Page 34 of The Hymn to Dionysus
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Traditionally, kings and queens have to be healthy and whole in order to serve, because they’re reflections of their kingdom: if the king is sick, the superstition is that the kingdom will soon follow. It’s a stupid law. There are generals with one leg or one eye, or with the falling sickness, and I always preferred them, because someone who’s been wounded or who’s grown up struggling knows a lot better than some hale brash giant what it’s like to be scared. But, it was the law. So, the traditional way to rule someone out of the kingship is to blind him, castrate him, and shove him on a galley to be a slave at the oar until he dies, probably about three days later. It’s bad luck to execute a king. I don’t know why they think it’s less bad to do the other thing, but there you are.
I had a cell to myself. It was a dark oven. I could stand on tiptoe and see, just, through the long narrow window into the market square, where slaves were picking up empty grain sacks and people were out in the sunset with freshly baked bread and jugs of wine, and the jubilant ease of people who weren’t going to starve any more. Knights newly reunited sat out on the steps together, talking about what the madness had been like. And I could hear the heralds everywhere, yelling that at dawn, Phaidros Heliades was going to be blinded and sent to serve at the oar for high treason.
I’d never been this afraid before. It wasn’t like the fizzy energy you get before a battle, the one where you have to bounce up and down and make unfunny jokes. It wasn’t like anything. I would have been less scared of being straightforwardly executed, but this was dread stacked on dread.
Be Persephone. Always negotiate. See Death coming, see him leaning against the door, and say, aha, you’re coming with me , thank you very much. Only there was no negotiating any more. The Guards had been told not to come even within shouting distance of me. The whole prison was silent. The Queen knew all about Be Persephone.
The ground juddered; Poseidon smashing his fist into it from far away. I put my head against the wall, hoping I could die in an earthquake before they got the knives out.
A few minutes after the little earthquake, some people came out of the Palace, grumbling about old ceilings. When another tremor came, this one big enough to make the ground look like it was breathing, a lot more people arrived, carrying lamps, still—gods, it felt like a thousand years ago—in their feast clothes, some with cups and plates. It still wasn’t enough to really alarm anybody. Achaea is earthquake country. I’d been getting used to it since I came back to Thebes. I watched, grateful to have some people to look at. It was a good distraction from how horribly fucking alive I felt, now I was on my way to dying.
Not like invigorated. Just—healthy. All my joints were working strong and smooth, the stab wound in my shoulder was healing wonderfully. I was working like I was supposed to, I was the strongest I could be and probably had ever been. Like Helios, laughing that day on the line, before—before.
I wasn’t even going to get that kind of death. What was going to happen in the morning was unsayable. Some things are so poisonous than even the names are poison, and anyone who understands the word ends up sick just from the knowing of it.
There was a knot of Guards, escorting Pentheus.
“The Palace has stood a thousand years, I think it can stand another few hours,” he was saying tiredly.
There was a stony but nonetheless concerned shifting under the purple cloaks.
“When the god goes before the Queen, the High City shall fall?” he guessed, quite gently.
He sounded like he had grown up since I’d last seen him an hour ago. The last of his childhood was gone. He had stood up and fought, and now he knew how strong he was ... he was being careful of other people.
“There’s no god here. As my mother said, there was a witch with some poisoned wine and some tricks, and an ambitious knight. It’s just an earthquake.”
“Pentheus,” I said.
The Guards tightened and looked like they wanted to stop him going near any walls, but he waved them off.
“Phaidros.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I didn’t take you.”
He came closer to the bars, but not very. The torchlight slung gold over him. He looked older, and harder. “What’s more likely? That I spoke to a witch, who knew a knight with a very convincing claim to being the lost prince, and who just—didn’t mention it? And then that knight just stumbled over me, and in the line of his duty, because he’s just that fucking dedicated to his vows, happened to take me back at the opportune moment?”
“Pentheus—”
“Or,” he said over me, “I spoke to a witch who knew a knight with a claim, and he said, I have an idea . You both hid me. You took advantage of the madness and the drought. He kept me drugged in the maze. He poisoned the wine at the stadium. You brought me back when you were certain the Queen would reward you as she did. You tell me, Phaidros. What would you believe?”
“You know if you’d waited another quarter of an hour, it would have been me going to Egypt and not you?”
“What?”
“That’s what I was talking to the Queen about. She had agreed. You were to stay in Thebes.” What was so fucking aggravating here was that there was no objective obstacle. There was no god any more, there was no army at the gates, nothing clear and clean to fight against. It was just politics, and a broken boy, and a piece of flamboyantly terrible timing. If someone had put all this in a report about some other kingdom and told it to me, I’d have said, Don’t be so stupid, no group of thinking humans can misunderstand each other that badly, go back and find out what really happened . “Sometimes people aren’t out to screw you over.”
