Page 4 of The Hymn to Dionysus
3
The next time I met Dionysus was at sea.
It was the year when I went from being one of the stars of the legion to being mud on people’s boots.
I fought on the front line beside Helios for the first time when I was nineteen. I’d been chafing for years to do it, because nineteen is elderly to join the line for the first time—almost everyone else I knew had gone at sixteen, but all through my teens I was little for my age, and I didn’t grow until late. I’d been worried that I never would, but then up I went, and in one summer I was suddenly taller than Helios.
I don’t know how knights do it where you’re from, but I’d be willing to bet it’s similar to us, because it works.
We build the front three lines, at the very least, out of pairs of sworn knights. To swear your oath to another knight is a kind of marriage vow: it is as binding, and as deep. We do this not just because each partner would die to save the other one, but because each one of us would die in order not to embarrass the other. Shame is a big driving force. If I screwed up, it would be Helios who caught it from the older knights.
Theban lines famously do not break, and it’s because of that battle order. The Spartans do it the same way, and really, so does anyone else relying on heavy infantry. I don’t often make predictions for the future, Dionysus being a walking exercise in how it can all go splat when you least expect it, but even knowing him, I’ll say very comfortably that the most effective legions will still run that system in a thousand years.
As I say, nineteen was old and some of the officers had thought I would never make it to the vanguard, but they changed their minds when I brought down a chariot, horses and all. I was strong and fast and vicious, with everything to prove after years of waiting, and I was in love with Helios in exactly the insane, all-consuming way the legion prefers.
Now, when I talk to people who served for other nations, they seem to have the same sense that Theban knights are sort of dangerously mad, and maybe our witches give us drugs to make us unafraid of charging cavalry, and it’s hard to explain that when your family is there on the line, not waiting at home, the best, most exciting thing you can be allowed to do is join the shield wall. I’d never been so happy as I was that day on the line with my shield covering Helios’s right side, and I don’t remember being scared. There was nothing to be scared of, except dishonouring him. The best moments of my whole life were on that line. Under our black banners, with my shield locked against his, as the drums rolled and the legion sang the hymn to Ares, a beautiful battle anthem to bring down the sky, never mind Trojan chariots ... I’d never been so happy.
It was the first year of the long siege, a gorgeous spring, when the fighting was still fierce and none of us was hopeless yet. For a few months, I was Wonder Phaidros, which had the unfortunate side effect of making me into an arrogant prick.
Then one day, I took it too far.
We were marching that day against cavalry, and we were all happy and fizzy, because that meant that if we were quick, we’d get some horses off the Trojan knights. Horses are worth a fortune in Achaea. Looking back, I can’t quite believe that I did what I did just because I wanted a nice horse, but people do stupid things for stupid reasons, and that was mine. Or—well. It wasn’t that I wanted a horse. I wanted the honour. I wanted to see Helios light up with pride and hit me over the head for being a suicidal moron, and then to hold onto me too tight like he did when he’d just seen me nearly die. That made me feel immortal.
We don’t ever break the line.
But there was an incredible black charger, carrying a woman in silver armour. I’d seen her before, often: none of us knew what her real name was, her Hatti one, but we called her Andromache, which means “fighter of warriors.” I thought I could throw her, get the horse, and be back in formation very quickly. That isn’t what happened, of course. She was older than me, a seasoned soldier, and she did what any seasoned soldier would. When I broke ranks, she ignored me, trusting her horse to kick me down, and aimed an arrow straight past me, then another—she was so fast that I thought maybe Artemis was with her—and another, and she killed three knights before the people on either side could close the shield wall.
That’s how Helios died.
So when we set sail to take our cargo of silver and slaves to Egypt a few weeks later, nobody was talking to me, except sometimes to recommend that I kill myself.
They couldn’t kill me, because I was the helmsman, which is a difficult job but one I’d always been good at. I might have been an idiot, but I had a good memory for things I saw, whether that was the stars, or the shape of the shallows, or the wrecking shores. Everyone else who definitely wouldn’t crash the ship was dead. Those three arrows from the Trojan general had only been the start of what became a total rout.
