Page 42 of The Hymn to Dionysus

There was sudden, intense silence, except for the howling of the storm just on the other side of the wagon’s thin walls.

“It’s over,” someone else said, low and urgent. “Thebes isn’t infected. Look, he’s fine, he’s not—”

“You’re going to drink that,” a lady said, “or you’re going out in the storm.”

Dionysus put his hand over mine where it was resting on my sword hilt, before I could say anything. “Why is it important?” He could speak like they did.

“It’s medicine,” she said tightly.

“It helped,” the first man said, just as obscurely.

“What does that mean?” I asked, somewhere between frustrated and dismayed.

“Just drink it!” they all yelled at me.

I looked at Dionysus, in case any of that made more sense to him than to me. “I can’t break my vows just to be polite,” I said quietly, only for him. I wasn’t sure what I wanted him to do.

“You can if it means you don’t die in a dust storm,” he said.

“No—”

“Your life is mine. You gave it to me. It isn’t yours to throw away for no reason.”

I swiped the flask and drank, then pushed it back against his chest and had to sit there with that rancid poison lightness going through my veins.

For whatever insane reason of their own, all the people from Pylos relaxed.

I put my hands over my face so I didn’t have to look at anyone.

It couldn’t have been that long, but it felt like hours. We kept perfectly still, trying to breathe slowly. I thought we really would all die, even in the shade of the wagon, and I sat there trying, through the molten slag that was my brain now, to piece together what I should say to Helios when I saw him. He’d be livid. Did you die honourably in battle, knight? No, sir, I suffocated drunk in the back of a wagon like a fucking moron.

When it stopped, the temperature plunged so suddenly that I felt cold. All my thinking came back; all of us lifted our heads and looked between each other, as though we all hoped somebody else might have proof that it was over, properly, not just pausing. It was Dionysus who pushed open the wagon door first. Cold air rushed in, and I’d never been so happy to breathe. It felt like swallowing ice water. He stepped down first, and turned back to give me a hand, because it was an awkwardly steep step. We both helped everyone else down. The little boy was last and giggled as we swung him down, one of us on either arm. I tried to find something else to look at, and Dionysus was the nearest thing. He was staring towards the city walls.

“They never opened the gates.” There was real dismay in his voice. “Why?”

At the gates, there were ragged heaps that looked like old grain sacks, some big, some small, with dust heaped up on their windward sides. The big shapes were dead horses and oxen. The little ones were dead people.

In a strategic way, I could see very well why they’d done it. In a human way, though—I was glad I hadn’t been the one to give that order.

“Because there’s no food in the city. The choice was bodies inside, or bodies outside,” I said. I coughed, because I’d swallowed a lot of dust, which was making cement along the back of my throat. Around us, other people were starting to edge out from whatever had given them cover, but not all of them.

I had thought I’d grown out of it, but seeing the bodies at the gate gave me that tidal bore of panic-relief that comes when you’ve just marginally not died. Dionysus looked like he might be having it too.

“Thank you,” he said. “For helping me.”

I gave him a disapproving look, because nobody should thank knights for doing their duty. It was a bleak window into the life of a witch. He expected to be left behind. “Don’t be silly,” I said, imitating the way he’d said it to me before. I’d never imitated anyone in my life, but I wanted him to stop looking like he thought he didn’t have a basic right to be rescued when it was necessary by someone whose profession it was. I hoped he’d hit me.

No; he only smiled. “Do you think we can get back into the city?”

“They should open the side gate if we can convince them we’re citizens. They’ll be able to hear us now.”

We set out that way. The wind was still strong, though blessedly cooler now. After the furnace heat of the storm, ordinary baking was a relief. I smiled when I realized I was entirely in his shadow. It was still an uncanny novelty to be so close to someone so tall. Nice, though. Even around other knights, I was always worried about what would happen if someone made me jump. Dionysus . . . I’d bruise him, but he was big enough to restrain me if he wanted.

Dionysus pushed one hand against his ear, took it away, then did it again, and turned around twice as he walked. The way the wind pulled his clothes made a ghost of the way he’d looked when he danced. I looked right away. “Can you hear something?”

“I can never hear anything,” I said, but as I said it, I realized I could. It was just at a pitch that blurred for me. It sounded like a kind of wailing whirring, but what a thing really was and what it sounded like now to me were very different. It was a little while before I heard people yelling, and when I looked, I soon saw why.

In the ground, there was a chasm, just at the base of the city wall. It must have been there all the time, but the wind had uncovered it, scouring away decades of earth and leaving just the rock.