Page 35 of The Hymn to Dionysus
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My house had been set on fire, and it was still burning. It must have been a message for anyone who thought helping me might be a good idea. Whatever they’d used for fuel, it was considerable: the heat from the blaze was powerful even fifty yards away on the path. The smoke was choking, and my poor olive trees were burning. Normally I walked past them every day and didn’t feel anything at all about them except distantly grumpy, because at least since I’d been here they hadn’t so much made olives as green rocks, but now they were on fire—they seemed like people. Where the fires were hottest, there was a yellow glow and mirages in the air, and just for a few seconds, I would have sworn I saw Hephaestus, limping as he moved bronze into a forge that was there behind the wreckage of my kitchen just like three could be there behind some apples. He looked right at us and offered Dionysus a small, fiery bow. Dionysus tilted forward too, and courteously, the cinders stopped settling on us, stopped trying to set our hair on fire or catch in our sleeves.
His side of the maze was far enough away that the fire wasn’t there yet. On the way around, I worried that it would be soon, because the sparks leaping from one patch of scrub to the next were tinderbox bright, but when we came into his garden, I realized I didn’t need to worry. There was water everywhere; water running through the channels, in little falls across parts of the ruins that sprayed the paths and made at the old stone smell of the beach at Troy after rain, and of course, in the vines and in the trees, all alive again. No sparks were catching. To get down into the chambers where he lived, we had to step over a stream.
“Pentheus knows where you live. They’ll look for you here,” I said. It was the first time the bellowing of the fire was quiet enough to speak over.
“He doesn’t know where to go once we’re in the maze.”
“But it’s right—” I stopped, because I’d expected to come out in the airy chamber with the fountain, but instead there was just a corridor, and a branch in the ways, and then another, and a weird feeling we were going in a spiral, and then down again. More turns. It would have been hopeless without him. I would never have thought anything was down here, except more ruins.
Then there it was, the same chamber, which I would have sworn was much more straightforward to reach before. The fountain was chattering to itself, alive with spring water, and with tiny birds who had come to drink. They whirred away when we came in, but quickly seemed to realize there was no need to worry, and flitted back.
“Witching?” I said.
“Magic,” he said.
I sank down on the fountain edge, which was cushioned with moss, and dipped my hand into it. The water was cool: genuinely, blessedly cool. I scooped up a handful to drink. Sweet and clear. Up above us, the sky was darkening, and there was the smell of smoke, but it didn’t feel dangerous any more. The earthquake hadn’t broken anything, either, not even a plant pot.
Dionysus sat down a little way from me, out of reach, scanning me in a way that made me worried I looked like I was thinking about murdering him. From our clothes, there was the smell of smoke and of baking, from the burning olives and lemons; we both looked ten years older. The inside of my skull was still echoing.
The leopard sat down nearby, swishing her tail.
I swallowed, and tasted cement. “Does it make you dizzy, seeing through her eyes and yours at the same time?”
He smiled a little bit. “Something wicked. Bees are awful.”
Bats, I thought; he had been in the bats.
Another little silence. It rolled around the fountain edges.
“Are you going to kill me now?” I asked.
“ What? ”
“You told me you would come back for me in the end, for revenge,” I said, a bit flat, not liking being played with.
He sat as if I’d handed him something incredibly heavy, graven with something important in a lot of languages, like the law stones the Egyptians leave everywhere. He looked like he was trying to find a language he knew. When he did, I saw something break in his expression. “I told you I’d come back for you,” he said, very soft. “Come back ... for you. If you needed me. To help.”
“Oh,” I whispered.
“You called me here,” he said. His voice broke smoky again, but he wasn’t angry this time. “Why would you do that if you thought I was coming to kill you?”
I had to look into the water. “I’d had enough. I ... I wanted to see you, even if it was just for revenge. You were my guest on that ship, you’re my family, even if I was the worst host there ever was.” I swallowed. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“You were frightened, at the dance. I thought you’d changed your mind about asking me. No one wants to see me twice. But ... you did call, and I wanted to stay, and lots of people have blue eyes, so at least to begin with I thought—well, if I pretend not to know what’s happening, maybe he’ll think I’m someone else.” He closed his teeth for a second. “I can’t seem very normal for very long, but even when it was obvious, you didn’t say anything, so ... I didn’t either. I feel like there must be a word for when two people both know something but they both pretend not to know because they’re worried the other one will leave.”
