CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IFIND MYSELF BEFORE A map again, trying to focus – to tap into those lurching instincts that tell me where to turn and which step to take.
But the map means nothing to me – it is on the deck that I feel it.
Actually, it is high that I feel it, up on the rail at the front of the bow, my toes curling into the wood and Calybe hugging my shins so I don’t topple off.
With the ocean sprawling before me, that winding path finally unravels.
On the second day, Silen frowns, staring at the same horizon.
‘This is the way to Naxos.’
‘No,’ I say – because that doesn’t feel right.
But if not Naxos, where?
It takes nearly three days to sail. Dionysus settles, a little.
Resting his head on my thigh as I toy with his hair and reassure him that everything he’s seeing sounds terrifying, that I’d be concerned too if I could hear spirits of violent death, that I know something of what it is like to fear your own father.
Sterope grounds him too, calming him better than my gentle words.
Dionysus spends his hours threading garlands of dried figs and ivy or crowns of pine cones and branches of myrrh. Sometimes, when he hears things, he is not quite so scared – and he speaks back, asking questions, sorting through whatever it is he’s sensing.
At one point, he seems to be spiralling, rolling from the spirits chasing him to his father’s proposed schemes, trying to plot out his next move and who else he might have got involved, when all at once he blinks and says, ‘It’s happening again, isn’t it?
’ then leaps from his seat to thrust his head into a basin of water, left overnight and chilled on the deck.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, rushing over, just for him to flip his head back, specks of the icy water spraying from his hair and peppering my skin.
‘Shock to the system,’ he says. And it pulls him out of his cyclone thoughts for a little while.
Silen is right. Perhaps most of the time he does not know what he is seeing is not real, but Dionysus has been through this before and has been preparing for its return for a long time.
A part of him, in some tighter spiral of his mind, perhaps, clearly suspects.
Somewhere, he is trying so very desperately to escape this.
Still, there are moments where he shouts back, like he could drown the cackling spirits out.
Times when he demands I leave him – because I’m mortal and I’m in more danger if his father comes. He insists he doesn’t want me there, tells me I’m making everything worse, that this is why no god would ever think to take a mortal wife and he was stupid, foolish, arrogant …
Sometimes Silen and Hermes come swooping in, distracting him as he suggests cursing his father first before Zeus can reach him himself.
Opora and Calybe attempt to distract me in turn, their near-constant bickering transformed into a performative comedy, while Myrto braids my hair and Zosime, having finally relented, plies me with honey cakes.
And Dionysus is not only his illness. When he is more lucid, we squabble in our usual manner, and then all at once a wave hurls us together, and next thing I know our lips are brushing over one another and I am grasping him so tightly I dig nail marks into my palms through their grip on his chiton.
It is turbulent. But it is better than the alternative: him, facing this alone. Me, not having any version of him at all by my side.
The islands trickle in until all at once there are so many the ocean feels crowded. And soon shapes feel familiar. I watch as we sail right past Naxos, perched at the edge of the boat, pointing until … oh.
Hermes leans against the rail. ‘Delos,’ he says. ‘Of course.’
‘Of course?’
‘It’s the most sacred isle there is. Mortals are not permitted to be born or to die or to be buried upon its land. Where better for a woman so many want dead to hide than in a place they cannot kill her?’
The island is like a sunset coalesced. A monument of marble, painted and arrayed so that on every hilltop there is a statue, on every corner a temple.
Boats line the harbour, more on the horizon, and as we draw close, a figure detaches from the docks’ crowd, draped in a black veil and a slick, silky chiton like the dark spills across her – swelling over her stomach where evidently a child grows.
In my mind, the exit is reached – her. Medea.
They say she’s a murderer. That she killed the woman her husband tried to leave her for. That she buried her own children too. That she comes from a barbarous nation. That she is the violent force behind every one of Jason’s conquests.
But they also say she saved Heracles. Saved Jason. Saved every single Argonaut a dozen times over.
I approach with trepidation.
‘Cousin,’ she intones, her lofty voice echoing even across the breezy port. ‘The portents foretold of your approach. They spoke of a dying god. Of his rebirth. Of a race across the ocean that would bring you to me.’