“If this ship so much as judders,” the captain told me mildly, “I will chain you to an oar with the slaves.”
Everyone was waiting for me to screw it up. I was too, because you need to be able to go into a calm kind of trance to handle a ship well, and I couldn’t reach it. After seven days at sea, I was shocked that I hadn’t wrecked us. We hugged the coast as far as possible, because deep-sea sailing was dangerous and stormy, so it was straightforward enough. Steer away from the shallow bits and all would be well. We put in at night; winter was coming, the seas were turning rough, and I twice saw the wind hurling itself into funnel spirals around a harpy as she raged across the horizon. I felt it tug the keel, though we were twenty miles away. I was dreading the open-sea passage to the Nile.
It was just before we were about to leave the coast and strike out into the deep sea, on a bronze evening when I was looking over the side and thinking that perhaps I should drown myself, when someone saw the boy on the shore.
The boy was beautiful. We thought he must have been the son of a noble lady or a queen, because he was wearing a purple cloak against the sea wind. He would be a worth a fortune, and so we pulled in to the shale beach to take him.
He didn’t run away. Perhaps he realized he would never run fast enough and he might as well save himself the bother, but it was still eerie to wade out of the sea ready for a fight, only to find him walking out right to us in the tide line, as though he had long since arranged to meet us there.
I was used to snatching people; but he didn’t fight, and so instead it was a strange sort of escort, and it was nearly politely that we took him aboard. There was some debate about where to put him. Usually slaves went down in the hold, but ours was already crowded, and there were some angry men down there who might hurt him just because they could. So we put him by the mast. We put chains on him, which he seemed not to mind. He just settled down, looking intrigued through his eerie blue eyes—people grumbled when they saw, because the Egyptians paid less for blue, it was ugly, but otherwise he was perfect—and we sailed away, the trade wind filling our black sails so well it felt like a gift from Poseidon. Some people thought he must be simple because he was so peaceful. I didn’t think so. When someone is that calm in a crisis, either they don’t know what’s happening, or you don’t.
I thought maybe I knew those eyes, and even that cheerful calm.
I tried to say that maybe we were the ones who didn’t quite see what was happening, but someone smacked me over the head and told me to shut up. The boy smiled at me, like we both knew the punchline of a joke nobody else had got to yet, and held his hands up to show me the manacles as they fell off.
It was strange, having him aboard. Nobody tried to bother him, even when it became obvious he could get out of his chains. There was a ... not-thereness about him. People had a way of walking past him like they’d forgotten him, and because he didn’t talk, it was easy for them to keep forgetting.
I don’t know why it didn’t work on me. Maybe it was because he could see I wasn’t in anyone’s good ledger.
Or maybe he knew me, from all those years ago, and the lightning strike. I still had that spectacular scar over my face from the chariot incident.
Even though he was going to be sold in Memphis, even though it was a stupid idea to latch onto him, I was grateful to have another outcast to sit with. He seemed happy to have me. I brought him food, like I was his host and not his gaoler, so we had all our meals together, and I wrapped him up in my cloak at night; the purple one was long since reassigned. He never spoke, and I wasn’t certain he understood me, but he seemed like he was listening when I told him about why everyone was so angry with me, and what I’d done.
“I think I just lost my mind,” I said, for what must have been the twelfth time. He was doing amazingly well at not shoving me over the side. I was yanking a comb through my hair. After days at sea, we had stopped to take on fresh water that morning, which meant finally getting a proper wash, but when your hair is down to your waist and you live in a salt wind, things are less straightforward on that front than you might like. I couldn’t cut it. The only Theban knights with short hair are slaves who used to be Theban knights.
He said nothing, but it was a sympathetic sort of nothing. I realized he was waiting hopefully to see if I might give him the comb. Feeling like a pig not to have offered it to him first, I touched his shoulders to get him to turn away from me, and ran the comb through his hair myself. He let me, and seemed happy at least. I wished I could tell if he was pretending not to be scared.
The comb went through easily, though his hair was much thicker and heavier than mine. The sea seemed not to notice him any more than the crew did. He had stayed luminously clean the whole time. Or maybe he just seemed clean because he looked so healthy.
