Page 24 of The Hymn to Dionysus

23

We were still awake to see the dawn come in past Harper Mountain. All night, we sat watching the front door, expecting to hear something bang into it, but everything was quiet. When I tilted it open, I eased out first and looked to either side in the glow of the sunrise, the blade of my sword tinted pink and violet. No one was there, and nothing looked out of place. I went out a little way to see up to the roof, waiting to see a horned shadow crouching up there. No.

Dionysus pinned back the doors to let the air in. There was no reason to think the danger was gone just because it was morning, but it was hard not to feel like we’d reached a safe border wall. At least now if the thing came back, we would see straightaway.

Like it was an idea that had travelled a long way to arrive in my head, I realized I was going to have to put on the red cloak and go to the Kadmeia again, because despite everything, I hadn’t found the prince, and I was no closer to anything useful.

It was only gradually that I noticed what Dionysus was doing. He was cutting up some oranges.

“Where did you get those?”

He pointed with the knife. “Your trees.”

“But they’re dead,” I said, twisting around, and then blinked twice, because in fact the twin orange trees that marked the way through the olives weren’t dead. They were very much alive, verdant, and full of oranges. Not quite believing what I was seeing, I strayed out to look, and it was only when I’d picked an orange and peeled it and found it was real that I turned back to the house and saw the ivy and the honeysuckle surging up the old masonry. There were bees looking into the flowers, and tiny bright birds perched in among it all. Two days ago it all been as barren and beige as everything else.

“They must have found some water deeper underground,” he said, doing very good work of seeming distracted. “Eat that, you need something alive, you can’t be living off bread.”

I didn’t say anything, because I was too puzzled. He could have said, Yes, that was me, you’d better get used to it, but don’t worry, you won’t have to live with it for long. In fact, he could have done that all along. When he first saw me with the bull on the edge of the crater, he could have said right to my face, Watch this: I’m going to make you like me, and I’ll only kill you once you do, and it will be satisfyingly terrible. There was no need to hide behind witching, or pale excuses about underground water. That was bizarre. He hadn’t cared, years ago, whether anyone realized what he was, and I couldn’t see why he cared now.

And, and : half of Thebes was looking for a god to give the crown to. It was his for the taking, but he wasn’t taking it. If he had done something huge and deinos, and turned the Queen into a deer or the Palace into a great tree, then he could have been king by now.

But no. He was in my kitchen.

He noticed the silence.

“I do not,” he said, “get in trouble with the Temple of Hermes for frivolous witching, and I’m not in the least worried about what would happen if you report me to them.” It was one of those lies he lit up like a signal for an incoming army.

I was starting to notice that whenever he did that, there were actually two lies involved: the one he was lighting up, and the one that fell into shadows that were much deeper because of the light. The first one, you were supposed to catch. I was supposed to sit here and laugh and think, Ah, well, so there is a rule at Hermes . But the second one ...

I pretended not to have seen the second one. “I won’t tell anyone. This is lovely. Thank you.”

He looked pleased and sat down around the angle of the table from me. I watched him as well as I could without staring, filling up with a honey happiness. For years, I would have given anything to have him back and see if he was all right. And here he was. Grown-up, healthy, vengeful maybe, and a bit crazy, but not broken. He was the least broken person I’d ever met.

“May I ask you for more advice?” I asked.

He snapped some grapes off a bunch where each grape was fully the size of a plum, and as dark. I didn’t ask where the grapes were from. Probably there were brand-new vines growing out of my bedroom wall. “You stayed up half the night calming me down about a mad person in the cupboard, I think you can ask me for as much as advice as you like.”

I nodded slowly, feeling confused about that now too. I’d just accepted it last night, but in the clearer thinking of the morning, it seemed bizarre that any of it could have frightened him. He hadn’t been frightened of being stolen by pirates: one madman in a cupboard was startling, but that man could have been ash floating on the breeze by now if Dionysus had been genuinely worried. So what: he was pretending to be frightened? I didn’t think so. I’d spent my whole life around frightened people and he hadn’t been acting, last night.

All the odd things—that he seemed not to want his crown, that he was finding excuses for his miracles, that he had been scared yesterday—they were starting to make the outline of a shape. I was missing something, and it was sizeable. I felt like I always had done when I did a cargo stock take and found myself staring at a big empty space where something was supposed to be, but it wasn’t on the manifest.

“Why were you afraid?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t mind now in daylight when he could see any monsters coming. “I don’t mean you shouldn’t have been but—you can tame real bulls, never mind a pretend one.”

