CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AS EVERYONE ELSE RUNS FROM the fire, Dionysus and I, without conferring, charge towards it, drunken haze lifted and replaced with urgent clarity.
‘We can use the empty amphorae as buckets,’ he suggests. ‘Douse the flames.’
‘Buckets?’ I demand. ‘Are you a god or not?’
‘Well, darling, that is the question, isn’t it?’
The heat hits us before we’re anywhere near the houses, which are lighting quick and flaming high.
Dionysus snatches an amphora and races towards the ocean and I, with no better idea, race to do the same – but the amphora is larger and heavier than the ones I’d found in those huts and I could barely lift those when empty.
‘Let me,’ Silen says as they appear, lifting it with ease – blasted immortals and their infuriating strength. ‘I think most people are on the beach but …’
‘I’ll check.’
I dart along the harbour’s edge to the houses in the fire’s path, bursting on to a quiet street, the clamour echoing behind me and swallowed by the roaring flames. Ahead, people rush, hauling goods from homes, throwing bags out of windows.
And I am not the only one here, warning people.
‘The campfire is out of control!’ the man who accosted me shouts, knocking on doors and alerting drunken revellers. He grabs one red-haired man by the shoulders and yells: ‘The gods have forsaken us! Clear the streets. Clear the homes.’
I do not stay to hear more – whatever zealotry he’s preaching is beside the point if he’s evacuating people. So I take the next street over, bashing on doors and urging people to flee until my voice breaks and … the smell of smoke fades.
I can no longer see the flames curling over the rooftops.
I race back the way I came, dizzy from the fumes and the wine, and there, finally, is Dionysus, leaning on Silen, gasping before the charred wreckage.
The thiasus are boarding the boat behind him while he speaks to a gathering crowd.
‘We will ensure the town is rebuilt. If we all lend a hand –’
‘You did this!’ a woman snarls. ‘Look what comes of your recklessness!’
‘You are no god.’ A man spits at his feet – the red-headed man from the town, his face contorted in fury.
‘The women have angered Hestia, leaving her hearth untended. And Hera by not upholding their marital duties. And we men have outraged Zeus by not leading them in those pursuits. The gods demand order! You, Dionysus, do not walk the halls of Olympus and you do not speak for its council either.’
‘Look, I really don’t think my father has ever wanted order in his life,’ Dionysus says, raising his hands in some effort to calm them.
‘In fact I –’ He sees me and relief flickers, and he seems to lose his train of thought.
He eyes the boat as subtly as he can and, getting the hint, I creep past the townspeople to its mooring.
‘That’s hardly the whole pantheon, is it?
Aphrodite, for instance. She loves chaos.
Definitely not much husband-serving there either.
And Artemis – evidently women can worship the gods just as well by running through the woods, hunting and cosying up to one another by the campfires, bathing together, really it –’
I make it on to the boat, Myrto hauling me up on to the deck.
The crowd surges and suddenly Dionysus is beside me, Silen catching him as he stumbles.
Dionysus glances at the ocean doubtfully as ropes are hurriedly untied. He reaches out a hand, just as Theseus once did, and we lurch forward.
But then the boat shudders, and I look at Dionysus and he is so very pale. ‘We might need the sails for –’
He collapses before he can finish.
Under sail, the journey takes twice as long and we are all exhausted by the time we dejectedly trek to the tents.
Silen remains on the boat with Dionysus, waving our curiosity away.
‘He’s just exhausted,’ they say. ‘Tried putting the fires out himself before he made that pact with Poseidon. I suppose we can deal with that in the morning – he promised the sea god the best of our wine stores.’
But that’s not what concerns me come daybreak.
Don’t gods trigger natural disasters when entire towns refute their divinity?
Don’t they swallow islands whole? Can’t they at the very least put out a damn fire?
I know Dionysus’s powers need belief so maybe it’s only a matter of the way the revellers turned on him, but how can one single town be enough to dilute the power of a god?
And then, of course, there is his own confession: is he a god or isn’t he? That is the question.
Is he just lying to everyone here and to everyone he meets and to me? Didn’t I sense that when I first met him? The Theseus to it all?
I need answers before the contempt swallows me.
So I go to his tent, having no idea how to knock or announce myself so trying a simple, hesitant calling of his name. ‘Dionysus?’
