Page 5 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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In the summer Dionysus came to Thebes, it was so hot that there were mirages in the sky. On a day watch on the city wall, looking out over the plains, you’d see the dust plume. Before many hours had crawled by, you’d see cities in the shapes, and giants, just like you do in dense fog at sea. On a night watch, the heat was no less. The hottest part of the day was immediately after sunset, when the white towers glowed like molten bronze and the dust billowed, and armour heated up so badly that if you poured water on it, it steamed. The city was a crucible.

I had to stop halfway up the long flight of steps to the High City and the garrison. Stop and breathe, and sit down with a water flask, even though I could normally take it all at a half run. If I tried that now, I saw green stars.

When I looked back over the lower city, it was through columns of black smoke rising from the temple altars. I could taste the ash and the incense even up here. Sacrifices: to make it rain. So far, none of the gods were impressed enough to intervene. It had been like this for six weeks, and there was a permanent charnel-house-smoke pall over the city. From any distance, Thebes looks like a crown of towers on its hill—now, the crown was burning.

I swallowed some of my lukewarm water, holding my breath so I wouldn’t know how badly it tasted of the leather flask, but even then, I couldn’t shut out the smoke. The smell of the smoke was the smell of a city falling.

Then, even though it was so hot I could hardly breathe, I was cold.

I wasn’t on the steps up to the High City in Thebes any more.

I was outside the walls of Troy. It was freezing: winter. Even though fighting is thirsty work, I had a scarf tucked into my breastplate, because the wind howled off the sea and pushed its way under every rivet. My arm ached; one of the gatehouse towers had just exploded and a chunk of stone had blasted into my shield. The smoke was everywhere, so thick I couldn’t see the knights on either side of me, even though we were still more or less in formation.

“There they go!” someone shouted.

I looked up, through a thinner shroud in the smoke, at the spire of a temple—I’d never known which god the temple of was for, but I’d spent more than a decade hate-admiring those spires and their golden roofs, and wondering how they were built so high. People were jumping from the top: priestesses in green, falling like peacocks that had been shot midair.

I had a surge of exhausted joy and joined in when my unit cheered. The priestesses only jumped from a city’s towers when it was certain to fall. Their god must have told them we would win. Thank fuck. It had only taken thirteen years.

Our trumpets sounded, and the signal flags went up. Advance.

“Mind out,” someone said to me, on the steps to the High City in Thebes, here, now, in the broiling summer and the smoke haze from sacrifices.

Even though I knew exactly what was happening—and this was what drove me so mad—even though I knew I wasn’t really at Troy at all, I was in Thebes, and I was on my way to the garrison for the night—it was so discombobulating that I couldn’t even say sorry for blocking the way up the narrow stairway. I just made an incoherent noise and shuffled to the side, not very certain about standing up, because a big portion of my mind couldn’t tell if I was on the steps, or if I was among the wreckage outside the city walls on that frozen winter morning with ice forming across the filigree of my breastplate.

“Ah—are you ... all right?” the woman said tentatively. She was older than me, scribe-looking; yes, with a crate of clay tablets strapped to her back.

“Yes. Sorry.” What was I even saying? Was it words? “I’m—it’s—it’s just the heat.” I sounded like a Persian dandy who needed his own special fainting couch.

She looked relieved she wouldn’t have to do anything else, and carried on.

Once she had gone, I smacked the back of my own hand to try to make myself recognise what was now and what wasn’t. It wasn’t like remembering, those flashes. It didn’t feel like sitting on some steps and thinking, Hm, yes, it was cold that day , all the while fully knowing where I was now, and when. It felt like it was happening again. Happening , as real as the heat and sacrifice smoke and the taste of leather flask.

It did work, sort of. My hand hurt. Now. Right. Good.

I was still shaking. It was making the water in my flask slosh.

You go through life imagining you’re a decent soldier of use and honour, and then one day you come home and you’re just a lump who obstructs the paths of commuting scribes. How the sodding wheel turns.

“Stop it,” I said, in case hearing a voice giving an order would help, even if it was my voice. “Come on. ” I couldn’t be late, not today.

When I did get up—victory!—I felt weak, but not so badly as before. I carried on slowly. One step; one step. Gradually, something like strength came back into my knees, and I stopped feeling like I might collapse. All right. Good; good. I might still be on time.

I had no idea what those bizarre little episodes of uselessness were, and I didn’t want to find a witch and enquire. It was humiliating and probably it was just hunger and heat. Our rations were down to two thirds recently, which isn’t ideal when you train for four hours a day. Hopefully, the visions would die once the autumn finally came, and it had to come soon. We were almost in Harvest Month now—or what would have been Harvest Month, if there were anything to harvest.

