Page 1 of The Hymn to Dionysus

PROLOGUE

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ

“Sing of rage, goddess”

—THE ILIAD, LINE 1

Our bards always ask the Muse to find the beginning, but the big joke—I say joke in the loosest possible sense—is that they never then start at the bloody beginning. Find the beginning, Muse, and then they say, well, here we are, seven years into the middle of a big adventure I haven’t told you about, there was this witch, right, and this man—and then they sparkle at you like it’s clever.

It’s not clever. It’s irritating.

I am going to start at the beginning, because I’m a knight, and I was taught to report things properly, in a straight line, without faffing around and looking smug that I’ve remembered the bits I artfully left out to Reveal Unto You later on for narrative effect. I’m not going to sing it to you in poetry, either. Poetry is for things that are made up. I’m just going to tell it.

But I do promise this. One way or another, I will do what the bards always ask the Muse for, after they’ve done their stupid opening about beginnings.

I’ll tell you about rage, and a complicated man.

1

My name is Phaidros. I was born into the Furies, which is the frontline legion of the Theban army. My commander was a joyful trickster called Helios, and his commander was Artemis, the famous lady who won the archery contest every year for ten years at the Oracle Games. I know people from other places say who their parents and grandparents were, but that isn’t how Theban legions work. I don’t know who my parents were and I didn’t even think to wonder about it until I was older. Helios told me different things depending on how he was feeling. Maybe I was the son of a princess; maybe he’d found me on the rubbish heap behind a sacked city; maybe he had been friends with my mother, another knight who had had me with the weird slave nobody liked because he insisted on making his own cheese. He was making a point, not just being annoying. It doesn’t matter where a Theban knight is born, or how.

There was a whole pack of us, little knights raised among the tents. It was fantastic. People from other walks of life tell me about growing up in houses, and going to school with tutors who want you to learn about numbers and lying to people—I can’t think of anything worse. We ran around a lot, we played in the sea, we helped with polishing armour and making arrows, and our commanders hid honey cakes and toys in among the wreckage after the fighting was over, which was why I always loved big battles. And I met lots of interesting people. When you’re five, the best thing in the world is a literally captive audience who has been considerately chained to an oar so they can’t escape all the questions you want to ask about what it’s like to live in a place made of stone.

The older knights told us that we were from a stone place too—Thebes—but I didn’t understand what that was. It was somewhere in the west, the place where the slaves and the grain and the silver flowed back to, but we only ever went as far as a harbour to load it all onto carts before setting out again. It sounded scary. Cities were things you broke and set fire to. It was hard to imagine why anyone would live in one on purpose. It struck me as something between accidental and openly stupid, living in a place stuffed with silver and warehouses and good-looking people who would fetch a lot of gold if you were to sell them to the right sort of gentleman in Egypt.

The first time I met Dionysus was on my first visit to Thebes.

I was four or so when our whole legion finally got leave to come back to Thebes. We’d had lots of shore leave before, but all in different places, usually close to wherever we were raiding—this was a real holiday, and the first time since I’d been born that the knights could come home to see their families. It sounds rough, but five years is a fairly ordinary raiding tour; the world is wide and Poseidon holds grudges. You couldn’t expect to come home much sooner.

Everyone was caught between excited and scared. People worried husbands might have got tired and married someone else, or that retired commanders would be angry with them for not sending word, or what presents they should bring for all the children they’d never met. To give you some idea of how big an event this was, I actually have no memories at all of anything before. I used to tell Helios he could have kept me in a box those first years and saved himself a lot of bother; it’s a total blank. Thebes outshone everything else.

Don’t get me wrong about the clarity with which I say all this. Maybe it was my first real memory, but nobody can clearly narrate anything that happened to them when they were five. The only reason I can do it for you is that for years after we went to Thebes, Helios repeated it to me again and again. It became as established a bedtime story as Death and the Girl, or how Hermes became a god, or Artemis and the arrogant huntsman. He made sure I remembered. He wanted it graven on my soul, so that I would never forget why we couldn’t go back.

Helios was in the strange position of having a twin who wasn’t also a knight. She lived in Thebes, and we were going to see her. It seemed bizarre to me that they’d been separated like that, but he tipped his head and said some people had to do other things, and so we hurried off the ship to beat the hordes of people making their way towards Thebes too, and rented a horse from a man who didn’t want normal iron money, only silver or gold, even though that’s forbidden for us, because he traded between cities and there was something complicated to do with something called exchange rates that Helios tried to explain to me, after I saw him produce entirely illegal silver pieces for the man’s tiny weighing scales. I didn’t understand at the time why he took such pains trying to explain it to someone whose main priority, really, was bouncing; but I do now. If I had mentioned to anyone that he had been carrying silver, he would have been arrested. But I was distracted by a green bird and money was boring.

I got my first sight of Thebes from the brow of the steep hill that tipped the road down towards the Amber Gate.

Thebes is a strange place. It sits in a valley under Harper Mountain and its vales of sacred trees, always somehow in full sun, and I think even a stranger here could guess that it didn’t begin in the usual way, with people finding stone for quarries or land to till. It feels different.

Once, there was a warrior from Asia, King Kadmus, who paused here at the springs on his way somewhere else. There was a dragon, and it wouldn’t let him take water. After he had killed it, Athena told him to take its teeth and sow them in the earth. People sprang up from them, knights stronger and fleeter than there had ever been, and it’s to them we trace back our combat lineages. That’s why we’re called the Sown. Helios told me the story as we rode down.

So Thebes is a holy city, begun by dragon’s teeth sown at the behest of the god of just war. There are grander places—everyone says the whole world is in Memphis, and that there are mighty new kingdoms rising from the dust in Canaan—but there isn’t a stranger one. There isn’t another place where there are as many temples as chariots, or where the air fizzes with miracles. It’s that same prickle that happens if you rub two pieces of amber together and then hold one above the hairs on your arm.

Even being so little, I felt it. Perhaps that was partly because it felt so foreign. I’d grown up ransacking bits and pieces of the Hatti Empire, or even the gold-soaked places along the Nile. I was used to seeing Egyptian gods, and statues of the great Hatti knights in their heavy mail guarding the city gates. I’d never known that there were places like that which belonged to us. I’d never seen our gods in marble or bronze. For me, our gods were things you sometimes saw for a snatch in the distance in the heat mirages on the sand, or in the lightning. Wild things.

But there they were. A bronze statue of a gigantic figure on a gigantic horse stood at the gate. The road led beneath the arc of the horse’s throat.

“That’s Herakles,” Helios said. “Do you want to see something fun?”

“What?”

He guided our horse close to Herakles, and very slowly, the giant bronze figure bowed His head to us, a gentle, courteous sort of greeting. I nearly fell out of the saddle.

“He’s alive!”

“It’s called a marvel,” Helios explained. “Inside the statue, there are special devices. They move water, and that moves wheels, and the wheels move the statue. They’re very holy, so when we see them, you have to be careful not to touch them, all right? If you break one, you’re cursed.”

I stared, certain Herakles was about to ride after us. Helios squeezed me, and we rode on through the high gate. Herakles, fortunately, did not.