Page 25 of The Hymn to Dionysus

24

It took only a week to organise the funeral games. That didn’t seem like nearly enough time, but it turned out that the contracts for state funerals were advanced and updated depressingly often, so that they could be held at short notice. In the garrison, the younger knights volunteered to compete, especially the ones who were hoping to marry soon (suddenly the old saying that a good match comes with victory laurels was everywhere), the banners went up through the town, and the vintners and farmers shipped what was left of their dwindling stock up to the Palace supply offices.

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. The little knights seemed happy to have me back, even Feral Jason once I’d given him a dead mouse to feed his snakes-for-hair and pretended that looking at him had turned me to stone, but more of them were missing, too; gone to Hermes or Ares. I’d only got two thirds of a unit.

It was becoming rare to see anyone moving between Palace courtyards without a mask. They were all different, and though they were mostly shaped like human faces, not animals, I kept catching myself going tense whenever I saw a new one, waiting to hear that thunk of hooves, or to catch the sun gleaming on real horns. Outside the Palace, there were more and more of the unsettling straw masks—cheaper, stranger, all bound into different dead-eyed shapes.

I stopped the little knights wearing them. I told them about the man who was halfway a bull, in the maze. Some of them laughed at first but when it was obvious I wasn’t joking, most of the masks vanished again, or at least, they did until I went home at night.

We were supposed to be conducting war games—how to take cargo from a docked ship—but that was sporadic. What took up almost all our time, the whole garrison, were patrols of the major roads. I’d never done that before in Thebes. We were drowning in thefts, robberies, sudden attacks, especially outside the bars, which were heaving like I’d never seen before. Every street corner was littered with broken wine jars.

But we were coping, more or less, until the night before the funeral.

I thought it was going to be a quiet night. My unit was patrolling Harper Way, the long main road to the mountain and the maze, and it was boring, because after nightly Hidden rides, it was deserted. A few masks lay discarded at the road sides, and every so often, forgotten things winked and gleamed—dolls, necklaces, even abandoned bags—but the people had melted away.

Ivy was forcing its way up between the paving stones of the road. In the deserted quiet with the wild creeping back, I could see what the road would look like in a hundred years, or a thousand, when Thebes was a ruin after all the fine clockwork melted down for swords long ago, and nobody remembered there had ever been marvels.

We were almost at the end of our watch when a battle horn sounded, high and eerie in the night.

The little knights all looked at me, confused. Inside the city: it had to be a mistake, or a drill, or someone taking the piss.

It wasn’t. It was Polydorus’s unit, formed into a shield wall at the top of what was usually a quiet road, full of airy houses where trader families lived. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first. A whole mob of people in those straw masks were hurling wine jars at the knights.

“Phaidros, fucking Zeus alive,” Polydorus said when I locked my shield with his. “It’s something about flour, the traders are using short measures—”

A wine jar smashed against my shield. There must have been a lit rag in it, because the thing exploded. Burning brandy vapour hissed up around us both. I had to tear my cloak off as fire rushed down one side of it.

There was a hush. Not far away, my cloak blazed by itself. Getting angry about flour was one thing, but trying to kill a Sown knight was something else.

Between the shields and through the smoke, I saw a slim figure standing on a wall. For a lightning bolt of a second I thought it was Dionysus—but it was just a man in a bronze mask that looked a bit like him. I should have been thinking about the fight and the order to advance, but even as the crowd of masked men realized they didn’t have much choice now but to charge at us, I found myself checking every few steps for that man on the wall. He was very still, but watching, like a general.

Afterwards, I sat on the edge of a fountain in the road, washing blood and soot off my shield. The fire had done something interesting to the filigree, and now it had oxidised rainbows in it. I quite liked it. I was in a sunny mood now. Things had seemed a bit too much earlier, but sometimes what you need to remember is that everything is fine as long as you aren’t currently on fire. Around us, the traders were edging out of their houses, bringing us cold water, which was kind of them, and helping to move the bodies.

“Sir,” Jason said, sounding uncertain. He was frowning at something off to our left.

Polydorus looked over at the same time as me. He was halfway through plaiting his hair over his shoulder to keep it damp and cool for longer. Mine, wet too, was coiled up on the nape of my neck. The stone roads seemed to soak in the heat all through the day, and breathe it out again as soon as the sun set. Some of the little knights were lying flat on the paving, staring up at the sky and trying to keep still until I had to give the order to move.

