Page 7 of The Hymn to Dionysus

6

The little knights were fizzy when we got back to the garrison, and some of the younger ones were reenacting especially gory moments. I scooped a bucket of water from the fountain to wash the blood and the road grit out of my hair while I watched them play. It was just before dawn, which was searing pink onto the horizon.

“Keep it down,” I called. I couldn’t hear much but they were a garrulous bunch, this year. Secretly I liked that about them. Knights should be good at talking. “People are trying to sleep. Jason, that isn’t your lamb, let her go.”

They did good work of looking chastised.

“Herakles. Offerings. Like real humans,” I added, pointing at the marvel in the middle of our courtyard. The new sun was slinging orange and purple across his bronze shield. “Then you’ve got an hour before the Bull Ceremony. You need to be in day armour, and not asleep.”

They didn’t put Herakles in our yard because they want us to be like him. They put him there because they don’t. Everyone knows the first part of his story, about how strong he was and the labours, and the sodding Athenians like to leave it there, but that isn’t the end. The end is that when he goes home to his wife and his three children, he’s been too long fighting, and one night, he thinks they’re enemy soldiers and kills them all.

If you’re sitting there saying, Oh, no, what a dreadful thing to tell children , then you can fuck off to Athens and enjoy their puke-inducing happily-ever-after stories where everyone prances joyfully off into the joyful sunset like demented morons. It is not a proper story unless everyone murders each other at the end.

The young knights formed into a more or less orderly queue to leave Herakles some arrowheads, or filigree, or something else small but significant.

“Jason,” I said, more to my bucket than to him, “a severed hand is not an offering. Put it in the rubbish ditch or I will shove it so far up your arse it will be able to manipulate you like a repulsive little Jason-puppet.”

Some of the others laughed and Feral Jason did as he was told, doing what was actually quite a good impression of a sad sock puppet.

Their commanders were coming out to say hello and to ask how it had all gone. A boy called Amphitrion—he was one of my worries—was such a gentle, happy person that a few weeks ago he had bought a sacrifice lamb but had not been able to face the idea of actually putting her on the altar, so now she was a garrison mascot. His commander had come out with her and she was baaing happily. I was trying not to get too attached to her, because at some point Feral Jason would decide he wanted a lamb dinner, but it wasn’t working.

Jason’s commander was waiting too; he was a chronically tired-looking man with prematurely grey hair, a few years younger than me, and he was a walking piece of irony, because his name was Polydorus, which means “many-gifted.” Everyone called him Polynemesis, which means “repeatedly cursed.” I saw his expression turn pained.

“Jason,” I said as Jason passed me again—not needing to ask what he was doing or planning because if it was upsetting even his commander, who was surely numb to most of his nonsense now, then it was probably as well not to invite it into permanent memory storage—“what makes you imagine I won’t tell everyone your favourite thing is silk trousers from Persia, before I plant a pair in a particularly startling shade of mauve among your gear in the next inspection?”

He stopped walking.

“You wouldn’t, sir,” he said, not sounding very certain.

“Feel free to risk it, then,” I said with not very well-concealed glee, because of the pair of mauve Feral Jason–sized trousers waiting for deployment in the secret cupboard under my desk.

He grumped off back to the rubbish ditch to put back whatever horrifying thing it was he’d salvaged from it to start with. I saw his commander relax, or relax as much as a human can if they’re permanently responsible for a Feral Jason.

Polydorus saw me watching and came across. Whatever he wanted to say must have been important, because like everyone else about my age, he tended to avoid me. Maybe he was cursed with Jason, but I was cursed generally.

“You know his history?” he asked. He was a superb archer, and he spoke like he shot: straight to the target, with a tight-strung air that said he was waiting for you to forget what you were doing, nock your arrow with the cock feather up, and accidentally shoot at a perfect ninety-degree angle right into his eye. Lately he seemed more like that with me than with other people.

I nodded. “His first commander was Ajax. You rescued him after the herd of dismembered goats incident.”

Polydorus nodded slightly. “He doesn’t choose to be like this. He’s a good boy.”

He was younger than me, so he couldn’t give me orders, but he was on the edge of it. If I stayed unmarried for much longer, I could expect a lot more of that. I’d not done the decent thing and died for Thebes in battle, and barring that, I hadn’t done the next most decent thing and had children to start replacing the fallen. I was just here, taking up rations for no reason.

“He is a good boy,” I agreed, “but he does choose, and what he chooses is to be a horrible little sod, because you let him.”

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he changed his mind and bowed—not deep enough—and went fast after Jason. I wondered how long it would be before junior officers stopped bowing. Probably not long. And then; well, it would be impossible to keep control of this unit. I’d seen it happen before, I’d been in one of those units with an ageing unmarried polemarch, seventeen years old and at my peak Dick Phaidros stage. We had hounded him. So had the other officers.

He had walked into the sea one morning.

I thought about him a lot lately.

I wasn’t going to get married, though. You can’t involuntarily attack anyone who makes you jump and be married at the same time. Either I would kill her accidentally, or she would kill me on purpose. Whatever happened, I’d have to live with it, until the boy from the shore came.

