Page 75 of The Hymn to Dionysus

There was a dusting of grey in the man’s hair, just like Dionysus’s.

Part of me locked up. It was the part that had finally breathed when Dionysus lifted me at the dance, and the part that had believed him when he said I was safe, and the part that secretly loved his mad stories—or rather, that he told them to me.

It said: I can’t. I can’t. He’s too like him.

I wasn’t wearing a helmet, but that didn’t matter. The one on the inside was there, and now, I pulled the visor down.

“We’ll see, sir. Gods can’t die,” I said, and slit his throat.

He did die. He crumpled into a little heap on the ground, and where his blood poured onto the flagstones, poppies bloomed.

Poppies grow on battlefields. They like blood. The fields in front of the walls at Troy had been full of poppies, every summer. I tried to stop that thought, because like one of those hull breaches on a ship that start out tiny but prise themselves open wider and wider as the force of the sea crushes into them, I could feel I was about to lose where I was and when, and I’d be back on the plain again, with those gruesome poppies, and that it was going to be worse than before, and it was going to happen in front of everyone.

Something that wasn’t me waded through the flooded corridors, and closed a watertight door.

I couldn’t hear.

The crowd was writhing and I could see people were shouting, or praying, or crying, but all I could glean was a kind of hum. It made me feel like I wasn’t really there, even when some people pushed forward to pick the poppies and soak cloths in the blood, it all felt more like seeing it in a painting than living it.

The Kadmeia was overrun with ivy. Everywhere slaves were working with garden shears, trying to cut it back where it grasped up the pillars and sprayed around the window frames. It wasn’t just ivy, either; honeysuckle, swathes of jasmine, growing right out of the flagstones, wrecking door hinges. In the courtyard where the shrine to Semele was, the pomegranate trees were in full bloom, and already growing pomegranates. For me anyway, it was as silent as moss.

I wanted to curl up in a corner and stare at the wall, or anything that wasn’t the way the man had fallen, his hair like incense smoke. There wasn’t time for that. We were waiting for the Queen. We had the body to show her, and the mask, and the story.

Jason and Polydorus had come. I must have looked wrong, or ill, because Polydorus had put his cloak around me, and Jason wanted to me to sit down. I was glad of the cloak, because even though I was nearly sure the night was still hot, I was freezing; my fingernails looked like glass. All my thoughts had gone spacey and strange. I didn’t feel bad, just distant. It was quite nice really. It was a relief not to be collapsed in a heap thinking I was at Troy: this was maybe not ideal knightly function, but it was all right. I wished they would stop looking so worried, but the way they kept looking at each other, it was like they thought . . .

Like they thought I was going to lose it and murder someone if nobody intervened. Of course they did. Jason had seen that once already, with his old commander. Polydorus didn’t want him to see it again.

People were turning, looking and talking towards the right; the Queen was here.

Someone must have just turned her out of bed—it was an unholy watch of the night—but she was dressed, her hair bound up in a knot like mine because of the heat. If she was surprised to find her receiving room full of knights and dead bodies, she didn’t show it. We all knelt. Polydorus was explaining something, his eyes trained respectfully on the hem of her dress. Like Pentheus’s robe at the Bull Ceremony, it was stitched with a slim band of embroidery that from any distance looked like a plain ribbon, but up close, like this, showed Hatti gods. I loved cloth from Hattusa. I wasn’t supposed to: it was all amazing colours and much too gaudy for us, or at least the way they wore it: whole cloaks covered in brocade, temple curtains brilliant with stitched scenes, sometimes in patterns so spectacular that the weavers probably went blind at thirty. If it was just up to me though, I’d have filled the house with it.

The hem came closer, and she took my arms and drew me upright. I kept looking down, but she touched my chin to angle it up, so I could see what she was saying.

“You did the right thing,” she said. “Well done. What’s happened to you?”

“It’s battle madness,” I said, and with shame screwing a way through my skull, I knew that it came out strange and flat, in that accent that all deaf people have because you modulate your own tone so much as you speak, and when you can’t, it shows. I hated it: it made me sound like I didn’t belong here. “I’m sorry, lady.”

“Bring the witch,” she said to someone past my shoulder. I felt something through the floor that might have been footsteps. Then to me again, “You’re freezing. Come on.” She took me out to the courtyard steps, which were still warm, and pushed my shoulder until I sat down. She sat next to me to wait, and took off the crown. She spun it between her hands the way athletes spin laurels. It made her look like a girl who’d just won a boxing match, one she hadn’t enjoyed very much. The crown flashed silver and gold, the figures of the warrior saints dancing around the band.

“Lady, I’m all right,” I tried to say.

“Oh, shut up.”

I did, gratefully.

“So, it seems Apollo has forgiven us,” she said, at the green everywhere. “Do you think?”

“No, lady,” I said.

She snorted. “You don’t need a witch, you’re clearly fine.”

I felt a bit better for that.

“You really believe there is a mad god?” she asked. “Why?”

“Because everything that’s happening—it’s all the same and what it adds up to isn’t Apollo. The wild, and the masks, and the madness, and the song . . . it’s all . . .” I told her not very coherently about blue.

I thought she would tell me not to be so stupid, but she only listened. When I finished, she nodded. “I understand. I don’t . . . see it, though; they don’t seem the same to me. Perhaps I was wrong about something in the dust, perhaps the madness is a curse, but if so, it’s from Ares, as punishment for excesses at Troy. The drought is from the Mother. The magic in the masks—that seems like Hermes to me. God of witches? But something’s changed for the better. All this green. They say we’ll have a pomegranate harvest tomorrow. I think the sacrifices are working.”