“She did, but she cared more about you,” Kallikles said. “And that’s right, that’s how it should be. We’re growing up, we have our own lives, the two of you would have gone on together.”

“And you’re Apollo,” Arete said. “You’re more important than we are.”

“You seem to be choosing to become gods yourselves,” I said. “But whether you do or not, she’d have put herself in front of a blade for you. For Neleus as fast as any of you.”

“Yes,” they both agreed, with no hesitation.

“And of those things she cared about that much, the one she put her body in the way of was art.”

“Yes,” Arete said.

“Whoever killed her didn’t want to kill her the way Kebes and I wanted to kill each other. Not personally. They just killed her because her body was between them and art.” I stopped, to make sure this made sense. They nodded. “So we have to stop the art raids,” I concluded. “That’s what she’d want, far more than vengeance. They didn’t kill her because they wanted to kill her. They killed her because she put her body between them and the head of Victory.”

“Stopping the art raids would be a really good thing, but I don’t know whether it’s possible,” Arete said. “People have tried before. Ficino and Mother tried. Manlius did.”

“We’d have to go to all the cities,” Kallikles said.

“We’re going to have to do that anyway, to tell them about the Lucian civilization,” I said. I sighed. “It won’t be easy. But it’s what she would have wanted, and it’s what we need to do.”

We swam back to the ship. Even though I understood now why she had chosen to die, I still couldn’t die myself and go back to Olympos. There might be other things I needed to understand from incarnation to become my best self—there probably were, and most of them awful, to do with old age and grief. And now I had to stay alive and go through them and learn, without having Simmea to help. I felt tired thinking about it. But beyond that I had the terribly complicated task of resolving everything Simmea would have wanted resolved, the art raids, relations between the Republics, the situation with the Lucians. It was the kind of thing Simmea was really good at, and I really wasn’t. But that was the work that needed to be done.

23

MAIA

Simmea and I were turning cheeses in brine when the mission from Psyche arrived. It was a hot summer day and we had been working hard. Cheese wheels are heavy, and if not turned they’ll start to rot. It was the kind of thing Workers had done for us, but which people can do perfectly well; the kind of thing Lysias used to try to persuade people to do, but which we never did as long as there were plenty of Workers to do it for us. The disappearance of all the others did mean that there were plenty of spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-one, but we only asked them to do the most important things, things that people couldn’t do.

The smell of cheese was overpowering in the storehouse. It was good strong sharp goat cheese and I knew I’d be glad of it when winter came, but I wasn’t sorry to be interrupted.

The messenger was one of the older Young Ones, a girl of about ten. She brought a written message for Simmea, and it was Simmea they wanted; she was on the Foreign Negotiations Committee. “A mission from Psyche,” she said, looking up from the note. “I’m going to have to go, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll finish up here,” I said, with a sigh.

“No, come with me,” Simmea said, picking up her kiton from the heap where she had tossed it. “I want to talk to you. We can both come back and finish up afterward. Pytheas will watch Arete.” I had been back in the Remnant City for a couple of years. Arete was six. Simmea was just over thirty, all taut muscle and sinew. White stretch marks showed as fine seams on her flat brown belly and the sides of her breasts, the legacy of her two pregnancies. She had a very distinctive face, which many people found ugly but which I was so entirely used to that it just seemed to me Simmea’s face.

“I think we should go through the wash fountain before appearing to visitors,” I said.

Simmea laughed. “I got so used to the smell of the cheese that I’d stopped noticing it. But you’re right. You know, you taught me how to use the wash fountain on my very first day in the city.”

“I always did that with new Florentine girls,” I said. “Easing them in.”

I picked up my own kiton and we walked out together. It felt hotter out in the sun. “I don’t know how you coped with all of us,” she said. “I had a little taste of it when we brought the boys home, but they were so small. Ten thousand ten-year-olds doesn’t bear imagining.”

“It was terrible,” I agreed.

“And it’s not even what Plato suggests. He says take over an existing city and drive out everyone who is over ten—so you’d have had nine- and eight-year-olds, and so on down to babies.”

“It seemed more practical,” I said, defensive as always when Children criticized the decisions the Masters had made. “It was Plotinus’s idea.”

“If you’d got children of all ages from ten to newborn, that wouldn’t have been any easier,” she said, opening the door into Thessaly.

I followed her across the room, tightly packed with beds, empty now because Pytheas was busy somewhere else and the children were at lessons. We went into the spacious fountain room, tiled in black and white diagonals. She turned on the water and we both stepped under. The shock of the cold water on my hot sweaty skin was delicious.

Clean, I dried myself on my kiton and wrapped it around me. Simmea did the same. “I should wash this one day soon,” she said, looking critically at a stain. Then she looked directly at me. “I was hoping to do this over a cup of wine after we’d finished with the cheese, but I wanted to ask you about the New Concordance,” she said.

I opened my mouth, but she held up a hand.

“I know you hate it. I want to understand. You know more about it than anyone here. Ikaros wants—well, the City of Amazons want—to send people here to preach. In the Foreign Negotiation Committee we’re debating whether it will do more harm to allow it or forbid it. We’re going to take it to Chamber.”

“I was a Christian before I came here,” I said.

“So was I,” Simmea said, surprising me.

“You remember?”

“Of course I remember.” We went out into the street again. “You told us to forget. Ficino said it had been a dream. But ten years of life isn’t a dream, and you can’t forget it.”

“I sometimes almost forget the years before I came here, and I was nineteen,” I said.

Simmea looked at me sideways with a patient expression. “New Concordance?”

“Sorry. It’s wrong. Literally and specifically wrong. Ikaros has built a whole complex structure based on incorrect axioms. He’ll debate any individual point, but I couldn’t get him to examine his axioms.” We walked down the broad diagonal street of Athene, passing others and nodding greetings to them from time to time.

“So what’s so appealing about it? Why did people convert, both historically and in the City of Amazons? Why was my village Christian? Why did Botticelli convert? He wasn’t an idiot. Anyone can see he thought hard about things.”

I blinked. “Botticelli was always a Christian. What made you think he converted?”

“Didn’t he paint the Seasons and the Aphrodite first, when he still believed in the Olympians, and then the Madonnas and things after his conversion?” she asked.

“No, he painted some pagan scenes even though he was always a Christian,” I said. “I don’t know all that much about Botticelli’s personal beliefs, but in the Renaissance almost everyone was Christian, although of course they admired the ancient world. They used pagan stories and imagery just as stories. But Christianity was the majority religion, and it was hardly even questioned. It was the same in my time.”