Page 12 of The Hymn to Dionysus

11

Normal Sown households are big. I should have been living with Helios, his wife, and any of their children still too little for the legion; as well as my wife, our children, our wards, and maybe even her commander. Generally, you’d have men and women on separate sides of the house, because of how irritating men can be mistaken for vegetables. Polydorus had all of that. I was just me. So, instead of one of the tall townhouses on Copper Street, the Palace administrators had assigned me a strange place right on the edge of Thebes, halfway up the last hill before the mountain. Home was a house and an olive grove, and one crooked lemon tree that never made any lemons, on that wild land on the doorstep of the forest.

The house wasn’t really a house. It was five or six habitable rooms on the edge of a great ruined maze. Nobody knew why it was here, but it was definitively a maze and not just a ruined prison or temple: some ways were dead ends, some curled around and around and then you came out only a few feet of the side of where you’d gone in. Here and there on the less-damaged walls, there were frescos in a style very different to the Theban one, and sudden dips where the land had crumbled and exposed the storeys below ground, of which there were at least three. Stand at the edge of my olive grove, among the roots, and look down: what you’ll see is a lichen-eaten staircase, delving towards the sound of water.

I’d never explored it properly. Sometimes, some absconding cows got lost down there and I helped the farmers fish them out, but being down below ground made me feel uneasy before too long. It was cold down there, really cold, even though underground places are usually warm, and sometimes there were carvings on the walls that were so old I wasn’t even sure people had made them. Whoever had built it, I couldn’t help thinking they—maybe like Daedalus at Knossos—had wanted to trap something inside.

The dark was deep on the little path up to the maze by the time I walked it, which was why I had a lamp. But tonight there were torches burning on the verges, marking the curves of the path in a great string. I frowned over that, because my slaves would have set themselves on fire before they did anything that helpful. Very distantly, I started to hear music; drums, pipes. Maybe people laughing. I thought I was making imaginary patterns from the drone of the cicadas, but the further I went, the more distinct it was. Music. Not our music. Something else. I slowed down. I was so tired; too tired to be angry. I wanted to go home, eat something, burn the disconcerting mask, and collapse. I was deaf enough to sleep through it.

Someone was standing under an olive tree, watching me.

For a split second I thought there was something horrifying wrong with them, but it was a mask, not quite like the one I was still holding but not unlike either. This one was a weeping face.

They were just standing there, staring.

In the dark, I couldn’t see any eyes beyond the mask; only that twisted expression moulded into the plaster.

“Hey,” I snapped. “What are you doing?”

It was one of those moments that, although you understand, later, how it came to be, and you can see its clockwork and what gear moved what and how, is nonetheless—at the time—that particular type of unnerving that clenches all your insides up into a rat king.

The figure in the mask turned around, away from me I thought; and there was another mask. They had two faces.

The second one was wearing a manic grin.

I’d jolted right back before I understood that the sad mask was on the back of the person’s head, and the grinning mask was across their face.

Then whoever it was laughed and ran away, down through the olive grove, straight under the house, into the tunnels.

“No, stop! You can’t go down there, you’ll get l—”

“Aren’t you coming?” a voice floated back. “Dionysus invited you.”

The laughter faded off into the labyrinth, where it was lost in the music.

I looked down at the mask in my hand, coming to terms with not sleeping for another hour. If this Dionysus was not only going to find out my name and have some poor bastard seek me out on the street to give me a creepy mask, but send people round to harass me until I turned up to whatever blasphemy was going on further along the maze, then I would turn up, and I would make him eat his fucking mask.

Once I was a little way along the path, towards the westernmost edge of the labyrinth where the music was coming from, I saw more torchlight. Voices rose over the music, laughing. Before long, I saw the people too, people in masks and dressed in bright colours, clacking wine cups together. The air was full of smoke and alcohol. And that unholy music, which sounded like nothing ever sanctioned in Thebes. It was wild, and loud, and disgusting.

I pressed my teeth together. The law about Sown knights and alcohol wasn’t arbitrary. You do not want a bunch of professionally aggressive lunatics each with an armoury’s worth of heavy weaponry to be drunk. We’re bad enough sober. Even the smell of it was making me edgy.

Lamps like I’d never seen before glimmered everywhere. Mine were just ceramic things with a well for oil, but these were glass; colourless glass, bright glass, glass with images painted on it, glass faceted like a mosaic. They spilled coloured light in patches across tree boughs and threw it upward to make the leaves of grape vines purple or yellow, and there were grape vines everywhere. And ivy: it was rioting right up the trees, so dense that sometimes the shape of them was lost.

