CHAPTER FOURTEEN #2
‘Right, well, I guess my time in his thigh made me a full-ichored god – which only increased Hera’s ire.
And now there’s talk of making Heracles a god when he completes his trials and it’s made anyone with a drop of immortal blood realize they can have full divinity too if they only kill enough monsters or go on enough quests – there’s even one who supposedly fed his enemies to a monster trapped beneath his palace. ’
I flinch and Dionysus looks at me, confused but calculating, and so I rush: ‘Minos, right? His wife is a daughter of Helios. Everyone at the temple is familiar with the affairs of Crete. But she’s the one with the immortal blood, not him.’
He arches a brow. ‘Don’t tell me you’re actually a priestess.’
‘I was in training before … you know.’
Before I ran off with a man who absolutely fits with what Dionysus is saying: a demigod who cares for little else but how his story will be told – perhaps he even hopes it will gain him godhood.
‘There are two options in a world like that,’ Dionysus says. ‘You achieve more than the last person, or you make them achieve less. Have you heard of Perseus?’
I grimace. ‘The man who killed Medusa.’
A story that made me relieved my brother was locked safely in a labyrinth.
‘Perseus was given the task of tracking her down by my – our – father. Zeus even ordered some of the gods to help him. Evidently there are some on Olympus who would like Perseus to join them. But Olympians don’t grant godhood often.
Perseus started out the normal way – trying to prove himself.
But now he’s apparently got it into his head that a quicker and easier way to make space for himself is to take away someone occupying it.
Namely the great and gloriously handsome Dionysus. ’
He says all this so thoroughly jovially that it takes me a moment to realize what he’s saying. ‘He thinks what?’
Dionysus shrugs. ‘Gods need followers. Or at least people to recognize us and say our names when they push food into a fire and send its smoke to the Heavens. A whisper of prayer. A rite or two … Perseus knows if he stops my notoriety growing, my immortality will fade and maybe a Perseus-shaped spot will open up on Olympus. Last night wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried to disrupt a revelry to keep my rites from spreading. ’
I think of that man, of his warning … of the way I suspect he might have started that fire.
Dionysus taps on his cup, deep in thought.
‘That’s the issue. I’m not quite goddy enough for godhood and not quite mortal enough to have whole kingdoms and armies behind me.
I thought I might be able to do something with this power.
I’m not above crafting my own personal playground like the other gods do, I’m just not so sure why it’s only my joy that matters within it.
It seems to me the happiness of powerful men is often built on the oppression of so many others.
I think there’s another way – to happiness and to power. I’d like both to be shared.’
‘That’s … noble,’ I say – because in that moment I can see it: the speech that gets so many people to join.
His words are a tender lure – and it’s his own conviction that makes them feel believable.
That he really, truly thinks this is possible – and that perhaps it’s not so ridiculous to hope for it yourself.
‘Well, it wasn’t just me. Silen, Myrto, Charopeia, Ampelos, Phasyleia – women who’d had enough and satyrs who were damaged by the expectations placed on their shoulders and those of us who live outside gender’s constraints who thought the whole system was nonsensical …
Liberating the women seemed a worthy cause, a strand of the oppression to start plucking at.
So we founded the thiasus. I thought my power would protect them – and it’s true, infuriatingly, that without a god at their side some would-be hero would have slain every single barbarian heretic and claimed it another achievement.
But now my power is faltering and it seems all I’ve really done is put a large group of people I care about at risk. ’
His hand falls to Sterope, burying itself in her fur, and I go to say something but am so torn between it is a worthy cause and maybe you’re a worthy cause too that I can’t utter anything at all.
‘Anyway, it will all be fine,’ he says, examining one of the figs on his garland.
‘I just need to make allies with the Olympians, enshrine myself irrefutably in the halls of myth and cement my renown beyond reproach. Easy. Nothing to it. I could do it in an afternoon if I put the figs and pine cones down. So if you’re thinking of staying, that’s what you should know – that you don’t need to believe in me, but in us.
That it will put you in danger.’ He takes a final sip of wine, gaze falling to his hearth.
‘And that I am indeed a god. Just the sort you have to be desperate to follow.’
