Page 23 of The Hymn to Dionysus

It echoed in the cool brick cellar, so that it sounded like there were a lot more voices than those five.

“What is that?” I asked. I wanted to scratch my skin off. “Where did they get it from?”

“We don’t know what it is,” he said, too gently, and I made an effort to hold myself still. A knight turning twitchy is not something anyone wants to see, even a priest of Ares. “But these two, and your lad, were on the parade ground when the star fell. If it was a star.”

“The star did it,” I echoed. Maybe there had been prints in the glass, maybe there was a god, just not the one I’d thought.

“Seems so,” he said, infuriatingly delicately.

“And the other three, who weren’t at the parade?”

“The first two spoke to them just after.”

I stared at them. Turning, turning. They started a new verse one after the next in an eerie chain—sing sing sing sing sing—and I had a weird sense that it wasn’t random. “It’s infectious?”

“Some kinds of madness are.” He took a deeper breath, probably getting ready to say something else vague and unhelpful, so I cut him off.

“So some people saw a star or a god come down, and now they’re virulently and identically mad,” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

He looked uncomfortable to have it laid out in a straight line. “If you like.”

“Of course I don’t fucking like. Can you say what you mean, please?”

“I mean,” he said, lowering his voice so much I could barely hear him, “the Queen does not take kindly to rumours of gods coming to Thebes.”

“Not really the Queen’s choice whether they do or not, is it?”

Something like understanding broke across his face. “When did you come back from Troy?”

“Six months ago.”

“You don’t know, then. Every so often, someone declares himself to be the lost prince, the son of Zeus, and the Queen—well, the Queen makes short work of him,” he said. His eyes darted to either side as though he were genuinely worried someone might be listening. “I’d be very careful too, if I were you. People have been killed for repeating rumours. Now come on, I don’t want you exposed longer than you have to be.”

I meant to go, but then I stopped, because I knew the words.

I couldn’t have said how, or where from. But they were there, in my head, like I was remembering something from a long, long time ago—the way you remember things that were drummed into you when you were tiny, and the recollection of who by or why is gone.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance,

Revel-bright and border-breaking

Ring, ring the bells . . .

I wanted to sing it too. Part of me said: You’ll feel so much better if you sing it.

It felt exactly like that urge to jump when you’re on the edge of a cliff.

The priest got me by the arm and tugged me to the stairs. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but given that it does seem to be infectious, I’m going to recommend that you don’t visit again.”

Maybe it was too late. Maybe I had it already, whatever it was. Maybe in an hour I’d start singing.

9

Knights train for four hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired and stars or gods are falling out of the sky and someone’s gone mad. It’s four hours a day, every day, unless you go into battle.

The young knights were learning how to turn as a unit. It’s difficult. If you’re marching straight, but then the order comes to form a shield wall on the right, everyone has to swing their shield right, not knock out the person next to them, and come to terms with the idea that they aren’t where they thought in the battle order. The person who was ten ranks back on the right side is now in the middle of the front line. Today, they were practising it again and again, and after ten tries, I jumbled them all up so that nobody was ever in the same position for long.

“Come on, again,” I said, as shields clattered and tangled, again.