Page 18 of The Hymn to Dionysus

17

The temple courtyard had been tranquil when I brought Amphitrion. Now, it wasn’t just full; it was seething. Most of the people inside I recognised from the garrison. Older knights, knights in training, even a general. Some were healthy but bringing commanders and wards; and some were singing or humming, left alone to just spin and spin in whatever corner they could find with enough space. The song was everywhere, different snippets of it, different verses, but it was all the same thing.

I’d never been afraid on a battlefield. It’s not that I’m especially stupid, or, I hope not. You can see someone take down the knight beside you with a battle axe and not panic if you know exactly what’s meant to happen next and how to do it. It was liturgy: close the wall, step into the breach, spear forward, step, and watch the signal flags. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple.

I was afraid walking through that courtyard.

I shouldn’t have been. Most people in it were just dancing, and humming, or singing. But it was so away from anything they would ever have done in their right minds that part of me wound up tighter and tighter with a dread of what they might decide to do next; and whether there was something in the air that would bring that madness to me too. By an orange tree, two priests were trying to tie someone to the trunk to stop him dancing, and I could see why. He was badly sunburned and he looked like he hadn’t had any water, and if they let him keep dancing like he wanted to, he would die soon. But as soon as they caught his elbows, he lashed out with his spear arm, and hit one of the priests so hard the man reeled away with blood pouring down his face.

“Knight?”

The priest I’d spoken to before was just in front of me, looking like he had meant to be on his way somewhere else before he noticed me. He had a cloth over his mouth and nose. I wished I had one too.

“The Queen sent me. I’m supposed to try and talk to some of the knights.”

He touched his ear to say he couldn’t hear over all the noise. He motioned me into a side building, shut the door, and leaned against it. It was a records room. Clay tablets lined the walls, up to three times the height of a person, with ladders that moved along the shelves on rails. A wheelbarrow full of new records stood in the middle of the floor waiting to be filed, so fresh out of the kiln that they were steaming. He didn’t take the mask off. I wished he would; it was much harder to make out what he was saying now I couldn’t see his lips.

“Did you say you’ve been sent here too? You don’t seem mad.”

“Not yet,” I said. “The Queen wants me to talk to some of the knights. She isn’t convinced the madness is real.”

“Not r—have you seen out there?”

I nodded, even less convinced she was right now than before.

He pulled another mask out of his pocket and gave it to me. “Put that on. Why wouldn’t she think it’s real?”

“There’s a rumour about a god of madness,” I explained. “And anything to do with a new god looks like fraud to her, because of the story about her sister.”

“I’ll show you the boy you brought in,” he said, sounding angry, but it wasn’t anger-anger. He was tired and upset.

He led me outside again, then down through the temple. The hallways were all howling. There were five times more people here than the temple had ever been made to hold. As we passed downstairs, though, into the cellar where the original five knights had been, it was quiet. I was about to ask if the priests had found some kind of drug that worked, but then I stopped, because that wasn’t it.

Lined up and covered in sheets, waiting for their pyres, were four bodies.

“They don’t eat,” the priest said quietly, “and they don’t drink, and they won’t stop moving. In this heat ... it’s killing people in about twelve hours. We’re restraining as many as we can now.”

I moved the edge of the shroud on the smallest body. We always say to relatives, he looked like he was sleeping, but bodies don’t look like they’re sleeping. They look as different without souls in them as coats look without people in them. But it was Amphitrion. I sighed. I’d always known I’d be standing here like this one day, because he had never been the kind to survive long, but I had thought it would be a little further away.

“Have you notified his commander?” I asked, wondering what would happen now to Penelope the Not-Sacrifice Lamb.

“No time,” snapped the priest. “There are two hundred others up there and we’re trying to keep them alive. None of us has slept. Tell that to the Queen.”

“What do you need?” I asked.

“More space. More people. Quarantine measures, for fuck’s sake. Now get out, before you catch it too.”

