We came out into an enclosed courtyard. I was glad to see the sky and the sun again. There was a piece of sad mosaic on the wall—abstract, only a pattern, but what made it sad was the presence of two tiny fragments of porphyry given pride of place. Porphyry is a speckled purple rock which, over time, had in Medieval Europe come to stand for the lost wonders of Rome. The Egyptian quarry it came from was lost after Rome fell, and so were the skills of making steel tough enough to work it. It’s a volcanic rock, and it’s therefore present in quantity on Plato. The Workers can work with it easily, so there’s lots of it everywhere and we have all kinds of things made out of it. But here and now, porphyry symbolized the lost heritage of Rome, and here set in the wall were these two minute pieces, all poor Bologna had left of the ancient world. They had not entirely forgotten what it meant, but they couldn’t come any closer than this to regaining or re-creating it. I wished somebody in Bologna would pray for my help so that I could give them something better than this. And they were about to be sacked, too. It really wasn’t fair.

Pico led me into a cloister. The shadows of the pillars were falling across the open central space. A heavily bearded monk was sitting on the wall reading Latin poetry, a cat curled on his lap. Pico frowned. “We should wait here,” he said, quietly. “We’re not supposed to have guests in our cells, and I’m not supposed to be in my cell at this time of day. He’ll go to Vespers soon.”

He nodded to the monk and took a seat against a pillar on the other side of the cloister. “Won’t they expect you to go?” I asked, sitting beside him and looking over at the well in the center of the courtyard.

“I’m only visiting. They know I’m a scholar.”

“He won’t speak Greek?” I asked, smiling at the monk, who smiled back uncertainly.

“Here?” Pico asked. He was right. It was even less likely we’d find someone who understood Greek here than among the stonemasons.

It was too much. “If she had to leave you somewhere in 1506 with Christian books and a university, why aren’t you in Florence?”

“There was a book here I needed. And there are people there who know me too well not to recognize me, even if I tell them I’m my own son. They poisoned me the first time, after all. And Soderini’s in power, and the Medici will be back soon and feeling vengeful—I could hardly bear to see it. It’s the last days of the Republic.” He stopped. “The Florentine Republic, that is, not Plato’s Republic.”