Page 51 of The Hymn to Dionysus

He opened his hand, and there was a horrible cracking noise that must have been bones resetting themselves, and the snake lifted its head as if nothing had happened. He let it go into the grass again.

I had heard of sorcerers in Egypt who had that kind of magic, but I’d never seen it, and never thought I would see it. I didn’t want to breathe.

“I can make it so that you don’t remember,” he said, nodding to the snake, “or so that you do. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling warm and gold, and safe.

I wondered what you had to do, to forge an agreement with the Ferryman. Something deinos. Perhaps more than an ordinary witch could do.

He has blue eyes, and wherever he goes, people lose their minds . . . and I had invited him here, and there had been footsteps in the glass.

“How do you know about the mad god?” I asked.

Sometimes, you have a conversation between two mirrors. Instead of talking to just one person, you talk to versions and versions of them, reflected back and back. Maybe I was talking to a good witch. Maybe I was talking to a thing that had screamed down from the sky and made itself into a man from the cinders. Maybe he knew I was wondering about it, and maybe he didn’t, and maybe he would laugh if I asked him, or maybe he would lose interest and I’d be a pillar of fire. Among all the reflections, I couldn’t tell which one was really him.

“Everyone knows, except here.”

“But you can’t just—not notice a god.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—I know Zeus is here, I’ve seen lightning. I was a sailor, I know Poseidon; I’ve been in love, I understand the Lady. I’ve fought justly, so I know Athena, and I’ve fought in a blind rage; I know Ares. Wherever I go, they have gods, but those gods are the same as ours really. They have the Mother in Egypt, but they call her Isis, and in Persia she’s Ishtar. Everyone dies: everyone has a name for the Unseen. But I’ve never come across a god we just . . . don’t have.”

Dionysus was smiling. “You’ve seen him. You know him well. Knights know him as well as any sailor knows Poseidon.”

I looked up slowly.

“On battle lines, sometimes people go blind, don’t they? Or they run away, and everyone thinks they’re cowards, but later they don’t remember. Or they seem like a great fighter, for years, but then one evening, something snaps, and in their sleep they murder fifty cattle thinking those are soldiers; or fifty people. Herakles killed his family. That’s the mad god.”

He was right. I did know all that, very well indeed. I’d seen people hauled off the line blind for no reason. We all knew it had to be a god, but nobody knew which one. And battle madness: I’d always conceived of it as a kind of generalised weakness of soul, not a god taking a hammer to anyone’s mind.

His function is to guard the border between the clockwork and the wild.

“The royal prophet said something about how he’s to do with wine as well,” I said. “That’s—a different sort of madness, I can see that, but . . .” I was struggling to say what I meant. “But it’s very specific. Battle madness and drunkenness? It’s not like the sea, or death. They’re not important enough to be a . . . to be a god.”

Dionysus was watching the other witches finishing their ritual, the figures in black moving straight and slow now through the mad knights in their cages. “Well. They’re two things of a great many, none of which people here put together into one idea. There are plenty of others. Stories. Dancing. Masks.” A dry wind moved his veil, ghosting it against one of side of his face. “And the trance of prophets, and the bees, and the auroch. He is what makes a beaten wife murder her husband, and slaves kill their owners, and citizens burn palaces.” He moved his fist very slightly, miming an upward punch.

None of those things felt to me as if they had anything to do with each other, and I was about to say so, but I recognised the feeling suddenly. It was how I felt when I was learning a language that marked the borders of its ideas differently to ours.

In our language, we have a colour that is the sky, and also the colour of a shield, and we say that’s bronze. Then there’s a colour that’s wine, and the sea, and we call that purple: but that doesn’t make sense to anyone from the Tin Isles. If you sail into the north, where the nights are long and you can be fog-bound for days ten ship lengths from shore, and you pull in at Tintagel, by the great mines, people don’t understand calling the sky bronze and the sea purple. It doesn’t matter if you say, Well, before you treat bronze it’s greenish and where the sun is strong in the south, the sea really is the colour of wine in the afternoon: they look at you like you’re mad, because for them, the sea and the sky are one colour. We aren’t seeing different things, but we are thinking of them differently.

The mad god was like that. I was seeing him: but the way I thought meant I didn’t put all his parts together into one thing.

When I’d found out about the special Tin Isles colour, I’d spent a week gathering up bits of old glass and jewellery and corroded bronze and thread and asking miners, Is this right? Is this? Is this? and eventually, I’d got an idea of the band of things they put together as their sea-sky colour.

It had a been an uncanny thing when the idea had soaked into me enough that one morning, I looked out at the sky and the sea and thought: Yes. That’s blue.

“I know they all look different,” Dionysus said, and I could see him hunting around for ways to explain, but I cut my hand across the air. I didn’t mean to, but it was my sign for it’s all right. It was almost impossible to explain things like that, when you could already see what linked them up.

“I’ll see it soon,” I said, and explained about blue.

He tilted back a little then, as if I’d said something extraordinary. “That’s a graceful way to see a group of things you hate,” he said.

“How I feel about things isn’t very relevant to understanding what they are and why they’re driving half the garrison mad,” I said. “You didn’t say he was a good thing, just that he’s a true thing.”

“Yes,” he said, and looked away again. He wasn’t, I noticed suddenly, drinking. Maybe he had had some of that lethal brandy before he arrived, but I didn’t think so. He was glacially sober.

“Do you want to get on?” I asked awkwardly.