Hermes was looking like himself again. He nodded. “Well, technically. And we shouldn’t be using Necessity as a shield. I’m amazed Apollo even thought of that, he’s usually so law-abiding.”

“You said it’s like a stone in your shoe?”

“Like a sharp painful stone that half cuts off my foot at every step that isn’t in the direction Necessity wants me to go, back to conceive Alkippe and set time straight.” He shrugged. “But don’t worry. None of this was my idea, or yours either. It shouldn’t come to that and it should be all right, even if he’s angry. We can blame it all on Apollo and Athene. Now, tell me about Kebes.”

I didn’t like the way he was approaching this, and I wasn’t reassured, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I looked back up at the beautiful trees. One of them had black bark and tiny yellow leaves falling in long strips like hair. “After twenty years, we found Kebes again, and the Lucian cities. That’s when Pytheas entered into the musical contest with Kebes.”

“Oh, I heard about that. Apollo won by playing the lyre upside-down, and then he flayed the other fellow to death. It doesn’t sound like him at all.”

“He cheated,” I said.

“Apollo?” Hermes sounded astonished.

“No, of course not. Kebes. It was a contest for original composition, but he played a song Grandfather recognized from a future time.” I didn’t want to look away from the colors of the leaves, and the pattern the branches made.

“How did Kebes know it?”

“We don’t know. Pytheas checked, and he couldn’t have learned it from anyone who went to Lucia with him, though it’s possible he could have learned it from one of the other Masters before he left—though they were so decidedly strict about musical modes it seems unlikely.”

“You really stick to only the Dorian and Phrygian, as Plato wrote?” Hermes asked.

“Yes, of course we do. The other modes are bad for people’s souls.” I looked up beyond the tree branches at the sky, which was an intense shade of blue I’d never seen before.

“And you don’t find it monotonous?”

The answer to that one was very easy, as it’s actually laid out in Plato so I could simply paraphrase. “Do you find a diet of healthy food monotonous so that you’d go out and eat unhealthy food and tasty poisons and make yourself sick? How much more so for the soul.”

Hermes laughed. “How pious you sound. Platonic piety.”