Page 129 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I was, though. It was just taking a little while for me to flow through into all my old tributaries and streams.

I paused. “And I remember something about you owing me dinner.”

He hit my shoulder, and then he started to cry, or maybe he was laughing, or both. I pulled him sideways into my lap, and all around us, even though they didn’t really know he was there, people sang his hymn.

40

A long time after, centuries and more, when Troy was just a story and our language was lost, and all the marvels were melted down for ploughshares and spears, people wondered what had happened. City after city fell: Pylos, Mykenai, Sparta, Hattusa, right from Achaea, to Syria, to Egypt. If you go to those places and walk around the ruins, you’ll see something strange. They weren’t destroyed by earthquakes, or by invading armies. You won’t find arrowheads in the earth. In all those places, it’s like people there just . . . went mad one day, and set fire to everything.

I’ve heard philosophers say that really this is just what happens to humans when it’s very hot and there’s no food. Kings make stupid decisions and end up hanged in their own palaces; people loot and then run for the hills, and never come back down again. Some of them like to say that there were invading armies, but they cleared up after everything, which no army in the history of anything has ever done.

Both of those ideas are wrong.

What happened was that one day, a queen tried to be too much like a marvel, and a god broke her and everyone else for a thousand miles around. The holy raging swept half my world. People stretched to breaking by the heat and by hunger snapped. Buildings burned, and kings hanged; in the places where men kept their wives like prisoners, the women tore them apart; on the galleys, the slaves exploded from the holds. The world turned upside down, for maybe six hours. No more.

After that, though, a lot of what there had been before was ash.

Now, they don’t know we ever built marvels; they don’t know we had calculating machines, or astronomers, or witches with great magic, because nothing is left but those scraps of tax records—just like Dionysus said, because even when he’s joking you have to watch out for prophecy—noted down on clay that baked in those fires. Some people even think Troy never happened, and the memory of those futile, brave infantry legions, built of pairs of sworn knights, is fading into legend. For a long time, the world I used to know shrank. Knights became shepherds, and cities stood empty.

They came back, though. Slowly, few by few. There was new writing. New cities, new people. It was like watching bluebells push up across the forest floor after a fire. And then one day, after we had wandered far enough east to see the people who painted with fire in the sky, and far enough north to see where it rained feathers, we arrived in Athens, just as a festival was starting.

I was ready to be grumpy about it, but I had to work hard at that: it’s difficult not to like a place where someone hands you a flower for no reason when you come down off the ship, and the fountains are running with wine.

“What is going on?” I said, because it wasn’t just the festival. People looked—happy. Half the world was there. There were traders from Egypt and a caravan from Aleppo laden down with bronze; there were priestesses dancing in red on the steps of a temple, and even though it was Athens, there were women everywhere, even noblewomen, with parakeets on their shoulders and fleets of daughters and slaves laughing after them. Lots of families too, where everyone was playing a game—the slaves were in charge, well-dressed gentlemen hurrying to bring them drinks or food, or even borrowed cloaks in the autumn wind, which was established enough now to be getting its wisdom teeth.

There were puddles winking on the ground.

“Don’t look at me,” Dionysus said, much too innocently. “We should go and see where everyone’s going, though. Who knows, maybe it’s a horrifyingly violent boxing match—maybe they throw people they don’t like to lions now, you’ll like that.”

“Can’t we just find an inn—”

“No, no, no . . .” He steered me left to keep us with the crowd. Up ahead was a big building, circular, heaving with people, green flags flying, and children selling ivy crowns outside. Dionysus bought one with a scrap of silver and set it into my hair.

“What have you done?” I said slowly.

“I haven’t done anything, I just arrived. You were there. You were cross with me about growing wisteria up the rigging—”

“How do you expect anyone to take in the sails if there’s sodding vines growing up the—”

“It’s pretty!”

“You’re pretty,” I growled.

“I am n—hang on,” he said, and then he looked pleased.

I gave up on a proper answer. It was true I’d been there today. But seven hundred years was a long time. We had been apart for decades of that, sometimes because of storms and wars, sometimes on purpose. He still had the witching instinct to make sure nobody, including me, knew everything about him. He thought I wouldn’t like him any more if I did, which I thought was funny and he thought I was pretending to think was funny, and round and round it went.

But anyway, he liked Athens. He kept coming here, lately, very much without me, on account of how I still had a powerful instinct to set it on fire that I was right now this second fending off heroically. They were doing some complicated thing with their government, he said, where they tried to give all the free men a vote in the Assembly. It seemed like a stupid idea to me—if you put a bunch of rich men together in a room alone without anyone who understands the real world to give them a shove in the right direction, what you’ll get is mutually exclusive with any sort of sensible policy—but he thought they were onto something.

The little girl who’d sold the ivy crown gave me change for his silver. It was a coin. They were new inventions, stamped with images of gods or whoever the current archon was, and controlled tightly by something called the central mint, so that all of them were the same weight, standardised now across all Athens and its territories, like they did in proper countries in Africa and the Levant. I turned it over, feeling stupidly pleased that good inventions were making their way into our rubbishy, dusty corner of the world. I’d never really believed Dionysus when he said time was seasonal and I’d arrived in a long winter, and that I’d see things bloom soon—but here it was, the first blue of the new bluebells, and the turning of the world.

Stamped on the coin was a young man half hidden by grape vines.

“Is this you?”

“No. Why would it be me? Don’t be silly, Phaidros.” He was doing big eyes at me.

“I see,” I said again, plotting revenge, depending on whatever terrible thing was waiting in the stadium. “But Dee?” I know: these days, everyone says die-oh-neye-sus, but it wasn’t that, to begin with. It was dee-oh, like theo; it means “god.” It was deo-nusos, the daughter of the god, because in the old days, witches were always she, like ships and kestrels.