Page 46 of The Hymn to Dionysus

And about an hour before all this began, I had called him here. It was too close to ignore, but I couldn’t make it fit. I still wasn’t dead. I wasn’t even mad.

The Queen looked weary. “All right, who is he?”

“Long ago,” Tiresias said, “there was a god older and greater than Zeus, who is a child by comparison. He was never a god of anything so straightforward as thunder or the sea. Humans are weird animals; partly we’re wild, and partly we are clockwork. Unholy devices, all of us—mechanisms bolted onto bone.”

I frowned, because they were speaking subtly differently, not in the cheerful way they had before. They sounded less like they were talking now, but something else was talking through them; something friendly and ancient that liked them, but nonetheless had its own voice. I’d never been to Delphi, I’d never seen Apollo possess the Oracle, but all at once I knew it would look like this.

“The mad god is as old as human beings, and his function is to guard the border between the clockwork and the wild. When we veer too near to clockwork, he brings the old wildness again; to remind us of what we are, and to save us from much worse. He can be gentle; he is in music and the bards’ stories, and in a cup of wine. He can be a shepherd easing us away from the borders of the poison places. But fight him, and he will fight back. He is madness too. At our peril we forget the king of the holy raging, who, like the ivy, never dies.”

“Is that,” said the Queen, sounding as though she had passed irritated now and flown into a sort of serene hopelessness that she was ever going to get out of this room, “a very impressive-sounding way of saying we should all get really drunk and have a cataclysmic party, or else? Music, stories, wine? What? Is this a bet you’ve got with your opposite number in Athens?”

People laughed.

Tiresias swayed, like they had been sleepwalking and now they were waking up. I went up the steps fast, worried they were going to fall.

“Prophet?” I said tentatively.

Tiresias blinked twice. “Helios?”

“Phaidros.”

They shook their head once, looking disconcerted. “You sound so alike.” It was true. If I was being especially obnoxious, all he had to do was swear pyroclastically at a general through a tent wall and blame me, and discipline was immediately restored. “What . . . was I saying?”

It wasn’t pretend. They had no idea.

“A masterly performance as always,” the Queen growled. “Now we’ve heard from all sides: send out the heralds. Anyone who sings that song will be condemned to immediate slavery. Anyone caught sacrificing to any new god will also go to the fields, or to the galleys. Anyone spreading rumours of the lost prince will be executed. Thank you all. Heliades, come here.”

Tiresias squeezed my arm and gave me a wry look that said, Didn’t I tell you? “Hand me that tortoise,” was all they said.

I gave them the tortoise, and the apple, and watched them vanish into the cold fog for a second before I carried on up the steps to the throne. That voice just now—it hadn’t been Tiresias.

The Queen looked me over as though she suspected Tiresias was infectious. “Go to Ares and question the afflicted knights. Find out if they really are mad,” she said. “If this is fraud, then whoever paid them will also have Pentheus.”

“Yes, lady,” I said quietly, but didn’t move, because two equal and opposite forces were at war in my head, and the result was exactly no motion in either direction.

What Tiresias had said was sound. I knew it was. I knew there was a god who drove people mad and who had wrecked my ship. I’d brushed his hair once.

But the kind of person who said, Haha, but what you’ve got to remember is that humans can’t be all duty and honour and rationality all the time, and if you try then there’s a special god who’ll drive you mad—that kind of person was usually telling you his grand philosophy while he was four drinks down and about to make his third lunge after the good-looking stable boy. It was laziness, and the need to intellectually justify being a pig. We’re all just animals really, no use pretending we ain’t! Lunge. Cue a huge fight to save the stable boy. Something right down in my soul was embarrassed for Tiresias, that they had said that in public. Even though . . .

Even though I also knew that what had said it today wasn’t some hog of an Athenian gone three sheets to the wind. It wasn’t even Tiresias.

“Do you . . . need winding up?” the Queen offered, pretending—very kindly, given that she could have hit me—to look for the key to my clockwork.

I couldn’t say to her that a god had once turned my ship back into a forest. She would never listen to anything I said again.

“I think it’s possible not to see what you don’t expect to, lady,” I said to the hem of her cloak.

Even that made me sound like I wanted to desert and go to Athens.

“And to see what you do expect to, even when it isn’t there,” she said. She took my elbows and guided me upright. I kept my eyes on the cloak hem. It had a double seam, stitched in silver. “Why do you expect to see a god, knight? Do you think the story about the lost heir is true, do you think my sister had a child of Zeus?”

“Are you certain that she didn’t?”

“Yes,” she said unexpectedly. She touched my shoulder and guided me behind the throne, through a low door into a much smaller chamber behind.

I slowed down, because I’d expected a receiving room or somewhere private she could sit by herself and not listen to Tiresias, but it was full of marvel mechanisms. They were built into the walls, and everywhere there were pipes, hot and cold. Things clicked and turned, feeding into the throne. In the middle of the room, looking out of place, were a couple of chairs, a little table with a pitcher on it, a bowl of apples, and box of papyrus documents. She nodded for me to sit down. “Less eerie when you know how it works, isn’t it,” she said, nodding at the walls and the pipes. “The story about my sister is the same. It was never meant to be a true story, when she said the father was Zeus; it’s a legal shorthand. Have you heard of this?”

“No?” I said, wrong-footed.