I had to turn around as I walked to take it in. It wasn’t just that someone had decided this was a good place for a party. Someone was living here, growing things here, grapes and spices, and hibiscus flowers, and bright plants I couldn’t even name. Even the moss that grew across the open ruins of the labyrinth was lush. It was impossible. The water it would all need had dried up months ago.

I brushed the shoulder of someone who looked more sober than other people. When she turned around, she wearing a mask too.

“Who started this?” I asked, and didn’t add, Don’t mind me, I’ll just stab him and be on my way .

“What? You don’t know Dionysus? Everyone knows Dionysus! He was here a second ago ...”

“What does he look like?”

“He has a silver mask. You’ll see. I heard he’s from India.”

I moved on, half looking for the man, half just trying to keep my bearings. The whole thing was like a fever dream. I’d walked through the ruins before, but I couldn’t tell where I was now. In one of the labyrinth’s old fountains, pristinely clean, there was wine trickling through the half-worn-away statues of someone else’s gods, foaming where it fell any distance, the edge of the wall just too high for anyone to fall into, and lined with endless cups. Servers in animal masks collected old cups, vanishing into the shadows under the vines, behind where the musicians played. Hundreds of people. The gods knew how this Dionysus prick had organised it all and kept it secret at the same time.

No, well: clearly the masks were invitations, and probably the messengers had told people where to come, and to be quiet about it. Probably most people hadn’t punched them in the face before they could say anything. But why me? A senior Sown officer, proverbially square: that was madness. And how did he even know my name?

Those brilliant glass lamps lit the way down into the lower passages of the labyrinth. Lots more people were down there. When I strayed that way, a boy who seemed familiar under the mask caught me and slung his arm around my shoulders, alarmingly taller than anyone has any right to be when you remember them being born.

“Phaidros! You were one of my officers at Troy!”

“Stop touching me,” I said. “Where’s Dionysus?”

He giggled. I’d never seen a knight drunk before—even when I’d been fighting with Helios and drinking with the Athenians, I’d never got to giggling stages of drunkenness—and it was getting harder and harder not find it obscene. “Dionysus! I saw him before ...” He turned around twice on the spot, and nearly fell over.

“Who is he?”

“I heard he came from Hattusa. I think he’s a prince.”

Hattusa was not in India. Hattusa was across the sea from us: they had forbidden anyone in their sprawling empire to trade with us for reasons that boiled down to thinking we were grubby and annoying. Troy was on the nearer edge of the Hatti Empire.

But the prince part made sense. There were hundreds of people here, and thousands of drachmas’ worth of wine. Then the musicians, and the food going round on trays, the slaves who were clearing away cups and bringing new ones: it must have cost a fortune.

“Where did you see him last?” I demanded.

He executed what he probably thought was a flirty wink. “Why don’t we go somewhere quiet and I’ll tell you?”

I smiled and felt the old scar stretch. “Why don’t I make you eat your own kidney?”

He seemed to sober up quite fast. “Up there.” He pointed up to a terrace that overlooked everything; two storeys above the sunken part of the labyrinth, the same level as my house way at the other end. There was a stairway. Lamps lit the way up, two on every stair.

I climbed up slowly, weaving through drunk people and laughing people and someone playing with a happy-looking monkey making its way through half a coconut. The music snaked and coiled around everything. It was vile. The more I saw of it all, the more angry I felt. If I didn’t find Dionysus soon, I was going straight back to the High City to report it and send in the night watch.

At the top, you could see down into the labyrinth below.

I’d never known there was an open part, but there was, in stretches and starts. Sometimes it vanished under rocks, but most of it was visible, and if you stood here, you could watch the people inside getting lost and doubling back. And couples in not very hidden away corners, pretending they were hidden away.

There was a man standing alone on the edge, watching. He was dressed in dark colours, all blues and greens. Although it was still hot and everyone else here wore tunics with only one shoulder, he had his arms covered. He was the first person I’d seen here not holding a wine cup. His mask was different too. It was silver, and it didn’t distort his face, although worked into that silver, I could make out figures in gold, people and animals and trees, polished so smooth the surface looked like you could have run your hand across and it felt nothing; it was a piece of metalwork to inherit, not to buy, and only then for queens and princes. Everywhere else, people were dancing, but there was a perfect stillness to him, and it was making him half-invisible. People were going by him, not seeing him, even though he was standing under a string of lamps. In all the spinning and colours, they seemed primed only to see moving things. He looked the way lighthouses look on a churning sea.

