Page 30 of The Hymn to Dionysus

It was one of those moments that, although you understand, later, how it came to be, and you can see its clockwork and what gear moved what and how, is nonetheless—at the time—that particular type of unnerving that clenches all your insides up into a rat king.

The figure in the mask turned around, away from me I thought; and there was another mask. They had two faces.

The second one was wearing a manic grin.

I’d jolted right back before I understood that the sad mask was on the back of the person’s head, and the grinning mask was across their face.

Then whoever it was laughed and ran away, down through the olive grove, straight under the house, into the tunnels.

“No, stop! You can’t go down there, you’ll get l—”

“Aren’t you coming?” a voice floated back. “Dionysus invited you.”

The laughter faded off into the labyrinth, where it was lost in the music.

I looked down at the mask in my hand, coming to terms with not sleeping for another hour. If this Dionysus was not only going to find out my name and have some poor bastard seek me out on the street to give me a creepy mask, but send people round to harass me until I turned up to whatever blasphemy was going on further along the maze, then I would turn up, and I would make him eat his fucking mask.

Once I was a little way along the path, towards the westernmost edge of the labyrinth where the music was coming from, I saw more torchlight. Voices rose over the music, laughing. Before long, I saw the people too, people in masks and dressed in bright colours, clacking wine cups together. The air was full of smoke and alcohol. And that unholy music, which sounded like nothing ever sanctioned in Thebes. It was wild, and loud, and disgusting.

I pressed my teeth together. The law about Sown knights and alcohol wasn’t arbitrary. You do not want a bunch of professionally aggressive lunatics each with an armoury’s worth of heavy weaponry to be drunk. We’re bad enough sober. Even the smell of it was making me edgy.

Lamps like I’d never seen before glimmered everywhere. Mine were just ceramic things with a well for oil, but these were glass; colourless glass, bright glass, glass with images painted on it, glass faceted like a mosaic. They spilled coloured light in patches across tree boughs and threw it upward to make the leaves of grape vines purple or yellow, and there were grape vines everywhere. And ivy: it was rioting right up the trees, so dense that sometimes the shape of them was lost.

I had to turn around as I walked to take it in. It wasn’t just that someone had decided this was a good place for a party. Someone was living here, growing things here, grapes and spices, and hibiscus flowers, and bright plants I couldn’t even name. Even the moss that grew across the open ruins of the labyrinth was lush. It was impossible. The water it would all need had dried up months ago.

I brushed the shoulder of someone who looked more sober than other people. When she turned around, she wearing a mask too.

“Who started this?” I asked, and didn’t add, Don’t mind me, I’ll just stab him and be on my way.

“What? You don’t know Dionysus? Everyone knows Dionysus! He was here a second ago . . .”

“What does he look like?”

“He has a silver mask. You’ll see. I heard he’s from India.”

I moved on, half looking for the man, half just trying to keep my bearings. The whole thing was like a fever dream. I’d walked through the ruins before, but I couldn’t tell where I was now. In one of the labyrinth’s old fountains, pristinely clean, there was wine trickling through the half-worn-away statues of someone else’s gods, foaming where it fell any distance, the edge of the wall just too high for anyone to fall into, and lined with endless cups. Servers in animal masks collected old cups, vanishing into the shadows under the vines, behind where the musicians played. Hundreds of people. The gods knew how this Dionysus prick had organised it all and kept it secret at the same time.

No, well: clearly the masks were invitations, and probably the messengers had told people where to come, and to be quiet about it. Probably most people hadn’t punched them in the face before they could say anything. But why me? A senior Sown officer, proverbially square: that was madness. And how did he even know my name?

Those brilliant glass lamps lit the way down into the lower passages of the labyrinth. Lots more people were down there. When I strayed that way, a boy who seemed familiar under the mask caught me and slung his arm around my shoulders, alarmingly taller than anyone has any right to be when you remember them being born.

“Phaidros! You were one of my officers at Troy!”

“Stop touching me,” I said. “Where’s Dionysus?”

He giggled. I’d never seen a knight drunk before—even when I’d been fighting with Helios and drinking with the Athenians, I’d never got to giggling stages of drunkenness—and it was getting harder and harder not find it obscene. “Dionysus! I saw him before . . .” He turned around twice on the spot, and nearly fell over.

“Who is he?”

“I heard he came from Hattusa. I think he’s a prince.”

Hattusa was not in India. Hattusa was across the sea from us: they had forbidden anyone in their sprawling empire to trade with us for reasons that boiled down to thinking we were grubby and annoying. Troy was on the nearer edge of the Hatti Empire.

But the prince part made sense. There were hundreds of people here, and thousands of drachmas’ worth of wine. Then the musicians, and the food going round on trays, the slaves who were clearing away cups and bringing new ones: it must have cost a fortune.

“Where did you see him last?” I demanded.

He executed what he probably thought was a flirty wink. “Why don’t we go somewhere quiet and I’ll tell you?”