He looked at me like I’d slapped him, but then he shut that down and half laughed. “You know there’s a story doing the rounds at the moment? It’s new, it’s everywhere, you’ll have heard it. It’s about a prince whose father went away to the wars when he was a baby, and his mother ruled for a long time alone—but now the wars are over, and still no king has returned, suitors are closing in to marry the Queen and take over the kingdom. You’ve heard it?”
“No,” I said.
“Her suitors—lords from all the kingdoms all around—make everyone’s life hell. They take and take, they all assume the kingdom is theirs. She’s holding them off, but really it’s the prince’s responsibility to do something, but he’s too young to know what to do and he thinks he’s going to be killed. Yes?”
“He sounds like a useless little prick, doesn’t he,” I said flatly. I didn’t like monologues even when the setting was a nice campfire on the shore.
“And then ... his father comes home, and says, it’s all right, I’ve got you now. Leave it to me. The boy doesn’t believe him, because there are dozens of suitors and they’re all pigs. But then his father kills them all. He just walks through the Palace with a longbow, like Apollo. And after that, the king and the queen and the prince are a family again. Nice, right?”
I waited, though I did wonder what the fuck kind of queen wouldn’t have just poisoned them all by then. I suspected an Athenian story.
“I hate that story,” he said flat and hard. “It’s fantasy. Fathers don’t come for you when you need them. Fathers are wolves who only don’t hurt you for as long as you aren’t inconvenient.” He inclined his head. “So don’t try to tell me you came to save me.”
Dionysus had told me this would happen. Take him back now, and he’ll become merciless, because nobody ever showed him any mercy.
I had to thump my fist against the bars, very slowly. I’d never met a single soul who got in his own way so much. “Gods, Pentheus. Even if there was a father who adored you trying to get into the Palace, even if he was knocking down the gate and offering to kill anyone who had ever wronged you, you wouldn’t fucking hear him for crying that no one is coming.”
Horrible pain went over his face. He thought I was saying it just to hurt him. “I hope the knife is blunt,” he told me, with a knot in his voice.
Rancid ghost pain shot right through me.
You can know someone turned out bad because nobody loved them enough, and you can understand, and empathise—and you can still hope that a building falls on them.
Obligingly, the ground shivered again. One of the Guards came to guide him away from the building, out into the open again. He didn’t look back. I thunked my head against the bars.
The tremors had disturbed some bats. Now, they were chittering right through the empty prison, just like they’d gone through the maze when Pentheus stole me. A couple even got through the bars on the door and ricocheted around the cell. One crashed into me. I had to pick it up and edge it outside through the window bars. It didn’t try to bite me; it just sat in my hands, looking strangely happy, and when I put it outside, it just sat there too, wings folded and fur fluffed up. It made a little squeaking noise so it could see me, and I had an odd feeling that I was getting a good-natured bat survey. Then it flapped away.
The ground heaved, and I fell over. There was a collective yell from the courtyard as everyone else did too.
I pulled myself upright by the window bars; snatched my hands back, because they felt wrong; then stopped.
Ivy was forcing its way up through the flagstones outside, vivid and green and impossible. I had to stand there with my hands still out, a few inches off the bars. I could see the ivy growing.
Terrible, terrible hope swelled up inside the chambers of my heart, enough to hurt.
A stream of purple cloaks flowed down the steps from the throne room, surrounding the Queen. They Guards had their shields raised overhead, covered in dust.
Another tremor, and the flagstones rippled. I swayed with the quake, riding it, and feeling crazily as though I wasn’t really there: I was just watching or dreaming, and my pulse was going where are you where are you where are you.
“Let’s evacuate the Palace,” the Queen called. She sounded calm, like she always did if things were getting dangerous. “Everyone out, into the courtyards. Make sure the fires are out in the kitchens. No lamps left burning inside. Where’s Pentheus?” It was hard to see by the torchlight and the confusion of people hurrying away from the buildings.
“Here,” Pentheus said. “I’ve got Apophis and Lord Halys too.”
I only saw him then because I was looking for him.
Dionysus was sitting on the edge of the great fountain of Apollo. He had been all along. He was wearing witch black, but unveiled, still as a tomb. Ivy and jasmine had exploded over the Apollo marvel already, the shape of it lost under the density of the vines. No one had noticed. He was there and not there.
“What about Phaidros?” Pentheus asked the Queen.
They both looked towards the cells. They could see me. There was a torch above the barred window.
“Leave him. It’s up to the gods.”
