Page 11 of The Hymn to Dionysus

After a while, I had to shift about, because ivy had grown round my knee.

When I looked at him, he twisted his nose, looking guilty, as if growing ivy over people were an annoying habit his parents had been trying to school out of him.

“Can I call you Ivy?” I said tentatively. “It’s rude not to call you anything.”

He smiled, maybe because he understood, maybe just because I didn’t mind the ivy. I wondered if there was a way for me to sneak him off the ship and find him passage back the way we had come. I’d need to try. I’d promised him.

The wind was blowing from the north, sending us fast towards the Nile delta, past the Great Isle. In the morning everyone was in a good mood, because the night watch said we had covered a clear forty miles overnight, which was incredible. I only half heard, groggy after a night full of dreams about a great hunt in a forest. I’d never seen any forest, but I felt like I knew this one down to its last root and ant. I could still taste the greenness in the air.

In the night, ivy had grown over my ribs, the way Helios might have put one arm across me. It felt strangely the same, too, even though the boy had his back to me. I unwound the ivy and pulled a blanket over him better. However he was doing it, I didn’t care. All I cared about was that he was warm and, if not happy, then not miserable. If I could just keep him well—then he had a chance. He might not die on the sea passage. If he died, I was going overboard.

Like I did every morning and every night, I looked into my kit bag to touch Helios’s helmet and say a silent hello to the mask. I was losing sight of him, despite that mask. The man was so different to the bronze; and different, of course, to when it had been cast. He had been fifteen then, younger than I was now. My reflection in it looked more like him.

As the sun came up over the water, staining it wine red, the light glinted wrongly along the mast.

It was covered in vines. Brilliant green ivy, and grapes, already halfway to ripe even though they hadn’t been there yesterday, coiling up along the yards. The posts that held up the rail around the deck were unrecognisable. They had turned back into trees in the night; small, but already full of pine cones.

Somebody must once have replaced a plank in the hull with pear wood, because now, there was a pear tree growing on the prow, roots half covering the painted eye there, and seeming—somehow this was madder than anything else—not to mind the saltwater brushing them.

“How did you not see this happening?” someone asked the night watch steersman, who was staring at it all, as bewildered as the rest of us.

“I don’t . . . I thought . . .” He had a strange glassy look, one I recognised now.

The boy with blue eyes was exactly where he always was, at the base of the mast; but it didn’t look like a mast any more, just the trunks of the vines, and all around them, there were flowers shoving up through the grain of the deck, and moss. He had picked a bunch of grapes, and he offered me one.

I stared at it, because I remembered Persephone. Eating something means you accept hospitality, and with hospitality, there is a covenant you must keep. There are debts you owe that last generations. So I shook my head and knelt down instead, and he looked at me sidelong like he’d just seen me do something quite clever.

“If you keep doing this, the ship will sink.”

He only lifted his eyebrows a little.

Of course it would sink the ship. That was the point.

The whole crew had to go up the rigging with knives to cut back the grass waving there. The rope was turning back into hemp. Then we had to climb higher and cut back the vines that had locked the yards in place. They wouldn’t turn. I heard someone murmur that even the rudder wasn’t working.

I looked downwind. Ahead of us, there was a cliff. There were a lot of very sharp rocks at the base. The water around us was deep. There would be no swimming to safety, even for the people who could swim. Beside us, there were dolphins. The babies loved playing in the bow wave, because it swept them along. One of the bigger ones turned sideways in the water and looked up at us, clearly wondering what we were doing, being so silly and not getting in the water where things were more fun.

As fast as we worked, though, everything grew back. The vines were wrapped tight around the mast and the yards, and they were ageing in front of us; we weren’t cutting through tiny new shoots any more, but bark. At the base, they were more like trees. The boy with blue eyes was set up comfortably in a hollow full of flowers now, handing out grapes whenever anyone went by. Unlike me, everyone else was taking them, though they did look uncertain after a couple of seconds about where the grapes had come from. It wasn’t invisibility, though. Some people had very much remembered he was there.

It didn’t take long for the first person to say we should throw him over the side.

I dropped down next to him. If I’d had any valour at all, I would have said, It’s all right, you’re my guest, and I will die for you here before I let anyone touch you.

But I didn’t. I didn’t; even though I knew it was wrong, and even though, in the hazy way you understand time when you’re very young, I knew that not doing that was swinging my whole life the wrong way, throwing me off course, forever. I knew, but I couldn’t say it. Everyone I knew in the world was on this ship. They hated me, and Helios was gone, but they might forgive me in the end. I had never been by myself, ever. To launch myself into the world alone, for a boy who wasn’t really a boy at all, however much I wanted to help him . . .

I’d promised him, but had he even understood? Probably not.

And what was that promise worth, anyway? Nothing. I couldn’t help. I’d never been able to help. It was a grief dream.

“Do you understand what they’re saying? They want to put you overboard. Can you swim?”

He looked like he might laugh. I had a feeling he understood exactly, and he was very happy for everyone to dig themselves deeper into their hole.

“Get him up,” someone told me.

“Don’t,” I tried.

I should have drawn my sword.