Page 15 of The Hymn to Dionysus
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There were easily a thousand people approaching the walls. The crowd was becoming denser, because the watchmen had already closed the gates. There was a dull kind of protest, but everyone seemed to expect it; no doubt the same thing had happened at every place they’d tried before this. The train of carts and wagons and trudging people snaked right back along the westward road, disappearing into the heat haze. Thousands more.
“Where have they come from?” I asked one of the watchmen as she let me through the tiny side gate.
“I can’t understand them. Somewhere further than Sparta, it must be.”
The second I was outside, I was surrounded by people shouting.
“You have to let us in—”
“We need water—”
“—died on the road—”
It was the way they spoke in the west, sharp and jagged like the rocks along the shores out there. I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t sailed.
“Wait! Wait. Where have you come from, what’s happened?”
Everyone yelled at once.
I’d been right.
Pylos, the great city that controlled all the western harbours, had fallen seven days ago.
At first I thought people were telling me it was legions from Egypt or Hattusa taking revenge for what we had done at Troy, stealing as much as they could in recompense for all the Kind Sea shipping taxes they had lost. But that wasn’t what they were saying at all.
“No, you don’t understand. No one came . It was just people. Normal people, in the city,” an older man told me as I sifted through people near the gate, trying to find anyone who could understand me. He looked bewildered.
“Normal people in the city,” I repeated. It wasn’t another language, it was all Achaean, but in just the same way that different cities are wildly different to each other here—I have more in common with Egyptian officers than I do with the aristocracy of Athens—the words we use are different too, and sometimes, so is the grammar. People from the west sounded odd and abbreviated to me, and I knew from years resupplying in their harbours that to them, the way we spoke around Thebes sounded ancient.
“Yes, normal people!”
Someone who might have been his daughter lifted her hands a little in a way that said, it’s all right, he’s never very specific. “People went mad. Ordinary people. In the end they just burned the Palace down.” She blinked once. “I think I did.”
There was a prickly silence, and some of the people around us who had been listening too took a sudden interest in their bootlaces and the straps of their packs. I had a feeling that if I asked around, no one would know anyone who did anything at the Palace; but that if I searched the wagons, there would be a lot of newly redistributed grain and gold.
“Mad,” I said, with a spider-feeling on the back of my neck. “Mad how?”
“It’s over now,” the woman said quickly.
At the side gate there was a stir, and between shoulders and wagons, I saw a swift-moving phalanx of figures in black, veiled despite the heat, hands tattooed black-red. People drew back to let them through, and soon voices called out, sometimes with words I didn’t know, but it was obvious what they were saying: yes, here, I need a witch. Without meaning to, I looked for someone taller. Yes: he was talking to a family in a wagon, carrying a medicine satchel. I drew my teeth over my lower lip, not liking that he was out here. Nobody could see him properly through the veil at least, but someone as tall and fine-turned as Dionysus would fetch a fortune at a slave market even in Athens, never mind if anyone managed to get him as far as Egypt. All these people were desperate, and it didn’t matter if they’d all been scribes and accountants and horse-trainers a week ago. When a city falls, there’s an alchemy that turns office clerks into hyenas. He was a clever witch, for sure, but no witching can stop someone punching you in the face and loading you into the back of a wagon.
Which, of course, he would fucking deserve, after almost getting me and a hundred others killed last night in the Guards’ cells.
The old man looked wretched. “You have to tell your queen to let us in. We heard Thebes still has supplies, and law, and ...”
I wanted to say, Look at the ground: we don’t have food . There were wisps of old grass, blasted to straw. Even just standing in the full sun was giving me a headache. It felt like my blood was evaporating and my veins were trying to pump rust.
“I have to do a headcount and report to the Palace,” I said. I had to speak carefully, trying to choose words we had in common. “You’ll be told what will happen as soon as we can.” I looked around again, more and more worried by new things I was noticing. Very thin children sitting too quiet in the wagons. Young people grey with dust. I couldn’t see any water. “If you go around the north side of the city, there are springs.”
