“No, English is much like Greek in structure, but with odd tenses and conditionals and a very large vocabulary,” Slif replied. “It shows signs of being a creole originally, a merger of two or more different languages from the same family. Such often keep the vocabulary of both parent languages with different shades of meaning. Also, it has borrowed a great deal of technical vocabulary from Latin and Greek. The spelling is bizarre. It’s fascinating. But it’s not elegant.”

“It sounds like a kind of clicky buzz to me,” Akamas said. “I can see that it has borrowed some words from Greek, but I think they’d have done better to borrow the entire language and be clear. Or why didn’t they stick to Latin? English comes from Britannia, originally, apparently, and they spoke Latin there in Tacitus’s day. I don’t understand this desire people seem to have to be constantly changing things.”

They had both finished eating, so they bade us joy and left. They were going to catch up on sleep, and I envied them the opportunity.

“Where’s Pytheas?” Alkippe asked as soon as they had gone.

“We don’t know. He and Jathery went off together. They’ll be back tonight,” I said, praying that they would, that Jathery would go back and conceive her, that the world would be safe for her to grow up. “Now eat your porridge, don’t play with it.” I’m not Thetis. I don’t cry easily. But this conversation kept bringing a lump to my throat.

“Who’s Jathery?” Alkippe asked.

“He’s the one we thought was Hermes,” I said.

Dad looked at me sideways. “That wasn’t Hermes?”

“No, as it turns out that was Jathery, a Saeli trickster god,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. A night’s sleep had done me good, but it was still an uncomfortable thought, and I didn’t want Dad to worry about it. Klymene put her old hand on mine. I looked at her, and she smiled consolingly. I don’t know how she knew there was anything wrong.

“I thought he wasn’t like the way I thought Hermes would be,” Alkippe said, triumphantly.

“Well, that was extremely clever of you,” I said. I hadn’t guessed at all.

“Where’s Thetis?” Dad asked, clearly looking for a way to change the subject. “I was expecting her to come in with you.”

“Finally,” Alkippe said, bouncing on the bench. “She said if you asked to tell you that she’d gone down to the harbor to see Hilfa and collect the books for Ikaros before she goes to the nursery, and she’d see us all here at dinner like always.”

“Right,” Dad said, suddenly paying a lot of attention to scraping his bowl.

“Last night, Auntie Thee was with Jason and Her- and Jathery. I thought Jason was your friend?” Alkippe asked me.