The Hymn to Dionysus

by Natasha Pulley

I was tired, but being able to spite an annoying person is an amazing source of energy.

Facts.

You think you grow out of things, but it’s that the world changes around you, not that you do.

Egyptians are annoying for the following reasons. One, they think they’re the best educated people in the world, so they ignore most things told to them by people who are not Egyptians, on the reasoning that you must be a moron who lives in a pigsty.

“Is it possible, lady?” She breathed in deep, in the give-me-strength way Helios had used to do when someone told him to get the siege ladders.

I looked at him hard, not wanting to have to spell out for him what slavery would be like for someone who looked like him. “If I have to come and rescue you from the King of Persia’s zoo before anyone has a chance to try and make you breed with another giraffe,” I whispered back, very fast so that any of the Pylos people who heard me would struggle to follow in Theban dialect, “you will never live it down. I will follow you around, reminding you about it, even if I have to ride after you as you gallop free across the fucking savannah.”

“Does this need to involve me?” I said, sliding the traditional razor into my voice. “It was a lung! Permission to throw him down the fucking well, sir?” “Granted,” I said, in case there were still miracles.

I took over my unit again from an exhausted-looking Polydorus, who gave me a thousand-mile stare and said he was just off to die in peace now.

“Suffering doesn’t make people good or noble. A little bit gives them perspective. A lot turns them cruel, and too much—you get a murderer or a marvel, and neither of those are really people any more.”

“I thought you were drawing out a revenge quest. I was telling you to get on with it. I thought you were just . . . I thought,” I said, trying hard to say it in a straight line, “that the only reason you were being kind to me was to make it worse when you murdered me.” He lifted his eyebrow a tiny fraction. “You’re fucked up, Phaidros.”

“You’re a snob, Phaidros, you’re an art snob. Oh, could people feel something about it? Boo, hit it with a rock.”