Page 40 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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The shore was black, and so was the water. Mist hung in rags here and there, and from somewhere—in a way that sounded like everywhere—there were voices. Some of them were whispering, and some were singing, much too softly to make out. There were people too, but they were silent: facing the river, waiting for the Ferryman. None of them seemed to know that the others were there. It wasn’t cold, or warm, only quiet, except for that whispering song that sounded, in tiny snatches, very familiar. The river flowed to my right, into a great cavern. There was light that way, silvery.

“Phaidros.”

It wasn’t exactly a voice, and it didn’t exactly call. It was another strand of the singing-whispers; it sounded like whoever had said it had been saying it for a long time, not in a way that expected any immediate answer. It was more like a beacon lit on a difficult shore, and every time it repeated my name, it was another swing of the mirror to make the light flash.

I turned around twice, trying to track where it was coming from.

“Phaidros.”

In an inlet was one last living thing. It was a white tree. The voice was coming from there.

I’d thought it was in full bloom, the tree, full of leaves and blossom, but as I came nearer to it in the dimness, I saw I was wrong. They weren’t leaves: they were scraps of cloth, and ribbons, and silver and clay prayer tokens. Some were messages. I stared up—up and up, because it was taller than any tree I’d ever seen—and the way they flickered in the breeze was mesmerising. There were languages I recognised and languages I didn’t, languages that didn’t look like writing at all, and somewhere deep down, I knew there were languages here that had died a thousand years before we thought humanity had been created, and languages here that wouldn’t be born for a thousand years after everything I knew was dust.

“Phaidros?”

The voice was different. A real voice, not that echo from before.

It was Helios.

And there he was, under the tree, sitting in the high roots, exactly like I remembered: he still had his armour, my armour now, and his shield. His spear was propped up next to him. I stared at him, and then crumpled onto my knees. Dust puffed up, and fell much too slowly, like we were underwater. Or—like there was no time, and each mote could do whatever it liked, without any urgency.

“You waited.”

“I told you I would,” he said, sounding puzzled. He smiled, the kind of smile that was all eyes, not teeth. “Has it been long?”

I was already seeing through a haze of tears. “Ten years.”

His eyebrows flickered upwards, but like always, he was good at taking things for what they were, and not wasting energy exclaiming over what they ought to have been. He was looking at me with a smile still in the lines around his eyes. “You’re grown up. You look ...”

“Like you,” I said, my throat tight. I could see it, it was right there. It always had been.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

I swallowed, even though I could already feel that having a throat, never mind one that had gone dry, was more a habit of thought than a physical fact here. “When you left your ward behind at the temple,” I said. “You never did go back, did you?”

He lifted his head, just slightly. On anyone else it would have been nothing, but he had always kept his mannerisms slight, always the perfect knight, almost unreadable in the face of bad things unless you knew him, and I knew this too. It was what he did when something had gone so far wrong there was no getting away from it without losing lives.

“Do you remember that game with three cups I used to play with you, when you were tiny? There’s a ball hidden and you have to guess which cup ...?”

“Find the Lady?”

“Three children,” he said. “Semele’s baby. My ward. And another boy with a scar I bought at a slave market outside the Temple of Hermes.”

I frowned. “Three.”

“Before I say this—I know it’s ridiculous. But I was fifteen, and the Hidden were coming, and I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“No, I ... I understand,” I said, but I stumbled over it because although I had known that of course he’d been fifteen, I’d always heard that through a child’s mind when he told me the story. Fifteen had seemed unreachably grown-up then. Now—the idea of expecting any one of my little knights, even the most cunning, to find some way of hiding a baby caught in a royal blood feud was so far beyond ridiculous that it hurt to think of.

“I took Semele’s baby to the Temple of Hermes. I was looking for witches. He was already the image of Semele, and the King, and the only thing I could think of that would keep him safe was growing up under the veil.”

I sat back, and only realized once I did that I’d been pushing my fists into the ground. There was moss among the black stones, living, even here, although the stones were strange. They were all eroded perfectly smooth, not like normal shore-shale at all; as though all the tides there could ever be had already worn them down. They were stones for the end of time.

“Hermes has always allowed people to give children to the witches, but a prince turning up in the middle of the night while the Kadmeia was on fire with a stolen baby—I thought I’d have to give them my armour to take him.” He frowned into the memory. “But as soon as we arrived—there were moths everywhere. Those huge ones that look like little ghosts. They were going to him like he was a lamp, and he was laughing. The witches all came to see, and the Holy Mother came out herself. She said I didn’t know what I’d brought them. She said he had brought me. Gods save me but—I believe it.”

“I don’t ... understand,” I said, because that had to be Dionysus—but he had begun this story after I’d said I looked like him. I’d thought it was going to be an explanation about why.

