Page 37 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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We set out early, while it was still cool—or almost—and the sun hadn’t broiled everything yet. It would have been cooler to walk under the shade of the trees, but neither of us even discussed it. Helios had told me the story of Actaeon, who had tried to go into the sacred woods to hunt, and ended up turned into a stag himself. The stag’s head was still on the wall at the Palace.

It was the strangest thing, but as we walked uphill, I could feel things that didn’t belong to me. I kept wanting to rearrange my feathers, or get a burr out of a tail I didn’t have, and every so often, the sun was blinding through eyes that were meant for moonlight. Once, I tried to reach up to pick an orange, and it was Dionysus’s hand that moved. He winced.

“Sorry.”

Something in my head vanished, and I was just me again. Which felt small and uncomfortable and trapped. I’d been—bigger, a second ago.

He was looking at me like he expected to be shouted at.

“But that was nice,” I said.

He hesitated, then took my hand, and it came back; not so strong. I wasn’t seeing through anyone else’s eyes any more, or feeling confused about wings. But I could feel that we were surrounded by lots of star-points of tiny minds that didn’t even notice we were alive, just funny moving hills, and great, slow, strange minds I didn’t recognise, for whom we were strange flashes, babies one minute and then dust. Those were dark, under the earth somewhere, but they could feel us walking above. Off to our right was a disturbed-hive thrum that I realized after a little while was Thebes. It was eerie, but only in the way that floating underwater above a reef is eerie, knowing you’re seeing things humans can’t normally see, and that you could drown, but you won’t.

“That’s lovely,” I said, and for a split second, I heard how my voice sounded to him, which was dizzying but not horrible.

He smiled as if I’d said something immensely graceful, not just the truth.

The sun was creeping up higher, the air already warmer. The way was getting steep, and rocky, and dry. Whatever that great presence was that lived under the ground, it died away here, and the world seemed too quiet. No water; even the trees, though they delved deep, were gradually dying.

“Might take longer than we’d hoped,” I observed, not feeling very optimistic about the springs. If they were still there, the water would be hard to get to.

“There are lots of animals up there,” he said, pointing more or less north. “That usually means water.”

Another hour or so proved him right. The springs had shrunk, a lot—there were smooth patches on their banks where the water had used to be—but there was still water, and it was full of birds and animals that must have come from all around the forest, including what I was almost sure was the same leopard I’d met before. Some of the birds were amazing, brilliant green, with red crests, not normally to be found at all in Achaea, or not that I’d ever known; they must have come a lot further.

As if he were opening a door, slowly, in a way that felt very much as though he was hoping I might not notice, I started to hear all their minds, little bright things delighted with the water and stealing shiny things from the big featherless boring birds and their stone nests down in the plain below, and feeling the tug of north, where there would be cooler weather.

I lifted my eyebrows at him, pretend-stern.

He faltered. “Too much,” he said.

I pushed him in the pool. “What sort of moron doesn’t want to make friends with the adorable birds, Dionysus? Who have you been talking to for the last thousand years and why did you put up with such a luxurious selection of dickheads? Fuck!”

He laughed, and incredibly, much more incredibly than finding myself able to overhear the interests of birds, he blushed. I couldn’t see it, he was too dark, but I felt the blood rush. I pretended not to notice and started refilling our flasks, a little away from the smaller animals who would have been frightened if I got too close. The leopard sat down opposite me, coiling her tail and thinking how useful it would be to have the weird claws that could carry things like water, even when you were away from a pool; very ugly, though. Imagine being that ugly all the time. Amazing how more of their fathers didn’t just eat them at birth to spare everyone else the unpleasantness of looking at them.

“Yes, well, I hate your ears,” I told her. “Look, they’re all wonky, someone’s eaten one.”

Funny noises they made as well. Still, probably anybody would make all sorts of distressed noises if they had go around all bald and minus two legs and with stupid prey-teeth that weren’t any good for anything except—urgh— vegetables .

I flicked water at her.

Probably, probably , the One from the Trees wouldn’t mind if she ate his friend, just a little bit. It wouldn’t be very delicious, but it couldn’t be flicking water annoyingly if it didn’t have its weird claw things.

“Dionysus, the leopard wants to eat me.” One from the Trees; it was like she knew, somehow, about the Hunt and the forests, and where he had come from.

