Page 61 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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I walked up through the city at dawn, and by then, the heralds were calling the stay-at-home order: the census would start at noon. Night market vendors packing up to go home, dusty and tired, looked annoyed about the noise; the homeless people on the road verges barely stirred; and some knights coming back to the garrison after the Hidden ride wondered grumpily if that would mean they had to be awake at noon. It felt like a mad luxury to be able to hear it all. Yesterday, I would have come this same way and not known the heralds were out until I saw them. Now, I could hear five at a time, streets apart. All of Thebes was full of their bells ringing and the clear voices calling. They would do it for an hour now, and an hour before the census began.

I should have felt hazy from the broken night, especially after what the triplets had told me, but I was full of energy. I kept hearing things I didn’t recognise and soon found myself playing a game to see how many I could guess. There was a skimming noise that turned out to be a weaver’s shuttle as she skimmed it through her loom, a shush that was dead leaves tumbling on the road, and then, incredibly, the hiss of the paintbrush as a man worked brilliant colours into the glaze of a new mask at a tiny table he’d set up outside his pottery shop. It was exquisite, and so were the others drying on pegs on the wall behind him. Word must have been spreading fast, about what the witches had done.

After that, I saw more of them. When I passed the Temple of Ares—where, gods alive, I could hear the disjointed songs of the knights inside—there was a delivery cart with its two drivers unloading and four guards with them. All six of them were wearing full masks, painted in colours and gold, the faces all the blank and beautiful, like young lords and ladies come to a feast.

The census began with a briefing for the census-takers—Palace scribes all—at the Guards’ Court. I explained that we were looking particularly for young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, because before long, we might have to start a general army draft, and we needed to know who we’d got before anyone had time to hide. Everyone took it silently. The Guards were standing on the edge of the gathering, watching, and I knew they were looking for anyone who seemed too intrigued and too chatty; anyone who might imagine that the silence order didn’t apply if they just told one or five neighbours and a few kitchen slaves.

My part of the grid was the High City; the garrison, where I’d know straightaway if anything was odd, and the Temples of Ares, then the Bronze Court and the Weavers’ Court. I always liked visiting the weavers; they hung gigantic bolts of cloth up to dry from dyeing, each one sixty yards long, and they flew over everything like the battle banners of giants.

A census sounds easy. You just have to take details from everyone and note them down. But the logistics of doing that on clay tablets were exhausting. I could fit maybe four people on each tablet, if I wrote small. So I arrived with a crate of tablets—or rather, a burly slave and a crate of tablets—and by the time I’d covered the weavers, the whole crate was used up. While the slave fetched another box of new tablets from the main administration office, I ran the old crate over to the Potters’ Court for firing. Their yard was already filling up with crates from other census-takers, the heat from the kilns was already blistering, and potters were working soaking wet from the fountain, because it was only way to stay even half cool enough.

On the pretence of looking for smuggled gold or silver, the Guards searched everywhere we collected information. They, at least, knew who we were looking for. It felt profoundly inefficient. I kept pausing to uncramp my writing hand, fantasising about just putting out a general proclamation: forty talents of silver for Pentheus returned to us safe and well. But then the Egyptians would hear, and Prince Apophis would make doubtful noises about handing over his grain, and the Queen’s authority would seem untrustworthy if she couldn’t even keep a good rein on her own son, and it would all be a mess.

When it was the garrison’s turn, the young knights seemed mutedly pleased to see me, but they were quiet, and I saw why straightaway. At least ten of them were missing. All gone to Ares; all singing that infuriating song. I could smell alcohol in the air, and even though that would have been enough for a garrison-wide lockdown in normal times, everyone was pretending not to notice. Amphitrion’s sister was by herself in a corner. Polydorus, Jason’s commander, had taken over while I was gone.

“How have they been?” I asked. We were in the mess, each unit lined up and waiting to be registered, either by me or by one of the scribes.

He shook his head. “A lot of them . . . they’re having nightmares. All the same thing.”

I stopped writing. “The same thing?”

He leaned forward half an inch, his version of a nod. “I have it too. It’s a hunt. There’s a lion, and the hunters and the dogs kill it, but once it’s dead, it turns into a man. It must be an omen, but I asked the priest at the shrine to Apollo and he didn’t know.”

“A lion that turns into a man,” I said, uncomfortable and not sure why. There was something familiar about it.

Polydorus was quiet for a second. Across from us, still in the line, obediently enough, Feral Jason was dissecting something which I hoped had been dead already. Polydorus watched him with the blankness of a person who had given up on trying to protect anything smaller than a dog. “They say everyone dreams prophecy when a god is close.”

“Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” I said, looking around for Penelope now that I’d seen Jason. It was a relief when I realized she was curled up under the table, eating a basket of dandelions. I stroked her ears to say hello. She bleated hospitably.

She wouldn’t last much longer. I’d arrived exactly as lunch did, and it was sparse. The bread loaves were much smaller than normal. There were olives and apples that looked like they’d been in the stores for months, still good but not very; some oil, some oranges that must have been imported or pirated because our own groves had failed this year; but no cheese, no milk, not even eggs. Knights only have meat at festivals or after sacrifices, it’s too luxurious to give even to the Sown every day, but usually that translated into once a week. It had been a month since I’d seen any here. What was on the tables now were starvation rations. Around the edges of the room, the slaves were watching with a vulture intensity.

I was hungry too. I’d been too busy to notice mostly, but now I was sitting here, it was difficult to remember what I was supposed to be talking about. I wanted some of that bread more than anything. I was entitled to it, it was part of my rations, but I’d be able to get something somewhere else. At least I was on the border of the forest. I could shoot something tonight. I would. There’s only so long you can get by on bread and oil. I split one of the meagre little loaves in half and lobbed one half to a little boy, one of the kitchen children, and gave the other to Polydorus.

“You need to eat,” Polydorus said to me, grave.

“I’m smaller than you,” I said. “And I’m on writing duty, not training.” I lifted the stylus.

He stared at the bread and I thought he was going to refuse, because at least among knights, it’s shameful to accept a gift from anyone you don’t feel is your equal or better—he certainly didn’t think I was his equal—but he took it.

“Why are you on writing duty?” he asked, in his sniper way. “Jason thinks the Queen is keeping you in a secret harem.”

“With this face? No, it’s administrative rubbish.”

He lifted his chin a fraction. “And it’s nothing to do with how nobody has seen Pentheus since the star fell.”

Fuck.

“Why would my going blind staring at tablets have anything to do with Pentheus being in a sanctuary?” I asked, making an effort to sound light.

“Because if he has the madness, then he’s out of the succession, and you’re . . . it,” he said. “You’re the Queen’s brother-in-law. You’re on desk duty because it takes you away from anything dangerous. If you’re killed, there’s no other obvious successor.”

I almost dropped my tablet. “Polydorus—gods’ sake, I am not anything to do with the Queen, and the succession is not determined by some random moron marrying the Queen’s younger brother, that would be stupid, the succession is determined by the Queen. If anything happens to Pentheus, there are slaves in the fields with better links to the royal family than me. I wasn’t even born in Achaea, I’m probably Egyptian.”

“You’re a good liar,” he said, with exactly the coolness and certainty of his own integrity I had aimed at Dionysus when I first spoke to him at the dance, and for the first time, I felt how unpleasant it was to be on the receiving end. It was righteous, in a shut-down way that looked—from this end—cultish. I frowned into that thought, because it was a jellyfish thought: there were things in the tentacles that trailed down deep and shimmered with a nasty electrical sting, though I couldn’t see what they were just yet.

“I will stab you in the liver with this stylus.”