The wind was picking up, so I plaited his hair and tucked it under the edge of his cloak, my cloak, which he was holding wrapped close now.
“Warm enough?” I asked. I was, but I’d been up and down all day. He had been sitting still. He didn’t always: sometimes he went below to see the slaves, which usually we would have put a stop to, but since he didn’t speak, it was hard to see the harm in it. To my surprise, nobody had tried to kill him, not even the captured Trojan knights bound for the mines. I wasn’t sure what he did down there, but whenever it was my turn to take their rations down, everyone seemed much calmer than they usually would have.
He nodded, but he didn’t look too warm. I hugged him to make sure and rubbed his arms through the cloak. It’s never hot at sea. Even if the land is baking, you need layers on the water. To my shock, he laughed; a tiny laugh, low and smoky, but a laugh all the same, and he tucked himself sideways against my chest, unafraid as a puppy, and it meant everything.
I kept my arms around him and tried hard not think about Helios. If I didn’t think about him, he wasn’t gone; he was just somewhere else, and it wasn’t my fault, and there had been no pyre on the shore, and one day soon he’d turn up and it would all have been a horrible dream.
I felt awkwardly like I was a little boy playing at being a host and he was being obliging and playing at being my guest, in an imaginary house and not a ship heading for the slave markets on the Nile, with all the old eagerness I really did used to have for those games. Hosting a guest is sacred. Our word for that is xenia —hospitality, but much more profound, a holy bond enforced by Zeus himself. We were a nation of wandering knights, far flung on raids years from home, and although the world would eventually turn, and there would be such things as inns and way-houses, there weren’t then. You asked for xenia at the door of a stranger, because it was that or starve on the road, and it took the most phenomenal leap of trust and courtesy to open that door, see a hulking scarred soldier outside, and say, Yes, come in . But that was the custom. People did it. We did. It was inviolate. Trust someone like that, and it lasts beyond your lifetime. Every so often, Helios had let someone stay with us, and they stayed in touch forever. Their children would stay in touch forever, and if I had children, they would too. We were all kin. I’d never done it in my own right, and part of me was twisted up with shame, because this, what I was doing now, felt like a deformed mockery of the real thing. We wouldn’t stay in touch. It wasn’t sacred. We were going to sell him into a horrible life that would probably be very short indeed.
Unless , said a voice that belonged to Helios, you make it real. It’s real if you decide that it is.
That would mean fighting for him and helping him escape, when the time came. That would mean being his, automatically and forever, in the way Helios had been mine.
I wanted to promise him that straightaway, but I was old enough to know it would be stupid to do that. Fighting for him would mean leaving my unit. However much they all hated me for now, they were still my unit, and duty is honour, and obedience is strength. They were everything I had left. To leave them behind, and the legion, and everything, for a boy I’d known for a few days—that was insane.
And right.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said, before I could think myself out of it. “I’ll look after you. I promise.”
It was such a small thing, but somewhere, behind the world, something went in a great ledger, and something mighty took notice.
What had I done? It was childish and impulsive and stupid was what it was, but—I’d said it now. I was bound for the rest of time. I should have been afraid, because what would happen when I couldn’t keep that vow, but I only felt glad. If I could keep it, if I could just be knight enough, then ... I’d have a family again. All at once I was lost in imagining a life away from the unit, wandering to different places for no reason except to see them, watching him pick up interesting pebbles on the shore, maybe fighting freelance when we needed money. Maybe we’d find a way to get him all the way back home, wherever that was, and maybe his mother would be a fine lady, with a beautiful feasting hall by the sea and room for another person, if I was quiet and dutiful. When he grew up to be lord of that place, I’d be there, serving, like knights are meant to do.
Maybe the boy understood, because he squeezed my hands.
Down in the hold, the slaves were singing. I’d thought none of them spoke the same language, because the Empire marshalled all its allies from across the world to defend the holy city; but they were all singing the same words. It was a weird tune, nothing like our hymns, and I had no idea what it meant, but a deep-down instinct knew it was something unholy. Someone shouted at them to shut up, but they didn’t.
