Page 8 of The Hymn to Dionysus

7

The black banners of the House of Kadmus snapped above the parade ground as the garrison formed up into its units. I herded the young ones into their ranks at the front, reminding them to do ordinary things they would have done without thinking if they hadn’t been tired already: straighten cloak pins, buckle greaves up properly, tie their hair up again if they’d pulled it loose when they came home earlier. The hot wind rippled our cloaks and zithered dust across the open space in front of us.

The Bull Ceremony was a last resort. To sacrifice one bull is a significant thing—they were from the Queen’s own herd, the bulls, and each one was worth more than my house. We were about to sacrifice twelve, to all twelve of the gods, because we still didn’t know which one we had offended, and which had made the drought. Anyone who was anything to do with the Kadmeia would witness it—knights, Guards, civil servants—along with a thousand citizens in the public stands. It was a desperate, once in a generation ceremony, one I hoped I’d never see again. If it didn’t rain after this, then there was nothing left to do but raid.

Up on the balcony of the Palace’s royal apartments stood the Queen, the prince, and some tall people in vivid white who might have been Egyptian, all beneath a beautiful moss-green canopy. I kept my eyes on the ground so I wouldn’t stare at the Queen. I could almost remember what Helios looked like, if I watched her for long enough. But knights can’t go around staring at the Queen.

In the public stands, people had brought scraps of cloth to dip into the blood of the bulls who would be sacrificed today. It was lucky, although probably not lucky enough. It hadn’t rained now for ninety-seven days.

The order came for the serving units to march. We would just be watching; the little knights had taken their oath, but they wouldn’t be full members of the garrison until they had been in battle.

Ahead of us, the priestesses from the Temple of Athena were dancing the Bull Dance. I’d heard it was so difficult that it took them ten years to learn. Each step had to be a particular distance, each finger had to stay at a particular angle; it was military precision. It was slow, in time with the drums, but I didn’t envy them at all. Even our full-armour drills were probably less wearying. At least you did that fast and then it was over. At least you didn’t have to hold your arm at an exact forty-five-degree angle above your head for half an hour.

The Hymn to Apollo rolled out across the parade. It’s the anthem of Thebes.

Holy archer, lord of marvels

Bless this day and all who call you here.

Drums the size of humans were keeping the rhythm, marching pace. It was beautiful, the sterile and rigid order of it. There’s joy in perfect unity.

But a little part of me, the part of me that had loved seeing the hull of the ship turn back into trees even though I’d been drowning when I saw it, thought: There’s something dead about all this. Maybe the drought has gone on so long because the gods don’t know we’re still alive.

As I was scanning the young knights and helping with the last few buckles and pins, there was an interested stir and gazes started slipping past my shoulders, and I looked round and went heavily down on one knee, because the prince was right behind me. Kneeling burned, because my greaves had already heated up. Behind me, the rest of the unit did the same with a thunk of armour.

The prince’s name was Pentheus. It means “sorrow.” The gods like to take away children whose parents brag, so Theban tradition is to give them sad names by way of saying nobody was very happy at all, nothing to see here, smite some other bastard in Athens, thank you. But the name suited the boy. He was slight, with a painfully stiff bearing and too many lines on his face for the age he was. He was perhaps eighteen, but it was a glassy, spidery eighteen; some of the youngest girls behind me were broader and stronger.

When he put his hands down to take mine and lever me upright again, they were so fragile I was scared to close my fingers over them. I stared at the hem of his red ceremony robe, floor length, so I wouldn’t stare at him. Because knights have to look at the floor, Theban hems are often worth looking at. His had a ribbon of glorious Hatti embroidery on it—maybe it was an illustration of a story—and the tiny figures there were wearing armour stitched in gold and silver. It was subtle, but it glinted.

“You’re Phaidros Heliades?” he asked, and my skeleton went tight, because usually when someone asks me that, it’s because they’re checking they’re not about to stab an innocent person who happens to look like me.

“Yes, lord.”

“You were sworn to my uncle.”

I was struggling to hear him over the drums, which I could feel through the ground as much as through the air. “Yes, lord.”

He nodded once. He didn’t move like someone his age. He went slowly, marvel precise. The weight of the crown was heavy, even though he wasn’t wearing it yet. “Would you mind if I stood with you to watch this?”

“Please,” I said, wondering what was happening now. Princes don’t pay attention to unmarried polemarchs of young regiments.

“The Queen is arranging for me to marry an Egyptian,” he said, from nothing.

I tried to fit the ideas together and struggled. I’d never heard of it before. Egyptian ladies do not leave Egypt. If you die away from Egypt, your soul gets lost; when your chance of dying in childbirth is one in five, the odds are unattractive for most people.

