Page 28 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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In the garrison dormitories, commanders, wards, or sometimes mothers were collecting the gear of the executed knights. Armour, clothes, kit; sometimes boxes of dice and games, or worse, toys. It was all so quiet I might as well have lost my hearing again. I opened one door and then snapped it straight shut again, because one of the mothers had hanged herself inside. I called for some slaves before anyone else could see and then, because it was all I could think of, I went down to the kitchens and told the cooks to use the last of the eggs and honey, and get some cake into everyone.

Few by few, I found what was left of my unit. The little knights were coming back one or two at a time, ashen, and sometimes disguised as civilians, in case people decided they hadn’t quite finished wanting to lynch anything in a red cloak yet. I got them sitting down in the mess, where they stayed exactly where I put them, looking like lost ducklings with no duck. Some of their commanders, the surviving ones, came through to find them. Some didn’t. Polydorus sank down next to me, silent and wooden. I didn’t know what to say. I had a feeling he was probably as much relieved as anguished, and probably the guilt from that was worse than anything I’d ever felt about Helios. I swallowed down the need to tell him what had happened with Jason. It wouldn’t help. It would break him in half. It was still like trying to swallow needles.

“She’s arresting all the vintners,” Polydorus said, nodding out to the courtyard to show me where he’d heard it. “Have you ever heard anything so stupid?”

What would Dionysus do if someone tried to arrest him? I didn’t have enough brain leftover to think about it.

“Help me look after the little knights,” I said, because Polydorus needed something to do other than stare at the ground. “Do you remember the rules of that pirate game?”

“Pirate game—oh, Ares. I can’t forget.”

It was a board game that everyone at Troy had used to get very intense about on the long, miserable night watches. It was to do with sirens and sea monsters and pirate kings, and it was stupidly complicated, which was perfect. Between us, we roped in all the little knights. Whenever anyone new came to join us, there had to be a Ceremonial Recitation of the Rules. After a little while, they were squabbling about whether sirens beat pirates and could we explode the sea monster or was that cheating.

One of the generals slowed down as he passed by, and I thought he was going to tell us to stow it, but instead he asked if he could play.

“Sir?” one of the little knights said to me suddenly, sounding alarmed.

“Hm?”

“You don’t look very ...”

I had forgotten to do anything else about my shoulder. I cast around vaguely for anything I could use as a new bandage. “I’m all right.”

“You realize you took a vow of honesty,” Polydorus murmured. “Is there a witch anywhere in ...”

“I’ve seen one. I’m fine. A lot of blood doesn’t mean a lot of hurt.”

The general had overheard. “Go home, Heliades. You can’t do anything else now. I’ll send a couple of slaves with you, make sure you don’t collapse on the road. Take some horses.” He sighed. “You’re one of only two polemarchs left. Do take care not to die of that, would you please?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, staring into the near future. Home: I’d probably see Dionysus there. What was I meant to say? Would you mind not playing with your food quite this much? I had to say something now. What had happened today—I couldn’t call it disproportionate. It wasn’t. Cross a god at your peril. Apollo and Artemis had murdered all sixteen of a woman’s children because she boasted too much. Gods aren’t meant to be reasonable. But I couldn’t keep pretending he was just a witch.

“Oh, that reminds me,” the general said. “There’s a witch looking for you. Tall, good-looking? Arrestingly weird voice? He’s outside.”

Fuck.

I heard Dionysus before I saw him. The courtyards were quiet. The haze of smoke that hung in the air, dancing with tiny ashes, seemed like maybe it didn’t come from sacrifices, but from those pyres in his voice.

“So what you do is, you get a racing camel, and you go out into the desert in the very hottest part of the day. It’s so hot that this is incredibly dangerous; the way is strewn about with the bones of people and camels who didn’t go in and out quick enough. If you drop water on the ground, it boils.”

I came around the last corner from the cloister, and from there I could see down into the Knights’ Court, to where Dionysus was sitting on the edge of the fountain with a whole group of people sitting around him. More were pausing in the colonnades, leaning against pillars, some setting down baskets and boxes. Usually anyone telling anything even approaching a story would have been dragged away on suspicion of being a bard (penalty for singing unlicensed accounts: slavery) but perhaps the red tattoos were his shield here. Or maybe nobody had enough heart left to stop him.

“And you know when you reach the right place. Because everywhere, all through the sand, there are tracks a foot broad of gold dust. Under the surface, as the ants tunnel through, it gets pushed up, and you can see it everywhere, just like you can if you see an ant colony when you lift up a stone.”

I had an eerie vision of a great desert plain all laced with gleaming veins of gold.

“So, the gold-hunters leap off their camels, and scoop up as much as they can. But they don’t have long at all before the sun starts to sink and the air starts to cool, and the ants come out again. Every single ant is as big as a dog, and you’ve not seen quick till you’ve seen these things.”

I strayed closer, not quite sure what I was hearing, but I was definitely hearing right.

“And then it’s back on the camels with the gold dust and they ride hell for leather for home over the desert, all these giant ants galloping after them, and if your camel isn’t quick as Artemis herself—” He leaned down and snatched up a tiny little boy, who squeaked joyfully. “Eaten!”

