“You like it?” I asked.

“I hate missing it, but I love catching up. Think how many new arguments they’ll have come up with, how many new thoughts in a thousand years! I can hardly wait. Ikaros will try to synthesize them all into one system, but I want to hear what they are and point out all the holes.”

As we got nearer Thessaly, he speeded up a little, then stopped entirely. “Somebody came back and filled it all in,” he said. “What I said, what Simmea said. It reads like a proper dialogue.”

“Hasn’t it always been like that?” It had been like that as long as I could remember.

“No, the only thing written down was what Crocus said, and the other Workers. We humans spoke out loud. Though whoever did it remembers what we said accurately, not like Plato who was making most of it up even when he wasn’t making up the whole thing.” He tutted.

My uncle Porphyry opened the door of Thessaly. Porphyry lived in the City of Amazons so I didn’t see him very often. He was the most mysterious and divine of my uncles, and at the same time the most playful and childlike. When I was a child he had been my favorite uncle. He lived with his mother, and had no children of his own, but he loved to play with his nieces and nephews, and now with the new generation. At family gatherings he was often romping outside with the children, or telling stories to groups of them. As I’d grown up I’d grown shy of him, knowing how powerful he was, and sometimes seeing him do strange things that made me uneasy. In the last few years, seeing Alkippe’s delight in him had rekindled my old memories.

He stepped forward and took Sokrates’s hands. “Joy to you. I’m Porphyry.”

“Pytheas’s son by Euridike, and you live in the City of Amazons and Ikaros was your teacher,” Sokrates said. I had no idea how he could know all that. “And you’re a god and you fetched the new Workers.” Which told me that of course Crocus must have told him.

“That’s right.” Porphyry let go of Sokrates’s hands and nodded to me. “Good to see you again, Marsi.” Nobody had called me by that short name since I was a child, so it made me feel happy and young to hear it from Porphyry now.

“What happened to the tree?” Sokrates asked accusingly as soon as we’d followed Porphyry through the house and into the garden, where Ikaros was sitting by the herm. It was the kind of day when you wanted to sit outside, knowing winter was close and there wouldn’t be many more days when you could.