Page 84 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Down in the crowd, people began to sing. It was the hymn to Athena; the thanksgiving for justice.

The Queen patted my back and I followed her to the stairs, down through the tower—all the way down, the hymn swelled, even though the walls—and then out past the throne, onto the balcony that looked out over Thebes, and over the singing crowd. Her chamberlain was waiting, with the Marvel Crown. The Queen lifted it from its velvet cushion in passing and paused while slaves fitted the royal silver armour over her clothes.

“Borrow your sword?” she said to me as she came into view of the crowd.

I gave it to her.

She unsheathed it and held it up high, and there in the sun and the burning sky she looked like Athena, and the crowd exploded. I twitched, because for a split second I thought they were about to surge at the gates and start firing poisoned arrows at her, but I was wrong. It wasn’t rage. They were cheering.

27

In the garrison dormitories, commanders, wards, or sometimes mothers were collecting the gear of the executed knights. Armour, clothes, kit; sometimes boxes of dice and games, or worse, toys. It was all so quiet I might as well have lost my hearing again. I opened one door and then snapped it straight shut again, because one of the mothers had hanged herself inside. I called for some slaves before anyone else could see and then, because it was all I could think of, I went down to the kitchens and told the cooks to use the last of the eggs and honey, and get some cake into everyone.

Few by few, I found what was left of my unit. The little knights were coming back one or two at a time, ashen, and sometimes disguised as civilians, in case people decided they hadn’t quite finished wanting to lynch anything in a red cloak yet. I got them sitting down in the mess, where they stayed exactly where I put them, looking like lost ducklings with no duck. Some of their commanders, the surviving ones, came through to find them. Some didn’t. Polydorus sank down next to me, silent and wooden. I didn’t know what to say. I had a feeling he was probably as much relieved as anguished, and probably the guilt from that was worse than anything I’d ever felt about Helios. I swallowed down the need to tell him what had happened with Jason. It wouldn’t help. It would break him in half. It was still like trying to swallow needles.

“She’s arresting all the vintners,” Polydorus said, nodding out to the courtyard to show me where he’d heard it. “Have you ever heard anything so stupid?”

What would Dionysus do if someone tried to arrest him? I didn’t have enough brain leftover to think about it.

“Help me look after the little knights,” I said, because Polydorus needed something to do other than stare at the ground. “Do you remember the rules of that pirate game?”

“Pirate game—oh, Ares. I can’t forget.”

It was a board game that everyone at Troy had used to get very intense about on the long, miserable night watches. It was to do with sirens and sea monsters and pirate kings, and it was stupidly complicated, which was perfect. Between us, we roped in all the little knights. Whenever anyone new came to join us, there had to be a Ceremonial Recitation of the Rules. After a little while, they were squabbling about whether sirens beat pirates and could we explode the sea monster or was that cheating.

One of the generals slowed down as he passed by, and I thought he was going to tell us to stow it, but instead he asked if he could play.

“Sir?” one of the little knights said to me suddenly, sounding alarmed.

“Hm?”

“You don’t look very . . .”

I had forgotten to do anything else about my shoulder. I cast around vaguely for anything I could use as a new bandage. “I’m all right.”

“You realize you took a vow of honesty,” Polydorus murmured. “Is there a witch anywhere in . . .”

“I’ve seen one. I’m fine. A lot of blood doesn’t mean a lot of hurt.”

The general had overheard. “Go home, Heliades. You can’t do anything else now. I’ll send a couple of slaves with you, make sure you don’t collapse on the road. Take some horses.” He sighed. “You’re one of only two polemarchs left. Do take care not to die of that, would you please?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, staring into the near future. Home: I’d probably see Dionysus there. What was I meant to say? Would you mind not playing with your food quite this much? I had to say something now. What had happened today—I couldn’t call it disproportionate. It wasn’t. Cross a god at your peril. Apollo and Artemis had murdered all sixteen of a woman’s children because she boasted too much. Gods aren’t meant to be reasonable. But I couldn’t keep pretending he was just a witch.

“Oh, that reminds me,” the general said. “There’s a witch looking for you. Tall, good-looking? Arrestingly weird voice? He’s outside.”

Fuck.

I heard Dionysus before I saw him. The courtyards were quiet. The haze of smoke that hung in the air, dancing with tiny ashes, seemed like maybe it didn’t come from sacrifices, but from those pyres in his voice.

“So what you do is, you get a racing camel, and you go out into the desert in the very hottest part of the day. It’s so hot that this is incredibly dangerous; the way is strewn about with the bones of people and camels who didn’t go in and out quick enough. If you drop water on the ground, it boils.”

I came around the last corner from the cloister, and from there I could see down into the Knights’ Court, to where Dionysus was sitting on the edge of the fountain with a whole group of people sitting around him. More were pausing in the colonnades, leaning against pillars, some setting down baskets and boxes. Usually anyone telling anything even approaching a story would have been dragged away on suspicion of being a bard (penalty for singing unlicensed accounts: slavery) but perhaps the red tattoos were his shield here. Or maybe nobody had enough heart left to stop him.

“And you know when you reach the right place. Because everywhere, all through the sand, there are tracks a foot broad of gold dust. Under the surface, as the ants tunnel through, it gets pushed up, and you can see it everywhere, just like you can if you see an ant colony when you lift up a stone.”

I had an eerie vision of a great desert plain all laced with gleaming veins of gold.

“So, the gold-hunters leap off their camels, and scoop up as much as they can. But they don’t have long at all before the sun starts to sink and the air starts to cool, and the ants come out again. Every single ant is as big as a dog, and you’ve not seen quick till you’ve seen these things.”