Page 93 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I hated it.

People got out the way so that he had a clear path to the Queen. He bowed stiffly.

“Lady.”

“Sown.” She smiled, bowed back, and there, in her, I saw exactly what was happening in me.

She didn’t care either. She had learned not to, because it would have been agony, all the time.

“Come on,” I murmured, less and less sure I’d done the right thing. “Let’s get you away from all the audience.”

The way he gripped my arm, he might have been drowning.

As the Queen’s attendants began to see people out, Apophis clipped up the steps and, because he was six feet tall and twice their size, brushed by them without seeming even to see that they were there. His own retinue of slaves was behind him, half a battalion of them, all just as immaculate and polished as he was, most of them far taller than any of us, gleaming with turquoise and gold worth more than most Sown estates. I must have been more tired and more hungry than I’d really known, because seeing them made me think about a story I’d heard a bard sing at one of the wayside places on my way from Troy. It was about a great knight, dead in Hades, and what he said to a living man who was visiting. Better to be the meanest slave in heaven, than a king in hell. I’d tried not to remember it because I needed it not to be true, because if it was true than Helios was miserable, but the echoes of some stories echo around inside your head long after the lyre strings are quiet. I couldn’t tell why I’d thought of that. No; Pentheus, going to Egypt to be nobody, but getting away from being a king in a madhouse.

“What,” Apophis said to me, enunciating precisely, “in the name of Ra is this supposed to be? You held a funeral and now you appear to have resurrected your prince? Or was he never dead, and you were trying to avoid your agreement with the Pharaoh? What?”

“He was missing,” I said. I put my hand on his chest and pushed slowly to make him stand further away from me. “And we didn’t tell you because people here are already starving to death and we need your grain. We were hoping to find him. We didn’t: we assumed he was dead, hence the funeral. But we’ve found him. I know it’s stupid and messy, but that’s what it is.”

“People will think you’ve swapped in another boy.”

“When you say people, do you mean you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he snapped.

“There he is, you can see him.”

“You know you all look the same to me.”

“Apophis . . . we just held some extremely expensive funeral games. If we’d swapped him, there would have been no funeral. You’d never even seen him. It would have been easy. This is just what a giant fucking cock-up looks like.”

He did seem to think about it at least. When he spoke again, it was quieter. “It’s a marvellous narrative. A young prince back from the dead to save his city. It will combat these superstitions of a lost prince and a mad god coming for the throne.”

“Sir,” I said, “I have no doubt that’s what the Palace will say happened, you’re right, but it isn’t what anyone planned. He went mad, we lost him, we’ve found him. It is very embarrassing; it is not a conspiracy.”

“Either way, you’ve all been lying to me. According to you, the prince was in a sanctuary all this while. I am astonished; the duplicity is shameless. I am inclined to leave, and let this—insane city eat itself with its mad god and its vanishing princes!”

I looked up at him for a few seconds, not seeing his face, but the future where I had to take my little knights into battle, and see how well they could manage that left turn against Egyptian soldiers who outnumbered them. “Then . . . the next time you’ll see me is when I’m killed on the deck of one of your ships.”

“Don’t be absurd, I have three thousand men guarding those ships, you can’t possibly mount an attack, you’ll lose your entire garrison.”

“I know,” I said. “But we’ll have to anyway. All this green? Even that can’t save us now.”

Something opened in his expression. He touched my shoulder, tilting me away from the Queen and Pentheus, and the Guards. Unlike me, he was clean. Somehow his white clothes had stayed white, even with all the sacrifice smoke. “Are you swearing to me that that boy is indeed the prince, and all of this was just—a mistake that got out of hand?”

“I swear, sir.”

“Then . . . I’ll take you at your word, knight.”

That caught me out. “Why?”

He smiled. “Among ourselves we have been calling you Honest Heliades.”

“You . . . might not be entirely a prick,” I admitted.

“Isn’t it nice when we get on?”

“No. I still don’t like you, you loom and you’ve got pretentious earrings.”