“Bull is one of Father’s,” he said, picking up a bough and smelling it. Scent is a sense I do not share. “I could look like a bull if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t be a bull in essence, the way I’d be a dolphin, or Hephaistus a lion. I’d only seem like a bull, a disguise, exactly the same as looking like somebody’s charioteer.”

“But aren’t there other bull gods in other pantheons?” I asked.

“Yes. I expect it’s different for them.” He set the bough down neatly on the pile.

“But how, if there’s only one Form of the bull?” I asked, perplexed.

“It’s not like Plato’s Forms, really. And it’s connected to culture and place and personality, like I said.”

“But for Zeus—this is so difficult to understand.”

“Father has a lot of shapes. He likes shapes. That’s part of his essential nature, changing shape. It’s part of his perfection, if you want to put it that way.” He took up the broom again and began to sweep. “The thing Plato’s dead wrong about is thinking we don’t want anything and are perfectly happy and don’t care. We’re much calmer than humans, and I’m quite content most of the time, but I have projects, desires, plans, people and things I care about. We all do. And sometimes we come into conflict because of that.”

“Plato’s God could only really be one,” I said, coming over with more wood.

“It sounds really boring to me,” he said.

“It sounds to me like I was before I developed consciousness,” I said. “Unchanging, not wanting anything, no emotions.”

“Yes, a god like that wouldn’t need self-awareness and might be better off without it. A Worker god! I must tell—” He stopped and took a deep breath in the way he often did when he wanted to change the subject. “There’s a lot more of this wood than I thought there would be.”

“Trees often seem bigger when they are down.”

“Bigger and smaller both. I’m sad to see it go. It was a link with Sokrates and Simmea. We used to sit in this garden and talk. It was so different then. Warmer. Sokrates made that herm, you know. He’d stopped working as a sculptor before the attack on the herms, but he took up his tools again for that.”

“I knew he made the herm. It makes me happy that he was a sculptor too, though I did not know it when I knew him.”

“He’d have been excited by your work, as I am,” Pytheas said.

It made me happy to hear this said. But then Pytheas looked around sadly at the chilly space the garden had become.