Page 53 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I couldn’t see Dionysus’s face any more, and so he was only a tall spectre beside me, but I knew his angles and posture well enough to know he was watching me, though he hadn’t moved his head. “Warm,” he said.

“What’s happening?” the first knight in the old man mask asked, but he didn’t sound right. He was about twenty-five, but his voice was cracking and high. He sounded elderly.

“The masks make them . . . what the mask is,” I said slowly. “Or, it—confuses them? Just enough, to . . . what, to not be knights, and so the madness doesn’t quite—stick, in the same way?” I stopped. “Is this why witches wear veils?” I said it at the same time I thought it, without being able to trace the reasoning properly, but the moment it was out, I knew I was right. It was witching thinking, I could tell that much at least, and maybe even blue. “You can only be a good witch if you’re not entirely a person at the time. You have to be something . . . blank.”

Dionysus’s shoulders went back and he looked down at me with a disconcertion that showed in all his bones. “Gods, Phaidros. If the knighting ever falls through, the witching is waiting.”

It was hard not to feel pleased with that, even though I shouldn’t have cared what he thought.

It was working on perhaps a third of the afflicted knights. Some were sitting down now; some were even eating, slowly, as though they were struggling to remember the last time they had done it. A girl from my unit in the mask of an older lady was even talking to her witch, almost normally. With a fizzy hope rising and rising inside, trying to crush it down so I couldn’t be too disappointed if it all stopped working, I went across to see if she would recognise me, and she lit up.

“Phaidros,” she said. Her voice was lower than usual, but that was all. “I haven’t seen you for an age.”

She had seen me two days ago. It sounded mad, but it was so much better than the singing madness that I could have cried with relief. I hugged her and she laughed, and I asked her if she wanted to see her commander, and she looked a little bit puzzled and asked me if her commander was still alive—she was talking as though twenty years had passed—but when I said that yes she was, she was at the garrison, very worried, the girl beamed and said she’d like that a lot if I really wasn’t winding her up. When I gave her some bread, holy of fucking holies, she ate it. I held her masked face in both hands for a second, torn between joy and dismay, because if we had asked the witches sooner, maybe Amphitrion wouldn’t be dead. The girl smiled and held my wrists, and told me to calm down, young man, which only made me laugh more. I sounded hysterical; it wasn’t knightly, to laugh like that, but just for now, I didn’t care.

Not a cure, not exactly, and not for everyone, but so, so much better than a death sentence in the cellars of Ares. Feeling like you feel when you walk into the sea and a wave lifts you and tides you to the shore, I went back to Dionysus and, not caring that it was improper, or that I shouldn’t touch a veiled witch, or that I didn’t even know any more if he was just a witch, I slung both arms around him, dragging him down to that he had to bend forward against me.

“Thank you,” I said against his hair. “I would never have asked the Queen for this parliament if it weren’t for you and all your—fucking peculiar ways.” I was still laughing while I said it and it made me my voice sound completely unfamiliar, even from the inside.

He hugged me back just as tight. I couldn’t see through the veil, only the sheen of the strange, liquid fabric in the torches. I kissed him through it, just a scratch against his cheek, playing really, but he went still.

I did too, suddenly needlingly aware that there were people watching us, and why wouldn’t they, because probably Tiresias had been a child who knew nothing of Apollo the last time a sane knight had forgotten himself so far as to snatch at a witch in public. I had a searing realization that I’d crossed an unmarked, crucial border.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I managed, staring at the ground and wanting to vitrify. I’d always thought I had a great curtain wall in my head between me and anything like that, and there was a chthonic horror in understanding that actually, it was just a tiny moat I could trip over if I didn’t look where I was going, and there was evil on the far side, whickering at me through the fog. Helios would have had me flogged. Forget yourself a little, and you’re far closer to forgetting yourself altogether than you ever want to think.

“Don’t be so stupid,” Dionysus said. He sounded shocked.

“I know, I’m sorry—”

“Phaidros! I’m telling you not to be sorry, not—this—where is this rancid shame coming from, who did this to you?” His voice was a broken lamp, smoking and full of shattered glass, and I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t understand, and it was so far away from what I’d expected him to say that the sounds of the words hardly hung together into any meaning at all.

He had no time to say anything else, because right through the temple courtyard, there was a sudden, perfect silence. The witches had stopped murmuring. And the knights—the knights, masked and not, were marvel-still, and as if they had heard a command roared across the field, they all turned the same way. It was towards us. No; towards him.

Something took hold of them then. They started to talk. Not to each other. They aimed it at some point in the middle distance, and they all said different things. I slipped past other people until I could catch some words.

“—and they shall rave on the mountainside—”

“She will murder her sorrow—”

“Dance!”

“The High City shall fall when the god goes before the Queen . . .”

Close to me was a scribe from the Palace with a clay tablet. I apologised, stole it, pushed the heel of my hand across the clay to erase the marks, and started to take down what they were saying. It didn’t take long before I realized each knight was saying the same thing again and again, but all of them were saying different things.

When the god goes before the Queen, the High City shall fall

She shall murder her sorrow in a crown of ivy

They shall break free and rave on the mountainside

Into ruin shall fall the House of Kadmus, into ruin all Achaea

Flee, children of the dragon

Sing

Dance