Page 43 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Something was down there among the rocks.

It was something bronze. Bronze statues. People were starting to gather along the edge. It wasn’t steep, so I climbed down along with a priestess in red and a couple of young men who were gripping cudgels in the way of people who had never been in a fight before. Dionysus stayed at the top, looking uneasy, as though he would have liked to tell me not to go.

The wind sang through the fissure in the bedrock, and it sang in the bronze as well. There was a clicking I couldn’t work out; something, I would have sworn, was winding up.

It wasn’t until I was almost down on a level with them that I realized how big the statues were. Twice life-sized, at least, made to be seen from a distance. They were lying down, like they were sleeping. At first I thought they were supposed to be women, but they weren’t. They were monsters; all teeth, limbs all far too long for humans. When I started to pick a way through them, trying to work out when they were from, I wished I hadn’t. They weren’t like any marvels I’d seen before. The joints were all hinged; if I’d known a way it was even remotely possible without hydraulics—and there couldn’t be unless these things had their own reservoir that somehow hadn’t dried up, buried somewhere beneath them—I would have sworn they were designed to sit up. It shouldn’t have been so disconcerting. They were just statues.

Maybe long ago, those hydraulics had worked. Now there couldn’t be anything in the clockwork but dust.

They sounded like they were breathing.

Up above us, the wind gusted, and the statues howled. It was loud even for me. The boys shot back up the scree to ground level. The priestess slammed her hands over her ears.

One of the statues twitched, and something in its mechanisms woke up just enough for the clockwork to remember what it had used to do. It was a horribly living twitch. Its shoulders jolted, and I stared, because to move like that, the bronze would have to be as pliant as chain mail, but it wasn’t, it was bronze, I could see, it was right in front of me. I started to edge back to the chasm wall. The priestess was already climbing it.

The wind came again, and one of the statues sat up. It was serpentine, snake-smooth, not a mechanical jolt, and it should have been impossible. Bronze rusts. Leave it underground—all of them should have been green with age and damp, but they were as perfect as they must have been when they were put down here.

Then another one, and another one, and I couldn’t look away and I was feeling behind me for the wall, which somehow still wasn’t there, and right by my boots, something bronze moved too quickly for me to catch what it had been, but I thought it was a tail.

The wind was powering through the statues now, and they were howling a terrible clockwork song. There were words, but I couldn’t understand, and now they were sitting up, the bronze things were taller than me, and I had a sudden crushing certainty that whoever had built them, they had never, ever meant for a person to get stuck in among them, because if a single one of these titan machines smacked one arm sideways, I was dead, and there were so many of them juddering upright from the earth now that I would never have seen it coming.

Just as I pulled myself up onto the next rock shelf and Dionysus caught my hand to help me to the top, a tail slammed into the place I’d been standing. It shattered the stones.

Dionysus and I sat on the edge of the pit, staring down at the bronze monsters still screaming their lost ancient words in the wind, and so did everyone else. We were all quiet. The dust and the heat and the storm weren’t forgotten but it didn’t matter for now.

The marvels were like nothing I’d ever seen. The quantity of bronze was madness. It could have supplied a legion of knights with full armour. The quality of the engineering too. It could only have been a message from a queen or king. Nobody else could have commanded anything like the wealth to build these things. Whatever they were saying, it had been important to whoever had wanted them built. And it was hard not to feel as though, for all they were saying words we couldn’t understand, this was what you would make if you weren’t building something for now, but for people living a thousand years after your language had been forgotten. That was the only reason to do this, instead of just carving it on the city walls. If you carved it, you expected someone to be able to read it.

“Can you tell what they’re saying?” I asked.

Dionysus repeated some of it. It was odd, but the Furies’ language matched his accent better than ours. “I’d have known what that meant, when I was young,” he said, sounding strange, and sad. “Do you ever feel like your whole life happened to you in languages you don’t speak any more?”

That hit me deeper than I expected. “All the time. What is it?”

“I’ve forgotten,” he said, apologetic.

I knew what that was like. I’d grown up across half the world, swimming in a hundred languages. I knew scraps of things whose names I didn’t know from territories I couldn’t remember. Sometimes I said things to myself around the house while I was making bread or pinning back the shutters, and for my life I couldn’t have said where they were from or what they meant.

Whatever the marvels were saying, though, it was a warning. You didn’t build twenty screaming Furies and bury them in a cavern for a once-in-twenty-generations drought to uncover if you were saying anything good.

“I need to report this,” I said, getting up.

15

Queen Agave came down herself. One of our priestesses came too, with a dictionary. It was bound papyrus, a book, not a scroll, as thick as my wrist and so fragile with its reed pages that I half expected it to catch fire in the sun. They said it was Old Cretan, which was what royal proclamations had been made in, long ago. Nobody spoke it any more.

I wondered how Dionysus had known. Maybe there was a tiny pocket of mountain country somewhere where it was still alive, just. I couldn’t ask; he was gone already, probably to help the survivors.

Along with our priestess, and another from Pylos, and six or seven Guards, cloaks such a deep purple in the glaring sun they didn’t look real, we stood at the edge of the marvel chasm while the statues roared. I was cooking inside my armour, and Thebes’s crown of towers really did look like it was burning. Even from down here, the smell of charred meat and incense was so heavy I felt like I’d never be able to taste anything else again. In twenty years, if I had the bad luck to live that long, I’d bite into some bread and it would still taste of sacrifice fires.

The priestesses were struggling to hear the Furies’ words clearly enough to look them up. It wasn’t that they were blurred, just that it’s very difficult to hear the borders of words in a language you don’t hear aloud, even if you can read it.

Listening for Dionysus’s cadence, though, which sang much more than ours did, I could guess. I offered a couple of words I was sure about, eyes right down, not wanting to sound like I thought I knew more than they did.

“Oh, you’re right; of course you’re right,” the Pylos priestess said. She sounded annoyed. I stepped back, out of the way, so that I wasn’t looming over her shoulder.

“Gods, Phaidros,” the Queen said, as if it really were a genuine skill. “You’re going to have to teach me that.”

I tried to tell if she was taking the piss. Any sailor speaks a lot of languages, which means we tend to be good at hearing accurately, even if we don’t hear well.