CHAPTER THIRTEEN
IDO NOT, IN FACT, wear something incredibly inappropriate – though I’m not sure anything is considered inappropriate here. Instead I wear a borrowed chiton – muted and plain, a similar sort of grey to my eyes and decidedly the sort of thing I can vanish into.
Dionysus’s boat looms nearly as tall as the cliff faces, with several masts and tightly bound sails – redundant, I suppose, when it’s apparently powered by dolphins.
He stands at the foot of the plank leading to its deck, helping maenads and satyrs board. When he sees me, his face cracks with an enormous grin.
‘Not a word,’ I scold before he can start, but that does little to deter him.
‘You’re coming with us!’
I move past him. ‘Perhaps I’ll stay there.’
‘Perhaps you won’t!’
Music has been an ever-present part of the camp.
There’s always been someone playing some sort of instrument around the fires.
But on the boat it hits its crescendo – which is probably the only thing distracting me from my surging nausea the moment we push away from the beach.
The waves rocking beneath remind me of only one thing – Theseus and his steadying hands.
We round the corner of the inlet and there islands spill. A few are so clear I can make out the towns and villages, more beyond are hazy patches. For so long, I stared at a barren horizon dreaming of land, and here it was all this time.
I sit with Myrto at the bow of the ship, Opora and Calybe beside us as they argue about whose idea it was to join the thiasus.
‘Are you alright?’ I ask Myrto, whose eye has been occasionally twitching since we set sail.
‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘This happens sometimes – I get these compulsions for movement or speech. There tend to be bubbles when it happens a lot, and then it happens less and, well, I guess I’m headed into a surge of them.’
‘Oh. Is it painful?’
‘Not normally. It can make my muscles a bit sore with all that repetition. They can be annoying. But they’re funny sometimes too.
My mother didn’t like them very much but here they’re just …
a thing, I suppose. Like I say, not all of us run away for the orgies; some of us just want to exist in peace. ’
‘For the record,’ Opora adds, ‘when I said I joined for fun, I didn’t mean I joined for the orgies.’
Calybe considers, then adds, dryly: ‘I might have.’
‘Cabarnis!’ someone calls, and we leap to our feet.
The island forms a dip around the port, the trail of towns beyond glowing bright in the last golden rays of the sun.
We are headed to the main town – to an actual port.
Fishing boats sit in rows, empty market stalls lined up beyond.
The streets are narrow and winding, grey stone with slatted wooden roofs so that with all that rock and wood the town blends into the rising mountain and forests stretching beyond.
As we draw closer, the children playing on the rocks point to our boat excitedly, the women drop laundry to jump in delight and the groups gathered around board games in the last evening light scatter pieces in the race to their feet.
The celebration begins before we even dock.
Dionysus, Dionysus, Dionysus – his name carries on the wind, the very sound of their joy.
Women and girls pour from homes, a bright array of chitons and finely braided hair.
They dance as the music reaches them.
Other instruments join. A woman with ribbons in her grey hair plucks at the strings of a lyre. A boy Glaucus’s age toys with an aulos. Even those without begin bashing pots and pans. It is a jubilant, riotous cacophony.
Myrto gets her list out again – or maybe it’s a different one because it has an orange ribbon wound about it that might denote it as her revelry operations tablet.
‘I need the amphorae taken down first,’ Myrto directs.
‘Get the wine flowing. Silen, can you start the bonfire on the beach so we can roast the meat from the hunt? Opora, do you have your tympanon? Perfect, would you please lead the procession through the streets to draw everyone out?’ Opora begins beating the instrument in her hand, a quick pounding rhythm.
I turn back to observe the rising crowd as the rest of Dionysus’s followers race from the boat to join them.
‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ Calybe says, coming up beside me and resting on the boat’s rail.
‘I’d never seen anything like it, when the revelry came to our town.
The men hosted parties sometimes but we had to weave and wait for them to come home.
Then Dionysus came – an actual god in our tiny town, so the men flocked to worship him.
And the first thing he did was order them to go home and fetch their wives and daughters and only then would he see fit to bless the town.
Then … the music played. Opora never wanted it to stop and I suggested it never had to.
We followed those beats across an ocean. ’
Is this what Myrto meant? Sailing from town to town, bringing joy and revolution too?
