Page 108 of This Divine Revelry

‘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.