Page 74 of The Hymn to Dionysus

“Sir,” Jason said, sounding uncertain. He was frowning at something off to our left.

Polydorus looked over at the same time as me. He was halfway through plaiting his hair over his shoulder to keep it damp and cool for longer. Mine, wet too, was coiled up on the nape of my neck. The stone roads seemed to soak in the heat all through the day, and breathe it out again as soon as the sun set. Some of the little knights were lying flat on the paving, staring up at the sky and trying to keep still until I had to give the order to move.

Jason hesitated in a way I’d never known him to do, and then like a much smaller child, took one of our hands each and towed us to the shadows around the other side of the fountain, where there was a dead man. Or I’d thought it was a man.

Polydorus knelt down slowly. He tugged one of the feathers—huge, white pinion feathers—gently at first, then harder.

“Is it glue?” Jason asked.

“No.” Polydorus pushed the cloak aside so we could see.

The man had feathers right down both arms, tawny and white. When I took the owl mask off him, we all recoiled, because the face underneath was not altogether a man’s any more. The eyes, open, were orange. We all stayed exactly still for what felt like a long time. Other knights came to see what we were looking at, and then stood there in silence too. Some people made the bull sign for good luck.

The body was changing in front of us. It was like watching a flower wilt. Now that the mask was off, the beak was softening, and there were tiny snaps as the feathers began to fall away. They didn’t vanish. They stayed there on the ground, offensively, still being feathers. When Jason picked one up, it looked heavy. Polydorus smacked his hand to make him drop it, like he’d touched something cursed.

“Pardon me, knights?” said a light, polite voice.

There was a young man waiting far enough away to be respectful. Someone held up a torch so we could see who we were talking to; slim, small, probably a slave, but strange-looking, because he had blue eyes.

“Yes, sir?” I said.

He was the man from the wall.

“May I take my friend away?” he asked, and he was starting to seem odd, because although he was being polite, he didn’t seem afraid of us—even though most of Thebes would have waited at least an hour to interrupt still-bloody knights, particularly if it was civilians who had just tried to set one of them on fire. I started to get a tickle of unease.

“Not yet,” I said. “You’ll need to wait until the morning. I have to take him to the Palace to show the Queen his—condition. You can come for him then.”

The young man stayed where he was. “But the Queen will have the body destroyed. He must have a real funeral, and real honours. He was undergoing the Holy Change, after all.” Still calm, still unafraid, as though there were an invisible wall between us that would stop anyone hurting him. It was how Dionysus was.

Something in my thinking, the part that was beginning to understand witching, went click. I looked down to his hands, knowing he would be holding that bronze mask from earlier. It was beautiful, cast to look like very wealthiest, most cultured sort of Egyptian gentleman; except that in the eyes, there was blue glass, and wound through the hair was an ivy crown.

Wearing a bull mask would turn you into a bull now.

Wearing a Dionysus mask would . . . what?

A little crowd had gathered behind him. Some of them were the same people who had just run away from the battle. Most were wearing masks, but under them, they were still ordinary: young girls and boys who had just come straight from kitchens, still in aprons; an older lady in an orange sash that meant she was a marvel-maker; a man who still had dried clay on his hands, who must have been making vases—or masks—at his wheel an hour ago. They were all keeping back from the young man with the bronze mask, though, and not in the practical way they would have kept back from a knight. It was the way people gave priestesses space—and witches. Reverence.

I was glad, for the hundredth time, that I sounded so unlike what I was. I sounded like a temple chorister only just old enough to grow his hair long. It was a voice to keep the peace with. “Holy Change, sir?”

The young man nodded once, all restraint and grace. I could have been speaking to a king, not a slave. When he spoke again, it sounded airy, and he aimed it at a point somewhere just above my head. “This is a most sacred thing, and it will change all Thebes before the end.” He was speaking with an accent now. It was old. It was how Dionysus spoke; or it would have been if Dionysus had said the things people expected gods to say, and not stories about be-carted sheep and feather rain. “It is part of my rites, which I must not be denied.”

The little crowd behind him, which was broadening now—some of the traders had come across to look, some drawn with worry, some kindling with what seemed to me like a terrible sort of hope—murmured and nodded. I heard a couple of people say something that might have been all hail.

Fuck fuck fuck.

“Your rites? I’m afraid I don’t know your name, sir.”

Don’t say it, don’t you fucking say it; channel Dionysus enough to have his foresight, and to realize what I’ll have to do if you say it.

He put the bronze mask on. “I am the Raver.”

Some people knelt. Murmurs skittered away in every direction—through the crowd, through the knights.

Sometimes, you can see the future. Sometimes there are two ways, laid out as clear as parallel corridors in a maze, and sometimes, you can look down through the ruined places and see both paths.

I could try to keep the peace. I could take him to the Queen, and these people would come too. They’d send their children running to bring relatives and friends and there would be a mob, and the Guards would have to let them into the Palace or end up trampled. There would be no order to fire or draw swords, because nobody wanted to massacre civilians. When the Queen appeared, though, the witching that is all that maintains the royal house would be very weak. Rather than a great figurehead seen from a balcony, she’d be right there in front of them all, a tallish lady who looked like a knight and just as easily wounded as one. And someone would risk their life, because they were desperate and hungry and the only way out was a god, and they would snatch the crown. Maybe they’d fall, maybe there would be a massacre then, but even if the crown didn’t reach him, this man would be king then. There would be knights who obeyed him—I could see some even now with hope-stars in their eyes—and maybe, if he wore the mask long enough, he would be god enough to convince the rest.

Sometimes you can keep the peace. Sometimes you can’t, and then the only consideration left is whether smashing it yourself with as precise a blow as you can will end with fewer people dead than letting the Fates do it. The Fates are never precise: they use sledgehammers.