Page 2 of The Hymn to Dionysus

1

My name is Phaidros. I was born into the Furies, which is the frontline legion of the Theban army. My commander was a joyful trickster called Helios, and his commander was Artemis, the famous lady who won the archery contest every year for ten years at the Oracle Games. I know people from other places say who their parents and grandparents were, but that isn’t how Theban legions work. I don’t know who my parents were and I didn’t even think to wonder about it until I was older. Helios told me different things depending on how he was feeling. Maybe I was the son of a princess; maybe he’d found me on the rubbish heap behind a sacked city; maybe he had been friends with my mother, another knight who had had me with the weird slave nobody liked because he insisted on making his own cheese. He was making a point, not just being annoying. It doesn’t matter where a Theban knight is born, or how.

There was a whole pack of us, little knights raised among the tents. It was fantastic. People from other walks of life tell me about growing up in houses, and going to school with tutors who want you to learn about numbers and lying to people—I can’t think of anything worse. We ran around a lot, we played in the sea, we helped with polishing armour and making arrows, and our commanders hid honey cakes and toys in among the wreckage after the fighting was over, which was why I always loved big battles. And I met lots of interesting people. When you’re five, the best thing in the world is a literally captive audience who has been considerately chained to an oar so they can’t escape all the questions you want to ask about what it’s like to live in a place made of stone.

The older knights told us that we were from a stone place too—Thebes—but I didn’t understand what that was. It was somewhere in the west, the place where the slaves and the grain and the silver flowed back to, but we only ever went as far as a harbour to load it all onto carts before setting out again. It sounded scary. Cities were things you broke and set fire to. It was hard to imagine why anyone would live in one on purpose. It struck me as something between accidental and openly stupid, living in a place stuffed with silver and warehouses and good-looking people who would fetch a lot of gold if you were to sell them to the right sort of gentleman in Egypt.

The first time I met Dionysus was on my first visit to Thebes.

I was four or so when our whole legion finally got leave to come back to Thebes. We’d had lots of shore leave before, but all in different places, usually close to wherever we were raiding—this was a real holiday, and the first time since I’d been born that the knights could come home to see their families. It sounds rough, but five years is a fairly ordinary raiding tour; the world is wide and Poseidon holds grudges. You couldn’t expect to come home much sooner.

Everyone was caught between excited and scared. People worried husbands might have got tired and married someone else, or that retired commanders would be angry with them for not sending word, or what presents they should bring for all the children they’d never met. To give you some idea of how big an event this was, I actually have no memories at all of anything before. I used to tell Helios he could have kept me in a box those first years and saved himself a lot of bother; it’s a total blank. Thebes outshone everything else.

Don’t get me wrong about the clarity with which I say all this. Maybe it was my first real memory, but nobody can clearly narrate anything that happened to them when they were five. The only reason I can do it for you is that for years after we went to Thebes, Helios repeated it to me again and again. It became as established a bedtime story as Death and the Girl, or how Hermes became a god, or Artemis and the arrogant huntsman. He made sure I remembered. He wanted it graven on my soul, so that I would never forget why we couldn’t go back.

Helios was in the strange position of having a twin who wasn’t also a knight. She lived in Thebes, and we were going to see her. It seemed bizarre to me that they’d been separated like that, but he tipped his head and said some people had to do other things, and so we hurried off the ship to beat the hordes of people making their way towards Thebes too, and rented a horse from a man who didn’t want normal iron money, only silver or gold, even though that’s forbidden for us, because he traded between cities and there was something complicated to do with something called exchange rates that Helios tried to explain to me, after I saw him produce entirely illegal silver pieces for the man’s tiny weighing scales. I didn’t understand at the time why he took such pains trying to explain it to someone whose main priority, really, was bouncing; but I do now. If I had mentioned to anyone that he had been carrying silver, he would have been arrested. But I was distracted by a green bird and money was boring.

I got my first sight of Thebes from the brow of the steep hill that tipped the road down towards the Amber Gate.

Thebes is a strange place. It sits in a valley under Harper Mountain and its vales of sacred trees, always somehow in full sun, and I think even a stranger here could guess that it didn’t begin in the usual way, with people finding stone for quarries or land to till. It feels different.

Once, there was a warrior from Asia, King Kadmus, who paused here at the springs on his way somewhere else. There was a dragon, and it wouldn’t let him take water. After he had killed it, Athena told him to take its teeth and sow them in the earth. People sprang up from them, knights stronger and fleeter than there had ever been, and it’s to them we trace back our combat lineages. That’s why we’re called the Sown. Helios told me the story as we rode down.

