Page 45 of The Hymn to Dionysus

There were all kinds of stories about Tiresias. People—including Tiresias—said that they had started out as a woman and been turned into a man by Apollo, or the other way around—now they were neither on account of how Apollo couldn’t decide in the end and didn’t really care anyway because it was core Tiresias-ness that he liked. They had been struck blind by the force of their visions, and if they weren’t immortal then they were at least old enough to remember Kadmus and the dragon. I believed the first two but not the last one. They weren’t that old.

Now that I was close, I could see what they were doing, which was sharing an apple with a very happy tortoise. It’s hard not to like someone who befriends passing tortoises.

“Prophet?” I said.

The tortoise gave me a narrow look, defending its half of the apple between its paws.

“The Queen,” said Tiresias, without any preamble, “is about to ask us all to agree that there’s no god at work here, it must be a perfectly ordinary plague or a conspiracy or some rubbish; but I think you and I both know that the mad god is very real, and very much here, in Thebes. You’re not going to want to, I know, but you need to say what you think. Otherwise all she’s going to hear is a bunch of idiots who always agree with her; and me, a vendor of what she likes to call esoteric bollocks.”

“I decidedly do not know that there’s a god—”

“Don’t be silly,” Tiresias said, so similarly to the way Dionysus had said it that I had an eerie certainty that they were quoting him, to prove they could overhear things even when they weren’t close by. And—they spoke like him anyway. It was that same accent. Slighter, but they sang their sentences like he did, the ends of words sharp and bronze. “You know him well. He has blue eyes, and wherever he goes, growing things riot, and people lose their minds.” They winked at me. “In places where they haven’t been so stupid as to forget about him, they call him Bakhos.”

That sent a cold spider down my back. It meant “Raver.”

“Why would you think I know him?” I asked. No one knew about the boy from the shore, no one.

“Depends, doesn’t it?” Tiresias said, glimmering at me in exactly the same way Dionysus had last night. “Either a prophet is a person with an excellent intelligence network, and we make certain to hear things across many countries and decades very secretly, and someone saw what happened to your ship and reported it to me—or, Apollo granted me a vision. But a prophet is assuredly a person who would be foolish to let anyone know which it is. Some people will listen only to Apollo, some only to more earthly intelligence. Best to straddle both, I find.”

The Raver—gods, what a name.

“Do this for me, sweet knight,” they said, more seriously. They took my hand, easily, without searching for it. Because they wore indigo, Apollo’s colour, their sleeves had stained their knuckles blue, like the reverse of witches’ tattoos. “The Queen is in danger of making the mistake that all clever people make every so often, which is to think she always judges well, and always sees right. Don’t let her.”

All the things I wanted to say crowded up behind my teeth, so many that I couldn’t say anything. If the mad god was the boy from the shore, then there was a severe chance that I had called him here. Only I wasn’t dead, so he couldn’t be; so what was going on, and why was Tiresias so sure, and was it possible that they were lying to me in order to win the point they wanted to make?

Too late, though: there was a stir across the hall as the Queen walked out from behind the throne, a heavy cloak across her shoulders now, and the marvel crown, with its writhing silver figures of warrior saints, set through her hair.

“What we know,” the Queen said into the new, deep silence, “is that a star fell, and some knights close by lost their minds. Shortly after, my son vanished. Several days earlier, Pylos fell, amid reports of the same madness, and the same song.” She was standing in front of the throne, not sitting on it. “Several centuries earlier—too early for us to have any record of their building—Fury marvels were buried outside the city wall, reciting the same song as the knights now confined at Ares. If this were any other city, with different folklore, I would have no hesitation in concluding that this is a god. However, as we all know, any suggestion of divine intervention in Thebes must be treated with the utmost scepticism. Therefore, I’d like to hear what else this might be.”

A smallish woman stepped forward. She was, like most people who worked directly for the Palace, a slave, but instead of an iron collar, hers was silver, and she was dressed as finely as any Sown lady, in orange: a senior marvel-maker. I only just had time to wonder why a marvel-maker was important for all this before she began.

“It seems striking,” she said, “that this madness has emerged in a drought. We must consider the possibility that it wasn’t the star which caused the madness in the afflicted knights, but something it churned up in the ground. There are many substances that can cause madness, as anybody who’s ever worked in a mercury mine can attest. Pylos is likewise in drought. It seems significant that the Furies were uncovered by a dust storm, and were apparently designed for that. Dust storms move soil. If the madness they warn against afflicted people at the time of their building, also in drought, we can fairly safely say this has something to do with drought conditions.”

“Why would people be singing the same song, cities and centuries apart?” the Queen asked.

I had a sudden feeling that this had been rehearsed. Tiresias smiled at me.

“Songs can survive for a thousand years. Certainly some of the legends of King Kadmus are that old. If it’s in general folk memory, then many people will have heard it outside Thebes. I find it telling that it was knights who sang it, not ordinary citizens: the knights have been away from Thebes for many years. They heard all kinds of forbidden things. It is, sensibly enough, a song about madness—and the deranged will tend to say the first thing that comes to mind. It isn’t wildly unlikely for mad people in different places to sing a song about a mad king. One starts, another copies them; there needn’t be anything divine about it, only ordinary human clockwork.”

She didn’t, I noticed, say “mad god.”

“I think that’s a very benign view of what’s happening,” the captain of the Guards said from beside me. He was as slate-faced as he had been last night when he ordered a hundred and fifty people to be confined for three days in lethal heat. “Something in the ground would suggest this madness is real. It clearly isn’t. The refugees from Pylos were very keen to tell us that people there just . . . went mad. There is no such thing as a citywide madness. But there is such a thing as civil uprising. There was never any madness at Pylos, there was treason and an old song about riot and chaos that the ringleaders used to pull people together under one banner, but now it’s over, people want to believe something else, and they’ve convinced themselves that the mad king in the song is a god. As Zoe says, songs have long lives, especially treason anthems. Outside Thebes it could easily have survived from the time of King Kadmus to the present day. And as for the ‘afflicted’ knights—I’ll stake my armour that there was nothing in the ground, and nothing in the star. Someone ambitious took advantage of its falling and paid those knights to sing and feign madness.”

I wanted to think that wasn’t possible. I’d been with Amphitrion when the star fell; but if someone had moved through the smoke and spoken to knights quietly, would I have known? Probably not.

“They would have had to do that very quickly, Captain,” the Queen said, “given that it was less than an hour between the star’s falling and the arrival of the first knights at Ares.”

“Blackmail doesn’t take long,” he said seriously. “Don’t do as I say and I’ll kill your sister, do as I say and I’ll pay you: it’s that fast.”

“So. Something in the ground, or opportunistic fraud. Anything else?”

“I can tell I’m going be hurled off the city wall in a sack full of snakes soon, but I’m very old so I don’t care,” Tiresias said, and in the fog, a few people laughed. It was a strange choice, I thought, for them to be funny: prophets were usually serious people. I would have thought that the less serious the prophet, the less serious the prophecy would sound.

“Tiresias, I already know what you’re going to say,” the Queen said.

“Really, you know all about the mad god already? Good. You know not to ignore him, then.”

He has blue eyes, and everywhere he goes, growing things riot, and people lose their minds.