Page 116 of The Hymn to Dionysus

The trees had made us a shield above, but the walls were falling now. The torchlight was gone and the dark and the dust plumed everywhere. Something slammed into the locked-together branches over our heads and the wood shrieked. We both fell onto our knees at the same time, heads down against the roaring, furious masonry.

When the noise stopped, everything seemed completely silent, though I knew it couldn’t be. There was light, though: moonlight, very bright, and it was only in stages that it occurred to me that I shouldn’t have been able to see that, because we were supposed to be inside. There was no more inside. I coughed as the dust got into my lungs, and put my hands down. The floor, which had been stone before, was soft with moss. Dionysus straightened up slowly. Where he’d been holding my shoulders, and I’d been holding his arms, there were clean handprints; otherwise both of us were covered in dust. He coughed too and brushed me off, or pretended to; he was seeing if I was hurt. I wasn’t.

There was movement beside us. There were horses running past, some still saddled. They must have escaped from the stables, and now they were getting away from the worst of the damage, just like they had years ago when the lightning came. Dionysus put his hand out to one of them, a savage battle charger I’d seen kill Trojan knights entirely by himself, but the stallion stopped and leaned down to nose at us both, a Horse hello.

I gripped the bridle and swung into the saddle. Dionysus climbed up behind me, tall enough to see past my shoulder. The horse cantered away, down to the lower city, through the roads filling with worried people looking up at the ruins of the Kadmeia, speculating, wondering about the ivy growing anew up the houses, the orange trees bursting to life, the pomegranates falling in the gutters, and not seeing us.

33

My house had been set on fire, and it was still burning. It must have been a message for anyone who thought helping me might be a good idea. Whatever they’d used for fuel, it was considerable: the heat from the blaze was powerful even fifty yards away on the path. The smoke was choking, and my poor olive trees were burning. Normally I walked past them every day and didn’t feel anything at all about them except distantly grumpy, because at least since I’d been here they hadn’t so much made olives as green rocks, but now they were on fire—they seemed like people. Where the fires were hottest, there was a yellow glow and mirages in the air, and just for a few seconds, I would have sworn I saw Hephaestus, limping as he moved bronze into a forge that was there behind the wreckage of my kitchen just like three could be there behind some apples. He looked right at us and offered Dionysus a small, fiery bow. Dionysus tilted forward too, and courteously, the cinders stopped settling on us, stopped trying to set our hair on fire or catch in our sleeves.

His side of the maze was far enough away that the fire wasn’t there yet. On the way around, I worried that it would be soon, because the sparks leaping from one patch of scrub to the next were tinderbox bright, but when we came into his garden, I realized I didn’t need to worry. There was water everywhere; water running through the channels, in little falls across parts of the ruins that sprayed the paths and made at the old stone smell of the beach at Troy after rain, and of course, in the vines and in the trees, all alive again. No sparks were catching. To get down into the chambers where he lived, we had to step over a stream.

“Pentheus knows where you live. They’ll look for you here,” I said. It was the first time the bellowing of the fire was quiet enough to speak over.

“He doesn’t know where to go once we’re in the maze.”

“But it’s right—” I stopped, because I’d expected to come out in the airy chamber with the fountain, but instead there was just a corridor, and a branch in the ways, and then another, and a weird feeling we were going in a spiral, and then down again. More turns. It would have been hopeless without him. I would never have thought anything was down here, except more ruins.

Then there it was, the same chamber, which I would have sworn was much more straightforward to reach before. The fountain was chattering to itself, alive with spring water, and with tiny birds who had come to drink. They whirred away when we came in, but quickly seemed to realize there was no need to worry, and flitted back.

“Witching?” I said.

“Magic,” he said.

I sank down on the fountain edge, which was cushioned with moss, and dipped my hand into it. The water was cool: genuinely, blessedly cool. I scooped up a handful to drink. Sweet and clear. Up above us, the sky was darkening, and there was the smell of smoke, but it didn’t feel dangerous any more. The earthquake hadn’t broken anything, either, not even a plant pot.

Dionysus sat down a little way from me, out of reach, scanning me in a way that made me worried I looked like I was thinking about murdering him. From our clothes, there was the smell of smoke and of baking, from the burning olives and lemons; we both looked ten years older. The inside of my skull was still echoing.

The leopard sat down nearby, swishing her tail.

I swallowed, and tasted cement. “Does it make you dizzy, seeing through her eyes and yours at the same time?”

He smiled a little bit. “Something wicked. Bees are awful.”

Bats, I thought; he had been in the bats.

Another little silence. It rolled around the fountain edges.

“Are you going to kill me now?” I asked.

“What?”

“You told me you would come back for me in the end, for revenge,” I said, a bit flat, not liking being played with.

He sat as if I’d handed him something incredibly heavy, graven with something important in a lot of languages, like the law stones the Egyptians leave everywhere. He looked like he was trying to find a language he knew. When he did, I saw something break in his expression. “I told you I’d come back for you,” he said, very soft. “Come back . . . for you. If you needed me. To help.”

“Oh,” I whispered.

“You called me here,” he said. His voice broke smoky again, but he wasn’t angry this time. “Why would you do that if you thought I was coming to kill you?”

I had to look into the water. “I’d had enough. I . . . I wanted to see you, even if it was just for revenge. You were my guest on that ship, you’re my family, even if I was the worst host there ever was.” I swallowed. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“You were frightened, at the dance. I thought you’d changed your mind about asking me. No one wants to see me twice. But . . . you did call, and I wanted to stay, and lots of people have blue eyes, so at least to begin with I thought—well, if I pretend not to know what’s happening, maybe he’ll think I’m someone else.” He closed his teeth for a second. “I can’t seem very normal for very long, but even when it was obvious, you didn’t say anything, so . . . I didn’t either. I feel like there must be a word for when two people both know something but they both pretend not to know because they’re worried the other one will leave.”

I realized I was sitting there with my hand pressed over my mouth and had to concentrate to take it away. “Why? I betrayed you. I should have fought for you.”

“What are you talking about? You were a child. They would have killed you.”