CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
IDO NOT KNOW HOW long we walk, only that it is a very long time before the path veers around itself and I cannot tell if we are following its trail to the centre or out to an exit.
When I look at Dionysus, that haziness about him appears more substantial and I smell smoke, thicker with every step.
Dionysus’s fingers grip mine tight until suddenly he turns, grasping my wrist and pushing me up against the wall.
I think of Theseus and our escape from Crete, but Dionysus does not merely draw me out of the way, he lingers, shielding my body with his own.
Behind him, figures charge. Women wielding long, curving knives, their eyes rolling, froth spilling from their cracked lips. Their howls echo in the labyrinth, long-suffering pleas, but they do not seem to see us. They just charge onwards – then, in their wake, centaurs gallop, similarly frenzied.
‘Oh, so that’s what this is,’ he says, letting me go.
‘What is?’
He swallows, glancing along the path. ‘I think the further we go, the more we will encounter terrors from my past.’
‘Your past,’ I echo, looking to where the women disappeared. If we turned in the other direction, would we find his future instead? Is that how it works? Or is it as I said, when I first contemplated the labyrinth: Death, if it lurks within, will find you.
When I face Dionysus, I catch aspects of that haze: fluttering hair, flashes of jewellery, a wavering cloak, smudges of kohl – and so much more I can’t quite identify, a sort of energy that shifts.
I am seeing Dionysus’s past – and, presumably, snatches of the costumes worn, the performance layered over the only thing with any true substance: Dionysus, frightened, hurt and incontestably radiant.
Dionysus reaches for my hand again and the moment our fingers close around one another, those wavering shapes settle into now Dionysus – his hair trimmed from our wedding, shadows dark beneath his eyes and flickers of gold lacing about his arms, his fingers, even glinting at his ears.
But it’s all still translucent. Still just as much a performance.
And it’s those jewel-bright eyes beneath that give the truth of him.
‘My first caretakers,’ Dionysus explains of the frenzied women.
He takes my hand again and we keep walking.
‘The Lamides. Hera got them when I was still only a baby – her favoured curse. Why kill me herself when she could warp my loved ones’ minds so they’d do it for her?
She cursed them and turned their sons to centaurs and Hermes arrived just as they were all about to plunge their knives into me.
He was too late for the sailors they’d sliced apart, though. ’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s going to get worse.’
‘I know. I’m sorry about that too.’
He takes a breath – the sort that rattles in his chest. ‘I’m just glad you’re here.’
Dionysus keeps walking, undaunted.
The next ghostly figures rise up from the ground. We pause, watching them spill.
‘This is the worst one,’ Dionysus says quietly. ‘Past this and it’s practically easy.’
His voice is too choked for me to believe that. There is a man, and a woman and two small children. The vision has not turned yet, not gone wrong, and Dionysus pushes us forward, right through them, before it can.
The mist dissipates.
‘I don’t have to relive this, surely,’ he says, suddenly furious.
‘Is that the point of this maze? My own mind made physical – to prove that I have suffered? I know that. Does your magic think falsehoods cloud my mind and warp my reality because I am traumatized? Perhaps in part, but it is so much more complicated than that.’
He picks up speed, and I scurry to keep up.
‘I agree,’ I say, eyeing every brick, right down to the grain of the clay. Like one suggestion that something is amiss would expose the truth of this. ‘There is nothing we face here that talking through your past could not just as easily achieve.’
‘You sound like Silen,’ he mutters. ‘They’ve been trying to get me to pore over my every childhood memory for years – like that might solve any of this.’
‘It might,’ I say, considering the point. ‘Your crafts, your coping mechanisms … I’ve seen those help. So maybe talking might too. Maybe together they’re all part of a process and the labyrinth is here amplifying their impact, giving you the chance to retake control?’
‘Control?’ he scoffs. ‘You think I’m in control here?’
‘Dionysus, please. Try it. Talk.’
‘Alright, fine,’ he says, voice sharp. ‘I lived with those people when I was a young girl, claiming to be their daughter. They’re about to be struck by Hera’s curse.
My uncle will hallucinate that his own son is a deer and hunt him.
My aunt will scald her baby in boiling water.
They die. They all die! And it’s horrific and it’s brutal and it’s enough to drive anyone from their own mind!
Then Hermes will take me to the next guardian. ’
A woman stumbles through, gone before we can take note.
‘Rhea,’ Dionysus says. ‘And I’ll be happy for a while but my father will decide it puts her at too great a risk, so he’ll have Hermes shuttle me to the next.
