Page 126 of This Divine Revelry

Dionysus follows my gaze. ‘Shall I hurl these back at you?’ he calls. ‘Or should we speak with more civility?’

Perseus smiles. ‘Of course. Leave your weapons and come to the gates. I’ll have my men prepare for your arrival and we can negotiate your surrender.’

Dionysus flicks his wrist and the arrows fly towards Perseus, landing in a perfect circle around his feet.

Perseus cowers, his hands flying to cover his face, and when he looks back at Dionysus he makes no effort to hide his fear. Hermes was right – I don’t believe Perseus anticipated Dionysus wielding this sort of power.

‘We will negotiate,’ Dionysus agrees. ‘That is all.’

Around us, the rest of the thiasus peel themselves from the ground.

‘Would you like to rethink that?’ Perseus snarls.

Behind us, there is a dull rumbling, growing ever greater. They are upon us at once – men on horses’ backs or in chariots drawn by them, curved blades raised that make ours look like little more than flint fire-starters.

There is no moment to rethink because they do not pause to hear our shouts of surrender – we anticipated disgruntled townspeople or the efforts of guards, not soldiers, not the full might of an army.

Dionysus races forward like he might place himself between the soldiers and the thiasus but they’re already surrounding us – and then all at once they are among us. Dionysus is quick but each donkey bleat or dolphin squeak erupting from a struck soldier is drowned by clashing iron and he falters, turning and reaching but not risking hitting our own people.

I clutch his arm. ‘Come on! We need to get to Perseus. It’s the only way to stop this.’

He leaps across me, his staff held out to block a blow that had been aimed my way, and that thyrsus is twirling, taking hits, iron bouncing off the gods-cursed gold.

Another blade catches the sun, and I sense that – the light arcing through it – before I discern the whistle of metal swinging towards me. I grasp the soldier’s wrist, and draw up those walls. The labyrinth slams into place and I let go, leaving the man staring at what is not there.

I pluck the sword from his hand.

And use it to deflect a jab aimed at Dionysus – just enough to hit them with my other hand, the jolt all it takes to draw up another labyrinth and leave them staring into the abyss.

Dionysus throws his arm above me and arrows rain on to the invisible shield.

‘You’re right,’ he says – eyeing Perseus on those walls, watching the carnage with unabashed delight.

We battle our way through and, gods above, Medea was right. I am stronger. It is not even that my powers deplete less readily or that I am not so easily exhausted, but that using them feels invigorating – and it is enough to blunt the sharp edge of so much iron, and the tang of blood in the air. I am a whisper weaving through the battlefield. A gentle touch in so much harshness, immobilizing and incontestable.

Dionysus does not need a true immortal form for his divinity to be evident – he is a blade cleaving through the conquering masses. Men who try to attack us trip over sudden grapevines or scramble to gather imaginary pine cones with ardent, desperate fervour. In the fray, soldiers shift and morph, collapsing wherever Dionysus spots them into all manner of beasts until their squawking, braying, bleating rings out over the shrieks.

Where he falters, I reach out and walls spring up and around, paths wind through, visions leap and fade.

In moments, we are at those gates – a slam of his thyrsus against it and the lock falls apart.

We race up the steps of the walls, soldiers backing away from us, or else snatched by vines and left dangling over the precipice, and there is Perseus, blood draining from his face – scrambling back.

Dionysus jams his thyrsus beneath Perseus’s chin, the tip of the pine cone wickedly sharp.

‘Call them off, now!’

Perseus sneers but he glances to his men. ‘Blow the horn. End this.’

Its answering blast is thunderous.

The clash of metal ceases. But their weapons are still in hand. Soldiers lift their swords high, or else hold maenads at spearpoint. Around us, arrows are nocked, ready to fire. And littered among them are the wounded, the bleeding, the dead. Not all in armour. Some in the linen of the thiasus or the rough-hewn weaves of the villagers. I see horns covered in blood. Or braids trodden into the mud …

No. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go.

‘Try anything,’ Perseus snarls – like a weapon is not still held to his throat, ‘and they resume. But you’ve quite made your point. So let’s discuss your options.’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE