It was cool and dark and smelled of something heavy and sweet. I stood still for a moment while my eyes adjusted. There were high windows with no glass, which had contained lovely stained glass scenes of the life of Yayzu when I’d seen them before. The inside of the church had been lit with electricity then, too, and there had been paintings and statues. Now it was mostly bare. There was a shadowed altar, with a cloth and a gold cross on it, and four rows of benches. I thought for a moment that the sailor was wrong, or that Kebes must have left, because I couldn’t see anybody, then I realized that there was someone prostrate on the tiles in front of the altar. It seemed an uncomfortably intimate way to catch somebody unawares. I wished he had been on the boat. He must have heard the door creak as we came in, but he hadn’t moved. I looked at Hermes for advice. He spread his hands theatrically. My job, of course.

“Matthias?” I called, uncertainly.

He raised himself and turned, looking towards us for a second, then he leapt to his feet and came running up the aisle, his arms outspread as if to enfold me. “Simmea!” he shouted. “You came at last!”

I had not known what to expect, but being mistaken for my long-dead grandmother was not on the list. I knew I looked a bit like her—several people had told me so, and I was familiar with Crocus’s colossus of her so I knew there was indeed a family resemblance between us. It must have been enough, with the light behind me, and Kebes’s imagination and memory.

“I’m not Simmea,” I said hastily. I had been told he had been her friend and debate partner, and that he had raped her at a Festival of Hera. Nothing I had heard prepared me for the longing and hope in the way he called her name. I had always imagined him a monster, and I wasn’t prepared for the man.

He stopped, and squinted at me. “Then who are you?”

“We come from Athene,” Hermes said. “We want the message she left with you.”

“Let me see you.” Kebes pushed open the church door. Hermes and I followed him out into the agora. The sunlight was blinding after the darkness within. He barely glanced at Hermes before staring at me avidly. I looked back at him. He was a burly man who seemed about my own age. He had a broad forehead from which his hair was starting to recede. “You look so much like her. Are you her daughter? Our daughter? Brought here out of time? What’s your name?”

“My name’s Marsilia. Simmea was my grandmother,” I admitted. I felt sorry for him, which wasn’t anything I’d ever have predicted.