Page 26 of The Hymn to Dionysus

25

On the day of the funeral, the knights marched in the procession through the city, just behind the Queen. The roads were frosty with scraps of cloth cut into the shape of flower petals, in the absence of real ones. They were everywhere, piling up in drifts on the waysides and spinning in little whirls where the hot wind played with them, catching on laundry lines and along the spokes of cartwheels, and in the high plumes and horns of the generals’ helmets.

Some of my little knights looked glassy and strange. I found myself counting heads over and over, to make sure nobody had drifted off to dance in an alleyway. Two units ahead, I saw Polydorus, obvious because of his grey hair, turn back often, clearly checking exactly the same thing. He looked even more exhausted than he always did. I didn’t blame him. If anyone was going to go mad soon, it was Jason.

The people lining the roads looked just as bad.

Usually, important funerals are like dark carnivals. I could remember sitting on Helios’s shoulders to see the parade when a famous king was killed in battle, excited because they were giving out free food and a state funeral is the only time you’ll ever hear the Hymn to Hades, which felt special and magical, and in a way specially for me, because of our line’s words— be Persephone, always negotiate . All the children had learned it the night before so we could be part of the choir and we’d all loved it.

There weren’t any excited children today. There were children, but they were standing quiet and dusty with their parents, some slumped on the ground where there was a bit of shade, but mostly just stuck in full sun. Everyone had scarves crossed under their collars so they couldn’t burn worse than they already had. The heat was a sledgehammer. Some people looked upset, perhaps to see the royal line broken, and all the uncertainty that brought—or perhaps just that it was miserable to stand out for so long, breathing the ash. When the Hymn to Hades began, some people did sing it with us, but some just stared at nothing.

Everything still sounded dull and woolly. I could hear a little bit more than yesterday, enough to function, just—but still not even as well as I had done before Dionysus cured me.

Someone, not that far away, wasn’t singing to Hades. I would have sworn I heard —raving wild and riot raving in one of the pauses, but though we all looked, it wasn’t obvious where the voice had come from.

In the alleyways between houses, there were people sitting, avoiding the procession, and they had gone still in the dead-eyed way people do when there’s nothing left to do except sit there and die.

The gods willing, Dionysus was right: if Pentheus was officially dead, then the Egyptians couldn’t be offended, and perhaps we’d have to pay more for the grain, but we would still be able to have it. If they turned around now—I’d really hoped to hold onto my little knights for longer than this.

I kept scanning the crowd for any more masks that looked like a god, but so far there was nothing. The Guards were searching people, just in quick scuffles lost in the crowd. I wasn’t sure because I couldn’t hear, but I thought it was those masks they were looking for. I didn’t think there would have been an official proclamation. If it were announced that putting on a god mask turned you into a god, everyone would try it. The Queen had seemed so calm about it yesterday, though. I still couldn’t tell if that was because she was pretending to be calm, or because something about that experiment of Tiresias’s had given her a good reason to be.

When Dionysus met me at the stadium gate after the parade, waiting to the side of the streams of people, he was lifting linen petals out of his hair, the fall of it pulled over his shoulder so he could see. The grey in it made him look—now he was in funeral white—as though he had been standing close enough to a pyre for the cinders to have settled on him.

“Good morning, sir,” I said, trying hard not to let it show that I’d just had a gigantic burst of happiness to see him. There was part of me that was writhing like molten iron after yesterday, but the sight of him poured water on it and in all the steam, I could breathe properly again. I couldn’t tell why.

“Good morning, knight, how strange to see you upon the road,” he said, and fell into step beside me. He was giving me a witching study and I thought he was going to say that he’d heard I’d lost my hearing again, and was I all right, and I’d feel stupid and humiliated all over again. But he didn’t. Instead he put his arm around me and pulled me close. “I’m so happy to see you,” he said against my hair.

