Page 52 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“You still haven’t drunk all that,” he said to the flask.

I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be doing. I drank more water.

Bakhos, the Raver, lord of the dance, and madness, and wine, and blasphemous music, and whatever that animal, auroch fury it was that built and built in you when you’d been wronged and one day you just—snapped. Whatever colour it was that ran through all those things, it was something to do with chaos. It was everything we hated here, and everything we outlawed. Wasn’t it? Bees, the trance of prophets . . . there was nothing wrong in those. Stories; Helios had told me stories.

“Do you think he’s offended, that he’s been forgotten here?” I asked.

I thought he was going to say, Yes. Obviously. He’s calling in his debts.

“No,” Dionysus said. He sounded strangely muted now, as though he had found something sad in what I’d said about blue. I hoped not. I liked the blue story; I’d only meant it as an interesting curiosity. “Belief never made a god, and nor did sacrifice. They just are.”

“What do you mean?” It sounded close to heresy.

“Well—Poseidon is the sea, and the tide won’t stop rising just because no one sacrifices to him. Time is there, death is there, the earth, war, love. Even if there is some terrible place three thousand years from now where nobody remembers any gods at all, there will still be the sea and love . . .” His eyes slipped to the knights again. Even behind the veil, they were starry with the lamplight. “And madness. People will have just forgotten how to talk to them.”

It had the ring of prophecy. Even after I’d thought about it later, I couldn’t tell why. The words of oracles are delivered in verse—that’s why bards sing in verse, because it’s the Muse talking, not them, or so they like to say—but Dionysus hadn’t spoken in poetry. It still prickled the hairs on my arms. “Then . . . why would he do this?”

He was watching the other witches and the mad knights in their cages now, not me, his shoulders loose and his red-tattooed hands in his lap, trapped between his knees. For such a tall man, he took up almost no space. “Maybe he’s like anyone, maybe he’s just visiting. Maybe he’s trying to make sure some idiot doesn’t commit suicide by tyrant.”

Either he was reminding me he couldn’t possibly know, or it was a way of saying, Well, you asked me to come. Back between the mirrors again.

Maybe it was because I was turning feverish from hunger and the strangely comfortable headache, but it didn’t feel terrible, to be between the mirrors. It was disconcerting, but sometimes . . . I liked being disconcerted. And I didn’t like that I’d made him sad. I hunted around for something that would spark him off again.

“Don’t call the Queen a tyrant,” I said. “Tyrants seize power, monarchs inherit it; if you call her a tyrant it sounds like you’re saying there’s another rightful heir. I don’t think you could make her think she’s a swarm of bees, or whatever it is you normally do to people who vex you, before she has you shot. So just—be careful.”

“It’s squirrels,” he said seriously, “I really like squirrels; it’s because they have tiny hands and their tails are silly.”

I looked away so he wouldn’t have to see me grinning. I was still caught up in the novelty of meeting an adult who liked to play and joke and who didn’t seem to worry at all about his dignity—and the strangest thing was that he wasn’t missing dignity. He had plenty, but it was like quicksilver instead of armour. You couldn’t put a dent in it.

He refilled the water cask and gave it to me again. “How’s the headache?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and I was. I had a feeling it was less to do with being made to drink enough as sitting down and talking to someone who minded so much about what happened to me that he would threaten, convincingly, to go down to Hades and drag me back if I was too careless. “Thank you. Is there anything I can do to help?” I nodded at the mad knights.

He shook his head as he stood up. “I doubt it. Go home, get some rest.”

“No, I’ll wait for you. The road isn’t safe, neither of us should be walking alone at night any more.”

“You really think so?” he said. Earlier, with the people from Pylos, I’d thought he was oblivious to danger because he was too tall to come up against any most of the time, but I had a scritching feeling now that it might be because he really, truly never was in danger. I almost asked him. Only almost. If I was wrong, he’d laugh at me, which would be a relief, but if I wasn’t . . . I didn’t know what he would do. But sure as the Acheron is cold, we wouldn’t talk again like we had just now. That was the most I’d talked to anyone in ten years, about anything that wasn’t to do with how to smash a city wall open. I could live between the mirrors for a while longer.

“The Guards are arresting people to order, to go into slavery and get the harvest in,” I said instead, quiet, because you don’t need to be told when some things are secrets. “I don’t think they’re going to be strict about whether anyone’s committed any real crime or not. I think they’re going to take whoever’s an easy target. Anyone alone on the road.”

As soon as I said it, I was acutely aware of the people around us, and how many of them were near enough to listen. If someone tried to drag him away, maybe they would turn into a tree—or maybe he would die in the fields. That hurt to think of.

Dionysus said nothing, but he nodded once and turned towards the mad knights. I did too, wanting to see what the witches would do differently than the priests.

Already, they seemed more precise. None of them were trying to stop the knights dancing or singing with brute force, and not just because it would have been hard for them to. When a priest tried, one of the witches stopped him, fast, and I heard her say it would hurt the knight more than letting him get on with it for now.

I blinked twice when one of the witches took out a mask, one of the ones—or very like them—from Dionysus’s dance. It was sculpted and painted to look like an old man, gaunt, with cheekbones that were too sharp and sunken eyes painted dark to make them more sunken still, mouth open so the person wearing it could still speak clearly, beard as grey as the skin, silver hoops pierced through the alabaster ears to suggest a sailor. It looked like a horrible caricature of a person while the witch was holding it. She held it up in front of a knight so that he could see it as he turned through his dance, and then, fast because she had to catch him in one of those turns, she pressed it over his face.

The man stopped turning. He didn’t bring his hands up to hold the mask, but he let the witch hold it in place while she tied the cord of the mask behind his head. He just stood there, not moving, not dancing. Then . . . all at once, he seemed to feel the heat of the evening, and how tired he was, and probably how hungry and thirsty, and he buckled down onto the ground. One of the witches gave him a flask and he drank from it.

“How did she do that?” I breathed. There was silence from everyone who had seen. Other witches were moving away purposefully now, opening up their medicine satchels, taking out other masks—masks of beautiful married ladies with short hair and golden coronets, masks of satyrs with wicked grins and tiny horns, masks of old men, but never, I realized, anyone of fighting age. No unmarried women with long hair. No young men. But all the witches had some, as though a mask was an ordinary kind of medicine everyone knew about.

“Do you want to guess?” Dionysus asked me. It should have been irritating, but he said it carefully, and after what we had talked about just now, I understood why. He was trying to show me what blue was, and that worked far better if I had to look for myself. I brushed his elbow to tell him not to worry I was about to swear explosively and demand real answers. He skimmed his hand over mine and I almost said, Please, please don’t, because I already liked him too much for it to be knightly.

“The masks aren’t knights,” I said slowly, not quite there.

There was a frustrated shout from not far away, because on another knight, it hadn’t worked, and she was still turning and singing. On another, a man from Polydorus’s unit now in a married-lady mask, it seemed to slow him down enough for one of the witches to get some water into him, but he didn’t stop, exactly; he was still rocking and mumbling, and when she let go of him, he went back to a small, more shuffling version of the endless spinning of the dance.