He pretended to bite my shoulder. It was only when I twisted back that I realized twisting should have hurt. Yesterday the knife wound had been raw and barely closed. There was just a slim scar now. I looked down and pushed my fingers against what had been most painful place. Nothing. He saw me notice and this time, he pretended to look stern, which doesn’t work so well when you’re beautiful and half your face hasn’t been minced.

I smiled. “Got enough water?”

He nodded. “Shall we go?”

“Very slowly,” I agreed.

His dark eyes strayed up ahead. “I’ve never walked so far in this kind of heat, is it ...?”

“Miserable, but it’ll be fine. I’ll tell you riddles. You’ll be too annoyed to notice it’s hot.”

“I’m ... very old, I know all the riddles.”

“Oh, not that old, surely,” I said, filling up with the glee of someone who can see victory laurels waiting right there on a plinth.

“I’m trying not to think too hard about it, actually, given how recently you were a baby.”

“So you won’t mind,” I said, trying hard to sound boyish and innocent, “if I bet you dinner in Aulis I can tell you a riddle you don’t know?”

“Lovely, I’ll take free food.”

“You promise ?” I really do sound about sixteen if I half-try, it’s dreadful.

He shrugged. “I promise I will eat the dinner you are assuredly going to pay for with the silver you will somehow have to acquire between here and there, yes.”

I grinned. “I like scallops, by the way, they’re very expensive.”

He watched me for a second, hunting for whatever he’d missed, and then hissed. “Oh, fuck , you’re a fucking sailor!”

“Too late! Dinner in Aulis, old man!”

He started to laugh, but then stopped, and touched my arm to stop me walking. “Phaidros.”

It wasn’t anything he’d seen. It was that down in the city, something had shifted, and minds sharp and well-fletched were turning their attention towards the mountain.

It wasn’t like having a god’s-eye view. I’d always thought the gods knew things because they were looking down from Olympus, maybe with some kind of holy device to help them focus on the people of specific interest, but the way he saw—the way he was making me see—was the same way I always saw, but with lots of different eyes. It wasn’t only seeing, either. I was hearing, and feeling the heat, and noticing things filtered through different minds that perceived everything a little bit differently to the way I did.

A few miles behind us, the Hidden thundered out of the Palace gates. It had taken this long to go through the wreckage of the prison and find the trees that had been doors and the safe hollow space where I conspicuously wasn’t.

It wasn’t a young unit. It was everyone who was left, who could ride. I could feel Polydorus, or rather what had used to be Polydorus. When he had seen Jason’s mother hold up the head from the chariot, he had broken. It wasn’t a great, grand, spectacular breaking, just the tiny but definitive snap of a bird’s hyoid. He felt strangely free now. All those years aching and worrying that he wasn’t going to be able to see Jason through, even though that was what he had sworn to do when he found that tiny little boy hiding behind a dead sheep after fucking Ajax’s fucking insane rampage, and all those little fires of hope when Phaidros, who wasn’t actually the unmitigated curse everyone said, realized that the way to help Jason was to play with him, not flog him: gone. All he was now was the shield and the spear, and the narrowed vision from the inside of a helmet.

Amphitrion and Allecto’s mother was there too. She had retired from the army fifteen years ago when she had the twins, which was a waste of fucking time it turned out, because the boy had died of the madness and she had had to kill the girl with her own hands after the stadium. Children were only yours for seven years, everyone knew that, and they had been in the garrison now longer than they hadn’t, but when the order came from the Queen—she had almost packed a bag and run for Aulis. But then her husband had said, Please, we need to run, you can’t do this : and she had locked up with scorn and said, We are Sown. We are this . And then down deep somewhere, there was a little snap, and suddenly, amazingly, she didn’t care any more.

As they rode down through the lower city, priests and slaves were everywhere, digging in the rubble for survivors, helping people into shade, handing out bread. Everyone looked grey and exhausted: not much better than the refugees from Pylos.

The Queen was with them too, because even if monarchs and heirs did not go to war, they did hunt. It was good to hold a shield and spear again. What had happened yesterday had a dreamy quality now, for her and for nearly everyone. She remembered the earthquake. The Guards had gone mad. And then, in the prison, that weird glade, formed of great oak trees that hadn’t been there before. Tiresias said, Look, they were the doors , but ... that couldn’t be true. What was true, though, was that there was no Phaidros. No body. He had run. Or been taken. Had there not been another man, a tall man in witch black, who had stood in front of her, terrible and entirely unconcerned in a way human beings can’t be, and ...? No. That memory felt untrustworthy. It was a sort of mirage, born of the earthquake and all that suffocating dust that had knocked everyone out. Dust, of course it was something in the dust. It didn’t matter. What mattered was getting Phaidros before he crossed the Corinth border, because after a disaster like this—well. People would think (already thought) the earthquake had happened because he had been imprisoned. They would drown her and give him the crown just to apologise.