I step back, a little unnerved. ‘Really?’
‘No,’ she says with a breathless laugh. ‘Hecate told me. In person. She was picking her nails at the time.’
She pushes the veil from her face. Her skin is fair, untouched by the sun – just like mine – and like me she too towers above those around us, her hair an untameable dark weave.
‘Come,’ she says, eyes flitting across me with not so much warmth as intrigue. ‘Walk with me.’
She takes me away from the city, up into the foothills of the neighbouring mountains.
‘Delos has temples to Isis, Serapis, Hadad, Atargatis and many more gods outside the pantheon that traders have brought to these shores. But nothing for Hecate.’
Hecate. Goddess of magic. Medea was her high priestess. She taught her to do all she can do.
Medea stops walking. ‘And yet, you may always find her power at the crossroads.’
The road ahead branches – one path leading up into the mountains, another down towards the coastline where smaller fishing boats are lashed.
Medea crosses to a fallen tree lying in the shadow of another and sits down upon it. ‘Come, Grandfather doesn’t need to hear everything.’ She squints at me in the brightness. ‘You are awfully quiet, Ariadne. That doesn’t tend to run in our family.’
‘Sorry – still shaken from a recent kidnapping, I think.’ I take a seat beside her. ‘Did Hecate really speak to you about Dionysus?’
‘Yes,’ she says – like speaking to a goddess is an ordinary occurrence.
‘Theseus drove me from Athens – I don’t know what’s wrong with us.
You, your mother, Circe, especially me – we all have the worst taste in men.
Aegeus approved his son’s effort to kill me, even knowing I carried our child.
So I ran. But I couldn’t go far, not like this.
’ She gestures at her stomach. ‘On the outskirts of Athens lies Eleusis. I knew Hecate was working on something there with the Queen of the Underworld and her mother, the goddess of the harvest. It sounded a safe enough place to claim sanctuary.’
‘And she mentioned Dionysus specifically?’
She nods. ‘Yes – sometimes. She’s not the easiest to follow, though – seems to expect you to know what she’s talking about and keeps going until you catch up.
Death and rebirth was a continuous refrain.
And she mentioned bleeding a god a number of times.
Though it’s not my first time hearing that.
Bleed a god, take their power – it’s a rumour heroes have whispered amongst themselves for years.
This just might be the first time it’s actually been within their grasp. ’
I tense. Perseus had said something like that … He’s going to get weaker – weak enough to bleed.
I’d thought he meant it poetically. Weak enough to kill. And even then, the notion that killing Dionysus might be a route to godhood has always seemed ludicrous – like the Olympians require a set number and would hurry to replace him with the first available hero.
But there’s more to it?
‘It’s true, then?’ I ask. ‘That is how it would work?’
Medea shrugs. ‘Like all rumours, it’s a little warped.
But Dionysus proved that immortality can be achieved through a sort of transference.
If he had been born of his mother, he’d be just another mortal demigod running around.
But stitched up in his father’s thigh, he absorbed divinity.
And if he could take immortality from his father’s body, why couldn’t another demigod take it from him in turn?
Immortality is a hungry thing – it wants to consume.
Some demigods are even born with it outright.
But others? Well, if you have immortal blood in your veins, sometimes all it takes is a slight boost, a jolt to take it from a spark to an inferno.
A full mortal couldn’t do it; the divinity would burn them up.
But a demigod? If they were to capture a god, any god, really – but let’s consider yours the easiest to fall into their clutches, rejected by Olympus and walking the mortal plane as he does – then yes, they could draw that immortality out for themselves. ’
My heart pounds and it feels all the more ominous with Delos stretched out before me – all those temples, all the men hungry to erect them for themselves.
Perseus himself, luring me in with the promise of exactly that because he knew how powerful an offer it would be.
Medea traces the grain of the log we sit upon, far too nonchalant for my liking.
‘Unlike those other gods, I’m not sure yours has enough of that fuel to go around.
It wouldn’t be Zeus, dripping it into him with each pulse of ichor, never feeling his own depletion. It would likely bleed Dionysus dry.’
‘Oh, just let them try,’ I growl – and she laughs.