Page 17 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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The throne room was wreathed in steam from the dragon marvels. It was a relief to walk into the white gloom after the blinding sun outside, but it wasn’t just to save everyone’s eyes. Here and there in that artificial fog were ghosts—people listening, maybe scribes, maybe Guards, always too hazy to see well. Around the throne itself, the air was clear. People standing in the steam could see us, but we couldn’t see them. The vapour was cold enough that I needed my cloak, which was a desperate relief. With the dimness and that cold fog, and the spectres of the watchers around us, the throne room didn’t seem like it was part of the rest of the Palace; it felt more like we had crossed a border, and come into that dead hinterland at the gates of Hades.

The Chamberlain had told me to stay, but I didn’t understand why. There was nothing useful I could do here, and the longer I was here, the longer I wasn’t organising the census.

The other people here were important: the Chamberlain, the captain of the Guards, senior advisers, and even, sitting on the steps that led up to the throne and almost invisible in the vapour, the royal prophet. I didn’t know anyone, so I stayed back, standing on the border between the clearer air in front of the throne, and the fog where the watchers waited.

I felt someone’s eyes down my left side and looked across to find that the prophet was staring at me, or rather through me; Tiresias was blind.

“Heliades,” they said, quiet but clear, even though I was twenty feet away and not making any noise. “Come here.”

Disconcerted, I went across and knelt down close to the steps.

There were all kinds of stories about Tiresias. People—including Tiresias—said that they had started out as a woman and been turned into a man by Apollo, or the other way around—now they were neither on account of how Apollo couldn’t decide in the end and didn’t really care anyway because it was core Tiresias-ness that he liked. They had been struck blind by the force of their visions, and if they weren’t immortal then they were at least old enough to remember Kadmus and the dragon. I believed the first two but not the last one. They weren’t that old.

Now that I was close, I could see what they were doing, which was sharing an apple with a very happy tortoise. It’s hard not to like someone who befriends passing tortoises.

“Prophet?” I said.

The tortoise gave me a narrow look, defending its half of the apple between its paws.

“The Queen,” said Tiresias, without any preamble, “is about to ask us all to agree that there’s no god at work here, it must be a perfectly ordinary plague or a conspiracy or some rubbish; but I think you and I both know that the mad god is very real, and very much here, in Thebes. You’re not going to want to, I know, but you need to say what you think. Otherwise all she’s going to hear is a bunch of idiots who always agree with her; and me, a vendor of what she likes to call esoteric bollocks.”

“I decidedly do not know that there’s a god—”

“Don’t be silly,” Tiresias said, so similarly to the way Dionysus had said it that I had an eerie certainty that they were quoting him, to prove they could overhear things even when they weren’t close by. And—they spoke like him anyway. It was that same accent. Slighter, but they sang their sentences like he did, the ends of words sharp and bronze. “You know him well. He has blue eyes, and wherever he goes, growing things riot, and people lose their minds.” They winked at me. “In places where they haven’t been so stupid as to forget about him, they call him Bakhos.”

That sent a cold spider down my back. It meant “Raver.”

“Why would you think I know him?” I asked. No one knew about the boy from the shore, no one.

“Depends, doesn’t it?” Tiresias said, glimmering at me in exactly the same way Dionysus had last night. “Either a prophet is a person with an excellent intelligence network, and we make certain to hear things across many countries and decades very secretly, and someone saw what happened to your ship and reported it to me—or, Apollo granted me a vision. But a prophet is assuredly a person who would be foolish to let anyone know which it is. Some people will listen only to Apollo, some only to more earthly intelligence. Best to straddle both, I find.”

The Raver—gods, what a name.

“Do this for me, sweet knight,” they said, more seriously. They took my hand, easily, without searching for it. Because they wore indigo, Apollo’s colour, their sleeves had stained their knuckles blue, like the reverse of witches’ tattoos. “The Queen is in danger of making the mistake that all clever people make every so often, which is to think she always judges well, and always sees right. Don’t let her.”