He had on a silver bracelet, and it clinked against my armour. It was oddly unsurprising to find that I could hear that now. Around us, the world turned loud and clear. I was out of my box. I could hear people talking, actual words, not just a distant buzz.

He hadn’t done it on purpose. I doubted he even knew. It was just a function of—what?

Calming down. Feeling safe. Something—easing.

Blue, maybe.

I put my arm around his waist and squeezed. “Why?”

“I was lonely.” Like we had been married for years, he took my shield for me. It was a relief, because it meant I could pull my helmet off and carry it.

“You see people all the time,” I protested, wondering what it must be like, to be so unembarrassed and so open that you could just say that to someone. I unclipped the helmet’s visor and put it down the front of my tunic, where it stayed in place because my breastplate was buckled on close. I’d been doing that for years. Things get stolen. If someone wanted that visor, the only image of Helios ever made, they’d have to take it off my corpse.

“You can be lonely in a crowd,” he pointed out.

“Well. Not today, strange one,” I said.

“What does that mean—strange one?” he asked.

I heard it from his point of view and realized how odd it was. The word is daimonios ; like a daimon, a spirit. It was another one of those words like deinos , that means several things—“inexplicable” and “wondrous,” “uncanny” and “precious.” “It’s like ‘my dear,’ ” I explained.

Inside, the stadium was much bigger than I’d thought. Around the outer edge, marvels of nymphs held up a canopy that covered the sun-side half, and everything smelled gloriously of wine—his wine, all black and honey—because there were stewards taking it round to everyone, free.

“You must have sold your whole stock to the games master,” I said.

“Me and every vintner in the city,” he agreed.

Although everyone was dressed in white and it was still broiling, people didn’t seem so grim now as they had on the parade route; there were people laughing, groups of girls taking turns trying to juggle apples—for some reason everyone was learning to juggle this year—and old men clustering together to compare news, and I had to take it in bit by bit, because I’d not seen so many people all in one place before since Troy, but it wasn’t like seeing battalions form up. There was no one giving orders or directions. Everyone seemed to know where to go, and it was strange watching them, because from a distance, they made patterns, a lot like bees.

The seats were stone, and they’d soaked in the sun all morning, so they were warm, and everything must have been scrubbed clean yesterday or this morning, because it all looked brand-new.

Dionysus lifted two cups down from a steward’s tray and gave me one.

I hesitated, feeling uncomfortably like I was rule-breaking even though I wasn’t. In the story, they always said, don’t eat anything; don’t drink anything. If you take something, you owe something. I’d always wondered why Persephone ignored it, or forgot it, but I was starting to see. It wasn’t that she was ignoring or forgetting anything.

I took the cup and tapped it to his, and for all it was blazing out here, his wine tasted of winter. It made me remember that dream about the frozen forest and the man in the mask and the crown of horns.

It made me even warmer too.

“Can you help me?” I asked about my armour. Theban armour laces tight down the back: you can’t put it on or take it off by yourself. It’s a way of making sure commanders and wards overlap twice a day, in theory. In practise, for me, it meant I inconvenienced a lot of a slaves.

He nodded and undid the lacing, which was straight, designed not to be tugged open fast. I looked at my knees, trying not to feel it too much as his fingertips skimmed the nape of my neck, but I did; much more than when one of the Palace valets had laced it up for me this morning. When the two sides opened out, I eased out of it, clipped Helios’s mask against my belt instead, and set the breastplate down on the ground, along with my sword. I’d propped that against the seat, but a little girl in front of us lunged for it, wanting the shiny thing and Dionysus had to catch it awkwardly just as she knocked it over. It tilted partly out of its sheath on the way. I tensed up, because it was honed so sharp it could cut falling cloth, but of course that was stupid: he knew knives, and he held it safely. I swallowed, waiting for him to ask about the inscription. He was looking, but he didn’t say, Why is your sword named after a Trojan princess?

“Can you read?” was what he actually said.

I could have crumpled onto the floor and put my head on his knees. “Mm. All senior officers have to.”