I must have been thinking about it behind everything else, but I hadn’t be aware of it, so the thought felt like it flew out of nowhere.

There was a very simple way that this could be the god from the ship. I wasn’t dead yet because he was going to make me watch everyone else die first.

When I arrived back at the Palace, the Queen was in the cloister, talking to the Guard captain about arrest numbers. Someone else was there too, the abbess from the Temple of the Mother, which was strange, because it was hard to see what she could have to do with the Guards. I stayed back, but like before with the Egyptian prince, the Queen saw me and held her arm out for me to come closer. Once I was in reach, she shepherded me nearer by the small of my back and gave me a little interrogatory look that was asking if that was close enough for me to hear. I could have kissed her hand. Because I could mostly read lips, and partly hear, and I was decent at guessing, most people completely forgot I had any trouble.

“—should get at least a hundred people,” the Guard captain was saying. “Our informants in the lower city have reported that the song is already everywhere, even among people who aren’t mad.”

“And the temple’s fields have lost how many slaves?” the Queen said to the abbess.

“Two hundred to starvation, and another two hundred have tried to run,” the abbess said.

“That many,” the Queen murmured.

“In the last week,” the abbess said grimly. “And the rations will only get worse. We’ll lose a lot more next month unless the Egyptian grain comes through. What crops we do have will rot in the ground without people to farm them.”

“Arrest four hundred people,” the Queen said to the Guard captain. “At least. We get them transferred to the fields as quickly as possible. No holding cells: straight into chains, straight out to the estates. Preferably men. Rowdy ones who we can do without anyway. Anyone talking about a new god.”

“For those numbers, it would be best to have use of the Hidden.”

I twitched. A Hidden ride was difficult enough when you were hunting hardened murderers. To go after ordinary people—there were knights dead enough inside to follow that order and lose no sleep, but not my unit of little knights. They were only fifteen.

“Yes. Inform the duty officer at the garrison.”

He bowed briskly. “Obedience is strength, lady.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she said, and he clipped away. The abbess bowed slightly too and went more slowly. “Heliades, that was quick.”

I almost didn’t hear. Arrest quotas: I’d grown up with restricted rations and rules, I was used to someone in a palace somewhere deciding how much I was allowed to eat or how much of my time was really mine, but I’d never heard of innocent civilians being arrested for a non-crime just to fill a labour shortage.

“We can’t get workers into the fields any other way,” the Queen said, as if all my thoughts had etched themselves right across my face. “We can’t haemorrhage money paying day labourers to do it. The payments to Egypt for the grain are crippling the treasury. This is the only fast, cheap way to get the harvest in.”

“They’ll all die,” I said, as if she wouldn’t have thought of that already.

“If they don’t, then all of us will.” She caught my eye. I’d been staring at the ground. “Your report from Ares?”

I had a nasty thought. Was she truly worried about sedition, and someone making a false claim to the throne—or was she making the mention of a new god a criminal offence literally just to fill the fields? It was ruthless, and it was flawless marvel-thinking. If you didn’t consider misery, yours or anyone else’s, a reason not to do something, which was the real heart of being Sown ... it was a good solution. I had to box my thoughts around to what she’d asked me. “The madness is real. It’s contagious; there are hundreds of knights there now, the whole place is chaos. They’re starting to die from it. Four deceased, so far.”

She frowned. “They’re dying?”

“Yes. They don’t eat or drink, they won’t stop dancing, so the heat kills them quickly. The priests are trying to restrain the rest, but it’s not going well. They’ve requested help. More people, more space, quarantine procedures.”

“What’s your assessment, do they actually need it or can they get by with what they have if they just dig in?”

“They need it if we don’t want hundreds of knights to die by tomorrow evening.”

