“I wonder if Kebes is even going to show up,” Phaedrus muttered, but just then there was a stir in the crowd, and there was Kebes at the top of the slope, still dressed in his costume from the day before, with the Phrygian cap pulled down on his broad forehead. A woman and a boy came with him, carrying a strange assortment of things I couldn’t quite figure out.

“Why would she have given him those?” Father murmured.

“Who? Mother?” Phaedrus asked.

Father laughed shortly. “No indeed. Athene. It’s an instrument she invented and then discarded because it made her look so ugly playing it. It’s called a syrinx, or pan-pipes.”

I’d never seen anything like it. It consisted of a set of hollow tubes of different lengths bound together. “Like a whole set of flutes?” I asked. Wind instruments were banned at home, because Plato thought they made people soft.

“Yes, sort of,” he said. “And what do the others bring?”

The woman was carrying a little folding stool. The boy had a bag, which he set down on the left of the wooden thing and unfastened. Inside were a set of leatherworking knives and a number of leather straps.

“Afraid, Pytheas?” Kebes asked.

Father laughed, because of course he wasn’t afraid at all. I wondered if he half-wanted Kebes to kill him so that he could go back to being a god and stop needing to figure out mortality from first principles. But what was the threat in a wooden pole and a set of little knives? The crowd seemed to know, because they had fallen silent as soon as the boy undid the bag. Torture, I thought, just as Father had said. Erinna was frowning at the bag. She asked Ficino something and screwed up her face at his reply. Klymene shook her head.

Kebes’s eyes swept over the judges. He nodded to the woman, and she and the boy moved back and climbed up the first set of stairs to sit down in a clear space on the first bench on the edge of the crowd. Father set down his swords on the opposite side of the wood from the bag, took his lyre from Phaedrus, and nodded coolly to us. “See you later.” Phaedrus moved back, but I moved forward to embrace him, being careful of the lyre. “Win,” I said. “What he said was an insult to the honor of all three of us.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “Fascinating as it might look in the art of later times, I find I have very little desire to be skinned alive.”