Page 21 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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I was just falling asleep when the triplets did something they never had before. One of them banged on the door. I jolted awake and pulled it open, feeling hard done by. I hadn’t slept for years; all I’d ever wanted in life was my own tent and someone cleverer than me to tell me what to do, and this was what had come of it.

“What? What stunningly sinister thing have you come up with now, you creepy little doll-people?”

All three of them were outside. They all pointed to the door down into the maze. It was down a flight of steps from the kitchen.

“Something’s down there,” one of them said. “It’s ...” He looked at his brothers for a word.

“It’s banging,” one of the others said.

“It screamed,” the third said.

They all looked up at me with huge eyes and I realized that they meant it. They were frightened.

“Something?” I asked. I had to rely on them for sounds around the house: by myself, I wouldn’t know if a thief was making himself dinner in the kitchen. “What do you think it is, a wolf, or ...”

“It’s not a wolf,” the first brother said softly.

Maybe it was the mystery thing that had been leaving dead animals in the olive grove.

Suddenly the boys looked very fragile.

“Right,” I said, quietly, in case it could hear us too. “You all come in here. There’s a lock.” I’d put on a lock, so that I knew they couldn’t come in at night and hide under the bed. “I’ll go down and see what it is. Stay here until I come back. If anything happens, if I don’t come back—run to Dionysus next door and tell him. You know, the tall man, the witch?” The furious celestial thing that will burn me soon—no. No. Shut up.

They all nodded.

“Good. Lock this after me. I’ll see you soon.” They only looked more afraid than ever. There was nothing reassuring I could say. I had no idea what was in the maze. “And don’t do anything unnatural to my gear. I don’t want any dolls with pins in or little cursed bundles of sticks or whatever it is you’re planning to use this time for.” I signed watching them.

Owl stares, but one of them might have smiled: the experimental smile of someone who was just starting to wonder if maybe I was joking.

I smiled back and pressed the door closed.

We never went far into the maze. We kept apples and cheese down there when we had those things, or olives from the grove if the trees grew any edible ones, but we left them just inside the door. It was cold no matter the heat above. The dark was deep, the passages were narrow, and unless you enjoyed being lost and upsetting a lot of bats, there was no reason to bother. I went with my sword in one hand and a lamp in the other, listening. Now I was down here, I could hear whatever it was in the echoes—rasping, breathing. It was loud, but that didn’t mean anything. The maze moved sound so strangely it must have been designed to do that.

I clocked the hilt of my sword to the wall to see if I could make whatever it was come to me. It did pause, like it was listening, but then nothing.

“Come on. Come out, come and be murdered like a good mystery thing so I can go back to bed,” I said into the echoes.

“Back to bed,” said the echoes, “back to bed?”

I tried not to be unnerved by the way they changed my intonation.

“Back to bed,” they crooned. “Be murdered.”

I decided not to do any more talking.

Painted onto the walls, which were bare, hacked-out bedrock, were pictures so ancient I wasn’t sure people had made them. They showed the old goddesses, all wings and teeth. The Furies still sleep under the earth somewhere. I tried not to look. I didn’t want to think about whether they were why this maze was here.

“Come out,” the echoes whispered, and perhaps because I wasn’t hearing well enough or because the twisting ways had changed the sound, it didn’t sound like my voice any more.

I hit a dead end and had to double back. The echoes were stealing the sound of my steps too, at a lag, so that it sounded like there were three or four people walking. I had to keep stopping, to check.

The fifth time I stopped, the echo-steps didn’t stop. Someone else, something else, was walking close to me. I swung my lamp back. No one behind me, no one ahead, but they must have been only a few bends in the path away from me. I moved faster, and started to concentrate on keeping silent. Still, though, there were steps. Through the echoes, I couldn’t tell if the thing was moving on four legs or two.

Something tapped my shoulder.

I spun around sword first, but no one was there. Or no one I could see.

Tap, same shoulder.

Still no one.

I clamped my hand over my shoulder where I’d felt it, tingling nastily, and felt something sticky. When I held my hand to the light, there was something black-red on my fingertips. I shone my lamp upwards, and stared, because the ceiling was bleeding. Slow, viscous streams were creeping down the walls, dripping on the way, through strange patterns in the rock walls that had formed like furrows. They looked horribly biological. A feeling like dozens of spiders ran down my back. Nothing in my training had told me what to do if one day you went down into a maze and part of it turned out to be the insides of a giant.

Something bumped into the side of my head, and I heard a discombobulated buzz.

