Ariadne(93)

He did not wait for an answer. ‘I know that it might look . . .’ he cast around for the word, an Olympian momentarily unseated. ‘Unsettling,’ he finished. ‘To someone on the outside, perhaps it seems barbaric.’

I wondered how I had become someone on the outside. I had thought we made a perfect circle, he and I, with our children clasped tightly in the protective embrace of our arms. When had he slipped away? How had I not noticed it happen?

‘The blood rites,’ he said, and his voice lingered on the words, savouring them like a fine vintage. He glanced at me, saw my revulsion. ‘It is not a dance of death that we do,’ he said. His voice became more earnest now, his fingers tightened on my arm. ‘The goat – it dies so that it can live. So that I can bring it back. I wish I could explain it to you, Ariadne, I wish that you could see!’ He looked like a boy again, the youthful god who had skipped from the ship years ago, dolphins plunging wildly through the waves behind him, he was so full of glee and innocent-seeming exultation. ‘Of all the gods, with all their tricks – thunder, flying sandals, silver bows and the rest of it – which of them can hold death in their hands and restore it to life? Which of them can renew that which is dissolving to cold smoke before their eyes and make it breathe, warm and vigorous once more? Only I, Ariadne, only I am poised on that delicate line balancing between death and life. Only I can plunge in at the very moment that life is breathed out of the still-warm body and restore it to its whole and vital self, as though it had never gone at all.’

The image of Phaedra, swinging slow and heavy from a branch, flickered between us for a moment.

‘I cannot do it once the body is cold,’ he admitted. ‘When the soul is fully departed and on the path to Hades, I cannot snatch it back from him. It is only in the final moment, whilst the last pulsing of life continues to flow, that I can divert it. If I could take another soul from that dank kingdom, believe me, Ariadne, I would bring your sister back to you. That cannot be done, or I would do it for you.’

I believed him. And I was glad of that, at least.

‘Of all the Olympians, only I have this power,’ he said again. ‘It is a greatness that they cannot claim. And my followers, my maenads – for them, it is something beyond all imagining. It brings them flocking in greater numbers than ever before. As news spreads that Dionysus can bring the dead back to life, they will come to me in their thousands . . .’

He paused. I knew that he looked beyond me to smoking altars, to sacrifices and prayers and songs in every great city that sprouted up in the wide world outside our island. It was a mighty lure, indeed. I did not have the strength of will to point out that it was an empty trick. They would all join together in the worship of Dionysus, in the hope that he would bring back their dead, I knew. But their cherished sisters and brothers, their treasured sons and daughters, their beloved parents would continue to dwell under the inexorable gaze of Hades. All that my husband could offer them was a restored goat, pieced back together moments after they had ripped it apart in their bare hands.

Once, perhaps, I might have said this to him. But something told me that he would not hear it from me now. Just like Phaedra, who had stood impassive as I spoke the unwelcome truth.

I hardly knew where to even begin. ‘I didn’t like it,’ I said weakly. Limply. Pointlessly.

‘Then do not follow us again,’ he answered. There was no unkindness in his tone.

I let him help me to my feet. We walked back together to the house, to where our other children played. We were side by side, and perhaps he believed that we were as close as we had ever been. But I knew a chasm had opened up between us, and I did not think that he could bridge it.

I was not sure that I would even want to try.

On Naxos, life wore on. The simple joy of our existence was destroyed, but I found that it was surprisingly easy to carry on as before. Dionysus and I still laughed, we still talked, though never of what I had seen, nor of the gods. The children continued to grow. The maenads sang every day in the sunshine and swayed up the mountains under the cover of darkness.

Dionysus came and went, as he had always done, and I never asked now for stories of what he had seen and heard. I did not hanker after news from over the waves any longer. Nor did I bother to ask any more why he never thought to take me with him.

His mood had lightened; that much was certain. His newfound power brought him worshippers, just as he had anticipated, and he no longer seemed to return from his travels petulant and sulky. Instead, he returned like the Dionysus of old – fleet-footed and always laughing.

Sometimes, in the quiet hours of the night, I would open my eyes in the blackness and see those twisted, blank-eyed faces in the clearing, hear the eerie moan of their song. In the background, Phaedra would turn one way and then the other on her rope, the roar of the sea in the distance. Then I would wake and walk out in the mist that swirled across the beach before dawn, and pace until the emerging sun burned away the image.

In the clear daylight, I could reason it away. Their ritual did no harm – the animal lived unscarred, and all was well by morning. I saw no trace of cruelty in the maenads as they drifted through our fields by day. I wondered if it contributed to their gentleness? The ritual gave fearful shape to the anger and the grief that had driven so many of them here in the first place; they screamed and danced in their blood-soaked frenzy by night so that they could live serenely in the sunlight. Dionysus had not given Euphrosyne her baby back; her daughter’s bones still lay where she had died, all alone, her cries unheard. When I pictured that, I could see how some satisfaction might be found in that shared howl of visceral ecstasy, as they ripped through skin and muscle to the beating heart of the creature, lost in the madness together, shrieking out their pain and frustration. Who was I, the mother of five healthy children, to judge another woman’s suffering? Perhaps my husband’s cult was an antidote for these losses, borne otherwise in silence.