Page 40 of The Hymn to Dionysus

There were easily a thousand people approaching the walls. The crowd was becoming denser, because the watchmen had already closed the gates. There was a dull kind of protest, but everyone seemed to expect it; no doubt the same thing had happened at every place they’d tried before this. The train of carts and wagons and trudging people snaked right back along the westward road, disappearing into the heat haze. Thousands more.

“Where have they come from?” I asked one of the watchmen as she let me through the tiny side gate.

“I can’t understand them. Somewhere further than Sparta, it must be.”

The second I was outside, I was surrounded by people shouting.

“You have to let us in—”

“We need water—”

“—died on the road—”

It was the way they spoke in the west, sharp and jagged like the rocks along the shores out there. I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t sailed.

“Wait! Wait. Where have you come from, what’s happened?”

Everyone yelled at once.

I’d been right.

Pylos, the great city that controlled all the western harbours, had fallen seven days ago.

At first I thought people were telling me it was legions from Egypt or Hattusa taking revenge for what we had done at Troy, stealing as much as they could in recompense for all the Kind Sea shipping taxes they had lost. But that wasn’t what they were saying at all.

“No, you don’t understand. No one came. It was just people. Normal people, in the city,” an older man told me as I sifted through people near the gate, trying to find anyone who could understand me. He looked bewildered.

“Normal people in the city,” I repeated. It wasn’t another language, it was all Achaean, but in just the same way that different cities are wildly different to each other here—I have more in common with Egyptian officers than I do with the aristocracy of Athens—the words we use are different too, and sometimes, so is the grammar. People from the west sounded odd and abbreviated to me, and I knew from years resupplying in their harbours that to them, the way we spoke around Thebes sounded ancient.

“Yes, normal people!”

Someone who might have been his daughter lifted her hands a little in a way that said, it’s all right, he’s never very specific. “People went mad. Ordinary people. In the end they just burned the Palace down.” She blinked once. “I think I did.”

There was a prickly silence, and some of the people around us who had been listening too took a sudden interest in their bootlaces and the straps of their packs. I had a feeling that if I asked around, no one would know anyone who did anything at the Palace; but that if I searched the wagons, there would be a lot of newly redistributed grain and gold.

“Mad,” I said, with a spider-feeling on the back of my neck. “Mad how?”

“It’s over now,” the woman said quickly.

At the side gate there was a stir, and between shoulders and wagons, I saw a swift-moving phalanx of figures in black, veiled despite the heat, hands tattooed black-red. People drew back to let them through, and soon voices called out, sometimes with words I didn’t know, but it was obvious what they were saying: yes, here, I need a witch. Without meaning to, I looked for someone taller. Yes: he was talking to a family in a wagon, carrying a medicine satchel. I drew my teeth over my lower lip, not liking that he was out here. Nobody could see him properly through the veil at least, but someone as tall and fine-turned as Dionysus would fetch a fortune at a slave market even in Athens, never mind if anyone managed to get him as far as Egypt. All these people were desperate, and it didn’t matter if they’d all been scribes and accountants and horse-trainers a week ago. When a city falls, there’s an alchemy that turns office clerks into hyenas. He was a clever witch, for sure, but no witching can stop someone punching you in the face and loading you into the back of a wagon.

Which, of course, he would fucking deserve, after almost getting me and a hundred others killed last night in the Guards’ cells.

The old man looked wretched. “You have to tell your queen to let us in. We heard Thebes still has supplies, and law, and . . .”

I wanted to say, Look at the ground: we don’t have food. There were wisps of old grass, blasted to straw. Even just standing in the full sun was giving me a headache. It felt like my blood was evaporating and my veins were trying to pump rust.

“I have to do a headcount and report to the Palace,” I said. I had to speak carefully, trying to choose words we had in common. “You’ll be told what will happen as soon as we can.” I looked around again, more and more worried by new things I was noticing. Very thin children sitting too quiet in the wagons. Young people grey with dust. I couldn’t see any water. “If you go around the north side of the city, there are springs.”

I shouldn’t really have said that, but they would have found out soon anyway. Thousands of people could occupy the springs and stop water going into Thebes if they wanted to force us to open the gates. I waved at a watchman on the wall and then spoke to him through the little side gate when he came down.

“Run to the garrison, tell General Alexandra that a lot of people are about to go to the springs.”

“Shouldn’t we put a stop to that, sir?” he asked. He was one of those officious middle-aged men who always mistook his own worst fears for good solid common sense. “What if—”

“That’s up to the general,” I said, cutting under him, but friendly. It wasn’t unreasonable to be frightened. “But unless we want a lot of bodies outside the wall, then we’ll just supervise.”

Then, going slowly under the pounding sun, I started to walk up the road, counting, and wondering exactly what the lady had meant when she said people went mad, and whether I would be able to convince anyone to tell me.