Page 128 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“I consent.”

“This has to be your desire, not your duty,” he said.

“Things can be desire and duty,” I said.

He let his breath out, and his shoulders sank. He seemed smaller.

Helios was fading into the shades as they boarded the ferry. I couldn’t tell if what he had just done for me was duty or desire or both. I’d thought maybe he would be more fathomable now we were the same age, but I’d never get an accurate count of those fathoms. He went all the way down, Helios.

“It’s a fair way to walk,” Dionysus said, and I realized at last that he had been waiting at the mouth of a cave. His lamp, the only light but the disembodied silver light of the shore, gleamed on a narrow stairway. “You can’t look back.”

“You know me,” I said. “I could stand at the top for a thousand years and never look back.”

He moved his shoulder in a sort of one-eighth shrug. “I know. It just feels—well, the story.” He put me in front of him to make me go first, and gave me his lamp. “I never understood why Persephone ate the pomegranate. Death steals you and takes you here: even then, even if it’s kidnapping, if you take something you owe something. Why would she?”

I smiled at the way ahead. It was rocky, but the stairs were sometimes a little lost, not often walked, but there. Soon the only light was his lamp. “Because he didn’t steal her. She stole him. But . . . she knew her mother would be distraught if she just chose him, and so she took the pomegranate. And the old laws kicked in: she had taken something from him, and so she owed something. Her mother could think it was just a mistake and this was an irritating compromise, not that her daughter had decided to leave her behind. It’s a diplomacy pomegranate.”

He laughed, and it was a real laugh. It smoked up through the cave, and it was the best thing I’d ever heard. I put my hand back for him without looking back. He took it and didn’t let go, his fingertip hooked over the red string around my wrist.

39

Dionysus was moving life—borrowing it—from the forest, and the things below. A tiny fraction from each tree and vine. The things that had shut down in me began to work again. Flickers of electricity, blood moving, damage knitting up, very fast. I was coming back too, the thing that was me, that had been on the shore before. Then I was back in my own mind, not everyone’s, and it was like putting on armour I knew very, very well.

I sat up, and for a whole second, it was paralysingly strange to have hands.

“Was I just . . . somewhere else?” I felt sure I had been. I’d been under the earth, and in the trees, and then there had been a dark shore and a river and maybe Helios had been there, but I couldn’t catch hold of any of it. The way my memory worked wasn’t right for things like that. It was like trying to carry water in a basket.

“Can you tell me what your name is?” Dionysus asked. He had one hand on my back like he was worried I might not remember how spines worked.

I had to think about it. Something to do with brightness, and the sun. “Phaidros.”

He looked into my eyes. Those had always been difficult, eyes, although why was floating just out of reach. Whyever it was, it was something little and silly.

“Where are we, can you remember?”

I could still feel the dryads underground. “This is the place where the great bulls first agreed to the ploughing, and where the witch made wine with honey.”

He looked frightened and I realized that was right generally, but wrong for me, or, the shape I was now: that was an old answer.

“Thebes,” I said. “This is Thebes.”

“That’s good, knight,” he said, sounding strained. “Do you remember what my name is?”

I was getting the hang of it, the pathways in my own mind, the more he spoke. “Well, you said it was Dionysus but you made that up.”

He sort of laughed. “Right. I—do you want to know my real name?”

I frowned. He wasn’t supposed to. There was something about witches. “But I thought you couldn’t say?”

“You’ve done a lot of things you weren’t supposed to for me,” he said. “It’s Ivy. My name is Ivy.”

That was familiar for some reason. I touched the ivy crown in his hair. “I know you from a long time ago, don’t I? When we were younger.”

“That’s right.”

“You turned the ship into a forest. It was lovely.” I looked around properly. All around us, the campfires were cracking and sparking under the last of the bronze sunset, and lots of people were telling stories, or playing on bone whistles, or teaching the little girls a new kind of dance. Around them, the grass was growing lush and green, and nothing like the strawy beige scrub it had been this morning. The horses were grazing. It was the most peaceful thing I’d ever seen.

Dionysus was watching me, still looking worried I wasn’t all there.