So Thebes is a holy city, begun by dragon’s teeth sown at the behest of the god of just war. There are grander places—everyone says the whole world is in Memphis, and that there are mighty new kingdoms rising from the dust in Canaan—but there isn’t a stranger one. There isn’t another place where there are as many temples as chariots, or where the air fizzes with miracles. It’s that same prickle that happens if you rub two pieces of amber together and then hold one above the hairs on your arm.

Even being so little, I felt it. Perhaps that was partly because it felt so foreign. I’d grown up ransacking bits and pieces of the Hatti Empire, or even the gold-soaked places along the Nile. I was used to seeing Egyptian gods, and statues of the great Hatti knights in their heavy mail guarding the city gates. I’d never known that there were places like that which belonged to us. I’d never seen our gods in marble or bronze. For me, our gods were things you sometimes saw for a snatch in the distance in the heat mirages on the sand, or in the lightning. Wild things.

But there they were. A bronze statue of a gigantic figure on a gigantic horse stood at the gate. The road led beneath the arc of the horse’s throat.

“That’s Herakles,” Helios said. “Do you want to see something fun?”

“What?”

He guided our horse close to Herakles, and very slowly, the giant bronze figure bowed His head to us, a gentle, courteous sort of greeting. I nearly fell out of the saddle.

“He’s alive!”

“It’s called a marvel,” Helios explained. “Inside the statue, there are special devices. They move water, and that moves wheels, and the wheels move the statue. They’re very holy, so when we see them, you have to be careful not to touch them, all right? If you break one, you’re cursed.”

I stared, certain Herakles was about to ride after us. Helios squeezed me, and we rode on through the high gate. Herakles, fortunately, did not.

When he told me the story again later, once we were back at the beaches and the raids, one of my favourite bits was always the marvel Herakles. When you’re tucked in bed and cuddled up with your commander and the sentries are tall and strong outside and the perimeter fires are blazing, titan scary things have a way of feeling cosy.

Cities in Achaea usually have two parts. First there’s the lower city, which is where most people live. Thebes’s lower city seemed to me like a chaos of stone ways that looked like the tiny tunnels inside bones, full of people like I’d never seen before. There were old people all over the place, with grey hair—they hadn’t been killed or starved, they looked quite good even, some of them in very fine robes and gold chains. Men and women dressed differently from each other, not all in armour, which seemed risky, and children with no obvious commanders played in the fountains. On the steps of a great temple, a whole flock of priestesses in deep, bright red were playing an intense game of pickup sticks. Nothing was on fire, and nobody was running away from us. Some boys wearing metal collars and dark clothes bowed to us. They were incredibly pale, all foam-coloured, with light hair that didn’t look real. I twisted round to see them go, trying to decide if they were normal or some kind of monster.

“They’re from the Tin Islands,” Helios told me. I must have looked worried. “People are strange there. When they’re little, they have white hair, and as they get older, it gets darker.”

Sometimes he made things up, but the boys really did have horrible colourless hair, and horrible colourless eyes. “Yuck,” I decided.

And then, above it all, is the High City. This is the home of the Palace, and sometimes the grandest temple. In Thebes, the Palace is on a great spar of rock a clear three hundred feet above the town. Helios guided the horse that way, because his sister—and being four, I thought this was a normal thing for a person’s sister to be—was the Queen.

The Palace was called the Kadmeia, after King Kadmus who killed the dragon. The halls were cool, pale marble. I hunched against Helios’s shoulder as tight as I could. The only marble places I’d been to before were tombs, and I didn’t want to walk on the stone. It seemed dead. But it was good to be inside, because it was starting to rain, plinking and shimmering on Helios’s armour. He bundled me up in his cloak, and while we waited for his sister, he stood on the steps with me, looking down over the city. He told me what we were seeing: the Temple of Ares, all white. Harper Mountain, in the west. The sacred forest, where only women were allowed to go.

“How come only they can go?”

“To get away from us. Otherwise we’d end up planted in the vegetable patch.”

“Why would they plant us?” I said, confused.

He started to laugh, and then he apologised, and said I was completely right, but sometimes people did mistake very troublesome men for vegetables. For months and months after, I made him check me over in the bath for any suspect-looking shoots that might suggest I’d been bad and I was imminently turning into an onion.

