Ariadne(63)
I had never seen such great groups of women before. Not veiled, not quiet, not subservient. Their conversation was free and frank and flowing. I wondered what the fathers, brothers and husbands that they must have left behind would think if they could see their women roaming the landscape unfettered.
I could not find my place within them, somehow, but I felt at ease walking alongside them. I found great peace under the sunshine, pruning and watering and harvesting the simple miracles of our crops. And all the while, there was Dionysus in the background. We ate our meals together, and when he presided over the maenads’ worship I found myself sitting at his side rather than kneeling with them. The days were strung together like beads on a cord – a beautiful necklace, a gift I had never expected.
I was with Dionysus every day, for he never seemed to leave now. He showed me that he was truly the best of all men, of all gods. It was not just his stories; I had fallen for tales woven in the moonlight before and knew better than to trust a man’s account of himself. I saw it in his easy laughter as he walked amongst his maenads, his bounteous hospitality and his care for us all, and I saw it in the gentle coaxing of my friendship and the manner in which he sought to obtain my approval. He created for us all a paradise on Naxos; a happy, thriving community that existed beyond the reach of the laws and constraints of the world we had all left behind. When I danced on Naxos, I felt barely a pang for the gleaming wooden circle crafted by Daedalus at Knossos. No foul whispers could reach me here and there were no distant bellows or the rumbling of frantic hooves beneath my feet. No burn of shame, watching my mother’s hunched form drift unseeingly past the rich tapestries and polished statues. No shiver of malice breathed through the air, no stench of miasma clinging to the marble pillars and the intricate tiles of each mosaic. I was thankful to live a life that I had never even known to dream. I never missed Crete at all.
I had fallen in love with Theseus in the sizzle of lightning as our eyes connected across a macabre feast, when he stood in chains and promised with his clear, green gaze to set me free. I had known nothing about him when I swore to be his wife save for the lies he had told me. With Dionysus, everything was different. I felt that we had built a trust between us, something real and tangible, and I could not deny how much I longed for him. But I could not ignore the obvious.
‘Will you still visit this island in a few years?’ I asked him one evening as we walked together on the beach.
He looked surprised, faintly amused. ‘I have not left it in weeks,’ he answered. ‘I rather feel you should ask the opposite question.’
‘In years to come, the island may have changed. I will change,’ I said, veering closer to what I really wanted to say. ‘But you will still look the same, is that not true?’
He considered his reply. He knew what I meant. ‘Gods do not age,’ he said finally.
‘But I will. Perhaps you will not want to come here, to see how I keep your home by then. Or perhaps you will bring other beauties with you and I will sweep the floor and boil the water for you when my hair is grey and my face wrinkled with time.’ I could not keep the bitterness from my voice as I imagined how it would happen.
‘I will love you when you are shrivelled and ancient,’ he said, an intensity in his tone that I had never heard before.
I had been staring determinedly away, up at the stars beginning to glimmer in the night sky, but at this I turned my face to his. He had never spoken like this to me and my heart pounded painfully, despite myself. ‘Can that be true?’ I whispered.
He took my hand in his. ‘I can go anywhere in the world that I choose,’ he said. ‘A god’s freedom is limitless. But I only want to be here, milking goats and talking with you . . .’ He paused. ‘I cannot love another immortal. I see them, vain and stupid, puffed up with their own importance and their petty cruelties. Mortals may age, but the gods are prisoners of their own infantile whimsies, never capable of change and never knowing what it is to love because they dare not risk the suffering of loss.’
His face was so open, so wracked with pain and honesty. He had never looked more human. Surely a god could not be so vulnerable?
‘I loved Ampelos. I know what it is to lose someone. But it taught me that every second can be precious, even in a god’s eternity. I do not want to waste any. I cannot bear to see you married to an undeserving man or to watch your life fade away to nothing, leaving no children behind or any trace that you were ever on this earth. We might only have a mortal lifetime, but it will belong to us and no one else.’
Perhaps my life truly did belong to him – he had seized me from the jaws of death, after all. There was no mortal man I could put more trust in than him. I wanted to discover what life would be like with this strange, boyish immortal whose power could split the earth in two but whose nature was gentler than anyone I had known. I put my other hand on top of our entwined fingers, held his hand between mine.
A wisp of cloud floated across the face of the moon like the veil fluttering over the face of a bride. Dionysus pulled me close in a wordless embrace. I felt his heart beat beneath his breast like a mortal man. It was all too easy to forget that he was not.
What do you imagine the wedding of an Olympian god to be like? The bridal pair descending in a chariot of clouds, pulled by silver horses? Fine robes encrusted with rubies and emeralds, lined with rich purple, belted with delicate golden chains? A banquet served upon plates of beaten bronze, piled to the skies with roasted meats, and ambrosial rivers flowing? A throng of towering divinities ringed with fiery haloes, incandescent with power and beauty beyond imagining?