Behind me, the sunset was burning orange through the smoke. It was different to Troy.

It was. The sunsets had been a strange kind of indigo there.

It was fine.

At the top, I had to stop again to wait for a funeral procession to go by. There were no mourners, just hot, dusty priests, with six or seven biers draped in cheap beige cloth. All the shapes underneath were far too thin. That was the most I’d seen at once, so far; things were getting worse. I bowed my head. Slaves always die first when the rations go down. They have half as much as citizens even in the best of times.

Every day, I walked up here betting myself that today was the day the garrison would be sent out to deal with bread riots. It was a miracle nothing had happened yet. Rations kept shrinking, which meant the civil granaries were nearly empty, and in the garrison, we were all restless, the way you always are when you know you’ll be fighting soon. And we would be fighting soon: we would have to be. If you can’t harvest grain, the only thing left is to steal it.

I was hoping we’d be sent to Athens. Athens is always improved by being on fire.

A great archway led into the square. It was a new monument to the fallen, visible right across the city because it was four storeys tall, and it was carved with images of hundreds of soldiers seething before the walls of Troy. In alcoves stood marvels of people who had served with particular valour. There were seven, one for each of the city’s seven gates, every one blessed by a temple and half-deified to join the ranks of the war-saints of Thebes. There was a knight who had led the cavalry charge that finally broke the Trojan infantry; a witch who had stayed with us even during the plague and saved at least a thousand wounded; a noble lady who had killed her son when she found out that he had deserted his unit.

Helios should have been up there. He would have, if I had held the line and he’d got the death he deserved.

I tried not to think about him. If I did, I could feel the space where he’d used to be much too clearly. It was person-sized but it was deep, a chasm all the way down to the halls of the Queen Below and the snicker of the waters of the Acheron. It didn’t matter what I tried to fill it with, people or work or distractions. Those things just clacked bleakly on the rocks on the way down and vanished into the dark. So it just followed me around, a sort of shadow that the setting of the sun didn’t blur or fade. If I sat still for long enough, it sat down next to me and took up all the air.

I’d stopped trying to fill it. Now I was just waiting for the boy with blue eyes to come back for his revenge, and then that would be that.

I stopped in the shadow of the monument and glanced both ways, checking for Guards. None so far, but they were everywhere in the High City. I pulled my cloak out of my bag and, despite a very urgent need to throw it as far from me as I could, I put it on, clipping its buckles to the ones on the shoulders of my breastplate.

“Knight!” a clear harsh voice called.

Ugh.

I arranged my face into the expression of quietly cheerful courtesy it’s advisable to adopt around the Guards.

Among the dull smoky buildings and the dull smoky people, the Guard’s cloak was vivid purple. She was walking towards me, slowly, because the Guards never rush.

When I first came back to Thebes and I’d been stopped for Inappropriate Apparel, I’d said, That’s a stupid law, I’m not doing that ; and sometimes, six months later, I woke up pouring sweat in the middle of the night, thinking I was still in the airless little cell with no water. It had only been a two-day detention, but gods almighty it had been hot. I’d been convinced I was going to die, without my sword in my hand and nowhere near a battlefield, like a deserter.

She nodded at my bag.

I handed it over. She looked through. There was nothing in it except the flask, a lamp for when I walked home tomorrow night, a little cask of lamp oil, and my ration tablet.

We have two layers of nobility: the knights, who are serving soldiers, and the Guards, who police the knights. That’s necessary, I’ll very grudgingly admit, because there are thousands of knights. A knight is a free citizen with full civil rights, a vote, and exemption from the death penalty except for desertion. Birth and blood don’t matter for knights, only combat lineage: who your commander is, and who their commander was. The Guards, though, are harvested from the five families closest to the throne. They don’t serve in the legions.

“Are you carrying silver or gold?” she said, not sounding nearly as bored or as perfunctory as I would have liked.

(Penalty for carrying silver or gold inside city walls: five years of slavery.)

“No, lady.” I kept my eyes on the ground.

“Alcohol?”

(Penalty for a knight becoming inebriated on active service: five years of slavery.)

“No, lady.”

“Have you recently sent or you do intend to send your slaves for gold, silver, or alcohol?”

It was tempting to say, Yes, I’ve got legions of slaves lined up and a giant shipment from Hattusa waiting at the dock. I’m going to build myself a house out of wine jars and then decorate the whole lot in filigree .