I’d never met a lady before. All the women I knew were normal women. They wore armour and spent most of their time fixing boats or training; and sometimes I met women who were slaves, who did lots of work. When the Queen came down the steps to find us, I didn’t really understand that she was a human. She was so different. She was clean like I’d never seen anyone before. Her clothes were amazing; she had a purple dress, really purple, a colour so expensive I’d have been lucky to steal a purple sock, and it was girdled and pinned with gold, and there was gold in her hair, and on her fingers. I hid against Helios’s shoulder, because there was something a lot more forbidding about that purple gown than a knight’s armour. I could see it was for something a lot less straightforward than armour.

“And this must be your new ward?” she said to Helios. She sounded just like him. “I can’t believe they decided you were sensible enough to look after a whole human.”

“He’s only a tiny human,” Helios laughed, scooping her into a hug that crushed me between them. I hated it, because she didn’t smell of normal things like armour polish and sweat, but flowers, and something smoky and alien that I realized a lot later was incense. When Helios was telling me the story in the months and years to come, he sometimes lit incense to make me remember that smell. “This is Phaidros. Phaidros, this is Queen Agave.”

She bowed to me and I bowed back as well as you can when you’re four and holding hard onto someone else’s breastplate strap. Helios rubbed my hair, which was what he did instead of saying well done .

“Phaidros; are you really?” Phaidros means “bright.” “Are you good at puzzles?”

I grew up with that joke. “No, I’m quite stupid actually,” I said, because it saved time and humiliation when I didn’t know the answer to riddles.

She laughed, and Helios tapped me gently. “I’m quite stupid actually, my lady .”

“My lady,” I repeated, embarrassed.

The bizarrest thing about memories is how, just like things in the real world, they change with perspective. At the time, I remember thinking Helios and the Queen were both unfathomably grown-up and glamorous. But now, looking back, they were children themselves. They must have been about fifteen.

Helios carried me all the way through the Palace’s looming halls, out to a garden where there was grass and a great fountain, and he only put me down once there was no more stone. I stayed close to him, not sure about the fountain. The water was moving by itself and I couldn’t see how. In it, there was a statue of Poseidon. As I watched, He turned His head.

I tugged Helios’s cloak.

“Hello, small knight?”

I pointed. “There’s a monster,” I said, in the clear way I’d been taught to report dangerous things, like oncoming chariot lines or a cloud of arrows.

“Ah, no. He’s a marvel, like Herakles. Come on, let’s give Him an offering. He’s good, the priests made Him, He’s here to watch over—”

I hid under a hedge. Knights take a vow of honesty, but Helios’s definition of truth was nearly as snaky as Dionysus’s would be later. I was just about old enough to suspect that sometimes he told strategic lies so that he wouldn’t have to deal with a small, frightened child in moments when he didn’t especially have the time to do that. I’d been convinced until recently that sometimes enemy troops liked to go for a swim face down in the sea so they could say hello to the fish, which they were able to do on account of how foreigners secretly had gills. Having spoken to a lot of foreign slaves in my increasingly good Hatti, though, I was starting to conclude that the gills situation might not quite be what he’d claimed.

He got down on his front to see me. “Honestly. It’s not a monster.”

“You’re full of it, sir.”

He hung his head. “That is true. I am.”

Behind him, the Queen thought, and then, without worrying about the purple gown or the gold, or looking silly, she climbed into the fountain where the water was knee-deep, sat down on Poseidon’s lap, and put her purple veil on Him. I giggled. So did Helios. And then we all played in the fountain, and Poseidon seemed not to mind at all. Helios gave me a little carved bead to put in the marvel’s hand and told me how to say the right prayer, and Poseidon bowed His head courteously, and I was rapt.

It was raining more by then, but it wasn’t cold. The summer had been blazing so far even at sea, and it was the kind of rain that comes because the weather is pent up and frustrated after weeks of nothing but searing sky and hot winds. Above the city, the clouds were gathering dark, the dark that would have been dangerous on the sea. If we’d been on the ships, we would have been steering for shore now, and finding a shallow berth where the storm couldn’t hurt the hulls. I glanced up at Poseidon, wondering anxiously whether He was annoyed.

Someone came out of the far side of the cloister. I thought at first that they would be coming to tell us to stop being silly and get inside, but they weren’t. It was another lady, again in purple, but she was carrying a baby. She sat down with it on a bench a good way from us. Helios and the Queen, who had been having a fight that was she was winning, went quiet. I looked between them, not sure what was happening, and very much wanting to ask if I was allowed to go and play with the baby.

“She’s kept it, then,” Helios murmured.

