Page 119 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“I do. You need to know what you’re making promises to.”

34

A long time ago, when only a few hundred people lived along the banks of the Nile and everyone else flitted in the deep forests, before ploughing, and before anyone ever prayed to the sky for rain to save their crops—before crops—what mattered was the Hunt.

They called Her Mother, the god of the earth, but mother is one of those words whose meaning shifts depending on who you are. For him, then, it was a flint word, hammered to an arrow point. Mothers were the ones who killed the newborns the Hunt couldn’t hope to feed; mothers were the ones who burned the bones, and read the future in the shapes of the cracks the fire made in them. Mothers were more dangerous than the mammoth.

Mothers decided who the sacrifice would be.

He was young but not very. Very young men didn’t know anything and they didn’t make good husbands. The mothers kept him unmarried, because the bones told them early on what he was for. Everyone knew but no one said it. If you were that tall and that finely turned, you couldn’t expect anything else. So he went to the witches when he was small, like the sacrifices always did, and learned how to read the forest. He learned how to feel where north was, even after being blindfolded and spun around in a strange grove. He learned how to follow the deer, and understand the bees, and because his face wasn’t meant for anyone but Her, the mask stayed on always.

It was lonely and he hated it, because it didn’t feel like living at all, just watching other people live. They always said, Don’t worry, you’ll live forever, but that sounded nightmarish. He had a good idea of what She was now, and mostly it was horrible. It was ripping out the hearts of the deer and skinning wolves and always being up to your elbows in blood, and having no time to think anything or do anything except the endless Hunt.

“You can’t live if you don’t kill something else,” his own mother said, but that was why he liked the bees. If you asked them right, they would let you have some of the honey, and you didn’t have to kill anything at all.

Honey had a fizz to it if you left it in water, and once you left it long enough, it took on a kind of magic. It changed people, made them bright and merry, even the witches. So when the Hunt led them back round every year to the caverns, he went to see the bees in their cave. He loved the way they danced to each other. He still couldn’t tell why they did it, but they did. And he loved how they built things. They didn’t wander endlessly, following stags or the herds. There were hives the size of a tent; mountains, if you were a bee. Instead of killing things, they all had their own jobs to do, and they harvested their pollen, and made enough to feed everyone. He had spent a lot of time wondering how much better the world would be if people were more like bees.

Bees didn’t sacrifice anyone to keep the Queen happy. He had watched the bee queens. They were stronger than the rest, and bigger, but they were gentle. They had lots of husbands and, even though the husbands were useless and idle, they didn’t hurt any of them. Not unless the hive was starving.

He left the casks in the cave next to the bees to sit for a year while the clan moved on, and then every year he came back for them. A year was good; it tasted nice anyway. That morning, though, there was a bit of an impediment to getting to them, because a bull had got there first. Not at the wine, but the bees. It was munching its way through a giant honeycomb, not looking like it meant to move at all soon.

He looked back towards the camp. He should tell them it was here. Or better, he should kill it and then tell them. Very risky, to do it by himself, but frankly he was quite open to being killed by a bull given that he only had a few months left before the witches killed him and left him in the holy cave. But he didn’t want to kill it. The bull was incredible. It was gold, gleaming in the last of the light, and mighty. It must have been twice his size, its horns as long as his arms, and nocked from fights with other bulls. They had enough food already. They didn’t need a huge feast.

So he sat down to wait for it to go on its way, and propped up the little leather bag with its grain offering for the bees. There was corn growing in the grove by the camp. He’d planted it last year, not that he’d told anyone. If anyone had caught him doing that, the witches would have shredded him. Folly to rely on the sky for rain. It’ll never rain when you want. Don’t waste your time scrabbling with seeds. Make your arrows.

You couldn’t say: You know actually, I’ve been watching it, and corn needs minimal looking after. You just plant it and leave it. It’s like a weed.

But no. You could only make bread when you found a whole grove of the corn, and then everyone celebrated and said how bountiful She was, as if you couldn’t do better than that if you just dug over the earth yourself and brought it a bit of water sometimes. No, because that would tie you to a particular part of the land, and what would you do when someone else found you, or when the bulls trampled it, and on and on they went, as though twenty determined people and a fence couldn’t look after most of that.

Blasphemy. Fences. The earth isn’t yours. She’ll curse you. Shut up and go hunting. Or do you think that all the mothers there have ever been have somehow been wrong about how to get food into you?

“No,” he said, prodding the corn, because he couldn’t say it to anyone else, “but maybe when you spend every moment of the day running after something and putting up tents and killing spare children, you’re not giving yourself time to do any thinking. It’s not blasphemy to say there could be better things. Is it?” He aimed this at the bull, who had heard him and looked round.

It clearly didn’t think he was worth worrying about. One of the two-leg things with their sharp sticks was no more worry to a bull than one irritable hedgehog would be to him.

“Hmph,” it said.

He got up to see how near he could go to it. The big ones were vicious, but they were—because they were so big—sometimes very calm, too. They knew you couldn’t hurt them. This one was honey-drunk already, all sticky and happy. He put his hand out slowly. It eyed him, not too impressed, but when he touched its side, it seemed not to mind. Close to, it was even bigger than it had looked before. It had left great prints in the earth, and whenever it moved, he felt the ground judder.

The bull studied him, looking almost interested.

It was so strong. If a person could cut into the earth a little way with some flint and then plant seeds, you could clear whole groves if you could persuade a bull to help you. A whole plain. How much corn would there be then? More than the clan could eat in a whole year, even if they ate nothing else. And if the bull brought his wives, and they agreed to help too, and there were the bees . . . you could live without ever killing anything. Milk and honey, and bread. The Hunt could end.

He could see himself in the bull’s serene eyes. He was just a man and it was just a stupid daydream. Nobody would ever tame the herds. They were the wildest things there were. No bull would ever help plant corn.

And anyway, they weren’t wrong, the witches. The bees and the herds and the earth weren’t just tools. Even good axes had names. To try to make a bull into something so tame as a thing that just helped you plant seeds . . . that was unholy.

But just yesterday morning, he had had to ask Henna which of her twins she wanted to live, because everyone knew they couldn’t feed two extra. Barely one. She chose the girl, of course she did—women lasted far longer in times of famine, men were strange fuel-hungry luxuries for times of plenty—and so he’d had to take the boy out into the woods to the altar.

The witches called that the balance. But that was unholy too. He had never said so to anyone, he would have been shunned, but he was sure that he couldn’t be the only one who thought so. The freedom of a bull was worth as much as anyone’s, but that little boy had been worth something too.

The wind shifted. It was cold, colder than it should have been. The season was turning early. Tomorrow there would be frost. The bull noticed it too, and turned away.

Someone touched his shoulders, and he froze. No one could touch him. It was forbidden. So he didn’t turn around. It wouldn’t be anyone he knew, and there was no one else in these woods. These were clan heartlands. The totems kept others away.

“Already?” he said.

She paced around in front of him, and he closed his eyes, because you weren’t ever meant to see. But She took the mask off him, and his lungs seized up, because no one had seen his face since he could remember.