Page 94 of The Hymn to Dionysus

He laughed. “You’re a wonderful, wonderful man,” he told me, and walked away looking cheerful, followed by his retinue of increasingly confused slaves.

“Well done,” the ubiquitous Chamberlain said to me, with an unusual failure to broadcast her normal suspicion that I was a wild pig in a clever disguise. “That was . . . very good.”

I looked around. “Are you feeling all right?”

“The Queen wants you to stay,” she added, signalling the last of the slaves to leave, and to close the chamber doors.

“What happened to you? Do you remember?”

The audience hadn’t gone, just shrunk. Now, we had a priestess and a physician, and in the background, Tiresias, standing in the archway that led outside to the shrine to Semele, which was crowded with candles and offerings; slaves were out gathering it all up in hessian rubbish sacks.

Beyond that, down on the plain, the dead land beyond the Fury marvels and the last outpost of green that was the Temple of Apollo looked strange: like a god had combed ash into the air in slim tines, much smaller and much more numerous than the titan pillars of sacrifice smoke that still poured into the sky.

Funeral pyres. It was hundreds and hundreds of funeral pyres.

The Queen was watching Pentheus intently. I’d tried to say that it might be better to give him an hour, but she had looked at me like I’d spat.

“No. The last thing I remember is seeing the witch enchant the bulls, with Phaidros.” He was sitting very straight, hands clamped into his lap to hide the grazes and the grime under his fingernails. They hadn’t even let him wash yet, or eat. I looked at the Queen, wanting to say that if a beggar sought hospitality here then they’d be treated with more ceremony, but I already knew what she would say. Princes have more duties than beggars.

“Why had you gone to see Phaidros?” the priestess asked.

He didn’t look away. There was a strange calm to him now. It was the one I’d had after Helios had been killed. The worst had happened: there was nothing to be afraid of any more. “To ask for help. I didn’t want to go to Egypt. But he said I needed to do my duty.”

The Queen caught my eye and tipped her head ruefully.

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lord,” the priestess pushed, “you ended up in the woods running wild in the mask of a bull: something happened. Someone gave you that mask. Did you see anyone, did you talk to anyone?”

“No, just Phaidros.”

That wasn’t true; he had spoken to Dionysus, they had walked away together. Still, if he didn’t remember, then he didn’t. I pushed my hand over my face—thought to the side of everything else that I needed to shave—and wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me, given that anyone even a little wobbly in their own mind completely lost it anywhere near Dionysus, it could have happened to Pentheus too.

Dionysus could have spoken to Pentheus, sent him away, and never known that Pentheus’s mind had shut down straight after that.

No; that didn’t explain the mask. Pentheus had had his before anyone else—before the witches tried it at Hermes, before everyone else tried it.

Gods, had he just . . . picked it up at the dance? The servers there had been in animal masks. Was this just a horrendous mishap?

“And how did you turn him back?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. I just said wake up and he did.”

“But what made you think that would work?”

“I . . .” I sighed. “I know a witch. He says things with authority and I always believe him even when it’s stupid because he’s deinos; it seemed worth a try.”

“That’s enough,” the Queen decided. “Madness overtook dozens of people who saw the star fall; Pentheus too, clearly, and the only mystery is how he ended up so far from the Kadmeia.”

That felt like missing a step on the stairs at night, because now I’d heard her say it, I could see that it was true and it wasn’t. Whatever had seized Pentheus, it was a very different kind of madness. Everyone else sang the song and danced, but he had run wild, killed things, maybe people, and he’d been conscious enough to eat and to drink, and take shelter in the maze from the heat. And if anyone else could have been cured with an order from someone believable to wake up, then the witches would have done that.

“You can go,” she said to the priestess. “Not you,” she said, when I started to get up.

I sat down again and looked across at Pentheus, who was still straight and stiff, gazing at something in the middle distance now. Because someone needed to, I caught his shoulder and scooped him sideways. I was surprised when he let me. He just dropped his head against my collarbone and stayed there, motionless. He still smelled of the forest, all crushed grass and honey.

I still wasn’t relieved or happy, and I still didn’t feel sorry for him. I just knew it was important to pretend I felt all those things, because if I didn’t, then . . .