Page 42 of The Hymn to Dionysus

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A long time after, centuries and more, when Troy was just a story and our language was lost, and all the marvels were melted down for ploughshares and spears, people wondered what had happened. City after city fell: Pylos, Mykenai, Sparta, Hattusa, right from Achaea, to Syria, to Egypt. If you go to those places and walk around the ruins, you’ll see something strange. They weren’t destroyed by earthquakes, or by invading armies. You won’t find arrowheads in the earth. In all those places, it’s like people there just ... went mad one day, and set fire to everything.

I’ve heard philosophers say that really this is just what happens to humans when it’s very hot and there’s no food. Kings make stupid decisions and end up hanged in their own palaces; people loot and then run for the hills, and never come back down again. Some of them like to say that there were invading armies, but they cleared up after everything, which no army in the history of anything has ever done.

Both of those ideas are wrong.

What happened was that one day, a queen tried to be too much like a marvel, and a god broke her and everyone else for a thousand miles around. The holy raging swept half my world. People stretched to breaking by the heat and by hunger snapped. Buildings burned, and kings hanged; in the places where men kept their wives like prisoners, the women tore them apart; on the galleys, the slaves exploded from the holds. The world turned upside down, for maybe six hours. No more.

After that, though, a lot of what there had been before was ash.

Now, they don’t know we ever built marvels; they don’t know we had calculating machines, or astronomers, or witches with great magic, because nothing is left but those scraps of tax records—just like Dionysus said, because even when he’s joking you have to watch out for prophecy—noted down on clay that baked in those fires. Some people even think Troy never happened, and the memory of those futile, brave infantry legions, built of pairs of sworn knights, is fading into legend. For a long time, the world I used to know shrank. Knights became shepherds, and cities stood empty.

They came back, though. Slowly, few by few. There was new writing. New cities, new people. It was like watching bluebells push up across the forest floor after a fire. And then one day, after we had wandered far enough east to see the people who painted with fire in the sky, and far enough north to see where it rained feathers, we arrived in Athens, just as a festival was starting.

I was ready to be grumpy about it, but I had to work hard at that: it’s difficult not to like a place where someone hands you a flower for no reason when you come down off the ship, and the fountains are running with wine.

“What is going on?” I said, because it wasn’t just the festival. People looked— happy . Half the world was there. There were traders from Egypt and a caravan from Aleppo laden down with bronze; there were priestesses dancing in red on the steps of a temple, and even though it was Athens, there were women everywhere, even noblewomen, with parakeets on their shoulders and fleets of daughters and slaves laughing after them. Lots of families too, where everyone was playing a game—the slaves were in charge, well-dressed gentlemen hurrying to bring them drinks or food, or even borrowed cloaks in the autumn wind, which was established enough now to be getting its wisdom teeth.

There were puddles winking on the ground.

“Don’t look at me,” Dionysus said, much too innocently. “We should go and see where everyone’s going, though. Who knows, maybe it’s a horrifyingly violent boxing match—maybe they throw people they don’t like to lions now, you’ll like that.”

“Can’t we just find an inn—”

“No, no, no ...” He steered me left to keep us with the crowd. Up ahead was a big building, circular, heaving with people, green flags flying, and children selling ivy crowns outside. Dionysus bought one with a scrap of silver and set it into my hair.

“What have you done?” I said slowly.

“ I haven’t done anything, I just arrived. You were there. You were cross with me about growing wisteria up the rigging—”

“How do you expect anyone to take in the sails if there’s sodding vines growing up the—”

“It’s pretty!”

“You’re pretty,” I growled.

“I am n—hang on,” he said, and then he looked pleased.

I gave up on a proper answer. It was true I’d been there today . But seven hundred years was a long time. We had been apart for decades of that, sometimes because of storms and wars, sometimes on purpose. He still had the witching instinct to make sure nobody, including me, knew everything about him. He thought I wouldn’t like him any more if I did, which I thought was funny and he thought I was pretending to think was funny, and round and round it went.

But anyway, he liked Athens. He kept coming here, lately, very much without me, on account of how I still had a powerful instinct to set it on fire that I was right now this second fending off heroically. They were doing some complicated thing with their government, he said, where they tried to give all the free men a vote in the Assembly. It seemed like a stupid idea to me—if you put a bunch of rich men together in a room alone without anyone who understands the real world to give them a shove in the right direction, what you’ll get is mutually exclusive with any sort of sensible policy—but he thought they were onto something.

The little girl who’d sold the ivy crown gave me change for his silver. It was a coin. They were new inventions, stamped with images of gods or whoever the current archon was, and controlled tightly by something called the central mint, so that all of them were the same weight, standardised now across all Athens and its territories, like they did in proper countries in Africa and the Levant. I turned it over, feeling stupidly pleased that good inventions were making their way into our rubbishy, dusty corner of the world. I’d never really believed Dionysus when he said time was seasonal and I’d arrived in a long winter, and that I’d see things bloom soon—but here it was, the first blue of the new bluebells, and the turning of the world.

Stamped on the coin was a young man half hidden by grape vines.

“Is this you ?”

“No. Why would it be me? Don’t be silly, Phaidros.” He was doing big eyes at me.

“I see,” I said again, plotting revenge, depending on whatever terrible thing was waiting in the stadium. “But Dee?” I know: these days, everyone says die-oh-neye-sus , but it wasn’t that, to begin with. It was dee-oh , like theo ; it means “god.” It was deo-nusos , the daughter of the god, because in the old days, witches were always she , like ships and kestrels.

“Hm?”

“This had better not involve poetry.”

“You’re a snob, Phaidros, you’re an art snob. Oh, could people feel something about it? Boo, hit it with a rock.”

