Page 98 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Why?”

“So they won’t talk to us about anything else?” I said, feeling increasingly like a real prick for having made them stand up all this time. I was hungry and tired, but I was trained to be hungry and tired, and I was only thirty-one. They were leaning on their cane, and for all they weren’t old, they weren’t going to see fifty again either. “Tiresias, this news has been in circulation for about an hour and I’m already up to here in people asking me for favours and money and jobs; please just tell me something fun about tortoises?”

Tiresias laughed. “You are a ludicrous outdated piece of chivalry that . . .” They trailed off, and something in their expression went glassy.

“Prophet?” I asked, wary.

When they spoke again, it was their voice, but it wasn’t them. “Sweet knight, do not lose your faith in holy devices. The messages might have been bought and paid for, and manufactured by human beings, but there is yet holy transmutation in the great machines, and the god will speak true, even when he has been paid to be false.”

Tiresias blinked twice. “Right, so, something funny about tortoises. You’re in for it, Phaidros. I know a lot of tortoise jokes.” They paused. “I feel like you’re looking at me funny.”

“I—no,” I said, not daring to touch it. “Nothing.”

The Temple of Apollo was just outside the city. It sat in what was usually a lake, on an island, but there was no water left. The lake bed was baked, and strewn with the bones of fish and eels, and even birds. What had used to be banks of reeds were more like coarse straw heaps now. Around the struts of the ancient causeway, coins and brooches and tiny messages in tiny bottles gleamed dully in the sun: old offerings. The temple itself was so white it was hard to look at in the morning glare. Beyond it, the plain was blasted, and swimming with dust trails. No one, and nothing, was on the road. The green that was engulfing the city inside the walls wasn’t here. I watched the Queen. She must have been talking to her advisers, even Tiresias, about why that was and which god they thought had been appeased. An attendant was carrying a basket of pomegranates that had grown overnight in one of the Palace courtyards to give the priests. I wondered what would happen if even the Oracle said, Sorry, that’s the Raver.

The Queen’s retinue was flying the black flag of the royal house, and once we were close, the temple’s bronze gates swung open by themselves. As we passed the bronze panelling, I felt the heat ricocheting off it. The edge of my armour was already burning my neck, even though it had been barely a quarter-mile walk under the shade of the canopies eight slaves had kept over us the whole time.

I kept two paces behind her, the same as Pentheus, so that the three of us made a moving triangle with her in the lead. We weren’t married yet, and even when we were, I wasn’t going to be a reigning king, and I didn’t want anyone to imagine for a second that I thought I would be.

She glanced back at me. “Ready?”

I bowed a little and stepped off to the side with the stewards and the Guards while she went on into the sanctuary.

The way it would work, she had explained, was:

The Oracle would receive her in the sanctuary. That was a place only for the supplicant, to hear the official question to the god. That was the theatre side of things.

But there was backstage, too, and I was it. If I waited in the courtyard for long enough, someone would come out—a priest who didn’t look anything much to ask me inside for some water, and we would talk, and the point was that he would find out what exactly was behind the official request, and if I could remember how to be amenable enough and charming enough, he might be the way I could find out what the temple knew, and maybe even how they knew it, and what their answer was likely to be.

Like all supplicants had to be, the Queen was dressed in white. As she climbed the steps, the wind pulled at her dress and tugged her hair sideways over her shoulder.

Flash, headache, and I was at Troy again, struggling to put up the tent with Helios in the wind, which was pulling at his hair too. There had been storms and everything had fallen down in the night, and everyone was nervous, because now was the perfect time for the Trojans to raid us while we were in such disarray. And I swear that he looked at me then like I wasn’t the child I’d been at the time, but who I was now, staring at him down the passageway of the years.

Although the lake was dry, there were working fountains in the courtyards, and shady cloisters, and trees that were still alive. I sat down on the edge of a fountain, beneath an ancient olive tree, and scooped up a handful of water. I was so thirsty it tasted sweet, as if someone had put honey in it. I let my head bow until the ends of my hair brushed the fountain rim, grateful for a few minutes by myself. I’d been surrounded by endless people since going into the Palace—gods, that was only yesterday morning—and it was amazingly wearing, after being alone for so long. It wasn’t the same as the tight-packed total lack of privacy in the legion. There, no one cared about me particularly, or what I was doing. Now, people were watching me all the time.

Pentheus came to have some water too and shot me a look that was full of apology for existing. I flicked some water at him. He flinched and didn’t laugh—he didn’t understand I was playing, he was reading it as fuck off—so I got him in a headlock and wrestled him sideways across my lap, and then he did laugh. I pushed him gently upright. Then, a bit brilliantly, he splashed me back.

“That,” said a cheerful voice, “is a superb scar.”

I looked around. There was a man sitting not far from me. He was about my age, maybe, but not sea-battered or worn out from living in camps and ships, and light like you can be only when you work indoors. He was dressed in blue; a priest here, then. Short hair. And he was smiling, because there was a scar across his face too, different to mine but just as noticeable.

“So is that,” I said, full of approval. I don’t like priests who haven’t been in the world but he had clearly, thoroughly been in it.

“How’d you get yours?”

“Run over by a chariot. You?”

“Dunno, I had it when the temple got me. I want to think it’s something good like a chariot but probably I just annoyed a cat.”

I laughed. “I’m Phaidros.”

He gave me a sideways look and smiled. “Very appropriate,” he said, pointing upwards to the sky.

We give our gods titles. Apollo is almost always called Phoibos Apollo, “Shining Apollo,” which comes from the same word as Phaidros. Anything that’s phai or phoi is to do with light.

“Me too,” he said.

“Sorry?”