Page 47 of The Hymn to Dionysus

She didn’t seem annoyed; she only sat forward. “When someone has a child outside wedlock, she has two choices: she can hand it over to a temple for adoption, or, if she wants to keep it, she vows that the father was a god. Of course it’s very unlikely that that happened, but nobody can say it absolutely isn’t true, as you point out, because that would be denying the existence of the gods, which is blasphemy . . . the penalty for which is slavery, you see? We find that with this law, far fewer people end up in cycles of revenge killing that start with infidelity. One of King Kadmus’s more elegant legislative solutions to ongoing blood feuds. It isn’t a genuine account of meeting a god. It’s a legal way to invoke the protection of the crown.” She half laughed. “If Zeus was involved at all, it was because he was angry with having his name associated with hers. Hence the lightning.”

“I understand,” I said quietly.

“You look doubtful.”

“What if it’s a god who’s nothing to do with your sister?”

She nodded slightly. “Maybe. But if I send out the heralds and announce that we think there might be a god, let’s sacrifice to him and try to stop the madness spreading, people won’t sacrifice to a god. They’ll sacrifice to the lost heir. The more they believe, the more ready they will be to accept the first enterprising fraud who steps forward, and he will. Across my reign, three men have tried. I’m sure there will be a fourth.”

“But what if there is a god? It’s more dangerous to ignore them.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said frankly. “Gods come and go. Thebes can survive the brief and passing interest of a god. What it cannot survive is a civil uprising in a time of drought and oncoming famine. Look at Pylos. Those uprisings very rarely succeed in installing anyone new on the throne. All they do is destroy the throne.” She opened her hands where they had been clasped on her knees. “Look, just between the two of us, without any politics or other interests: I don’t think there’s a god here. I think Zoe is right, I think there’s probably something in the ground, and I think—I hate to say it—that Captain Pompous is right as well. Someone’s trying to swing this around to look like a good story and climb up to the crown. And I think that even if I’m wrong, even if there is such a thing as the mad god . . . he’s far less dangerous than thirty thousand human beings hanging over the edge of bread riots. Do you agree?”

“No, lady,” I said, seeing the mast, which had turned back into an oak, smash into the sea.

She smiled. The lines formed round her eyes the same way they had around Helios’s. “Good. Kings and queens need to have someone who disagrees with them.” She clapped my shoulder as she stood up. “Onward to Ares, knight.”

17

The temple courtyard had been tranquil when I brought Amphitrion. Now, it wasn’t just full; it was seething. Most of the people inside I recognised from the garrison. Older knights, knights in training, even a general. Some were healthy but bringing commanders and wards; and some were singing or humming, left alone to just spin and spin in whatever corner they could find with enough space. The song was everywhere, different snippets of it, different verses, but it was all the same thing.

I’d never been afraid on a battlefield. It’s not that I’m especially stupid, or, I hope not. You can see someone take down the knight beside you with a battle axe and not panic if you know exactly what’s meant to happen next and how to do it. It was liturgy: close the wall, step into the breach, spear forward, step, and watch the signal flags. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple.

I was afraid walking through that courtyard.

I shouldn’t have been. Most people in it were just dancing, and humming, or singing. But it was so away from anything they would ever have done in their right minds that part of me wound up tighter and tighter with a dread of what they might decide to do next; and whether there was something in the air that would bring that madness to me too. By an orange tree, two priests were trying to tie someone to the trunk to stop him dancing, and I could see why. He was badly sunburned and he looked like he hadn’t had any water, and if they let him keep dancing like he wanted to, he would die soon. But as soon as they caught his elbows, he lashed out with his spear arm, and hit one of the priests so hard the man reeled away with blood pouring down his face.

“Knight?”

The priest I’d spoken to before was just in front of me, looking like he had meant to be on his way somewhere else before he noticed me. He had a cloth over his mouth and nose. I wished I had one too.

“The Queen sent me. I’m supposed to try and talk to some of the knights.”

He touched his ear to say he couldn’t hear over all the noise. He motioned me into a side building, shut the door, and leaned against it. It was a records room. Clay tablets lined the walls, up to three times the height of a person, with ladders that moved along the shelves on rails. A wheelbarrow full of new records stood in the middle of the floor waiting to be filed, so fresh out of the kiln that they were steaming. He didn’t take the mask off. I wished he would; it was much harder to make out what he was saying now I couldn’t see his lips.

“Did you say you’ve been sent here too? You don’t seem mad.”

“Not yet,” I said. “The Queen wants me to talk to some of the knights. She isn’t convinced the madness is real.”

“Not r—have you seen out there?”

I nodded, even less convinced she was right now than before.

He pulled another mask out of his pocket and gave it to me. “Put that on. Why wouldn’t she think it’s real?”

“There’s a rumour about a god of madness,” I explained. “And anything to do with a new god looks like fraud to her, because of the story about her sister.”

“I’ll show you the boy you brought in,” he said, sounding angry, but it wasn’t anger-anger. He was tired and upset.

He led me outside again, then down through the temple. The hallways were all howling. There were five times more people here than the temple had ever been made to hold. As we passed downstairs, though, into the cellar where the original five knights had been, it was quiet. I was about to ask if the priests had found some kind of drug that worked, but then I stopped, because that wasn’t it.

Lined up and covered in sheets, waiting for their pyres, were four bodies.

“They don’t eat,” the priest said quietly, “and they don’t drink, and they won’t stop moving. In this heat . . . it’s killing people in about twelve hours. We’re restraining as many as we can now.”

I moved the edge of the shroud on the smallest body. We always say to relatives, he looked like he was sleeping, but bodies don’t look like they’re sleeping. They look as different without souls in them as coats look without people in them. But it was Amphitrion. I sighed. I’d always known I’d be standing here like this one day, because he had never been the kind to survive long, but I had thought it would be a little further away.

“Have you notified his commander?” I asked, wondering what would happen now to Penelope the Not-Sacrifice Lamb.