“There are lot of things that would be much better if more people hit them with rocks,” I said, watching another new invention while it declaimed about logic from on top of a box. They were called philosophers. This one was haranguing some poor man who was too polite to get a rock. As far as I could gather, the point of them was to try and reason out the truth of things—but only things you couldn’t go out and check, because otherwise that was too much like hard work—and then yell about it a lot, to the eventual end of generating a following of attractive young men, ostensibly to teach, but in fact to stare at creepily.

“No there aren’t,” Dionysus said. “You know what would make things better? Universal suffrage and the study of art and philosophy. Why do you think people here are so happy? It—”

“Aha!” the philosopher shouted. “But if you are a father, than you’re a father to everything ! You’re the father of this dog! You can’t say you’re not, or you’re not a father, but you are, so riddle me that!”

“I really walked into this,” Dionysus mumbled.

I looked around for a rock. There weren’t any, but there was a geriatric turnip beside a vegetable stall.

“Oi dickhead,” I said, and threw the turnip, not very hard. The philosopher squeaked and fell off his box.

It got a little cheer.

“Hey! How dare you! You, you, you threw a turnip at me!”

“No I didn’t. Did I throw anything at you?” I said to the man who had suffered the harangue.

“No sir,” he said, grinning.

“See? I didn’t throw anything at him, so I didn’t throw anything. So, now it’s happening,” I added to Dionysus, as the philosopher vanished behind a crowd of people who were catching on about the ontological impossibility of throwing vegetables, “I feel like I might be quite good at philosophy.”

Dionysus only looked happy. “See? I told you you’d like Athens now.”

Inside, the stadium wasn’t quite like a stadium. Usually, the arena would be clear, or marked out for races, or wrestling. But this one was floored with wood. There were trapdoors in it, and to one end, there was a house-sized wooden building set up with all sorts of machinery and something like a crane, and things a little like marvels that looked like they were built to turn.

I hadn’t been in a crowd like this for a long time; perhaps not even since the funeral games at Thebes. It was cooler than it had been then, though. The sun was just setting, and city-owned slaves all in the same uniform were lighting torches, and the first chill of the autumn was settled over the stone seats. Once we had sat down, Dionysus turned sideways and tilted me back against his chest, and wrapped his cloak around us both.

Down in the arena that wasn’t an arena, there were people gathering—in strange clothes, very old now, and masks.

That gave me a little jolt of alarm.

“Nothing is going to happen,” Dionysus said. “It’s different here. They know how to use masks properly. They wear them for a living.” He crossed his arms over my chest, one hand under my tunic so he could hold my shoulder. It put a little thrill of happiness all through me. I was waiting for him to lose interest, dreading it, knowing it had to come in the end, had been for a long time, but here he still was. “This is how they tell stories. They don’t sing them to a lyre. They pretend to be the people in the stories.”

That sounded strange, and intense. And with the masks—I could imagine it would be easy to forget who you were, when you weren’t in the story. “Why?”

He took a breath and then held it, thinking. “Blue,” he said.

It was called a stage, the new wooden arena, someone told me later. The people in the masks were actors. They were waiting for something. Slowly, the stadium quietened. Then all at once, the slaves snuffed out the lights—all but the ones around the stage—and down there on the boards, there was a primeval yell, fifty voices, and then drums, and a song that tried to fuse the pieces of my spine together. They were singing in their language, which was like ours but made new, clipped in some places, sprawling in others, but I knew the words anyway. The audience sang it too.

Only it felt different this time. There was no electric madness in the air. Nobody was about to lose their minds and turn on each other. The opposite. People were smiling. Along from us, a man was holding his baby daughter on his lap, holding her hands to help her clap in time with other people.

Dionysus squeezed my hand.

A woman bounded onto the stage, full of energy, and bowed. I didn’t understand what she was doing until she spoke: she had one of those voices that could carry over battlefields. A herald, or something like.

“Good evening, my ladies and lords, slaves and citizens, all equal tonight in this, our twenty-fifth Dionysia!”

A roar of applause came from the crowd. A slave gave us some wine in pretty glazed cups. Dionysus touched his to mine, unusually shy. He thought I was going to growl at him about how this wasn’t boxing.

“I just—thought it would be funny to show you. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t start ...”

“I know,” I said, starting to laugh, because even now, witches wore veils, and he did too, if he was working. It was hard to see how a man who spent half his life erasing his own face might think I’d imagine he’d do anything for the sake of vanity. “It’s good.”

“Really?”

I twisted back enough to kiss him, just. Because—I’d seen little festivals before, in isolated places where whoever was most downtrodden, whether it was the women or the slaves, worked themselves into a shadow of the holy raving, and turned it into a festival. That helped: that was a kind of shield wall against what had happened in Thebes. But I’d never seen a place where they had truly understood what he was, not on this scale, not everyone, all at once. He wasn’t showing me because he was vain. He was showing me because what all this meant was that at least for now, Athens was safe: it didn’t just have a shield wall but a great curtain wall. A festival like this—if it was what it looked like, and it did what I thought it might—would protect people all the year long. Armour: not anaesthetic.

The herald waited for enough quiet before she went on. “For these three nights, the Archon presents three great stories for you all to judge. As always, the victory laurels will go to the writer who best fulfils the demands of the god. Through the pens of our bards, may you find laughter, and tears ...” People laughed, because she held up a happy mask, then a sad one. “And that holiest of things: catharsis.”

Release. It meant release.

Blue.

“We don’t have to stay,” Dionysus said, close, because people were still cheering. “I know it isn’t really your ...”

“No, I want to see. I like stories.”

He hugged me hard. I held his wrists so he couldn’t let go.

The herald was laughing. “And so, people of Athens—and Sparta—and Thebes”—cheers from difference places in the crowd—“raise a cup: to the king of the holy raging, who, like the ivy, never dies.”