Page 39 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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What’s most confusing about being a human one second and then being quite a lot of birds and small animals and partly some dryads the next is that you can see what’s going on from a lot more angles than you previously could. I could see Dionysus through many pairs of eyes, and hardly any two worked in the same way. Some saw him clear and sharp. Some saw him in colours I’d never known about, with kinds of light I’d never seen. And some things that knew he was there weren’t seeing him at all, but they could build an idea from what they did know in the same way I built ideas from seeing. They knew his weight on the earth, and how fast he moved, and that the alchemy of him was different to the other things that looked like him. They were grateful for the blood soaking into the earth.

It was too much. I started to come apart. I’d thought I knew what I meant when I said me , but that was wrong; it was just so much sand in a bucket, and me was the bucket shape, but now I didn’t have a bucket. Although I’d held the shape of it for a few seconds, the sea was pouring in now, and there wouldn’t be any shape at all for much longer.

Through all those other eyes and other ways of seeing, I saw him buckle onto the ground next to what had been me a second ago. He didn’t make a sound, because no one would help him even if he did. He tipped forward so that the ends of his hair coiled against my chest. He wanted to cry, but he was too wrung out, after too many centuries. He was so old, and so tired, and maybe it was now another time of turning; maybe there should be new gods again and the old ones should just be forgotten. What was the point?

“So you’re not a god, then,” the Queen said. She wasn’t being cruel, or wasn’t meaning to: she was just thinking aloud, and there was a kind of heavy curiosity to it more than anything else. “You would be able to bring him back if you were.”

He could; he could, but there were the Deathless, and the Dying. For him, life was just a fact: he was always alive, and so in order to make sure one particular part of him—the one that looked like a human—remained so, all he had to do was rearrange other parts of himself.

For the Dying ... it was different. To pull a human being away from the Unseen, there was a horrible cost, and it wouldn’t be him who had to pay it.

It was so horrible that the Deathless largely agreed never to do it. The agreement had always been there, an unuttered contract to prevent the wars that had harrowed the beginning of the world, when they had all thought they should be entirely free, not realizing that if they tried to be that, then no one was free except the very strongest, and that if they were all a little less than free, then nobody was a slave. The King in the Thunder was assiduous. He let his own sons die on the field, even though each death was a hammer blow, and each one made him harder, more tempered, more frightening.

How many deaths had Dionysus allowed over the years? He didn’t know. He was older than the thunder king.

There were the Deathless, and there were the Dying.

Of course, it was his choice in the end whether he stayed Deathless.

That jolted me into pushing back against that sea of other things. I could hold together the little thing that was me. It was an effort, but that didn’t matter.

No. Fight.

I didn’t mean to, and it startled me as much as anyone, but I’d made about forty people say it. Archers still on horseback, people who’d been thrown, the slaves behind.

The Queen looked around fast, looking disconcerted for the first time since I’d known her. Everything was still now. The birds, feeling confused, had gone back to the trees. The dryads had stopped growing.

Dionysus had his hand over mine. There was nothing there now, no pulse, but I could see him, with other eyes.

I couldn’t touch him with my hands, but I could move ten other people around him. Please. Don’t die here.

He wasn’t interested. He knew I would scatter to nothing in a minute. He let his head rest against my chest, and he didn’t seem to care that the Queen was raising her hand to tell the archers to aim.

All at once I was furious.

I wasn’t good enough at any of it to make anyone drag the Queen and the hunters off their horses, or I would have. It felt too complicated to try to move so many different hands in so many different ways, like trying to do arithmetic in your third language under pressure, but I could make people do one thing all at once. That was simple enough. All I could think of was to make them sing. Even though I was sure I couldn’t reach further than about fifty people—it was too many minds, too heavy, and they were all different—the song rippled around the mountain as other people sang it themselves.

Sing, sing to lord the of the dance,

Thunder-wrought and city-razing

King, king of the holy raging,

Rave and rise again.

Dionysus looked up like he was coming out of a trance. He was shaking, but all those voices had been enough to bring him back, more or less, to now. I could feel him starting to come away from shock into something more like what I felt, maybe because I felt it. Anger, slow, because he was one of those people who always took far too long to get angry, like anyone truly strong, but it was building.

Will you show me some magic?

“Yes,” he said.

I’d understood more or less what he had meant, when he told me the story about the old goddess who had made him what he was. Dying and rising: he lived in a body that could be damaged and which could die, and did sometimes. I hadn’t understood that he lived in the man I recognised in exactly the same way he moved around in owls or snakes. The man was no more him than the owl. He just borrowed it more often, because it could do more and he liked things that could speak, like humans and dolphins, and bees.

