Page 38 of The Hymn to Dionysus

36

There was nowhere to hide but the forest, but even so, I slowed down when we came up to the border. I’d never crossed it. Men hadn’t, not for a thousand years. Not since Actaeon had seen the dryads, and turned into a stag, and been ripped apart by his own dogs.

The next step would mean easing over the roots of a great oak that had pushed up my side of the road. She would know, the dryad who lived in the oak. It must have been a slow kind of fury, the rage of the trees, but all I could think of was how it would feel, when the bones of my hands started fusing together into hooves, and the horns started grinding up out of my skull.

Dionysus stepped across it like he would have his own threshold.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Listen.” He took my hand to give me a tiny pull over the border, and he was right: I could hear them if I listened.

I’d always thought of dryads as people who also happened to be trees, but that, I realized then, was a very human way of imagining. They weren’t.

They were under the earth, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, and they knew we were there. They could feel us walking, the weight of us, the length of our steps, and from that, they had quite a good idea of us, though not the same as mine. And they didn’t know enough about humans to know what type of humans we were, any more than I would have known types of dryad, or even if there were types. They were minds that stretched for miles through the woods, knowing every inch of those miles, and they were dreaming: huge, slow, ancient dreams, because they had been here as long as Dionysus and longer. Those dreams were about the taste of the soil, and the festivals of the ants, and strange, creaking acquaintances with roots and branches that lasted a thousand years. I was like a sudden spark; the things down deep noticed me in the way I noticed fireflies. It was brief interest, and that was all. They didn’t care if I walked in their woods, because humans weren’t important enough to think of at all.

“But ... Actaeon,” I said, confused.

“Witching,” Dionysus said.

I didn’t understand, but then, maybe because I just knew him well enough, or maybe because I could think through his thinking now, I did.

If you’ve got a city full of professionally violent, angry men who go out to the wars and trudge home battle mad and uncontrollable, you have to make sure there are places they cannot, cannot go. Only, there are no fences that a strong enough, angry enough person can’t rip down in the end, so what you do is, you build the fence in his head.

The dryads were there and these woods were holy, that was no lie. But they didn’t care. Of course they didn’t care. They were older than people, and long after people had blasted themselves off the face of the earth, they would still be beneath it, dreaming.

The dryads could feel hoofbeats.

A hundred horses, more, heavy with people on them. And ahead of them, dogs. The dogs knew exactly where we were.

We started to run, aiming for the rocks up ahead, under the shade of the great trees and into a gloom and unevenness of ground that the horses would struggle with, and Dionysus did—something, I felt it, but I couldn’t understand what exactly—and birds exploded from the forest, gritting the air so that even someone very close to us would have been hard put to make out two running figures among the chaos of feathers and wings.

The horses were still coming. The dogs called to each other. There, over there, over there.

Dionysus turned back, and I felt the thoughts go through him this time. He could have made all the riders forget what they were doing and attack each other, but that was cruel, and for him, it was the same as hitting a child; he couldn’t send them to sleep, because a lot of them would be killed as they fell over the horses’ hooves, and he didn’t want to do that either—just warn them again, and so he made the horses panic, just for second: just enough to make them rear and throw a lot of the riders, and no more.

Some people fell, but some didn’t.

The trees were growing, pressing closer together, the branches closing the way. The dryads remembered him, He of the Trees, the little witch who had faced the Mother and told her his dreams of honey and fields, and an end to the great Hunt; of course they would help—but even with a titan effort, even at a sprint, they couldn’t move as fast as humans did, and though the bark was creaking and reaching, it was slow.

The birds were still thundering. Everything was wings and claws.

Through a brief gap, though, I saw the Queen, in silver armour, with a silver bow.

Just like Andromache.

I did what I’d been much too stupid to do all those years ago for Helios. I didn’t try to pull her off her horse. I just got in the way of the shot.

It’s strange how there can be stillness in the middle of a storm of birds and falling horses, but there was. Her mind was right there in front of me, and I could see myself through it, and how tired and sad it made her. Even though she knew it was hopeless and stupid and irrational, there was a fluttering scrap of her that wanted me to say something that would make all this unnecessary, so we could just go home. I even knew what it was.

I’d say: No, he stole me—he stole me. I don’t choose this. Let me come back. I choose duty and honour, and you, I choose you.

The tree branches were creeping closer together, and by tiny fractions, or it seemed so because time is so slow just before you die, some of the riders were turning into wild animals, but none of it was quick enough.

In that split second, I realized I’d rather die now than say that.

Some final fragile thing snapped .

She shot me straight through the throat, and I felt whatever that vital crucial thing that makes humans humans go out, and then I was just ... gone.