Ariadne(98)

Did he mean to drive them all to insanity? Was this the lesson he would teach them? I stared at him, surrounded by the roiling serpents he had summoned, the unearthly howls of the women reverberating through the skies. I could not watch any more. My hand pressed to my mouth, I fled below deck to where the maenads huddled, mute with terror. Their faces told me that this fury that Dionysus now unleashed was alien to them; a change had been wrought upon him, and my fragile hope that they might know how to prevent it withered.

‘What can we do?’ I asked them desperately.

Beneath the horrid sound of the women’s screams, I heard a new noise. A chorus of thin, high-pitched, bleating cries.

I had seen one goat ripped apart in ritual frenzy. When I closed my eyes, I could still see their hands around its fragile legs. Hear its helpless cries. See the blank, unheeding faces of the women as they closed in around it. I cursed my cowardice, but I could not bring myself to leave the ship, to see that savagery again, enacted over and over.

I stayed with the maenad women, our hands held fast together.

We waited for it to end.





40


I don’t know how much time passed before the noise faded altogether. The maddened shrieks that pounded in my head like a nightmare gave way to an eerie song that made the flesh creep from my bones until that, in turn, gave way to howls of demented joy. Finally, the weeping. Soft at first, then rising like rain.

And then silence.

I looked at the frightened women clustered around me. They had come to Dionysus, to Naxos, for sanctuary. For a life of peace, away from those who sought to make their lives miserable and tormented. This is not what they had come to us for. In my breast, I felt a molten anger towards my husband. He had kept us sobbing in fear of him in the darkness of the ship whilst he played his hideous games with the Argive women. They had done nothing to him but refuse him.

I would not let it happen again. I stood, stumbled to the deck of the ship, gulped in the welcome air above. I turned to face the city.

The breeze felt light and fresh; the clouds above promised the cleansing fall of rain to wash the world anew. No snakes, no storms, no crazed god raising his staff to the sky in terrible vengeance. No women. The vast bronze doors of the city were sealed; its secrets tightly locked within.

And on the beach a golden-haired young man, standing carelessly on the sand, unchanged from the day I had first set eyes upon him. So it would be until the seas boiled away to nothing and the dome of the sky collapsed in upon the earth.

He raised his eyes to me. I could not read in them what he had done.

And then he was before me, on the ship. Like a statue of himself, his face revealed nothing. I could not bring myself to move any closer towards him.

A single, monstrous scream shattered the silence. The city walls still stood, imperturbable and smooth, but now another scream followed, and another; great shouts and the sound of clashing metal spilled out.

‘What is happening in there?’ I asked him.

He smiled, a strange twist of his mouth, almost a grimace. ‘I expect they prepare to fight.’

‘Why?’ I could not believe that we were having this calm conversation. I wanted to seize his tunic, shake the answers from him, but I did not know if I could ever lay my hands upon him again.

For an instant, the smoothness of his face cracked, crumbled into a sadness that was gone almost before I had seen it.

He sighed. ‘Perseus will want his vengeance upon me.’ It sounded as though he spoke of a mild inconvenience.

I forced myself to take one shaking step closer to him. ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘Dionysus, what have you done?’

He moved swiftly, took my elbow, moved me further back into the ship. I flinched at the feeling of his fingers around my arm. He was like a stranger to me, as if someone had poured another man into the mould of my husband. I did not know what he was thinking.

He pushed back his golden curls from his brow. ‘I did not intend—’

My heart throbbed painfully. ‘Does an army come for us? Tell me.’

‘Perseus’ army is nothing to me,’ he said quickly. ‘Stay here, I will keep them at bay.’

I gulped down my reluctance to touch him, my instinct to recoil from him, and took his face in my hands. He could have shaken me off like a fly, but he hesitated. He looked so young, his face framed between my palms, the sun streaming behind him. He was like a boy, caught out in mischief, a mixture of guilt and defiance mingled in his expression.

‘Perseus is angry, he makes a great display. I should have known that he would. I will deal with it, he will not cause us any true harm. But it is best that you stay here, out of sight, whilst I calm him down.’

I could have laughed at the ridiculousness of it – though if anyone could calm down an army of rampaging soldiers, I supposed it would be Dionysus. He was renowned for bringing his gift of relaxation, a gentle intoxication of the senses, a soothing joy and merry companionship. I wondered how he had found it in himself to incur the wrath of a city now bent on revenge against us. And if he could not talk them round, then what? From years ago, in Crete, I heard Theseus tell Phaedra that she would not want an army on her doorstep if she knew what armies did. ‘Dionysus, tell me why.’ I had borne his sons, given him years of my life. I deserved an explanation when he brought war down upon my head and he knew it.

He loosened my hands, moved away from me. ‘I called out the women,’ he said, as though I had not seen it happen myself. ‘They rejected my words, my invitation to worship. They said again what Perseus had said, they turned their heads away, they protested that they would not drink wine, for it was foul and would bring only shame and depravity upon them. They did not want my rites, they said; they refused all that I could show them. They would stay obedient to their men, they insisted . . .’ He paused. ‘I was angry.’