(Penalty for a false confession: ten years of slavery.)

“No, lady.”

She was studying my ration tablet. “You’re well provided for,” she remarked when she saw the allowances. Her eyes ticked over me. “Unmarried, though. Where’s your sense of duty, Sown?”

It was rhetorical. I kept looking at the ground. She couldn’t arrest me for being unmarried. I’d paid the fine already this month. It said so on the tablet.

She gave the tablet back. “Well. There you are, Polemarch Heliades of the Fifth Unit,” she said, irritatingly enunciating every single syllable so it sounded like one word— pol-eh-mark-hell-ee-a-dees —with a wryness that said, In my day we didn’t let dishonourable unmarried idiots become polemarch of a whole unit of knights. “Duty is honour.”

“Duty is honour,” I muttered, and thought, Well, when the bread riots come and someone impales on you a big spike, I shall be far too busy looking meekly at the ground like a good knight to notice . The Athenians, sod them all, have a stupid joke about exactly this. Our word for pupil, as in eyes, is parthenos . But that’s also our word for a virgin; Athenian teenagers keep their eyes down, because Athenian men are psychopaths. So some smart-arse noticed that we do that too and started calling us the parthenai, which means “the virgins.” You’ll hear it every time Theban soldiers meet Athenian soldiers. Oi oi, watch out lads, the virgins are coming.

As I say, they’re much improved by being on fire.

Feeling as though I were wearing a red flag that said COME AND GET ME , I started across the market square. It would have been easier if I’d been able to hear. I wasn’t deaf, yet; I could hear someone close to me. But I couldn’t hear general diffuse things, like one set of footsteps coming closer to me among many. I started losing my hearing on the day Troy fell. It was odd: I hadn’t been too near any explosions and no one had hit me on the head. But that afternoon while I sat in the throne room, with some very good cakes from the palace kitchen, the world fell quiet, as though Athena had put me in an invisible box.

“Need a labourer, sir?”

I just managed to catch myself before I swung round and punched him in the eye. He must have seen me twitch, because he jolted right back from me, hands up. I held mine up too, well away from my sword. When I looked around, there were a dozen people already, looking ragged and determined. Lots of them had clay signs around their necks that said things like STRONG LABOURER or FLUENT IN EGYPTIAN , mostly in the same handwriting, because it would be only one or two of them who could write.

They were all talking at once, and I could only catch random snatches.

“I know olives, and yews—”

“Someone to teach your children? I speak Egyptian—”

“I can weave!”

“I’m worth ten oxen but you can have me for four!”

“No. I’m sorry,” I said, completely unable to tell if I was talking loudly enough. “Good luck.”

Some of them followed me across the square anyway.

For me, in the legion, slaves were people who you stole from other places. It had been a strange revelation that those people were in the tiny minority of slaves generally. Most people are born into hereditary service—that would be civil servants like scribes and Palace administrators—or they sell themselves. All these people here now would have been farmers or herders or weavers this time last season, struggling but just about making ends meet. Now there were hardly any crops to grow, and the price of wool was sky-high because it was so hard to keep sheep alive in the drought, and even goats were struggling; nobody could make a living any more. So they offered themselves for sale. Instead of paying a merchant, you paid their family, a kind of advance for future labour—only, much cheaper than it would have been if they’d been able to wait for payment until after the work was done.

Some of them followed me right out of the square. They only stopped when I passed under the open gates of the garrison.

“Oh, come on,” one of the men said. “You’re a Sown knight. You could take all of us and you wouldn’t even notice.”

I would. I’d been trained to look after myself, and being looked after was something between awkward and humiliating, and I hated having even the three slaves I did have. I could sweep my own bloody floor. It was legion discipline. I was scared of letting someone else do it. I’d get lazy and repulsive, and when the boy with blue eyes did finally come, he’d take one look at me, decide it would be much funnier not to kill me, and I’d have to live until I was fifty and I died of whatever it is you die of when you’re too rich and you have too much wine and bits of you start falling off.

“No, thank you,” I said.

He gave me a look with murder in it, the kind I’d only seen on battlefields before. “When the lost prince comes back, I hope he fucking curses you.”

I stopped moving, because I hadn’t heard anything about the lost prince for years. The memory of the baby and the lightning lived deep down, in bedrock cellars in my mind that I never visited. It had been a long time since I’d been down there and remembered that when the boy with blue eyes came aboard my ship, I’d wondered if maybe they were the same person.

“He did that years ago,” I said, and shut the gate.