I am not using that word lightly. Father’s face looked like a city that had been sacked and the fields sown with salt. He has a highly expressive face, the kind of face you see on statues of gods and heroes. Now you could have used it as a study for Niobe or grieving Orpheus. It wasn’t just that he had been weeping. He wept quite easily; I’d often seen him with tears in his eyes at something especially moving. Mother used to tease him about it a little sometimes—she’d say she could tell him a story about a child finding a lost goat and he’d tear up. But now his face was ravaged. I’d never seen anything like it. I sat up at once, closing the book. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Simmea,” he managed to say before he broke down again, and so I knew.

“Mother? Dead? How?” Having thought of Orpheus, my imagination went immediately to Euridike and the snake in the grass.

Father sat down beside me and put his arm around me in the most awkward, tentative way imaginable, as if he didn’t know how hard to squeeze, or was afraid of breaking me. “Art raid,” he said.

I wanted to cry, I wanted to fling myself on his chest and be held and comforted, but the openness of his grief made mine close up somehow. I felt it as a gulf inside myself, but I didn’t cry. An art raid. She had been killed by human greed and folly. And she had despised the art raids. “Instead of raiding each other for art, we should be making more,” she had said.

“I couldn’t save her, she wouldn’t let me,” he choked out.

“She wouldn’t let you?” I echoed. “Why not?”

“Can you think of any reason? I can’t,” he said.

I sat there in the awkward circle of his arm and tried to think. “Could you have saved her?”

“Easily, if I’d had my powers. And I could have had them before she was dead. I’d have been back in a moment.”

I shook my head. “She must have had a good reason.” I was only just starting to take it in that she was dead, that she wouldn’t be coming in soon to teach the calculus class, that I’d never be able to tell her I’d be Briseis. On that thought I started to cry sudden hot tears. I hadn’t really understood even then. I hadn’t started to think about the long term. I hadn’t even got any further than that afternoon.

Mother and I had fought about all kinds of things, mostly when she thought I wasn’t working hard enough, or when I forgot to do things. She could be impossibly sanctimonious and stiff-necked. She never let me get away with sliding along as my friends sometimes did; she wanted me trying my hardest every moment. But we’d been the only women in a household of men, and even when she drove me mad with irritation she was still Mother. I loved her and knew she loved me. If she had no patience with irrationality, she would always listen to reason, and sometimes change her mind. “She was a philosopher,” I said.

“She was,” Father agreed. “She was a Philosopher King, she was what Plato wanted to produce, the ultimate aim of his Republic. And she was killed in a silly fight for the head of Victory.”

“The head of Victory?” I asked, and then I realized what he meant, the statue in the shrine outside the south gates. She was killed trying to stop the raiders from stealing the head of Victory. It sounded almost too symbolic to be true.

“We don’t know who it was, but Klymene thinks it might be Kebes.”

“Kebes? The Goodness Group?” I pulled away from his arm, which wasn’t giving me any comfort anyway, and leaned against the tree where I could see his face. “They’ve never taken part in an art raid before.”

“They’ve never had any communication with us since they left,” Father agreed.

“It was probably Psyche. Or the Amazons.” They were the two that raided us for art most frequently. It had been the Council of Psyche who had started the whole thing by demanding that the art be shared out equally to all the cities in proportion to their population. Some of us had wished ever since that we’d just agreed there and then. Plato had set out rules for warfare, but he only ever imagined one Just City, not five of them squabbling over a pile of sculpture.

“Klymene said the Goodness had been seen. And she said she didn’t recognize anyone.”

I shook my head. “I never heard that Kebes wanted art.”

“Who knows what he wants? I never did. He broke a statue once, on purpose. He just wanted to get away, and to destroy the City if he could.” Father’s eyes came into focus. “I remember him sitting where you are sitting now and saying as much.”

It was strange to think of Kebes as a real person my parents had known, and not a demon to be afraid of. He had left at the Last Debate, years before I was born. “Maybe—” I began to say, then stopped. I’d been going to say that maybe Mother would understand what Kebes wanted, and I had to face up to the fact that she might well, but she wouldn’t be able to tell us.

Father wasn’t all that good at knowing what people meant, but he seemed to guess that time. He started to cry again, tears streaming down his face. He was looking at me, but he seemed to be looking through me. “How am I going to manage the rest of my life without her, Arete?”

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. I didn’t even know how I was going to manage the rest of the day. I couldn’t think how I was going to cope with Father being like this. Yes, he’s the god Apollo, but that often makes it harder, not easier, not just for him but for all of us. He’s not used to ordinary human things. I’m sure he must have lost people before, but the ways he’d coped with that as a god wouldn’t be possible for him as a human. He couldn’t create a new species of flower and call it after Mother, for instance. And normally when he was having problems that arose out of being human he’d ask Mother about it, and they’d have a fascinating conversation, and she’d help him understand how it worked, logically, and then he’d be all right. Now, without her—was I supposed to help him with it? The thought was terrifying. I wasn’t all that good at being human myself yet. I was only fifteen. I didn’t know enough about it. It wasn’t fair. I wanted to grieve for my mother, not to have to worry about helping my father cope.

“Death is a terrible thing,” he said.

“What do I have to do to not die?” I blurted. I’d often wondered about this, but never asked directly.

“Not die?”

“To become a god. I’m your daughter. I could.” I hoped I didn’t sound childish or hubristic. Fortunately, he took me seriously.

“You could. Several of my sons have.” It sounded so strange to hear him mention sons and know he didn’t mean my brothers. “You’d have to decide to do it, and you’d have to find your power, and you’d have to find a new and original way of being Arete. Being excellent, that is!” He was still weeping, but his eyes were focused on me now. “You’d still have to die. If you became a god it would happen afterward.”

“But you have a body when you’re a god?”

“Yes, but it’s not the same as a mortal body. Nothing’s the same. I’ll have to die to get back to being a god. It’s the only way. What you should do, if you want to be a god, is to find something to be responsible for, something you can take charge of. That’s what my sons who are gods did. It could be something that no god cares about now, or it could be something of mine that I’d devolve onto you. It would have to be something that needed a patron, something you cared about. And then after you died, instead of going on to Hades your soul would go to Olympos and you’d become a god. But you might prefer to stay mortal and go on to have new lives. You get to start again and forget. And there are things humans can do that gods can’t—humans can do whatever they can, but we’re bound by Father’s edicts—or, if we break them, we are subject to punishment. There’s a lot to be said for being mortal … but it is also awful, I’ll admit.” He wiped his hand over his eyes and tried to smile. “I would still grieve if I were my proper self, but it wouldn’t swallow me up this way.”