Page 44 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“It’s a loop,” our priestess said at last. She and the other from Pylos had just closed the dictionary and exchanged a look I couldn’t read. “They’re saying the same thing again and again. I think it says sacrifice—”

“Or sing,” the other one put in. “It’s the same word.”

Something heavy settled deep in my chest.

“Sacrifice, or sing . . . to the master of dancing.”

I had a powerful urge to get right away from the marvel Furies. They were unsettling enough just in themselves, all bronze teeth and razor wings, but they couldn’t, they could not be chanting a forbidden song that had begun in Thebes after the falling of a star. They had been underground for—how long? A thousand years? It couldn’t be the same song.

“What’s that, is that a god?” the Queen asked, looking sceptical that the priestesses even distantly knew what they were talking about.

Our priestess shrugged and the Pylos priestess looked troubled. She was saying the words to herself.

“What else does it say?”

“It’s . . . something like, made in thunder, burner of cities . . . and then an old word we’re not sure about. It could be a kind of clan leader, or . . .?”

Thunder-wrought and city-razing . . . I could hear it as clearly as if I were in the cells still.

“King,” I said, not believing that it really could be. “King of the holy raging, rave and rise again. Is that it?”

Our priestess looked indignant. “You speak Old Cretan?”

“What?” the Pylos priestess said, as if she had just watched me crawl out of a tomb.

“At the Temple of Ares, six knights are singing that song and they can’t stop,” I explained, clear like I’d always been taught to report, but I didn’t feel very clear. Our knights couldn’t be singing the same song as some marvels from a thousand years ago which had been buried until this morning. “The priests say it’s madness—”

The Pylos priestess caught the arm of a dusty man whose clothes looked like they had used to be very fine, and spoke in their dialect so fast I only just caught it.

“The mad god is here. The knights are already singing to him.”

The man looked grim, and shouted an order to some of the people on wagons nearby. I didn’t understand the words, but I understood their faces. He might as well have said there was plague here and someone had just arrived coughing. People who had been unharnessing horses and oxen to let them graze on the sparse, straw-dry grass snatched up reins and straps again, and like a ripple, the news started to travel backwards through the great caravan.

“What was that?” the Queen said to me. “What did she say?”

“She said the mad god is here, but I don’t—wait! Lady, what do you mean? It’s just a song—”

“It is not just a song,” she said. She came right up to me, and the Queen, and wrenched her veil off. There was a terrible scar down her right eye, inflamed and still new. “It means he’s here. Our knights sang it too. Half of these people sang it before the end. Half of Pylos went insane. I don’t mean they were angry because there was no food and it was very hot, I mean insane. They started to sing that song, and they started to dance, and they couldn’t stop, and before long they were tearing the Palace down.” She looked between us. “Troy was a holy city and we burned it, and he is the curse that follows. And now he’s here. You need to sacrifice to him yesterday, or you need to get out. It’s infectious, you probably have it already. I’m sorry,” she said again, grim, and sprang onto the back of a wagon that was passing us. The driver was urging the oxen into a trot. Dust rose up all around us.

The Queen glanced at me as people and horses and wagons juddered by. She was still and unflustered, like any good knight in the face of something strange, but she did look puzzled.

“Have you ever heard of a mad god?”

I shook my head. But everyone from Pylos must have thought he was worse than the drought, because right down the length of the road, everyone was moving on, and I didn’t see a single person stop. Soon, the only people left on the road were the ones who had died in the storm.

16

The throne room was wreathed in steam from the dragon marvels. It was a relief to walk into the white gloom after the blinding sun outside, but it wasn’t just to save everyone’s eyes. Here and there in that artificial fog were ghosts—people listening, maybe scribes, maybe Guards, always too hazy to see well. Around the throne itself, the air was clear. People standing in the steam could see us, but we couldn’t see them. The vapour was cold enough that I needed my cloak, which was a desperate relief. With the dimness and that cold fog, and the spectres of the watchers around us, the throne room didn’t seem like it was part of the rest of the Palace; it felt more like we had crossed a border, and come into that dead hinterland at the gates of Hades.

The Chamberlain had told me to stay, but I didn’t understand why. There was nothing useful I could do here, and the longer I was here, the longer I wasn’t organising the census.

The other people here were important: the Chamberlain, the captain of the Guards, senior advisers, and even, sitting on the steps that led up to the throne and almost invisible in the vapour, the royal prophet. I didn’t know anyone, so I stayed back, standing on the border between the clearer air in front of the throne, and the fog where the watchers waited.

I felt someone’s eyes down my left side and looked across to find that the prophet was staring at me, or rather through me; Tiresias was blind.

“Heliades,” they said, quiet but clear, even though I was twenty feet away and not making any noise. “Come here.”

Disconcerted, I went across and knelt down close to the steps.