I patted the water vaguely, to have something to do with myself. There weren’t any fish in it, which seemed like an oversight to me. When I stole a look that way, the baby looked like the best sort of baby. He was big enough not to be too fragile, but little enough to think everything was interesting. I wasn’t allowed to just run off, though. The last time I’d done that, I’d gone straight under a chariot, which is what happens to stupid children. There didn’t seem to be any chariots around here, but then, I’d thought that before too.

“Well, that’s the law, isn’t it,” the Queen murmured back. “If the father is a god then you can keep it.”

“I mean. I tell the kids all kinds of rubbish but I feel like even Phaidros is big enough to see the holes in that one.”

“What am I big enough for?” I asked, still trying to see if there was a way I could swing things round to playing with the baby, who was smiling at me now.

Helios was sitting on the fountain rim. With an uncharacteristic fidgetiness, he lifted me out of the water and onto his knees. I had a clear feeling that he wanted to put something solid between himself and the lady with the baby. I had a surge of protectiveness for him. Sometimes he did just worry about things for no reason. Sometimes after big battles he didn’t like loud noises, or the campfires, even though it could be freezing out on the beaches.

“That’s our sister,” he explained quietly. “She says the father of her baby is Zeus.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“Probably not.”

“Definitely not,” the Queen said, a bit flatly. “She’s been terrorising the slaves for years.”

I looked over at the lady and imagined her jumping out of bushes at unsuspecting men trying to get on with the gardening, and wondered how that linked up to having a baby. Then I wondered why Helios and the Queen were so worried about it. Ladies were scary, but babies weren’t.

“Can I go and—”

“No. No, no.” Helios hugged me tighter, gone taut. Even though there would be no playing, I was glad to be wanted and useful again.

“Why are you scared of a baby?” I asked.

He was never surprised, but something in his expression cracked now.

The rain was coming down harder. Away in the distance, lightning flickered, and it was a long few seconds before the thunder rolled. Helios flinched. I stroked the back of his hand. He was never very good with thunder, even though he knew it was only Zeus dancing.

The Queen put her arm around both of us.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll do unto her before she does unto me.”

A man had come out too, and he’d gone to sit next to the lady with the baby. He leaned over to say hello to the baby, letting it play with his fingertips. I hated him in the immediate way you hate anyone who’s allowed to do a thing you’d really like to but can’t. Grown-ups could play with babies whenever they wanted—they could even make one if they wanted—but here I was, clamped onto Helios’s lap, getting rained on and not allowed to play with the baby even a little bit, and no one even seemed to realize it was unfair.

There were still no chariots, either.

Helios stiffened even more. Usually he only went that way when he was about to shoot someone.

“Is that her husband?” I asked, trying to sound older. Theoretically I knew what husbands were and that somebody might expect me to be one, one day. As far as I understood, it was about keeping quiet and polite and doing as you were told, which seemed all right, because that was the same as being a knight.

“No,” the Queen said grimly, “that’s my husband.”

She said it as if it meant a great deal, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and neither of them explained. I stayed quiet, feeling mutinous, because it was rich to say I couldn’t go and see the baby but then talk in ways I couldn’t understand.

“Agave,” Helios said, very soft. “Let’s go inside. I’m sitting out here in the open in full armour; I’m going to get hit by lightning.”

She gave him a strange look then, the look people do when someone has said one thing, but it makes them think of something else completely. But all she said was, “You’re right. Let’s go.”

I had an overpowering feeling that the words they’d said to each other had no relationship to the meaning.

Annoyed with trying to decipher Grown-Up Code, I did one last check for chariots—all clear—and then hurried over to the lady to say hello and I was Phaidros and please could I hold her baby because babies were the best things in the world and I was very trustworthy and I had plenty of experience, honest.

Helios would catch me soon and he’d be angry but at least I would have had a baby-hug by then.

The lady laughed. Even if Helios hadn’t said she was their sister, I would have guessed. She looked like him and Agave; they all had the same teeth. “Of course, little knight. You sit here.”

“That’s a big scar for a tiny boy,” the man said, the King, so gently that I considered not hating him any more. “What happened?”

“I was careless around a charioteer,” I explained, distracted because the lady had just put the baby in my arms, and he was a brilliant baby. He was nicely heavy, and solid, with curly black hair and amazing blue eyes. He was big enough to sit up by himself, and have proper opinions about things; maybe to walk. “Hello. What’s your name?”

He bit my knuckle experimentally, looking up at me all brand-new. I squeezed him as much as I dared to, very aware that I needed to make the most of him before Helios noticed I was gone.

“He doesn’t have a name yet. Any thoughts?”