My aunt Makris – but that’s a liability too.
’ Another woman flashes past us. ‘Then nymphs on Mount Nysa.’ They spring up, the collection of them – and a child I recognize.
Silen, younger, their horns slight bumps on their skull.
‘Which is how I’ll get this name, by the way.
Dios after Zeus and Nysa after the mountain.
I was twelve by the time they thought they should give me a name, like I might actually stick around past the next sunset. ’
He stops, breathing hard. The path is shrinking, winding in. I don’t know what we’ll find at the centre. I don’t know if he can face it.
‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted. The next sunset.
’ His eyes flutter shut, like he might block all this out.
‘All those heroes vying for immortality and I, with it in my grasp, have only ever dreamt of reaching the next tomorrow.’ He opens his eyes to stare at the vast empty path ahead of us.
‘The nymphs were the last,’ he says, voice flat like it has been of late, sometimes, when the energy and the feelings fade from him.
‘Then I was finally struck by her curse myself.’
‘Did you … did you hurt anyone?’
Because that’s what Hera’s curse did in all those instances.
‘I don’t remember,’ he says with nothing short of anguish. But how could I not have seems to go unsaid. With all that evidence behind us, what we will find ahead feels inevitable. ‘The first boy I ever loved was dead by the time I was lucid. So maybe …’
Maybe.
But as we walk, nothing finds us. It is the longest stretch of barren hall, as though Dionysus’s own lack of memory prevents the labyrinth filling in the gaps.
In the silence, I hear a gentle hum from the ground below, and as I notice it I realize too that the ground is warming. Like a forge burns beneath, manufacturing all we can see.
Maybe Silen was right – that talking does help – because there is so much here: pain, terror and a lifetime of fleeing even before that first voice flitted into his mind and told him to run.
With that whirring below? I could believe wading through his past is indeed doing something.
‘I don’t think this is the full labyrinth,’ I say. ‘I think it’s just the layer we’re seeing.’
‘A labyrinth within a labyrinth within a labyrinth,’ Dionysus says with faint amusement. ‘Yes, that seems a more apt manifestation of my mind.’
We round a corner to a figure. A boy, maybe fifteen or so, hunched and rummaging through grapevines tangled on the floor.
‘Oh,’ Dionysus says softly, stumbling to a halt.
The boy lifts his head as though he hears him when none of the others so far have seemed to notice us at all. When he shifts, I see the pointed ears that mark him as a satyr.
‘Ampelos,’ Dionysus says, moving closer. As he releases my hand, that wavering about him flutters once more.
The boy turns, revealing the full horror of himself. He has been gored from collar to hip, his insides spilling. The blood pools across the ground, marking the grapes with a dark red hue.
Dionysus swoops upon him but his hand goes straight through him. He crouches by his side.
‘Did I do this?’ Dionysus asks, his voice quiet. The haze around him settles, and he is younger, softer, his hair in ringlets about his face.
Ampelos blinks. ‘No, of course not. I was thrown from a bull. Then it … charged towards me and … I remember the moon …’
‘You made a boast against the goddess of it,’ Dionysus says, his eyes low, breath shallow. ‘I remember. I thought it was a hallucination.’
‘It wasn’t you,’ Ampelos says, shaking his head, and he too fades, fritters away into nothing.
‘Ariadne.’ Dionysus’s voice cracks.
‘I’m here,’ I say, rushing to him as he stands, haze settling once more, and he grasps my hand tight.
The whirring beneath intensifies – like he is doing something here, impacting the labyrinth and all those lingering below.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. But he doesn’t seem relieved at all that he was not at fault; his jaw is tight and he hauls us onwards.
We round the corner, the labyrinth almost corkscrewing now we are so close to its centre.
I come face to face with myself, grey and hazy. The figure’s hair is matted, skin wind-chapped and dirty, face gaunt from weeks on an island.
I push myself aside, and another me crawls up from the floor, grasping a bleeding throat. Another, a length of rope still trailing on one wrist. The next, exhausted and half starved on the planks of a ship.
A wall closes before us – the centre of the labyrinth. And dozens of versions of myself rise up, surrounding us.
‘This isn’t quite the dream I imagined it would be,’ Dionysus says, letting go to step away from them.
‘Why am I here?’ I demand. ‘You haven’t lost me.’
Yet – the voices, my own voice, seem to whisper. Is it that: does he fear losing me like he lost everyone else?