He watched me for too long, and I had a creeping sense of having said something stupid. “For sure, knight: why would I have been afraid when I think it was fifty-fifty that you almost didn’t shout. I think you almost lay there while he tore you apart. Never did a witch struggle more to keep a healthy person alive, Phaidros, I swear it.”

“I—right,” I said, because that wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. Me, he’d been frightened for me, and that had been real fear, the way he’d gone so cold; it wasn’t soldierly irritation that I’d been careless, nor witching. He cared what happened to me. To me .

Because he was the one who needed to kill me, and it would be enraging and rending if someone else did first. The gods knew I’d felt like that about Andromache. I’d once shot at my own knights to keep her alive towards the end—anyone watching the way I was in those last few battles would have thought I loved her, the way I protected her—but I still felt like he had just taken me in from the winter and wrapped me in a blanket.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said.

“Ah, so,” he said neutrally, sinking back in his chair and still watching me over the rim of his cup, which put pressure on a part of my brain that hadn’t been built for pressure. It creaked dangerously. I looked down and tried to think about something reassuring and boring that wouldn’t make me want to choke into humiliating grateful tears, like how we used so differently. For him, it was more like “then”—it was a ghost of some rhythm in an older language, but I couldn’t trace how I knew until suddenly, uncomfortably, I realized I knew that in the same way I knew about the Hunt, and the god in the mask, and the Ones Who Come After.

Fuck, pull yourself together.

“The census didn’t work,” I said. Yes. Reporting. I knew how to do that. “The person I was looking for is still missing. It’s going to cause problems. He’s crucial to a deal for grain from the Egyptians, but it won’t work if he’s fucked off to fucking Sparta. I really thought he was still in the city, but I just don’t ... know any more.”

“An alliance,” Dionysus said. “We’re not just talking about a nobleman, are we?”

“No. It’s the prince. I die if you tell anyone that,” I added.

Dionysus looked into a plant pot which had had some dead mint in it for about three months, and planted his orange pips in it. “Even if I told someone, they’d think I was making it up.”

“True,” I said, reassured.

He thought about it. He had his hair tied up in a knot with its green cloth, and he had never looked less dangerous. He looked like he was about to take some laundry out to the springs. “So the problem is that the Egyptians will be offended.”

The mint, I swear, had perked up. There was green on it.

“Yes. At best they’ll think we’re incompetent and at worst they’ll think the Queen is lying so she doesn’t have to hand him over. Either way, there’s a danger they won’t let us have the grain.”

His eyes went over me twice and I thought he seemed unhappy about something. “Can I ask why it’s you looking for him?” He sounded unusually serious. Normally, his ashy laugh was only arm’s length away, waiting in the corner, but it had gone away elsewhere for now.

“The Queen thinks he ran away, and that he might come with me willingly if I find him. My commander was the Queen’s brother. I’m his uncle by oath.”

“Her brother,” he echoed, and there was something strange in the way he said it. There was hopelessness in it, and however I tried to look at it, I couldn’t see why.

“What?” I asked.

“No, I was going to say you should leave it to someone else, but—I can see you can’t.”

“Why should I leave it to someone else?”

The way his eyes brushed over me then, I could see that he had watched the centuries turn, and knights like me serve queens like ours again and again, all different, and all the same. “The Queen will kill you in the end.”

“She might, she might not,” I said. “But duty is honour.”

He looked like he would have liked to punch whoever first said that, but he didn’t argue with me. Instead he stayed quiet, studying the edge of the table. He wasn’t thinking: he had already had a thought, but he wasn’t sure it was a thought he should say. It was extraordinary to read a person like that, but he was like watching very clear water. “Hold a funeral.”

“Hold a ... funeral,” I repeated experimentally.

“The Egyptians can’t be offended if he’s dead.”

I had to stare at it for a while, because my instinct was to say, No, that won’t work, because what if he turns up again? Immediately there would be problems for the throne, because people would say the real prince was dead and this person might look like him but he was clearly an imposter, and there was nothing the Queen could do to argue against that. People love conspiracies. And even if that wasn’t a difficulty; it would be a hard, hard thing for the Queen to arrange the funeral rites for her son without even knowing if he was truly dead or not.

No , said the little voice in my head that had always belonged to Helios but increasingly sounded like Dionysus. She’s a Sown lady. Duty comes first. She won’t refuse to do something just because her feelings are hurt. That’s the reason she clashed with Pentheus in the first place. She doesn’t understand people who aren’t like that.