What he was, was everything. He was everywhere, in everything that was alive or had ever been alive, anything that had grown or could grow. It was why he would never die. He was part of those great deep-down minds, the trees, even the bedrock that had slow, strange memories of churning when the ground was made in fire. And when he wanted to, he could move it all as easily as he could move the tattooed hands of the man.

I didn’t see what he did. It was different to seeing; there was more of it. There was a thing that was three , but you never saw it in itself, you just saw its shadow cast on things: three apples, three bees, three witches.

He took the Queen’s mind, and he held it up to the light like a bronzesmith would study the mechanisms of a faulty marvel. Now that I had everyone else’s to compare it to—I could see them all as clearly as I could see their faces—it wasn’t quite how human minds usually were. There was hardly any ... any human in it. It was glittering clockwork, exquisite, wonderful in its own way, but not ... really ... a person any more.

He stripped away the clockwork, carefully, like any good craftsman, and set it aside.

She realized what was happening while he did it, and with a cold moonrise of horror, she tried to argue. She tried to say that she had never chosen to be like this: it had been done to her. She hadn’t wanted to be married, she had wanted to stay in the legion with Helios, but her mother had said, No, you must do your duty, because duty is honour , and she had bowed her head. After that, she had to be almost nothing but clockwork because she had no patience with madness or running away or walking into the sea, and it had been a kind of victory.

But it was your choice , he told her, very soft, in a way that was to language what he was to the man he sometimes moved around in. I do not care why, or what drove you. I only care what you have done. What I will do now, will remind people not to choose like you did for a thousand years.

Everyone on that mountain lost their minds. Or rather, he took them all, and kept them for later.

The Hidden forgot who they were hunting, and swung joyfully towards the trees to look for mountain lions and lynxes. Some of them stopped to make themselves ivy crowns from the vines that rioted up the trees. There was a triumphant howl not far away as someone found the trail of wolf. Deep under the earth, the dryads noticed and watched because this was strange. In the forest, the deer, who had learned to listen to the dryads too, heard the shift and ran.

Not far away, Pentheus was nocking an arrow. He wasn’t mad. There wasn’t enough of a person left in him to go mad: he couldn’t any more than a marvel could.

He didn’t know what was happening, or how the witch had done it, but the Queen looked glassy and strange, and whatever kind of trickery it was, he wasn’t going to complain.

The Queen knew when she was being watched, and she slung to the side as the arrow sang past. But she didn’t really know there had been an arrow. She wasn’t seeing a boy with a bow any more.

She was seeing a young lion.

Dionysus watched quietly. Around him, everyone whirled: singing his song, dancing, trailing ivy and laughter. Somewhere under it, real but maybe more real than other things, the horn of the old Hunt called. There were drums from somewhere. Yes; other people were coming up the mountainside, ordinary people, families, with children. All of Thebes.

Some others saw the lion too and ran with the Queen. Much, much too late, Pentheus understood that they were faster and stronger than him.

Around us, around Dionysus, the drums rolled on, and the song was a tempest. A little girl set an ivy crown in his hair. He let her, and then directed her mind away, after some butterflies, so she wouldn’t see what came next.

When the Queen and the others caught Pentheus, they tore him apart. It was like watching children with a straw doll: there was something innocent about it, even as the doll went to pieces, and they were all laughing, because it was incredible to have caught a lion without weapons, this was how people must have hunted in the long ago when bronze was still a dream and a spear was a bone spar from one of the giants that walked the great steppe in the north. She had never been this happy, the Queen: she had never just flung herself at anything with no thought for duty or honour or law, just laughed and moved as hard and fast as she could, unweighted by the crown.

Bring down a thing that wants to kill you with all your tribe and there is the foundation stone of what humans are, all the joy in being alive, and the drums, and the song, and instead of keeping it for yourself, you sacrifice it and sing it to the lord of the dance, the render of cities and men, the king of the holy raging, because he is this, all the joy and the wildness and humanness, distilled into one thing. Every now and then, in one searing precious instant, you can see him, in the way you can see three.

He let them sing, and dance, and light fires, and hunt for a while, into the dusk. He didn’t move. I didn’t either. It was difficult to keep holding myself together, but the leopard let me ride with her. We sat next to him, paws on his knees. Then, gradually, he let it lift. He had kept all their minds safe, and few by few he put them back, and though there was still a merry glow in the air, and singing, it wasn’t the mad god’s song any more, just folk rhymes, the first rounds of lullabies for the littlest children.

Very slowly, the Queen realized that what she was holding was not the head of a lion.

It was like watching someone wake up. She was still for a second, and then she threw it away, jolting onto her feet. For a long time, she just stared down at it; then at Dionysus. He stared back, unmoving, except for the wind pulling at his hair. Then she walked into the forest, and I don’t think she ever came out again.

And I ... wasn’t there any more.