I shouldn’t really have said that, but they would have found out soon anyway. Thousands of people could occupy the springs and stop water going into Thebes if they wanted to force us to open the gates. I waved at a watchman on the wall and then spoke to him through the little side gate when he came down.
“Run to the garrison, tell General Alexandra that a lot of people are about to go to the springs.”
“Shouldn’t we put a stop to that, sir?” he asked. He was one of those officious middle-aged men who always mistook his own worst fears for good solid common sense. “What if—”
“That’s up to the general,” I said, cutting under him, but friendly. It wasn’t unreasonable to be frightened. “But unless we want a lot of bodies outside the wall, then we’ll just supervise.”
Then, going slowly under the pounding sun, I started to walk up the road, counting, and wondering exactly what the lady had meant when she said people went mad, and whether I would be able to convince anyone to tell me.
I walked for a mile across the cracked plain, but I didn’t find the end of the caravan. I would have gone further, but it was then that I realized I wouldn’t make it back if I did. It was too hot. The buckle on my kilt kept burning me whenever I brushed it, and even though it was thick, I had to put my cloak on properly. Where it didn’t cover me, my wrists and my hands soon looked like I’d plunged them into scalding water. I would have kept going despite those things, though, if I hadn’t started to see the bodies on the wayside. A man collapsed right in front of me. I caught him and lifted him onto the back of a wagon, and tried to tell the people nearby to veer north, to the springs, but they couldn’t understand what I was saying.
By then, my count was at three thousand, with no end in sight. It had been stupid to come out with no water. It was such a sailor thing to do: it had just never occurred to me that the heat would be this bad, because at the sea it never was. Angry with myself, I turned back, but then slowed down.
Even with water, it would have been slow going, and dangerous. The headache was getting worse now. Human bodies can endure a lot more than their owners usually think, but I knew the limits of mine and I was about half an hour from collapsing.
Pentheus was inexperienced, but he wasn’t stupid. If he had tried to leave the city, the heat would have forced him to turn back very quickly. These people had made the journey because they had to, with the protection of covered wagons. One boy, perhaps with a stolen horse which would also need water, would get barely five miles from Thebes. If he had been taken, with a wagon and supplies, the Hidden would have caught up.
He was still in the city. He had to be.
The hot wind was stripping the topsoil off the ground. Only it wasn’t soil any more; it was dust, and snakes of it streamed everywhere, shushing through wagon wheels and the manes of the donkeys and horses. So much of it was moving that where wagons paused at the roadside, drifts of dust heaped up so quickly that people had to excavate the wheels. Because I was sweating, it was sticking to me, and to everyone else; we were all grey with it.
It happened across perhaps two or three minutes.
It got hotter. Noticeably, frighteningly hotter. The air went from ordinarily baked to the way it feels inside a sauna before you pour the water over the stones, almost too hot to breathe. I saw people on the road notice too, slow down, reach for water.
I would have trudged on oblivious if someone hadn’t tugged my cloak and pointed behind us.
Horizon to horizon like a brown cliff, so tall it was already shading the sun, was a dust storm. I’d only ever seen them in Egypt. Achaea might be a barren rocky mess, but dust storms—all I could do was stare at it, even when I realized it was moving so fast that I wouldn’t get back to the city walls. It had shapes in it, galloping ahead. They looked like the gods were riding into Thebes.
A family beside me were pulling luggage out of a covered wagon so they could get inside it, so I helped, looking around at the same time for the witches. Everywhere, horses were spooking. The ones that weren’t tied to anything were panicking and running, and even the oxen, usually as willing to stir as rocks, were lowing and swinging their horns, dragging little carts with them as they thumped away from the dust and the new heat. Two carts crashed into each other and smashed.
The heat was so bad it felt dangerous to breathe. My lungs were cooking. All my thoughts were turning to sludge. We had about the length of time it takes to saddle a horse before nobody would really be able to think any more. Some people would faint. Some would have seizures. In Egypt, we had lost chunks of regiments that way.
