Page 83 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“A holy device,” I said, appalled. “I can’t—”

“This is how they work,” she said over me. “This is how they all work. There’s no magic in marvels. Apollo doesn’t care what you make a machine say. I need you to say this, it needs to be a man’s voice, and it can only be a member of the House of Kadmus. You’re family, Phaidros.”

I was suspended in honey again. Drowning, but in something sweet. I’d never felt like that before this week, no one had ever made me feel like that, and now two of them had come along at once.

I must have looked like I was about to hurl myself off the roof, because she slowed down and came back to me, although she had been on her way to the edge to see out over the city.

“I know it’s hard to hear,” she said, more gently—but not, I thought, like she really did know. More like she knew that it was the best thing to say in order to make me gut up and do as I was told. “I know. It’s reassuring to think the gods are with us in holy machines, but they’re not. It’s just priests and oracles. And sometimes, desperate queens and kings who need to find a way to bring order back to a city that’s eating itself.”

I couldn’t tell what it was in me that was breaking, but something was. The way I understood the world, and Thebes, and everything in it—it was too big to have a name.

“Tell me what you have to say, knight.”

I swallowed it all down. “This is not the work of a god, but a man, and poisoned wine. Justice is in the hands of the daughters of the dragon.”

“Good. Stand here.” She looked up at the marvel, leaning back to see the heights of it against the sun. “It’s almost ready.” She was right: the steam was singing inside. She went to the edge of the roof, saw something that made her smile, and knocked her fists together. That zing she’d had before in the courtyard was even stronger now. She was Helios on the front line, waiting for the advance order: it was pure joy. I’d thought it was deinos enough in him, because even among knights, it’s rare to genuinely love battle once you understand what it is. I only have it sometimes. To feel the joy of war in the face of not just a chariot line coming at you, which is straightforward, but an entire city howling at the edge of uprising—that was something else. “They’re here.”

I went to the edge too.

At the hem of the crowd now, there was a red band. I couldn’t work out what I was seeing at first. Not serving knights.

They were women, all of them, Sown ladies dressed in ceremony red. Every one of them, and there must have been about a hundred, had come on a war chariot, with a full team of horses, and with younger girls behind them to serve as the squires—just like in the story, where Hera and her daughters got Athena’s chariot ready. They had surrounded the crowd without trapping them: there was enough room between the chariots to run past. Each chariot glittered with the combat lineage crests of each family; each of the women would have once been a serving knight, before marriage. From up here, I couldn’t make them out, but I could see the blinding shine off the bronze and the filigree. The horses, bred from the same lines as the garrison’s chargers, were bad-tempered in the heat and the crowd, snapping at anyone who came up too close to them. A weird, uneasy murmur went through everyone.

The Queen gave me a look of absolute delight, and shoved another lever in the marvel, hard.

A noise like I had never heard before tore right across the city. It was like a battle horn, but it was so much louder than any horn. I had to smack both hands over my ears. It shook the roof under us, and vibrated in the bronze of the marvel. If someone had told me that it was the signal that sounded when Athena and Ares rode out from Olympus, I would have believed it.

The crowd turned, looking up at us, and the Palace, and the great marvel.

The Queen put me in front of the flue, close, so I was breathing into it. Even that tiny sound echoed impossibly, so loud I was sure people down in the streets could hear it. She grasped my shoulders to keep me in the right place.

It was sacrilege, but it was an order from the Queen, and duty is honour.

Duty is honour.

“This is not the work of a god, but a man, and poisoned wine. Justice is in the hands of the daughters of the dragon.”

Some device inside the marvel took my voice and changed it into thunder that crashed over the whole of Thebes.

The Queen tapped me and pressed her finger over her lips, and then, still full of joy, mimed giving me a round of applause. She pulled me to the edge of the roof, pressing my shoulder to keep me low. We both knelt down at the edge to see into the crowd below, where the angry chants and shouting had gone silent. I had to push my fist against my heart, because my ribcage had gone stiff with the knowledge that—just like when Dionysus had lifted me up and I’d lost sight of why I shouldn’t dance—I’d crossed an invisible border, and there was no true going back. Only with Dionysus, it had been a relief, in an unholy kind of way. This was just unholy, and what was leaning its boot right into my chest was the opposite of relief. Pressure, that felt like it would be rib-breaking soon.

The Sown mothers, a good two feet above the ground where they were mounted on the chariots, all held up something. They had one or sometimes two each, small things, the size of an oil jug or a head, and it took me entire seconds to understand that the things weren’t just the size of heads. They were heads.

I forgot everything about the marvel and sacrilege and the Queen and Dionysus. Jason’s mother was down there. I recognised her, she was my age, we had been in the same unit, but she had gone home to Thebes to marry before the ship was wrecked. The head she was holding was Jason’s.

When they spoke, they all spoke together, and it clear even from the roof.

“Pardon us for the dishonour our children have brought to you, citizens of Thebes, and pray that we shall give you better knights in the years to come.”

If I was shocked, the crowd was stunned. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word.

The Sown ladies climbed down from the chariots and picked up baskets. The baskets were full of gold and silver, the spoils of war from Troy—not money, but plates and chalices and jewellery. They began to hand it out to everyone in the crowd. On any other day, they would surely have been mobbed, but everyone was broken-marvel still, and the red figures moved through in peace, trailed by their younger children, who had brought water, or wine.

And then people just . . . began to leave. It began at the edges of the crowd. It effervesced, and people misted away into the alleys and the squares, moving slowly, without any of the rage from before. The faces I could make out looked numb, or confused, or sometimes relieved. One man was sitting on the ground, staring at a severed head as if he were trying to work out what he was supposed to do now.

“You didn’t know why the Theban legion is called the Furies, did you?” the Queen said.

In the top of my mind, I’d thought it was just because we were fierce. But somewhere in the deep under-strata, I did know. People had told stories around campfires about what happened if Theban knights tried to desert, or worse, if they killed a Theban civilian. I’d thought they were just trying to scare the children. The Furies—the real Furies, from the holy stories—come for any truly unjust murder.