Page 19 of The Hymn to Dionysus

When he put his hands down to take mine and lever me upright again, they were so fragile I was scared to close my fingers over them. I stared at the hem of his red ceremony robe, floor length, so I wouldn’t stare at him. Because knights have to look at the floor, Theban hems are often worth looking at. His had a ribbon of glorious Hatti embroidery on it—maybe it was an illustration of a story—and the tiny figures there were wearing armour stitched in gold and silver. It was subtle, but it glinted.

“You’re Phaidros Heliades?” he asked, and my skeleton went tight, because usually when someone asks me that, it’s because they’re checking they’re not about to stab an innocent person who happens to look like me.

“Yes, lord.”

“You were sworn to my uncle.”

I was struggling to hear him over the drums, which I could feel through the ground as much as through the air. “Yes, lord.”

He nodded once. He didn’t move like someone his age. He went slowly, marvel precise. The weight of the crown was heavy, even though he wasn’t wearing it yet. “Would you mind if I stood with you to watch this?”

“Please,” I said, wondering what was happening now. Princes don’t pay attention to unmarried polemarchs of young regiments.

“The Queen is arranging for me to marry an Egyptian,” he said, from nothing.

I tried to fit the ideas together and struggled. I’d never heard of it before. Egyptian ladies do not leave Egypt. If you die away from Egypt, your soul gets lost; when your chance of dying in childbirth is one in five, the odds are unattractive for most people.

“Are you going to Memphis?” I said at last. That was the only possible way for him to be on the same continent as his future wife, even though as far as I knew, there had never been a Theban king in waiting who didn’t live in Thebes.

He nodded.

“Why?” I said, because I couldn’t imagine an African lady being at all interested in marrying the prince of what, to her, would seem like a shack at the end of the world. There were Egyptian shepherds with more land and more wealth than Pentheus would inherit even when he was king. There was more money, more influence, more culture at the court of the Pharaoh than there was in all the separate cities of Achaea put together, to the tenth power. The whole earth turns around Memphis.

Ahead of us, the drums rolled on, and the priestesses danced, and the hymn stretched up for the bronze sky, where the sun was rising. I looked up, thinking about my futile little prayer burning on Apollo’s altar, and wondered if he’d heard, or cared. God of the sun, and god of the wolf: it was hard to imagine that he would ever pass on messages from a broken knight who had burned his altars at Troy.

“The Queen says it will be to our advantage to have some presence at court in Memphis.”

It wouldn’t. Nobody would involve him in anything. It would be the same as our queen consulting a swamp person fresh from his mud hut on the Tin Isles. “And . . . what do you say, lord?”

“I say she’s getting rid of me so she can start again and get a better heir, hoping I die conveniently of marsh fever en route.” He kept his tone entirely neutral, like any young Sown person should do, but it was strained.

“Nile’s very clean, probably no joy there.”

He smiled, a very tiny smile, but still a smile. He looked up at me properly for the first time. “I don’t want to go,” he said.

“We all go where we’re sent, lord; obedience is strength,” I said.

The sun was just lifting over the city wall, drawing a clear bright line across my shield, and everyone else’s.

At the far gate, some stable hands were leading out the bulls for the sacrifice, very carefully. Bulls in other countries are sometimes about the height of a person. Not ours. They’re aurochs; they are to those smaller bulls what Herakles is to me. Their horns are as long as my arms or more, and standing straight, I would perhaps reach the shoulder of a slighter one. These were white and gold, beautiful things, and allowed to roam mainly wild in the royal fields, bred to be the best sacrifice for the gods they could possibly be. I felt tired, more than before. The animals were so lovely, and all of Thebes had been burning sacrifices for weeks. The smoke from the fires was hazing above the ground right now. Maybe it was blasphemy to think so, but I couldn’t imagine that twelve more would make any difference.

The part of me that had used to work overseeing rations in the camp outside Troy said, At least the sacrifices mean people are getting some food. The gods want the burnt bones of a sacrifice—people have the meat. The Queen was making this sacrifice not just to appease whichever gods were angry with us, but to feed the crowd and stave off starvation. Twelve bulls go a long way.

Pentheus stared unwavering across the parade ground. “What I want is irrelevant. I know, the Queen says so too. It’s noteworthy, though, how she always ends up with what she wants.”

A significant part of me was annoyed to hear him scratch at his responsibilities even that much, particularly while he was surrounded by knights younger than he was whose duties were far harder than his. “Duty is the price we pay for being rich, free, and well thought of all at the same time,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.

“But why does it have to be like that?”

I watched him for a second. “Because people as powerful as you, who go through life thinking they have a god-given right to do whatever they want, do not make good kings.”

“I don’t think I can do whatever I want, but I’ve never even been away from Thebes. I can’t go to Egypt.”

Everyone has a turn of phrase that sends them instantly from nought to homicidal. Helios had hated people who said apparently. Although he had been far too restrained to punch anyone over a meeting table, there had been a general who he had called Apparently Megara with the kind of raw loathing most people save for leeches.

My nought-to-homicidal thing was, I can’t {insert possible but inconvenient thing here}.

“You won’t asphyxiate the second you see the Nile,” I said. I was impressed with myself that I held back from saying, Well, when I was your age, a crocodile on the Nile once snatched me off the ship, everyone took the piss for months, and there are still people in the garrison who call me Delicious Phaidros: would you like to see the giant scar and then whinge about being married to a fine lady?