I didn’t have time to think long, because a scribe arrived, bowed a good distance from me, and gave me a tablet at arm’s length. I had to stretch to take it. She looked like she was trying to stay out of easy punching range.

I soon saw why. The tablet said our rations were being cut again; it listed the new weights of everything. It hadn’t been a lot before. Now it was what we would have given slaves a year ago.

What I wanted to do was run into the general’s office and demand to know, after an introductory scream of primordial rage, what the fuck the Palace thought it was doing. If you don’t feed children properly, they don’t grow, and you end up trying to defend your city with knights who are a foot smaller than the Spartans. Which the Palace fucking knew already. That was why we always gave slaves less than citizens: if you’ve got a whole mass of workers whose lives are always horrible and who will absolutely try to kill you once they’re miserable enough, you want them to be little. And if things were this bad, why hadn’t we been sent raiding? Why was the whole garrison just sitting here while everyone starved?

Instead, I walked fast to catch up with a kitchen slave who was just crossing the shady part of the courtyard with a basket of eggs. They were steaming, so they must just have been hard-boiled. The Palace sits on hot springs, and in the kitchens, they used big troughs to boil hundreds of eggs at a time in the hotter pools. “Pardon me,” I said quietly. “But if I were to owe you a debt, Sown knight to a good lady, would you mind pretending to faint and letting everyone steal a few eggs?”

“Can I have a lock of your hair?” she said, worryingly instantly.

I cut off a twist of my hair, tied it in a knot, and gave it to her. “Do I want to know why?”

She laughed. “I’ll give it to my husband. He’s obsessed with you. If I ever go a week without hearing the story about Phaidros Heliades and Princess Andromache, I’ll die happy.”

“Right,” I creaked, hoping that her husband wasn’t a lie-in-wait-in-a-hedge type.

She walked another twenty yards or so and then fainted, amazingly realistically.

There was a charged pause, and then everyone close by snatched a couple of eggs each and melted into the cloisters, and within seconds all the eggs were gone. I made a show of helping her up, wrote on the wax stock tablet and signed it with my seal bead ( EGGS STOLEN BY JASON POLYDORIADES, APOLOGIES, SIGN. POL. PH. HELIADES ), and escaped with a stolen egg of my own. Around the cloister, the little knights were bartering excitedly with each other for eggs as if it were a feast day.

For a second it was funny and I felt pleased and then, like always, immediately sad because I had no one to tell except the Nothing that had used to be Helios; and then I realized it was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

I hadn’t made my offering to Herakles yet—I’d meant to give him the egg, so that one of the little knights could steal it later—but I stopped beside the marvel and stood there staring at it, wondering what I even thought I was doing.

I’d never prayed to the god from the ship. I didn’t know his name, so I didn’t know which altar to try, but even if I had, I’d never prayed for anything to any god: I made sacrifices in the way I paid taxes. Gods are like queens. You pay what you owe and in return they don’t notice you.

But if a bad day was going to be watching the little knights die on a raid in Athens, and a good day was finding an egg, then I didn’t want to hide beneath his notice any more.

He had been my guest all those years ago. I should have died defending him. All this, everything after, it was just one long wrong turn. If he would come back—then at least I could give him the revenge he was owed. I could die doing something decent, like I should have on the ship, and maybe he might even feel better for it.

I’d know he was all right.

I crossed the courtyard, past Herakles, through the officers’ mess, to the shrine for Apollo just beyond. The shrine was a beautiful place, an altar under an archway all filigreed in silver, and a bell above so the god would hear you. The priest, dressed in indigo like all the Apollo acolytes, was tending the altar fire, feeding it the bones of something small to keep the sacrifice going.

“Sir,” I said, not sure how to phrase what I wanted to say. “I’d like to make a sacrifice, but I don’t know the name of the god. What do you do, when you don’t know?”

Despite the heat and his heavy robes, he didn’t look annoyed. I’d always liked priests of Apollo. They were so calm it was catching: you always feel better if you sit with one of them for a while. “Why don’t you know, knight?”

“I met him once but he didn’t say his name.”

“How did you know he was a god?”

I’d never told anyone what had happened. Partly it was because saying it aloud would have made me sound insane and everyone would think I’d drunk seawater, but only partly. The bigger reason was that the memory of the ship turning was all I had of the boy on the shore. It was precious and I couldn’t just hand it over to anyone who asked for it.

“He was.”

“Well, Apollo will know,” the priest said reasonably.

I gave him the egg, and he smiled. He must have been tired of killing animals on the altar. It was sticky work.

“What prayer would you like to make?”

“I can write,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, and showed me the slips of prayer papyrus and the ink. Tactfully, he drifted away to water the god’s holy tree, an ancient olive that must have been old when Herakles was born.

Slowly, and carefully, because papyrus is only for holy things and the ink was worth more than I was, I wrote down the prayer. It wasn’t really a prayer.

I hope you come soon. Then I hesitated, because you have to say your name, but it felt strange to write my name on something a god would read. Phaidros from the ship.

I waited for the ink to dry, then held the papyrus slip in the fire. The flame caught and the paper burned fast, and the smoke rose up into the sky like a distress signal.