Page 17 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Jason,” I said as Jason passed me again—not needing to ask what he was doing or planning because if it was upsetting even his commander, who was surely numb to most of his nonsense now, then it was probably as well not to invite it into permanent memory storage—“what makes you imagine I won’t tell everyone your favourite thing is silk trousers from Persia, before I plant a pair in a particularly startling shade of mauve among your gear in the next inspection?”

He stopped walking.

“You wouldn’t, sir,” he said, not sounding very certain.

“Feel free to risk it, then,” I said with not very well-concealed glee, because of the pair of mauve Feral Jason–sized trousers waiting for deployment in the secret cupboard under my desk.

He grumped off back to the rubbish ditch to put back whatever horrifying thing it was he’d salvaged from it to start with. I saw his commander relax, or relax as much as a human can if they’re permanently responsible for a Feral Jason.

Polydorus saw me watching and came across. Whatever he wanted to say must have been important, because like everyone else about my age, he tended to avoid me. Maybe he was cursed with Jason, but I was cursed generally.

“You know his history?” he asked. He was a superb archer, and he spoke like he shot: straight to the target, with a tight-strung air that said he was waiting for you to forget what you were doing, nock your arrow with the cock feather up, and accidentally shoot at a perfect ninety-degree angle right into his eye. Lately he seemed more like that with me than with other people.

I nodded. “His first commander was Ajax. You rescued him after the herd of dismembered goats incident.”

Polydorus nodded slightly. “He doesn’t choose to be like this. He’s a good boy.”

He was younger than me, so he couldn’t give me orders, but he was on the edge of it. If I stayed unmarried for much longer, I could expect a lot more of that. I’d not done the decent thing and died for Thebes in battle, and barring that, I hadn’t done the next most decent thing and had children to start replacing the fallen. I was just here, taking up rations for no reason.

“He is a good boy,” I agreed, “but he does choose, and what he chooses is to be a horrible little sod, because you let him.”

He looked like he wanted to say something else, but then he changed his mind and bowed—not deep enough—and went fast after Jason. I wondered how long it would be before junior officers stopped bowing. Probably not long. And then; well, it would be impossible to keep control of this unit. I’d seen it happen before, I’d been in one of those units with an ageing unmarried polemarch, seventeen years old and at my peak Dick Phaidros stage. We had hounded him. So had the other officers.

He had walked into the sea one morning.

I thought about him a lot lately.

I wasn’t going to get married, though. You can’t involuntarily attack anyone who makes you jump and be married at the same time. Either I would kill her accidentally, or she would kill me on purpose. Whatever happened, I’d have to live with it, until the boy from the shore came.

I didn’t have time to think long, because a scribe arrived, bowed a good distance from me, and gave me a tablet at arm’s length. I had to stretch to take it. She looked like she was trying to stay out of easy punching range.

I soon saw why. The tablet said our rations were being cut again; it listed the new weights of everything. It hadn’t been a lot before. Now it was what we would have given slaves a year ago.

What I wanted to do was run into the general’s office and demand to know, after an introductory scream of primordial rage, what the fuck the Palace thought it was doing. If you don’t feed children properly, they don’t grow, and you end up trying to defend your city with knights who are a foot smaller than the Spartans. Which the Palace fucking knew already. That was why we always gave slaves less than citizens: if you’ve got a whole mass of workers whose lives are always horrible and who will absolutely try to kill you once they’re miserable enough, you want them to be little. And if things were this bad, why hadn’t we been sent raiding? Why was the whole garrison just sitting here while everyone starved?

Instead, I walked fast to catch up with a kitchen slave who was just crossing the shady part of the courtyard with a basket of eggs. They were steaming, so they must just have been hard-boiled. The Palace sits on hot springs, and in the kitchens, they used big troughs to boil hundreds of eggs at a time in the hotter pools. “Pardon me,” I said quietly. “But if I were to owe you a debt, Sown knight to a good lady, would you mind pretending to faint and letting everyone steal a few eggs?”

“Can I have a lock of your hair?” she said, worryingly instantly.

I cut off a twist of my hair, tied it in a knot, and gave it to her. “Do I want to know why?”

She laughed. “I’ll give it to my husband. He’s obsessed with you. If I ever go a week without hearing the story about Phaidros Heliades and Princess Andromache, I’ll die happy.”

“Right,” I creaked, hoping that her husband wasn’t a lie-in-wait-in-a-hedge type.

She walked another twenty yards or so and then fainted, amazingly realistically.

There was a charged pause, and then everyone close by snatched a couple of eggs each and melted into the cloisters, and within seconds all the eggs were gone. I made a show of helping her up, wrote on the wax stock tablet and signed it with my seal bead (EGGS STOLEN BY JASON POLYDORIADES, APOLOGIES, SIGN. POL. PH. HELIADES), and escaped with a stolen egg of my own. Around the cloister, the little knights were bartering excitedly with each other for eggs as if it were a feast day.

For a second it was funny and I felt pleased and then, like always, immediately sad because I had no one to tell except the Nothing that had used to be Helios; and then I realized it was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

I hadn’t made my offering to Herakles yet—I’d meant to give him the egg, so that one of the little knights could steal it later—but I stopped beside the marvel and stood there staring at it, wondering what I even thought I was doing.

I’d never prayed to the god from the ship. I didn’t know his name, so I didn’t know which altar to try, but even if I had, I’d never prayed for anything to any god: I made sacrifices in the way I paid taxes. Gods are like queens. You pay what you owe and in return they don’t notice you.

But if a bad day was going to be watching the little knights die on a raid in Athens, and a good day was finding an egg, then I didn’t want to hide beneath his notice any more.

He had been my guest all those years ago. I should have died defending him. All this, everything after, it was just one long wrong turn. If he would come back—then at least I could give him the revenge he was owed. I could die doing something decent, like I should have on the ship, and maybe he might even feel better for it.