I couldn’t see Dionysus and assumed he had gone already, until I saw him by a cart marked in blue with the sigils of the Temple of the Mother. Someone was trapped under it. He wasn’t strong enough to lift it.
I didn’t know what the Witches’ Vow was, but I had a terrible feeling it would have things to say about abandoning a patient, even if it did mean you died trying to help.
If you had asked me an hour ago, I would have grumbled that he was a sacrilegious criminal and if he wanted to die then he could do it, thank you; but you’re a different person when you have time to think about things.
I ran across and shoved cart upright—both of us together was only just enough—and then the man trapped underneath was scrambling out and running away, and not thanking Dionysus at all.
“Phaidros,” Dionysus said, sounding more grateful to see me than anyone ever had.
“Come on,” I said, pulling him. “We need to get inside. This heat—”
The dust blasted through us and instantly he was invisible, but I was still holding onto him. Even though it was only a few yards away, the wagon vanished, and it took three tries to find it.
The people already crowded inside were good about squeezing us in, though I was very soon sure it wasn’t in the general spirit of xenia. It wasn’t normal for witches to take off the veil in public, but Dionysus had to, to breathe, and when it was off, I saw at least four pairs of eyes flick over him, assessing how tall he was, how magnetic he was with his hair tied up high and cindered with grey; how straightforward it would be to just take him and sell him somewhere. I stared back at them, hoping that they were all exhausted enough and starving enough not to want to bother—and acutely aware that I wasn’t as strong as I should have been. I’d been losing weight like everyone else. But, the scar across my face did still make me look like I’d tear someone’s throat out with my teeth. The eyes skittered away. I nudged Dionysus and gave him my knife.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” he whispered. It was either deranged optimism, or the cosmically stupid certainty that most very tall men have, which is that nothing is dangerous, neither for them nor for anyone else.
I looked at him hard, not wanting to have to spell out for him what slavery would be like for someone who looked like him. “If I have to come and rescue you from the King of Persia’s zoo before anyone has a chance to try and make you breed with another giraffe,” I whispered back, very fast so that any of the Pylos people who heard me would struggle to follow in Theban dialect, “you will never live it down. I will follow you around, reminding you about it, even if I have to ride after you as you gallop free across the fucking savannah.”
He looked at me as if I’d just said something incredibly kind, and took the knife.
I relaxed a tiny bit, which I regretted, because at least when I’d been thinking about giraffes, I hadn’t been thinking about the heat.
The heat. It was like sitting by a furnace, but the quality was different, because with a furnace you can step away, and you can feel a border of cooler air on one side of you, but not this. This was going to kill us all if it went on for long.
“Is there any water?” a little boy asked.
“There’s wine,” a man said, and gave him a sip from a flask before nodding at him to offer it to me.
I shook my head, wondering what the fuck kind of life they’d had in Pylos, that they had fled the city with wine rather than water. Maybe these boxes were filled with cake and silk trousers.
“No, take it,” the man said, more insistently than seemed rational.
“I can’t. I’m Sown, we don’t drink.”
There was sudden, intense silence, except for the howling of the storm just on the other side of the wagon’s thin walls.
“It’s over,” someone else said, low and urgent. “Thebes isn’t infected. Look, he’s fine, he’s not—”
“You’re going to drink that,” a lady said, “or you’re going out in the storm.”
Dionysus put his hand over mine where it was resting on my sword hilt, before I could say anything. “Why is it important?” He could speak like they did.
“It’s medicine,” she said tightly.
“It helped,” the first man said, just as obscurely.
“What does that mean?” I asked, somewhere between frustrated and dismayed.
“Just drink it!” they all yelled at me.
I looked at Dionysus, in case any of that made more sense to him than to me. “I can’t break my vows just to be polite,” I said quietly, only for him. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to do.
“You can if it means you don’t die in a dust storm,” he said.
“No—”
“Your life is mine. You gave it to me. It isn’t yours to throw away for no reason.”