All the things I wanted to say crowded up behind my teeth, so many that I couldn’t say anything. If the mad god was the boy from the shore, then there was a severe chance that I had called him here. Only I wasn’t dead, so he couldn’t be; so what was going on, and why was Tiresias so sure, and was it possible that they were lying to me in order to win the point they wanted to make?

Too late, though: there was a stir across the hall as the Queen walked out from behind the throne, a heavy cloak across her shoulders now, and the marvel crown, with its writhing silver figures of warrior saints, set through her hair.

“What we know,” the Queen said into the new, deep silence, “is that a star fell, and some knights close by lost their minds. Shortly after, my son vanished. Several days earlier, Pylos fell, amid reports of the same madness, and the same song.” She was standing in front of the throne, not sitting on it. “Several centuries earlier—too early for us to have any record of their building—Fury marvels were buried outside the city wall, reciting the same song as the knights now confined at Ares. If this were any other city, with different folklore, I would have no hesitation in concluding that this is a god. However, as we all know, any suggestion of divine intervention in Thebes must be treated with the utmost scepticism. Therefore, I’d like to hear what else this might be.”

A smallish woman stepped forward. She was, like most people who worked directly for the Palace, a slave, but instead of an iron collar, hers was silver, and she was dressed as finely as any Sown lady, in orange: a senior marvel-maker. I only just had time to wonder why a marvel-maker was important for all this before she began.

“It seems striking,” she said, “that this madness has emerged in a drought. We must consider the possibility that it wasn’t the star which caused the madness in the afflicted knights, but something it churned up in the ground. There are many substances that can cause madness, as anybody who’s ever worked in a mercury mine can attest. Pylos is likewise in drought. It seems significant that the Furies were uncovered by a dust storm, and were apparently designed for that. Dust storms move soil. If the madness they warn against afflicted people at the time of their building, also in drought, we can fairly safely say this has something to do with drought conditions.”

“Why would people be singing the same song, cities and centuries apart?” the Queen asked.

I had a sudden feeling that this had been rehearsed. Tiresias smiled at me.

“Songs can survive for a thousand years. Certainly some of the legends of King Kadmus are that old. If it’s in general folk memory, then many people will have heard it outside Thebes. I find it telling that it was knights who sang it, not ordinary citizens: the knights have been away from Thebes for many years. They heard all kinds of forbidden things. It is, sensibly enough, a song about madness—and the deranged will tend to say the first thing that comes to mind. It isn’t wildly unlikely for mad people in different places to sing a song about a mad king. One starts, another copies them; there needn’t be anything divine about it, only ordinary human clockwork.”

She didn’t, I noticed, say “mad god.”

“I think that’s a very benign view of what’s happening,” the captain of the Guards said from beside me. He was as slate-faced as he had been last night when he ordered a hundred and fifty people to be confined for three days in lethal heat. “Something in the ground would suggest this madness is real. It clearly isn’t. The refugees from Pylos were very keen to tell us that people there just ... went mad. There is no such thing as a citywide madness. But there is such a thing as civil uprising. There was never any madness at Pylos, there was treason and an old song about riot and chaos that the ringleaders used to pull people together under one banner, but now it’s over, people want to believe something else, and they’ve convinced themselves that the mad king in the song is a god. As Zoe says, songs have long lives, especially treason anthems. Outside Thebes it could easily have survived from the time of King Kadmus to the present day. And as for the ‘afflicted’ knights—I’ll stake my armour that there was nothing in the ground, and nothing in the star. Someone ambitious took advantage of its falling and paid those knights to sing and feign madness.”

I wanted to think that wasn’t possible. I’d been with Amphitrion when the star fell; but if someone had moved through the smoke and spoken to knights quietly, would I have known? Probably not.

“They would have had to do that very quickly, Captain,” the Queen said, “given that it was less than an hour between the star’s falling and the arrival of the first knights at Ares.”

“Blackmail doesn’t take long,” he said seriously. “Don’t do as I say and I’ll kill your sister, do as I say and I’ll pay you: it’s that fast.”

“So. Something in the ground, or opportunistic fraud. Anything else?”

