Page 9 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I don’t know how knights do it where you’re from, but I’d be willing to bet it’s similar to us, because it works.

We build the front three lines, at the very least, out of pairs of sworn knights. To swear your oath to another knight is a kind of marriage vow: it is as binding, and as deep. We do this not just because each partner would die to save the other one, but because each one of us would die in order not to embarrass the other. Shame is a big driving force. If I screwed up, it would be Helios who caught it from the older knights.

Theban lines famously do not break, and it’s because of that battle order. The Spartans do it the same way, and really, so does anyone else relying on heavy infantry. I don’t often make predictions for the future, Dionysus being a walking exercise in how it can all go splat when you least expect it, but even knowing him, I’ll say very comfortably that the most effective legions will still run that system in a thousand years.

As I say, nineteen was old and some of the officers had thought I would never make it to the vanguard, but they changed their minds when I brought down a chariot, horses and all. I was strong and fast and vicious, with everything to prove after years of waiting, and I was in love with Helios in exactly the insane, all-consuming way the legion prefers.

Now, when I talk to people who served for other nations, they seem to have the same sense that Theban knights are sort of dangerously mad, and maybe our witches give us drugs to make us unafraid of charging cavalry, and it’s hard to explain that when your family is there on the line, not waiting at home, the best, most exciting thing you can be allowed to do is join the shield wall. I’d never been so happy as I was that day on the line with my shield covering Helios’s right side, and I don’t remember being scared. There was nothing to be scared of, except dishonouring him. The best moments of my whole life were on that line. Under our black banners, with my shield locked against his, as the drums rolled and the legion sang the hymn to Ares, a beautiful battle anthem to bring down the sky, never mind Trojan chariots . . . I’d never been so happy.

It was the first year of the long siege, a gorgeous spring, when the fighting was still fierce and none of us was hopeless yet. For a few months, I was Wonder Phaidros, which had the unfortunate side effect of making me into an arrogant prick.

Then one day, I took it too far.

We were marching that day against cavalry, and we were all happy and fizzy, because that meant that if we were quick, we’d get some horses off the Trojan knights. Horses are worth a fortune in Achaea. Looking back, I can’t quite believe that I did what I did just because I wanted a nice horse, but people do stupid things for stupid reasons, and that was mine. Or—well. It wasn’t that I wanted a horse. I wanted the honour. I wanted to see Helios light up with pride and hit me over the head for being a suicidal moron, and then to hold onto me too tight like he did when he’d just seen me nearly die. That made me feel immortal.

We don’t ever break the line.

But there was an incredible black charger, carrying a woman in silver armour. I’d seen her before, often: none of us knew what her real name was, her Hatti one, but we called her Andromache, which means “fighter of warriors.” I thought I could throw her, get the horse, and be back in formation very quickly. That isn’t what happened, of course. She was older than me, a seasoned soldier, and she did what any seasoned soldier would. When I broke ranks, she ignored me, trusting her horse to kick me down, and aimed an arrow straight past me, then another—she was so fast that I thought maybe Artemis was with her—and another, and she killed three knights before the people on either side could close the shield wall.

That’s how Helios died.

So when we set sail to take our cargo of silver and slaves to Egypt a few weeks later, nobody was talking to me, except sometimes to recommend that I kill myself.

They couldn’t kill me, because I was the helmsman, which is a difficult job but one I’d always been good at. I might have been an idiot, but I had a good memory for things I saw, whether that was the stars, or the shape of the shallows, or the wrecking shores. Everyone else who definitely wouldn’t crash the ship was dead. Those three arrows from the Trojan general had only been the start of what became a total rout.

“If this ship so much as judders,” the captain told me mildly, “I will chain you to an oar with the slaves.”

Everyone was waiting for me to screw it up. I was too, because you need to be able to go into a calm kind of trance to handle a ship well, and I couldn’t reach it. After seven days at sea, I was shocked that I hadn’t wrecked us. We hugged the coast as far as possible, because deep-sea sailing was dangerous and stormy, so it was straightforward enough. Steer away from the shallow bits and all would be well. We put in at night; winter was coming, the seas were turning rough, and I twice saw the wind hurling itself into funnel spirals around a harpy as she raged across the horizon. I felt it tug the keel, though we were twenty miles away. I was dreading the open-sea passage to the Nile.