The boy was smiling.
I was off watch for the first half of the night, so I had time to sleep a bit. I hated that I wasn’t having nightmares. The Furies should have been hounding me for every second of every night for all but murdering my only family, but no. I slept fine.
I leaned back against the mast, meaning to shut my eyes, but then I stopped. There was a little shoot growing from a knot in the wood. I frowned at it and pulled, expecting it to come free easily, roots only just lodged into some crack in the grain of the timber, but it didn’t. It was growing out of the wood, not just anchored to it. There were others too, further up, better established, and with a strange, half-horrified and half-repulsed drop, I realized that the wood of the mast was growing. It had been aired and sanded and varnished years ago, but even so—the shoots were making oak leaves. All the way to the top yard.
When I showed the boy, he winked at me.
“The mast,” I tried to say the first mate later, because I thought she was slightly less likely than the captain to chain me up below. “Have you seen?”
I think for her—like all true sailors—the sieges and the raids were just vexing interludes between nice stretches at sea. At sea, it was hard to convince her that there could be anything wrong with the world, and I was nervous trying to do it now.
“What about her?”
“She’s—growing?”
I felt stupid saying it, even though it was clearly happening hardly four feet away from us. When things are odd enough, they don’t go through your mind like normal things do. I think minds have filters; usually, those filters are useful, because they stop you mistaking dreams or mirages or those weird hunger-hallucinations for anything real. But then, truly strange things that are real get stuck in them, and then you can’t look at them properly. Or you can look, but then you look away and your mind says, No, that can’t be right, that’s silly, we must be mistaken —and it keeps doing it, every time.
She glanced over, and I thought she would somehow not see, but she did, and frowned. She pulled at one of the new twigs, just like I had; then she sliced it off with her knife, and then dug in the blade a little, but it was just the grain of the mast underneath.
“This is twenty years old,” she said, as if the mast had personally betrayed her. “She can’t be growing.” Nobody ever said “it” about anything on a ship. Ships are made from oaks, which are dryads, and just because you cut down the tree doesn’t mean the dryad goes away.
“I think it’s him,” I said about the boy, who had been watching, looking like he was having quite a lot of fun.
It made the first mate jump. The boy had been right next to us all this time, but she must not have seen. She looked down at him for a long time, and I could see him getting stuck in her strange-things filter, even though he was as solid as me.
It only made me more sure.
“Please, he’s doing this. You barely see him, that isn’t normal—what if he’s Poseidon, or Athena, or ...?” I couldn’t bring myself to say, Or maybe even the other one, the worst one . We have hedging names for gods, because true names have a lot of power; we call Poseidon Earthshaker, and politely, Aphrodite is the Lady, the Furies are the Kindly Ones. What we call Death is ha-eides: the Unseen.
“We need to let him go—”
“He’s just a bit simple. He’s fine,” she said, and went on her way.
I sat down with the boy again. Whatever was happening to the mast, whether it was him or not, he was still the only person I could sit with who wouldn’t immediately find an excuse to punch me.
After a while, I had to shift about, because ivy had grown round my knee.
When I looked at him, he twisted his nose, looking guilty, as if growing ivy over people were an annoying habit his parents had been trying to school out of him.
“Can I call you Ivy?” I said tentatively. “It’s rude not to call you anything.”
He smiled, maybe because he understood, maybe just because I didn’t mind the ivy. I wondered if there was a way for me to sneak him off the ship and find him passage back the way we had come. I’d need to try. I’d promised him.
The wind was blowing from the north, sending us fast towards the Nile delta, past the Great Isle. In the morning everyone was in a good mood, because the night watch said we had covered a clear forty miles overnight, which was incredible. I only half heard, groggy after a night full of dreams about a great hunt in a forest. I’d never seen any forest, but I felt like I knew this one down to its last root and ant. I could still taste the greenness in the air.
In the night, ivy had grown over my ribs, the way Helios might have put one arm across me. It felt strangely the same, too, even though the boy had his back to me. I unwound the ivy and pulled a blanket over him better. However he was doing it, I didn’t care. All I cared about was that he was warm and, if not happy, then not miserable. If I could just keep him well—then he had a chance. He might not die on the sea passage. If he died, I was going overboard.
