Page 101 of The Hymn to Dionysus

We all looked at the holy calendar ticking on its waist-high column in the middle of the courtyard. They were the most sophisticated marvels I’d seen, and it had been a bit of a revelation to me when I came back to Thebes and first realized that they were how people knew when the festivals were going to fall, and how the hours were measured. I’d always thought an hour was just a shortish spell of time that meant “a little while,” but it didn’t at all. It was exact, and these were the machines that said so. This one was a cube, filled with clockwork that you could see through the patterned fretwork in the sides, and dials, and jewels, and little figures and spinning bands etched with constellations. It measured hours, and days, and months, and years. It could tell you what time the Oracle Games should begin fifty years from now.

The hour marker seemed like it was moving very slowly.

“You asked me a few days ago about what happens if someone puts on a god mask,” the Queen said. “Would you like to see?”

I looked at her properly. “That—lady, tell me there isn’t someone in a cellar in an Apollo mask,” I said softly. “What if—”

She was shaking her head. “It’s all right. Come and see.”

It wasn’t a cellar. It was a pretty room inside the sanctuary, one where a priest must usually have lived. There was a desk and a chair and a wide window with a nice view of an inner courtyard, and a huge stripey cat that said hello to us as we came in, and an indigo cloak draped over the back of a couch, and scrolls everywhere. And, reading one in a sunbeam, was someone in a bronze mask of the god. The mask had a laurel crown and curly hair worked in gold. Under it, the man’s hair was gold too, the kind of gold nobody has really. Not red, like the north islanders, and not that drab grey colour people had in Scythia and the Tin Isles: it glowed in the sun. I stopped, wanting not to go one step closer, but the Queen squeezed my elbow.

“Good morning, sir,” she said to the masked figure. “How goes it today?”

“Oh, good morning, lady,” he said, and I jolted backwards, just by a tiny fraction, because he didn’t sound like a person. He sounded like Dionysus did when he wasn’t pretending not to be who he was: like harp strings, and whole choirs. It was beautiful, and frightening. He lifted his head and saw me, and seemed interested even through the mask. “Ah. Who’s this?”

“Do you think you can guess?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m still no prophet, lady. Although—you do look awfully familiar.”

“He looks like Helios sometimes,” Pentheus offered.

I wondered how he knew what Helios looked like.

“No . . .” the masked man said, sounding a little frustrated he couldn’t place me. “Never mind.”

“We’re waiting to see if the mask will bring any deeper qualities of the god,” the Queen explained. “He started to look like Apollo very quickly. Tiresias put the mask on him immediately after the witches had their success with the knights. So far, there’s been nothing else. No ability to prophesy, no particular affinity with a bow, nor a lyre. Any change at all?” she added to the masked man.

“Not that I’m aware of,” he said, and under the eerie Apollo voice, I could hear the scholar he really was. “I keep trying with the bow, but I couldn’t hit a target to save my life. Lots of dreams, but I think all of us have been having strange dreams. A forest, and a great Hunt, and . . . a man who’s also a lion.”

Pentheus looked uncomfortable.

“The Hunt, of course, is sacred to the Raver,” Not Apollo added.

“Artemis is the god of the Hunt,” the Queen said.

He tilted up a scroll. “Of hunting, now. I mean the Hunt. The old way, before cities. Before the taming of the herds, and farming, and harvest. Very old god, this one. Tends only to appear when things are terrible anyway. You know. Famine, drought, falling cities; he isn’t, contrary to what you might imagine given the alcohol business, a god for good times.” He shrugged, and somehow it was clear he was smiling a bit even under the mask. “Hard to tell what he is, really; the collection of things is quite strange. Music, dance—but not music like Apollo’s—holy trances, stories, masks, wine, madness, bees, ivy, the auroch. I’ve got a scrap of an old manuscript here that calls him He of the Trees, and Polyeidos.” Many-formed. “Difficult to pin down, isn’t he?”

All that was blue. I could see it but not quite grip onto why.

“General chaos,” the Queen said.

“Chaos, yes,” Not Apollo murmured. “But not always. A cup of wine isn’t chaos, and nor is a nice story. It’s more to do with . . . what . . . all of those things do. For people, I mean.”

Yes. Gods care what’s happening.

“The position of the crown,” Pentheus said carefully, “is that there is no such god.”

“No, well, I see why you have to say that, what with usurpers and the lost prince and so forth,” Not Apollo said. “But . . . you can’t deny any more that he is here. The Kadmeia is so bound in ivy that it grows faster than the slaves can cut it back, everyone says. That isn’t Apollo, I’m afraid. Nor is the magic of the masks, nor the madness.”

There was a certain freedom, I thought, in being locked in a room with four Guards. Nothing he said would leave, so he could say what he liked.

“What does he want, do you think?” the Queen said quietly.

I made an effort not to look at her, and not to show that I’d noticed this was the first time she had even come close to admitting that there really might be a mad god.

“Want?” He sounded sceptical. “I couldn’t speak to his desire, but what he does will become more and more intense, because it’s like drinking more and more wine, until what comes is the holy raving.”

“Would sacrifice stop it?”