I swiped the flask and drank, then pushed it back against his chest and had to sit there with that rancid poison lightness going through my veins.
For whatever insane reason of their own, all the people from Pylos relaxed.
I put my hands over my face so I didn’t have to look at anyone.
It couldn’t have been that long, but it felt like hours. We kept perfectly still, trying to breathe slowly. I thought we really would all die, even in the shade of the wagon, and I sat there trying, through the molten slag that was my brain now, to piece together what I should say to Helios when I saw him. He’d be livid. Did you die honourably in battle, knight? No, sir, I suffocated drunk in the back of a wagon like a fucking moron.
When it stopped, the temperature plunged so suddenly that I felt cold. All my thinking came back; all of us lifted our heads and looked between each other, as though we all hoped somebody else might have proof that it was over, properly, not just pausing. It was Dionysus who pushed open the wagon door first. Cold air rushed in, and I’d never been so happy to breathe. It felt like swallowing ice water. He stepped down first, and turned back to give me a hand, because it was an awkwardly steep step. We both helped everyone else down. The little boy was last and giggled as we swung him down, one of us on either arm. I tried to find something else to look at, and Dionysus was the nearest thing. He was staring towards the city walls.
“They never opened the gates.” There was real dismay in his voice. “Why?”
At the gates, there were ragged heaps that looked like old grain sacks, some big, some small, with dust heaped up on their windward sides. The big shapes were dead horses and oxen. The little ones were dead people.
In a strategic way, I could see very well why they’d done it. In a human way, though—I was glad I hadn’t been the one to give that order.
“Because there’s no food in the city. The choice was bodies inside, or bodies outside,” I said. I coughed, because I’d swallowed a lot of dust, which was making cement along the back of my throat. Around us, other people were starting to edge out from whatever had given them cover, but not all of them.
I had thought I’d grown out of it, but seeing the bodies at the gate gave me that tidal bore of panic-relief that comes when you’ve just marginally not died. Dionysus looked like he might be having it too.
“Thank you,” he said. “For helping me.”
I gave him a disapproving look, because nobody should thank knights for doing their duty. It was a bleak window into the life of a witch. He expected to be left behind. “Don’t be silly,” I said, imitating the way he’d said it to me before. I’d never imitated anyone in my life, but I wanted him to stop looking like he thought he didn’t have a basic right to be rescued when it was necessary by someone whose profession it was. I hoped he’d hit me.
No; he only smiled. “Do you think we can get back into the city?”
“They should open the side gate if we can convince them we’re citizens. They’ll be able to hear us now.”
We set out that way. The wind was still strong, though blessedly cooler now. After the furnace heat of the storm, ordinary baking was a relief. I smiled when I realized I was entirely in his shadow. It was still an uncanny novelty to be so close to someone so tall. Nice, though. Even around other knights, I was always worried about what would happen if someone made me jump. Dionysus ... I’d bruise him, but he was big enough to restrain me if he wanted.
Dionysus pushed one hand against his ear, took it away, then did it again, and turned around twice as he walked. The way the wind pulled his clothes made a ghost of the way he’d looked when he danced. I looked right away. “Can you hear something?”
“I can never hear anything,” I said, but as I said it, I realized I could. It was just at a pitch that blurred for me. It sounded like a kind of wailing whirring, but what a thing really was and what it sounded like now to me were very different. It was a little while before I heard people yelling, and when I looked, I soon saw why.
In the ground, there was a chasm, just at the base of the city wall. It must have been there all the time, but the wind had uncovered it, scouring away decades of earth and leaving just the rock.
Something was down there among the rocks.
It was something bronze. Bronze statues. People were starting to gather along the edge. It wasn’t steep, so I climbed down along with a priestess in red and a couple of young men who were gripping cudgels in the way of people who had never been in a fight before. Dionysus stayed at the top, looking uneasy, as though he would have liked to tell me not to go.
The wind sang through the fissure in the bedrock, and it sang in the bronze as well. There was a clicking I couldn’t work out; something, I would have sworn, was winding up.