Like I did every morning and every night, I looked into my kit bag to touch Helios’s helmet and say a silent hello to the mask. I was losing sight of him, despite that mask. The man was so different to the bronze; and different, of course, to when it had been cast. He had been fifteen then, younger than I was now. My reflection in it looked more like him.
As the sun came up over the water, staining it wine red, the light glinted wrongly along the mast.
It was covered in vines. Brilliant green ivy, and grapes, already halfway to ripe even though they hadn’t been there yesterday, coiling up along the yards. The posts that held up the rail around the deck were unrecognisable. They had turned back into trees in the night; small, but already full of pine cones.
Somebody must once have replaced a plank in the hull with pear wood, because now, there was a pear tree growing on the prow, roots half covering the painted eye there, and seeming—somehow this was madder than anything else—not to mind the saltwater brushing them.
“How did you not see this happening?” someone asked the night watch steersman, who was staring at it all, as bewildered as the rest of us.
“I don’t ... I thought ...” He had a strange glassy look, one I recognised now.
The boy with blue eyes was exactly where he always was, at the base of the mast; but it didn’t look like a mast any more, just the trunks of the vines, and all around them, there were flowers shoving up through the grain of the deck, and moss. He had picked a bunch of grapes, and he offered me one.
I stared at it, because I remembered Persephone. Eating something means you accept hospitality, and with hospitality, there is a covenant you must keep. There are debts you owe that last generations. So I shook my head and knelt down instead, and he looked at me sidelong like he’d just seen me do something quite clever.
“If you keep doing this, the ship will sink.”
He only lifted his eyebrows a little.
Of course it would sink the ship. That was the point.
The whole crew had to go up the rigging with knives to cut back the grass waving there. The rope was turning back into hemp. Then we had to climb higher and cut back the vines that had locked the yards in place. They wouldn’t turn. I heard someone murmur that even the rudder wasn’t working.
I looked downwind. Ahead of us, there was a cliff. There were a lot of very sharp rocks at the base. The water around us was deep. There would be no swimming to safety, even for the people who could swim. Beside us, there were dolphins. The babies loved playing in the bow wave, because it swept them along. One of the bigger ones turned sideways in the water and looked up at us, clearly wondering what we were doing, being so silly and not getting in the water where things were more fun.
As fast as we worked, though, everything grew back. The vines were wrapped tight around the mast and the yards, and they were ageing in front of us; we weren’t cutting through tiny new shoots any more, but bark. At the base, they were more like trees. The boy with blue eyes was set up comfortably in a hollow full of flowers now, handing out grapes whenever anyone went by. Unlike me, everyone else was taking them, though they did look uncertain after a couple of seconds about where the grapes had come from. It wasn’t invisibility, though. Some people had very much remembered he was there.
It didn’t take long for the first person to say we should throw him over the side.
I dropped down next to him. If I’d had any valour at all, I would have said, It’s all right, you’re my guest, and I will die for you here before I let anyone touch you .
But I didn’t. I didn’t; even though I knew it was wrong, and even though, in the hazy way you understand time when you’re very young, I knew that not doing that was swinging my whole life the wrong way, throwing me off course, forever. I knew, but I couldn’t say it. Everyone I knew in the world was on this ship. They hated me, and Helios was gone, but they might forgive me in the end. I had never been by myself, ever. To launch myself into the world alone, for a boy who wasn’t really a boy at all, however much I wanted to help him ...
I’d promised him, but had he even understood? Probably not.
And what was that promise worth, anyway? Nothing. I couldn’t help. I’d never been able to help. It was a grief dream.
“Do you understand what they’re saying? They want to put you overboard. Can you swim?”
He looked like he might laugh. I had a feeling he understood exactly, and he was very happy for everyone to dig themselves deeper into their hole.
“Get him up,” someone told me.
“Don’t,” I tried.
I should have drawn my sword.
I didn’t. Years after that, I jolted awake at night burning with shame for that spectacular failure of duty. “Please.”
