Page 33 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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I thought maybe that when we came up the steps to the Palace, there would be people waiting to arrest me, and the Queen, to give me a regretful look and say sorry, but if there was any doubt then the only sensible thing to do was have me immediately killed.

They weren’t; nobody was thinking about me at all, because the Egyptian grain convoy was in the main courtyard. Wagon after wagon, painted with the turquoise seal of the Pharaoh, accompanied by soldiers to keep people from stealing on the road—their soldiers, and ours. The Egyptians were all men, so they were bizarrely uniform, and all of them were tall and impressive, looking a lot like they were trying not to openly enjoy the whooping, cheering crowd. There were already grain sacks being passed out, queues behind the wagons, and the Egyptians were laughing with our knights, because probably they hadn’t seen people in Achaea queue before for food rather than the traditional mob. Palace clerks were checking ration tablets, running seal beads over clay, trading receipts. It was joyful and loud, but it was meticulous too. Every so often, someone tried to steal something and went down under a knot of soldiers.

“It’s you!” A lady with a baby slung both arms around me, then laughed away before I could ask why she was so happy to see a stranger.

Someone else saw, an older man, one of those quick sparky people who always make brilliant bosuns on ships, with a voice like a carnyx. He grinned. “It’s the King! All hail the King!”

All hail the King burst around the courtyard. Even the Egyptians standing on the grain wagons saluted, smiling.

Royalty is such a strange thing. To look at a city and everyone in it, you would think the only rational reaction to the richest people in it, who struggle the least, and who have fossilised that unfair economy around themselves so well that you can’t change it without a war, would be a sort of weary hatred.

But a royal house is spun of witchcraft, between many mirrors. People are their kingdoms—we say we’re Theban or Athenian or Spartan before we say anything else about ourselves—and the crown stands for the kingdom. Put some undeserving autocrat in charge who abuses people and loses all their battles, and everyone will resent it not just because their lives are harder, but because crowns are like battle standards: people care when they fall in the mud. In one flat way they are just silver and cloth: it doesn’t matter. Only people aren’t seeing silver or cloth. They’re seeing the kingdom, which is a reflection of who they are. The function of a queen is not just to rule. It’s to arrange the illusionary architecture of the royal house between those mirrors in the hearts of its citizens into the strongest structure she can, because though you can’t touch it, it is real: it’s like three . Arrange it beautifully and gloriously and magically enough, and your city in the ordinary world can sit in a dust bowl slowly starving ... but you won’t get weary hate for the crown. You’ll get adoration.

The prophecy had tilted people’s heart-mirrors at precise angles, and now the royal house was glittering.

I looked at Pentheus, full of dread, because it was a good few notches too fucking glittering, and he looked nervous too, but the Guards were already seeing us inside.

Half a regiment of beautifully dressed slaves took me into a set of chambers big enough to house five families, with a ludicrous fountain full of nymph marvels in the middle of the floor, and I hunted around for someone who might be able to say what was going to happen now, but everyone like the Chamberlain must have been busy with the grain.

“Can someone please tell us what’s going on?” Pentheus said to the room generally.

Everyone laughed. That seemed like a good sign, depending on what they thought of us.

The Queen, someone explained in the severe way that said we would know this already if we hadn’t absconded earlier, was calling the court together for a feast: a celebration of the betrothal and the success of the grain deal, and I wasn’t allowed to go in armour.

I wondered if the Queen had seen what had happened in the courtyard just now, and how she was feeling about Apollo’s arrangement of the mirrors.

“I need to see the Queen,” I said.

“She’s coming,” someone said. “Stand still.”

I couldn’t tell if that was good.

There was a bath with rose water. Then gold combs with fine gold chains sank through the base of my long army braid, so heavy that I had to hold my head exactly straight or it was uncomfortable. Gold clamped round my neck, like a very cynical, beautiful version of a slave’s collar. More gold all the way up my arm, made nearly like mail but not. Everything else in black and red, the colours of the House of Kadmus.

The thought that Helios might have lied to me thundered round inside my head like a charioteer with a bronze whip.

He had told me lies to make life easier, about foreigners having gills, and every time I’d asked him where he got me, he made up something new. But this—this was like saying that just because someone liked having bunches of peonies in the house, he must have run away to tend the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Tiresias had mistaken me for Helios. Pentheus thought we looked enough alike that he had added up the prophecy that way straightaway.

I had thought the courtyard didn’t look like I remembered. And Pentheus was right: nobody remembers coherent sets of events that happened when they were four. I remembered because Helios had told it all to me. Maybe I remembered only what he had told me. It felt real, but what did real feel like? As vivid and clear as I had it—or wouldn’t it feel vaguer, rougher, wouldn’t there be bits I couldn’t catch so well now, wouldn’t it be contextless flashes, like the rest of my childhood?