Bees.

Now I’d seen one, I could see others. They were following flight paths about a foot above my head. They weren’t normal bees. They were massive, black, cicada-sized monsters, and the droning of their wings was just at the pitch I struggled to hear, and gods, but the walls weren’t bleeding, it was honey . Those furrows weren’t rock, but hives. I’d never seen them built like that before. I held up the lamp higher, trying to see further, not sure I should trespass any more into the bees’ territory.

Another shriek came from up ahead. Further among those great citadel hives.

With honey tapping me all over now, I followed the noise.

The way opened out. It was sudden: the was the narrow beehive-lined corridor, then a turn so tight it aimed backwards, and then a great cavern that swallowed up my light. The bees were everywhere. I’d thought the hives along the corridor had been huge, but those were only little outposts. In here was a whole city. Honey gleamed on the floor and sometimes on the wreckage of broken combs where other things had wanted to get at it, and the bees were out in legions, making the air gritty, and I didn’t understand, because there were no flowers down here, but then I saw where they were going. There was a fissure in the roof of the cavern, and through it: moonlight. And a great tumble of flowering vines, completely in defiance of the drought.

There was a light, not too far away; just a single lamp, like mine. Someone was moving among the hives there, a tall slim figure with a knife that shone and hair bound up in a green band. Dionysus: I almost called out that it wasn’t safe, but then I saw what he was doing and shut up. He was taking pieces of honeycomb, setting them into a basket, and the bees were seething around his hands. There were so many that they would have killed him straightaway if anything startled them. They were swarming out of the hive, like soldiers pouring out to muster from a ship, under the command of some bee-herald whose voice we couldn’t hear, but they weren’t flying or stinging or any of it. In among all their writhing, they sometimes made shapes that bees shouldn’t know about. I saw shoulders and spines, and ships, and I stopped still when I understood they weren’t just looking at him. They were telling him things. Bees are prophets, everyone knows that, but I’d never actually seen them talk to anyone before.

I realized about a heartbeat too late that standing there in that vast dark space with a lit lamp was stupid, and right then, there was an unearthly crowing noise from the darkness. It was very much: What’s that?

I put the lamp down and snapped to the side, as far away from it as I could get without charging right into onto of those palace hives, and something else prowled into the light.

It was the size of a person. Crouched over, bundled up against the cold in the maze, honey-filthy, hair matted, and I would have said it was a human, but the shape of the head was wrong. Huge, heavy; horns. A bull—there was horror crawling right up the inside of my spine and making a nest in my skull—but no. A bull mask, made from tightly bound straw, the horns crowned in ivy as if the man had smashed headfirst into one of those vine-bound trees in the forest. Whoever it was, he considered the lamp, then kicked it, and the dark plunged in.

There was moonlight from up above, and Dionysus’s lamp, but both of those might as well have been as far away as the stars. I couldn’t see the bull-masked man. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. The man must have been able to see, though, because he screamed again, that same mad primordial scream that I hadn’t even recognised as human before, and he flung me backwards into the wall. Honeycomb broke under my shoulder, and furious bees roared, loud even for me, and then—

—and then it wasn’t bees.

It was the roar of chariot wheels as they thundered in over the plain at Troy. I wasn’t in the cold cave. I was in the cold night under sterile frozen stars, and the chariots were coming, making that insectile whickering noise they had because of the razorblades worked into the axles. They only had to drive past you to cut you off at the knees.

Helios was marshalling us into square units, shouting over the noise that he knew we remembered how to do this. Spears down, push, you could flip a chariot, he’d give the horses to the first person to do it (not you, Phaidros, we’re drowning in bloody horses, you little show-off) and people were laughing, and then—and then the sweep of the chariots reached the unit beside us and their polemarch was in pieces, and Helios shouted not to look at her, look at him, ready, and ...

“Phaidros. Knight, can you hear me?”

It was such a familiar voice, but it didn’t belong with the regiment. It had smoke in it. I didn’t have time to think about it, though, because the chariots were right on top of us, and Helios was facing the enemy polemarch at the front, smiling. He loved being on the front line, the way athletes love being in the stadium.

“It’s Dionysus. You’re in the maze. Come back, knight.”

I did know someone called Dionysus. He was kind, or maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was dangerous, or both; I couldn’t remember.

“Oh, it’s the bees,” I heard him say, more to himself than to me, and all the noise vanished.

Everything was silent.

