The Hymn to Dionysus

by Natasha Pulley

“It’s going to be all right,” I said, before I could think myself out of it. “I’ll look after you. I promise.” It was such a small thing, but somewhere, behind the world, something went in a great ledger, and something mighty took notice.

He sounded like that ash-glow looked; like the funeral pyre of kingdoms.

“Then what happens if you’re hurt?” I said incredulously. “Tough crackers really,” he said with a laugh under his voice, the same one I would have laughed if he had asked me if I thought it was unfair I wouldn’t live to see forty.

Humans are weird animals; partly we’re wild, and partly we are clockwork. Unholy devices, all of us—mechanisms bolted onto bone.”

Sometimes, you have a conversation between two mirrors. Instead of talking to just one person, you talk to versions and versions of them, reflected back and back.

Normal humans who live in proximity sometimes give things to each other; it’s a way of saying you’d like to be friends if it isn’t too inconvenient. Do you know about friends? It’s when you keep talking to another person for a good while but neither of you sets the other one on fire.”

Things had seemed a bit too much earlier, but sometimes what you need to remember is that everything is fine as long as you aren’t currently on fire.

a slim older man whose name I was nearly sure was Lord Halys. I liked him distantly for reasons I couldn’t remember; I had a feeling he had been a general when I was little, and that Helios had liked him. Sometimes you inherit liking people.

And that was because . . . there were no gods. There were forces, like the sea and death, and madness, but they weren’t conscious. They didn’t want things, or plan. That was all witchcraft, and once you know how the witching works, it stops working. He could see it all. What a god really did was marshal people together under a banner, and help them get things done. Build palaces, win wars. Otherwise nobody would ever agree about anything, but if you said the magic words, in the name of Zeus, or in the name of Ra . . . you could make people build things so great that their grandchildren wouldn’t see the finished temple. The gods were ideas, a great, sparkling lie to oil the clockwork of the world, and priests were only witches.