Jason hesitated in a way I’d never known him to do, and then like a much smaller child, took one of our hands each and towed us to the shadows around the other side of the fountain, where there was a dead man. Or I’d thought it was a man.

Polydorus knelt down slowly. He tugged one of the feathers—huge, white pinion feathers—gently at first, then harder.

“Is it glue?” Jason asked.

“No.” Polydorus pushed the cloak aside so we could see.

The man had feathers right down both arms, tawny and white. When I took the owl mask off him, we all recoiled, because the face underneath was not altogether a man’s any more. The eyes, open, were orange. We all stayed exactly still for what felt like a long time. Other knights came to see what we were looking at, and then stood there in silence too. Some people made the bull sign for good luck.

The body was changing in front of us. It was like watching a flower wilt. Now that the mask was off, the beak was softening, and there were tiny snaps as the feathers began to fall away. They didn’t vanish. They stayed there on the ground, offensively, still being feathers. When Jason picked one up, it looked heavy. Polydorus smacked his hand to make him drop it, like he’d touched something cursed.

“Pardon me, knights?” said a light, polite voice.

There was a young man waiting far enough away to be respectful. Someone held up a torch so we could see who we were talking to; slim, small, probably a slave, but strange-looking, because he had blue eyes.

“Yes, sir?” I said.

He was the man from the wall.

“May I take my friend away?” he asked, and he was starting to seem odd, because although he was being polite, he didn’t seem afraid of us—even though most of Thebes would have waited at least an hour to interrupt still-bloody knights, particularly if it was civilians who had just tried to set one of them on fire. I started to get a tickle of unease.

“Not yet,” I said. “You’ll need to wait until the morning. I have to take him to the Palace to show the Queen his—condition. You can come for him then.”

The young man stayed where he was. “But the Queen will have the body destroyed. He must have a real funeral, and real honours. He was undergoing the Holy Change, after all.” Still calm, still unafraid, as though there were an invisible wall between us that would stop anyone hurting him. It was how Dionysus was.

Something in my thinking, the part that was beginning to understand witching, went click . I looked down to his hands, knowing he would be holding that bronze mask from earlier. It was beautiful, cast to look like very wealthiest, most cultured sort of Egyptian gentleman; except that in the eyes, there was blue glass, and wound through the hair was an ivy crown.

Wearing a bull mask would turn you into a bull now.

Wearing a Dionysus mask would ... what?

A little crowd had gathered behind him. Some of them were the same people who had just run away from the battle. Most were wearing masks, but under them, they were still ordinary: young girls and boys who had just come straight from kitchens, still in aprons; an older lady in an orange sash that meant she was a marvel-maker; a man who still had dried clay on his hands, who must have been making vases—or masks—at his wheel an hour ago. They were all keeping back from the young man with the bronze mask, though, and not in the practical way they would have kept back from a knight. It was the way people gave priestesses space—and witches. Reverence.

I was glad, for the hundredth time, that I sounded so unlike what I was. I sounded like a temple chorister only just old enough to grow his hair long. It was a voice to keep the peace with. “Holy Change, sir?”

The young man nodded once, all restraint and grace. I could have been speaking to a king, not a slave. When he spoke again, it sounded airy, and he aimed it at a point somewhere just above my head. “This is a most sacred thing, and it will change all Thebes before the end.” He was speaking with an accent now. It was old. It was how Dionysus spoke; or it would have been if Dionysus had said the things people expected gods to say, and not stories about be-carted sheep and feather rain. “It is part of my rites, which I must not be denied.”

The little crowd behind him, which was broadening now—some of the traders had come across to look, some drawn with worry, some kindling with what seemed to me like a terrible sort of hope—murmured and nodded. I heard a couple of people say something that might have been all hail .

Fuck fuck fuck.

“Your rites? I’m afraid I don’t know your name, sir.”

Don’t say it, don’t you fucking say it; channel Dionysus enough to have his foresight, and to realize what I’ll have to do if you say it.

He put the bronze mask on. “I am the Raver.”

Some people knelt. Murmurs skittered away in every direction—through the crowd, through the knights.