No more Troy, no more chariot line. This was the maze, of course it was the maze, and I couldn’t believe there had been any question; and now Dionysus was kneeling in front of me, holding my neck to see into my eyes by the light of a new lantern. It shouldn’t have been quiet. The bees were boiling all around us, and I was crumpled against the cavern wall beside a hive swarming with upset workers trying to rescue baby bees who weren’t ready to leave the combs yet.

I tried to say something but I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

Dionysus touched his heart—the sign I always used for sorry . I must have used it with him and not realized.

Dionysus: who was dangerous, who was the boy from the shore, who was here for revenge, and who I was very happy to see all the same.

In case he had seen me do it before, I made my sign for thank you .

He pointed to the gap in the cavern roof, where there was a rope.

It was knotted, so you could stand on the end. He kicked some mechanism hidden by a rock, stepped onto the knot below mine, and put his arm across me. My ribs flickered, not used to that; he felt it and put his hand flat on my breastbone. Easy, easy. The rope began to rise on its own. I saw the counterweight go by; a person-sized wine cask, probably full of stones. Still, everything was soundless. It was a relief. I shut my eyes and let my head rest forward against the rope, which was waterproofed with beeswax pushed deep into the grain of the hemp. Behind me, Dionysus smelled of honey and flowers and hot linen, and I had a spike of embarrassment, because surely I was covered in honey and crushed bees now, and—but it was so good and safe too, his arm across me and his chest against my back. I could feel him breathing. I put my hand over his. I regretted it instantly because I shouldn’t have, because he was going to smack it away, but he only hooked his thumb over mine to hold it there.

He always seemed to make me feel two things at once and this time, it was hope and despair. I couldn’t go around feeling like this about a witch, if he even was a witch. I was supposed to be on the marriage register. And if he wasn’t ... only, it didn’t matter, because I’d forgotten what it was like for someone to think I was worth something, and it was like being exactly the right amount of drunk: shameful and lovely.

At the top was a little gantry. We stepped off the rope, and then there was the moon, and the ruin, and the impossible plants; ivy and grapes and jasmine and olives and flowers, as lush as they would have been in the greenest spring—they were so strong it was eerie, and all of it was silent. I couldn’t hear my own breathing. Dionysus led me across to a low flat wall by a water channel and pushed my shoulder until I sat. Some of his glass lamps sparkled there. I’d been right, I was covered in honey. I wanted to get clean, but without being able to hear my own voice from the inside, it was impossible to talk. I could tell the sounds would be wrong.

He touched my shoulder to make me look at him. He had brought his basket of honeycomb too, and now it was gleaming gold beside him. A little madly, I wondered what the bees had told him. He gave me a cup. It wasn’t water but deep, black wine that swam with stars from the lamps. I shook my head.

He put my hands around it. “Medicine,” he said, clearly, so I could see it.

I could smell that there was alcohol in it, but I sipped it anyway.

It was wine, or at least, mostly wine: but it wasn’t like anything I’d ever tasted before. It was sweet but sharp, and I could taste spice and fruit in it, and it was strong enough that it swept right through me straightaway, but there was something else as well. Everything went still, and slow. All the sharp edges of the world softened. Far from feeling drunk, I felt more like myself, like my normal thinking was coming back after that vision down in the cave, and with a new clarity, I understood why he had been collecting honey. This was honey-wine. I hinged forward over my own knees. I’d thought I knew what relief was—coming off a ten-hour night watch, not being wet any more after a screaming storm by the Cyclades—but this was something else.

Dionysus leaned to catch my eye, the ends of his hair coiling over the ivy on the wall. “You’re safe.”

I heard it somewhere deeper than normal hearing. Some part of me that I hadn’t known was curled up tight, backed into a corner, spear out, straightened up and looked around and said, Yes, you’re right. That’s all right then. And relaxed.

I could hear.

No.

I could hear better than before.

I could hear an owl a long way away, and something rustling in the forest, and the tiny shush of the wind in the trees. The water was giggling.

Whatever invisible box I’d been in since Troy, he had taken me out of it.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

I hadn’t realized that I was lip-reading as much as I was hearing. He sounded different—richer, clearer, like the low hum of a lyre when no one is playing it, but a cavalry regiment is riding close by, shuddering the strings.

“Yes,” I said, and then twitched, because I could hear myself too. I’d thought I could before, but it had been a lot dimmer than I’d realized. I could hear that I was speaking too quietly. “Would you—say something else?” I asked, to check, not wanting to believe it yet in case it was some kind of joy-hallucination brought on by not being trapped in a cave with millions of bees any more.

