Page 123 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Witching,” Dionysus said.

I didn’t understand, but then, maybe because I just knew him well enough, or maybe because I could think through his thinking now, I did.

If you’ve got a city full of professionally violent, angry men who go out to the wars and trudge home battle mad and uncontrollable, you have to make sure there are places they cannot, cannot go. Only, there are no fences that a strong enough, angry enough person can’t rip down in the end, so what you do is, you build the fence in his head.

The dryads were there and these woods were holy, that was no lie. But they didn’t care. Of course they didn’t care. They were older than people, and long after people had blasted themselves off the face of the earth, they would still be beneath it, dreaming.

The dryads could feel hoofbeats.

A hundred horses, more, heavy with people on them. And ahead of them, dogs. The dogs knew exactly where we were.

We started to run, aiming for the rocks up ahead, under the shade of the great trees and into a gloom and unevenness of ground that the horses would struggle with, and Dionysus did—something, I felt it, but I couldn’t understand what exactly—and birds exploded from the forest, gritting the air so that even someone very close to us would have been hard put to make out two running figures among the chaos of feathers and wings.

The horses were still coming. The dogs called to each other. There, over there, over there.

Dionysus turned back, and I felt the thoughts go through him this time. He could have made all the riders forget what they were doing and attack each other, but that was cruel, and for him, it was the same as hitting a child; he couldn’t send them to sleep, because a lot of them would be killed as they fell over the horses’ hooves, and he didn’t want to do that either—just warn them again, and so he made the horses panic, just for second: just enough to make them rear and throw a lot of the riders, and no more.

Some people fell, but some didn’t.

The trees were growing, pressing closer together, the branches closing the way. The dryads remembered him, He of the Trees, the little witch who had faced the Mother and told her his dreams of honey and fields, and an end to the great Hunt; of course they would help—but even with a titan effort, even at a sprint, they couldn’t move as fast as humans did, and though the bark was creaking and reaching, it was slow.

The birds were still thundering. Everything was wings and claws.

Through a brief gap, though, I saw the Queen, in silver armour, with a silver bow.

Just like Andromache.

I did what I’d been much too stupid to do all those years ago for Helios. I didn’t try to pull her off her horse. I just got in the way of the shot.

It’s strange how there can be stillness in the middle of a storm of birds and falling horses, but there was. Her mind was right there in front of me, and I could see myself through it, and how tired and sad it made her. Even though she knew it was hopeless and stupid and irrational, there was a fluttering scrap of her that wanted me to say something that would make all this unnecessary, so we could just go home. I even knew what it was.

I’d say: No, he stole me—he stole me. I don’t choose this. Let me come back. I choose duty and honour, and you, I choose you.

The tree branches were creeping closer together, and by tiny fractions, or it seemed so because time is so slow just before you die, some of the riders were turning into wild animals, but none of it was quick enough.

In that split second, I realized I’d rather die now than say that.

Some final fragile thing snapped.

She shot me straight through the throat, and I felt whatever that vital crucial thing that makes humans humans go out, and then I was just . . . gone.

37

What’s most confusing about being a human one second and then being quite a lot of birds and small animals and partly some dryads the next is that you can see what’s going on from a lot more angles than you previously could. I could see Dionysus through many pairs of eyes, and hardly any two worked in the same way. Some saw him clear and sharp. Some saw him in colours I’d never known about, with kinds of light I’d never seen. And some things that knew he was there weren’t seeing him at all, but they could build an idea from what they did know in the same way I built ideas from seeing. They knew his weight on the earth, and how fast he moved, and that the alchemy of him was different to the other things that looked like him. They were grateful for the blood soaking into the earth.

It was too much. I started to come apart. I’d thought I knew what I meant when I said me, but that was wrong; it was just so much sand in a bucket, and me was the bucket shape, but now I didn’t have a bucket. Although I’d held the shape of it for a few seconds, the sea was pouring in now, and there wouldn’t be any shape at all for much longer.

Through all those other eyes and other ways of seeing, I saw him buckle onto the ground next to what had been me a second ago. He didn’t make a sound, because no one would help him even if he did. He tipped forward so that the ends of his hair coiled against my chest. He wanted to cry, but he was too wrung out, after too many centuries. He was so old, and so tired, and maybe it was now another time of turning; maybe there should be new gods again and the old ones should just be forgotten. What was the point?

“So you’re not a god, then,” the Queen said. She wasn’t being cruel, or wasn’t meaning to: she was just thinking aloud, and there was a kind of heavy curiosity to it more than anything else. “You would be able to bring him back if you were.”

He could; he could, but there were the Deathless, and the Dying. For him, life was just a fact: he was always alive, and so in order to make sure one particular part of him—the one that looked like a human—remained so, all he had to do was rearrange other parts of himself.

For the Dying . . . it was different. To pull a human being away from the Unseen, there was a horrible cost, and it wouldn’t be him who had to pay it.

It was so horrible that the Deathless largely agreed never to do it. The agreement had always been there, an unuttered contract to prevent the wars that had harrowed the beginning of the world, when they had all thought they should be entirely free, not realizing that if they tried to be that, then no one was free except the very strongest, and that if they were all a little less than free, then nobody was a slave. The King in the Thunder was assiduous. He let his own sons die on the field, even though each death was a hammer blow, and each one made him harder, more tempered, more frightening.

How many deaths had Dionysus allowed over the years? He didn’t know. He was older than the thunder king.