Pathetic.
The boy was watching me, not smiling any more. Whether he understood our language or not, he understood what I’d done, and what I hadn’t.
He put his hands down on the deck, and something ... happened. There was a huge crash from the hold, and in a furious swarm, the slaves burst onto the deck. They were singing their song, and this time it was a battle howl, and they tore into the nearest sailors like I’d never seen even the greatest warriors fight before. A girl ripped out the captain’s throat with her teeth, and where the blood sprayed, poppies burst into life, blooming across the deck. There were no more chains around anyone’s wrists or ankles, just vines, and under our boots, the planking of the deck heaved as the dryads woke up, and grew, and grew.
The first mate threw me overboard; I still don’t know whether to drown me, or to save me.
All I could see was roiling water, and then I was sinking, too stunned to swim, staring at the keel of the ship, which was a rampage of coral and a sapling ash tree where the rudder should have been. It was a floating island, all chaos and beautiful, and part of me was glad to have seen it even though the cost was dying, but only for a flicker, because when people say you feel a lovely calm when you drown, they’re lying to you so you don’t feel sad about all your friends who will drown in the years to come.
My head was thumping from crashing into the water at the wrong angle, but I remembered to kick for the surface. The water was rough, though, and I could only breathe in gasps between the waves, the salt burning inside my nose and right in the back of my throat, and with a horrible certainty I realized the land was still too far away, and I was going to drown slowly, bit by bit, instead of fast.
Not far from me at all, the ship smashed on the cliffs. People and timber sprayed into the water. The grape-bound mast blasted down with a white plume.
The waves from it slung me towards the shore, not smoothly—I went tumbling like a ball of seaweed, sometimes getting snatches of sky and air, sometimes seeing people hanging in the deep water. Most sailors can’t swim. It doesn’t take long to drown.
I got hold of a piece of wreckage, or what should have been wreckage; it was a plank with most of a pear tree growing from it, and when I got my arms over it, a pear fell off and thunked me on the shoulder before it floated off, perfect and golden.
The shore was all vicious rocks. Some were under me now, too far down to stand on, some up ahead, and on one of them—on one of them was the boy, sitting as easy as a siren, watching the wreck. He had seen me.
“Khaire,” I choked, because I couldn’t think of anything else. It’s how we say hail , rejoice , and, I suppose indirectly, please don’t kill me . “I’m sorry we took you. I’m sorry I didn’t ...”
He inclined his head and looked past me. I looked too, struggling against the water.
The bodies were gone; not floating any more, not sinking. There were dolphins instead. They weren’t the same as the dolphins before. They were smaller, lighter, and they were playing and spinning with so much joy they must have been celebrating something. Maybe something like being unexpectedly alive and a dolphin after being convinced they were going to drown as humans.
“Who are you?” I asked uselessly. “Who should I sacrifice to?”
He smiled, slowly, and there was something ancient and frightening about that smile. “I’ll come back for you one day. I’ll tell you then.”
It was the first time he had spoken and for a second it wouldn’t go through my head, that he could. His voice was too old for the rest of him and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. When a city burns, the smoke has an orange glow from below, from the fires, but that far above all the chaos, it’s beautiful. I loved that moment of a siege: standing on the city wall and watching the embers flit and zither into that ashy light, which was really all the palaces and monuments transformed.
He sounded like that ash-glow looked; like the funeral pyre of kingdoms.
By the time I clawed ashore among the flotsam—by some miracle my kit bag was there, with Helios’s helmet still in it—he was gone. I walked for a long time over the rocks, looking for him, because even a god shouldn’t wander along a wrecking shore alone, but I couldn’t find him. Not then, and not for ten years.
Coming back for me meant revenge, and Hades knew what that would be if the warning shot was a smashed ship; but as the seasons rolled together, and the long siege ground on, and the plague came, I wished he would come, because at least then I’d know he was all right, not alone and betrayed on that godforsaken shore.
I don’t know when it started—maybe even as I began to panic on that beach—but after a while, I noticed that whenever my heartbeat was loud, it sounded like Where are you, where are you, where are you.