Sometimes, you can see the future. Sometimes there are two ways, laid out as clear as parallel corridors in a maze, and sometimes, you can look down through the ruined places and see both paths.

I could try to keep the peace. I could take him to the Queen, and these people would come too. They’d send their children running to bring relatives and friends and there would be a mob, and the Guards would have to let them into the Palace or end up trampled. There would be no order to fire or draw swords, because nobody wanted to massacre civilians. When the Queen appeared, though, the witching that is all that maintains the royal house would be very weak. Rather than a great figurehead seen from a balcony, she’d be right there in front of them all, a tallish lady who looked like a knight and just as easily wounded as one. And someone would risk their life, because they were desperate and hungry and the only way out was a god, and they would snatch the crown. Maybe they’d fall, maybe there would be a massacre then, but even if the crown didn’t reach him, this man would be king then. There would be knights who obeyed him—I could see some even now with hope-stars in their eyes—and maybe, if he wore the mask long enough, he would be god enough to convince the rest.

Sometimes you can keep the peace. Sometimes you can’t, and then the only consideration left is whether smashing it yourself with as precise a blow as you can will end with fewer people dead than letting the Fates do it. The Fates are never precise: they use sledgehammers.

There was a dusting of grey in the man’s hair, just like Dionysus’s.

Part of me locked up. It was the part that had finally breathed when Dionysus lifted me at the dance, and the part that had believed him when he said I was safe, and the part that secretly loved his mad stories—or rather, that he told them to me.

It said: I can’t. I can’t. He’s too like him.

I wasn’t wearing a helmet, but that didn’t matter. The one on the inside was there, and now, I pulled the visor down.

“We’ll see, sir. Gods can’t die,” I said, and slit his throat.

He did die. He crumpled into a little heap on the ground, and where his blood poured onto the flagstones, poppies bloomed.

Poppies grow on battlefields. They like blood. The fields in front of the walls at Troy had been full of poppies, every summer. I tried to stop that thought, because like one of those hull breaches on a ship that start out tiny but prise themselves open wider and wider as the force of the sea crushes into them, I could feel I was about to lose where I was and when, and I’d be back on the plain again, with those gruesome poppies, and that it was going to be worse than before, and it was going to happen in front of everyone.

Something that wasn’t me waded through the flooded corridors, and closed a watertight door.

I couldn’t hear.

The crowd was writhing and I could see people were shouting, or praying, or crying, but all I could glean was a kind of hum. It made me feel like I wasn’t really there, even when some people pushed forward to pick the poppies and soak cloths in the blood, it all felt more like seeing it in a painting than living it.

The Kadmeia was overrun with ivy. Everywhere slaves were working with garden shears, trying to cut it back where it grasped up the pillars and sprayed around the window frames. It wasn’t just ivy, either; honeysuckle, swathes of jasmine, growing right out of the flagstones, wrecking door hinges. In the courtyard where the shrine to Semele was, the pomegranate trees were in full bloom, and already growing pomegranates. For me anyway, it was as silent as moss.

I wanted to curl up in a corner and stare at the wall, or anything that wasn’t the way the man had fallen, his hair like incense smoke. There wasn’t time for that. We were waiting for the Queen. We had the body to show her, and the mask, and the story.

Jason and Polydorus had come. I must have looked wrong, or ill, because Polydorus had put his cloak around me, and Jason wanted to me to sit down. I was glad of the cloak, because even though I was nearly sure the night was still hot, I was freezing; my fingernails looked like glass. All my thoughts had gone spacey and strange. I didn’t feel bad, just distant. It was quite nice really. It was a relief not to be collapsed in a heap thinking I was at Troy: this was maybe not ideal knightly function, but it was all right. I wished they would stop looking so worried, but the way they kept looking at each other, it was like they thought ...

Like they thought I was going to lose it and murder someone if nobody intervened. Of course they did. Jason had seen that once already, with his old commander. Polydorus didn’t want him to see it again.

People were turning, looking and talking towards the right; the Queen was here.

