Page 71 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“No. It’s the prince. I die if you tell anyone that,” I added.

Dionysus looked into a plant pot which had had some dead mint in it for about three months, and planted his orange pips in it. “Even if I told someone, they’d think I was making it up.”

“True,” I said, reassured.

He thought about it. He had his hair tied up in a knot with its green cloth, and he had never looked less dangerous. He looked like he was about to take some laundry out to the springs. “So the problem is that the Egyptians will be offended.”

The mint, I swear, had perked up. There was green on it.

“Yes. At best they’ll think we’re incompetent and at worst they’ll think the Queen is lying so she doesn’t have to hand him over. Either way, there’s a danger they won’t let us have the grain.”

His eyes went over me twice and I thought he seemed unhappy about something. “Can I ask why it’s you looking for him?” He sounded unusually serious. Normally, his ashy laugh was only arm’s length away, waiting in the corner, but it had gone away elsewhere for now.

“The Queen thinks he ran away, and that he might come with me willingly if I find him. My commander was the Queen’s brother. I’m his uncle by oath.”

“Her brother,” he echoed, and there was something strange in the way he said it. There was hopelessness in it, and however I tried to look at it, I couldn’t see why.

“What?” I asked.

“No, I was going to say you should leave it to someone else, but—I can see you can’t.”

“Why should I leave it to someone else?”

The way his eyes brushed over me then, I could see that he had watched the centuries turn, and knights like me serve queens like ours again and again, all different, and all the same. “The Queen will kill you in the end.”

“She might, she might not,” I said. “But duty is honour.”

He looked like he would have liked to punch whoever first said that, but he didn’t argue with me. Instead he stayed quiet, studying the edge of the table. He wasn’t thinking: he had already had a thought, but he wasn’t sure it was a thought he should say. It was extraordinary to read a person like that, but he was like watching very clear water. “Hold a funeral.”

“Hold a . . . funeral,” I repeated experimentally.

“The Egyptians can’t be offended if he’s dead.”

I had to stare at it for a while, because my instinct was to say, No, that won’t work, because what if he turns up again? Immediately there would be problems for the throne, because people would say the real prince was dead and this person might look like him but he was clearly an imposter, and there was nothing the Queen could do to argue against that. People love conspiracies. And even if that wasn’t a difficulty; it would be a hard, hard thing for the Queen to arrange the funeral rites for her son without even knowing if he was truly dead or not.

No, said the little voice in my head that had always belonged to Helios but increasingly sounded like Dionysus. She’s a Sown lady. Duty comes first. She won’t refuse to do something just because her feelings are hurt. That’s the reason she clashed with Pentheus in the first place. She doesn’t understand people who aren’t like that.

I expected to spend an hour waiting around at the Palace. I could walk around the shrine to Semele among the ivy and try to think of a good way to suggest a funeral, without sounding as though I had given up hope for Pentheus. I wanted that wait. After barely half a night’s sleep, my head was full of fog. I was still nebulously scared that Dionysus was wrong, and I was the one who had done that to the triplets, and scared that I only believed him because that was so much nicer than not believing him. It was making me prickly and twitchy.

“Ah, good morning, Phaidros,” said the Egyptian ambassador, clipping down the steps with the happy energy of a person who had slept for ten hours and had a lovely long morning to himself to think things over, without being interrupted by any mad people in the cupboard at all. Even worse, it wasn’t the kind of good morning, Phaidros that planned to stand alone. It sounded horribly like it was bringing lots of friends. “I was just wondering—”

“No,” I said, before he could get going. “Fuck immediately off, I am not explaining writing or marriage, or . . . shoes, or whatever normal thing has mystified you now.”

He was smiling. “Breakfast. Would you like to have some?”

“In general or with you?”

“With me.”

Sometimes vows of honesty aren’t difficult to uphold. “I would rather get in that fountain and drown.”

Fortunately, for some Egyptian reason of his own, he looked delighted and went away laughing.

“You didn’t sleep very well then,” the Chamberlain said dryly at the top of the steps.

“You look me in the eye and tell me you’d have bloody breakfast with him.”

“I can’t,” she admitted.