For the next few days we host revelries on Naxos in the hope that rites and rituals might replenish Dionysus’s power enough that they – we? – might take the party elsewhere.
For one celebration, we make masks out of slivers of bark, and spin around the beach with no idea who we are dancing with.
By the end, we have created a dance that is half movement and half game, clapping and pounding until our bodies become instruments and switching partners after the movements are complete.
When I end up spinning with a person in a mask ornately carved in the shape of a tiger, a wry voice rings out from beneath: ‘Defeats the purpose if you’re always wearing a mask, don’t you think, Arkadia? ’
‘How did you …’ I trail off, missing a clap to adjust my owl mask as though it might have slipped.
‘You move like no one else,’ Dionysus says, and his voice crackles like the fire blazing at our centre. ‘It’s when you seem most yourself – when you dance. I’d recognize it anywhere.’
The flames are doused, instead a sudden chill, and Dionysus’s hands are warm against mine but I am so very cold.
Theseus’s breath at my ear. The soft exhalation of the words: ‘The world needs to see you dance.’
And I am stepping, my body spinning, but somewhere deeper I am falling, hurtling with every twirl. I keep moving, my breath held, waiting for the crash to come.
At another, I join the afternoon’s hunt.
And though I’d set snares and traps during my weeks alone on this island, there is a certain rage to it now, stalking through the forests with other members of the thiasus.
I remember thinking Artemis might find me in these woods, but if she is the ordered hunt, this is a frenzy.
This is every thought of my father and Theseus and my brother’s body and my sister’s betrayal and it is a plunging knife, a shot arrow and blood caught beneath my nails.
It is a space to let what is contained run free. To become wild.
To think of Theseus, and wonder what other violence my vengeance might yield.
‘New girl! Try this!’ Dionysus gleefully declares before pushing a cup of wine into my hand. Shrugging, I bring it to my lips. It is lighter than our usual wine, golden, and there’s an earthiness to it, a grounded flavour that feels warm and inviting.
‘Oh,’ I say, glancing from the cup to Dionysus. ‘Please tell me you didn’t put something weird in this.’
‘Pine resin!’ he cries, taking the cup back and taking a sip.
His lips brush right where mine just pressed.
‘Seals the amphorae, stops it spoiling and it’s delicious.
The pine cones win again!’ And I make a point not to drink any more of it that night, protesting this pine cone conspiracy that has gone on quite long enough.
I wait for it to hit – that sudden plummet, that swift snatching of any joy I manage to find.
And I realize the expectation alone is enough to fell me: my every move as haunted as the palace of Knossos ever was.
But those shadows have a name, beckoning me onwards – urging me to lay this spectre to rest.
At another, I sit in a circle with Calybe and we race to tie cherry stems with our tongues. At another, Opora and I strip off our chitons and run crashing into the ocean. At another, Myrto and I spin for so long on the dance floor the dizziness doesn’t abate until morning.
A week passes, maybe two. And always, no matter the joy, it simply refuses to settle in my heart.
Charis would love this. And aren’t these the very banquets my mother once hoped to host? And couldn’t Phaedra play her aulos freely here?
Sometimes I cannot believe that I am here at all – that I stirred my father into such fury and fled.
Did he take his anger out on my mother? Or Phaedra, even, for not warning him sooner?
Who will be there to take the blame when his rage flares?
Or will he turn it all on Theseus, chase him across the ocean and kill so many more Athenians than the fourteen I saved?
Theseus …
What am I doing here, convincing myself this life could be mine? Distracting myself with frivolity when what I truly want is so clear and urgent a fire sparking within.
Not peace but pain. An urge to take my hurt and return it tenfold.
I want revenge.
I am my father’s daughter, no matter how far from him I run.
The acknowledgement unfurls softly, hesitant – a thing I do not wish to admit: I am not staying.
I want to wring Theseus’s neck before he can hurt some other girl like he did me, and I want to rip my father’s power from him altogether and I do not want to remain here on this island, no matter how much I wish I did.
I have been removed from their stories, from their legends. But I refuse. I refuse! Make me the disobedient daughter or the wilful slut or write me as a witch if that’s the only sort of woman who centres in stories, but I will be at the tale’s heart once more.