Page 41 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I walked for a mile across the cracked plain, but I didn’t find the end of the caravan. I would have gone further, but it was then that I realized I wouldn’t make it back if I did. It was too hot. The buckle on my kilt kept burning me whenever I brushed it, and even though it was thick, I had to put my cloak on properly. Where it didn’t cover me, my wrists and my hands soon looked like I’d plunged them into scalding water. I would have kept going despite those things, though, if I hadn’t started to see the bodies on the wayside. A man collapsed right in front of me. I caught him and lifted him onto the back of a wagon, and tried to tell the people nearby to veer north, to the springs, but they couldn’t understand what I was saying.

By then, my count was at three thousand, with no end in sight. It had been stupid to come out with no water. It was such a sailor thing to do: it had just never occurred to me that the heat would be this bad, because at the sea it never was. Angry with myself, I turned back, but then slowed down.

Even with water, it would have been slow going, and dangerous. The headache was getting worse now. Human bodies can endure a lot more than their owners usually think, but I knew the limits of mine and I was about half an hour from collapsing.

Pentheus was inexperienced, but he wasn’t stupid. If he had tried to leave the city, the heat would have forced him to turn back very quickly. These people had made the journey because they had to, with the protection of covered wagons. One boy, perhaps with a stolen horse which would also need water, would get barely five miles from Thebes. If he had been taken, with a wagon and supplies, the Hidden would have caught up.

He was still in the city. He had to be.

The hot wind was stripping the topsoil off the ground. Only it wasn’t soil any more; it was dust, and snakes of it streamed everywhere, shushing through wagon wheels and the manes of the donkeys and horses. So much of it was moving that where wagons paused at the roadside, drifts of dust heaped up so quickly that people had to excavate the wheels. Because I was sweating, it was sticking to me, and to everyone else; we were all grey with it.

It happened across perhaps two or three minutes.

It got hotter. Noticeably, frighteningly hotter. The air went from ordinarily baked to the way it feels inside a sauna before you pour the water over the stones, almost too hot to breathe. I saw people on the road notice too, slow down, reach for water.

I would have trudged on oblivious if someone hadn’t tugged my cloak and pointed behind us.

Horizon to horizon like a brown cliff, so tall it was already shading the sun, was a dust storm. I’d only ever seen them in Egypt. Achaea might be a barren rocky mess, but dust storms—all I could do was stare at it, even when I realized it was moving so fast that I wouldn’t get back to the city walls. It had shapes in it, galloping ahead. They looked like the gods were riding into Thebes.

A family beside me were pulling luggage out of a covered wagon so they could get inside it, so I helped, looking around at the same time for the witches. Everywhere, horses were spooking. The ones that weren’t tied to anything were panicking and running, and even the oxen, usually as willing to stir as rocks, were lowing and swinging their horns, dragging little carts with them as they thumped away from the dust and the new heat. Two carts crashed into each other and smashed.

The heat was so bad it felt dangerous to breathe. My lungs were cooking. All my thoughts were turning to sludge. We had about the length of time it takes to saddle a horse before nobody would really be able to think any more. Some people would faint. Some would have seizures. In Egypt, we had lost chunks of regiments that way.

I couldn’t see Dionysus and assumed he had gone already, until I saw him by a cart marked in blue with the sigils of the Temple of the Mother. Someone was trapped under it. He wasn’t strong enough to lift it.

I didn’t know what the Witches’ Vow was, but I had a terrible feeling it would have things to say about abandoning a patient, even if it did mean you died trying to help.

If you had asked me an hour ago, I would have grumbled that he was a sacrilegious criminal and if he wanted to die then he could do it, thank you; but you’re a different person when you have time to think about things.

I ran across and shoved cart upright—both of us together was only just enough—and then the man trapped underneath was scrambling out and running away, and not thanking Dionysus at all.

“Phaidros,” Dionysus said, sounding more grateful to see me than anyone ever had.

“Come on,” I said, pulling him. “We need to get inside. This heat—”

The dust blasted through us and instantly he was invisible, but I was still holding onto him. Even though it was only a few yards away, the wagon vanished, and it took three tries to find it.

The people already crowded inside were good about squeezing us in, though I was very soon sure it wasn’t in the general spirit of xenia. It wasn’t normal for witches to take off the veil in public, but Dionysus had to, to breathe, and when it was off, I saw at least four pairs of eyes flick over him, assessing how tall he was, how magnetic he was with his hair tied up high and cindered with grey; how straightforward it would be to just take him and sell him somewhere. I stared back at them, hoping that they were all exhausted enough and starving enough not to want to bother—and acutely aware that I wasn’t as strong as I should have been. I’d been losing weight like everyone else. But, the scar across my face did still make me look like I’d tear someone’s throat out with my teeth. The eyes skittered away. I nudged Dionysus and gave him my knife.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” he whispered. It was either deranged optimism, or the cosmically stupid certainty that most very tall men have, which is that nothing is dangerous, neither for them nor for anyone else.

I looked at him hard, not wanting to have to spell out for him what slavery would be like for someone who looked like him. “If I have to come and rescue you from the King of Persia’s zoo before anyone has a chance to try and make you breed with another giraffe,” I whispered back, very fast so that any of the Pylos people who heard me would struggle to follow in Theban dialect, “you will never live it down. I will follow you around, reminding you about it, even if I have to ride after you as you gallop free across the fucking savannah.”

He looked at me as if I’d just said something incredibly kind, and took the knife.

I relaxed a tiny bit, which I regretted, because at least when I’d been thinking about giraffes, I hadn’t been thinking about the heat.

The heat. It was like sitting by a furnace, but the quality was different, because with a furnace you can step away, and you can feel a border of cooler air on one side of you, but not this. This was going to kill us all if it went on for long.

“Is there any water?” a little boy asked.

“There’s wine,” a man said, and gave him a sip from a flask before nodding at him to offer it to me.

I shook my head, wondering what the fuck kind of life they’d had in Pylos, that they had fled the city with wine rather than water. Maybe these boxes were filled with cake and silk trousers.

“No, take it,” the man said, more insistently than seemed rational.

“I can’t. I’m Sown, we don’t drink.”