“Are you hurt?”

Incredible. I started to laugh, and it sounded weird, because I could hear it in the air as well as though my own skull. And there was a lovely shushing sound around us, one I did know, but I hadn’t heard it for a long time, and it was—of course it was the leaves of the vines and the trees, swaying in the hot wind. It was nothing, but it felt like I’d finally made it home, for all I’d been home all this time. “I can hear the trees,” I said, probably sounding insane. “I couldn’t! I couldn’t before, I lost most of my hearing the day Troy fell, how did you do that?”

He opened his hands, the universal what can I say sign. “Witching.”

“Piss off, witching! There were falling towers, witches can’t fix that—”

“No,” he said. “But do you remember what it was you were doing, when your hearing stopped?”

“Nothing special,” I said, trying to think. “I was sitting on the steps of the throne room at Troy, we’d broken in about an hour earlier. It was lovely. I went through the kitchens and the slaves had just baked these amazing cakes. They were from the Tin Isles, you know, the ugly people with grey hair, but gods, they can bake. It had strawberries in it.”

He kind of laughed, not quite as though anything was funny. “What else?”

“Well ... some of the little knights were getting a bit overenthusiastic, they’d got the king in the corner, but it was very restrained, for the end of a ten-year siege. I hardly got any splatter. Feral Jason only set him on fire a little bit. Why? Is it important?”

He was giving me a strange glassy stare, the kind that he would have aimed at somebody exclaiming happily about the lovely wildflowers as they skipped closer and closer to a bear that was looking hopeful and getting the good silverware out: it was half dismay and half a dark need to see just how close to the bear I’d get before I noticed. “No,” he said, “not important at all, I was just interested in the ugly slaves and the baking.”

“I don’t know what’s happening any more,” I said, but I didn’t care, because I felt like I might pop. There was an owl in the olive tree behind him, watching us with eyes narrowed against the little lights of the lamps, and running its talons over the bark to clean them. I could hear the scrape, small but clear. I could hear the water laughing in its channel, and the sound my palm, sword-rough, was making against the stone wall, and the miniature shush of his clothes shifting when he moved, and it was all glorious. I’d forgotten there was so much in the world.

From the great fissure in the ground beside us, a voice echoed up. It was eerie, because the words didn’t quite sound like the speaker knew the meaning. They broke in odd places, as if they were just noises that came from somewhere past understanding.

I, I am the lord of the dance,

Duty, oath, and law are sacred

Lies, lie down all your sorrow

Dance with me again.

“We can’t leave him down there,” I said. “If he gets into a house ... my slaves are children. You’re alone. I should ask some knights to come.”

“Ah, no,” Dionysus said unexpectedly. “I don’t think he was trying to hurt you, he was just surprised. He’s been here a couple of days already and no harm done. He likes the bee cave, he likes the honey.”

“He was screaming.”

“Bees sting,” he pointed out. “Don’t bring the knights. He’s better off down there than in a cell, is he not?”

“He ... are you sure he won’t try to hurt anyone?”

“No, but I don’t think we ought to chain him just because he might.”

He was right. It was better than a cell, and whoever it was, the man hadn’t really hurt me. I’d wandered into his territory with a sword: it wasn’t unreasonable to be surprised.

“Walk you home?” Dionysus rounded off.

All good things kill you, in the end.

“Yes please, sir,” I said.

He gave me a lamp. Even that wasn’t quite safe on the uneven ground, which was sunken sometimes and full of unexpected exposed steps, or the pollards of broken pillars. I put my hand out for his. He took it and pulled me so that I bumped into him, on the edge of laughing his smoky laugh, and on my other side, the Nothing slunk off into the dark.

Bliss.

We paused for some goats to cross the path ahead of us. They were clearly on a mission to raid his miraculous garden. One of them baa’d at us politely. “So in Scythia, they have a kind of sheep with a really long tail,” Dionysus told me. “The wool weighs them down, though, and the sheep drag them along the ground and the wool gets all tangled and dirty; so the shepherds build each one a tiny cart to rest their tail on. They wheel around the mountains like that. If you hear a squeaky axle, it’s usually a sheep.”

I did my best stern look. “You made that up.”

“No, I’ve been,” he protested. “It’s a strange place. It rains feathers.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“It does, very cold feathers! I don’t know why.”

“I expect from the Great Heavenly Goose? Or the Almighty Eider Duck?”

He took a breath, then stopped. “Now we’re saying it, I’d like it a lot if Zeus turned out to be a big duck.”

