Page 109 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I thought maybe that when we came up the steps to the Palace, there would be people waiting to arrest me, and the Queen, to give me a regretful look and say sorry, but if there was any doubt then the only sensible thing to do was have me immediately killed.

They weren’t; nobody was thinking about me at all, because the Egyptian grain convoy was in the main courtyard. Wagon after wagon, painted with the turquoise seal of the Pharaoh, accompanied by soldiers to keep people from stealing on the road—their soldiers, and ours. The Egyptians were all men, so they were bizarrely uniform, and all of them were tall and impressive, looking a lot like they were trying not to openly enjoy the whooping, cheering crowd. There were already grain sacks being passed out, queues behind the wagons, and the Egyptians were laughing with our knights, because probably they hadn’t seen people in Achaea queue before for food rather than the traditional mob. Palace clerks were checking ration tablets, running seal beads over clay, trading receipts. It was joyful and loud, but it was meticulous too. Every so often, someone tried to steal something and went down under a knot of soldiers.

“It’s you!” A lady with a baby slung both arms around me, then laughed away before I could ask why she was so happy to see a stranger.

Someone else saw, an older man, one of those quick sparky people who always make brilliant bosuns on ships, with a voice like a carnyx. He grinned. “It’s the King! All hail the King!”

All hail the King burst around the courtyard. Even the Egyptians standing on the grain wagons saluted, smiling.

Royalty is such a strange thing. To look at a city and everyone in it, you would think the only rational reaction to the richest people in it, who struggle the least, and who have fossilised that unfair economy around themselves so well that you can’t change it without a war, would be a sort of weary hatred.

But a royal house is spun of witchcraft, between many mirrors. People are their kingdoms—we say we’re Theban or Athenian or Spartan before we say anything else about ourselves—and the crown stands for the kingdom. Put some undeserving autocrat in charge who abuses people and loses all their battles, and everyone will resent it not just because their lives are harder, but because crowns are like battle standards: people care when they fall in the mud. In one flat way they are just silver and cloth: it doesn’t matter. Only people aren’t seeing silver or cloth. They’re seeing the kingdom, which is a reflection of who they are. The function of a queen is not just to rule. It’s to arrange the illusionary architecture of the royal house between those mirrors in the hearts of its citizens into the strongest structure she can, because though you can’t touch it, it is real: it’s like three. Arrange it beautifully and gloriously and magically enough, and your city in the ordinary world can sit in a dust bowl slowly starving . . . but you won’t get weary hate for the crown. You’ll get adoration.

The prophecy had tilted people’s heart-mirrors at precise angles, and now the royal house was glittering.

I looked at Pentheus, full of dread, because it was a good few notches too fucking glittering, and he looked nervous too, but the Guards were already seeing us inside.

Half a regiment of beautifully dressed slaves took me into a set of chambers big enough to house five families, with a ludicrous fountain full of nymph marvels in the middle of the floor, and I hunted around for someone who might be able to say what was going to happen now, but everyone like the Chamberlain must have been busy with the grain.

“Can someone please tell us what’s going on?” Pentheus said to the room generally.

Everyone laughed. That seemed like a good sign, depending on what they thought of us.

The Queen, someone explained in the severe way that said we would know this already if we hadn’t absconded earlier, was calling the court together for a feast: a celebration of the betrothal and the success of the grain deal, and I wasn’t allowed to go in armour.

I wondered if the Queen had seen what had happened in the courtyard just now, and how she was feeling about Apollo’s arrangement of the mirrors.

“I need to see the Queen,” I said.

“She’s coming,” someone said. “Stand still.”

I couldn’t tell if that was good.

There was a bath with rose water. Then gold combs with fine gold chains sank through the base of my long army braid, so heavy that I had to hold my head exactly straight or it was uncomfortable. Gold clamped round my neck, like a very cynical, beautiful version of a slave’s collar. More gold all the way up my arm, made nearly like mail but not. Everything else in black and red, the colours of the House of Kadmus.

The thought that Helios might have lied to me thundered round inside my head like a charioteer with a bronze whip.

He had told me lies to make life easier, about foreigners having gills, and every time I’d asked him where he got me, he made up something new. But this—this was like saying that just because someone liked having bunches of peonies in the house, he must have run away to tend the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Tiresias had mistaken me for Helios. Pentheus thought we looked enough alike that he had added up the prophecy that way straightaway.

I had thought the courtyard didn’t look like I remembered. And Pentheus was right: nobody remembers coherent sets of events that happened when they were four. I remembered because Helios had told it all to me. Maybe I remembered only what he had told me. It felt real, but what did real feel like? As vivid and clear as I had it—or wouldn’t it feel vaguer, rougher, wouldn’t there be bits I couldn’t catch so well now, wouldn’t it be contextless flashes, like the rest of my childhood?

It took me a second to notice that all the slaves were kneeling.

The Queen was in the doorway. I knelt too. She came and pulled me up.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked towards the silver tray of beautiful things the kitchens had sent.

“Er—yes, but if I leave it then the slaves can have it,” I said, distracted, and feeling like my cogs were in the wrong alignment for simple questions.

“Are you all right?” she said, more carefully.

“I’m . . .” It was no good. “There is a priest at Apollo with the same scar and the same name as me, with a dagger from Helios. Pentheus—thinks Helios swapped us years ago. I think maybe all those people outside think that too. Do you?”

“Do you?”

“No! He was a tricky fucker but he didn’t lie to me for twenty years!”