“No, I’m good at tents but I’m rubbish at imagining.”

They both laughed. The baby squeaked and patted my hands with both of his. I grinned, in love, and distraught at the same time. The only difficult thing about being a knight is that commanders only ever take on one child at a time. I’d never have brothers or sisters, even though I would have liked that more than anything.

And then Helios saw me and ran across as if the King and the princess and the baby were as dangerous as any chariot.

“Phaidros!” Helios exclaimed. “Zeus above—I’m sorry, Semele. He’s never run off before.”

“But the baby,” I tried.

“A,” the baby said supportively. I hugged him closer in case someone tried to take him off me. He closed both hands around the ends of my hair against my shoulder.

“ Move , knight,” Helios said incredulously.

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance I can steal your baby,” I said to the lady. Sometimes people didn’t want babies. I was forever finding them in baskets outside the sieged cities. It seemed worth a try.

She smiled. “Afraid not. You’ll have to get Helios to make you one.”

“Takes ages,” I said sadly, and gave him back. As Helios propelled me away, the baby waved.

“Nice to see you too,” Semele called after us, so sarcastically that even I understood.

“Why is it not nice to see her?” I asked Helios.

Helios swept me up so he could walk away faster. “I’m sorry I ran away and didn’t do as I was told, Helios, it was a moment of madness and I’ll never do it ever again because I wouldn’t put you through watching me get killed like an idiot?”

“I did check for chariots,” I said feebly. My arms felt light and empty without the baby.

“Oh, right, so it’s fine to get lazy while you’re in Thebes, because you definitely won’t forget to be sensible again once we’re back on a battlefield, because the minds of small boys aren’t in any way like wax that just sets around the most recent thing it comes across.”

It broke over me that probably I wasn’t going to be allowed to see the baby again. There were plenty of things I wanted that I wasn’t allowed, usually because they were expensive or dangerous or impractical, and I didn’t mind, because none of them were important, but the baby was important. I looked back, miserable, and pressed my hands over my eyes. Knights are allowed to cry, but you can’t make a sound, in case of Enemies.

“Oh, tiny knight.” Helios scooped me up and put our heads together. “I’m sorry. There will be other babies to play with when we go home. You know Achilles, my friend in the other unit? He’s volunteered to take a ward. He might even have one by the time we get back. That will be fun, won’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, and put my head against his shoulder, full of grief anyway.

“You and babies,” he said, poking me until I laughed.

I forgot about the lady and the baby and the Queen’s husband, because inside, there was a gigantic dog who didn’t mind being ridden. Under the influence of the excellent dog, and of the Queen, who told him funny stories, Helios turned back into his normal cheerful self again, though not so quickly that I stopped wondering what had been the matter before. When he put me to bed—next to him, in a genuine, real bed with legs that took you right off the floor, which was exciting—I tried to ask again.

He wasn’t the kind of person who brushed off questions just because you were small, even if the question was a difficult one. “The Palace is a dangerous place,” he said eventually. “I always forget how dangerous, when I’ve been away.”

“Dangerous?” I said, puzzled, because the only possibly dangerous thing I’d seen was the dog, but she had got her nose stuck in someone’s shoe now and she didn’t seem very menacing. “Will people try and kill us in the night?” It happened sometimes. I didn’t mind. I was usually allowed to go back to sleep after I’d helped to mop up.

“No; no,” he said, rescuing the dog. “You’re right, it’s not that bad.”

I couldn’t tell what he thought I was right about.

“I’m not sleepy,” I said instead. “Tell the story about Death and the Girl.”

He folded back onto the bed and creaked. “It’s late ...”

I tunnelled under the blankets and came up in his lap. “Surprise badger!”

He tipped sideways laughing. “Ah, you make a good point. Fine.” He moved a pillow upright against the head of the bed and leaned on it. I curled up in his lap, aware I was behaving like a baby but loving having him all to myself. Usually there were his friends and orders and chores and all the rest.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl called Persephone. She was poor, and her mother was the sort of person who wanted her never to leave home or have any adventures, but she was too clever to stay cooped on a farm always. One day, she met Death on the road. Nobody wants to be friends with Death, so he was always lonely. He was a polite person and he bowed to her, and she bowed to him, which surprised him, because usually people ran away; but he was even more surprised when she said, Listen, I’ve got an idea ... ”

I went to sleep dreaming about going to live in Hades with all the souls, and crossing the river with the Ferryman. But under that, I couldn’t shake the sense that the princess with the baby had worried Helios far more than meeting Death on the road.