I have seen more smiles in seconds than I saw in a lifetime in Knossos. There is laughter and music and pounding footsteps – all the sorts of things my father banned unless it was to celebrate his own savagery.
I watch as wine is poured and groups gather and talk and dance.
I witness people relish this world rather than fear it.
Oh Fates, I want this.
There, I let myself admit it. I want music and laughter and dancing on the sands of beautiful islands. I want a group – this group – of outcasts and strays, the people who choose kindness over cruelty and power.
‘Come on,’ Calybe says, taking my hand. ‘Let’s go party.’
We clink cups of wine against each other and I let the bright, tart taste roll over my tongue. We wander through the streets, moving past dancing revellers and small huddles of people laughing and clutching drinks of their own.
In the narrow alleys between houses, children draw patterns in coloured charcoal on revellers’ skin. Calybe gives two girls a few coins in exchange for flowers that lace up our arms and smudge as soon as we are thrown back into the throngs of people.
More wine is poured, more music plays and somewhere in all the chaos I lose Calybe.
I move back, trying to find her, round a corner and nearly collide with a man coming the other way. I stumble back, passing him, just another reveller in a too-tight space.
But then he clutches my wrist and turns me to face him.
He is tall, his features blunt and framed by waves of pitch-dark hair. His clothes are fine – the weave narrow and tight, the sort of time-consuming work no one on a small island like this is wasting on clothes. A merchant, perhaps? An envoy? Someone with a boat, certainly.
‘What’s this?’ he asks, peering close as a smile twitches on to his face. ‘You are gods-touched.’
‘I’m a priestess,’ I say, trying to pull away. ‘Unhand me.’
‘No, you aren’t,’ he says, eyes darting over me like he might read my divine heritage in the lines drawn across my brow.
Can he? My heart suddenly freezes – because what good are my carefully spun lies if a seer, or a priest or whatever this man is can see the echoes of divinity in my skin?
His smile twists to a sneer. ‘A gods-touched girl stepping in the wake of the pretender god. Your father must be ashamed. Wouldn’t want to get caught here, a demi-thing like you.
The Olympians don’t take kindly to their offspring worshipping false idols – and no woman of good standing should be seen at a thing like this. ’
I stomp on his foot, ripping my hand from his grip. He doesn’t even flinch.
‘I’m a woman of no standing and I think I’ll do as I like.’
He chortles and it’s so utterly condescending. ‘I’m in no mood to incur the wrath of a shockingly paternal deity so you would do well, foolish girl, to listen to those who know better than you. Leave now. You do not wish to be caught in what is to come this evening.’
He steps back, vanishing into the sea of people.
Bastard. So that is what Myrto meant – men who do not take kindly to women joining in revelries.
What better way to spite them all than to have as good a time as possible?
The party has spilt on to the beach and so that is where I head.
I don’t realize how much wine I’ve drunk until I run up to Opora on the dance floor, and my limbs feel fluid and a little sloppy, like I flow as much as each note skimming across the waves.
Beside me a small group is dancing in a sort of frenzy.
Some sway in gentle circles, some in a dizzying ruckus, like even though a beat pulses none care to find it.
But I let it take me over, let it fill my limbs and then I’m moving like I’m breathing for the first time in a long, long while.
‘Look at you!’ Opora squeals. Then she drops her voice. ‘Is Silen watching us? They’re over there. With the vines encircling their horns?’
I glance over and spot a satyr who matches such a description. Their dark hair tangled with leaves, red-brown horns jutting above and their chiton draped low enough to reveal sharp collarbones and muscular shoulders.
‘Yes,’ I say, beginning to grin. ‘Is there any particular reason you’d want to know that, Opora?’
She swats at me. ‘Shh!’ As though anyone might hear us over this racket.
‘Do you want to make them jealous?’
‘I don’t know if that will help,’ she says, flushing and determinedly looking anywhere but at Silen. ‘I’ve been pretty clear about my feelings. They just … like to flirt, I suppose. Anyway, what about you? Any loves in your past?’
‘My best friend, for a while. It just turned out it wasn’t quite the sort of love either of us was looking for.
And … there was a boy after her.’ I’m not sure if it’s the wine or the music or this unbearable need to stop lying to these lovely people.
‘I didn’t love him, but if by love you mean someone who transforms the trajectory of your life, then, well, he certainly fits that description. ’
She must see my hatred – must feel it, actually, with the way my hands tense in hers.