“So it wasn’t Kebes?”

“You know it wasn’t. Stop playing games.” Father didn’t take his eyes off Ikaros for a moment. Ikaros was looking at Father, but he didn’t seem to be focusing on him.

“You’ve been swearing blood and vengeance on whoever has the head,” Ikaros said. “I’d be a fool to admit it if we had it.”

“As you may have heard, I took vengeance on Kebes. That’s enough. Besides, while there are some circumstances where it’s appropriate, this isn’t one of them. The important thing is to stop wasting lives and effort over this foolishness, not to make everything worse.” Father was utterly sincere.

“Our Young Ones enjoy the art raids. It makes them feel important and gives them a chance to let off steam,” Ikaros said. “And then they get out of control, and they feel important, and they have weapons. So you don’t need to tell me, because I can see exactly and precisely how things disintegrate into timarchy from here, and so I want to stop this as much as you do. But if we had the head, and I’m not saying we do, what would you suggest we do with it? We couldn’t return it with everything else.” He was telling the truth too, but Father didn’t look away from him to see me signal.

“And you can’t secretly keep it either, because then everyone will know that it wasn’t returned, and if that was kept back then other things might have been.” He hesitated, and continued in a lower voice. “And besides, she died for it.”

“Sneak it back into the temple,” I said. “Put it back where it came from, without admitting you ever had it in the first place.”

Ikaros laughed, and looked toward me, but not quite at me. “Audacious. But how do you suggest we do it? A troop heading for the temple would be assumed to be raiding and attacked. And half of my problem is how wild the Young Ones in the troops are. I need to keep them under control, and they wouldn’t respect me at all if I tried to stop them from fighting back if they were attacked. They might not even want to return it. And they have votes in our Assembly.”

“Let me sing to them, and see whether that will help change their minds about the fun of art raids,” Father said. “As for the head, get Rhadamantha to give it to Arete. Then Arete can quietly put it back. You and I won’t be directly involved. I won’t have to know officially who took it, or take any vengeance, and we can swear we didn’t do it. It can be a divine intervention.”

“An angelic one,” Ikaros said.

“Kebes and the Goodness Group have been practicing muscular Christianity all over the Aegean,” Father said, switching subjects smoothly.

“What?” Ikaros looked stunned.

“They have eight cities, mostly filled with refugees from mainland wars, mostly converts. It’s not your New Concordance, nothing like that subtle. They say Athene was a demon, perhaps Lilith.”

“What?”

“They’ve been teaching people to worship Yayzu and his mother Marissa, and revile Athene.”

“In a Platonic context?” Ikaros asked, quite calmly, surprising me because I was expecting him to say “What?” again.

“Oh yes. But with torture for heretics, you’d feel quite at home.”

“I would not! We don’t do anything to heretics but debate with them. And we have Saint Girolamo in our calendar.”

“Saint Girolamo, and the Archangel Athene too. You’ll have to send missionaries,” Father said, quite comfortably. “Nag them to death. Teach them your beautiful complex system. Let them know Christianity is all just fine up to a point, and torturing heretics is well beyond that point.”

“I thought you wanted people to worship the Olympians,” Ikaros said, frowning a little.

“I do, and so did Plato. I didn’t say we wouldn’t be sending out missionaries too.”

Ikaros laughed, and just then the girl Rhadamantha came back with the others. She looked a tiny bit like Erinna, she had the same kind of hair and the same lean grace. I was glad when she stayed for the debate.

The debate was long. Father and I explained the Lucian civilization and the two conferences. I had heard it all before, but I had to stay to sing, when Father decided it was time, and also to let him know when people were lying. By dinner time, I had realized that there was something seriously wrong with Ikaros’s sight, although he was trying to hide it. He didn’t have cataracts, and he didn’t peer and lean forward to see close up like Aristomache, but he never seemed to be focusing on what he was looking at. When Lysias passed him a note, he didn’t even glance at it. He fumbled picking up his wine cup. He couldn’t be blind. He had seen that I looked like Father. But that had been outside, in full daylight.

We had meetings with the committees, and then their Chamber, where we sang, several times. It took three days, but in the end they agreed to send envoys. They agreed to send their art back on the Excellence, too.

On the evening of the third day, after everything was agreed, I went for a walk up into the hills with my brother Porphyry, as I had done with Alkibiades. I didn’t know Porphyry well. He had always lived in the City of Amazons, and only made occasional visits to us. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said, awkwardly, kicking at a stone.

“We’re trying to stop the art raids in her memory,” I said.

“Is it true that Father tortured Kebes or Marsias or whatever his name was to death?” he asked.

“Yes. And it was Matthias. But he was Kebes when he was here, so we always call him that.”

“So does my mother. Matthias is a difficult name to get my tongue around anyway. So Father really killed him in that horrible way?”

“Yes. But Kebes was going to do it to him.” I explained the competition, and the battle afterward.

“I suppose he had to.” We were sitting down on the edge of a little stream, in the shade of a plane tree, dabbling our feet in the water. “But I think I would have cut his throat instead, even if that was their idea of justice.”

“So would I, and so would Kallikles,” I admitted.

“I’ve always been a bit frightened of Father, and this doesn’t help,” he said.

“Frightened of him? Why?” I couldn’t imagine it.

“Oh, because he’s so excellent. It makes it difficult to live up to. My mother always says he was just clearly the best when they were all growing up together. And she was beautiful then, of course.”

“I think your mother is still beautiful,” I said. Euridike had a lovely face and wonderful hair.

“She says she hasn’t been the same since she had babies. And she says it has been better for her, because she used to be vain about it. But anyway, back then when she tried to be friends with Pytheas because he was beautiful too, he never had any time for anyone except your mother. And he’s not just beautiful, he’s so good at everything. I always felt that I wasn’t good enough for him. Children are supposed to outdo their parents, but how could I ever outdo Pytheas?”

“You have your own excellence,” I said. “You just have to develop it. I never heard we were supposed to outdo our parents, or compare ourselves to anyone else, just that we had to work to become our best selves, the best that it’s possible for us to be.” I looked up at him. Porphyry was tall. “Do you know about Father?”

“Know what? He’s hard to get to know. Especially when I didn’t see much of him.”

I lay back and stared up at the blue sky through the dappled leaves. I had to ask him whether he wanted to go to Delos, but if he didn’t know who Father was that made it very difficult. “If you could have divine powers, but you had to keep them to yourself, would you want to?”

“Would I have divine responsibilities too?”

“What a good question! What do you mean?”

“Well, what kind of powers are we talking about?” Porphyry asked, treating the whole question as an abstract Platonic inquiry.

“Flight. Healing.”

“Right. So say I could heal people, would I have a responsibility to go around healing everyone all the time? Of course I would, nobody could have that power without. With flight I suppose I’d have a responsibility to take messages rapidly everywhere, and rescue people from burning buildings, and that kind of thing.”