Page 62 of The Hymn to Dionysus

He tipped his head in a way that said he would have very few opinions about it even if I did, and ate the bread.

I carried on writing names, checking down the tables and counting to make sure I hadn’t missed anyone, and trying not to do it too resentfully. Any garrison is a rumour nursery, but because they weren’t allowed to listen to bards to get their dose of made-up twattery that way, Theban knights grew bushier and more luxuriant rumours than anyone else in Achaea. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Jason flicked something biological at one of the other boys, who yelled and punched him. Polydorus’s stare migrated into the distance.

“Does this need to involve me?” I said, sliding the traditional razor into my voice.

“It was a lung! Permission to throw him down the fucking well, sir?”

“Granted,” I said, in case there were still miracles.

“I’m going to make a sacrifice to the mad god,” Polydorus said, as matter-of-fact as he would have been if he were saying he was off to the market for honey; not suggesting treason. “Do you want me to buy a lamb or something for you?”

“No!” I hissed. “Fuck, you’ll be sent to the galleys!”

There was a shriek that sounded suspiciously like someone being bitten by Feral Jason.

“I know,” Polydorus said dreamily.

By the time I’d finished my grid section, the potters had done a great deal of work, and most of the tablets from the rest of the census-takers were already fired. They were stacking them in the middle of the courtyard so they could be taken down to the archives, so I set up there to see the incoming census-takers as they gave in their tablets. The census was not, said the Queen, entirely irrelevant: it was useful to know how many people we needed to feed. In any case, it was important to pretend the census data was what we had wanted. The Egyptians were wandering around the Palace freely, and if they realized we appeared to have conducted a census but taken no records, someone would put two and two together.

I marked off grid sections as each scribe came back. Everyone said the same thing: no sign of Pentheus.

As the number of open, possible grid sections shrank, I started to feel a dull certainty that the Hidden must have missed something on the road. But I’d seen the report from the unit polemarch. They had stopped every wagon on the road and turned them upside down, but nothing. Of course, someone could have paid her off—not hard when the rations were sinking to nothing—but if that had happened, if Pentheus had been taken to Athens or Sparta . . . surely we would have heard from the Athenians or the Spartans by now, sniggering and demanding ludicrous sums of silver?

Two figures were moving through the smoke more slowly than the potters, one very tall. I went down on my knee when I saw the sway of the Queen’s long hair, which, like always, gave me a sorrow-hope twang, because in that first instant I felt like it might be Helios. The Queen bent to lift me up again.

“You remember Apophis,” she said.

“Vividly,” I said, looking him up and down in a way I hoped would discourage any urge he might have to speak to me.

Apophis was looking at some of the tablets. “Is this writing?”

I wondered what amazing Egyptian misunderstanding I was about to be treated to now. “It is.”

“Is it just numbers?” he asked after a moment.

“No. These are names, these are addresses; holdings.”

“But there are so few signs. How are you getting down the information?”

Another belter.

The Egyptian view is, as far as I can tell, that if you’re not a master artist willing to dedicate twenty years of your life to learning thousands of symbols, you have no business writing or reading anything and you ought to shut up before someone comes along to smite you.

“Each sign is a sound,” I explained. “Ta, ke, ka, like that. We only have so many sounds.” Forty-two.

“It doesn’t seem very sophisticated.”

“It isn’t. It isn’t for temples and monuments, it’s for noting things propped against a horse. You write in Coptic sometimes, don’t you? That’s just lines and dashes.”

He frowned. “That’s shorthand. Writing is sacred. Words can last for eternity. Some effort ought to go into them. Do you not think?”

I wrestled heroically with the urge to shove him in a kiln. “We like it for tax purposes.”

He laughed and turned to the Queen. “I was under the impression that you didn’t have writing out here, Agave. This is a nice surprise. You must teach one of my scribes, so we can translate your holy texts. Our scholars would like that very much.”

That would be hysterical. I’d once tried to tell an Egyptian the story of Athena’s birth—she is wisdom, and so logically enough she sprang from her father’s head, heads being where wisdom tends to gestate—and what he took away from it was that I had no understanding of reproduction in mammals.