Page 122 of The Hymn to Dionysus

A few miles behind us, the Hidden thundered out of the Palace gates. It had taken this long to go through the wreckage of the prison and find the trees that had been doors and the safe hollow space where I conspicuously wasn’t.

It wasn’t a young unit. It was everyone who was left, who could ride. I could feel Polydorus, or rather what had used to be Polydorus. When he had seen Jason’s mother hold up the head from the chariot, he had broken. It wasn’t a great, grand, spectacular breaking, just the tiny but definitive snap of a bird’s hyoid. He felt strangely free now. All those years aching and worrying that he wasn’t going to be able to see Jason through, even though that was what he had sworn to do when he found that tiny little boy hiding behind a dead sheep after fucking Ajax’s fucking insane rampage, and all those little fires of hope when Phaidros, who wasn’t actually the unmitigated curse everyone said, realized that the way to help Jason was to play with him, not flog him: gone. All he was now was the shield and the spear, and the narrowed vision from the inside of a helmet.

Amphitrion and Allecto’s mother was there too. She had retired from the army fifteen years ago when she had the twins, which was a waste of fucking time it turned out, because the boy had died of the madness and she had had to kill the girl with her own hands after the stadium. Children were only yours for seven years, everyone knew that, and they had been in the garrison now longer than they hadn’t, but when the order came from the Queen—she had almost packed a bag and run for Aulis. But then her husband had said, Please, we need to run, you can’t do this: and she had locked up with scorn and said, We are Sown. We are this. And then down deep somewhere, there was a little snap, and suddenly, amazingly, she didn’t care any more.

As they rode down through the lower city, priests and slaves were everywhere, digging in the rubble for survivors, helping people into shade, handing out bread. Everyone looked grey and exhausted: not much better than the refugees from Pylos.

The Queen was with them too, because even if monarchs and heirs did not go to war, they did hunt. It was good to hold a shield and spear again. What had happened yesterday had a dreamy quality now, for her and for nearly everyone. She remembered the earthquake. The Guards had gone mad. And then, in the prison, that weird glade, formed of great oak trees that hadn’t been there before. Tiresias said, Look, they were the doors, but . . . that couldn’t be true. What was true, though, was that there was no Phaidros. No body. He had run. Or been taken. Had there not been another man, a tall man in witch black, who had stood in front of her, terrible and entirely unconcerned in a way human beings can’t be, and . . .? No. That memory felt untrustworthy. It was a sort of mirage, born of the earthquake and all that suffocating dust that had knocked everyone out. Dust, of course it was something in the dust. It didn’t matter. What mattered was getting Phaidros before he crossed the Corinth border, because after a disaster like this—well. People would think (already thought) the earthquake had happened because he had been imprisoned. They would drown her and give him the crown just to apologise.

She’d thought she had killed everything but clockwork in her, years ago. But it wasn’t dead. She had beaten it into coma, but this last week, it had been waking, and a tiny voice had said, What if he’s right, what if it was monstrous, what your mother said to you, what if this was what family really was, this one modest man who was savage and kind at the same time . . .

It was like brandy.

Heady, and wonderful, and poisonous.

Somewhere down on the mountainside, Pentheus was struggling up the path in the heat, trailed by Tiresias, who was trying to tell him—begging him—not to go. I could see them through the birds and the ground, and I felt it when Pentheus almost fell and pulled himself up against a rock.

“Pentheus! Pentheus, stop, you can’t go up there. It’s dangerous, he’s dangerous! If your mother corners him—don’t you understand? He’s a god!”

Tiresias remembered what had happened because they always saw true, although just now, they wished that wasn’t the case. It would be a lot less awful, not to realize what was going to happen in about a quarter of an hour. It would have been less awful to stand in that courtyard after a god had shut down everyone’s minds and grown trees though a prison, watching everyone come around and feel puzzled and just . . . look at those trees and the hollow inside big enough to hold two people, and brush it aside like peculiar weather, seeing and not seeing at all.

“Of course he isn’t a god,” Pentheus said stiffly. “He’s just a witch and he was helping Phaidros to the crown, no doubt in exchange for a lot of money. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand.”

“You’re lying, Pentheus. You know you’re lying.”