I realized I was sitting there with my hand pressed over my mouth and had to concentrate to take it away. “Why? I betrayed you. I should have fought for you.”
“What are you talking about? You were a child. They would have killed you.”
“You were a child too. You—we took you.”
“No, you didn’t. I let you take me. I wanted to see what it was like on the interesting pirate ship.” He laughed, or he started to, but it made him cough, after all the smoke and the dust. “I only meant to be aboard for a few hours, I was going to leave you all alone once I’d looked around, but ... then you started talking to me like I was a real person and not a pretend ghost thing that used to be a person.” He paused. “And you still did that, even when the ivy grew and the slaves went mad.”
“You didn’t ... feel ...?”
“As though a boy with a sword should have protected me, when I’m older than Zeus and I run people mad even if I just sit quietly and do nothing, and I wasn’t in danger, or frightened?”
“That isn’t the point.”
He paused. “Are you sure?”
I had to hunch forward, because I hadn’t expected to laugh. When I raised my head again, he was watching me in the way I always watched a shore as I was leaving when I knew I wouldn’t see it again for a long time.
“I ... am sorry, about—earlier,” he said. “I would have spoken to the Queen instead of ... all that, but there was nothing I could have done to prove Pentheus lied.”
“Oh, well; I don’t think he thinks he is lying.”
“Oh, he knows he is,” Dionysus said with unexpected acid.
“You—did you say you took him?” I asked, trying to tell if I remembered that or if it was just something I’d half-dreamed in all the chaos.
He put his hand over his own throat. I saw him squeeze—enough to hurt. I knew the feeling; the truth was a thing with pincers clawing its way out. “I can’t turn down someone who asks for help, it’s the Witches’ Vow. I told him what he was asking for. Then I gave him the mask. I put him into the maze.” He shook his head once. “Then I went back up to the High City and lied to you. I’ve been lying to you all along. The census, the funeral, all of it, I was trying to steer you away from him.”
I had to laugh. It came out very low, from a lot deeper down than my normal voice did.
He looked at me with so much dread I stopped. It knocked me sideways, that he minded so much about what I might say. I could have forgiven him anything then, because he minded.
“You’ve never made a secret about lying,” I said. “You told me from the start.”
“Phaidros—”
I had to take his wrist and move his hand, because I couldn’t watch him do it any more. There were red marks around his neck. “If there is anything I understand in atomic fucking detail,” I said, “it is the upholding of a vow.”
We sat quiet for a little while. Behind us, the fountain chattered. The room was cool. Little by little, I started noticing ordinary things, like how there was a pin in my hair sticking into me, how there were anemones growing in the moss between us, and how yellow the leopard was, more yellow than any other sort of yellow. How the soot felt gritty under the neck of my tunic.
I looked around for a bowl and pitcher—yes, he had a bronze set, burnished so well I could see the two of us in it, and yellow of the leopard—then drew us both some water to wash with, and watched him from under my eyelashes as he rinsed through the length of his hair. It was such a normal, homely thing; it made him look like a boy at a laundry pool. Around us settled all the things we hadn’t said yet.
“Why did you come back for me?” I asked. “After what I said to you.”
“It was a reasonable thing to say,” he said to the water. The leopard was looking at me worriedly. I stroked its ears and it put its paw over my wrist, unexpectedly heavy. Dionysus swayed. “Things like me ... snatch at people all the time. It’s always terrible and it’s never a choice, for you. Hades stole Persephone and Zeus stole a king’s son and Aphrodite stole that poor man from Troy. I shouldn’t have touched you. I came back to apologise.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” I said, hating that he could ever think I’d think that, and dismayed, because it was a bitter way to see those stories. Stories are stories, and they’re brief, because they have to fit into the amount of time a reasonably drunk person will listen by a fire, so they leave out things, like whether the young prince was frightened or whether the Trojan man had a choice—but the way I’d always heard them, the way Helios had told them, was with a kind of gentle wryness. These things were phrased as seizing and thefts, and violence, because the people being stolen could hardly turn around to their families and their kingdoms and say, Look, I’m terribly sorry, but you can all shove it, thanks, all your duty and your honour: I’m off . So Zeus said to the prince’s father, No, I stole him ; and the Unseen said, Well, she had the pomegranate seeds .