Someone must have just turned her out of bed—it was an unholy watch of the night—but she was dressed, her hair bound up in a knot like mine because of the heat. If she was surprised to find her receiving room full of knights and dead bodies, she didn’t show it. We all knelt. Polydorus was explaining something, his eyes trained respectfully on the hem of her dress. Like Pentheus’s robe at the Bull Ceremony, it was stitched with a slim band of embroidery that from any distance looked like a plain ribbon, but up close, like this, showed Hatti gods. I loved cloth from Hattusa. I wasn’t supposed to: it was all amazing colours and much too gaudy for us, or at least the way they wore it: whole cloaks covered in brocade, temple curtains brilliant with stitched scenes, sometimes in patterns so spectacular that the weavers probably went blind at thirty. If it was just up to me though, I’d have filled the house with it.

The hem came closer, and she took my arms and drew me upright. I kept looking down, but she touched my chin to angle it up, so I could see what she was saying.

“You did the right thing,” she said. “Well done. What’s happened to you?”

“It’s battle madness,” I said, and with shame screwing a way through my skull, I knew that it came out strange and flat, in that accent that all deaf people have because you modulate your own tone so much as you speak, and when you can’t, it shows. I hated it: it made me sound like I didn’t belong here. “I’m sorry, lady.”

“Bring the witch,” she said to someone past my shoulder. I felt something through the floor that might have been footsteps. Then to me again, “You’re freezing. Come on.” She took me out to the courtyard steps, which were still warm, and pushed my shoulder until I sat down. She sat next to me to wait, and took off the crown. She spun it between her hands the way athletes spin laurels. It made her look like a girl who’d just won a boxing match, one she hadn’t enjoyed very much. The crown flashed silver and gold, the figures of the warrior saints dancing around the band.

“Lady, I’m all right,” I tried to say.

“Oh, shut up.”

I did, gratefully.

“So, it seems Apollo has forgiven us,” she said, at the green everywhere. “Do you think?”

“No, lady,” I said.

She snorted. “You don’t need a witch, you’re clearly fine.”

I felt a bit better for that.

“You really believe there is a mad god?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because everything that’s happening—it’s all the same and what it adds up to isn’t Apollo. The wild, and the masks, and the madness, and the song ... it’s all ...” I told her not very coherently about blue.

I thought she would tell me not to be so stupid, but she only listened. When I finished, she nodded. “I understand. I don’t ... see it, though; they don’t seem the same to me. Perhaps I was wrong about something in the dust, perhaps the madness is a curse, but if so, it’s from Ares, as punishment for excesses at Troy. The drought is from the Mother. The magic in the masks—that seems like Hermes to me. God of witches? But something’s changed for the better. All this green. They say we’ll have a pomegranate harvest tomorrow. I think the sacrifices are working.”

I nodded slightly, though I didn’t think it was about better or worse at all. It was the wild, taking back Thebes, and it wasn’t doing that to benefit or hinder anyone. Dionysus was brandy, and these miracles were the fumes, and the longer he stayed, the drunker we, and all the land, would be. I couldn’t say that.

The Guard was coming back with a witch who moved like she was very old. The Queen was talking to her, and I couldn’t tell if the witch spoke back because she was wearing her veil. She came to sit on the next step down from me, directly in front, so I could see her properly. The red tattoos on her hands came almost up to her elbows. I wondered how many mothers and babies that was. She’d seen whole generations into the world.

The Queen said something else and the witch took her veil off. She had bright black eyes.

“My name is Circe,” the witch said to me, “and I am ninety years old. I’ve served in the courts of queens and kings from Tintagel to Memphis, and my magic is far greater than the power of any of them. What’s happening to you now is a blessing from the mad god. He’s taken part of your mind away to keep you from doing anything else that’s going to hurt you.”

“Can we perhaps not invoke imaginary gods,” the Queen murmured.

“Just because you don’t know him in Thebes doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t,” Circe said, unmoved. “Drink this.” She gave me a bronze cup of that feral brandy.

“No,” I said, because I couldn’t do that in front of the Queen.

She put it aside, but gave me a look that said she couldn’t do much to help me if I wouldn’t accept any help. “You’re going to go home, and eat something, and see your family, and sleep like the dead, with no dreams. When you wake, you will hear again.”

No; I wouldn’t. I could see the trick. It was the way she’d told me who she was. The more deinos the witch, the more deinos the magic. She was trying to make sure I knew she was deinos. She was doing exactly what he had done, she was telling me I was safe, only it wasn’t going to work, because I didn’t believe her.

If you know how the witching works, it stops working.