It was just before we were about to leave the coast and strike out into the deep sea, on a bronze evening when I was looking over the side and thinking that perhaps I should drown myself, when someone saw the boy on the shore.

The boy was beautiful. We thought he must have been the son of a noble lady or a queen, because he was wearing a purple cloak against the sea wind. He would be a worth a fortune, and so we pulled in to the shale beach to take him.

He didn’t run away. Perhaps he realized he would never run fast enough and he might as well save himself the bother, but it was still eerie to wade out of the sea ready for a fight, only to find him walking out right to us in the tide line, as though he had long since arranged to meet us there.

I was used to snatching people; but he didn’t fight, and so instead it was a strange sort of escort, and it was nearly politely that we took him aboard. There was some debate about where to put him. Usually slaves went down in the hold, but ours was already crowded, and there were some angry men down there who might hurt him just because they could. So we put him by the mast. We put chains on him, which he seemed not to mind. He just settled down, looking intrigued through his eerie blue eyes—people grumbled when they saw, because the Egyptians paid less for blue, it was ugly, but otherwise he was perfect—and we sailed away, the trade wind filling our black sails so well it felt like a gift from Poseidon. Some people thought he must be simple because he was so peaceful. I didn’t think so. When someone is that calm in a crisis, either they don’t know what’s happening, or you don’t.

I thought maybe I knew those eyes, and even that cheerful calm.

I tried to say that maybe we were the ones who didn’t quite see what was happening, but someone smacked me over the head and told me to shut up. The boy smiled at me, like we both knew the punchline of a joke nobody else had got to yet, and held his hands up to show me the manacles as they fell off.

It was strange, having him aboard. Nobody tried to bother him, even when it became obvious he could get out of his chains. There was a . . . not-thereness about him. People had a way of walking past him like they’d forgotten him, and because he didn’t talk, it was easy for them to keep forgetting.

I don’t know why it didn’t work on me. Maybe it was because he could see I wasn’t in anyone’s good ledger.

Or maybe he knew me, from all those years ago, and the lightning strike. I still had that spectacular scar over my face from the chariot incident.

Even though he was going to be sold in Memphis, even though it was a stupid idea to latch onto him, I was grateful to have another outcast to sit with. He seemed happy to have me. I brought him food, like I was his host and not his gaoler, so we had all our meals together, and I wrapped him up in my cloak at night; the purple one was long since reassigned. He never spoke, and I wasn’t certain he understood me, but he seemed like he was listening when I told him about why everyone was so angry with me, and what I’d done.

“I think I just lost my mind,” I said, for what must have been the twelfth time. He was doing amazingly well at not shoving me over the side. I was yanking a comb through my hair. After days at sea, we had stopped to take on fresh water that morning, which meant finally getting a proper wash, but when your hair is down to your waist and you live in a salt wind, things are less straightforward on that front than you might like. I couldn’t cut it. The only Theban knights with short hair are slaves who used to be Theban knights.

He said nothing, but it was a sympathetic sort of nothing. I realized he was waiting hopefully to see if I might give him the comb. Feeling like a pig not to have offered it to him first, I touched his shoulders to get him to turn away from me, and ran the comb through his hair myself. He let me, and seemed happy at least. I wished I could tell if he was pretending not to be scared.

The comb went through easily, though his hair was much thicker and heavier than mine. The sea seemed not to notice him any more than the crew did. He had stayed luminously clean the whole time. Or maybe he just seemed clean because he looked so healthy.

The wind was picking up, so I plaited his hair and tucked it under the edge of his cloak, my cloak, which he was holding wrapped close now.

“Warm enough?” I asked. I was, but I’d been up and down all day. He had been sitting still. He didn’t always: sometimes he went below to see the slaves, which usually we would have put a stop to, but since he didn’t speak, it was hard to see the harm in it. To my surprise, nobody had tried to kill him, not even the captured Trojan knights bound for the mines. I wasn’t sure what he did down there, but whenever it was my turn to take their rations down, everyone seemed much calmer than they usually would have.