Little voices laughed and exclaimed: they were all children. Who belonged, of course—finally my bashed-about brain clicked around to what was going on—to people who hadn’t yet come back from the stadium, or who wouldn’t, or to slaves who were working past the usual hour to try and get the Palace back into some kind of order. I kept to the back, worried I was going to scare them, and waited for him to see me. He put the little boy factually in the fountain, which made the boy laugh like I’d never seen a human being laugh before. Children clung to him and asked for details as he made his way across, and he made up answers that made them laugh and tumble away to play.

The ghost of my little boy laughed through my memory, chasing a foal in the sea.

“I’ve your armour,” Dionysus said. “I couldn’t find anyone to give it to.”

“Thanks. Listen. You and I need to have a talk, so ...” I stopped, though, because he looked terrible. He was holding one arm close his ribs—his wrist was sprained or broken—and as he reached me, I saw the bruise just under his hairline; there had been a fight, or something. Once he was within arm’s reach, something in him shut off, like he’d managed to last just long enough to reach me, and he collapsed. I caught him before his head could hit the ground. His hair pooled on the flagstones.

“Excuse me,” I said to a passing slave who looked like she might work for the stables. “How possible is it to borrow a carriage?”

She smiled. “Borrow? You’re Phaidros Heliades, right?”

“Yes?” I said, waiting for a new bargain to do with my hair or something worse.

“The Queen assigned one to you. I’ll have the horses brought around. Do you need some help?”

“No.” He was lighter than he looked, and all at once, I didn’t want anyone else near him. “If you can show me the way.”

The driver went slowly. Despite the chaos that had overtaken the streets a few hours ago, the ways were clear now, hundreds of slaves still out with wheelbarrows and brooms. I kept Dionysus propped in my lap, one arm across his chest to keep him steady. I’d never been in a carriage before, never mind one that purported to be my own, and it was strange to see the world gliding by so smoothly outside—and to travel so easily, without feeling tired or hot. I was glad not to be in the sun. More glad that Dionysus wasn’t. I’d thought I was angry with him, but I couldn’t reach it any more.

He wasn’t out cold. He was awake enough to know where we were. How he’d stayed upright and telling stories to children all that time was beyond me. The bruise on his temple should have knocked him out. No doubt it would have, if the person who hit him hadn’t had to reach so far upward.

“What happened to you?” I asked after a while; after we were leaving behind the busier streets, and pulling onto the road that led up the mountain.

“Just some knights.” He was looking at the floor. I waited to see if he was going to spin me some mad story, but he didn’t, and he didn’t offer any more explanation.

“Why would you let anyone do this to you?” I said, not sure if I was angry or dismayed. “People don’t see you when you don’t want them to, why the fuck would you ...”

“Witching doesn’t work so well in a riot,” was all he said. I was sure it was a lie, but it wasn’t enough of a lie to highlight where the truth might be.

I let my head hang for a second, almost touching his. I’d worked myself up for a fight, but I couldn’t do it. “Can you tell me what I need to do about your wrist?” I asked instead.

“I can do something at home.”

“Like fuck you can, tell me what to do or I’ll guess and then you’ll be fucking sorry.”

He might have smiled a little bit. “It just needs a splint.”

I squeezed his good hand, worried that he still wasn’t looking at me. I felt his breath judder. “Is there any magic for pain that will work on you?”

He shook his head. We sat quietly for a while. Outside, the city fell gradually away, until there were more trees than buildings, clacking with prayer tags. I watched the woods thicken, and I thought that maybe, lurching from shadow to shadow much too fast for a human, there was a thing with horns following us.

The driver tapped on the roof. “Sir? Is it this gate, or the next one?”

We were outside my house, under the lemon tree. “It’s this one. Thank you.” I pushed the door open. “Come on, you’re staying with me,” I said to Dionysus.

“No, I can—”

“Shut,” I said, “up. Can you walk?”

He nodded and eased down after me. The carriage driver said the carriage and the horses were mine now, he could stable them here, he was happy to stay, but I sent him home, not wanting to think about what I could do to four sleeping horses if some new insanity overtook me while I slept, or what the mad bull thing would do to someone else in his territory. The carriage driver looked like he might die of gratitude.

“Bless you, sir.”

That was uncomfortably extreme. I wondered what had happened to him today. Maybe he had been at the stadium. I wished him a safe journey back and turned back for Dionysus, who was—of course—picking some brand-new, beautiful, perfect lemons from the lemon tree which had previously never made any lemons.

“Lemon cake, then, strange one?” I said to him. Maybe I should have been demanding answers, and even a cessation of hostilities, but he was the boy from the sea; my boy from the sea, and whatever he’d done and whyever he’d done it, being a guest is the same as being kin, and kinship doesn’t stop just because someone has done something terrible. There are laws older than the laws of a city. Taking him up on the right or wrong of it all could wait.

He did laugh, at least, and let me put my arm around his waist. I had a vivid memory of helping Helios, fuming, off the battlefield after he got someone’s javelin through his thigh. Being injured had always made him furious: he took it as a mark of personal incompetence. I couldn’t help feeling glad that Dionysus didn’t seem to.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, suspecting that if I didn’t ask directly, I wouldn’t hear about it until he collapsed again.

He was shaking with the effort of standing, but he managed to make his voice easy. “I’ll be happy as long as no one’s living in your cupboard.”