Page 49 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“We ask the witches to help. Using witches makes it look like a medical problem, not a divine one. No priests, no prophets, no civilians who’ll spread rumours. Witches can’t talk about their patients. They belong to the Temple of Hermes, don’t they? Hermes is huge. They could fit hundreds of people in there, and none of them will talk about it.”

She nodded once, slowly. The sun burned in the crown. My chest went tight. I was standing here giving advice to the Queen. Not considered, well-researched advice. Just the first chaotic thing that had occurred to me. Helios had told me once that being in royal service felt exactly like that moment where you’ve tripped on a stairway but you’re not falling yet, and I’d had no idea what he meant until right this second. “There can be only one parliament of witches in a generation. It’s part of their vow,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s a protective mechanism for the crown. If they ever got together and agreed anything—well, you’ve met witches. One is bad enough.” She paused. “I always swore I’d never do it unless we were in truly dire need.”

“We’re about to see a full-scale famine,” I said quietly. “Pentheus is missing, the Egyptians won’t give us the grain until they have a royal hostage, and if we don’t find Pentheus, we will need to steal that grain from the Egyptian ships in the harbour, and we’ll need the entire garrison to do that, because those ships will be defended by half an army. In what way could the need be less dire?”

“You just want to save some knights. Remember we are also trying to save Thebes.”

It was several steps too grandiose, even for a queen. The voice in my head said, You know, Phaidros, you probably need to shift your tolerance for stupid things up several notches if you’re going to work for the royal household, but the rest impaled it on a spike and set fire to the spike. “When you say Thebes,” I said, a bit flatly, “do you mean you and possibly some of your friends? Because you do not mean the rest of us.”

She lifted her eyebrow, just a fraction. “You know speaking truth to power is very rarely an ingredient for longevity.”

“Do your worst,” I said tiredly. It would be her or the god. Either way, I wasn’t going to live out the end of this week. I was starting to lose interest in the exact hows and whens.

She nodded once, and motioned across a slave. I couldn’t tell if it was going to be about arranging for me to be immediately strangled, or something else, but I couldn’t summon anything stronger than a kind of indifferent curiosity.

“Send a herald to Hermes,” she said. “Call a parliament of the witches for tonight.” As the slave hurried away, she shook her head at me. “That wasn’t brave, Heliades, that was suicidal: you didn’t know I wouldn’t kill you. Can you not throw yourself in front of any more chariots, please?”

“Yes, lady.”

“Now take fifty of the afflicted knights to Hermes. I want to know if the witches have any treatment for the madness. Report back in the morning: we’ll issue the stay-at-home order at dawn and begin the census then.”

“Yes, lady.”

I thought she would send me on my way, but she stood still, scanning me. “Phaidros—are you all right?”

Well: I think I might have called a god here, and I think he might be saving me till last. It sounds vain, but when you’ve been truly wronged, you can stay furious for years. Killing someone isn’t enough: you have to do something insane and make them watch. I burned down half the palace at Troy before I slung Andromache off a balcony, and she didn’t even do anything that terrible, she just killed a man in battle, which is much fairer than taking care of a child for almost a fortnight and then not stopping a crew of soldiers trying to murder him.

“I’ve just been out in the sun,” I said.

18

Hermes is the god of heralds, travellers, merchants, thieves, and liars. Foreigners always say that makes no sense, because how could you be there for merchants but also for the thieves who were nicking stuff off the back of the cart, and the witnesses who they paid off to lie about it, but the thing is, Hermes doesn’t care if things are taken honestly or dishonestly. Gods don’t care about what’s in your heart. Gods care about what’s happening, and what’s happening in all those cases is a crossing. Something moves; news, whether it’s right or not, people, goods, either sold or stolen.

So it isn’t very surprising that Hermes is also, in Thebes at least, the god of witches: the best liars in the world.

When the Queen’s call for the witches went out, it went from the Temple of Hermes. It was simple. Each messenger was told only to say, Come at dusk.

I was there on the steps, waiting with the Palace herald and the Queen’s chamberlain, when they started to come. People got out of their way, fast; but some stayed to watch, too, pointing out the temple to children.

More were arriving now, always one at a time.

I’d never known a group of people with so much in common to be so silent. Even on battle lines, people talk. The little knights turn brash and hyena-cackly, to try and prove they’re not scared; the officers ask each other if anyone knows whether the slaves have got anything interesting in for dinner, because by the time you’re thirty on the line, it’s the same as bricklaying for a day. But here, no. Each witch was a solitary thing, never standing too near to another, sometimes nodding once, but not talking.

Most of them were women, but not all. Some of the youngest had only the tips of a couple of fingers marked with the red tattoos; some of the oldest had them right up to their elbows. All of them had their hair loose, which meant not a single one was married, and all of them wore the black veil. Nobody shifted or complained in the last of the ailing sun while we all waited. Other people kept away from them even more clearly than they would have from bloodstained soldiers. It was eerie, and after a while, I started to feel cold.

I didn’t catch myself doing it for a little while, but I was looking for Dionysus from the moment the witches began to gather. It was difficult to see in the smoke and the orange evening, and the witches’ black veils, which swam in the wind like shades trying to pull away to Hades. Sometimes there was a tall figure who could have been him, but then they turned and the set of the shoulders was wrong, or the tattoos. They were like spectres in the smoke, and the more of them came, the harder it was to tell them apart.

I had just begun to think that he wouldn’t come, when I realized he had been on the edge of things all along. I bowed where I sat, not sure he had seen me through his veil, but he lifted his hand to me too. Seeing him gave me a bolt of something between gladness and fear.

He was just a man with blue eyes who liked causing trouble and being kind. He was.

A gong sounded, and we looked up to the temple steps, where the herald came forward to explain that there were afflicted knights inside, and the purpose of the parliament was to devise a treatment.

They opened the gates of the temple, and the witches moved through without a sound. No one spoke, even when the locked wagons and the mad knights came into easy view in the torches of the main courtyard. Dionysus didn’t go anywhere near them, and only folded down on one of the stone benches by a fountain to fill up his water flask. I went over to him, slowly, in case he was thinking, but he put his hand out to me; it was the way witches showed you they were smiling under the veil. I took it and he pulled me to make me sit down beside him on the fountain edge.