Page 67 of The Hymn to Dionysus

The room was still. Dionysus was exactly where I’d left him. Trying to breathe normally, I sat up and started counting down from two hundred. It was something Helios had used to do; it worked, sometimes. I could feel it wasn’t going to work now, but there wasn’t much else to try.

I was on a hundred and fifty-nine when, opposite me, the cupboard door opened and someone climbed out, monstrous in the bull mask.

The front of my mind tried very, very hard to convince the back of it that I was asleep and having a nightmare, because there was no possible way someone could have been sitting in that cupboard, but there they were, standing in the middle of the room, just out of the moonbeam. They were looking at Dionysus, standing too bent. It looked painful. Very quietly, they drifted towards him, not quite into the light, and sniffed. It was the way that the bulls studied a thing before they crushed it. And—I could hear hooves. I could hear the thunk of them on the floor, so heavy I was sure I’d see scars on the stone if I could just twist far enough to look, and I could smell that dense, green animal smell of cattle, and now, the way the moonlight was just catching those horns, which I was certain had been straw before, just part of a mask—the shine was the shine of bone.

I had to be asleep. I had nightmares all the time.

The bent figure swung slowly away from Dionysus and thudded across to me. It was so much heavier than it should have been. I could feel the floor shaking through the frame of the bed. The man, the thing, was keeping to the left of the moonlight, so that all I could see was a shadow with the suggestion of limbs and clothes. My sword was in the corner, as far out of reach as the Nile. I couldn’t do anything except keep still, and hope that would work on a man-bull like it did on real bulls.

The man-bull was right next to me, leaning down beside the pillow. It sniffed hard again, then powered out the same breath so hard it moved my hair. I still couldn’t see it fully, but I would have sworn on my armour that that head wasn’t a mask any more.

Fuck’s sake.

“Dionysus!” I yelled.

Dionysus sat up fast, and at the same time, the person, the thing, let out an animal snarl and ran away, thundering into the next room, and then there was a bang that was the door down into the maze smacking into the wall. I tried to get up but the rope round my ankle pulled me back. Dionysus had stopped in the doorway, hunter-motionless, looking out, into the kitchen, and towards the darkness of the stairs.

“Where did it—untie me? Where did it go?”

“Into the maze.” He cut the rope rather than wait around wrestling with the knot. The knife must have been very sharp indeed, because the rope gave with just one slice. Yes—it was my knife, the one I’d given him in the wagon with the people from Pylos. He gave it to me, then took the flints out of my tinderbox. Crack, crack, the tiny flashes strobing across us both, eternities between each one, and then one caught on a coil of sawdust, which he held to the wick of the lamp. The orange glow made the room feel safer, even though of course there was no difference at all.

“It was . . .” I pointed at the cupboard. “It was in the house all the time we were. It must have been. I was cooking all evening. I would have seen. Gods, don’t go down there!”

“Just to lock the door,” he said, fading into the dark at the bottom of the stairs. There was a clank that was the lock. He came back up, fast, and helped me pull off the last loop of the rope. “Are you all right?”

I had to look away, at the open cupboard. “Dionysus, that was . . . in the maze, I thought it was a man in a mask, but—was that a mask?”

“I don’t know,” Dionysus said. “Perhaps not, any more.”

From somewhere outside, or perhaps down in the maze, I couldn’t tell, there was a weird, eerie scream. It wasn’t a person. Dionysus sharpened.

“What?” I asked, uneasy.

He inclined his head and gave me a strange look. “I . . . think he’s defending his territory. He doesn’t understand why we’re in it.”

I thought, Well, if there’s anyone left who understands the Hunt, it’s you.

And then I thought, Where the fuck did that come from?

“Then why didn’t it try to hurt us?” I asked.

“We’re bigger than your boys.”

I breathed out slowly. “I need to catch it, once there’s daylight. See if it can talk. I want to ask it if it killed the triplets.”

He had been tying his hair up, but he stopped halfway through the last turn of the green cloth, his elbows still bent above his shoulders so that his shadow looked like it had wings. “You can’t still think it was you.”

“If that thing thinks it’s a bull, then it’s bad-tempered but it’s a herbivore.”

I should have gone after it then. It was stupid to sit around and wait for it to come back, but I was too tired. I’d been tired for days. I hadn’t slept properly since before the Hidden ride, and although I could function well enough for ordinary things, beginning a hunt for a wild—monster—would be idiotic. I was the kind of tired that makes wrong decisions, that catches on little worries but ignores real threats, that hesitates when you should never hesitate. I’d catch nothing in this state. I’d only hurt myself, or worse, get Dionysus hurt.

“Right.” Dionysus hinged down on the windowsill again, and something about the way he said it made me think he hadn’t really heard me. Now that everything was over, he didn’t seem at all as collected as he had a minute ago. My heart was thumping too. It was good that neither of us was hurt, but I kept having to look at the cupboard and check nobody was on their merry way out of it again. Maybe there was a secret tunnel. Maybe there was more than one. Maybe we should move to Italy.

“How is he a bull now?” I asked, or maybe it was more of a demand. “Have you cursed someone?”

“No!” There was more force in that than I’d expected. “This is old magic. It’s the mask.” He was saying it to his own knees, not me. “Even in normal times, if you give a person a mask, the mask changes the person. When there’s a god close by, everything is . . .”

“More,” I said dimly. Jasmine racing up the mast of my old ship. Knights like me who had been seeing things and wandering at night anyway but functioning, just, now swerving into madness. It was as though something of the god was in the air always, in the way the vapours of the great volcanoes must always be in the air, all across the world, but now—we were all on the edge of the volcano, staring into the caldera, but instead of making people dizzy and faint, these vapours made miracles.