Page 124 of The Hymn to Dionysus

There were the Deathless, and there were the Dying.

Of course, it was his choice in the end whether he stayed Deathless.

That jolted me into pushing back against that sea of other things. I could hold together the little thing that was me. It was an effort, but that didn’t matter.

No. Fight.

I didn’t mean to, and it startled me as much as anyone, but I’d made about forty people say it. Archers still on horseback, people who’d been thrown, the slaves behind.

The Queen looked around fast, looking disconcerted for the first time since I’d known her. Everything was still now. The birds, feeling confused, had gone back to the trees. The dryads had stopped growing.

Dionysus had his hand over mine. There was nothing there now, no pulse, but I could see him, with other eyes.

I couldn’t touch him with my hands, but I could move ten other people around him. Please. Don’t die here.

He wasn’t interested. He knew I would scatter to nothing in a minute. He let his head rest against my chest, and he didn’t seem to care that the Queen was raising her hand to tell the archers to aim.

All at once I was furious.

I wasn’t good enough at any of it to make anyone drag the Queen and the hunters off their horses, or I would have. It felt too complicated to try to move so many different hands in so many different ways, like trying to do arithmetic in your third language under pressure, but I could make people do one thing all at once. That was simple enough. All I could think of was to make them sing. Even though I was sure I couldn’t reach further than about fifty people—it was too many minds, too heavy, and they were all different—the song rippled around the mountain as other people sang it themselves.

Sing, sing to lord the of the dance,

Thunder-wrought and city-razing

King, king of the holy raging,

Rave and rise again.

Dionysus looked up like he was coming out of a trance. He was shaking, but all those voices had been enough to bring him back, more or less, to now. I could feel him starting to come away from shock into something more like what I felt, maybe because I felt it. Anger, slow, because he was one of those people who always took far too long to get angry, like anyone truly strong, but it was building.

Will you show me some magic?

“Yes,” he said.

I’d understood more or less what he had meant, when he told me the story about the old goddess who had made him what he was. Dying and rising: he lived in a body that could be damaged and which could die, and did sometimes. I hadn’t understood that he lived in the man I recognised in exactly the same way he moved around in owls or snakes. The man was no more him than the owl. He just borrowed it more often, because it could do more and he liked things that could speak, like humans and dolphins, and bees.

What he was, was everything. He was everywhere, in everything that was alive or had ever been alive, anything that had grown or could grow. It was why he would never die. He was part of those great deep-down minds, the trees, even the bedrock that had slow, strange memories of churning when the ground was made in fire. And when he wanted to, he could move it all as easily as he could move the tattooed hands of the man.

I didn’t see what he did. It was different to seeing; there was more of it. There was a thing that was three, but you never saw it in itself, you just saw its shadow cast on things: three apples, three bees, three witches.

He took the Queen’s mind, and he held it up to the light like a bronzesmith would study the mechanisms of a faulty marvel. Now that I had everyone else’s to compare it to—I could see them all as clearly as I could see their faces—it wasn’t quite how human minds usually were. There was hardly any . . . any human in it. It was glittering clockwork, exquisite, wonderful in its own way, but not . . . really . . . a person any more.

He stripped away the clockwork, carefully, like any good craftsman, and set it aside.

She realized what was happening while he did it, and with a cold moonrise of horror, she tried to argue. She tried to say that she had never chosen to be like this: it had been done to her. She hadn’t wanted to be married, she had wanted to stay in the legion with Helios, but her mother had said, No, you must do your duty, because duty is honour, and she had bowed her head. After that, she had to be almost nothing but clockwork because she had no patience with madness or running away or walking into the sea, and it had been a kind of victory.

But it was your choice, he told her, very soft, in a way that was to language what he was to the man he sometimes moved around in. I do not care why, or what drove you. I only care what you have done. What I will do now, will remind people not to choose like you did for a thousand years.

Everyone on that mountain lost their minds. Or rather, he took them all, and kept them for later.

The Hidden forgot who they were hunting, and swung joyfully towards the trees to look for mountain lions and lynxes. Some of them stopped to make themselves ivy crowns from the vines that rioted up the trees. There was a triumphant howl not far away as someone found the trail of wolf. Deep under the earth, the dryads noticed and watched because this was strange. In the forest, the deer, who had learned to listen to the dryads too, heard the shift and ran.

Not far away, Pentheus was nocking an arrow. He wasn’t mad. There wasn’t enough of a person left in him to go mad: he couldn’t any more than a marvel could.

He didn’t know what was happening, or how the witch had done it, but the Queen looked glassy and strange, and whatever kind of trickery it was, he wasn’t going to complain.

The Queen knew when she was being watched, and she slung to the side as the arrow sang past. But she didn’t really know there had been an arrow. She wasn’t seeing a boy with a bow any more.