Page 13 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I looked up, through a thinner shroud in the smoke, at the spire of a temple—I’d never known which god the temple of was for, but I’d spent more than a decade hate-admiring those spires and their golden roofs, and wondering how they were built so high. People were jumping from the top: priestesses in green, falling like peacocks that had been shot midair.

I had a surge of exhausted joy and joined in when my unit cheered. The priestesses only jumped from a city’s towers when it was certain to fall. Their god must have told them we would win. Thank fuck. It had only taken thirteen years.

Our trumpets sounded, and the signal flags went up. Advance.

“Mind out,” someone said to me, on the steps to the High City in Thebes, here, now, in the broiling summer and the smoke haze from sacrifices.

Even though I knew exactly what was happening—and this was what drove me so mad—even though I knew I wasn’t really at Troy at all, I was in Thebes, and I was on my way to the garrison for the night—it was so discombobulating that I couldn’t even say sorry for blocking the way up the narrow stairway. I just made an incoherent noise and shuffled to the side, not very certain about standing up, because a big portion of my mind couldn’t tell if I was on the steps, or if I was among the wreckage outside the city walls on that frozen winter morning with ice forming across the filigree of my breastplate.

“Ah—are you . . . all right?” the woman said tentatively. She was older than me, scribe-looking; yes, with a crate of clay tablets strapped to her back.

“Yes. Sorry.” What was I even saying? Was it words? “I’m—it’s—it’s just the heat.” I sounded like a Persian dandy who needed his own special fainting couch.

She looked relieved she wouldn’t have to do anything else, and carried on.

Once she had gone, I smacked the back of my own hand to try to make myself recognise what was now and what wasn’t. It wasn’t like remembering, those flashes. It didn’t feel like sitting on some steps and thinking, Hm, yes, it was cold that day, all the while fully knowing where I was now, and when. It felt like it was happening again. Happening, as real as the heat and sacrifice smoke and the taste of leather flask.

It did work, sort of. My hand hurt. Now. Right. Good.

I was still shaking. It was making the water in my flask slosh.

You go through life imagining you’re a decent soldier of use and honour, and then one day you come home and you’re just a lump who obstructs the paths of commuting scribes. How the sodding wheel turns.

“Stop it,” I said, in case hearing a voice giving an order would help, even if it was my voice. “Come on.” I couldn’t be late, not today.

When I did get up—victory!—I felt weak, but not so badly as before. I carried on slowly. One step; one step. Gradually, something like strength came back into my knees, and I stopped feeling like I might collapse. All right. Good; good. I might still be on time.

I had no idea what those bizarre little episodes of uselessness were, and I didn’t want to find a witch and enquire. It was humiliating and probably it was just hunger and heat. Our rations were down to two thirds recently, which isn’t ideal when you train for four hours a day. Hopefully, the visions would die once the autumn finally came, and it had to come soon. We were almost in Harvest Month now—or what would have been Harvest Month, if there were anything to harvest.

Behind me, the sunset was burning orange through the smoke. It was different to Troy.

It was. The sunsets had been a strange kind of indigo there.

It was fine.

At the top, I had to stop again to wait for a funeral procession to go by. There were no mourners, just hot, dusty priests, with six or seven biers draped in cheap beige cloth. All the shapes underneath were far too thin. That was the most I’d seen at once, so far; things were getting worse. I bowed my head. Slaves always die first when the rations go down. They have half as much as citizens even in the best of times.

Every day, I walked up here betting myself that today was the day the garrison would be sent out to deal with bread riots. It was a miracle nothing had happened yet. Rations kept shrinking, which meant the civil granaries were nearly empty, and in the garrison, we were all restless, the way you always are when you know you’ll be fighting soon. And we would be fighting soon: we would have to be. If you can’t harvest grain, the only thing left is to steal it.

I was hoping we’d be sent to Athens. Athens is always improved by being on fire.

A great archway led into the square. It was a new monument to the fallen, visible right across the city because it was four storeys tall, and it was carved with images of hundreds of soldiers seething before the walls of Troy. In alcoves stood marvels of people who had served with particular valour. There were seven, one for each of the city’s seven gates, every one blessed by a temple and half-deified to join the ranks of the war-saints of Thebes. There was a knight who had led the cavalry charge that finally broke the Trojan infantry; a witch who had stayed with us even during the plague and saved at least a thousand wounded; a noble lady who had killed her son when she found out that he had deserted his unit.

Helios should have been up there. He would have, if I had held the line and he’d got the death he deserved.

I tried not to think about him. If I did, I could feel the space where he’d used to be much too clearly. It was person-sized but it was deep, a chasm all the way down to the halls of the Queen Below and the snicker of the waters of the Acheron. It didn’t matter what I tried to fill it with, people or work or distractions. Those things just clacked bleakly on the rocks on the way down and vanished into the dark. So it just followed me around, a sort of shadow that the setting of the sun didn’t blur or fade. If I sat still for long enough, it sat down next to me and took up all the air.

I’d stopped trying to fill it. Now I was just waiting for the boy with blue eyes to come back for his revenge, and then that would be that.

I stopped in the shadow of the monument and glanced both ways, checking for Guards. None so far, but they were everywhere in the High City. I pulled my cloak out of my bag and, despite a very urgent need to throw it as far from me as I could, I put it on, clipping its buckles to the ones on the shoulders of my breastplate.

“Knight!” a clear harsh voice called.

Ugh.

I arranged my face into the expression of quietly cheerful courtesy it’s advisable to adopt around the Guards.

Among the dull smoky buildings and the dull smoky people, the Guard’s cloak was vivid purple. She was walking towards me, slowly, because the Guards never rush.