She’d thought she had killed everything but clockwork in her, years ago. But it wasn’t dead. She had beaten it into coma, but this last week, it had been waking, and a tiny voice had said, What if he’s right , what if it was monstrous, what your mother said to you, what if this was what family really was, this one modest man who was savage and kind at the same time ...

It was like brandy.

Heady, and wonderful, and poisonous.

Somewhere down on the mountainside, Pentheus was struggling up the path in the heat, trailed by Tiresias, who was trying to tell him—begging him—not to go. I could see them through the birds and the ground, and I felt it when Pentheus almost fell and pulled himself up against a rock.

“Pentheus! Pentheus, stop, you can’t go up there. It’s dangerous, he’s dangerous! If your mother corners him—don’t you understand? He’s a god!”

Tiresias remembered what had happened because they always saw true, although just now, they wished that wasn’t the case. It would be a lot less awful, not to realize what was going to happen in about a quarter of an hour. It would have been less awful to stand in that courtyard after a god had shut down everyone’s minds and grown trees though a prison, watching everyone come around and feel puzzled and just ... look at those trees and the hollow inside big enough to hold two people, and brush it aside like peculiar weather, seeing and not seeing at all.

“Of course he isn’t a god,” Pentheus said stiffly. “He’s just a witch and he was helping Phaidros to the crown, no doubt in exchange for a lot of money. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand.”

“You’re lying, Pentheus. You know you’re lying.”

Pentheus didn’t know that, actually. What he did know was that there had been an earthquake, and something about it had done something to everyone. Just like when the star had fallen. Sudden madness was unsettling, metamorphosis was very unusual, but ... the holy machines weren’t gods talking, just people. The story about the lost prince was just a misunderstanding of the fact that child of a god was royal code for born outside wedlock but let’s not have a blood feud. Wherever you looked for a god, there was just a collection of dull, human things where one wasn’t.

And that was because ... there were no gods. There were forces, like the sea and death, and madness, but they weren’t conscious . They didn’t want things, or plan. That was all witchcraft, and once you know how the witching works, it stops working. He could see it all. What a god really did was marshal people together under a banner, and help them get things done. Build palaces, win wars. Otherwise nobody would ever agree about anything, but if you said the magic words, in the name of Zeus, or in the name of Ra ... you could make people build things so great that their grandchildren wouldn’t see the finished temple. The gods were ideas, a great, sparkling lie to oil the clockwork of the world, and priests were only witches.

When you came down to it, nothing was anything except itself. A crown was a band of silver. An earthquake ... he didn’t know, but he would have bet anything now that it was just some arbitrary shift in the mantle of the world, no more significant or meaningful than a tree shaking in the wind. And sure as clockwork, madness wasn’t a god. It was just human minds, malfunctioning, like faulty marvels. Nothing divine breathed through it.

The reason he knew that was true was that he didn’t want it to be. It was terrible. But in his experience, the worst and bleakest explanation for a thing was the truest one.

“Pentheus,” Tiresias called again, coughing. They had breathed in a lot of dust, in the earthquake. “Pentheus, what do you mean to do ?”

Pentheus didn’t say anything, because there was no point, and he’d had enough. A whole lifetime of enough, even though he’d hardly lived at all yet. All this time, everyone had been trying to tell him to be Sown, even though they wouldn’t let him learn to be Sown: no garrison, no commander like everyone else, no training, he was supposed to know everything by magic. And then the Queen was angry when he—shockingly—didn’t understand how to do any of it. But the strange thing was, he had learned. Whatever the witch had done to him in the maze, it had switched off the thinking part of his mind, and now that it had switched back on again, he could see much, much better. Everything was right in front of him and as clear as the morning.

If you wanted to be in Thebes, and not go to Egypt, and learn how to be a good king ... then that was what you did. You didn’t rely on the Queen, who thought, not very secretly, that there were caterpillars who would make better kings. Or Phaidros, who said one thing to your face and did something else, as cunning as all good knights were supposed to be.

What you did was, you shot Phaidros and the Queen, blamed a witch, and took the throne.

That was Sown.