Page 20 of The Hymn to Dionysus

19

Along the roadsides, there were more people sleeping out than ever, sometimes in makeshift tents, sometimes just on the grass. They were the ones who hadn’t managed to sell themselves; mostly men, but plenty of families who must not have wanted to split up. There were bits of smashed wine jars everywhere and the smell of stale alcohol hung in the air. Tiny fires jagged gold over people. Everyone was hard lines and bones. Down on a dry stream bed, some girls danced, not in a way that looked like they were choosing to. I couldn’t hear if they were singing, but there was a dull thump that might have been a drum. Someone was trying to use it to slow them down. I couldn’t tell if it was working.

I felt light and strange from not eating, but even if you had put me in front of a banquet table, I don’t think I would have been hungry. I was all churned up like I hadn’t been since that huge fight with Helios. Which was ridiculous, because I owed Dionysus all the revenge he wanted, uncomplaining. It wasn’t a bad thing at all, either. It was fantastic. He was here, he was all right, he hadn’t died on that shore a decade ago. That was all I’d wanted. I was grateful, I was, and I had no right to feel betrayed, or sad, or any of it.

“Wine, sir? Helps keep the madness away, the witches say so!” Someone shoved a jar right in my face.

I shook my head and told myself to get a fucking grip before I walked obligingly into a band of thieves.

A lot of people, I started to notice through the hunger haze, were wearing clothes that were quite good; the kind of clothes I’d have expected from clerks and accountants and the owners of olive groves. A few months ago, they would have been well off.

All along the sides of the road, there were lines of people begging or selling small things set out neatly on sheets. Ornaments, cutlery, jewellery, cloak and kilt buckles, clothes, seal beads, even little marvels, the kind that would pour you a drink if you put a cup in their hands. Some of it would have been valuable three months ago. Now—it was so much junk. I didn’t know what a sack of flour cost now, but probably it was more than even the best silver necklace.

As the travellers on the road thinned out, and as the way twisted up to the maze and the mountain, eyes followed me, catching on my armour. Mostly it was just hostile lethargy, but there was speculation too. For the first time in a long time, for all I was so used to it I barely thought about it any more, deafness felt dangerous. I couldn’t hear if someone was behind me. I looked back. Only a few other people on the road. Soon I’d be the only one. Very stupid to have come alone.

I was coming up to a great tree now, and it was hung with bright prayer ribbons. On each one hung a clay tab, the kind you scratch a prayer into if you can’t pay for a scribe to write on papyrus, and though it was too dark for me to make out what any of them said, I could see there were dozens. Close to the tree, the air reeked of wine and honey: the roots were sticky with it. Little clusters of candles glowed among the roots too, nested in wreaths of ivy. People ghosted among them, lighting more, or tying up more prayers. A man’s voice was preaching up there somewhere; he was talking about the marvel Furies, and saying that Thebes had forgotten an ancient god, and the drought and the madness were his revenge.

Dionysus had said sacrifices made no difference.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance ...

A clear high horn split the night.

Usually, I was with the Hidden when I heard that horn. Inside the ranks, it felt safe. I’d never heard it alone on the road, in the dark, on foot. The hymn to Ares rose into the night after it, horribly slow, and far louder than the mad god’s song.

Even though I knew it was slow because that forced the riders to breathe normally, there was a deep primal part of me that didn’t hear it like that now. It sounded slow because they knew they were in no hurry. They had all night to run people down, and they would. I could feel the horses through the ground.

Everyone at the tree scattered. The road was instantly empty.

Normally, all I’d have to do was stand aside. The Hidden didn’t arrest knights. This wasn’t a normal ride, though, and they weren’t hunting slaves. They were filling the arrest quota. The Guard captain, for sure, wouldn’t care what I was.

I hauled myself up onto the bank, and it was shocking how weak I was after just a few weeks on short rations. I could lift my own weight but only just, and my arms shook.