“I can’t.” He was still looking at the letters. “Is it worth the effort?”

“I don’t know how I lived without it,” I said, a lot more effusive than I would ever have been if I weren’t bathing in relief at not having to explain how Helios had died. “It would be brilliant for you. If you wrote down your magic it would be much easier to keep track of everything, and to teach new witches, and ...”

He looked uncomfortable. “But it could last longer than me. I haven’t anything to say that should be around longer than the time it takes me to say it.”

“That’s silly,” I told him. “You’re silly.”

“Look at Pylos. You think you’re just an accountant noting down someone’s tax payment on a bit of clay you’ll wipe clean at the end of the day, but oh no, everyone goes mad and riots, the archive is on fire, the clay all bakes, and suddenly Achilles the shepherd, fourteen oxen and three barrels of apples to Poseidon will be all that’s left of you and the entire city.”

“Well—”

But he wasn’t finished. “And after all our world is gone and there’s no trace of us or marvels or Pylos and nobody knows if the war in Troy even happened, there it’ll fucking be, and priests thousands of years from now are going to have huge gatherings about whether or not their ideas about us are supported by fourteen oxen and three barrels of apples to Poseidon! ”

“Or,” I said, concentrating to keep a straight face, because I couldn’t just burst out laughing in public like a little boy; it was probably conduct unbecoming. “When you go shopping, you write down what you need and take it with you, and the writing remembers for you, and you’ll never forget the milk ever again.”

“Oh, that is clever,” he admitted.

All at once it occurred to me that he absolutely could read, and all that had been a way to make me stop being afraid of questions about Andromache. I felt like an old candle that had sat forgotten on a shelf for years, frozen into the same lumpy awkward shape, dull with dust, but now here was the fire again, and I was softening and changing and finding I didn’t have to be that cold shape forever, and the wax was turning warm and bright again. He’d burn me away altogether before long, but it was worth it.

A horn sounded to warn everyone the games were about to start. Dionysus scooped me sideways so I could rest back against him, one arm across my ribs. I held his wrist, wondering how this factored into what he had said about his vow. No family; no name; no one who knew him true. Well. I didn’t know him. I never would. Maybe that was why this was all right.

He put his cup on the ground and held my knee instead. It felt like a glimmering half-promise that maybe there was more that would be all right too, maybe later, after more wine, after walking back up to his garden in the dark.

The quality of that half-promise was a lot like the half-promise of xenia I’d made to him on the ship.

He was lying to me, of course he was. That was fine. It was a lovely lie.

There were some young men behind us, knights, making their way down to the patch of red around the Queen, and not being very quiet; they were already drunk and making a lot of effort to be more drunk, all of them carrying wine cups, one with an entire pitcher at the ready. I geared up to telling them to keep it down, but I was too slow. One of them knocked into Dionysus, hard enough to jolt him forward.

“Watch where you’re going,” he said.

“You watch where I’m going,” the young knight snapped, vicious out of all proportion, and yanked Dionysus’s head backwards by his hair. “How about you come with me, kalos?” Kalos had never been more of a threat.

It was Feral Jason. Of course it was Feral Jason.

All the people around us went instantly, deeply silent.

I broke his nose, then caught him by the strap of his cloak, meaning to drag him down to Polydorus. Later, I couldn’t decide if Jason realized that it was me before he pulled the knife. I did hear his friends scream at him to stop, but then it was too late, and the nasty little blade was hilt deep in my shoulder. I lifted my eyebrows at him, meaning to say, My gods, assault of an officer, you little fuckwit, let me see your rich uncle talk you out of that one , but I didn’t have the chance.

“Stop,” Dionysus said, not loudly, but he had stopped bulls, and it stopped knights too.

If someone else had said it, perhaps even if I had, Jason and his friend would have been on them like wolves, but they went still. It looked involuntary. It looked like what had happened to the knights at the Temple of Hermes, when they began to recite their prophecies.