“Are you going to Memphis?” I said at last. That was the only possible way for him to be on the same continent as his future wife, even though as far as I knew, there had never been a Theban king in waiting who didn’t live in Thebes.

He nodded.

“Why?” I said, because I couldn’t imagine an African lady being at all interested in marrying the prince of what, to her, would seem like a shack at the end of the world. There were Egyptian shepherds with more land and more wealth than Pentheus would inherit even when he was king. There was more money, more influence, more culture at the court of the Pharaoh than there was in all the separate cities of Achaea put together, to the tenth power. The whole earth turns around Memphis.

Ahead of us, the drums rolled on, and the priestesses danced, and the hymn stretched up for the bronze sky, where the sun was rising. I looked up, thinking about my futile little prayer burning on Apollo’s altar, and wondered if he’d heard, or cared. God of the sun, and god of the wolf: it was hard to imagine that he would ever pass on messages from a broken knight who had burned his altars at Troy.

“The Queen says it will be to our advantage to have some presence at court in Memphis.”

It wouldn’t. Nobody would involve him in anything. It would be the same as our queen consulting a swamp person fresh from his mud hut on the Tin Isles. “And ... what do you say, lord?”

“I say she’s getting rid of me so she can start again and get a better heir, hoping I die conveniently of marsh fever en route.” He kept his tone entirely neutral, like any young Sown person should do, but it was strained.

“Nile’s very clean, probably no joy there.”

He smiled, a very tiny smile, but still a smile. He looked up at me properly for the first time. “I don’t want to go,” he said.

“We all go where we’re sent, lord; obedience is strength,” I said.

The sun was just lifting over the city wall, drawing a clear bright line across my shield, and everyone else’s.

At the far gate, some stable hands were leading out the bulls for the sacrifice, very carefully. Bulls in other countries are sometimes about the height of a person. Not ours. They’re aurochs; they are to those smaller bulls what Herakles is to me. Their horns are as long as my arms or more, and standing straight, I would perhaps reach the shoulder of a slighter one. These were white and gold, beautiful things, and allowed to roam mainly wild in the royal fields, bred to be the best sacrifice for the gods they could possibly be. I felt tired, more than before. The animals were so lovely, and all of Thebes had been burning sacrifices for weeks. The smoke from the fires was hazing above the ground right now. Maybe it was blasphemy to think so, but I couldn’t imagine that twelve more would make any difference.

The part of me that had used to work overseeing rations in the camp outside Troy said, At least the sacrifices mean people are getting some food. The gods want the burnt bones of a sacrifice—people have the meat. The Queen was making this sacrifice not just to appease whichever gods were angry with us, but to feed the crowd and stave off starvation. Twelve bulls go a long way.

Pentheus stared unwavering across the parade ground. “What I want is irrelevant. I know, the Queen says so too. It’s noteworthy, though, how she always ends up with what she wants.”

A significant part of me was annoyed to hear him scratch at his responsibilities even that much, particularly while he was surrounded by knights younger than he was whose duties were far harder than his. “Duty is the price we pay for being rich, free, and well thought of all at the same time,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.

“But why does it have to be like that?”

I watched him for a second. “Because people as powerful as you, who go through life thinking they have a god-given right to do whatever they want, do not make good kings.”

“I don’t think I can do whatever I want, but I’ve never even been away from Thebes. I can’t go to Egypt.”

Everyone has a turn of phrase that sends them instantly from nought to homicidal. Helios had hated people who said apparently. Although he had been far too restrained to punch anyone over a meeting table, there had been a general who he had called Apparently Megara with the kind of raw loathing most people save for leeches.

My nought-to-homicidal thing was, I can’t {insert possible but inconvenient thing here} .

“You won’t asphyxiate the second you see the Nile,” I said. I was impressed with myself that I held back from saying, Well, when I was your age, a crocodile on the Nile once snatched me off the ship, everyone took the piss for months, and there are still people in the garrison who call me Delicious Phaidros: would you like to see the giant scar and then whinge about being married to a fine lady?

“Why aren’t you married?” he asked abruptly, with a spark of irritation. “You must be thirty now, you’re breaking the law.”

“I punch people who make me jump,” I said, hoping he would make me jump.

“There’s no exemption.”

“What’s happening now?” I asked slowly, aware that some of the young knights around us were listening hard.

“Everyone’s so fond of telling me that what anybody wants doesn’t matter, but I do feel that many of those people might perhaps need reminding what it is to actually have to do something you fear.”

