Page 59 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“We can’t leave him down there,” I said. “If he gets into a house . . . my slaves are children. You’re alone. I should ask some knights to come.”

“Ah, no,” Dionysus said unexpectedly. “I don’t think he was trying to hurt you, he was just surprised. He’s been here a couple of days already and no harm done. He likes the bee cave, he likes the honey.”

“He was screaming.”

“Bees sting,” he pointed out. “Don’t bring the knights. He’s better off down there than in a cell, is he not?”

“He . . . are you sure he won’t try to hurt anyone?”

“No, but I don’t think we ought to chain him just because he might.”

He was right. It was better than a cell, and whoever it was, the man hadn’t really hurt me. I’d wandered into his territory with a sword: it wasn’t unreasonable to be surprised.

“Walk you home?” Dionysus rounded off.

All good things kill you, in the end.

“Yes please, sir,” I said.

He gave me a lamp. Even that wasn’t quite safe on the uneven ground, which was sunken sometimes and full of unexpected exposed steps, or the pollards of broken pillars. I put my hand out for his. He took it and pulled me so that I bumped into him, on the edge of laughing his smoky laugh, and on my other side, the Nothing slunk off into the dark.

Bliss.

We paused for some goats to cross the path ahead of us. They were clearly on a mission to raid his miraculous garden. One of them baa’d at us politely. “So in Scythia, they have a kind of sheep with a really long tail,” Dionysus told me. “The wool weighs them down, though, and the sheep drag them along the ground and the wool gets all tangled and dirty; so the shepherds build each one a tiny cart to rest their tail on. They wheel around the mountains like that. If you hear a squeaky axle, it’s usually a sheep.”

I did my best stern look. “You made that up.”

“No, I’ve been,” he protested. “It’s a strange place. It rains feathers.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“It does, very cold feathers! I don’t know why.”

“I expect from the Great Heavenly Goose? Or the Almighty Eider Duck?”

He took a breath, then stopped. “Now we’re saying it, I’d like it a lot if Zeus turned out to be a big duck.”

We both laughed. It might have been the first time I’d laughed without feeling ashamed about it in years.

At my gate, he looked up at the lemon tree that never made any lemons as if he suspected it was just sulking and not trying hard enough.

“Do you—want to come in?” I asked, raw and somehow nineteen again.

He winced, and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m expecting a runner, I’ve got two girls right on the edge and if one of them doesn’t go into labour tonight then I’m no witch. Although,” he added, “before I forget.” He took a jar out of his bag and held it out to me. It was marked beautifully with blackwork patterns; bees, and vines, picked out very fine indeed.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Honey.”

“Why?”

“Ah. Normal humans who live in proximity sometimes give things to each other; it’s a way of saying you’d like to be friends if it isn’t too inconvenient. Do you know about friends? It’s when you keep talking to another person for a good while but neither of you sets the other one on fire.”

I almost laughed, because that was a two-sided joke if there ever was one, given that he assuredly would be setting me on fire soon. “I see, I see. And what’s the strategic function of this?”

“It’s operationally redundant,” he said, just as seriously, “but good for morale.”

I did laugh this time, sad and not. “Thank you,” I said. “I love honey.”