“I can tell I’m going be hurled off the city wall in a sack full of snakes soon, but I’m very old so I don’t care,” Tiresias said, and in the fog, a few people laughed. It was a strange choice, I thought, for them to be funny: prophets were usually serious people. I would have thought that the less serious the prophet, the less serious the prophecy would sound.

“Tiresias, I already know what you’re going to say,” the Queen said.

“Really, you know all about the mad god already? Good. You know not to ignore him, then.”

He has blue eyes, and everywhere he goes, growing things riot, and people lose their minds.

And about an hour before all this began, I had called him here. It was too close to ignore, but I couldn’t make it fit. I still wasn’t dead. I wasn’t even mad.

The Queen looked weary. “All right, who is he?”

“Long ago,” Tiresias said, “there was a god older and greater than Zeus, who is a child by comparison. He was never a god of anything so straightforward as thunder or the sea. Humans are weird animals; partly we’re wild, and partly we are clockwork. Unholy devices, all of us—mechanisms bolted onto bone.”

I frowned, because they were speaking subtly differently, not in the cheerful way they had before. They sounded less like they were talking now, but something else was talking through them; something friendly and ancient that liked them, but nonetheless had its own voice. I’d never been to Delphi, I’d never seen Apollo possess the Oracle, but all at once I knew it would look like this.

“The mad god is as old as human beings, and his function is to guard the border between the clockwork and the wild. When we veer too near to clockwork, he brings the old wildness again; to remind us of what we are, and to save us from much worse. He can be gentle; he is in music and the bards’ stories, and in a cup of wine. He can be a shepherd easing us away from the borders of the poison places. But fight him, and he will fight back. He is madness too. At our peril we forget the king of the holy raging, who, like the ivy, never dies.”

“Is that,” said the Queen, sounding as though she had passed irritated now and flown into a sort of serene hopelessness that she was ever going to get out of this room, “a very impressive-sounding way of saying we should all get really drunk and have a cataclysmic party, or else? Music, stories, wine? What? Is this a bet you’ve got with your opposite number in Athens?”

People laughed.

Tiresias swayed, like they had been sleepwalking and now they were waking up. I went up the steps fast, worried they were going to fall.

“Prophet?” I said tentatively.

Tiresias blinked twice. “Helios?”

“Phaidros.”

They shook their head once, looking disconcerted. “You sound so alike.” It was true. If I was being especially obnoxious, all he had to do was swear pyroclastically at a general through a tent wall and blame me, and discipline was immediately restored. “What ... was I saying?”

It wasn’t pretend. They had no idea.

“A masterly performance as always,” the Queen growled. “Now we’ve heard from all sides: send out the heralds. Anyone who sings that song will be condemned to immediate slavery. Anyone caught sacrificing to any new god will also go to the fields, or to the galleys. Anyone spreading rumours of the lost prince will be executed. Thank you all. Heliades, come here.”

Tiresias squeezed my arm and gave me a wry look that said, Didn’t I tell you? “Hand me that tortoise,” was all they said.

I gave them the tortoise, and the apple, and watched them vanish into the cold fog for a second before I carried on up the steps to the throne. That voice just now—it hadn’t been Tiresias.

The Queen looked me over as though she suspected Tiresias was infectious. “Go to Ares and question the afflicted knights. Find out if they really are mad,” she said. “If this is fraud, then whoever paid them will also have Pentheus.”

“Yes, lady,” I said quietly, but didn’t move, because two equal and opposite forces were at war in my head, and the result was exactly no motion in either direction.

What Tiresias had said was sound. I knew it was. I knew there was a god who drove people mad and who had wrecked my ship. I’d brushed his hair once.

But the kind of person who said, Haha, but what you’ve got to remember is that humans can’t be all duty and honour and rationality all the time, and if you try then there’s a special god who’ll drive you mad —that kind of person was usually telling you his grand philosophy while he was four drinks down and about to make his third lunge after the good-looking stable boy. It was laziness, and the need to intellectually justify being a pig. We’re all just animals really, no use pretending we ain’t! Lunge. Cue a huge fight to save the stable boy. Something right down in my soul was embarrassed for Tiresias, that they had said that in public. Even though ...