She was gazing across to the shrine of her sister, in the lightning-blasted courtyard where the ivy was claiming back all the broken, blackened masonry. More ivy than before. Something in its roots had woken up. “So it’s something in the ground. Zoe was right.” She sighed. “But the more people we involve, the more people will see what’s happening to the knights and call it the doing of the lost prince.”

I tipped back slightly, because I had been about to say, Look, what’s more important, the lives of knights or the suppression of rumours about the lost prince , but that was stupid. I had just watched her order the arrest of innocent people because it would be cheaper than paying day labourers. She would absolutely let a few hundred knights die. I caught myself wringing the red string with the bee charm on it round my wrist, as if it could magically tell me what Dionysus would say, because the gods knew he’d have a cleverer answer than just begging her uselessly not to do it.

“Witches,” I said, before I really understood what was behind the thought.

“What?”

“We ask the witches to help. Using witches makes it look like a medical problem, not a divine one. No priests, no prophets, no civilians who’ll spread rumours. Witches can’t talk about their patients. They belong to the Temple of Hermes, don’t they? Hermes is huge. They could fit hundreds of people in there, and none of them will talk about it.”

She nodded once, slowly. The sun burned in the crown. My chest went tight. I was standing here giving advice to the Queen . Not considered, well-researched advice. Just the first chaotic thing that had occurred to me. Helios had told me once that being in royal service felt exactly like that moment where you’ve tripped on a stairway but you’re not falling yet, and I’d had no idea what he meant until right this second. “There can be only one parliament of witches in a generation. It’s part of their vow,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s a protective mechanism for the crown. If they ever got together and agreed anything—well, you’ve met witches. One is bad enough.” She paused. “I always swore I’d never do it unless we were in truly dire need.”

“We’re about to see a full-scale famine,” I said quietly. “Pentheus is missing, the Egyptians won’t give us the grain until they have a royal hostage, and if we don’t find Pentheus, we will need to steal that grain from the Egyptian ships in the harbour, and we’ll need the entire garrison to do that, because those ships will be defended by half an army. In what way could the need be less dire?”

“You just want to save some knights. Remember we are also trying to save Thebes.”

It was several steps too grandiose, even for a queen. The voice in my head said, You know, Phaidros, you probably need to shift your tolerance for stupid things up several notches if you’re going to work for the royal household , but the rest impaled it on a spike and set fire to the spike. “When you say Thebes,” I said, a bit flatly, “do you mean you and possibly some of your friends? Because you do not mean the rest of us.”

She lifted her eyebrow, just a fraction. “You know speaking truth to power is very rarely an ingredient for longevity.”

“Do your worst,” I said tiredly. It would be her or the god. Either way, I wasn’t going to live out the end of this week. I was starting to lose interest in the exact hows and whens.

She nodded once, and motioned across a slave. I couldn’t tell if it was going to be about arranging for me to be immediately strangled, or something else, but I couldn’t summon anything stronger than a kind of indifferent curiosity.

“Send a herald to Hermes,” she said. “Call a parliament of the witches for tonight.” As the slave hurried away, she shook her head at me. “That wasn’t brave, Heliades, that was suicidal: you didn’t know I wouldn’t kill you. Can you not throw yourself in front of any more chariots, please?”

“Yes, lady.”

“Now take fifty of the afflicted knights to Hermes. I want to know if the witches have any treatment for the madness. Report back in the morning: we’ll issue the stay-at-home order at dawn and begin the census then.”

“Yes, lady.”

I thought she would send me on my way, but she stood still, scanning me. “Phaidros—are you all right?”

Well: I think I might have called a god here, and I think he might be saving me till last. It sounds vain, but when you’ve been truly wronged, you can stay furious for years. Killing someone isn’t enough: you have to do something insane and make them watch. I burned down half the palace at Troy before I slung Andromache off a balcony, and she didn’t even do anything that terrible, she just killed a man in battle, which is much fairer than taking care of a child for almost a fortnight and then not stopping a crew of soldiers trying to murder him.

“I’ve just been out in the sun,” I said.