“It makes me feel dizzy to think about it,” I admitted. “I don’t understand how this works at all.”

“Time is like a place we can step in and out of. And we can be in time in many different times and places, though never twice in the same time. We’re outside time now. We could go back in to an instant after we left, either right now or after spending months or years of our personal experienced time here. Or we can go back in somewhere else, which is what we’re going to do, and later we can go back to your home time an instant after we left.” I kept my eyes on the vibrant green of the leaves as he spoke.

“So what you call time is the material world, the sensible world?” I asked.

“You could say that. And where we are now is another world, if you like, the next layer out.”

The World of Forms, I thought. “And where is Athene?” I asked.

“Where she really shouldn’t be. She should be either somewhere in time or here, and instead she’s gone around it. Underneath it. There was a time—well, not a time, and not a place either. But maybe it’s easier to imagine if you think of time as a place, a location. It’s hard to talk about. Long ago, Father … built both time, and Olympos like a shell around it. I don’t know how. Before that there was only him and Chaos. And they say that time will one day end, and after it there will be Chaos again. And that’s where Athene is, out in the primal Chaos that surrounds both time and Olympos.”

“And she’s been there for two years, since she gave us Hilfa?”

“No.” I glanced at Hermes. He seemed to be stable again. He smiled at me in a kinder way. “It is hard to follow, I know. We have no idea how long she has been there. She could have gone into time this afternoon, stepped into your life of two years ago and given you Hilfa then, and then directly after that she could have gone to Lucia four thousand years before and given his part of the puzzle to Kebes. Or it could have been centuries for her. We don’t know when she did this, in her own time frame, only that she’s there now.”

“And we’re outside time and there’s no hurry?” The very idea of hurrying seemed alien to the air we were breathing.

“Well—normally that would be true. But I don’t want to stay bound by Necessity any longer than I have to—it’s exceedingly unpleasant. And we don’t know if there’s time where Athene is, or if so how it works, or what’s happening to her there, and whether duration there has any connection to how things work here, or in time. So actually we should collect our puzzle pieces as rapidly as we can.”

“And do you have any idea why she did it this way—giving different people the pieces instead of leaving it all with Hilfa?”

“It does seem most peculiar, doesn’t it? Even using Hilfa. I sincerely hope it was explained in that letter my big brother wouldn’t let me see, and that it was a good explanation too. The Enlightenment, ugh.”

“I’ve never heard of the Enlightenment. What’s so awful about it?” I asked, curious.

“The wigs.” He shuddered and gestured with both hands an armspan from his head, and for an instant I saw a huge elaborately curled monstrosity, with a Saeli face peeking out beneath. My stomach lurched. I quickly looked back up into the peacefully waving branches. “They all wore the most appalling powdered wigs, all the time, huge ones, men and women.”

He was much too frivolous for me. He was right to think he was better suited to Thee. “Well, we’re not going there,” I said, briskly. “But I don’t know the exact year the City was founded, I’m afraid. Athene never told us.”

“We’ll go to the Thera eruption and work back,” he said. “I think you’d better try negotiating with Kebes in the first instance. You have more of an idea of their culture. Normally I’d take the personal time to learn, especially as it’s so interesting. As it is, it might be better if you make the first approach.”

I nodded without looking away from the fascination of the branches weaving across the sky. “All right. But what should I offer him?”

“Tell him you’ve come to collect whatever Athene gave him, that ought to be enough. And if not, try the gold in your new purse.”

“I suppose that might work,” I said. Everything I’d heard about Kebes made him seem likely to be sufficiently corrupt to accept a bribe.

“Failing that, we can offer to teach him some inappropriate songs,” Hermes said. I could hear the amusement in his voice. “What do they wear?”

“Kitons,” I said. I looked down at my cold-weather fishing gear. The Amarathi-made waterproof jacket seemed terribly out of place in the beautiful golden sunlight of this grove. “I should have changed before we left.”

“Appearances are easy,” Hermes said, and as fast as that we were both wearing kitons, his pale gold and mine red, both with embroidered borders in a blue and gold book-and-scroll pattern exactly like the one Pytheas had been wearing, and both pinned with identical gold pins. Mine had been on my jacket collar before. Hermes seemed solidly and completely himself now, as much himself as the trees were themselves. “Red is a good color for you. You should wear more red.”

I didn’t say it didn’t matter what I wore because I’d never be Thetis so I might as well not make any effort. I didn’t say that I had dreamed about him for the last eight years, and I hadn’t even known he was a god. I did not in fact say anything. I looked down and saw the kiton and the loam I was sitting on. Then I rubbed the kiton between my fingers. It felt combed almost smooth, like good Worker-woven wool. “Isn’t this supposed to be the World of Forms?” I said. “The true reality outside the cave we live in that only feels like reality? So how can you change things here?”

“That’s only a Platonic thought experiment, an analogy.”

“Are we in the third hypostasis? The hypostasis of soul?” The Ikarians and the Neoplatonists of Psyche believed that there were five layers of reality, and that things could change in the lower three.

“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Hermes said. “Things don’t age and die here, but they can change and grow. And I haven’t truly changed your clothes, only the appearance of them. It’s still your rain suit really.” He stood up. “Come on.”

“But I can feel it,” I objected.

“It’s simply sensation,” he said. “That’s as easy to change as any other sense.” He held out a hand, and I took it. It felt real, he felt real, but so did the wool of the red kiton which I knew was an illusion.

He pulled me to my feet, and once again there was no sense of transition. We were standing in the glade on Olympos and I was enjoying the touch of Hermes’s hand, and then we were floating in the air above an immense volcanic eruption. It was night. A great plume of flame was billowing up through the air below us in red and gold and orange and all the colors of fire. I had seen plenty of eruptions, but never from this close, and never below me. The fire flickered and changed shape against the darkness. We weren’t falling, or moving at all, but the fire seemed to be reaching up great greedy arms toward us. I hate to confess such a loss of control, but I screamed.

Then we were back in the glade. I was still gasping and shuddering. I bent over, taking deep breaths as my stomach lurched, afraid I might throw up. Hermes took no notice. “Northeast Lesbos, you said? Let’s try fifty years.”

We were standing at the foot of a hill, by a sea so blue it almost hurt my eyes. The gentle slopes of the hills were covered with olive trees, but there were no buildings or any other signs of civilization. “Is this the place?” Hermes asked. Two grey and white birds startled into flight as he spoke. They were much bigger than the jay I had seen on Olympus. I watched them fly off, circling over the water and calling to each other raucously. I couldn’t tell whether this was the right spot. “Zeus moved the cities to Plato, not the locations. So I don’t know. If I see buildings I ought to recognize them.”