Kebes scowled. “Dear demon that I see before me, lord of riddles and play, master of shape and form, please take me to New Venice on Mars to learn glassblowing for a year immediately before the Worker Rebellion of 2140, and bring me back safely to Lucia in this time.”

“Give Marsilia the message,” Hermes said.

Kebes drew a creased piece of paper from inside his kiton and handed it to me. “Good luck,” I said.

Hermes winked, and then they were gone. I opened the paper at once. Incomprehensible symbols covered it—some Greek letters, some Latin, some strange symbols I had never seen before. I folded it again carefully and put it safely inside my kiton. I sat down and stared at the swirling dust in the empty agora. Two little brown birds, smaller than my hands, were tugging at something. I was exhausted and emotionally drained. I had never imagined feeling sorry for Kebes, or even having any sympathy for him. I poured the wine from my cup onto the ground, in an invocation to Dionysios and Hestia, and filled my cup from the water jug. As I finished drinking it, they were back.

Kebes was wearing trousers and a jerkin and a Phrygian cap. He looked tired and much paler, as if he had spent the year without seeing sunshine. He was clutching a set of pipes that could only be a syrinx.

“How was it?” I asked.

“Wonderful. Terrible,” he said. He staggered to the chair and sat down. He filled a cup with neat wine and swallowed it in one draft. “We flayed people alive. But it worked. It was working. We were winning. And the music, the music of freedom.” He picked up his syrinx and started to blow.

I put my hands to my ears, but before I’d heard two notes of that dangerous music we were back on in the peaceful glade, surrounded by the beautiful trees.

13. Crocus

13

CROCUS

I. On Philosophers Who Have Been Slaves

Aesop was a slave. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was the slave of the Roman Emperor Nero’s guard captain.

Phaedo of Elis, the friend of Sokrates for whom Plato named his most beautiful dialogue, on the immortality of the soul, was a slave. He met Sokrates and came to philosophy, and Sokrates asked Krito to buy him and set him free, as an offering to philosophy and to the gods. (Krito did this without hesitation, as I would have expected of him. I did not know him well, but he was always a good man.)