“I thought you were drawing out a revenge quest. I was telling you to get on with it. I thought you were just ... I thought,” I said, trying hard to say it in a straight line, “that the only reason you were being kind to me was to make it worse when you murdered me.”
He lifted his eyebrow a tiny fraction. “You’re fucked up, Phaidros.”
“I’ve been noticing that lately.” I put my hand over his and squeezed. He let me, though he didn’t touch me.
“I’m not going to be angry,” he said, “if you don’t want to stay here. I’m a hell of a thing to stay with. There are other parts of the maze, or ...”
He let it hang, but I knew what that or was.
It was my duty. That was to go back up to the Palace and see if the Queen was alive, to negotiate, to persuade her it hadn’t been me, there really was a god, there had been no plot, nobody wanted her crown; it was to go and help, because the High City was in ruins and they would need all hands to move the wreckage, to find places for people to stay, and then the long slog of salvage and rebuilding. I had sworn my oath to Thebes and the call of duty meant I should go back, even if Thebes had wanted me half dead by now and sent to the sea.
“No,” I said.
It was much too unobtrusive and quiet for what it was, which was the cracking of a shackle I’d always worn.
He smiled, not enough to show his incisors. “Look ... however ill-advised I think it is, you’re in love with the Queen. I’m not going to snarl at you if you want to try your luck, going back.”
“I’m not in love with the Queen. I love her, but that’s different to in love. She is everything my duty is, but ...” I struggled, and realized it was the first time in my life I’d ever said anything like this aloud. “If the choice were mine, if nothing else depended on it, if I could just ...” It sounded utterly wrong and shameful and ridiculous and forbidden, but something was lifting too—there was a mask coming away. “I would never have gone anywhere near the Palace, or her. You’ve got it the wrong way around. I want to stay with you. What are you going to do now?”
“Leave. I can’t stay here, everyone will lose their minds.”
“You ... don’t care.”
“No, but you do, and this is your home, I don’t want to wreck it any more than I already have.”
“This is not my home, I’ve lived here for six months and never before that. Let’s go together.”
“Really,” he said, not as a question. He wasn’t convinced I was choosing so much as appeasing the horrifying wild thing that had just destroyed half of Thebes.
I brushed a twist of grey-black away from his face. He was very still, and he looked afraid. It was the fear I had around anyone I could hurt by accident. “I’m not some boy you stole, strange one. I stole you, remember?”
He tipped his head a quarter inch, the barest kind of agreement. He had his hands clamped in his lap. I cradled them between mine and kissed his knuckles, then the red marks on his throat.
When he kissed me back, I felt like I’d finally been allowed to sail into a safe harbour after too long at sea. It was like I’d never managed to get home after that shipwreck. I’d come back to land, but there was no anchor, just wandering and waiting and watching the storms, and now—it all went quiet. Shelter. It made me cry, which made me worry he was going to think I was saying no, but he understood and just lifted me sideways into his lap. I felt strangely panicky. It was too long since anyone had done that, I was too old, there was something terrible about a beautiful witch worn down by the world to paying any attention at all to beaten-up knight who should have died years ago.
He set his hand against the side of my skull as if he’d overheard the thoughts, the way you put your hand to a glass to stop it ringing after someone’s smacked it. It worked the same way. I turned my face against his hand and listened to all the quiet come down in my head.
It was little by little that I started to notice I could hear things and feel things I didn’t generally. Not far from us, there were tiny, busy balls of thought, preoccupied with the logistics of dismantling what I knew was a crust of bread but for them was a mountain, and getting it home, and how nice it was to snug up close with the others in the nest, all brothers and sisters, and sleeping below somewhere was the Queen, who was good and gentle, and whose eggs made such strong soldiers.
I thought I was dreaming, and when I opened my eyes, it was weird to find that I was the size I was, with hands and elbows and eyelashes, and for a whole second, I had no idea what to do with any of those.
