Page 73 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“I did think that, when the rations went down. But . . . did we even have the means to supply more long sea voyages?”

“No. It cost more to fight at Troy than we gained from any plunder.”

I wasn’t surprised. A fully fitted warship cost acres of silver. We had lost so many on the punishing voyage home. It shouldn’t have been that way. It wasn’t that far. In fair weather, you could sail from Achaea to Troy in about two weeks. But Troy had fallen in winter. Our word for winter is the Storms. It had taken five months to get home. Harpies had raged all the way, spinning the wind and the water into terrible cyclones that had hauled ships right from the sea and dropped them from the air. Whole crews had drowned. I’d never known a season like it—my unit had tried to wait it out, but after two months stranded, we ran out of food and we had to sail. Probably some ships were still wrecked on little islands, trying to make repairs.

“If all else fails,” she said, “it’s going to be Athens. But that will be scant gain for a lot of effort. They’re barely better off than we are.”

I nodded once, soaking all that in. When I’d said it—when Dionysus had said it—I’d known funeral games would be a political gamble. That wasn’t the same as gambling the lives of everyone in the city on the very last of the food.

“So,” she rounded off, “we’ll need to find a body that looks more or less right, though I’m sure that won’t be difficult.” She said it with the same dispassion as everything else. Then, suddenly, like a splinter in glass, “Would you ever have just run away, when you were his age? You had a difficult life. I imagine you never got anything you wanted. Did you ever think about desertion?”

“No,” I said slowly, “but . . . I had everything I needed. I had Helios, and my unit, and a profession I was good at. It didn’t matter that I didn’t always get what I wanted.”

“Are you saying Pentheus didn’t have what he needed?” Arrows again, but not quite play-fighting this time.

“Yes. I don’t think royal heirs ever get what they need,” I said, looking at the neat rows of chain mail, the pliers still resting on her knee, how she had her hair in a long rope over her shoulder, like a knight.

The way she stared at me then: I might have punched her in the gut and she would have been less hurt. I tilted back, because I hadn’t meant it to hurt her at all—I’d thought I was saying something obvious that we both knew but that she couldn’t say herself.

“I’m a bad mother, aren’t I,” she said quietly.

I wanted to hold her hands. Of course I didn’t do it. “You’re Sown.”

She looked down at me with the fossil of a smile around her eyes. It was the kind of smile I’d always imagined that Athena aimed at the people who died under her banners; the sorrow of immense might, capable of going into a frenzy of grief that brought cataclysms, but far, far too restrained to do anything but smile that sad smile.

24

It took only a week to organise the funeral games. That didn’t seem like nearly enough time, but it turned out that the contracts for state funerals were advanced and updated depressingly often, so that they could be held at short notice. In the garrison, the younger knights volunteered to compete, especially the ones who were hoping to marry soon (suddenly the old saying that a good match comes with victory laurels was everywhere), the banners went up through the town, and the vintners and farmers shipped what was left of their dwindling stock up to the Palace supply offices.

I took over my unit again from an exhausted-looking Polydorus, who gave me a thousand-mile stare and said he was just off to die in peace now. The little knights seemed happy to have me back, even Feral Jason once I’d given him a dead mouse to feed his snakes-for-hair and pretended that looking at him had turned me to stone, but more of them were missing, too; gone to Hermes or Ares. I’d only got two thirds of a unit.

It was becoming rare to see anyone moving between Palace courtyards without a mask. They were all different, and though they were mostly shaped like human faces, not animals, I kept catching myself going tense whenever I saw a new one, waiting to hear that thunk of hooves, or to catch the sun gleaming on real horns. Outside the Palace, there were more and more of the unsettling straw masks—cheaper, stranger, all bound into different dead-eyed shapes.

I stopped the little knights wearing them. I told them about the man who was halfway a bull, in the maze. Some of them laughed at first but when it was obvious I wasn’t joking, most of the masks vanished again, or at least, they did until I went home at night.

We were supposed to be conducting war games—how to take cargo from a docked ship—but that was sporadic. What took up almost all our time, the whole garrison, were patrols of the major roads. I’d never done that before in Thebes. We were drowning in thefts, robberies, sudden attacks, especially outside the bars, which were heaving like I’d never seen before. Every street corner was littered with broken wine jars.

But we were coping, more or less, until the night before the funeral.

I thought it was going to be a quiet night. My unit was patrolling Harper Way, the long main road to the mountain and the maze, and it was boring, because after nightly Hidden rides, it was deserted. A few masks lay discarded at the road sides, and every so often, forgotten things winked and gleamed—dolls, necklaces, even abandoned bags—but the people had melted away.

Ivy was forcing its way up between the paving stones of the road. In the deserted quiet with the wild creeping back, I could see what the road would look like in a hundred years, or a thousand, when Thebes was a ruin after all the fine clockwork melted down for swords long ago, and nobody remembered there had ever been marvels.

We were almost at the end of our watch when a battle horn sounded, high and eerie in the night.

The little knights all looked at me, confused. Inside the city: it had to be a mistake, or a drill, or someone taking the piss.

It wasn’t. It was Polydorus’s unit, formed into a shield wall at the top of what was usually a quiet road, full of airy houses where trader families lived. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first. A whole mob of people in those straw masks were hurling wine jars at the knights.

“Phaidros, fucking Zeus alive,” Polydorus said when I locked my shield with his. “It’s something about flour, the traders are using short measures—”

A wine jar smashed against my shield. There must have been a lit rag in it, because the thing exploded. Burning brandy vapour hissed up around us both. I had to tear my cloak off as fire rushed down one side of it.

There was a hush. Not far away, my cloak blazed by itself. Getting angry about flour was one thing, but trying to kill a Sown knight was something else.

Between the shields and through the smoke, I saw a slim figure standing on a wall. For a lightning bolt of a second I thought it was Dionysus—but it was just a man in a bronze mask that looked a bit like him. I should have been thinking about the fight and the order to advance, but even as the crowd of masked men realized they didn’t have much choice now but to charge at us, I found myself checking every few steps for that man on the wall. He was very still, but watching, like a general.

Afterwards, I sat on the edge of a fountain in the road, washing blood and soot off my shield. The fire had done something interesting to the filigree, and now it had oxidised rainbows in it. I quite liked it. I was in a sunny mood now. Things had seemed a bit too much earlier, but sometimes what you need to remember is that everything is fine as long as you aren’t currently on fire. Around us, the traders were edging out of their houses, bringing us cold water, which was kind of them, and helping to move the bodies.