“You can come home with us,” Polydorus said to me. He had knelt down on my other side. “We’re much nearer than the maze.”

“No,” I said, because he didn’t like me, and because he had a wife who would surely not enjoy a whole extra human in her house when she already had to put up with Jason—especially not a deaf battle-mad one she wouldn’t even be able to communicate with. And they had children: two little girls still too tiny to join the garrison. Polydorus had married the second he was eligible to on his mother’s orders, and his wife was ... I thought she was a knight too, invalided out of service because she’d lost an arm, and now something influential to do with the Temple of Athena. And his commander was still alive: he was an official in the Assembly. I had a distant feeling that they were all one household. I knew the house, on Copper Street—it was one of a row of beautiful Sown mansions, built for exactly that sort of extended family. They all had courtyards with orange trees, and if you looked down at them from the Palace, you could see them because of the oranges that fell in the gutter channels in a bright line.

“It will be worse by yourself,” Circe told me, severe.

I nearly told her she didn’t know what she was talking about. I didn’t have it in me to stay with a family. Even if it turned out Polydorus’s wife and commander didn’t mind me at all, they would still be one thing, all joined together and belonging, and I would just be me. When I tried to go to sleep, the Nothing would be there, filling the room, where my little boy and Helios and his wife and children, and mine ... weren’t. It would be worse than going home by myself. That was good, dark loneliness, not the kind horribly illuminated by someone else’s happiness.

“All right, everyone get out,” the Queen said, to put an end to it. She looked tired. “Not you, Heliades.”

“Come to Copper Street after,” Polydorus told me urgently.

“I’m fine,” I said again. “But thank you.”

The Queen watched them leave. She seemed like she was struggling with something. “They’re right, you shouldn’t go home by yourself. I imagine you’d be easy to steal. You’re very manageably sized.”

I snorted without meaning to and mimed punching her in the head. She caught my fist.

“Come on. You’re staying here. Where there is not a lovely family you don’t belong to,” she said over me when I started to argue.

I must have looked taken aback, because she shrugged slightly.

“I don’t like visiting families either,” she said. She looked like she’d wrenched it out from under a grindstone.

If she had handed me a fistful of rubies it would have felt less important. I couldn’t think that she said anything like that more than twice in ten years.

She tipped her head towards the long cloister to point out where to go. I followed her. We had to walk carefully, stepping over vines—ivy, wisteria, things I didn’t know the names of—growing right across the flagstones.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s an injury, it isn’t your fault,” she said. She seemed muted—she was too restrained to complain, but I knew why. Before now, she’d talked to me as though we were more or less made of the same stuff. Now ... she was being careful of me, because it was obvious that we weren’t.

I wanted to punch something.

“How are you like you are, lady?” I asked. “Like a marvel?”

“I didn’t spend twenty years at war and raids, for a start,” she said, smiling a bit. It was regret, that smile. She wished she had served. She was ashamed she hadn’t.

I filled up with a sort of helpless devotion then. Nobody had expected her to stay with the garrison. It would be idiotic for a queen to die in a field a thousand miles from her city and hurl the succession into disarray. She knew that too, I knew she did, but if she was so deep-down Sown that she felt ashamed anyway, in the face of all reason, then we hadn’t had as true-hearted a knight on the throne since Kadmus.

“No, you would have been fine at Troy,” I said. She would.

“You have to say that.”

I let the silence fill up with all my suicidal opinions about how she was a mad despot and how her fish were stupid.

“True,” she admitted, as if I’d said something. She thought about it for a little while. We were halfway along the cloister, with gardens on either side, and ivy bursting up the pillars. The slaves were still trying to cut it back, but as we went by, I saw one of them stop and unwind a vine that had grown around his ankle while he’d been standing there. “I lost three children before Pentheus. It was because I had them when I was too little; I was fourteen and babies are big, so it was a bit silly.”

Nothing ever made me feel sick. I could watch a witch do surgery on someone’s brain while I was having dinner and have no reaction at all except general interest, but I had to slow down now.