He caught my eyes and nodded slightly to say he was getting to it. Commanders never apologise to their wards and nor should they, but this was the closest I’d seen him come to it, and I didn’t like it at all. I’d thought I knew what he’d done, or at least suspected, and I’d been getting ready to be hurt and angry, but now I was off balance again, and I felt like there was a very deep drop on one side of us.

“Round and round she goes,” he said, miming moving the cups, and I had a painful flash of being five and completely delighted that he could make things disappear. “Where she stops, nobody knows. When I left Hermes, I went to a slave trader and I bought a little boy, about four. With a scar. About your age. I took him to Apollo, told them he was called Phaidros. I left my dagger with him. I told the priests in not very cryptic terms that he was to find me if he ever had questions about where he came from.”

“A decoy,” I said, still struggling to catch up. Helios Polytropos, even now, even when I’d thought I knew all his tricks.

He nodded slightly. “And then, I took you back to the legion.” He paused, like it was hurting him to talk about it. He closed his hand over one of those timeless pebbles, which creaked against the others, and a little stream of dust-without-time lifted in its eerie, leisurely way. Across the river on the other shore, something laughed. It didn’t sound human. “I made sure that it looked strange. I took a year to get back, I told everyone I’d been shipwrecked. When I did rejoin a Theban unit, it wasn’t my original. You were little for your age, because we had had some bad years before then; so I told them you were a year older than you were, but I made sure I was giving you the kinds of toys much littler children would have—you didn’t care, you were happy with a rock—and so that made it sound like a lie: you looked three years too young. Word got round that I had a ward who was clearly younger than I was saying. I wrote messages back to the Temple of Apollo, knowing they’d be intercepted, asking after the boy there. That was all reported back to Agave. After that, I made sure we kept falling off the map. Trading runs to Tintagel, Scythia, even India once. To make it look like I was outrunning anyone who might be watching me.”

“You made it look like you took Semele’s baby with you,” I said. “So ... gods. So that no one would look for him with the witches.”

“Yes.” He looked miserable. “But there was a problem.”

I waited. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to anyone more closely.

He put his hand out and covered mine. He was warm. It was a shock. It seemed insane that he could touch me here, but he felt as solid as he always had, and though the light was strange, our hands looked like they always had. Mine darker, his lighter.

“You never looked like you could be Semele’s,” he said. “I got you in Egypt. You were a child of the river. When we sieged Tanis and it fell, the Nile filled with babies in reed baskets. You were one. If I’d put you in a turquoise collar everyone would have thought you were a son of the Pharaoh. It was obvious you were nothing to do with the House of Kadmus.”

“But I do,” I said. “Look like her. You. I look really like you.”

I’d seen him look afraid once or twice before, but never of me. He did now. “The witches told me that it would be a problem. They ...” His focus shifted to the side. “They told me something very strange. They told me to go to a bronzesmith, and have a new helmet made.”

I didn’t need to breathe any more, but I had been doing it until then. I stopped.

“They told me that the mask should be of me, not a god. And to let you play with it.” He really looked as though he was ready for me to punch him. “So I did. You loved it, you were always stealing it. And—the more you wore it, the more you looked like me. I don’t know what that magic was. They told me it would only work on you, you were—god-touched. By the time you were twenty ... people were asking if you were my son. Nobody said nephew. But that was what they meant.”

I was grinning like the Festival of Apollo had come around early, but he didn’t see because he was still staring at the ground.

“It was a terrible thing to do. I put you in horrible danger. But you were fucking tough, Phaidros, even when you were tiny, and clever, and ... I thought it wouldn’t matter down the line if someone accused you of being the heir. You’d find a way of out of it. I’m so sorry. Semele’s boy—he was blood kin. And you loved him. I couldn’t leave him for the Hidden. I don’t mean I didn’t want to, I couldn’t .”

“Helios—that’s fucking genius. I love it.”

His eyes came up fast. “What?”

“Don’t be silly, of course I love it.”

He laughed, just a bit.

There was a creak behind us; there was a ferry, drawn on groaning ropes that would take it to the far shore. A shadow stood at the great wheel that wound the ropes in and out. Soon we would be two of those figures on the shore waiting to go. I wondered what it would be like. We’d board the ferry knowing each other, and then—how long did it take for the river to make you forget? Would we reach the far shore and still know, sort of, that the other one was important, or would it just be gone—would it be like standing with a stranger?

A wave of sadness rolled through me. I loved Helios, of course I did, but somewhere in another world, Dionysus was alone. This river might as well have been the ocean. There would be no crossing. I’d never be able to keep that vow I’d made to him so long ago on the sea. What a way to die, on a broken vow.

“Phaidros,” Helios said quietly. “I think that man is waiting to talk to you.”

Dionysus had been standing about twelve yards away all the while. He was holding a lamp, the kind miners have, the shade almost closed, but there was a crack of light inside. The light didn’t look like it belonged here. My heart swooped with something that felt like hope and dread at the same time. I jolted upright and across to him, which slung dust and strange cold crystals into the air, where they hung and winked, not falling.

