Page 36 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I looked down at the silver bee charm on its red string around my wrist, and realized I believed him.

He was maddening and shameless and dangerous, but it had been a strange day and all the strangest parts had happened with him, and it felt like I knew him, even though he wasn’t the boy from the sea. “Can I ask your opinion about something?”

He looked surprised that I’d want to hear his opinion about anything, but he waited.

“I’m trying to find someone who’s missing. It’s urgent. But I’m not allowed to make it known that they need to be found, so searching is difficult. How would a witch do it? Although if you say witching,” I added, “I will punch you in the throat.”

He gave it some thought. “Call a census,” he said.

13

I didn’t sleep. It doesn’t matter how exhausted you are: if it’s hot even at night and the god of sleep doesn’t like you anyway—his favourite thing was the just-before-dawn nightmare—you just have to learn to function without. I hadn’t really got the trick of it.

“Ugh,” I said to the ceiling as the sun prised open the horizon.

The just-before-dawn nightmare had been worse than normal. I got up to get away from bed, which didn’t feel like a nice place to rest but a horrible horizontal prison cell, and nudged the shutters open. Just outside my window was the little shrine with my wine and honey offering to the god. I wondered bleakly if the ants having the time of their lives on the cup now were some mechanism of transubstantiation, but I was pretty sure they were just ants. Sacrifice, the priests said. You’ll be sleeping wonderfully in no time. I hoped they were all eaten by ants.

I pushed my hands against my eyes. The dream had been horrible. I’d been hunting in a forest. I was chasing something that might have been a lion, but sometimes, when I caught a flash of it through the trees, it didn’t seem like a lion at all but a man, but somehow that didn’t matter and I was full of joyful bloodlust anyway, and so was everyone else, and through the trees was a weird, awful song, and drums, and drums.

There was a gasp from further into the olive grove, and three sets of eerie grey eyes met mine through the low branches.

I had three slaves in the way you can have toothache, or a family curse. They were princes from Troy: triplets, about fourteen years old now, and easily the creepiest, most unnerving humans I’d ever met. I’d spent an awful lot of the last six months trying to get them to run away. I’d been leaving gates suggestively open and coming home reliably late from the garrison, and saying things like, Oh, no, I’ll have to be gone all night again. But no. Here they still were. I’d thought they were afraid at first, but I was coming to the conclusion that in fact they didn’t want to escape. That was concerning, because more and more, I was worried that what they did want might be something to do with harvesting my organs and sacrificing them to Zeus for a return to their previous good fortune.

“What are you doing?” I said slowly. They never talked to me, so speaking to them was pointless, but I was in the habit of trying anyway.

They stared at me for another second, and without any discussion at all, they all bolted in different directions. I shuddered.

The windows of the house were low, so I could just step out. When I found the place where they’d been standing, I could see why they had paused. There was a dead wolf there. It had been killed just like the fox last night: neck broken, no other wounds. I stood looking at it for a while. There was no way the triplets could have killed a wolf.

Eventually, I picked it up and took it behind the house, to the forest border. Men couldn’t cross, because it was sacred and dryads are territorial, but I left the carcass in the roots of an oak tree. Other things would be grateful for it. Trees are people, just slower, and ever since I’d come to the maze, I always had a feeling I was living right on the edge of someone else’s city, great and ancient; it was probably a good idea to show it some honour.

From just inside came the snick of a broken twig. I looked up, very still. I couldn’t hear anything else, but there was a pressure along the back of my skull that said something was watching me, something big, and it was very, very close. Nothing was moving. The forest looked dead: the trees were parched, there were no birds or rabbits, and even the insects had died. Slowly, and I couldn’t tell how, because I wouldn’t have heard it even from someone leaning right over my shoulder, I started to feel sure that something was breathing.

Probably someone who had run away from slavery last night, after the rations were cut.

The Hidden couldn’t ride into the woods, or rather, more than half of us couldn’t and the other half didn’t like it. If you could make it as far as the forest, you were safe, provided you were able to negotiate with the dryads.

Or it was something else.

I stepped back gradually, two paces, five, then walked fast back to the house, just in time to see the delivery cart from the Palace coming along the road. Usually it was the driver and his assistant, but today, it came with four guards, all in armour despite the warm morning. Frowning, I went down through the olive grove to meet them.

“Morning,” the driver called, sounding relieved. “Sorry about the parade, but we keep getting attacked on the road.”

He wasn’t joking. One of the guards had blood on his face.

I helped them bring everything inside, then sat them all down at the table to bring them some water and some food, because this was my fault. If I’d lived in Thebes, this wouldn’t have happened. The driver had been coming every week since I’d been given the house—supplies are how knights are paid—and this was the first time I’d heard of any trouble. They all looked disproportionately grateful to be sitting down.

As they always did, the triplets emerged to help, terrifyingly, silently efficient as always. They understood that I couldn’t sell them, I knew they did, because I’d told them that in five languages; which left me bewildered about why they did anything in the house at all. They knew I wouldn’t hurt them; maybe someone at the Palace had put the fear of Ares into them, but if that was the case, it had lasted a long time now. I didn’t think so. More unnerving mysteries.

“It’s escaped slaves,” the driver explained, after they’d all told me what had happened. Some men had jumped them from some bushes on a narrow stretch of the mountain path, only three or four, but enough to be scary. “Their rations have gone down so much it’s nearly nothing. Well. Field slaves, anyway,” he said, watching the triplets, who were healthy and round. “People are running away all over the place. You’ll have a fuck of a time keeping up with it, sir, even with the Hidden.”

“Running where?” I asked. The next nearest city was Athens, ninety miles away, or Sparta, over a hundred.

He shrugged. “Into the forest? Towards Lake Copais? Dunno if there’s still water in it, but . . .” He trailed off and looked worried, and I realized he had been going to say, that’s what I’d do. He must have thought about it. All civil servants are slaves, from royal ministers and scribes right down to the stable boys and the delivery drivers. His rations were being cut badly too.

I pushed some apples towards him. “Come on, you’re spurning my hospitality here. I haven’t got the madness, or the fucking plague. Take some things for the road, all of you.”

They all laughed but nobody took anything except a few olives.