I wasn’t dreaming. I sat up in the dark, taking in the bedroom, trying to remember where I was. It only came to me slowly. Dionysus’s room: his side of the maze. We were down deep, at least three storeys. Moonlight came down through windows that were cut carefully to line up across the levels. We were well below my cellar, and it was cool enough that I could nearly have called it cold. Above the bed were the spectacular roots of a tree, alive with ivy and honeysuckle and some kind of trailing flower that swayed in the little breeze that came down to us from the stairway. Climbing vines with tiny white flowers hugged most of the far wall, full of the glass lamps he had used at the party—all alight, even though he hadn’t lit them and there were no slaves here.
My sitting up had made something else near the doorway jump, another mind that had thought nothing big was alive down here and that built its idea of the world with sounds, not light, and it called back to the others, mimicking the shape of what it had heard with the noise so the others would know what to look for. And somewhere above us: great slow ageless thoughts, not seeing or hearing, but delving in the earth, and feeling the hot wind, and keening quietly for water. Even though I couldn’t hear any sound at all.
“It’s the trees,” Dionysus whispered. “They cry when there’s no water.”
I was so aside from myself that I didn’t even find it odd, and I sat there wondering if there were some ants now who were having confused dreams about being a giant.
Dionysus seemed smaller than he was, lying down. He was curled up now. I touched his shoulder to ask if it was all right to lie back down where I had been or if he’d rather I stayed on my side. He held his arm out for me and pulled me back against his chest, and fitted his knee between mine. Somehow he didn’t have any difficult angles, even though I’d slept alone for years and I wasn’t used to another person any more. I held his hand where it rested on my waist. My fingertips were too rough to feel where the tattoos stopped, but just by my hip, I could. It was a tiny slight difference, and such a meaningless thing to know about him, but it was important, too.
I could feel him waiting, with genuine dread, for me to ask why I was suddenly hearing a lot more of the world than I had done a few hours ago.
I was happier not asking. It was here now. It wasn’t unpleasant. I didn’t need to know the clockwork of it; knowing wouldn’t change anything.
“Blue,” I said instead, shifting to face him. “I think I know what it is now. Wine, and stories, and the dance. Madness; masks, and ...” I didn’t want to say it, because it was a kind of holy, the way I was feeling now: weightless, like when he’d lifted me, and the before-remembering moment of waking up. I pressed my hand very gently between his legs to show what I meant, though, and he made a tiny sound that sent a painful, lovely ache through my groin and up my chest. “It’s release. It’s all ... things that take you away from yourself, and into something—truer, and wilder. Some of them do that a very small way. Some of them do it entire.”
“Yes.” He laughed the littlest ghost of a laugh and I understood why: he’d thought I never be able to see it, not really. “Yes.”
From up above, a knitting needle of daylight came around the window frame. I shut my eyes, not wanting to think about the next time we were going to be able to sleep. Out in the forest somewhere, hopefully on the far side of Harper Mountain, towards the border with Corinth. Maybe to keep me from saying anything horrifying about getting up and getting started, Dionysus gathered my hair into one hand, twisting it over his knuckles. I held his free hand.
I could feel that my hand felt small to him, and rough from sword hilts, and he could tell where the bones still weren’t quite right after I’d broken my last two fingers in an oarlock years ago. I’d been ashamed before because I was so used up and worn down, but that wasn’t how he was seeing me. He thought I looked the same as I had a decade ago on the deck of the ship as it turned to trees. He was holding, the way people hold moths rescued from candles, the memory of me looking puzzled—but not scared—about the ivy growing around my wrist. It was a little shock. I would barely have recognised myself.
He must have noticed me noticing, because he said, “You haven’t ... you haven’t asked me what I am or where I came from.”
I shook my head once. “None of my business.”
He was quiet for a long time, his fingertips just moving to and fro between the vertebrae in the base of my back where my spine always hurt if I lay still too long. I’d twisted something after falling off a horse once and it had never entirely untwisted—except, now, it didn’t hurt. It made me want to laugh. Increasingly I had a sense that he just sort of tidied up as he went along, putting things right, growing things, healing old fractures, in the same way other people stacked crockery and folded blankets.
Yes: pharmakeia.
He touched our heads together. “I can’t tell you what I am, I don’t know that; but I can tell you how I came to be, and what I’m for.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I do. You need to know what you’re making promises to.”