Page 10 of The Hymn to Dionysus

He nodded, but he didn’t look too warm. I hugged him to make sure and rubbed his arms through the cloak. It’s never hot at sea. Even if the land is baking, you need layers on the water. To my shock, he laughed; a tiny laugh, low and smoky, but a laugh all the same, and he tucked himself sideways against my chest, unafraid as a puppy, and it meant everything.

I kept my arms around him and tried hard not think about Helios. If I didn’t think about him, he wasn’t gone; he was just somewhere else, and it wasn’t my fault, and there had been no pyre on the shore, and one day soon he’d turn up and it would all have been a horrible dream.

I felt awkwardly like I was a little boy playing at being a host and he was being obliging and playing at being my guest, in an imaginary house and not a ship heading for the slave markets on the Nile, with all the old eagerness I really did used to have for those games. Hosting a guest is sacred. Our word for that is xenia—hospitality, but much more profound, a holy bond enforced by Zeus himself. We were a nation of wandering knights, far flung on raids years from home, and although the world would eventually turn, and there would be such things as inns and way-houses, there weren’t then. You asked for xenia at the door of a stranger, because it was that or starve on the road, and it took the most phenomenal leap of trust and courtesy to open that door, see a hulking scarred soldier outside, and say, Yes, come in. But that was the custom. People did it. We did. It was inviolate. Trust someone like that, and it lasts beyond your lifetime. Every so often, Helios had let someone stay with us, and they stayed in touch forever. Their children would stay in touch forever, and if I had children, they would too. We were all kin. I’d never done it in my own right, and part of me was twisted up with shame, because this, what I was doing now, felt like a deformed mockery of the real thing. We wouldn’t stay in touch. It wasn’t sacred. We were going to sell him into a horrible life that would probably be very short indeed.

Unless, said a voice that belonged to Helios, you make it real. It’s real if you decide that it is.

That would mean fighting for him and helping him escape, when the time came. That would mean being his, automatically and forever, in the way Helios had been mine.

I wanted to promise him that straightaway, but I was old enough to know it would be stupid to do that. Fighting for him would mean leaving my unit. However much they all hated me for now, they were still my unit, and duty is honour, and obedience is strength. They were everything I had left. To leave them behind, and the legion, and everything, for a boy I’d known for a few days—that was insane.

And right.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said, before I could think myself out of it. “I’ll look after you. I promise.”

It was such a small thing, but somewhere, behind the world, something went in a great ledger, and something mighty took notice.

What had I done? It was childish and impulsive and stupid was what it was, but—I’d said it now. I was bound for the rest of time. I should have been afraid, because what would happen when I couldn’t keep that vow, but I only felt glad. If I could keep it, if I could just be knight enough, then . . . I’d have a family again. All at once I was lost in imagining a life away from the unit, wandering to different places for no reason except to see them, watching him pick up interesting pebbles on the shore, maybe fighting freelance when we needed money. Maybe we’d find a way to get him all the way back home, wherever that was, and maybe his mother would be a fine lady, with a beautiful feasting hall by the sea and room for another person, if I was quiet and dutiful. When he grew up to be lord of that place, I’d be there, serving, like knights are meant to do.

Maybe the boy understood, because he squeezed my hands.

Down in the hold, the slaves were singing. I’d thought none of them spoke the same language, because the Empire marshalled all its allies from across the world to defend the holy city; but they were all singing the same words. It was a weird tune, nothing like our hymns, and I had no idea what it meant, but a deep-down instinct knew it was something unholy. Someone shouted at them to shut up, but they didn’t.

The boy was smiling.

I was off watch for the first half of the night, so I had time to sleep a bit. I hated that I wasn’t having nightmares. The Furies should have been hounding me for every second of every night for all but murdering my only family, but no. I slept fine.

I leaned back against the mast, meaning to shut my eyes, but then I stopped. There was a little shoot growing from a knot in the wood. I frowned at it and pulled, expecting it to come free easily, roots only just lodged into some crack in the grain of the timber, but it didn’t. It was growing out of the wood, not just anchored to it. There were others too, further up, better established, and with a strange, half-horrified and half-repulsed drop, I realized that the wood of the mast was growing. It had been aired and sanded and varnished years ago, but even so—the shoots were making oak leaves. All the way to the top yard.

When I showed the boy, he winked at me.

“The mast,” I tried to say the first mate later, because I thought she was slightly less likely than the captain to chain me up below. “Have you seen?”

I think for her—like all true sailors—the sieges and the raids were just vexing interludes between nice stretches at sea. At sea, it was hard to convince her that there could be anything wrong with the world, and I was nervous trying to do it now.

“What about her?”

“She’s—growing?”

I felt stupid saying it, even though it was clearly happening hardly four feet away from us. When things are odd enough, they don’t go through your mind like normal things do. I think minds have filters; usually, those filters are useful, because they stop you mistaking dreams or mirages or those weird hunger-hallucinations for anything real. But then, truly strange things that are real get stuck in them, and then you can’t look at them properly. Or you can look, but then you look away and your mind says, No, that can’t be right, that’s silly, we must be mistaken—and it keeps doing it, every time.

She glanced over, and I thought she would somehow not see, but she did, and frowned. She pulled at one of the new twigs, just like I had; then she sliced it off with her knife, and then dug in the blade a little, but it was just the grain of the mast underneath.

“This is twenty years old,” she said, as if the mast had personally betrayed her. “She can’t be growing.” Nobody ever said “it” about anything on a ship. Ships are made from oaks, which are dryads, and just because you cut down the tree doesn’t mean the dryad goes away.

“I think it’s him,” I said about the boy, who had been watching, looking like he was having quite a lot of fun.

It made the first mate jump. The boy had been right next to us all this time, but she must not have seen. She looked down at him for a long time, and I could see him getting stuck in her strange-things filter, even though he was as solid as me.

It only made me more sure.

“Please, he’s doing this. You barely see him, that isn’t normal—what if he’s Poseidon, or Athena, or . . .?” I couldn’t bring myself to say, Or maybe even the other one, the worst one. We have hedging names for gods, because true names have a lot of power; we call Poseidon Earthshaker, and politely, Aphrodite is the Lady, the Furies are the Kindly Ones. What we call Death is ha-eides: the Unseen.

“We need to let him go—”

“He’s just a bit simple. He’s fine,” she said, and went on her way.

I sat down with the boy again. Whatever was happening to the mast, whether it was him or not, he was still the only person I could sit with who wouldn’t immediately find an excuse to punch me.