Page 29 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Yes please.”

“I will investigate,” she said solemnly, handing back my tablet and the new honey in its ceramic jar. Her eyes slipped past me towards the column of lights that was the High City. “Were you up there when the god fell? People are saying that anyone who saw it went mad.”

“Six people who were close to it went mad,” I said. I hesitated. “Just be careful about saying it’s a god.”

She laughed. “Of course it was a god! What do we think, lads: the business up in the High City, god or lump of rock?” she said more loudly to the stall-owners around us.

“God,” they all chorused.

“See?” she said. “It’s the lost prince come to put things right.”

“Well. I’ll see you soon,” I said.

As I walked away, something made me look back. At the stall, the man who had been following me, and another who I hadn’t known was with him, ghosted up to the honey seller, said nothing at all, and dragged her away. Everyone saw; studiously, everyone pretended not to have seen.

The way home was lined with people begging. Not the people you usually see begging; there were whole families, not ragged yet. As I passed by, not looking at the clay signs they were wearing, I caught a snatch of a song. A woman was dancing in a strange vacant way by the window, singing to herself. I had an instinctive surge of repulsion to hear that, and hear it inside the city from someone who should have known better, but under that, my real thoughts said: She isn’t choosing to do that.

Just like you do if someone else yawns, I felt the hollow need to sing along with her opening up in the back of my throat. I clamped my teeth shut, disgusted.

Sing, sing to the lord of the dance . . .

Someone tapped my shoulder, and without any intervention from any part of my mind which might have said, Hold on, it’s probably just a flower seller, my fist shot out, automatic as a broken marvel.

There was an awful crunch as I broke the man’s nose. He screamed and collapsed. I put my hands over my face. People were giving me shocked looks, as if I’d chosen to do it. I wanted to yell that of course I fucking hadn’t, any more than you choose to jerk your hand away from something that’s burning you. But if it’s your fist, it’s your fault.

I bent to help him up. “I’m so sorry. Will you let me take you to a—”

“Get away from me!” he snapped, frightened.

I stepped right back from him.

He scrambled up and staggered away from me, and it wasn’t until he was gone that I realized he had left something behind. It was a mask. I picked it up, meaning to go after him to give it back, but I’d already lost him in the throngs of people going home for the night. I looked down at the mask, wondering what to do with it. Maybe hand it in to the nearest bar, in case he came back for it. I turned it over in case there was a maker’s mark on it, then stopped dead in the middle of the street. There was no maker’s mark, but there was writing across the inside.

For Phaidros Heliades,

Regards,

Dionysus

11

Normal Sown households are big. I should have been living with Helios, his wife, and any of their children still too little for the legion; as well as my wife, our children, our wards, and maybe even her commander. Generally, you’d have men and women on separate sides of the house, because of how irritating men can be mistaken for vegetables. Polydorus had all of that. I was just me. So, instead of one of the tall townhouses on Copper Street, the Palace administrators had assigned me a strange place right on the edge of Thebes, halfway up the last hill before the mountain. Home was a house and an olive grove, and one crooked lemon tree that never made any lemons, on that wild land on the doorstep of the forest.

The house wasn’t really a house. It was five or six habitable rooms on the edge of a great ruined maze. Nobody knew why it was here, but it was definitively a maze and not just a ruined prison or temple: some ways were dead ends, some curled around and around and then you came out only a few feet of the side of where you’d gone in. Here and there on the less-damaged walls, there were frescos in a style very different to the Theban one, and sudden dips where the land had crumbled and exposed the storeys below ground, of which there were at least three. Stand at the edge of my olive grove, among the roots, and look down: what you’ll see is a lichen-eaten staircase, delving towards the sound of water.

I’d never explored it properly. Sometimes, some absconding cows got lost down there and I helped the farmers fish them out, but being down below ground made me feel uneasy before too long. It was cold down there, really cold, even though underground places are usually warm, and sometimes there were carvings on the walls that were so old I wasn’t even sure people had made them. Whoever had built it, I couldn’t help thinking they—maybe like Daedalus at Knossos—had wanted to trap something inside.

The dark was deep on the little path up to the maze by the time I walked it, which was why I had a lamp. But tonight there were torches burning on the verges, marking the curves of the path in a great string. I frowned over that, because my slaves would have set themselves on fire before they did anything that helpful. Very distantly, I started to hear music; drums, pipes. Maybe people laughing. I thought I was making imaginary patterns from the drone of the cicadas, but the further I went, the more distinct it was. Music. Not our music. Something else. I slowed down. I was so tired; too tired to be angry. I wanted to go home, eat something, burn the disconcerting mask, and collapse. I was deaf enough to sleep through it.

Someone was standing under an olive tree, watching me.

For a split second I thought there was something horrifying wrong with them, but it was a mask, not quite like the one I was still holding but not unlike either. This one was a weeping face.

They were just standing there, staring.

In the dark, I couldn’t see any eyes beyond the mask; only that twisted expression moulded into the plaster.

“Hey,” I snapped. “What are you doing?”