have come with them on the back of a wagon. Birds were forever hiding in the shrouds of ships or in packed-up tents. One night watch, some people had gone up the mast to let down the sails, and down on the deck, I’d got a rain of confused puffins.

“A city’s fallen,” I said, very quietly, so no one else would hear. I studied the bird again. The last time I’d seen one, we had been resupplying at a thriving dockside, and merchants had been selling fans made of those incredible pink feathers. “It’s Pylos,” I added.

“Pylos can’t have fallen, there are forty thousand people there.”

“Suboptimal,” I agreed, because she wasn’t really arguing with me.

She didn’t let her face move at all. To anyone watching, we might still have been talking about the strange bird. “Find out what happened.”

Close to us, a couple of the Guards whose duty that kind of thing must usually have been looked puzzled. I was too. She had mechanisms in place for this, people with clearly demarcated duties—she didn’t need to use some half-deaf polemarch she’d scooped out of the garrison for her reconnaissance reports. If she noticed, she pretended not to. I had an odd feeling that I was being interviewed again, but I was already looking for Pentheus: it wasn’t about that.

“Yes, lady.”

“Heliades,” she said, before I could go. “Count them. Grain is coming from Egypt—but not that much.”