Pentheus didn’t know that, actually. What he did know was that there had been an earthquake, and something about it had done something to everyone. Just like when the star had fallen. Sudden madness was unsettling, metamorphosis was very unusual, but . . . the holy machines weren’t gods talking, just people. The story about the lost prince was just a misunderstanding of the fact that child of a god was royal code for born outside wedlock but let’s not have a blood feud. Wherever you looked for a god, there was just a collection of dull, human things where one wasn’t.

And that was because . . . there were no gods. There were forces, like the sea and death, and madness, but they weren’t conscious. They didn’t want things, or plan. That was all witchcraft, and once you know how the witching works, it stops working. He could see it all. What a god really did was marshal people together under a banner, and help them get things done. Build palaces, win wars. Otherwise nobody would ever agree about anything, but if you said the magic words, in the name of Zeus, or in the name of Ra . . . you could make people build things so great that their grandchildren wouldn’t see the finished temple. The gods were ideas, a great, sparkling lie to oil the clockwork of the world, and priests were only witches.

When you came down to it, nothing was anything except itself. A crown was a band of silver. An earthquake . . . he didn’t know, but he would have bet anything now that it was just some arbitrary shift in the mantle of the world, no more significant or meaningful than a tree shaking in the wind. And sure as clockwork, madness wasn’t a god. It was just human minds, malfunctioning, like faulty marvels. Nothing divine breathed through it.

The reason he knew that was true was that he didn’t want it to be. It was terrible. But in his experience, the worst and bleakest explanation for a thing was the truest one.

“Pentheus,” Tiresias called again, coughing. They had breathed in a lot of dust, in the earthquake. “Pentheus, what do you mean to do?”

Pentheus didn’t say anything, because there was no point, and he’d had enough. A whole lifetime of enough, even though he’d hardly lived at all yet. All this time, everyone had been trying to tell him to be Sown, even though they wouldn’t let him learn to be Sown: no garrison, no commander like everyone else, no training, he was supposed to know everything by magic. And then the Queen was angry when he—shockingly—didn’t understand how to do any of it. But the strange thing was, he had learned. Whatever the witch had done to him in the maze, it had switched off the thinking part of his mind, and now that it had switched back on again, he could see much, much better. Everything was right in front of him and as clear as the morning.

If you wanted to be in Thebes, and not go to Egypt, and learn how to be a good king . . . then that was what you did. You didn’t rely on the Queen, who thought, not very secretly, that there were caterpillars who would make better kings. Or Phaidros, who said one thing to your face and did something else, as cunning as all good knights were supposed to be.

What you did was, you shot Phaidros and the Queen, blamed a witch, and took the throne.

That was Sown.

36

There was nowhere to hide but the forest, but even so, I slowed down when we came up to the border. I’d never crossed it. Men hadn’t, not for a thousand years. Not since Actaeon had seen the dryads, and turned into a stag, and been ripped apart by his own dogs.

The next step would mean easing over the roots of a great oak that had pushed up my side of the road. She would know, the dryad who lived in the oak. It must have been a slow kind of fury, the rage of the trees, but all I could think of was how it would feel, when the bones of my hands started fusing together into hooves, and the horns started grinding up out of my skull.

Dionysus stepped across it like he would have his own threshold.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Listen.” He took my hand to give me a tiny pull over the border, and he was right: I could hear them if I listened.

I’d always thought of dryads as people who also happened to be trees, but that, I realized then, was a very human way of imagining. They weren’t.

They were under the earth, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, and they knew we were there. They could feel us walking, the weight of us, the length of our steps, and from that, they had quite a good idea of us, though not the same as mine. And they didn’t know enough about humans to know what type of humans we were, any more than I would have known types of dryad, or even if there were types. They were minds that stretched for miles through the woods, knowing every inch of those miles, and they were dreaming: huge, slow, ancient dreams, because they had been here as long as Dionysus and longer. Those dreams were about the taste of the soil, and the festivals of the ants, and strange, creaking acquaintances with roots and branches that lasted a thousand years. I was like a sudden spark; the things down deep noticed me in the way I noticed fireflies. It was brief interest, and that was all. They didn’t care if I walked in their woods, because humans weren’t important enough to think of at all.

“But . . . Actaeon,” I said, confused.