“Don’t look like that, it’s how just things are for married girls, it’s part of growing up,” she said, as if that wasn’t worse. “But the point is, if the mad god was going to come for anyone, it was me. He didn’t, though. He didn’t take my mind away to make anything easier. I was in my right mind for every second, no one tried to help, not a god or a person, which is a thoroughly good thing, because I learned to fulfil my function. My mother said something I’ll always remember. She said, being Sown is about being hammered out in a furnace. You suffer, and if you’re not careful, you crack on the anvil. But not if you learn to love the anvil. In the end, really, cracking or not is a choice. It isn’t a god; there’s no mad god, he’s just a story to make people feel better about letting themselves break. Love the anvil, and what it can make you, and you’ll be a marvel knight.”

I stayed quiet for a long time, so long that she must have thought I had nothing to say about it, because she moved on.

“But Phaidros—I thought you could hear this week. You were deaf before, or a little bit, but this week, you’ve been much better. What happened there?” She said it carefully, and with a surprised little drop I realized she was worried about prying.

“A witch,” I said.

“What did she do?”

I didn’t want to talk about Dionysus, not to anyone, but especially not to her. It felt like I was drawing a thin but crucial thread between them, one that might tighten, and reel them nearer and nearer, until they crashed into each other. “He told me I was safe and I believed him.”

“Why? You didn’t believe Circe just now.”

“He’s deinos. He doesn’t try to be, he’s kind and he laughs, but—he is.”

I thought she would grumble about mummery, but she grinned. “Enchanting.”

The Nothing caught up with us, stretching.

“I’m too old for that,” I said, as much to remind me as her.

“Oh, fuck off, Phaidros, you can’t say that to someone ten years older than you.”

It was the first time I’d heard her swear properly and it cheered me up a lot.

“No, I mean too old for men. I should be on the marriage register.”

She looked interested. “Why aren’t you? You must be paying a fine.”

“I punch things that make me jump. I kill things in my sleep.” I pressed my teeth into my lip. I didn’t want to say it, because if it was only Dionysus who knew, then it was a sort of shared dream, but once I told her ... “Maybe my slaves. They’re dead.”

“Oh. Well, the Palace can supply you with new ones, the Egyptians brought us some as gifts. There are some big men you’d struggle to sleep-murder.”

“Not quite the moral of that story, lady?”

“Yes it is, knight,” she said, smacking my arm. “Gods’ sake, get new slaves, get on the marriage register, and get a fucking grip. And sacrifice to Athena, to apologise for all the grip you haven’t been getting.”

I laughed, then put my hand over my mouth, because it was wildly improper, but then she laughed too, and I actually heard it sing around the cloister. For the first time all week, I felt like I’d done something good.

A minnow of a thought said: Blue. Dionysus tries to make you laugh, and you have this deep-down sense that she needs to laugh sometimes, and that’s ... blue.

“Here you are,” she said, about a doorway open and filled with candlelight. There were lamps everywhere, and food set out on a table, and a marvel cup-bearer by the door, holding a jug of water. The Queen put a cup in its free hand and it hinged forward to pour out the water, beautifully calibrated. Once the cup was full, she gave it to me. “Get some rest. I’ll tell the Guards you might sleepwalk, and one of them will bring you back.”

“Thank you,” I said, and relaxed. She was right. It was safe. I couldn’t hurt the Guards. They wore full armour. Slowly, because there was time now, I started to feel the bruise down my shield arm from earlier, and the place where my cloak had been on fire, and a cut through my eyebrow I didn’t remember getting. After all the hazy dislocation of the way I’d been thinking before, it was lovely.

“No, I should be thanking you. You might have saved my crown tonight.”

“What are you going to do, lady? If anyone who wears a god mask now starts to turn into ...”

“Oh, Tiresias is ahead of us both,” she said, with an absolute absence of urgency. “I’ll show you, it’s interesting.”

I hinged a couple of inches into a bow, too tired to be curious, just relieved she’d already thought of it.

“Sleep well, knight.”

“And you. Though—lady?”

“Mm?”

“What you said, about how no one came, and what your mother told you. I hope she’s eaten by wild fucking dogs in Hades for the rest of eternity.”

At first, she started to nod, which was a response to whatever bland good night she’d thought I was going to say, and then she stopped and looked at me properly. Different things went over her face then. It was hard to track them, but when they stopped, the one left closest to the surface was something very brittle. She didn’t say anything, but as though I were the king and she were the knight, she took my hand and kissed my knuckles, and turned away into the dark.