“Five years earlier than when we spoke to Kebes before. The boat’s there.” He gestured towards it. “Goodness. What a name!”

“What?” I was so used to it as a name that I’d never really considered it before. “It’s a great name!”

“Very Platonic,” Hermes agreed, so I didn’t understand his previous objection.

“Let’s try again,” I said. We walked over to the Goodness, which was tied up at the same spot. The same sailor was standing in a slightly different place on the deck, coiling a rope. One of the grey and white sea birds was perched on the rail in almost the same place. “Is Matthias aboard?” I asked. It reminded me of rehearsing a play, but of course the sailor didn’t recognize me, and didn’t know his lines.

“Nope,” he said. “Went ashore.”

“Do you know where I could find him?”

The sailor looked from my face to my gold pin, and frowned. His pin was silver, I noticed. “Might be in the church,” he said, after a noticeable hesitation.

I thanked him, then Hermes and I turned and walked away, up the steep hill in the blazing sunshine. I led the way towards the agora where I remembered the church standing in my own world. “Churches are a kind of Christian temple, and Kebes is some kind of permanent priest,” I remembered. “It’s going to be really hard to talk to him, to be friendly I mean.” I wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. When I’d been in Lucia before, the streets had been bustling. Now there was nobody in sight but an old man leading a laden donkey down the hill, and two little girls playing on a doorstep. The sea below was so still that birds were sitting floating on the water.

“You said he believes Athene is a demon. Will he think I am a demon too?” Hermes looked quite pleased at the thought.

“I expect so. The Ikarians say the Olympians are angels, and the Lucian church these days—I mean, in my own time, on Plato, has moved a lot closer to the Ikarians. I’ve never really paid that much attention—with Pytheas right there and his children being my uncles and aunt, and all of them saying Yayzu isn’t anything different, it’s hard to take contradictory beliefs seriously. Though the Ikarians claim it doesn’t contradict at all.” We came to a beautiful, slightly old-fashioned sculpture of Marissa, which I remembered from when I was in Lucia in my past and its future. I gestured to it. “But why have only one goddess, instead of all of them?”

“It’ll probably be best if we don’t debate religion with him,” Hermes said.

“Should we tell him who we are?” I asked.

“If we don’t, how will he know to give us Athene’s message?”