I pulled my red ceremony sash off and shoved it against the wound, then pulled out the knife. The sash soaked straightaway, and blood sheeted down my arm. Because it was so hot out here, the blood didn’t feel warm, just wet. I had a bleak vision of the next few weeks. I wouldn’t be able to lift a shield properly. I’d be twitchier than ever, seeing knives everywhere, I’d have a string of thoroughly entertaining panics in the middle of the night, and I’d feel ashamed and useless and like I’d left all my dignity on the floor of this stadium.

“Sit down,” Dionysus said, so soft and controlled that it couldn’t have been anything except almost-panic. It was how I talked when I knew someone might die. “Lying down would be better—”

I saw Jason realize that I was hurt badly enough that he might actually stand a chance of killing us both, running down to Polydorus and telling his story first, before anyone else could say that he had started it. If he could say I was drunk and I’d grabbed him— it would only work if I wasn’t alive to defend myself but even so it was better than what would happen to him now, if I lived—

“Diony—”

He didn’t even turn around. “I said stop .”

Even though Dionysus spoke no louder than he ever did then, I felt his voice whiplash through everyone in that stadium. It was the way that lightning will strike an officer on the end of a front line, but then blast through the whole shield wall, hurling the knights backwards, burning inside their armour before they even hit the dust: Zeus’s last resort if the generals ignored signs from the augurs not to fight.

Something vanished from inside Jason’s eyes.

Tiresias had said that humans are clockwork welded onto a soul. Jason’s clockwork smashed, and all that was left was something wild.

It went from the boys behind him too.

Down closer to the arena, there was a weird stir that sounded like the bees had sounded when I crashed into one of their hives, and I looked back, knowing something was wrong but not able to pin down what I was hearing. Around the Queen and the Egyptian delegation, a swathe of red and purple was vivid against the white crowd, because all the knights and Guards were sitting together; now that swathe was writhing. People were standing up, reaching for swords ...

Jason tore into the boy next to him from nowhere. One of his friends screamed and went for him teeth first, and down by the arena, there was a roar, because it was happening down there too. One after the next, the knights were—snapping, like invisible lightning was tearing through them, rippling out around the stadium, and then the air was made of yelling and screaming, and the whole crowd in white was abandoning everything and running for the gates in a human surge, and everything closer to the arena was heaving mass of red and bronze.

I waited for it to happen to me too.

Dionysus levered me down on the closest seat. Chaos howled around us, but no one touched us; nobody even came near. He pulled the veil out of his hair and bound it around my shoulder, leaning hard into the knot until my arm went numb.

I stared at him, waiting, because surely if he had cursed all the knights then I was soon to follow, and any second now he was going to say, Well, you know what you did , and my mind would snap.

“Just stay still,” he said, as people hurtled past us. Down by the arena, the shocked Guards had got themselves into some order, and they were pushing back against the heaving mass of the mad knights.

I took a breath to demand that he stop this, right now, and I didn’t fucking care who he was and what I’d done to him, because this was insane.

But he had gone; he was four rows down from me now, helping up a woman who had fallen in the crush and whose arm looked broken. She looked relieved to see a witch. Once he had bound her arm against her chest, he moved on again, to a boy who was bleeding. It was happening around the stadium now; that first river of people was gone, leaving just tributaries now, and witches ghosting around the fallen.

Down where the knights were, the Guards were locked into place around the Queen, and there was a different quality to the madness. People in red cloaks were losing interest in the strange, absent way that distracted animals sometimes do. Some were leaving. Some might have been coming back into their minds. I saw Jason straighten up suddenly, blood on his face, paralysed for a second, and then he ran for the south gate.

I picked up my sword, because my sword arm was still fine, and started down.

“Phaidros,” Dionysus said when he saw. “Don’t.”

He’s playing. This is it. This is where he kills everyone and you watch, and then you’re last.

Strapping my shield on, the weight of it pulling against the new wound but duty is honour, I ran down to help the Guards move the Queen.