There’s a beat of silence, and then a droll, ‘Whatever your name is?’ which I imagine means come on in, so I do.
I expect to find him exhausted – on his bed or one of those klines, recovering from yesterday.
Instead he is sprawled on the floor, beads and string littered about him as he threads amethysts on to a long leather cord.
The necklace might be more reasonable if there weren’t also dried figs strung alongside the jewels.
I sigh. ‘You’re using figs now?’
‘Well, you didn’t like the pine cones, Arianne.’
I flinch at the false name – this one too close to my own – but he’s so focused on forcing a needle through the fig’s tip he doesn’t notice.
Steeling myself, I say: ‘I assume you know what it is I want to talk to you about.’
‘I gather it’s not to thank me for stalling the townspeople long enough for you to make it back to the boat?’
I swallow, suddenly terrified the answer might not be what I want it to be.
‘Are you actually a god? Or are you lying to all these people?’
He looks up from the figs. I watch as the realization hits.
‘You’re thinking about joining.’ There’s none of the unabashed glee of his previous assertions that I might never leave.
He is serious, as I have never seen him – except for last night.
He says it in exactly that same way – like I am another blazing, consuming fire.
‘I’m considering it,’ I admit. ‘I don’t know that I agree with everything. But sailing from town to town to make people a little bit happier? To leave them freer? I could believe in that. But …’
He stands, draping his latest garland about his neck, and crosses to the table. ‘But you couldn’t believe in me.’
Yes.
Desperately, I try: ‘I’m not the reverential sort.’
He snorts. ‘Aren’t you a priestess, new girl?’
Oh. Right. But he’s pouring a drink and waving me away.
‘It’s alright, I understand. Growing up the way I did, I never really understood why anyone worshipped the gods either.
I don’t particularly want reverence, but apparently I need it.
Which is why I created the thiasus, why I walk this land instead of sitting on Olympus – because I am them and they are me.
You don’t need to believe in me. Believing in our message, in what we do?
That sustains me just as well. It’s all the legend of the great god Dionysus being fuelled. ’
Oh. Oh. ‘So it is just that? A legend?’
‘I’m a god, Archippe. Just relatively new and with a few … peculiarities. My father is Zeus but my mother was mortal. Semele, Princess of Thebes.’
I slide into the seat opposite, though I don’t accept the offered cup. ‘So you’re a demigod.’
Like my mother. Like my witch aunt – is that what he is? Someone like Circe with powers derived from the gods?
‘No. Or yes. Maybe? Some sort of hybrid between god and demigod, I suppose. Mortal mother and immortal father. Immortal already married father whose wife wasn’t all that happy with the infidelity.
But Zeus strung Hera from the sky and made her swear on the Styx not to rise against him, which left her only one option to protect herself: to avenge herself on the women he cheats with instead. ’
‘What do you mean protect herself?’ I demand, because it’s a little too close to home: gods punishing mortal women when their own egos are threatened.
‘Followers are power,’ he says simply. ‘Respect is how you survive. Hera is goddess of marriage so every infidelity against her threatens her very existence. That’s possibly the worst part of all this: that I understand why she killed my mother.
She tricked her, convinced her to entice a promise from my father and when he agreed – at Hera’s prompting – my mother asked to see his true immortal form. It burned her to cinders.’
‘Dionysus,’ I say, and before I’m quite conscious of it, I’ve reached across the table for him. But he grabs for his cup like he hadn’t seen my hand move.
‘Oh, please do save the gasps and pity – we have a lot more to get through.’
And it’s this – this is what I can’t believe in – that he’d rather brush everything off or make an eccentric joke or reach for that damn cup of wine than acknowledge the fact that these things hurt.
‘But in her ashes my father found me. I was too small to live so he had me sewn into his own flesh. I grew in his thigh.’
‘His … what? His thigh?’
‘Gods,’ he says with an eye-roll. ‘They’re strange, ill-adjusted creatures.’
He looks at me expectantly but I don’t take the bait and he sighs like I’m not making his trauma nearly enough fun.
‘I should be a demigod. But Zeus technically birthed me – and no one ever seems to want to interrogate that, actually: my father birthed me and everyone still seems to want to define something as glorious as womanhood by who can and can’t give birth. Terribly boring, if you ask me –’
‘Dionysus,’ I prompt, because this is a very unsubtle dive into a distraction and he raises his cup like he is all too aware of it.