Page 12 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I didn’t. Years after that, I jolted awake at night burning with shame for that spectacular failure of duty. “Please.”

Pathetic.

The boy was watching me, not smiling any more. Whether he understood our language or not, he understood what I’d done, and what I hadn’t.

He put his hands down on the deck, and something . . . happened. There was a huge crash from the hold, and in a furious swarm, the slaves burst onto the deck. They were singing their song, and this time it was a battle howl, and they tore into the nearest sailors like I’d never seen even the greatest warriors fight before. A girl ripped out the captain’s throat with her teeth, and where the blood sprayed, poppies burst into life, blooming across the deck. There were no more chains around anyone’s wrists or ankles, just vines, and under our boots, the planking of the deck heaved as the dryads woke up, and grew, and grew.

The first mate threw me overboard; I still don’t know whether to drown me, or to save me.

All I could see was roiling water, and then I was sinking, too stunned to swim, staring at the keel of the ship, which was a rampage of coral and a sapling ash tree where the rudder should have been. It was a floating island, all chaos and beautiful, and part of me was glad to have seen it even though the cost was dying, but only for a flicker, because when people say you feel a lovely calm when you drown, they’re lying to you so you don’t feel sad about all your friends who will drown in the years to come.

My head was thumping from crashing into the water at the wrong angle, but I remembered to kick for the surface. The water was rough, though, and I could only breathe in gasps between the waves, the salt burning inside my nose and right in the back of my throat, and with a horrible certainty I realized the land was still too far away, and I was going to drown slowly, bit by bit, instead of fast.

Not far from me at all, the ship smashed on the cliffs. People and timber sprayed into the water. The grape-bound mast blasted down with a white plume.

The waves from it slung me towards the shore, not smoothly—I went tumbling like a ball of seaweed, sometimes getting snatches of sky and air, sometimes seeing people hanging in the deep water. Most sailors can’t swim. It doesn’t take long to drown.

I got hold of a piece of wreckage, or what should have been wreckage; it was a plank with most of a pear tree growing from it, and when I got my arms over it, a pear fell off and thunked me on the shoulder before it floated off, perfect and golden.

The shore was all vicious rocks. Some were under me now, too far down to stand on, some up ahead, and on one of them—on one of them was the boy, sitting as easy as a siren, watching the wreck. He had seen me.

“Khaire,” I choked, because I couldn’t think of anything else. It’s how we say hail, rejoice, and, I suppose indirectly, please don’t kill me. “I’m sorry we took you. I’m sorry I didn’t . . .”

He inclined his head and looked past me. I looked too, struggling against the water.

The bodies were gone; not floating any more, not sinking. There were dolphins instead. They weren’t the same as the dolphins before. They were smaller, lighter, and they were playing and spinning with so much joy they must have been celebrating something. Maybe something like being unexpectedly alive and a dolphin after being convinced they were going to drown as humans.

“Who are you?” I asked uselessly. “Who should I sacrifice to?”

He smiled, slowly, and there was something ancient and frightening about that smile. “I’ll come back for you one day. I’ll tell you then.”

It was the first time he had spoken and for a second it wouldn’t go through my head, that he could. His voice was too old for the rest of him and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. When a city burns, the smoke has an orange glow from below, from the fires, but that far above all the chaos, it’s beautiful. I loved that moment of a siege: standing on the city wall and watching the embers flit and zither into that ashy light, which was really all the palaces and monuments transformed.

He sounded like that ash-glow looked; like the funeral pyre of kingdoms.

By the time I clawed ashore among the flotsam—by some miracle my kit bag was there, with Helios’s helmet still in it—he was gone. I walked for a long time over the rocks, looking for him, because even a god shouldn’t wander along a wrecking shore alone, but I couldn’t find him. Not then, and not for ten years.

Coming back for me meant revenge, and Hades knew what that would be if the warning shot was a smashed ship; but as the seasons rolled together, and the long siege ground on, and the plague came, I wished he would come, because at least then I’d know he was all right, not alone and betrayed on that godforsaken shore.

I don’t know when it started—maybe even as I began to panic on that beach—but after a while, I noticed that whenever my heartbeat was loud, it sounded like Where are you, where are you, where are you.

4

In the summer Dionysus came to Thebes, it was so hot that there were mirages in the sky. On a day watch on the city wall, looking out over the plains, you’d see the dust plume. Before many hours had crawled by, you’d see cities in the shapes, and giants, just like you do in dense fog at sea. On a night watch, the heat was no less. The hottest part of the day was immediately after sunset, when the white towers glowed like molten bronze and the dust billowed, and armour heated up so badly that if you poured water on it, it steamed. The city was a crucible.

I had to stop halfway up the long flight of steps to the High City and the garrison. Stop and breathe, and sit down with a water flask, even though I could normally take it all at a half run. If I tried that now, I saw green stars.

When I looked back over the lower city, it was through columns of black smoke rising from the temple altars. I could taste the ash and the incense even up here. Sacrifices: to make it rain. So far, none of the gods were impressed enough to intervene. It had been like this for six weeks, and there was a permanent charnel-house-smoke pall over the city. From any distance, Thebes looks like a crown of towers on its hill—now, the crown was burning.

I swallowed some of my lukewarm water, holding my breath so I wouldn’t know how badly it tasted of the leather flask, but even then, I couldn’t shut out the smoke. The smell of the smoke was the smell of a city falling.

Then, even though it was so hot I could hardly breathe, I was cold.

I wasn’t on the steps up to the High City in Thebes any more.

I was outside the walls of Troy. It was freezing: winter. Even though fighting is thirsty work, I had a scarf tucked into my breastplate, because the wind howled off the sea and pushed its way under every rivet. My arm ached; one of the gatehouse towers had just exploded and a chunk of stone had blasted into my shield. The smoke was everywhere, so thick I couldn’t see the knights on either side of me, even though we were still more or less in formation.

“There they go!” someone shouted.