I smiled at that. “I think I know what true music is. And also I know that the true Dionysus is the force of creation, brought to us by Zeus as the bearer of life—not, as you women would have it, of mindless destruction. But let that pass. You say I should come with you to your revels and learn the truth of your beliefs. But do you mean that? Would you really want a man present at your feast, Hesione? Admit it, cousin: when the full madness is upon you, you detest all men, and would tear any man apart who went near you!”
“You say we detest men? You, who loathe all womankind so much that you take only handsome youths as your lovers?”
I reminded her of my love for Eurydice, whom I still mourned in songs that made all the world weep. If I had turned to members of my own sex for the comforts of love after the death of Eurydice—and it was true; I had, many times—it was only because no other woman in the world could ever have been to me what Eurydice was. But that in itself only angered Hesione all the more, for she saw it as a rejection of her entire sex. I could do nothing against such a belief. Nor could I pry her loose from her conviction that the Dionysus of the maenad frenzies was the true Dionysus.
I knew, as I have always known, that only by becoming Dionysus myself, only through my dying and being reborn even as he was slain and born again, could I break through the wall of her madness and the madnesses of her cult. By that sacrifice, and by it alone, would I be able to return my people to the essential way of harmony. Gods must die—and there is a part of me that is a god—to lead their people onward to the truth.
I was prepared for it. I had prepared for it all my life. By dying as in their fables Dionysus himself had died, I would become Dionysus for them, and they would worship me as they had worshipped him, and Dionysus and Apollo would at last be united in their minds.
And so—and so—when the day came—“The maenads are dancing in the forest, Orpheus,” said one of the men of my court. “You must go to them and calm them with your music, or they will destroy us all!”
“Yes,” I said. “I must go to them.”
I heard the strident screeching of their flutes long before I saw them, the pounding of their drums, the penetrating outcry. Then they came into view, dozens of them, racing wild-eyed across the meadow, their painted faces shining, their serpent-threaded hair unbound and streaming behind them, their animal-skin garments hanging open. How crazed they were! How far gone in their frenzies, how maddened by love of their god!
Here was beautiful Hesione, face smeared with blood and distorted into a terrible grimace, eyes so glazed she scarcely seemed to recognize me.
“Do you know me, Hesione?” I asked, holding my lyre aloft. “I am Orpheus. Come, Hesione. Listen to my song.”
I could tell that she had no idea who I was. She scooped up a strand of ivy and held it beckoningly toward me, as though she meant to bedeck my shoulders with it as one would bedeck a bull being made ready for the sacrifice. From her crimson lips came a strange bellowing sound that no one would know for the voice of a woman.
Beside her at the front of the pack was tall scarlet-haired Phorixo, altogether lost in the raptures of her rite, and next to her gentle Carya the healer, but she was not so gentle now, for the blood of beasts ran down her arms and shoulders, and dripped from the tips of her bared breasts. Carya, at least, knew me. “So there you are, Orpheus! You who scorns us all, come to mock us!”
“You know me, Carya,” I said. “I mock no one.”
And I took up my lyre and began to play.
The birds in the trees heard my song and ceased their chatter.
The snakes wrapped in the maenads’ hair heard me. The wild animals of the forest heard me.
Golden Apollo himself heard me. He hovered in the air above me, visible as though through a bright shimmering veil. He touched his lyre and I heard his music answering mine. And I saw the stars shining by day all about him, pulsing and quivering like drumheads beating of their own accord, filling the heavens with all their many colors, and I heard once more those thousand thousand lyres all at once, and the stars were singing their blessed song, that vast eternal harmony, that celestial music that has ever been my joy.
“Now you know who you are, Orpheus, and who you will be,” said Apollo to me, as he had in my boyhood.
I smiled, and I felt the warm glow of his smile upon me.
But the Bacchantes themselves heard only the imagined voice of their god, who was Apollo also, but in the form of fiery Dionysus.
Hesione threw the first stone, which struck me in the forehead. The healer Carya threw the next; and then the air was thick with them, striking hard, knocking the breath from me. I fell to my knees. They came rushing toward me, shrieking.
So it was about to happen, the thing I had seen so many times in my memories of the future, the thing that had happened before and would happen again, and again and again. Well, so be it. It had been decreed. The stones battered me, but I did not stop playing. In another instant the women were swarming around me like hungry beasts. Their deafening shrieks assailed my ears. I felt the blows of their ivy-wrapped staffs. In a moment they would rake my skin with their nails and seize my arms and tear at my flesh.
But I held tight to my lyre and continued to play. I am Orpheus, Apollo’s son, and the gods had placed me here for this. So, calling on all the strength that remained to me, I played and I sang. By grace of Apollo, I played and I sang. I would not cease my song until the end. I knew that the time was coming once again for me to die; but it was not here yet, and, until that time had come, I would not cease my song.