Dionysus stood up. Nobody seemed to see him cross the courtyard. People got out of his way, though—slaves, Guards, knights, right out of it, leaving empty space around him, as though they did know on some level that something was there. A few puzzled looks fell onto the ground where, in his wake, flowers were blooming up through the cracked flagstones. Even though they couldn’t really see him, even though he was only there like three is there in three apples, the Guards looked dazed. One of them started to spin.
Sing, sing to the lord of the dance ...
“What’s happening?” Pentheus snapped suddenly. He wrenched a coil of ivy out of a crack in the ground.
“Shouldn’t have lied, should you,” Dionysus said in passing, and somehow I heard it even though he was still fully forty feet away.
Pentheus heard it too and spun around, but Dionysus was already gone, and all around them, the Guards were going mad, turning into the dance, singing. So were other people. Looking hypnotised, a Guard handed Dionysus the prison keys.
The Queen had seen. She stood in his way. “Stop. Who are you?”
“I’m the one who took your son. He asked me to. He asked to forget everything, so that’s what I did.”
“ Why ?”
I thought he would explain, because she was the Queen, and even gods listen to kings and queens. I thought he would tell her about how he had been ancient before Zeus was even thought of, and how these forests had been his long before Kadmus and the dragon, and maybe even threaten her, to try and make her remember the old ways of the Hunt before it was too late. In the bards’ stories, he would have. They do a thing called an aristea , in stories—it’s where the two people who are at odds but equally matched meet. It’s always long. They always talk to each other. It’s always clear that neither of them are wrong or right: it’s just that circumstances have forced them to fight. One always dies heroically; usually, the other one goes mad. It’s always huge, and sad, and lovely.
He didn’t. He didn’t care about her. He had seen the passing of a hundred queens.
He just switched her off.
Her and everyone else. They all just fell. Everyone in the courtyard, every Guard and slave, the Queen, Pentheus ... they all collapsed. I stared. He couldn’t have just killed them. Surely he hadn’t ...
He knelt down outside the window and gave the keys to me.
“Are they dead?” I rasped.
“Oh, fuck off, Phaidros, of course they’re not fucking dead, they’re asleep,” he said, his voice smoking crossly. “Meet me round the other way.”
I was shaking nearly too much to get the keys into the lock. Just as the lock gave, the ground bucked and I staggered against the wall, half running and half falling into the corridor.
I knew he was coming before I saw him, because the wooden door into the Guards’ common room was splitting, the dryad inside stretching, growing, turning back into an oak tree. She was already as tall as the room, branches creaking across the ceiling. Acorns rained across the floor. Something in my chest tied itself into one of those monkey’s fist knots we had used to put on the end of heaving lines to give them more weight, because what had he come back for, after what I’d said to him?
Then there he was. I thumped into him and thought, There, that’s fine, set me on fire now , but he didn’t. He crossed his arms over my back, both hands clenched over my shoulders. He curled forward over me, and around us, all the doors turned back into trees, the branches shielding us both, locking together, battening out the torchlight and the falling chunks of stone from the ceiling. We would never have been fast enough if we had tried to run anyway, but I wasn’t even sure I could have. I was crying, not just crying, a horrible wracking kind of sobbing, and I couldn’t stop, because it was raw relief. I’d never cried like that before. No galley. No hot irons, no knife. All the horror was tearing its way out of me and all I could do was grip onto him like he was jetsam after a wreck.
The trees had made us a shield above, but the walls were falling now. The torchlight was gone and the dark and the dust plumed everywhere. Something slammed into the locked-together branches over our heads and the wood shrieked. We both fell onto our knees at the same time, heads down against the roaring, furious masonry.
When the noise stopped, everything seemed completely silent, though I knew it couldn’t be. There was light, though: moonlight, very bright, and it was only in stages that it occurred to me that I shouldn’t have been able to see that, because we were supposed to be inside. There was no more inside. I coughed as the dust got into my lungs, and put my hands down. The floor, which had been stone before, was soft with moss. Dionysus straightened up slowly. Where he’d been holding my shoulders, and I’d been holding his arms, there were clean handprints; otherwise both of us were covered in dust. He coughed too and brushed me off, or pretended to; he was seeing if I was hurt. I wasn’t.
There was movement beside us. There were horses running past, some still saddled. They must have escaped from the stables, and now they were getting away from the worst of the damage, just like they had years ago when the lightning came. Dionysus put his hand out to one of them, a savage battle charger I’d seen kill Trojan knights entirely by himself, but the stallion stopped and leaned down to nose at us both, a Horse hello.
I gripped the bridle and swung into the saddle. Dionysus climbed up behind me, tall enough to see past my shoulder. The horse cantered away, down to the lower city, through the roads filling with worried people looking up at the ruins of the Kadmeia, speculating, wondering about the ivy growing anew up the houses, the orange trees bursting to life, the pomegranates falling in the gutters, and not seeing us.