Telling a prince what you think of him is an efficient method of suicide, but on balance, execution was less inglorious than being bullied by an insectile boy with no sense of duty. “Have you considered that perhaps the Queen is sending you away because you’re a whiny little prick and nobody likes you?”

He stared at me and I had a sharp sense it was the first time anyone had ever said anything like that to him. “You can’t say that.”

“Off you fuck,” I suggested, and thought, Well, Phaidros, this is it. Probably just as well, it’s embarrassing to have survived this long.

And no boy with blue eyes was coming. Of course he wasn’t. Apollo doesn’t pass on messages, and gods don’t come when you call, even for revenge. His revenge was going to be to let me drag on and on like this. Watching my knights fight over eggs, listening to someone who would be king whine about the lightest duty, while the rations shrank and shrank.

“You were sworn to my uncle!” Pentheus burst out, voice cracking. Suddenly he seemed very small, and lonely. “I just—I thought ...” He looked away. He was about to cry. “You could speak to the Queen.”

I sighed. It wasn’t his fault that he was irritating. Royal heirs are never sent to the legions. It would be idiocy. It was why Helios had served but the Queen hadn’t. One in three knights die before they’re eighteen. Half never make it past twenty-five. Of course he now imagined that he was having a dreadful time in the Palace surrounded by people who did everything for him. He had no idea what dreadful was. Everyone had worked hard to make sure he didn’t.

“I met the Queen once,” I said, more softly, “when I was a child. Nothing I say would matter.” I paused, because he was still Helios’s nephew, and I owed him what I could give, which was the advice Helios had always given me. “What you say will matter. Negotiate. Be Persephone. If you see Death coming, say, Fantastic, you’re coming with me, and I’m Queen .”

He didn’t laugh, only tilted his head, letting it move through his gears, expressionless. “I don’t think I can,” he said. “I don’t know how.”

I still had a primal urge to slap him and tell him to pull himself together, but that isn’t how humans work. The way you make a nervy mess of a boy into a someone useful is: you snatch him up in the corridor and pretend to steal him sometimes; you go and find him if he’s quiet and you make sure he gets some cake; you play Surprise Badger; and you let him get away with keeping a sacrifice lamb if he does big eyes at you and promises it will be a wonderfully house-trained lamb by the end of the week.

Nobody was going to do any of those things. He was too important.

“Try,” I said. “The worst she can do is shout at you.”

He gave me a doubtful look.

“Or drop you down a well,” I admitted.

“Pardon me if I don’t follow your advice,” he said gravely. “Only I get the feeling you’d enjoy seeing her drop me down a—”

There was a roar from the crowd.

People were pointing at the sky.

Something was there, a ball of fire and smoke screaming right at the city. For an irrational second, I thought we were under siege and it was something hurled out of a trebuchet, but there was nothing on the arid plain below us. Smoke tore across the dawn, and when I followed the arc, I could see exactly where it was going to land. Right in front of us.

They must have stopped the drums, they must have, but in my head I could still hear them, only it wasn’t the steady march of Apollo’s hymn any more. They were racing—running, then sprinting, and then faster and faster, and it wasn’t like any hymn any more, and if someone had told me that an army of the gods was riding to war I would have believed it.

The thing in the sky howled down and smashed into the parade ground.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a ship wreck: when the mast falls and the hull breaks, the water roars up higher than any palace, and you can see Poseidon raging in it. Whatever blasted into the ground then, it made the earth rise like the water would have, like it was nothing. Right along the lines, knights yelled and pulled their shields up overhead. I wrenched mine above me and Pentheus, dragging him with me onto the ground. In the stands, people dove for cover under the seats. I couldn’t see the Palace balcony any more. It was lost in the dust long after the burning earth had fallen down again.

Gradually, the dust clouds started to clear. I stood up and gripped Pentheus’s arm while I looked him over, but he seemed all right. So did the little knights. Shields came down and tipped dust and fragments of rock onto the ground. Up ahead of us, the priestesses were standing up too, grey. People in the public stands began to ease out from under the seats. The canopy that had been keeping the sun off them was on fire, shedding burning particles over the wall.

Only about fifty feet from us, there was a crater. It was glowing.

I could see the little knights asking each other things, and trying to ask me, but I couldn’t hear. I held my hand out to tell them to stay back for another few seconds. Along with some of the other older knights, I slid my shield back onto my arm and climbed over the rubble to the edge of the scar in the earth. The heat was so strong I could barely face into it.

Glass boiled at the base of the crater. Some patches were still white-hot, some making an unearthly crackling noise as it cooled and splintered and broke straightaway.

Leading from the centre out to the edge, quite close to me, there were shapes pressed into it. It was difficult to see properly through the heat, which hazed and writhed, but they were clear enough all the same.

