Page 57 of The Hymn to Dionysus

Still no one.

I clamped my hand over my shoulder where I’d felt it, tingling nastily, and felt something sticky. When I held my hand to the light, there was something black-red on my fingertips. I shone my lamp upwards, and stared, because the ceiling was bleeding. Slow, viscous streams were creeping down the walls, dripping on the way, through strange patterns in the rock walls that had formed like furrows. They looked horribly biological. A feeling like dozens of spiders ran down my back. Nothing in my training had told me what to do if one day you went down into a maze and part of it turned out to be the insides of a giant.

Something bumped into the side of my head, and I heard a discombobulated buzz.

Bees.

Now I’d seen one, I could see others. They were following flight paths about a foot above my head. They weren’t normal bees. They were massive, black, cicada-sized monsters, and the droning of their wings was just at the pitch I struggled to hear, and gods, but the walls weren’t bleeding, it was honey. Those furrows weren’t rock, but hives. I’d never seen them built like that before. I held up the lamp higher, trying to see further, not sure I should trespass any more into the bees’ territory.

Another shriek came from up ahead. Further among those great citadel hives.

With honey tapping me all over now, I followed the noise.

The way opened out. It was sudden: the was the narrow beehive-lined corridor, then a turn so tight it aimed backwards, and then a great cavern that swallowed up my light. The bees were everywhere. I’d thought the hives along the corridor had been huge, but those were only little outposts. In here was a whole city. Honey gleamed on the floor and sometimes on the wreckage of broken combs where other things had wanted to get at it, and the bees were out in legions, making the air gritty, and I didn’t understand, because there were no flowers down here, but then I saw where they were going. There was a fissure in the roof of the cavern, and through it: moonlight. And a great tumble of flowering vines, completely in defiance of the drought.

There was a light, not too far away; just a single lamp, like mine. Someone was moving among the hives there, a tall slim figure with a knife that shone and hair bound up in a green band. Dionysus: I almost called out that it wasn’t safe, but then I saw what he was doing and shut up. He was taking pieces of honeycomb, setting them into a basket, and the bees were seething around his hands. There were so many that they would have killed him straightaway if anything startled them. They were swarming out of the hive, like soldiers pouring out to muster from a ship, under the command of some bee-herald whose voice we couldn’t hear, but they weren’t flying or stinging or any of it. In among all their writhing, they sometimes made shapes that bees shouldn’t know about. I saw shoulders and spines, and ships, and I stopped still when I understood they weren’t just looking at him. They were telling him things. Bees are prophets, everyone knows that, but I’d never actually seen them talk to anyone before.

I realized about a heartbeat too late that standing there in that vast dark space with a lit lamp was stupid, and right then, there was an unearthly crowing noise from the darkness. It was very much: What’s that?

I put the lamp down and snapped to the side, as far away from it as I could get without charging right into onto of those palace hives, and something else prowled into the light.

It was the size of a person. Crouched over, bundled up against the cold in the maze, honey-filthy, hair matted, and I would have said it was a human, but the shape of the head was wrong. Huge, heavy; horns. A bull—there was horror crawling right up the inside of my spine and making a nest in my skull—but no. A bull mask, made from tightly bound straw, the horns crowned in ivy as if the man had smashed headfirst into one of those vine-bound trees in the forest. Whoever it was, he considered the lamp, then kicked it, and the dark plunged in.

There was moonlight from up above, and Dionysus’s lamp, but both of those might as well have been as far away as the stars. I couldn’t see the bull-masked man. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face. The man must have been able to see, though, because he screamed again, that same mad primordial scream that I hadn’t even recognised as human before, and he flung me backwards into the wall. Honeycomb broke under my shoulder, and furious bees roared, loud even for me, and then—

—and then it wasn’t bees.

It was the roar of chariot wheels as they thundered in over the plain at Troy. I wasn’t in the cold cave. I was in the cold night under sterile frozen stars, and the chariots were coming, making that insectile whickering noise they had because of the razorblades worked into the axles. They only had to drive past you to cut you off at the knees.

Helios was marshalling us into square units, shouting over the noise that he knew we remembered how to do this. Spears down, push, you could flip a chariot, he’d give the horses to the first person to do it (not you, Phaidros, we’re drowning in bloody horses, you little show-off) and people were laughing, and then—and then the sweep of the chariots reached the unit beside us and their polemarch was in pieces, and Helios shouted not to look at her, look at him, ready, and . . .

“Phaidros. Knight, can you hear me?”

It was such a familiar voice, but it didn’t belong with the regiment. It had smoke in it. I didn’t have time to think about it, though, because the chariots were right on top of us, and Helios was facing the enemy polemarch at the front, smiling. He loved being on the front line, the way athletes love being in the stadium.

“It’s Dionysus. You’re in the maze. Come back, knight.”

I did know someone called Dionysus. He was kind, or maybe he wasn’t, maybe he was dangerous, or both; I couldn’t remember.

“Oh, it’s the bees,” I heard him say, more to himself than to me, and all the noise vanished.

Everything was silent.

No more Troy, no more chariot line. This was the maze, of course it was the maze, and I couldn’t believe there had been any question; and now Dionysus was kneeling in front of me, holding my neck to see into my eyes by the light of a new lantern. It shouldn’t have been quiet. The bees were boiling all around us, and I was crumpled against the cavern wall beside a hive swarming with upset workers trying to rescue baby bees who weren’t ready to leave the combs yet.

I tried to say something but I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

Dionysus touched his heart—the sign I always used for sorry. I must have used it with him and not realized.

Dionysus: who was dangerous, who was the boy from the shore, who was here for revenge, and who I was very happy to see all the same.

In case he had seen me do it before, I made my sign for thank you.

He pointed to the gap in the cavern roof, where there was a rope.

It was knotted, so you could stand on the end. He kicked some mechanism hidden by a rock, stepped onto the knot below mine, and put his arm across me. My ribs flickered, not used to that; he felt it and put his hand flat on my breastbone. Easy, easy. The rope began to rise on its own. I saw the counterweight go by; a person-sized wine cask, probably full of stones. Still, everything was soundless. It was a relief. I shut my eyes and let my head rest forward against the rope, which was waterproofed with beeswax pushed deep into the grain of the hemp. Behind me, Dionysus smelled of honey and flowers and hot linen, and I had a spike of embarrassment, because surely I was covered in honey and crushed bees now, and—but it was so good and safe too, his arm across me and his chest against my back. I could feel him breathing. I put my hand over his. I regretted it instantly because I shouldn’t have, because he was going to smack it away, but he only hooked his thumb over mine to hold it there.

He always seemed to make me feel two things at once and this time, it was hope and despair. I couldn’t go around feeling like this about a witch, if he even was a witch. I was supposed to be on the marriage register. And if he wasn’t . . . only, it didn’t matter, because I’d forgotten what it was like for someone to think I was worth something, and it was like being exactly the right amount of drunk: shameful and lovely.