Page 9 of The Hymn to Dionysus

8

Nothing happened, and nothing happened. The crowds started to move away from the smoke, some carrying shards of glass from the crater in case those would bring luck. Slaves came out to start clearing the rubble from the torn-up flagstones, coughing and ash-stained. The prophets clustered together, consulting about what to do, and what it meant, and whether we should still sacrifice the bulls. Feeling like I was caught in the fall between someone kicking my ankle out and hitting the ground, all I could do was herd together the little knights to count them—all present: even Jason, unfortunately, had failed to vaporise—and start seeing them back to the garrison. The more time went by, the more certain I was that I’d tricked myself into seeing those prints in the glass, and the more I felt like an idiot for hoping. Of course there was no god coming.

In among streams of other knights, we reached the training yards as if it were any other morning. There was an excitable buzz through everyone, but it dimmed gradually as different polemarchs herded their units away to training, and the ordinary rhythm of the morning seemed like it was going to start uninterrupted.

It wasn’t until we were in our yard and the little knights were fetching their training shields that I heard it.

Someone was singing.

Everywhere is different. In some places, people will tear someone apart for touching a shrine, or taking a god’s name in vain. In others, it happens because they slept with the wrong sort of person, or because they preached the wrong kind of politics from their box in the marketplace. It’s always different, and to everyone from outside, the one thing that drives people to murder looks bizarre, but every city in the world has its forbidden thing, and everyone reacts in the same way when they see it. Everyone feels deep-down repulsed, and everyone feels the overpowering need to just make it stop, even if you have to hit someone with a brick.

Ours is blasphemous music. We have twelve songs. One for each of the gods. We have sung them for a thousand years, and we will sing them for a thousand more, to remember those who sang them before us. We don’t change them: we keep those songs in the same way other cities keep their temples, without tearing them down and building new ones every second hour. Any other music is unholy. It doesn’t come inside the city walls. I’d never heard it in Thebes. Even when I heard it outside Thebes, it made me itchy and angry.

And now, someone was singing.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance ...

Sometimes, because I was going deaf, I heard things. A kind priest told me once that the less you can hear of the world, the more you can hear of the gods, but I’m not that special and it was never that. It was my clockwork trying to make shapes it knew from the scraps of information it could hear, and often those shapes were completely wrong. I once heard a marvel of Hermes in the market tell me not to forget the cheese. I went still now, watching the little knights. There was something between shock and aversion etched on their faces, which probably mirrored mine. So it was real.

It was Amphitrion.

He was staring into space. His sister was shaking his shoulder, her gauntlet clinking against his breastplate, but he didn’t seem to feel it. I got in front of him and held his shoulders to see into his face. His eyes were miles away.

He still didn’t see me. He turned away from me, I thought towards his sister, the leather underplating of his armour creaking, but then he kept turning; halfway round, all the way, and then again, spinning slowly between me and his sister, who was normally so steady she would have taken the sky falling in with perfect knightly equanimity, but she looked scared now.

“Knight,” I said, quietly. “You need to stop. Now.”

“ Sing, sing to the lord of dance,

Thunder-wrought and city-razing— ”

“Stop. Amphitrion—”

“— king, king of the holy raging— ”

Jason smacked him experimentally over the head. “Hey. Shut up .”

Amphitrion didn’t notice.

“I’m going to get him away,” I said, urgency leaning a boot right into my breastbone. If the Guards heard him, he would be arrested and flogged. “Jason, run over to the Ninth Unit, tell his commander quietly that I’ve taken Amphitrion to Ares. Everyone else, wait here.”

Amphitrion let me steer him out through the main courtyard, past the marvel Herakles, and down the long steep stairs towards the lower city, to the white towers of the Temple of Ares. I should have kept one hand on him to make sure he kept going in the right direction, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him that much. I felt like I was escorting someone with plague.

Ares is where knights go to recover from injuries and battle madness; or to die from them. The sanctuary is quiet, the priests are all veterans, and they make sure nobody fragile visits. I had no idea what Amphitrion’s song was, but it had to be some kind of madness, because he wasn’t suicidal.