Even though I also knew that what had said it today wasn’t some hog of an Athenian gone three sheets to the wind. It wasn’t even Tiresias.

“Do you ... need winding up?” the Queen offered, pretending—very kindly, given that she could have hit me—to look for the key to my clockwork.

I couldn’t say to her that a god had once turned my ship back into a forest. She would never listen to anything I said again.

“I think it’s possible not to see what you don’t expect to, lady,” I said to the hem of her cloak.

Even that made me sound like I wanted to desert and go to Athens.

“And to see what you do expect to, even when it isn’t there,” she said. She took my elbows and guided me upright. I kept my eyes on the cloak hem. It had a double seam, stitched in silver. “Why do you expect to see a god, knight? Do you think the story about the lost heir is true, do you think my sister had a child of Zeus?”

“Are you certain that she didn’t?”

“Yes,” she said unexpectedly. She touched my shoulder and guided me behind the throne, through a low door into a much smaller chamber behind.

I slowed down, because I’d expected a receiving room or somewhere private she could sit by herself and not listen to Tiresias, but it was full of marvel mechanisms. They were built into the walls, and everywhere there were pipes, hot and cold. Things clicked and turned, feeding into the throne. In the middle of the room, looking out of place, were a couple of chairs, a little table with a pitcher on it, a bowl of apples, and box of papyrus documents. She nodded for me to sit down. “Less eerie when you know how it works, isn’t it,” she said, nodding at the walls and the pipes. “The story about my sister is the same. It was never meant to be a true story, when she said the father was Zeus; it’s a legal shorthand. Have you heard of this?”

“No?” I said, wrong-footed.

She didn’t seem annoyed; she only sat forward. “When someone has a child outside wedlock, she has two choices: she can hand it over to a temple for adoption, or, if she wants to keep it, she vows that the father was a god. Of course it’s very unlikely that that happened, but nobody can say it absolutely isn’t true, as you point out, because that would be denying the existence of the gods, which is blasphemy ... the penalty for which is slavery, you see? We find that with this law, far fewer people end up in cycles of revenge killing that start with infidelity. One of King Kadmus’s more elegant legislative solutions to ongoing blood feuds. It isn’t a genuine account of meeting a god. It’s a legal way to invoke the protection of the crown.” She half laughed. “If Zeus was involved at all, it was because he was angry with having his name associated with hers. Hence the lightning.”

“I understand,” I said quietly.

“You look doubtful.”

“What if it’s a god who’s nothing to do with your sister?”

She nodded slightly. “Maybe. But if I send out the heralds and announce that we think there might be a god, let’s sacrifice to him and try to stop the madness spreading, people won’t sacrifice to a god. They’ll sacrifice to the lost heir. The more they believe, the more ready they will be to accept the first enterprising fraud who steps forward, and he will. Across my reign, three men have tried. I’m sure there will be a fourth.”

“But what if there is a god? It’s more dangerous to ignore them.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said frankly. “Gods come and go. Thebes can survive the brief and passing interest of a god. What it cannot survive is a civil uprising in a time of drought and oncoming famine. Look at Pylos. Those uprisings very rarely succeed in installing anyone new on the throne. All they do is destroy the throne.” She opened her hands where they had been clasped on her knees. “Look, just between the two of us, without any politics or other interests: I don’t think there’s a god here. I think Zoe is right, I think there’s probably something in the ground, and I think—I hate to say it—that Captain Pompous is right as well. Someone’s trying to swing this around to look like a good story and climb up to the crown. And I think that even if I’m wrong, even if there is such a thing as the mad god ... he’s far less dangerous than thirty thousand human beings hanging over the edge of bread riots. Do you agree?”

“No, lady,” I said, seeing the mast, which had turned back into an oak, smash into the sea.

She smiled. The lines formed round her eyes the same way they had around Helios’s. “Good. Kings and queens need to have someone who disagrees with them.” She clapped my shoulder as she stood up. “Onward to Ares, knight.”