The shanty camp stretched right down the hillside, much bigger than I’d thought. The whole camp heaved now; people were putting out candles and fires, and running further into the scrub. Barely a quarter of a mile behind me on the road, a battalion of knights in black armour was riding in fast, torches streaming. The ground shuddered, and even from here, even I could hear the noise of their chain mail.

I ran, and I didn’t stop until I was much further up the hill, on the last bend before the maze, alone in the deep dark. Back the way I’d come, there was a noise like seagulls finding a feast in jetsam from a wreck, and for whole seconds, I tried to think what seagulls could be doing so far inland, until I understood I wasn’t hearing birds, but people, being caught and dragged away.

Although it should have been a huge relief to get home, I didn’t want to go into the house. The triplets would be there. I was too stormy inside. So I lingered in the olive grove, on a perfunctory hunt for any more dead things.

I found a hare, killed in the same way as everything else. Wanting to do something simple and useful and calming, I skinned him and stretched the hide on my leather frame, then left the body on the edge of the forest in case whoever or whatever had given him to me wanted the meat. There could easily have been escaped slaves living in the forest, leaving me things in exchange for olives I hadn’t even noticed going missing, or apples from the store in the maze. Would the triplets tell me if food was going missing? Probably not. They would worry I’d think it was them. Well, they wouldn’t worry, because they were hell automata and probably they didn’t worry about anything, but even so.

The forest was dark and silent. I could hear the dryads talking to each other in that low creaking of wood as their bark settled for the night. Nothing faster than a tree was moving out there.

“Thank you,” I said anyway.

The ivy was soaring so thickly up the trees now that some of the smaller saplings were losing their shape.

With nothing left to procrastinate with, I turned unwillingly to the house.

Obviously it’s horrible to be stolen from your city knowing your parents are dead if they’re lucky, or slaves elsewhere. Obviously it’s horrible to be taken to some barbarian country where people speak a different language and suddenly you’re supposed to spend your life doing housework for some army pig and feeling grateful you’re not out in the fields. Obviously I didn’t expect the triplets to be cheerful: that would have been stupid.

But here’s what happened whenever I went home.

The triplets had always made bread, very good bread, and set the table, everything laid out beautifully. Just for me. And then they stood there in a silent row and watched me eat.

I had tried to stop them doing it. I’d tried telling them to eat with me, or go away. I’d tried asking them why they were watching me. Nothing. They just stood, and watched. If I tried to take my plate away somewhere else, they followed. And so I had to eat in a minutely scrutinised, paralysingly awkward silence.

Then, I retreated to my room to get washed and changed, with the door very firmly shut, but one of them always stood right outside. I could see his shadow in the light from under the door. They did it in shifts, about an hour each. Always. Again, I’d tried to say they didn’t need to do that and frankly it was unsettling and could they, you know, sod off and play a game or something? But no.

They didn’t talk to me unless they absolutely had to. They rarely seemed to talk to each other. And if I woke up in the night and looked at the moonlight under the door, there was always the shadow of a pair of boots just outside.

Once I’d lit a candle for Helios, I brushed my fingertips against the filigree pattern on his helmet, trying like always to remember what he looked like, and failing. The bronze visor had been cast when he was fifteen; the age my little knights were now, a half-finished person, not the man who had laughed to face chariots. I mixed together some wine and some honey and a prayer to Hades to look after him, and poured it into the earth just outside my balcony door, by the shrine. The parched earth soaked it up straightaway. For what must have been at least the thousandth time, I wondered if he had kept his promise and waited for me on the shore.

I didn’t expect him to have waited. It wasn’t to do with him; it was that generally, I was like sea spray. I slipped off people’s feathers. It was the same again and again: I clung for a little while, but before long, everyone remembered their real concerns, shook their feathers out, and flew. I’d tried to make new friends after I found my way back to the legion at Troy, but I never stuck. Every so often there was someone who I would have given anything to stay with, but every time, it was the same. I had no traction.

Except with Dionysus. I hadn’t slipped away from him.

Now I’d had time to think, I didn’t care what he was doing. I’d go and see him tomorrow, and apologise for snapping, and make up a reason why, and then I’d enjoy him for however much time I had left, until he decided it was finished.