Part of me said: You’re supposed to avoid lighthouses .

“Are you Dionysus?” I asked, judging the distance between us with my hand on my sword, and where the right place on the back of his neck was.

He looked over and smiled. He took the mask off, and I saw the red tattoos that stained his fingers to the second joint. The witch. Tonight, his hair lay heavy over his shoulder, black clouded with ashy grey, barely moving in the hot breeze, and wound through with bright ivy that I thought at first was enamelled bronze, but it wasn’t.

He had blue eyes; the indigo blue at the hem of the sea, full of stars from the lamps.

“I thought you’d not come,” he said, and this time, his voice had pyre smoke in it.

I waited to go up in flames.

I’d never known that you can be overjoyed and terrified at the same time, but you can.

Something in his expression turned urgent, and he caught my arms as I sank onto my knees. I hadn’t meant to. All my strength vanished. He knelt down with me too.

I stared at him, uncomprehending, and still not on fire.

“This is very unusual,” he said, with something between cheer and rue. “Knights don’t usually swoon at the sight of me.”

I wanted to say, Why aren’t you killing me? but it seemed stupid.

He put a cup into my hands; water, not wine. I drank it slowly, watching him, trying to understand what was happening.

“Phaidros?” he asked, not as if he were certain I could hear him.

Maybe it was a joke. Maybe he was pretending to be concerned, and in a few seconds, he would laugh that weird smoky laugh and say, hah, got you, and I’d be a hole in the ground.

He gave me his hands to help me up.

Slowly, I was starting to see that nothing was going to happen, at least not now, this second. Even more slowly, the possibility gleamed that perhaps he wasn’t who I thought; he was just a witch with blue eyes and a charcoal voice.

Something like my normal thinking staggered back up to the surface, breathed at last, and suddenly I felt very, very tired. He hadn’t come, the boy from the sea. He wasn’t listening to prayers. Of course he wasn’t. The world wasn’t like that.

“I—thought you were someone else,” I explained, insufficiently.

His remarkable eyes slipped over me again, all the way down and all the way up. “Well, I ... hope you never meet him,” he said at last.

Up close, he was taller than me, almost a head taller. Now I was looking at him properly, I couldn’t tell if he was the boy or not. Ten years ago, that boy had been somewhere between fourteen and eighteen. Men change so much in that time—much more than women do—and maybe it was him, but anyone about the right age with blue eyes would probably have seemed right. Was he even the right age? I couldn’t tell. Sail long enough and you become terrible at judging the ages of people on land, who all look uniformly youthful and glowy. Sailors age twice as fast. Maybe Dionysus was twenty-five or maybe he was forty. The grey in his hair didn’t make him seem any particular age; it just made him look like he had walked through a fire.

“I heard you’re from Hattusa,” I said, feeling like I was stuck in the moment about five seconds after waking up. At first, I always forgot Helios was dead and my whole unit was at the bottom of the sea, and it was a lovely weightless feeling, but then I woke up all the way and the Nothing took up the whole room. “Or India.”

“Or Memphis,” Dionysus agreed, without saying if any of them were right, and looking like he hoped I was going to take him up on it.

Of course he was just a witch. I had just collapsed stupidly in front of a witch who had been kind enough to make a joke instead of demanding to know what in Zeus’s name was wrong with me and would I mind taking it elsewhere.

“I came to say,” I said, “wherever you’re from, I’m sure music like this is normal there, but it’s forbidden here. And so is wine. Sown knights can’t drink, for ...” I watched bleakly as the boy who’d spoken to me before got in a tussle with someone else and they both fell in a fountain. “Obvious reasons. You need to stop.”

“I understand, but I’m not going to,” he said.

I let my head drop. I couldn’t hurt him now, or even drag him off so someone else could do it. He had saved my life today, with the bull. I owed him his. And—and. He had just been kind when there was no need. “You’re going to end up in a cell. It won’t be very nice. They won’t let you go just because you’re foreign and you didn’t know.”

“I did know,” he said.

I waited to see if he was going to explain. He didn’t.

