Page 16 of The Hymn to Dionysus

15

Queen Agave came down herself. One of our priestesses came too, with a dictionary. It was bound papyrus, a book, not a scroll, as thick as my wrist and so fragile with its reed pages that I half expected it to catch fire in the sun. They said it was Old Cretan, which was what royal proclamations had been made in, long ago. Nobody spoke it any more.

I wondered how Dionysus had known. Maybe there was a tiny pocket of mountain country somewhere where it was still alive, just. I couldn’t ask; he was gone already, probably to help the survivors.

Along with our priestess, and another from Pylos, and six or seven Guards, cloaks such a deep purple in the glaring sun they didn’t look real, we stood at the edge of the marvel chasm while the statues roared. I was cooking inside my armour, and Thebes’s crown of towers really did look like it was burning. Even from down here, the smell of charred meat and incense was so heavy I felt like I’d never be able to taste anything else again. In twenty years, if I had the bad luck to live that long, I’d bite into some bread and it would still taste of sacrifice fires.

The priestesses were struggling to hear the Furies’ words clearly enough to look them up. It wasn’t that they were blurred, just that it’s very difficult to hear the borders of words in a language you don’t hear aloud, even if you can read it.

Listening for Dionysus’s cadence, though, which sang much more than ours did, I could guess. I offered a couple of words I was sure about, eyes right down, not wanting to sound like I thought I knew more than they did.

“Oh, you’re right; of course you’re right,” the Pylos priestess said. She sounded annoyed. I stepped back, out of the way, so that I wasn’t looming over her shoulder.

“Gods, Phaidros,” the Queen said, as if it really were a genuine skill. “You’re going to have to teach me that.”

I tried to tell if she was taking the piss. Any sailor speaks a lot of languages, which means we tend to be good at hearing accurately, even if we don’t hear well.

“It’s a loop,” our priestess said at last. She and the other from Pylos had just closed the dictionary and exchanged a look I couldn’t read. “They’re saying the same thing again and again. I think it says sacrifice—”

“Or sing,” the other one put in. “It’s the same word.”

Something heavy settled deep in my chest.

“Sacrifice, or sing ... to the master of dancing.”

I had a powerful urge to get right away from the marvel Furies. They were unsettling enough just in themselves, all bronze teeth and razor wings, but they couldn’t, they could not be chanting a forbidden song that had begun in Thebes after the falling of a star. They had been underground for—how long? A thousand years? It couldn’t be the same song.

“What’s that, is that a god?” the Queen asked, looking sceptical that the priestesses even distantly knew what they were talking about.

Our priestess shrugged and the Pylos priestess looked troubled. She was saying the words to herself.

“What else does it say?”

“It’s ... something like, made in thunder, burner of cities ... and then an old word we’re not sure about. It could be a kind of clan leader, or ...?”

Thunder-wrought and city-razing ... I could hear it as clearly as if I were in the cells still.

“King,” I said, not believing that it really could be. “King of the holy raging, rave and rise again. Is that it?”

Our priestess looked indignant. “You speak Old Cretan?”

“What?” the Pylos priestess said, as if she had just watched me crawl out of a tomb.

“At the Temple of Ares, six knights are singing that song and they can’t stop,” I explained, clear like I’d always been taught to report, but I didn’t feel very clear. Our knights couldn’t be singing the same song as some marvels from a thousand years ago which had been buried until this morning. “The priests say it’s madness—”

The Pylos priestess caught the arm of a dusty man whose clothes looked like they had used to be very fine, and spoke in their dialect so fast I only just caught it.

“The mad god is here. The knights are already singing to him.”

The man looked grim, and shouted an order to some of the people on wagons nearby. I didn’t understand the words, but I understood their faces. He might as well have said there was plague here and someone had just arrived coughing. People who had been unharnessing horses and oxen to let them graze on the sparse, straw-dry grass snatched up reins and straps again, and like a ripple, the news started to travel backwards through the great caravan.

“What was that?” the Queen said to me. “What did she say?”

“She said the mad god is here, but I don’t—wait! Lady, what do you mean? It’s just a song—”

“It is not just a song,” she said. She came right up to me, and the Queen, and wrenched her veil off. There was a terrible scar down her right eye, inflamed and still new. “It means he’s here . Our knights sang it too. Half of these people sang it before the end. Half of Pylos went insane. I don’t mean they were angry because there was no food and it was very hot, I mean insane . They started to sing that song, and they started to dance, and they couldn’t stop, and before long they were tearing the Palace down.” She looked between us. “Troy was a holy city and we burned it, and he is the curse that follows. And now he’s here. You need to sacrifice to him yesterday , or you need to get out. It’s infectious, you probably have it already. I’m sorry,” she said again, grim, and sprang onto the back of a wagon that was passing us. The driver was urging the oxen into a trot. Dust rose up all around us.

The Queen glanced at me as people and horses and wagons juddered by. She was still and unflustered, like any good knight in the face of something strange, but she did look puzzled.

“Have you ever heard of a mad god?”

I shook my head. But everyone from Pylos must have thought he was worse than the drought, because right down the length of the road, everyone was moving on, and I didn’t see a single person stop. Soon, the only people left on the road were the ones who had died in the storm.