Page 125 of The Hymn to Dionysus

She was seeing a young lion.

Dionysus watched quietly. Around him, everyone whirled: singing his song, dancing, trailing ivy and laughter. Somewhere under it, real but maybe more real than other things, the horn of the old Hunt called. There were drums from somewhere. Yes; other people were coming up the mountainside, ordinary people, families, with children. All of Thebes.

Some others saw the lion too and ran with the Queen. Much, much too late, Pentheus understood that they were faster and stronger than him.

Around us, around Dionysus, the drums rolled on, and the song was a tempest. A little girl set an ivy crown in his hair. He let her, and then directed her mind away, after some butterflies, so she wouldn’t see what came next.

When the Queen and the others caught Pentheus, they tore him apart. It was like watching children with a straw doll: there was something innocent about it, even as the doll went to pieces, and they were all laughing, because it was incredible to have caught a lion without weapons, this was how people must have hunted in the long ago when bronze was still a dream and a spear was a bone spar from one of the giants that walked the great steppe in the north. She had never been this happy, the Queen: she had never just flung herself at anything with no thought for duty or honour or law, just laughed and moved as hard and fast as she could, unweighted by the crown.

Bring down a thing that wants to kill you with all your tribe and there is the foundation stone of what humans are, all the joy in being alive, and the drums, and the song, and instead of keeping it for yourself, you sacrifice it and sing it to the lord of the dance, the render of cities and men, the king of the holy raging, because he is this, all the joy and the wildness and humanness, distilled into one thing. Every now and then, in one searing precious instant, you can see him, in the way you can see three.

He let them sing, and dance, and light fires, and hunt for a while, into the dusk. He didn’t move. I didn’t either. It was difficult to keep holding myself together, but the leopard let me ride with her. We sat next to him, paws on his knees. Then, gradually, he let it lift. He had kept all their minds safe, and few by few he put them back, and though there was still a merry glow in the air, and singing, it wasn’t the mad god’s song any more, just folk rhymes, the first rounds of lullabies for the littlest children.

Very slowly, the Queen realized that what she was holding was not the head of a lion.

It was like watching someone wake up. She was still for a second, and then she threw it away, jolting onto her feet. For a long time, she just stared down at it; then at Dionysus. He stared back, unmoving, except for the wind pulling at his hair. Then she walked into the forest, and I don’t think she ever came out again.

And I . . . wasn’t there any more.

38

The shore was black, and so was the water. Mist hung in rags here and there, and from somewhere—in a way that sounded like everywhere—there were voices. Some of them were whispering, and some were singing, much too softly to make out. There were people too, but they were silent: facing the river, waiting for the Ferryman. None of them seemed to know that the others were there. It wasn’t cold, or warm, only quiet, except for that whispering song that sounded, in tiny snatches, very familiar. The river flowed to my right, into a great cavern. There was light that way, silvery.

“Phaidros.”

It wasn’t exactly a voice, and it didn’t exactly call. It was another strand of the singing-whispers; it sounded like whoever had said it had been saying it for a long time, not in a way that expected any immediate answer. It was more like a beacon lit on a difficult shore, and every time it repeated my name, it was another swing of the mirror to make the light flash.

I turned around twice, trying to track where it was coming from.

“Phaidros.”

In an inlet was one last living thing. It was a white tree. The voice was coming from there.

I’d thought it was in full bloom, the tree, full of leaves and blossom, but as I came nearer to it in the dimness, I saw I was wrong. They weren’t leaves: they were scraps of cloth, and ribbons, and silver and clay prayer tokens. Some were messages. I stared up—up and up, because it was taller than any tree I’d ever seen—and the way they flickered in the breeze was mesmerising. There were languages I recognised and languages I didn’t, languages that didn’t look like writing at all, and somewhere deep down, I knew there were languages here that had died a thousand years before we thought humanity had been created, and languages here that wouldn’t be born for a thousand years after everything I knew was dust.

“Phaidros?”

The voice was different. A real voice, not that echo from before.

It was Helios.

And there he was, under the tree, sitting in the high roots, exactly like I remembered: he still had his armour, my armour now, and his shield. His spear was propped up next to him. I stared at him, and then crumpled onto my knees. Dust puffed up, and fell much too slowly, like we were underwater. Or—like there was no time, and each mote could do whatever it liked, without any urgency.

“You waited.”

“I told you I would,” he said, sounding puzzled. He smiled, the kind of smile that was all eyes, not teeth. “Has it been long?”

I was already seeing through a haze of tears. “Ten years.”

His eyebrows flickered upwards, but like always, he was good at taking things for what they were, and not wasting energy exclaiming over what they ought to have been. He was looking at me with a smile still in the lines around his eyes. “You’re grown up. You look . . .”

“Like you,” I said, my throat tight. I could see it, it was right there. It always had been.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

I swallowed, even though I could already feel that having a throat, never mind one that had gone dry, was more a habit of thought than a physical fact here. “When you left your ward behind at the temple,” I said. “You never did go back, did you?”

He lifted his head, just slightly. On anyone else it would have been nothing, but he had always kept his mannerisms slight, always the perfect knight, almost unreadable in the face of bad things unless you knew him, and I knew this too. It was what he did when something had gone so far wrong there was no getting away from it without losing lives.