I could smell the incense forty paces away, and from somewhere inside, a column of smoke climbed into the baking sky. Amphitrion was still singing. If I let him stand still, he turned and turned, dancing, just slowly, but there was something horrible about the slither of moving mail. Heat blasted off the flagstones and rippled so much it looked as though we were walking through clear water.

I eased him under the archway and into the temple gardens, where a marvel of Ares turned his head to watch us come in. I had to look down, the glare off the bronze too bright. Amphitrion seemed not to notice. He had looped back to the beginning of his song. Sing, sing to the lord of the dance ...

“I need help,” I said to the priests coming towards us. “I don’t know what happened. We were at the bull sacrifice when the star fell, and now he can’t stop singing.”

As I said it, I heard how strange it sounded, but the priests only glanced at each other, unsurprised. “Thank you, knight. We’ll take him from here. He can go in with the others.”

“Others?” I repeated, to make sure I hadn’t remember-the-cheese hallucinated.

I hadn’t.

There were five others. They were together in a cool underground room that must have been used usually for storage, with only a high thin window to let in the light. Now, though, there were pallet beds set up neat and careful, and a table with a water pitcher, and a priest watching in the corner—and five knights spaced out across the floor, turning in the same slow dance as Amphitrion, and singing.

They were all singing different parts of it, but even I could hear it was the same song.

I looked at the priest who had brought us down.

He shrugged slightly. “They’ve been coming in for the last hour. The Guards have been in and out, but there have been no convictions. It’s obviously madness.”

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance,

Lightning-born and madness-bearing,

Bring, bring to him wine and ivy ...

It echoed in the cool brick cellar, so that it sounded like there were a lot more voices than those five.

“What is that?” I asked. I wanted to scratch my skin off. “Where did they get it from?”

“We don’t know what it is,” he said, too gently, and I made an effort to hold myself still. A knight turning twitchy is not something anyone wants to see, even a priest of Ares. “But these two, and your lad, were on the parade ground when the star fell. If it was a star.”

“The star did it,” I echoed. Maybe there had been prints in the glass, maybe there was a god, just not the one I’d thought.

“Seems so,” he said, infuriatingly delicately.

“And the other three, who weren’t at the parade?”

“The first two spoke to them just after.”

I stared at them. Turning, turning. They started a new verse one after the next in an eerie chain— sing sing sing sing sing— and I had a weird sense that it wasn’t random. “It’s infectious ?”

“Some kinds of madness are.” He took a deeper breath, probably getting ready to say something else vague and unhelpful, so I cut him off.

“So some people saw a star or a god come down, and now they’re virulently and identically mad,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

He looked uncomfortable to have it laid out in a straight line. “If you like.”

“Of course I don’t fucking like. Can you say what you mean, please?”

“I mean,” he said, lowering his voice so much I could barely hear him, “the Queen does not take kindly to rumours of gods coming to Thebes.”

“Not really the Queen’s choice whether they do or not, is it?”

Something like understanding broke across his face. “When did you come back from Troy?”

“Six months ago.”

“You don’t know, then. Every so often, someone declares himself to be the lost prince, the son of Zeus, and the Queen—well, the Queen makes short work of him,” he said. His eyes darted to either side as though he were genuinely worried someone might be listening. “I’d be very careful too, if I were you. People have been killed for repeating rumours. Now come on, I don’t want you exposed longer than you have to be.”

I meant to go, but then I stopped, because I knew the words.

I couldn’t have said how, or where from. But they were there, in my head, like I was remembering something from a long, long time ago—the way you remember things that were drummed into you when you were tiny, and the recollection of who by or why is gone.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance,

Revel-bright and border-breaking

Ring, ring the bells ...

I wanted to sing it too. Part of me said: You’ll feel so much better if you sing it.

It felt exactly like that urge to jump when you’re on the edge of a cliff.

The priest got me by the arm and tugged me to the stairs. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but given that it does seem to be infectious, I’m going to recommend that you don’t visit again.”

Maybe it was too late. Maybe I had it already, whatever it was. Maybe in an hour I’d start singing.