It took me a second to notice that all the slaves were kneeling.

The Queen was in the doorway. I knelt too. She came and pulled me up.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked towards the silver tray of beautiful things the kitchens had sent.

“Er—yes, but if I leave it then the slaves can have it,” I said, distracted, and feeling like my cogs were in the wrong alignment for simple questions.

“Are you all right?” she said, more carefully.

“I’m ...” It was no good. “There is a priest at Apollo with the same scar and the same name as me, with a dagger from Helios. Pentheus—thinks Helios swapped us years ago. I think maybe all those people outside think that too. Do you?”

“Do you?”

“No! He was a tricky fucker but he didn’t lie to me for twenty years!”

She smiled with the same joyful gleam she’d had on the roof during the riot, and I stayed very, very still, because for the first time now, I could see just how finely calibrated a game she was playing. Dionysus was right: the best thing she could do for the safety of the crown was make everybody think the lost prince was already wearing it . But if I thought I was him—then I had a legal obligation to murder her because she had killed my mother, and I was infamous for paying my blood debts. I was the psychopath who had waited nine years to hurl a Trojan princess off a balcony and burn down her palace. The Queen was balancing between the benefit of everyone else thinking I was the prince, and the risk of tipping me into believing it.

And she was enjoying every pace of it, because this was her battlefield, and nobody else was as good as her.

“No,” she said. “Me neither. He would never have done that to you. Yes, there’s a priest at the temple who he sponsored, but he sponsored hundreds of children, he was a prince. I paid the temple to make that prophecy. It solves our god problem, see? I can hum and say the meaning is obscure, everybody else will put it together and feel clever, they’ll rally behind you; meanwhile, we both know it’s not you, we all win, and Thebes survives. Hurrah. Do people say hurrah?” she added pensively.

“Only Athenians say hurrah,” I said weakly.

Even if she had bronze-clad evidence that I was the prince—she wouldn’t tell me. That would be idiotic. Of course she was going to say ...

I couldn’t hold onto all of it properly any more. I couldn’t do what Dionysus did, and lean back and see it all from far enough away that he could see what was coming. I was jammed right up close to it, and there was nothing left to do except decide if she was doing it all for a good reason or not.

“Phaidros,” she said. “Lovely knight ... if I genuinely thought you were the prince, you’d be dead. I loved Helios, I love that you talk like he does and that you even look a bit like him, but that wouldn’t stop me. I think—you know that.”

Or you realized I was harmless as long as I didn’t know, and you kept me in reserve for a crisis. Like Pentheus vanishing, or a god falling ...

Did I really look like Helios? I was actually the least qualified person to know. I didn’t have a mirror, only rich idiots in Persia had real mirrors. I saw myself reflected in armour or water sometimes, but not clearly.

Sometimes you just have to admit you’re in a storm and stop trying to make any difference to where you’re going. The wind is the wind, and Poseidon is mighty.

“I ... gods, I wish you’d said,” I said, and it was a sort of relief to stop trying to strain against that internal rudder and just let myself spin into the current. “Pentheus and I were just having an Olympic crisis about it.”

“I would have told you both if you hadn’t buggered off straightaway,” she said, laughing. “What were you doing?”

“Uh,” I said, half laughing too now. “We went to see a witch for advice.”

“Is this your kinsman witch who thinks that madness is medicine?”

“Yes.”

“Glorious, and what astonishing piece of insanity did he say this time?”

“He told me to get out of Thebes.”

“I’m glad you don’t listen to him,” she said, patting my shoulder. “He sounds fun though. Should we invite him to the wedding and enjoy the inevitable fireworks?” Her eyes lit up. “ What if we introduced him to Tiresias? ”

I hugged her. It was the first time I’d touched her rather than just standing still if she touched me, and she stiffened, so that it was like holding a statue with real clothes on, but then she put her arms around me, holding the back of my head. I shut my eyes against her shoulder, breathing in incense. It was a miniature crack in the edifice of my certainty that Dionysus was going to kill me soon, but he had let me go, and now I could see a tiny snatch of a future beyond next week. It was family, and there was someone I belonged to. I shouldn’t look, it was dangerous to look, but ...

“Phaidros.” She sounded shocked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, lady. I’m just—I didn’t think I’d ever have a family again.”

She drew her thumbs under my eyelashes. She was smiling, or almost, caught between that and something much sadder, the same as me. “Me neither.”