It wasn’t until I was almost down on a level with them that I realized how big the statues were. Twice life-sized, at least, made to be seen from a distance. They were lying down, like they were sleeping. At first I thought they were supposed to be women, but they weren’t. They were monsters; all teeth, limbs all far too long for humans. When I started to pick a way through them, trying to work out when they were from, I wished I hadn’t. They weren’t like any marvels I’d seen before. The joints were all hinged; if I’d known a way it was even remotely possible without hydraulics—and there couldn’t be unless these things had their own reservoir that somehow hadn’t dried up, buried somewhere beneath them—I would have sworn they were designed to sit up. It shouldn’t have been so disconcerting. They were just statues.
Maybe long ago, those hydraulics had worked. Now there couldn’t be anything in the clockwork but dust.
They sounded like they were breathing.
Up above us, the wind gusted, and the statues howled. It was loud even for me. The boys shot back up the scree to ground level. The priestess slammed her hands over her ears.
One of the statues twitched, and something in its mechanisms woke up just enough for the clockwork to remember what it had used to do. It was a horribly living twitch. Its shoulders jolted, and I stared, because to move like that, the bronze would have to be as pliant as chain mail, but it wasn’t, it was bronze, I could see, it was right in front of me. I started to edge back to the chasm wall. The priestess was already climbing it.
The wind came again, and one of the statues sat up. It was serpentine, snake-smooth, not a mechanical jolt, and it should have been impossible. Bronze rusts. Leave it underground—all of them should have been green with age and damp, but they were as perfect as they must have been when they were put down here.
Then another one, and another one, and I couldn’t look away and I was feeling behind me for the wall, which somehow still wasn’t there, and right by my boots, something bronze moved too quickly for me to catch what it had been, but I thought it was a tail.
The wind was powering through the statues now, and they were howling a terrible clockwork song. There were words, but I couldn’t understand, and now they were sitting up, the bronze things were taller than me, and I had a sudden crushing certainty that whoever had built them, they had never, ever meant for a person to get stuck in among them, because if a single one of these titan machines smacked one arm sideways, I was dead, and there were so many of them juddering upright from the earth now that I would never have seen it coming.
Just as I pulled myself up onto the next rock shelf and Dionysus caught my hand to help me to the top, a tail slammed into the place I’d been standing. It shattered the stones.
Dionysus and I sat on the edge of the pit, staring down at the bronze monsters still screaming their lost ancient words in the wind, and so did everyone else. We were all quiet. The dust and the heat and the storm weren’t forgotten but it didn’t matter for now.
The marvels were like nothing I’d ever seen. The quantity of bronze was madness. It could have supplied a legion of knights with full armour. The quality of the engineering too. It could only have been a message from a queen or king. Nobody else could have commanded anything like the wealth to build these things. Whatever they were saying, it had been important to whoever had wanted them built. And it was hard not to feel as though, for all they were saying words we couldn’t understand, this was what you would make if you weren’t building something for now, but for people living a thousand years after your language had been forgotten. That was the only reason to do this , instead of just carving it on the city walls. If you carved it, you expected someone to be able to read it.
“Can you tell what they’re saying?” I asked.
Dionysus repeated some of it. It was odd, but the Furies’ language matched his accent better than ours. “I’d have known what that meant, when I was young,” he said, sounding strange, and sad. “Do you ever feel like your whole life happened to you in languages you don’t speak any more?”
That hit me deeper than I expected. “All the time. What is it?”
“I’ve forgotten,” he said, apologetic.
I knew what that was like. I’d grown up across half the world, swimming in a hundred languages. I knew scraps of things whose names I didn’t know from territories I couldn’t remember. Sometimes I said things to myself around the house while I was making bread or pinning back the shutters, and for my life I couldn’t have said where they were from or what they meant.
Whatever the marvels were saying, though, it was a warning. You didn’t build twenty screaming Furies and bury them in a cavern for a once-in-twenty-generations drought to uncover if you were saying anything good.
“I need to report this,” I said, getting up.