Page 126 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Do you remember that game with three cups I used to play with you, when you were tiny? There’s a ball hidden and you have to guess which cup . . .?”

“Find the Lady?”

“Three children,” he said. “Semele’s baby. My ward. And another boy with a scar I bought at a slave market outside the Temple of Hermes.”

I frowned. “Three.”

“Before I say this—I know it’s ridiculous. But I was fifteen, and the Hidden were coming, and I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“No, I . . . I understand,” I said, but I stumbled over it because although I had known that of course he’d been fifteen, I’d always heard that through a child’s mind when he told me the story. Fifteen had seemed unreachably grown-up then. Now—the idea of expecting any one of my little knights, even the most cunning, to find some way of hiding a baby caught in a royal blood feud was so far beyond ridiculous that it hurt to think of.

“I took Semele’s baby to the Temple of Hermes. I was looking for witches. He was already the image of Semele, and the King, and the only thing I could think of that would keep him safe was growing up under the veil.”

I sat back, and only realized once I did that I’d been pushing my fists into the ground. There was moss among the black stones, living, even here, although the stones were strange. They were all eroded perfectly smooth, not like normal shore-shale at all; as though all the tides there could ever be had already worn them down. They were stones for the end of time.

“Hermes has always allowed people to give children to the witches, but a prince turning up in the middle of the night while the Kadmeia was on fire with a stolen baby—I thought I’d have to give them my armour to take him.” He frowned into the memory. “But as soon as we arrived—there were moths everywhere. Those huge ones that look like little ghosts. They were going to him like he was a lamp, and he was laughing. The witches all came to see, and the Holy Mother came out herself. She said I didn’t know what I’d brought them. She said he had brought me. Gods save me but—I believe it.”

“I don’t . . . understand,” I said, because that had to be Dionysus—but he had begun this story after I’d said I looked like him. I’d thought it was going to be an explanation about why.

He caught my eyes and nodded slightly to say he was getting to it. Commanders never apologise to their wards and nor should they, but this was the closest I’d seen him come to it, and I didn’t like it at all. I’d thought I knew what he’d done, or at least suspected, and I’d been getting ready to be hurt and angry, but now I was off balance again, and I felt like there was a very deep drop on one side of us.

“Round and round she goes,” he said, miming moving the cups, and I had a painful flash of being five and completely delighted that he could make things disappear. “Where she stops, nobody knows. When I left Hermes, I went to a slave trader and I bought a little boy, about four. With a scar. About your age. I took him to Apollo, told them he was called Phaidros. I left my dagger with him. I told the priests in not very cryptic terms that he was to find me if he ever had questions about where he came from.”

“A decoy,” I said, still struggling to catch up. Helios Polytropos, even now, even when I’d thought I knew all his tricks.

He nodded slightly. “And then, I took you back to the legion.” He paused, like it was hurting him to talk about it. He closed his hand over one of those timeless pebbles, which creaked against the others, and a little stream of dust-without-time lifted in its eerie, leisurely way. Across the river on the other shore, something laughed. It didn’t sound human. “I made sure that it looked strange. I took a year to get back, I told everyone I’d been shipwrecked. When I did rejoin a Theban unit, it wasn’t my original. You were little for your age, because we had had some bad years before then; so I told them you were a year older than you were, but I made sure I was giving you the kinds of toys much littler children would have—you didn’t care, you were happy with a rock—and so that made it sound like a lie: you looked three years too young. Word got round that I had a ward who was clearly younger than I was saying. I wrote messages back to the Temple of Apollo, knowing they’d be intercepted, asking after the boy there. That was all reported back to Agave. After that, I made sure we kept falling off the map. Trading runs to Tintagel, Scythia, even India once. To make it look like I was outrunning anyone who might be watching me.”

“You made it look like you took Semele’s baby with you,” I said. “So . . . gods. So that no one would look for him with the witches.”

“Yes.” He looked miserable. “But there was a problem.”

I waited. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to anyone more closely.

He put his hand out and covered mine. He was warm. It was a shock. It seemed insane that he could touch me here, but he felt as solid as he always had, and though the light was strange, our hands looked like they always had. Mine darker, his lighter.

“You never looked like you could be Semele’s,” he said. “I got you in Egypt. You were a child of the river. When we sieged Tanis and it fell, the Nile filled with babies in reed baskets. You were one. If I’d put you in a turquoise collar everyone would have thought you were a son of the Pharaoh. It was obvious you were nothing to do with the House of Kadmus.”

“But I do,” I said. “Look like her. You. I look really like you.”

I’d seen him look afraid once or twice before, but never of me. He did now. “The witches told me that it would be a problem. They . . .” His focus shifted to the side. “They told me something very strange. They told me to go to a bronzesmith, and have a new helmet made.”

I didn’t need to breathe any more, but I had been doing it until then. I stopped.

“They told me that the mask should be of me, not a god. And to let you play with it.” He really looked as though he was ready for me to punch him. “So I did. You loved it, you were always stealing it. And—the more you wore it, the more you looked like me. I don’t know what that magic was. They told me it would only work on you, you were—god-touched. By the time you were twenty . . . people were asking if you were my son. Nobody said nephew. But that was what they meant.”

I was grinning like the Festival of Apollo had come around early, but he didn’t see because he was still staring at the ground.

“It was a terrible thing to do. I put you in horrible danger. But you were fucking tough, Phaidros, even when you were tiny, and clever, and . . . I thought it wouldn’t matter down the line if someone accused you of being the heir. You’d find a way of out of it. I’m so sorry. Semele’s boy—he was blood kin. And you loved him. I couldn’t leave him for the Hidden. I don’t mean I didn’t want to, I couldn’t.”

“Helios—that’s fucking genius. I love it.”

His eyes came up fast. “What?”

“Don’t be silly, of course I love it.”

He laughed, just a bit.

There was a creak behind us; there was a ferry, drawn on groaning ropes that would take it to the far shore. A shadow stood at the great wheel that wound the ropes in and out. Soon we would be two of those figures on the shore waiting to go. I wondered what it would be like. We’d board the ferry knowing each other, and then—how long did it take for the river to make you forget? Would we reach the far shore and still know, sort of, that the other one was important, or would it just be gone—would it be like standing with a stranger?