Page 6 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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This is a thing that might save you time when you travel. Mostly, cities train their nobility to be speakers, and poets, and sometimes just decoratively useless. But every so often, you come to the gates of a place where the Sown are soldiers down to the last child. It can be easy to admire that, and think how amazing it is that a place can have trained its warriors so very well that the city has never fallen to invasion, and kings and empresses from the furthest corners of the world want either to hire them, or leave them well alone.

Don’t admire it. Nobody decides one morning that the best way to educate their children is to send them to the army aged—in peace time, at the very latest—seven, and have them raised by knights. It would be idiotic to do that for no reason. Nobody thinks that’s a good way to bring up humans, not even me.

Perhaps there are some places that are that way because things are always desperate, the fields never yield, and their entire living has to be raiding—but then I always wonder why they don’t just move. There are plenty of empty places in Achaea, never mind the world, and colonies are normal. You’re not stealing the land from anyone. There are islands everywhere nobody owns. Move off your barren rock to a nicer rock.

No.

All you need to do is count the slaves.

For every citizen in Thebes, there are twelve slaves, and that ratio was going up every day the rain didn’t come. And what happens if twelve in thirteen people decide that they don’t like the way things are? Right. You need the free citizens—the Sown—to be terrifying.

The Hidden is a small regiment of a hundred and twenty knights. Young knights who haven’t yet fought on the front line, but who need practise. Randomly across any given month, we allocate one night—usually with a decent to bright moon—and we send the Hidden out around the city and the farmland about twenty miles around it in every direction. They have only one instruction. If they see a slave on the road who cannot show a Palace seal and isn’t accompanied by a citizen who can, that slave is to be shot.

Tonight was the first ride for my cohort. They were all fifteen and sixteen, all too young to have sworn their vows to their commanders yet, or to fight on the front line, but old enough for combat. I’d taught that age group for years now, with the depressing consequence that they looked younger every year.

The moon was huge and full, and so bright we had shadows in the training yard. Some of the higher-strung horses didn’t like it, and kept pawing at the black shapes that followed them around on the sand. I watched the younger knights checking each other’s armour with the carefulness of people who didn’t do it all the time; it wasn’t their own armour. You don’t wear your armour, during a ride for the Hidden. It’s black, without sigils, so that no one knows exactly who it is behind the helmet. Once they looked ready, I punched the lower hem of their breastplates to make sure they were buckled properly, and nobody’s hit them in the chin. No: they were good. If you fell off your horse, the first thing armour did was ride up as much as it could.

“Mount up,” I said, and the ranks broke up in a swirl of red cloaks. “We’re going on the north road.”

One of the stupider boys—I called him Feral Jason, because he was a horrendous little bastard and recently my favourite hobby was his subtle persecution—did a wolf howl, so I pushed him off his horse. He landed with a satisfying clank and a squeak he was going to be embarrassed about later, and then, because his horse was a good one with a faultless sense of whether she was carrying a real knight or a moron who just dressed like one, she pretended not to see him on the ground and trod on him: not with her whole weight, but enough to bang her shoe against his armour. I love warhorses.

“This is your first ride as knights, and not knights in training,” I said, loud enough to carry through the courtyard. “I know you’re excited. But you are knights, not animals. You’ve heard the Knight’s Vow a hundred times down the years, but now it’s your turn to swear it. Once you swear, there is no going back. You will be held to it always. Are you ready to give that oath?”

“Sir!”

“Swear your oath, Sown.”

Like it always did, it brought down a strange solemnity. It doesn’t matter how many times you hear other knights quote the vow at each other; it’s different when you say it yourself, before your first ride with the Hidden.

Around the edge of the courtyard, their commanders had come out to see them take the vow, unobtrusive in the shade and making an effort not to look too proud or too upset that their wards were growing up. I saw some of them dash a hand over their eyes, or standing close with their shoulders together, nearly propping each other up, because what this meant was that they’d done it: they’d kept a child alive right into knighthood, sometimes through everything at Troy. Most of them would never have expected to see this.

As always when I took young knights through the vow, I had to think hard about banal things, like my lemon tree that never made any lemons. If I didn’t, I would think of my ward, and of the little pair of shoes I’d had to donate to another commander in the plague year at Troy, and the clockwork marvel toy that the bronzesmith had had to melt back down, before it ever managed to be a birthday present.

I vow to serve my city, my Queen, and my comrades before myself. I pray to Athena to give me strength and justice, and I swear never to use one without the other; for strength without justice is savagery, and justice without strength is air. I will henceforth forego profit, untruth, and luxury.

Obedience is strength, austerity is freedom, and duty is honour.

I am not myself: I am my legion. We are the Sown, the children of the dragon; in fire we will come, and in ash we will leave, until we too are ashes.

