Page 14 of The Hymn to Dionysus

When I first came back to Thebes and I’d been stopped for Inappropriate Apparel, I’d said, That’s a stupid law, I’m not doing that; and sometimes, six months later, I woke up pouring sweat in the middle of the night, thinking I was still in the airless little cell with no water. It had only been a two-day detention, but gods almighty it had been hot. I’d been convinced I was going to die, without my sword in my hand and nowhere near a battlefield, like a deserter.

She nodded at my bag.

I handed it over. She looked through. There was nothing in it except the flask, a lamp for when I walked home tomorrow night, a little cask of lamp oil, and my ration tablet.

We have two layers of nobility: the knights, who are serving soldiers, and the Guards, who police the knights. That’s necessary, I’ll very grudgingly admit, because there are thousands of knights. A knight is a free citizen with full civil rights, a vote, and exemption from the death penalty except for desertion. Birth and blood don’t matter for knights, only combat lineage: who your commander is, and who their commander was. The Guards, though, are harvested from the five families closest to the throne. They don’t serve in the legions.

“Are you carrying silver or gold?” she said, not sounding nearly as bored or as perfunctory as I would have liked.

(Penalty for carrying silver or gold inside city walls: five years of slavery.)

“No, lady.” I kept my eyes on the ground.

“Alcohol?”

(Penalty for a knight becoming inebriated on active service: five years of slavery.)

“No, lady.”

“Have you recently sent or you do intend to send your slaves for gold, silver, or alcohol?”

It was tempting to say, Yes, I’ve got legions of slaves lined up and a giant shipment from Hattusa waiting at the dock. I’m going to build myself a house out of wine jars and then decorate the whole lot in filigree.

(Penalty for a false confession: ten years of slavery.)

“No, lady.”

She was studying my ration tablet. “You’re well provided for,” she remarked when she saw the allowances. Her eyes ticked over me. “Unmarried, though. Where’s your sense of duty, Sown?”

It was rhetorical. I kept looking at the ground. She couldn’t arrest me for being unmarried. I’d paid the fine already this month. It said so on the tablet.

She gave the tablet back. “Well. There you are, Polemarch Heliades of the Fifth Unit,” she said, irritatingly enunciating every single syllable so it sounded like one word—pol-eh-mark-hell-ee-a-dees—with a wryness that said, In my day we didn’t let dishonourable unmarried idiots become polemarch of a whole unit of knights. “Duty is honour.”

“Duty is honour,” I muttered, and thought, Well, when the bread riots come and someone impales on you a big spike, I shall be far too busy looking meekly at the ground like a good knight to notice. The Athenians, sod them all, have a stupid joke about exactly this. Our word for pupil, as in eyes, is parthenos. But that’s also our word for a virgin; Athenian teenagers keep their eyes down, because Athenian men are psychopaths. So some smart-arse noticed that we do that too and started calling us the parthenai, which means “the virgins.” You’ll hear it every time Theban soldiers meet Athenian soldiers. Oi oi, watch out lads, the virgins are coming.

As I say, they’re much improved by being on fire.

Feeling as though I were wearing a red flag that said COME AND GET ME, I started across the market square. It would have been easier if I’d been able to hear. I wasn’t deaf, yet; I could hear someone close to me. But I couldn’t hear general diffuse things, like one set of footsteps coming closer to me among many. I started losing my hearing on the day Troy fell. It was odd: I hadn’t been too near any explosions and no one had hit me on the head. But that afternoon while I sat in the throne room, with some very good cakes from the palace kitchen, the world fell quiet, as though Athena had put me in an invisible box.

“Need a labourer, sir?”

I just managed to catch myself before I swung round and punched him in the eye. He must have seen me twitch, because he jolted right back from me, hands up. I held mine up too, well away from my sword. When I looked around, there were a dozen people already, looking ragged and determined. Lots of them had clay signs around their necks that said things like STRONG LABOURER or FLUENT IN EGYPTIAN, mostly in the same handwriting, because it would be only one or two of them who could write.

They were all talking at once, and I could only catch random snatches.

“I know olives, and yews—”

“Someone to teach your children? I speak Egyptian—”

“I can weave!”

“I’m worth ten oxen but you can have me for four!”

“No. I’m sorry,” I said, completely unable to tell if I was talking loudly enough. “Good luck.”

Some of them followed me across the square anyway.

For me, in the legion, slaves were people who you stole from other places. It had been a strange revelation that those people were in the tiny minority of slaves generally. Most people are born into hereditary service—that would be civil servants like scribes and Palace administrators—or they sell themselves. All these people here now would have been farmers or herders or weavers this time last season, struggling but just about making ends meet. Now there were hardly any crops to grow, and the price of wool was sky-high because it was so hard to keep sheep alive in the drought, and even goats were struggling; nobody could make a living any more. So they offered themselves for sale. Instead of paying a merchant, you paid their family, a kind of advance for future labour—only, much cheaper than it would have been if they’d been able to wait for payment until after the work was done.