We both laughed. It might have been the first time I’d laughed without feeling ashamed about it in years.

At my gate, he looked up at the lemon tree that never made any lemons as if he suspected it was just sulking and not trying hard enough.

“Do you—want to come in?” I asked, raw and somehow nineteen again.

He winced, and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m expecting a runner, I’ve got two girls right on the edge and if one of them doesn’t go into labour tonight then I’m no witch. Although,” he added, “before I forget.” He took a jar out of his bag and held it out to me. It was marked beautifully with blackwork patterns; bees, and vines, picked out very fine indeed.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Honey.”

“Why?”

“Ah. Normal humans who live in proximity sometimes give things to each other; it’s a way of saying you’d like to be friends if it isn’t too inconvenient. Do you know about friends? It’s when you keep talking to another person for a good while but neither of you sets the other one on fire.”

I almost laughed, because that was a two-sided joke if there ever was one, given that he assuredly would be setting me on fire soon. “I see, I see. And what’s the strategic function of this?”

“It’s operationally redundant,” he said, just as seriously, “but good for morale.”

I did laugh this time, sad and not. “Thank you,” I said. “I love honey.”

“Welcome.” He looked down at me for just slightly too long, and I thought he might come closer, but then he dipped his head and stepped back. “Sleep well, knight.” He walked away into the dark, and from a tree, an owl swooped down and flew ahead of him, for all the world like it was showing him the way.

The house was quiet, but there was still a line of lamplight beneath my bedroom door. I tapped on the middle panel. “Boys?” I said softly. “Are you awake?”

The lock clacked, and there they all were on the other side, looking like lost ducklings. I froze when they lurched forward and hugged me, then put my arms around them as well as I could. They were still just little enough.

“It’s just a man,” I promised. “He’s gone mad. Dionysus is looking after him. I don’t think he’s going to try to come into the house. But you stay in here tonight, just in case. Keep the door locked. I’ll sleep in the other room. Wake me up if you hear anything inside the house.”

But actually, I’d wake up, because I could hear. It was only slowly breaking over me, all the things I’d be able to do now.

They looked at each other uncertainly, and I realized they wanted to keep up their normal night watch of me.

“Why do you do it?” I asked. “Why do you watch me at night?”

There was a kind of silent conference, and then the one I suspected was the eldest looked up at me properly.

“Because you walk at night,” he said. He looked nervous mentioning it. “The mad god possesses you.”

A sort of heaviness came over me, like all my bones were turning to lead. “Mad god.”

“There is a god who you do not worship here,” he said, small, as if he expected me to throttle him. “He has—cursed you. He curses soldiers. He makes you think normal people are enemies, at night. We have seen this curse at home. We watch, because we want to make sure you do not kill us.”

I stepped back without meaning to. “What?”

He glanced at his brothers again. “And—this last couple of days ... you’ve been killing other things. In the garden.”

Gods on Olympus.

“I see.” It was hard to talk, because my throat had turned to rock. “All the more reason to lock yourselves in. I’ll put locks on your doors tomorrow.” I had been going to leave it at that, but I couldn’t. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because—you don’t like us, and we do not know what you will do.”

Silence. Horrible things always are simple.

I didn’t know what to say, except the only solution I had, for all it was less than bronze-clad. “If you think I might hurt you, bring Dionysus, because if that happens, I’m not in my right mind, and he needs to take me to Ares. Do you understand?”

They nodded.

“I like you fine,” I said, lower. “You’ve been wonderful. I know this is a hard life for you now. You’re doing beautifully.”

“We are?” the middle one said. He looked like he might cry.

I brushed the top of his head. “Are you joking? You haven’t poisoned me or anything, it’s all very relaxing.”

Something was different. They were just ordinary children now, not guarded and blank. They were caught exactly in the strange half light between childhood and adulthood. I could see how they had been when they were five, all round and tumbling, and how they would be when they were thirty. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t had the sense to put it together earlier.

“Now off you fuck, get some sleep.”

For the first time since I’d met them, they all smiled.

“Night, Phaidros,” the oldest one said softly, once the others had gone into the bedroom ahead of him. He gave me what might have been a smile through the narrow gap between the door and the frame.

“Night, Kat.”

He looked taken aback.

“Ah, you see? Sometimes I’m not just a pig in a Phaidros disguise,” I said.

He laughed. It was still a small-child giggle, deep and involuntary, and it chimed down the corridor, finding its unfamiliar way around the rafters, and the house felt different entirely.