I held her wrists. She didn’t wear bracelets, just little sword-slash marks up her arms from garrison training when she was young. Even though I was happy, something deep down in me locked up, because we were close enough for her to kiss me and I didn’t want her to, really powerfully, involuntarily didn’t want her to, because I was still getting used to the memory of Dionysus doing it, trying to cradle it close and hold it for later, and if she did, one would blur into the other, and somehow that would be worse than being shipwrecked.

She didn’t, and only bumped our heads together.

I’d never been more grateful for anything. “Shall we go?” she asked with a carefulness that took me off guard, one that felt like she wasn’t just talking about whether to leave the room. I almost said that the way this worked was that she decided and then I followed, but I stopped, because she was watching me in a way that made me realize I was wrong. That wasn’t right, not any more. She would decide, and then, mindful of the terrible gravity of the crown, she would ask me if I was going to follow, instead of wrenching me into orbit.

It was like when Dionysus lifted me up at the dance. She was much stronger and greater than me, but courteous. It was frightening and safe at the same time.

“Yes.”

Around us, the slaves were smiling, and not even trying to hide that they were. It wasn’t until I looked beyond them I realized Pentheus had been waiting in the doorway, looking awkwardly at the floor. He was freshly dressed in feast clothes too—he must have gone and come back again in the time it had taken them to dress me. Just in time to contemplate the full bleakness of his mother remarrying and starting again while he was sent away.

“Didn’t see you,” I said to him, holding my arm out, in case that would help.

He didn’t come. “Did you just say Dionysus is your kinsman?” he asked.

It was well to the side of what I’d expected him to say, but maybe he was grasping at the nearest thing that wasn’t to do with the betrothal . “Yes,” I said, not knowing how to explain. “He was my guest a long time ago.”

“But—I thought he only recently came to Thebes?”

“I wrote to him,” I said, which was kind of true. “I invited him.”

When I blinked, I saw Dionysus in the maze again, and how exhausted he had looked. Not angry. That was what made it horrible.

I needed to go back. I needed to apologise. I needed to get on my knees like I should have done all along.

After the feast.

Pentheus stared at me with raw pain across his face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I—nothing,” he said, but he turned inward and glassy, and strange. He turned away and walked ahead of us.

I looked helplessly at the Queen. I taught people his age all the time, and usually they were clay tablets: all their unhappinesses were easy to read, and easy to sweep smooth and write over. Pentheus’s was there too, but it was another language.

She shook her head once, no wiser.

I didn’t have any more time to think about it, because one of the Queen’s secretaries ran in. Ran , even though none of them ever moved at a pace more urgent than an elegant glide, and not the earth shaking nor a god falling would make them sign their beads at anything other than a dead ninety-degree angle.

“Lady! Lady,” he gasped, and he was laughing. I’d never seen any of her secretaries laugh. “Lady, it’s the knights, you have to come and see—”

“What’s happened now? If we need to summon the Sown mothers again—”

“No! They’re coming in from Ares and Hermes, they’re all—they’re cured !”

She looked at me with the same wariness of good news that filled me up then too, and then we both started after the secretary, joining a quickening stream of people all going the same way. Pentheus let himself be left behind and ignored me when I put my hand back for him.

Around the pillars, the ivy was dying.

When we poured through to the Knights’ Court, along with an interested comet tail of Egyptians soldiers and people who had come for grain, it was already crowded. There were sudden overjoyed yells when wards recognised commanders who had vanished into Ares days ago, laughing, little knots of people thunking together, crying. I saw Polydorus’s commander, looking sunburned and worse for wear but very, very sane, scoop him right off his feet and spin him around. Even the Guards were looking happy.

I stared over everyone, at the sky, waiting for something else, something as terrible as the howling madness at the stadium or a star hurtling right at us, but the sky was only the sky.

It smashed into me very, very slowly. Whatever minds have instead of bones, I could feel mine splintering.

Dionysus was gone.

No. He couldn’t be.

What?

That wasn’t how any of this worked. A god didn’t scream down from the heavens for revenge and then just leave when you told him to.

Where are you, where are you, where are you?

“Phaidros,” Pentheus said beside me, as though I’d missed something urgent.

People had noticed us where we were standing at the top of the steps in our red and black and gold. A strange quiet was falling. It wasn’t until people started to kneel that I understood what was happening.

None of them knew about Dionysus. All they knew was that the Oracle had made a prophecy that made me sound like the lost prince, and now, the hour a crown was going on my head, the madness was gone.

The Queen was looking at me with a reserve that had not been there earlier when she told me it was just a trick. She didn’t have her war-joy glow. She was thinking. Really thinking. I saw her clockwork click around to the only workable solution, for now. She took my hand and lifted it over my head.

