Page 3 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Someone came out of the far side of the cloister. I thought at first that they would be coming to tell us to stop being silly and get inside, but they weren’t. It was another lady, again in purple, but she was carrying a baby. She sat down with it on a bench a good way from us. Helios and the Queen, who had been having a fight that was she was winning, went quiet. I looked between them, not sure what was happening, and very much wanting to ask if I was allowed to go and play with the baby.

“She’s kept it, then,” Helios murmured.

I patted the water vaguely, to have something to do with myself. There weren’t any fish in it, which seemed like an oversight to me. When I stole a look that way, the baby looked like the best sort of baby. He was big enough not to be too fragile, but little enough to think everything was interesting. I wasn’t allowed to just run off, though. The last time I’d done that, I’d gone straight under a chariot, which is what happens to stupid children. There didn’t seem to be any chariots around here, but then, I’d thought that before too.

“Well, that’s the law, isn’t it,” the Queen murmured back. “If the father is a god then you can keep it.”

“I mean. I tell the kids all kinds of rubbish but I feel like even Phaidros is big enough to see the holes in that one.”

“What am I big enough for?” I asked, still trying to see if there was a way I could swing things round to playing with the baby, who was smiling at me now.

Helios was sitting on the fountain rim. With an uncharacteristic fidgetiness, he lifted me out of the water and onto his knees. I had a clear feeling that he wanted to put something solid between himself and the lady with the baby. I had a surge of protectiveness for him. Sometimes he did just worry about things for no reason. Sometimes after big battles he didn’t like loud noises, or the campfires, even though it could be freezing out on the beaches.

“That’s our sister,” he explained quietly. “She says the father of her baby is Zeus.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“Probably not.”

“Definitely not,” the Queen said, a bit flatly. “She’s been terrorising the slaves for years.”

I looked over at the lady and imagined her jumping out of bushes at unsuspecting men trying to get on with the gardening, and wondered how that linked up to having a baby. Then I wondered why Helios and the Queen were so worried about it. Ladies were scary, but babies weren’t.

“Can I go and—”

“No. No, no.” Helios hugged me tighter, gone taut. Even though there would be no playing, I was glad to be wanted and useful again.

“Why are you scared of a baby?” I asked.

He was never surprised, but something in his expression cracked now.

The rain was coming down harder. Away in the distance, lightning flickered, and it was a long few seconds before the thunder rolled. Helios flinched. I stroked the back of his hand. He was never very good with thunder, even though he knew it was only Zeus dancing.

The Queen put her arm around both of us.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll do unto her before she does unto me.”

A man had come out too, and he’d gone to sit next to the lady with the baby. He leaned over to say hello to the baby, letting it play with his fingertips. I hated him in the immediate way you hate anyone who’s allowed to do a thing you’d really like to but can’t. Grown-ups could play with babies whenever they wanted—they could even make one if they wanted—but here I was, clamped onto Helios’s lap, getting rained on and not allowed to play with the baby even a little bit, and no one even seemed to realize it was unfair.

There were still no chariots, either.

Helios stiffened even more. Usually he only went that way when he was about to shoot someone.

“Is that her husband?” I asked, trying to sound older. Theoretically I knew what husbands were and that somebody might expect me to be one, one day. As far as I understood, it was about keeping quiet and polite and doing as you were told, which seemed all right, because that was the same as being a knight.

“No,” the Queen said grimly, “that’s my husband.”

She said it as if it meant a great deal, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and neither of them explained. I stayed quiet, feeling mutinous, because it was rich to say I couldn’t go and see the baby but then talk in ways I couldn’t understand.

“Agave,” Helios said, very soft. “Let’s go inside. I’m sitting out here in the open in full armour; I’m going to get hit by lightning.”

She gave him a strange look then, the look people do when someone has said one thing, but it makes them think of something else completely. But all she said was, “You’re right. Let’s go.”

I had an overpowering feeling that the words they’d said to each other had no relationship to the meaning.

Annoyed with trying to decipher Grown-Up Code, I did one last check for chariots—all clear—and then hurried over to the lady to say hello and I was Phaidros and please could I hold her baby because babies were the best things in the world and I was very trustworthy and I had plenty of experience, honest.

Helios would catch me soon and he’d be angry but at least I would have had a baby-hug by then.