Page 16 of The Hymn to Dionysus

The city gates closed at sunset. It meant traders couldn’t start out on any new journeys. Anyone out was either coming towards Thebes, where you had to pay a tax to enter after sunset, or they weren’t meant to be there at all.

In the drought, the only water within a day’s walk of the city was Lake Copais; the only road there is called Artemis’s Way. It isn’t by accident that Artemis is the god of the Hunt.

As they opened the North Gate, the watchmen made the sign of the bull at us. I’ve never been able to work out if was a way to wish us luck, or to keep us away from their households, if the time ever came. The bronze gates, each one three feet thick, swung open soundlessly on hydraulics more ancient than some of our gods, and on the wall, the marvels turned to watch us go, each one holding a torch to light the gate for the night, hazy in the smog of the sacrifice fires. Even by the moonlight, the columns of black smoke were rising clear. I could make out the glows of the altars.

I know there are places in Egypt and the wider world where it’s different, but our cities have a wall, and then that’s it. The city stops there; the watchmen stop there; and mostly, the law stops there. You ride from lights, and people, and tiny glimpses of potters up late in their workshops, painting beautiful things onto wine jars—across a border into a country that doesn’t belong to humans. There’s the road, and the dark, and on the back of your neck, a heavy awareness that you need to know exactly how long it takes you to shift your grip on your spear and throw it.

I was always more alert to that when I was with a very young unit. For all they were well-trained and mostly sensible, they were still ducklings in some important ways. Knights start young and they do grow up quickly—you can give command of a whole unit to someone who’s seventeen and you’ll have a perfectly good result—but there is a limit. Things still spook them. They’re still brand-new.

“Are those just beacon lights on the road up there, sir?” one of the younger girls asked me over the noise of the horses’ hooves. She sounded fizzy and excited, just like I had when I first did this. I was relieved, because when you have to make a group of children murder some people who’ve done nothing to them, the best way for them to be is excited.

Excited means they’re not afraid, they won’t waver over what they have to do, they won’t lose their grip on their swords. The ones I worried about were the ones who could put themselves too easily in the shoes doing the running.

“No, knight. Those are wagons.” The lights ahead started to wink out as the people in the wagons realized what was coming up behind them.

“I think they’re going away from us!”

“They are. Do you want to fire the flare for me?”

I’d never seen anyone look so pleased with something so small. “Thank you, sir!”

I gave her the arrow with the oil-soaked rag wrapped around the tip, held her spear in exchange, and took the reins of her horse just to be sure as she threaded the arrow into the bow. “Ready?”

“Yes, sir.” She touched the tip into the torch of the boy on her other side and fired into the sky. The arrow drew a line of orange into the dark, up ahead of the riders.

Behind us, there was a bang as a hundred spears thunked into a new grip in a hundred gauntlets, shifted from upright to horizontal. I looked back to see if anyone was slow, but they were doing well tonight. We had drilled it a dozen times a day for weeks. They all locked their elbows into place so that the spear shafts stayed level with the cheek plates of their helmets. Theban spears aren’t wood but bronze; they’re hollow inside, very light, but the young knights train with solid iron, so that when the time comes, they’ll be able to hold the real thing steady indefinitely. Here and there in the torchlight, silver charms and blessed ribbons winked. Some of them had tiny clay tabs bound to them with wire, written by priestesses at the Temple of Athena. They said things like MAY I ALWAYS FLY TRUE and NEVER MISS.

The wagons up ahead of us were clear now. They had pulled to the side of the road, and there were people running away over the dusty, scrubby land that, when I was a child, had been brilliant green fields.

I held up my spear so that the ranks behind me could see, and the first lines of the hymn to Ares lifted up into the dark.

Ares golden-helmed, bronze-clad, shield-bearer, city-saver . . .

The horses were trained to chase anything big that tried to get away from them once they heard the hymn, and the second they saw something to go after, they surged.

6

The little knights were fizzy when we got back to the garrison, and some of the younger ones were reenacting especially gory moments. I scooped a bucket of water from the fountain to wash the blood and the road grit out of my hair while I watched them play. It was just before dawn, which was searing pink onto the horizon.

“Keep it down,” I called. I couldn’t hear much but they were a garrulous bunch, this year. Secretly I liked that about them. Knights should be good at talking. “People are trying to sleep. Jason, that isn’t your lamb, let her go.”

They did good work of looking chastised.

“Herakles. Offerings. Like real humans,” I added, pointing at the marvel in the middle of our courtyard. The new sun was slinging orange and purple across his bronze shield. “Then you’ve got an hour before the Bull Ceremony. You need to be in day armour, and not asleep.”

They didn’t put Herakles in our yard because they want us to be like him. They put him there because they don’t. Everyone knows the first part of his story, about how strong he was and the labours, and the sodding Athenians like to leave it there, but that isn’t the end. The end is that when he goes home to his wife and his three children, he’s been too long fighting, and one night, he thinks they’re enemy soldiers and kills them all.

If you’re sitting there saying, Oh, no, what a dreadful thing to tell children, then you can fuck off to Athens and enjoy their puke-inducing happily-ever-after stories where everyone prances joyfully off into the joyful sunset like demented morons. It is not a proper story unless everyone murders each other at the end.

The young knights formed into a more or less orderly queue to leave Herakles some arrowheads, or filigree, or something else small but significant.

“Jason,” I said, more to my bucket than to him, “a severed hand is not an offering. Put it in the rubbish ditch or I will shove it so far up your arse it will be able to manipulate you like a repulsive little Jason-puppet.”

Some of the others laughed and Feral Jason did as he was told, doing what was actually quite a good impression of a sad sock puppet.

Their commanders were coming out to say hello and to ask how it had all gone. A boy called Amphitrion—he was one of my worries—was such a gentle, happy person that a few weeks ago he had bought a sacrifice lamb but had not been able to face the idea of actually putting her on the altar, so now she was a garrison mascot. His commander had come out with her and she was baaing happily. I was trying not to get too attached to her, because at some point Feral Jason would decide he wanted a lamb dinner, but it wasn’t working.

Jason’s commander was waiting too; he was a chronically tired-looking man with prematurely grey hair, a few years younger than me, and he was a walking piece of irony, because his name was Polydorus, which means “many-gifted.” Everyone called him Polynemesis, which means “repeatedly cursed.” I saw his expression turn pained.