Before I rode with them myself, the sight of the torches streaming by and the black horses bearing black-armoured knights was mesmerising. I remember being awed by it when I was small, and I remember wanting to go more than anything, for all Helios kept telling me it was different when you were in it. That had been on a beach somewhere in Hattusa. Here, in Thebes, the ride was so much of a spectacle that on likely nights, people brought their children to the garrison gates to see us go, tucked carefully to the sides of the road and out the way; part of the ritual now was to lean down in the saddle and touch hands with any children who were stretching up.

I don’t know if you’ve met a Theban warhorse, but imagine an irritable machine that’s going to plough on to where it wants to go even if there is an Egyptian chariot line in the way, and doesn’t especially care if you’re still on it when it gets there. A hundred of them thundering down the main road is a thing to see, the torches gleaming on the black helmets and black spearpoints. Each knight wears mail; not because we expect it will do a great deal that bronze breastplates can’t, but because of the noise it makes. A hundred sets of moving chain mail sounds like Poseidon rising through the ground.

The city gates closed at sunset. It meant traders couldn’t start out on any new journeys. Anyone out was either coming towards Thebes, where you had to pay a tax to enter after sunset, or they weren’t meant to be there at all.

In the drought, the only water within a day’s walk of the city was Lake Copais; the only road there is called Artemis’s Way. It isn’t by accident that Artemis is the god of the Hunt.

As they opened the North Gate, the watchmen made the sign of the bull at us. I’ve never been able to work out if was a way to wish us luck, or to keep us away from their households, if the time ever came. The bronze gates, each one three feet thick, swung open soundlessly on hydraulics more ancient than some of our gods, and on the wall, the marvels turned to watch us go, each one holding a torch to light the gate for the night, hazy in the smog of the sacrifice fires. Even by the moonlight, the columns of black smoke were rising clear. I could make out the glows of the altars.

I know there are places in Egypt and the wider world where it’s different, but our cities have a wall, and then that’s it. The city stops there; the watchmen stop there; and mostly, the law stops there. You ride from lights, and people, and tiny glimpses of potters up late in their workshops, painting beautiful things onto wine jars—across a border into a country that doesn’t belong to humans. There’s the road, and the dark, and on the back of your neck, a heavy awareness that you need to know exactly how long it takes you to shift your grip on your spear and throw it.

I was always more alert to that when I was with a very young unit. For all they were well-trained and mostly sensible, they were still ducklings in some important ways. Knights start young and they do grow up quickly—you can give command of a whole unit to someone who’s seventeen and you’ll have a perfectly good result—but there is a limit. Things still spook them. They’re still brand-new.

“Are those just beacon lights on the road up there, sir?” one of the younger girls asked me over the noise of the horses’ hooves. She sounded fizzy and excited, just like I had when I first did this. I was relieved, because when you have to make a group of children murder some people who’ve done nothing to them, the best way for them to be is excited.

Excited means they’re not afraid, they won’t waver over what they have to do, they won’t lose their grip on their swords. The ones I worried about were the ones who could put themselves too easily in the shoes doing the running.

“No, knight. Those are wagons.” The lights ahead started to wink out as the people in the wagons realized what was coming up behind them.

“I think they’re going away from us!”

“They are. Do you want to fire the flare for me?”

I’d never seen anyone look so pleased with something so small. “Thank you, sir!”

I gave her the arrow with the oil-soaked rag wrapped around the tip, held her spear in exchange, and took the reins of her horse just to be sure as she threaded the arrow into the bow. “Ready?”

“Yes, sir.” She touched the tip into the torch of the boy on her other side and fired into the sky. The arrow drew a line of orange into the dark, up ahead of the riders.

Behind us, there was a bang as a hundred spears thunked into a new grip in a hundred gauntlets, shifted from upright to horizontal. I looked back to see if anyone was slow, but they were doing well tonight. We had drilled it a dozen times a day for weeks. They all locked their elbows into place so that the spear shafts stayed level with the cheek plates of their helmets. Theban spears aren’t wood but bronze; they’re hollow inside, very light, but the young knights train with solid iron, so that when the time comes, they’ll be able to hold the real thing steady indefinitely. Here and there in the torchlight, silver charms and blessed ribbons winked. Some of them had tiny clay tabs bound to them with wire, written by priestesses at the Temple of Athena. They said things like MAY I ALWAYS FLY TRUE and NEVER MISS .

The wagons up ahead of us were clear now. They had pulled to the side of the road, and there were people running away over the dusty, scrubby land that, when I was a child, had been brilliant green fields.

I held up my spear so that the ranks behind me could see, and the first lines of the hymn to Ares lifted up into the dark.

Ares golden-helmed, bronze-clad, shield-bearer, city-saver ...

The horses were trained to chase anything big that tried to get away from them once they heard the hymn, and the second they saw something to go after, they surged.