Page 39 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I cringed inside, because it felt wrong to take the credit for Dionysus’s idea; but I couldn’t say, Actually I was discussing state secrets with a passing witch after we were both arrested. “Is it possible, lady?”

She breathed in deep, in the give-me-strength way Helios had used to do when someone told him to get the siege ladders. “This city has an administrative engine which frequently brings me to my knees. I’m certain it can be persuaded to bear the weight of a census.”

She was walking now, leading me towards the old ruined courtyard again, in the shade of the colonnade. Even there, the air was straight from a blast furnace. The red cloak was killing me. Like always now, a pall of sacrifice smoke veiled everything in grey; even buildings close to us looked hazy, and further away, the spires of the Temple of Zeus were ghostly. It was putting grey in my hair where it lay in its tail over my shoulder; the Queen’s too.

“I’ve told Apophis that Pentheus is spending some time sequestered at a sanctuary,” she said. “But he won’t believe that if it goes on for longer than a week.”

“If we send out heralds today to announce a stay-at-home order, we should be able to carry it out tomorrow or the day after.”

“Will people obey it or do we need to deploy the garrison?”

“I think they will,” I said. “If we conduct the census in the middle of the day, everyone will be at home anyway. The markets are only opening at night now . . .”

An amazing bird landed just next to me. It was gigantic and pink, and it looked nearly as interested to have found a Phaidros as I was to have found a bird.

“Awk,” it told me.

“I’ll send them out,” the Queen said, her eyes going over the bird too. “And I want you to—sorry, how is anyone meant to concentrate when there’s a gigantic pink bird? Where did he come from? What is he?”

“I don’t know,” I said, in love with it already. “I’ve seen them before in the west, but never here. They live in water, out around the islands, and by Pylos.”

Looking pleased with itself, the bird did an excited shuffle to the fountain and sat down in it, studying the fish.

“It’s going to eat my pedigree fish, isn’t it,” the Queen sighed.

“But now you’ve got a fun bird,” I offered.

“I suppose.”

“Pedigree fish,” I echoed, hearing it properly.

She gave me a severe stare. “Are you making fun of my fish, Sown?”

“Y . . . es,” I decided, because a holy vow of honesty doesn’t go away just because the Queen might have you sewn into a bag of snakes and hurled off a cliff for being irritating.

She laughed, and the bird made an oinking noise that set us both off even more. Some of the slaves had come out to see what we could possibly be talking about, and now, there were appreciative murmurs and theories about where it might have come from, and whether it could be an omen. I could see it might be, but of what seemed a bit mysterious. Eagles I understood, but enormous pink joke-birds were less easy to interpret.

The Queen, though, was frowning over the heat-waving city, and the great plumes of dust rising from the western road. “What is that?”

The dust off the road wasn’t just the hot wind, but scuffed up by what must have been hundreds of people. I could see the sun glinting on the harnesses of oxen, and children sitting dreary on the back of big wagons, married women riding donkeys. Even from so far away, it was clear something was wrong. Merchant trains were normally alive when they moved, with people coming out well ahead to announce them and advertise, and usually the wagons were bright colours. This didn’t look like that.

The bird. It must have come with them on the back of a wagon. Birds were forever hiding in the shrouds of ships or in packed-up tents. One night watch, some people had gone up the mast to let down the sails, and down on the deck, I’d got a rain of confused puffins.

“A city’s fallen,” I said, very quietly, so no one else would hear. I studied the bird again. The last time I’d seen one, we had been resupplying at a thriving dockside, and merchants had been selling fans made of those incredible pink feathers. “It’s Pylos,” I added.

“Pylos can’t have fallen, there are forty thousand people there.”

“Suboptimal,” I agreed, because she wasn’t really arguing with me.

She didn’t let her face move at all. To anyone watching, we might still have been talking about the strange bird. “Find out what happened.”

Close to us, a couple of the Guards whose duty that kind of thing must usually have been looked puzzled. I was too. She had mechanisms in place for this, people with clearly demarcated duties—she didn’t need to use some half-deaf polemarch she’d scooped out of the garrison for her reconnaissance reports. If she noticed, she pretended not to. I had an odd feeling that I was being interviewed again, but I was already looking for Pentheus: it wasn’t about that.

“Yes, lady.”

“Heliades,” she said, before I could go. “Count them. Grain is coming from Egypt—but not that much.”

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