I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing about me, but I’m one of those people who could have a tablet marked ABSOLUTELY DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TURN THIS OVER on my desk for years, and never turn it over. It isn’t that I’m not curious; it’s that I’ll put up with the curiosity just to spite whoever thought they had such a flawless understanding of humans that they could force me to do anything. Not explaining his spectacular breach of the law struck me as very do-not-turn-over tablet-y. For all I was grateful to him, a deep-down part of me decided I would stand here and die before I asked what he meant.

“Well, good luck,” I said, turning away and not even sure that I was going to make it home. Maybe I’d crumple on the roadside in a patch of grass. That would be fantastic. It was still hot. Possibly I would be eaten by wolves, but even that was more attractive than trying to argue with a witch.

“Wait,” Dionysus said.

He was studying me, which was uncomfortable, because I spent my whole life around knights who were careful not to do that. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at me square for whole seconds at a time. Helios, probably; in bed. It was orders of magnitude too intimate from a stranger. “Dance with me,” he said.

“What?” It came out flinty.

He took my hands as if we’d known each other for years. I’d forgotten what it felt like. Just for a second I was twenty again. You think you grow out of things, but it’s that the world changes around you, not that you do.

“Come on,” he said, with no impatience. “It will help.”

I smacked him off me. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Did your commander not teach you to listen to witches?” he said, but gently. When I put my hand on my sword, he just threaded his fingertips through my knuckles and lifted it away. I let him, because he had judged right; I wasn’t going to use it. “Please, knight. You’re here now.”

I didn’t decide. I hung suspended over not deciding like a dead wasp in honey, and time just moved on around me; and so did he.

Until that moment—I think because he was so still—people hadn’t noticed him. But when he danced, everyone saw him, and he could dance like I’d never seen. It wasn’t the way that the priestesses danced. It was as far from that as the sea is from a still lake. He didn’t have to concentrate, or count, or think in angles and inches. He just danced, and his hair spun and his clothes, which were made of fabrics lighter than I’d known you could weave, coiled and shifted like water, sometimes making half-shapes of their own, sometimes pressing to his shoulders or his spine, and it gave him a charge—I could feel it snapping and sharp in the air, and other people could too. It was pulling them towards him and suddenly everyone close to us was touching him and catching his hands and it was hungry: there was something dangerous about it, and with a weird unpleasant spike I had a sudden certainty they would have dragged him down if he had been slower, because it was unthinking rapture. I didn’t feel it; maybe it was because I could have had that alluring tablet on my desk for years and never turned it over. I was glad I didn’t. It looked horrible, and with a nasty bolt, I wondered if I was going to have to pull people away from him before someone hurt him.

He had a way of melding with the lamplight, and for all he was tall, I kept losing sight of him, and when he came around again, he was usually behind me somehow, but the tide of people always brought him back. Masks flashed by, some strange, some horrible, all different. It was good and it was dangerous as well, and in equal parts I wanted to join everyone else and feel that trance too, and I wanted it to stop.

The music lifted and he lifted me too.

It stopped all my thoughts, because it was frightening. I’d been a child the last time anyone had been strong enough to do that.

But it wasn’t bad. It was a comfortable, ghost-story fear; a mask over being entirely safe.

Just for a few seconds, I wasn’t a knight who was supposed to work like a marvel. I didn’t have duties or children to turn into marvel knights too, or strange songs, or a lost prince; I hadn’t outlived everyone worthwhile I’d ever known, I hadn’t all but murdered Helios myself. I was just me, without a past or a future, the same as those few glorious seconds after waking up, and just then, there was nothing to me except the lamplight and the music and a stranger’s hands round my ribs.

When he set me down, he did it so softly I might have been made of glass. Then he was still, just holding me by the hem of my ribcage, and people seemed to forget about him again. Part of me, shut off from the rest inside a Sown helmet that stayed on even when I wasn’t wearing the real thing, could see that this was very, very bad: alcohol and excess are the death of honour, and if I stayed here for even a little longer, I was going to end up doing things knights should never do, because the pull of it was riptide strong, which was appalling—things like this had always seemed dirty and ridiculous to me, I’d never even distantly wanted to be part of them, but I didn’t want to leave now. I wanted to get that memoryless feeling back. I wanted to see him dance again.

Dionysus looked down at me for a hanging second, and I thought he wanted to say something, but he didn’t have the chance, because an arrow sang between us and then the garrison night watch were shouting for everyone to stand still and shut up.

In a way, it was a relief.