“Please don’t say you let them hurt you—”

“No, I’m—alive, I’ll always be alive. This place isn’t mine. I can’t cross.”

On the river, the ferry was vanishing into silver fog, with its silent cargo of ghosts.

“This is my commander,” I said. Helios had come after me more slowly, not cautious exactly, but considered. It was obvious Dionysus wasn’t an ordinary person. I laughed for no reason except that it so strange and so fizzily wonderful to introduce them. “He saved you, once, when we were both very small.”

Dionysus bowed, even though witches don’t bow to anyone. “Then I owe you a debt, sir.”

Helios looked up at him for a long time. “No debt. You’re family.”

“Don’t ... write off a debt from something like me so quickly—”

“You’re still family,” Helios cut him off, unmoved. He was watching him. “The river sings of you, I think.”

“Yes.” For the first time since I’d known him, Dionysus sounded nervous. I felt it too. I felt like I was introducing lightning to the sea, or something else with equal and opposite charge.

“Are you here to take him back?” Helios said, about me.

“I’m here to give him the choice,” Dionysus said. He hesitated, and tilted slightly to me. “But if you come with me now, you can never come back here again. You’ll be like me, forever. You can never cross the river; you can never forget. I think—there’s a lot you’d like to forget.” His eyes flickered to Helios, then the river.

I was paralysed. Helios had waited for ten years in this dark place. I couldn’t leave him alone now. But Dionysus had been alone for twenty generations, and there was no way—I could see it very clearly in this dead silver light—that he would do it for much longer. In the silence, there was singing. It was like Helios had said; it was the river. On the far shore, things chittered. I heard the creak of a ferry rope again.

“Well?” Helios said to me. “Off you sod.”

“What?” My voice cracked over it. “But—”

“You heard. I’m not taking you over this river.”

“But you waited—”

“So?” He gave me the strangest, clear-eyed look. “You promised to protect this boy once, but you didn’t. Do it now. Do not dishonour me, knight.”

“Sir,” Dionysus began, “if you think your duty—”

“Nobody asked you,” Helios told him with exactly the same authority he’d always had, the one that spoke to your nerves without having to go through your mind first, even though he barely reached Dionysus’s shoulder. It was glorious witchcraft: Dionysus flinched. “Now what have you done with my sister?”

Dionysus stood a little aside so that we could see past him.

Waiting among the shades at the shore, there was one so pale that she was barely there. She was just a shape sketched in the air, sometimes clear if the silver light fell right, sometimes almost gone. With her, there was a wisp that might just have been a boy, but only if I tipped my head just right. I didn’t think they could see each other.

“Goodbye, little knight,” Helios told me. He put his arms around us both, then gave us both a tiny push. “Look after each other.” And then he turned and walked away, to his sister and the ghost that might have been Pentheus, and he did not look back.

“You can still go with them,” Dionysus said to me. “He decided for you when you were a child. You need not let him decide now.”

I locked my arms around him. He felt more—there—than other things. He was still in time. The hours were moving for him, somewhere. He hugged me too, his cheek pressed against my hair. He was warm, even here. “Don’t be so bloody stupid.”

“I have to ask you three times,” he said, very soft. “There are laws, even here; especially here.” He touched his head to mine. “My lord, may I take you above?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You consent never to return here.”

“I consent.”

“This has to be your desire, not your duty,” he said.

“Things can be desire and duty,” I said.

He let his breath out, and his shoulders sank. He seemed smaller.

Helios was fading into the shades as they boarded the ferry. I couldn’t tell if what he had just done for me was duty or desire or both. I’d thought maybe he would be more fathomable now we were the same age, but I’d never get an accurate count of those fathoms. He went all the way down, Helios.

“It’s a fair way to walk,” Dionysus said, and I realized at last that he had been waiting at the mouth of a cave. His lamp, the only light but the disembodied silver light of the shore, gleamed on a narrow stairway. “You can’t look back.”

“You know me,” I said. “I could stand at the top for a thousand years and never look back.”

He moved his shoulder in a sort of one-eighth shrug. “I know. It just feels—well, the story.” He put me in front of him to make me go first, and gave me his lamp. “I never understood why Persephone ate the pomegranate. Death steals you and takes you here: even then, even if it’s kidnapping, if you take something you owe something. Why would she?”

I smiled at the way ahead. It was rocky, but the stairs were sometimes a little lost, not often walked, but there. Soon the only light was his lamp. “Because he didn’t steal her. She stole him. But ... she knew her mother would be distraught if she just chose him, and so she took the pomegranate. And the old laws kicked in: she had taken something from him, and so she owed something. Her mother could think it was just a mistake and this was an irritating compromise, not that her daughter had decided to leave her behind. It’s a diplomacy pomegranate.”

He laughed, and it was a real laugh. It smoked up through the cave, and it was the best thing I’d ever heard. I put my hand back for him without looking back. He took it and didn’t let go, his fingertip hooked over the red string around my wrist.