I expected to spend an hour waiting around at the Palace. I could walk around the shrine to Semele among the ivy and try to think of a good way to suggest a funeral, without sounding as though I had given up hope for Pentheus. I wanted that wait. After barely half a night’s sleep, my head was full of fog. I was still nebulously scared that Dionysus was wrong, and I was the one who had done that to the triplets, and scared that I only believed him because that was so much nicer than not believing him. It was making me prickly and twitchy.

“Ah, good morning, Phaidros,” said the Egyptian ambassador, clipping down the steps with the happy energy of a person who had slept for ten hours and had a lovely long morning to himself to think things over, without being interrupted by any mad people in the cupboard at all. Even worse, it wasn’t the kind of good morning, Phaidros that planned to stand alone. It sounded horribly like it was bringing lots of friends. “I was just wondering—”

“No,” I said, before he could get going. “Fuck immediately off, I am not explaining writing or marriage, or ... shoes , or whatever normal thing has mystified you now.”

He was smiling. “Breakfast. Would you like to have some?”

“In general or with you?”

“With me.”

Sometimes vows of honesty aren’t difficult to uphold. “I would rather get in that fountain and drown.”

Fortunately, for some Egyptian reason of his own, he looked delighted and went away laughing.

“You didn’t sleep very well then,” the Chamberlain said dryly at the top of the steps.

“You look me in the eye and tell me you’d have bloody breakfast with him.”

“I can’t,” she admitted.

“May I see the Queen?”

“Go straight in,” she said.

“You are not a reliable person!” I growled.

It was early, but there was already a stack of clay tablets on the Queen’s desk. She was ignoring them. Instead, she had turned her chair around to face the courtyard, and she was making chain mail. It was fiddly and boring, and I knew exactly why she was doing it, because I’d used to do it for the same reason. It kept your hands busy and your mind in a straight line, because if you didn’t pay it enough attention, you stabbed yourself in the hand.

I’d made chain mail, when I was waiting for the witches to tell me if my ward would live or not.

“Did I just hear you giving the Egyptian ambassador a considerable dose of Theban honesty?” she said.

“You did, lady,” I said to the floor.

“Good, keep doing that. I don’t think he’s ever met anyone who doesn’t pretend to like him before. He keeps talking about you.”

That sounded dreadful. “Any chance we can discourage that, lady?”

“No. Duty is honour, and so forth. You look terrible, what’s happened to you?” she said.

I went down on one knee near the chair. Even doing an ordinary thing that any human would do waiting for news of a lost son, there was a holy-mechanism quality about her. It was a stillness and a precision, a sense of perfect counterweights working and springs blessed by gods long ago. It made me worry less about what I was going to have to say. She was a marvel queen. She would carry on no matter what. “Someone broke into my house in the night. He’s been in the maze for a while. But ... then he climbed out of the cupboard.”

“That’s exciting.”

“It was,” I agreed, and loved her for that. She would never say, Gods, are you all right? Of course I was all right, and if I wasn’t, I could take myself to the garbage well and get in it, thanks. It was a reassuring vote about my capabilities. “He was ... turning into an auroch. He was wearing a bull mask. But it wasn’t exactly a mask any more. He had hooves.”

She didn’t do me the indignity of asking if I was sure. Instead she nodded slowly. “Yes. There have been other reports. Tiresias is doing an experiment at the Temple of Apollo.”

I wanted to ask, but it wasn’t my place. If I needed to know, she would tell me.

She coughed. She was getting ill, from the weather or the strain or both. Of course, she would sit there and disintegrate before she said anything. I could see her attendants hovering in doorways, not sure if she would defenestrate them if they gave her something for it.

“You look like someone hit you with a rock and left you under a hedge,” I said, because I was probably too heavy to hurl from the balcony. “Are you going to let them make you a tea or something?”

She snorted. “I’m fine.”

“I’m the Queen of Sparta,” I said, and nodded to the closest boy to say it was probably all right to make that tea now.

“Are you here for a reason?” she asked me, putting arrowheads in her voice, but she was only play-fighting.

I shifted to go down on both knees rather than just one. “I think we should consider a funeral,” I said, and heard how flat it sounded, but I was so tired I couldn’t think of anything better.

I thought she would hit me. She didn’t move.

“I was going to say the same thing to you,” she said. “At least it will mean we’re blameless, in the eyes of the Egyptians. Perhaps if Apophis is sympathetic enough, the agreements will go ahead even without a hostage.”

