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After a pause he continued, "Yes. Yes, I remember he told me that himself."
Alex
paused again, waiting for an answer.
Faint, very faint and far away, the music of a single flute. Of course they
were
the creatures of Dionysus; what else could they be? But even the mad must
sometimes tell the truth.
Alex swallowed, then got out a whisper through a tight throat. "Lord
Dionysus?
Where are you?"
Our god is dead.
"Oh." He swallowed. "Then what do you want of me?"
Come. A little patch of blurred fog. The ghost of a pale hand, beckoning.
Shakily Alex rose to his feet. He wondered if he was weakening, though at the
moment he felt no particular hunger. Led by the sprite, for no great
distance,
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but by a convoluted path, to a cranny, a buried recess, that he would not
have
found unaided in a hundred years of searching, Alex came upon the body of the
previous avatar of Dionysus. At first, all he could recognize was the cape.
A swirling of half-visible forms was followed by what sounded like a
whispered
consultation, and then one who had been delegated to do so came back to the
young man again, an image becoming minimally plainer, the mere outline of an
old
man, bearded like a goat. When no one wears the Face of Dionysus, we grow
weaker
and weaker. If our god stays dead much longer, most of us will fade and die.
Alex looked about him on the dusty pavement, starting at the spot beneath the
mummified head of the late god. Nothing. "Where is the Face? Does one of you
have it?"
The vague form gestured, with what might have been its hands. None of us can
ever wear it, for we are not human. We are allowed to touch it only briefly.
A spotted panther, looking like a creature from somewhere deep in the
mainland
jungles, south of the Great Sea, came into view, silent as a ghost, regarding
him gravely. It was a very strange sight indeed, though not the strangest
that
Alex had seen today. And now there were two panthers, enough like each other
to
be twins. And, just behind the great cats, an image as of a small chariot,
hardly more than toy-sized. In a moment the animals withdrew, or disappeared.
The great cats had looked neither more nor less unreal than all the other
visitants; and as soon as they moved away, the chariot too was gone, if it
had
ever been there.
For a moment Alex recoiled in fear. But then he moved forward again to look.
At
last he knelt down, cautiously, beside the inert figure.
As a soldier he was no stranger to death in all its phases. Obviously the god
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had been dead for a long time. Judging from everything he knew about the
case,
Alex concluded that six months would be about the right interval.
Dionysus this
avatar of Dionysus had probably hidden here half a year ago, on the night
when
he fled from Shiva.
"Who are you?"
This time he was asking about the individual who spoke to him, not the whole
collection of them, and so his question was understood. My name is Silenus.
But
that does not matter. What matters is that spring has come again, and yet our
god is dead.
A second voice now joined in the ghostly whispering. Our god is dead, yet
spring
has come to the world regardless. Is that not strange and unbelievable? It
was a
weird, affecting lamentation, all the more intense because it was so inhuman.
This was one turning of the year when the previous avatar was not going to
revive. The body was little more than a skeleton by this time, but the rich
cape
that Alex remembered was here, now only a weathered rag. The golden winecup
Dionysus had drunk from in the great hall now lay near the skeletal right
hand.
Dionysus, at least in this most recent avatar, had not bothered to bear
weapons,
at least none of any ordinary sort. If a divinity became so weak that he
needed
a commonplace sword or spear, they weren't likely to do him any good.
The fleeing god had left his thyrsus-staff in the great hall, where it had
been
incinerated by Shiva. Alex wondered whether the staff might have
reconstituted
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