“Sown: your king!”

The roar was like being deaf again—I could hear a portcullis of noise and not hear anything in it. It was cheering, but not the normal kind. There wasn’t any ceremony or any duty, or courtesy—it was a visceral relief, and belief, and disbelief.

“What have you done?” the Queen said close to me, sounding strange.

“Nothing!”

“Nothing with your witch.”

“He isn’t my witch, he’s left.” I sounded as though somebody had tried to hang me, and for a few seconds my neck had taken my whole weight, but the rope had snapped.

She gave me a sceptical look, one that was reassessing me, clicking through possibilities and risks, and calculating whether or not she had just made an enormous mistake.

I felt sick.

The feast had been an occasion anyway, and the Palace was filled with bright banners, but now it was about two hundred people bigger than we had planned, and no one cared; it was a laughing chaos and I’d never seen anything like it inside the Kadmeia. Usually, the court was an austere place. Sown nobility dressed well but plainly. Anything too extravagant was usually out, automatically, because the first thing anyone would say was, What are you doing, you look like an Athenian . But for some very special occasions—the Festival of Athena, coronations, big weddings—there was a certain willingness to let the usual rules slide. There were people here tonight who I’d never seen out of legion uniform wearing bright silk that must have come in all the way from Hattusa, and gold-embroidered cloth, and those gems from India that look like they’re on fire on the inside. Lord Halys had gone the whole way; he was wearing trousers, like a Persian dandy. I had to give him some credit. I’d have died of shame. Maybe they were ironic trousers. Apophis, all in gold, looked like a god.

All I could do was sit next to the Queen and stare into the middle distance. Nobody seemed to think it was unusual. Bridegrooms are supposed to be nervous, and probably people thought I was just trying to get used to the enormity of what had just happened to me. Scum of the earth in the garrison last week, king now. King consort —though that was not what people were saying. They were saying king.

On the Queen’s other side, Pentheus looked like I felt, and I didn’t blame him. He was seeing his future vanish. If the Queen had my child now, his claim was gone. He was going to Egypt. In twenty years, if there was a choice between some half-forgotten dilettante from a mansion in Memphis and a true-born Sown knight raised in the garrison—as all younger royal children were—who people thought was the grandchild of a god, then it was pretty clear who the Assembly would back.

People were coming up to talk to us. I must have said things and smiled and deferred to the Queen, but it all hazed together and the second each person was gone, I couldn’t remember anything. All I could hear was what the Queen wasn’t saying. What if the madness really was a curse that lifted once we gave him the crown? What if he gets rid of me? He could. The garrison will do anything he says now.

Horribly, it was clear that a lot of other people were thinking that too.

For me, power had always been fixed. You obeyed the Queen, and you obeyed the general, and your commander. That was the order of the world, and the only way it could go if you didn’t want it all to collapse into screaming chaos like Pylos. I’d never seen what it looked like when the foundations of power shifted.

I’d never really understood before that this was all it was: people deciding whose orders to follow. The only real reason everyone obeyed one queen or another was that it would be too difficult not to. But when it wasn’t difficult ...

The Queen could see it too.

If I didn’t do something very fucking rapidly, I was going to be dead by tomorrow morning.

For a little while, I tried to decide if I cared. Dionysus was gone. I’d really expected to explode some time around now. I’d planned on it for so long now that the idea of living beyond that was a bit dismaying.

Along from me, Pentheus was staring unseeing into a cup of wine. His eyelashes were too dark. He wasn’t crying, but he was right on the edge of it, and tipping. On a ship, to gather in the sails when a storm is coming, you have to climb up the rig and edge along the top yard, which is about thirty feet off the deck. That’s hard enough in a strong wind. But it’s worse when you get to the sail. There’s a footrope under the yardarm, looped along, slack, utterly fucking treacherous, especially with five people moving along it, as they have to. If you’re slightly the wrong height—slightly too tall—then you can’t hold the yard very well as you go. It’s awkwardly at hip height, and in order to tie the knots to bind up the sails, you have to lean right forward, curling over it, so that your balance tips too far forward and you feel like you’re going to fall, and this always happens in dangerously strong wind, because that’s the only time you need to urgently take in sail. One wrong twitch of the rudder and you fall. More than once, Helios had clamped one hand onto the back of my collar at exactly the right second.

Nobody was holding Pentheus’s collar.

“Lady, can I ask for a wedding gift?” I said.

“If I can give it,” the Queen said slowly.

“Don’t send Pentheus to Egypt. Send me.”

“What?”

