Page 36 of This Divine Revelry

‘Followers are power,’ he says simply. ‘Respect is how you survive. Hera is goddess of marriage so every infidelity against her threatens her very existence. That’s possibly the worst part of all this: that I understand why she killed my mother. She tricked her, convinced her to entice a promise from my father and when he agreed – at Hera’s prompting – my mother asked to see his true immortal form. It burned her to cinders.’

‘Dionysus,’ I say, and before I’m quite conscious of it, I’ve reached across the table for him. But he grabs for his cup like he hadn’t seen my hand move.

‘Oh, please do save the gasps and pity – we have a lot more to get through.’

And it’s this – this is what I can’t believe in – that he’d rather brush everything off or make an eccentric joke or reach for that damn cup of wine than acknowledge the fact that these things hurt.

‘But in her ashes my father found me. I was too small to live so he had me sewn into his own flesh. I grew in his thigh.’

‘His … what? His thigh?’

‘Gods,’ he says with an eye-roll. ‘They’re strange, ill-adjusted creatures.’

He looks at me expectantly but I don’t take the bait and he sighs like I’m not making his trauma nearly enough fun. ‘I should be a demigod. But Zeus technically birthed me – and no one ever seems to want to interrogate that, actually: my father birthed me and everyone still seems to want to define something as glorious as womanhood by who can and can’t give birth. Terribly boring, if you ask me –’

‘Dionysus,’ I prompt, because this is a very unsubtle dive into a distraction and he raises his cup like he is all too aware of it.

‘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.’