I looked up at her and wondered how many people ever had the luck to serve under a just and careful monarch. Not many. Not many people at all would be able to kneel beside the throne and want to be kneeling there. But I did, then.

“Can the Treasury afford to hold funeral games?” I asked. “Do we have anything spare in the warehouses?” Even as I was saying it, it felt improper. I was talking as if we were family, a widow and a widowed brother-in-law awkwardly joining households and trying to find ways, without offending each other, to get some idea of the other person’s finances and how things were going to look until winter. I regretted it straightaway. I sounded like I was trying to shoulder my way into royal decision-making.

“No,” she said, astonishingly unoffended, and I sank down onto my heels with relief. “If we properly supply the games ... we’ll be perhaps a week off famine conditions even for the Sown.” She was studying me as if the answer might be in the scars on my face. “But that’s why it’s a good idea. Apophis knows we’re close to starving. We wouldn’t stretch to the expense if it wasn’t real. If we can make him believe it, he’ll renegotiate the grain deal. Meanwhile—all garrison units will be drilling war games this week. You need to rehearse how to take a heavily defended cargo ship.”

“There’s really nothing left, then,” I said.

She sighed, and tilted a tablet at me. “This is a Guard report. They found an old lady on what used to be a successful olive farm. No crop this year. When the census-takers visited, they saw a man’s shoes and coat by the door, but no man, and she wouldn’t admit to there being any in the house. They thought she was hiding a fugitive, but when they looked into the shed ... anyway, the Guards are having to go around the outer estates to make sure nobody else has eaten a tax collector.”

I made a noise I’ve never made before or since and smacked my hand over my mouth.

“I’m glad you did that as well,” the Queen said, tapping my shoulder with the tablet. “But that’s what we’re looking at now. There will have been more cases that have not been reported.” She was studying me again. “You think I should have sent the garrison out raiding months ago.”

“I did think that, when the rations went down. But ... did we even have the means to supply more long sea voyages?”

“No. It cost more to fight at Troy than we gained from any plunder.”

I wasn’t surprised. A fully fitted warship cost acres of silver. We had lost so many on the punishing voyage home. It shouldn’t have been that way. It wasn’t that far. In fair weather, you could sail from Achaea to Troy in about two weeks. But Troy had fallen in winter. Our word for winter is the Storms. It had taken five months to get home. Harpies had raged all the way, spinning the wind and the water into terrible cyclones that had hauled ships right from the sea and dropped them from the air. Whole crews had drowned. I’d never known a season like it—my unit had tried to wait it out, but after two months stranded, we ran out of food and we had to sail. Probably some ships were still wrecked on little islands, trying to make repairs.

“If all else fails,” she said, “it’s going to be Athens. But that will be scant gain for a lot of effort. They’re barely better off than we are.”

I nodded once, soaking all that in. When I’d said it—when Dionysus had said it—I’d known funeral games would be a political gamble. That wasn’t the same as gambling the lives of everyone in the city on the very last of the food.

“So,” she rounded off, “we’ll need to find a body that looks more or less right, though I’m sure that won’t be difficult.” She said it with the same dispassion as everything else. Then, suddenly, like a splinter in glass, “Would you ever have just run away, when you were his age? You had a difficult life. I imagine you never got anything you wanted. Did you ever think about desertion?”

“No,” I said slowly, “but ... I had everything I needed. I had Helios, and my unit, and a profession I was good at. It didn’t matter that I didn’t always get what I wanted .”

“Are you saying Pentheus didn’t have what he needed?” Arrows again, but not quite play-fighting this time.

“Yes. I don’t think royal heirs ever get what they need,” I said, looking at the neat rows of chain mail, the pliers still resting on her knee, how she had her hair in a long rope over her shoulder, like a knight.

The way she stared at me then: I might have punched her in the gut and she would have been less hurt. I tilted back, because I hadn’t meant it to hurt her at all—I’d thought I was saying something obvious that we both knew but that she couldn’t say herself.

“I’m a bad mother, aren’t I,” she said quietly.

I wanted to hold her hands. Of course I didn’t do it. “You’re Sown.”

She looked down at me with the fossil of a smile around her eyes. It was the kind of smile I’d always imagined that Athena aimed at the people who died under her banners; the sorrow of immense might, capable of going into a frenzy of grief that brought cataclysms, but far, far too restrained to do anything but smile that sad smile.