Footprints.

They were only there for a few seconds. Then the glass cooled; the surface dulled, then cracked; and the prints were lost as shards of it shattered and burst.

The most incredible bubble of hope-dread rose in my chest. I’d prayed to the boy from the shore to come, and what if he really had, what if he was here? I’d die in a few seconds, but that didn’t matter. I’d see him again. I might even have time to tell him I was sorry. And then, well, Helios had said he would wait for me in Hades, without crossing the river. Helios said a lot of things, so I wasn’t too sure he’d meant it, but maybe he had. Maybe I was about to see my whole family again in the space of the next minute.

I looked around, desperate for someone else to say, Gods alive, did you see that, someone walked out of that , or maybe even to see a pair of blue eyes I knew from long ago.

I didn’t find either of those, and instead, I almost jumped away from my own bones, because right beside me was one of the aurochs, fully twice my size. Its eyes were starry in the light of the molten glass. As if it were worried it had startled me, it bumped its nose very gently against my chest. My shoulders fitted between its horns.

“Help,” I said, very quiet. They weren’t tame, the bulls. I was lost in the smoke; nobody could see me. Everyone else was talking and theorising, and I couldn’t make out any individual words over that hellish cracking of the glass. The bull snorted. Its breath fogged my breastplate. It was twitchy: it didn’t like the noise either.

Someone touched my shoulder.

I turned my head just enough to see a tall figure in a black veil. His hand on me was tattooed dark red to his knuckles, like he had dipped his fingers in blood. He didn’t say anything, because it would have spooked the bull, but he didn’t need to. I let my breath out. A witch.

As if it wasn’t a wild monster which could have ground him into mince, he stroked the bull’s head and touched its nose to steer it to the side, away from me. When the wind caught the veil, it outlined the side of his face and I thought he might have been about my age, but that was all I could see of him.

The bull looked pleased with him and bumped his shoulder companionably. I thought he was laughing. As soon as its horns were away from me, I backed away from the edge of the crater, my hand on my sword in case he needed help, but he didn’t. He must have called to them somehow, because the other bulls were thumping across to him too, shaking the ground. Around us, other people were phantoms in the smoke and the dust, and to me, there was a kind of background roar-shush that was made of people shouting and talking and wondering. Three bulls; four; ten. They dwarfed the witch, but he still didn’t seem afraid, and they were still all behaving like happy lambs, snuffing at him and nudging him, but careful of their horns. As the last two came across, he led them away.

“Did you see that?” Pentheus exclaimed, suddenly right next to me. “He just took them away like it was nothing!” He sounded more impressed by that than the crater.

“There were footprints in the glass,” I said, not loudly enough.

I caught a few snatches of the voices around us. People were talking about falling stars and signs from the gods, though nobody seemed to be agreeing about what the sign meant. The Queen’s prophet had come down from the royal balcony to stand on the edge of the crater, scrying in the molten glass.

“There were what?”

What was he supposed to do about it even if there were? Start a hunt through the crowd for whoever was—what, on fire? Nobody was.

When they have dealings with people, gods look like people. Gods can even look like specific people. Helios swore he once had an entire conversation with me, even though I’d actually been—unbeknownst to him—on a scouting mission at the time. He hadn’t just spoken to someone who sounded like me through the tent wall. I had been in front of him: my armour, my scar, everything. I would have thought he was just winding me up if he hadn’t been openly disturbed by it. Something had been there.

Someone in this crowd, maybe even someone I knew, wasn’t a human being at all. I stared around, not even knowing what I was looking for, except maybe—the bubble of hope was still there but shrinking—for someone who was looking for me.

“Where’s the prince?”

A Guard was right next to me, trying to make me hear.

Pentheus was running after the witch, little-boy buoyant to see real magic. Just as he started to fade into the smoke I saw him catch up. He looped his arm through the witch’s, and then laughed when the witch took his hand and put it on the forehead of one of the bulls.

We have a word, deinos . It means “terrible” and “amazing” at the same time—it’s one of those inside-out words that means two things which should be opposites. It’s a word for horrifying miracles, and beautiful cataclysms, and gods. There was something deinos about the witch too: enough that I found myself staring hard at the ground where he had walked, in case his steps were burned into the sand.

They weren’t. Of course they weren’t.

He did look back, though. I couldn’t tell through the veil, but I had an uneasy feeling he was looking straight at me. Just for a moment, he was entirely still, a tall black spectre beside the prince and shaded by the Queen’s holy bulls against the pounding heat of the glass and the furnace dawn. Then the wind shifted, and they all disappeared into the smoke.

Nobody came to look for me, and there was no flash of blue eyes.