Page 21 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Footprints.

They were only there for a few seconds. Then the glass cooled; the surface dulled, then cracked; and the prints were lost as shards of it shattered and burst.

The most incredible bubble of hope-dread rose in my chest. I’d prayed to the boy from the shore to come, and what if he really had, what if he was here? I’d die in a few seconds, but that didn’t matter. I’d see him again. I might even have time to tell him I was sorry. And then, well, Helios had said he would wait for me in Hades, without crossing the river. Helios said a lot of things, so I wasn’t too sure he’d meant it, but maybe he had. Maybe I was about to see my whole family again in the space of the next minute.

I looked around, desperate for someone else to say, Gods alive, did you see that, someone walked out of that, or maybe even to see a pair of blue eyes I knew from long ago.

I didn’t find either of those, and instead, I almost jumped away from my own bones, because right beside me was one of the aurochs, fully twice my size. Its eyes were starry in the light of the molten glass. As if it were worried it had startled me, it bumped its nose very gently against my chest. My shoulders fitted between its horns.

“Help,” I said, very quiet. They weren’t tame, the bulls. I was lost in the smoke; nobody could see me. Everyone else was talking and theorising, and I couldn’t make out any individual words over that hellish cracking of the glass. The bull snorted. Its breath fogged my breastplate. It was twitchy: it didn’t like the noise either.

Someone touched my shoulder.

I turned my head just enough to see a tall figure in a black veil. His hand on me was tattooed dark red to his knuckles, like he had dipped his fingers in blood. He didn’t say anything, because it would have spooked the bull, but he didn’t need to. I let my breath out. A witch.

As if it wasn’t a wild monster which could have ground him into mince, he stroked the bull’s head and touched its nose to steer it to the side, away from me. When the wind caught the veil, it outlined the side of his face and I thought he might have been about my age, but that was all I could see of him.

The bull looked pleased with him and bumped his shoulder companionably. I thought he was laughing. As soon as its horns were away from me, I backed away from the edge of the crater, my hand on my sword in case he needed help, but he didn’t. He must have called to them somehow, because the other bulls were thumping across to him too, shaking the ground. Around us, other people were phantoms in the smoke and the dust, and to me, there was a kind of background roar-shush that was made of people shouting and talking and wondering. Three bulls; four; ten. They dwarfed the witch, but he still didn’t seem afraid, and they were still all behaving like happy lambs, snuffing at him and nudging him, but careful of their horns. As the last two came across, he led them away.

“Did you see that?” Pentheus exclaimed, suddenly right next to me. “He just took them away like it was nothing!” He sounded more impressed by that than the crater.

“There were footprints in the glass,” I said, not loudly enough.

I caught a few snatches of the voices around us. People were talking about falling stars and signs from the gods, though nobody seemed to be agreeing about what the sign meant. The Queen’s prophet had come down from the royal balcony to stand on the edge of the crater, scrying in the molten glass.

“There were what?”

What was he supposed to do about it even if there were? Start a hunt through the crowd for whoever was—what, on fire? Nobody was.

When they have dealings with people, gods look like people. Gods can even look like specific people. Helios swore he once had an entire conversation with me, even though I’d actually been—unbeknownst to him—on a scouting mission at the time. He hadn’t just spoken to someone who sounded like me through the tent wall. I had been in front of him: my armour, my scar, everything. I would have thought he was just winding me up if he hadn’t been openly disturbed by it. Something had been there.

Someone in this crowd, maybe even someone I knew, wasn’t a human being at all. I stared around, not even knowing what I was looking for, except maybe—the bubble of hope was still there but shrinking—for someone who was looking for me.

“Where’s the prince?”

A Guard was right next to me, trying to make me hear.

Pentheus was running after the witch, little-boy buoyant to see real magic. Just as he started to fade into the smoke I saw him catch up. He looped his arm through the witch’s, and then laughed when the witch took his hand and put it on the forehead of one of the bulls.

We have a word, deinos. It means “terrible” and “amazing” at the same time—it’s one of those inside-out words that means two things which should be opposites. It’s a word for horrifying miracles, and beautiful cataclysms, and gods. There was something deinos about the witch too: enough that I found myself staring hard at the ground where he had walked, in case his steps were burned into the sand.

They weren’t. Of course they weren’t.

He did look back, though. I couldn’t tell through the veil, but I had an uneasy feeling he was looking straight at me. Just for a moment, he was entirely still, a tall black spectre beside the prince and shaded by the Queen’s holy bulls against the pounding heat of the glass and the furnace dawn. Then the wind shifted, and they all disappeared into the smoke.

Nobody came to look for me, and there was no flash of blue eyes.

8

Nothing happened, and nothing happened. The crowds started to move away from the smoke, some carrying shards of glass from the crater in case those would bring luck. Slaves came out to start clearing the rubble from the torn-up flagstones, coughing and ash-stained. The prophets clustered together, consulting about what to do, and what it meant, and whether we should still sacrifice the bulls. Feeling like I was caught in the fall between someone kicking my ankle out and hitting the ground, all I could do was herd together the little knights to count them—all present: even Jason, unfortunately, had failed to vaporise—and start seeing them back to the garrison. The more time went by, the more certain I was that I’d tricked myself into seeing those prints in the glass, and the more I felt like an idiot for hoping. Of course there was no god coming.

In among streams of other knights, we reached the training yards as if it were any other morning. There was an excitable buzz through everyone, but it dimmed gradually as different polemarchs herded their units away to training, and the ordinary rhythm of the morning seemed like it was going to start uninterrupted.

It wasn’t until we were in our yard and the little knights were fetching their training shields that I heard it.

Someone was singing.

Everywhere is different. In some places, people will tear someone apart for touching a shrine, or taking a god’s name in vain. In others, it happens because they slept with the wrong sort of person, or because they preached the wrong kind of politics from their box in the marketplace. It’s always different, and to everyone from outside, the one thing that drives people to murder looks bizarre, but every city in the world has its forbidden thing, and everyone reacts in the same way when they see it. Everyone feels deep-down repulsed, and everyone feels the overpowering need to just make it stop, even if you have to hit someone with a brick.