Page 2 of The Hymn to Dionysus

When he told me the story again later, once we were back at the beaches and the raids, one of my favourite bits was always the marvel Herakles. When you’re tucked in bed and cuddled up with your commander and the sentries are tall and strong outside and the perimeter fires are blazing, titan scary things have a way of feeling cosy.

Cities in Achaea usually have two parts. First there’s the lower city, which is where most people live. Thebes’s lower city seemed to me like a chaos of stone ways that looked like the tiny tunnels inside bones, full of people like I’d never seen before. There were old people all over the place, with grey hair—they hadn’t been killed or starved, they looked quite good even, some of them in very fine robes and gold chains. Men and women dressed differently from each other, not all in armour, which seemed risky, and children with no obvious commanders played in the fountains. On the steps of a great temple, a whole flock of priestesses in deep, bright red were playing an intense game of pickup sticks. Nothing was on fire, and nobody was running away from us. Some boys wearing metal collars and dark clothes bowed to us. They were incredibly pale, all foam-coloured, with light hair that didn’t look real. I twisted round to see them go, trying to decide if they were normal or some kind of monster.

“They’re from the Tin Islands,” Helios told me. I must have looked worried. “People are strange there. When they’re little, they have white hair, and as they get older, it gets darker.”

Sometimes he made things up, but the boys really did have horrible colourless hair, and horrible colourless eyes. “Yuck,” I decided.

And then, above it all, is the High City. This is the home of the Palace, and sometimes the grandest temple. In Thebes, the Palace is on a great spar of rock a clear three hundred feet above the town. Helios guided the horse that way, because his sister—and being four, I thought this was a normal thing for a person’s sister to be—was the Queen.

The Palace was called the Kadmeia, after King Kadmus who killed the dragon. The halls were cool, pale marble. I hunched against Helios’s shoulder as tight as I could. The only marble places I’d been to before were tombs, and I didn’t want to walk on the stone. It seemed dead. But it was good to be inside, because it was starting to rain, plinking and shimmering on Helios’s armour. He bundled me up in his cloak, and while we waited for his sister, he stood on the steps with me, looking down over the city. He told me what we were seeing: the Temple of Ares, all white. Harper Mountain, in the west. The sacred forest, where only women were allowed to go.

“How come only they can go?”

“To get away from us. Otherwise we’d end up planted in the vegetable patch.”

“Why would they plant us?” I said, confused.

He started to laugh, and then he apologised, and said I was completely right, but sometimes people did mistake very troublesome men for vegetables. For months and months after, I made him check me over in the bath for any suspect-looking shoots that might suggest I’d been bad and I was imminently turning into an onion.

I’d never met a lady before. All the women I knew were normal women. They wore armour and spent most of their time fixing boats or training; and sometimes I met women who were slaves, who did lots of work. When the Queen came down the steps to find us, I didn’t really understand that she was a human. She was so different. She was clean like I’d never seen anyone before. Her clothes were amazing; she had a purple dress, really purple, a colour so expensive I’d have been lucky to steal a purple sock, and it was girdled and pinned with gold, and there was gold in her hair, and on her fingers. I hid against Helios’s shoulder, because there was something a lot more forbidding about that purple gown than a knight’s armour. I could see it was for something a lot less straightforward than armour.

“And this must be your new ward?” she said to Helios. She sounded just like him. “I can’t believe they decided you were sensible enough to look after a whole human.”

“He’s only a tiny human,” Helios laughed, scooping her into a hug that crushed me between them. I hated it, because she didn’t smell of normal things like armour polish and sweat, but flowers, and something smoky and alien that I realized a lot later was incense. When Helios was telling me the story in the months and years to come, he sometimes lit incense to make me remember that smell. “This is Phaidros. Phaidros, this is Queen Agave.”

She bowed to me and I bowed back as well as you can when you’re four and holding hard onto someone else’s breastplate strap. Helios rubbed my hair, which was what he did instead of saying well done.

“Phaidros; are you really?” Phaidros means “bright.” “Are you good at puzzles?”

I grew up with that joke. “No, I’m quite stupid actually,” I said, because it saved time and humiliation when I didn’t know the answer to riddles.

She laughed, and Helios tapped me gently. “I’m quite stupid actually, my lady.”

“My lady,” I repeated, embarrassed.

The bizarrest thing about memories is how, just like things in the real world, they change with perspective. At the time, I remember thinking Helios and the Queen were both unfathomably grown-up and glamorous. But now, looking back, they were children themselves. They must have been about fifteen.

Helios carried me all the way through the Palace’s looming halls, out to a garden where there was grass and a great fountain, and he only put me down once there was no more stone. I stayed close to him, not sure about the fountain. The water was moving by itself and I couldn’t see how. In it, there was a statue of Poseidon. As I watched, He turned His head.

I tugged Helios’s cloak.

“Hello, small knight?”

I pointed. “There’s a monster,” I said, in the clear way I’d been taught to report dangerous things, like oncoming chariot lines or a cloud of arrows.

“Ah, no. He’s a marvel, like Herakles. Come on, let’s give Him an offering. He’s good, the priests made Him, He’s here to watch over—”

I hid under a hedge. Knights take a vow of honesty, but Helios’s definition of truth was nearly as snaky as Dionysus’s would be later. I was just about old enough to suspect that sometimes he told strategic lies so that he wouldn’t have to deal with a small, frightened child in moments when he didn’t especially have the time to do that. I’d been convinced until recently that sometimes enemy troops liked to go for a swim face down in the sea so they could say hello to the fish, which they were able to do on account of how foreigners secretly had gills. Having spoken to a lot of foreign slaves in my increasingly good Hatti, though, I was starting to conclude that the gills situation might not quite be what he’d claimed.

He got down on his front to see me. “Honestly. It’s not a monster.”

“You’re full of it, sir.”

He hung his head. “That is true. I am.”

Behind him, the Queen thought, and then, without worrying about the purple gown or the gold, or looking silly, she climbed into the fountain where the water was knee-deep, sat down on Poseidon’s lap, and put her purple veil on Him. I giggled. So did Helios. And then we all played in the fountain, and Poseidon seemed not to mind at all. Helios gave me a little carved bead to put in the marvel’s hand and told me how to say the right prayer, and Poseidon bowed His head courteously, and I was rapt.

It was raining more by then, but it wasn’t cold. The summer had been blazing so far even at sea, and it was the kind of rain that comes because the weather is pent up and frustrated after weeks of nothing but searing sky and hot winds. Above the city, the clouds were gathering dark, the dark that would have been dangerous on the sea. If we’d been on the ships, we would have been steering for shore now, and finding a shallow berth where the storm couldn’t hurt the hulls. I glanced up at Poseidon, wondering anxiously whether He was annoyed.