“This, all this, whatever just happened—it makes me a danger to the crown. I don’t want to be. I’d rather die. Maybe you’ll decide I should do that. But Apophis wants a royal hostage and now you have a choice of two. One, the heir. Two, some fucking idiot from the garrison who’s only worth anything because of a prophecy and a well-timed—” I couldn’t call it a miracle in front of her. “A well-timed easing of mass hysteria. Send me away, where I can’t do any damage.”

She didn’t say anything at first, but an invisible chisel was marking a frown deeper and deeper between her eyebrows. “Phaidros, you’re volunteering for exile.”

“No, I’m volunteering to be what buys you grain for the next decade. This is the only efficient solution, lady. I think Apophis will take me if I ask him to.”

She watched me for a long time. “This is the wedding gift you request, knight?”

“It is, lady.”

“Then ... speak to Apophis.” She blew her breath out slowly. “You are a marvel knight.”

“Duty is honour,” I said.

My hair was fastened up with some complicated gold things, and when she touched the back of my head, her signet ring clinked.

“Can I tell Pentheus?” I asked, still very quiet.

Beyond her, Pentheus was still looking his wine. He had no colour, and now, I thought he was sweating; he looked ill. I went round to his chair. He flinched when I put my hand on the back of it.

“I need to tell you something,” I began.

He stood up suddenly. “Everyone, I have something to say on the occasion of my mother’s betrothal.”

The long table went quiet.

“I’ve tried to keep my silence, for the good of the kingdom,” Pentheus said. He wasn’t holding back the strength of his own voice any more. He was talking like he had in the maze with Dionysus; like I did, I realized suddenly, pulling the sound from low in his chest to give it the strength to carry over a room, or a training yard. “But I can’t. I vanished because I was kidnapped and drugged, and brought back to the Palace when the benefit would be greatest for the man who took me.”

I stood back from his chair. Someone had spilled some wine and a little of it soaked dark into the hem of my cloak.

“I didn’t understand why he did it, but today at the Temple of Apollo, we were given the answer. The Oracle said to the Queen, In marrying this man, you both condemn yourself to and save yourself from prophecy of the boy who should have been king. I don’t think the meaning could be clearer. Twenty-five years ago Princess Semele’s son vanished from the Palace during the lightning strike. Twenty-five years ago, my uncle Helios joined a new legion with a child of unknown origin, and now, everyone who might have known who he was is dead. And then in a time of crisis, I was taken, and given back only once my return would assure my captor great rewards from my mother. The oracle means that Phaidros is the lost prince. And it was Phaidros who stole me, and Phaidros who brought me back.”

Someone dropped a spoon. The little clang sounded like an explosion.

“No,” I said. “What? Pentheus—”

“No,” Pentheus said doggedly to his mother. “They did this together. Phaidros and his fucking witch. He wants to be king and when I asked him for help he saw an opportunity, and handed me over to the witch to be enchanted out of my mind. He just said they’ve known each other for years. It was a trick.” His voice sounded like his throat had locked. With a levee-breaking rush, I realized he wasn’t lying: he thought he was telling the truth. I’d told him I knew Dionysus, and he’d thought that meant we had planned it together. “The witch took me and together they worked out how best to put Phaidros on the throne.”

The silence was dead, like the entire room had taken an opium overdose. I looked at the Queen, because there was nothing I could say. Either she believed Pentheus or she believed me: there was no evidence to give her. Or—no. It wasn’t even about who she believed. It was about choosing who was least dangerous now. Everyone else watched her too.

The Queen stood up slowly. She looked utterly weary of the whole thing, and with a sort of fever flash, it went across my mind that this was how brilliant monarchs were pulled down. Bad luck and people reacting just a few minutes too soon, and witches trying to protect their friends, and king consorts who couldn’t find a way to make an angry, frightened prince less angry and frightened.

“Arrest him,” she said to the Guards, about me. “And find the witch.”

As she said it, she watched Pentheus, and this time, I recognised what she was doing. Kicking his mooring lines. She was seeing just how sure he was, waiting for him to say, no, stop.

Pentheus only stared straight back at her.

For the first time, I understood what Dionysus had been trying to tell me all along. I’d seen what happened in the stadium when he smashed everyone’s clockwork and all that was left was the wild thing at the heart of a human, but this was what happened when the wild died, and all that was left was the clockwork. It looked different—the opposite, absolute blank calm, oceans from the madness of the knights—but it was horrible in equal measure. I felt like I was seeing someone who had been mutilated past all repair.

The Queen lifted her eyebrow, but that was all. She didn’t change the order, and only nodded at the Guards. It was fractional, but I just caught it: she looked approving. She wanted Pentheus to be ruthless.

Ruthless is Sown.