I’ve said that Father invented music, and it’s true. I wasn’t really worried. All the same, we’d spent a long time the evening before discussing what he ought to play. For an audience that contained a large number of Yayzu worshippers, it shouldn’t be a religious theme. Similarly, it shouldn’t be something overtly Platonic. Phaedrus had suggested he play his song about the Last Debate, and it would have been a good choice, except that it was a subject that excited strong feelings for and against. We discussed elegies and love songs and praise songs. Father had written them all. “What we want is something everyone except Kebes will like,” I had said. We’d pretty much agreed that he’d play a song he had written years ago about the sun going down and a bird flying on toward the dawn. It’s a song about death and hope, of course, but it’s also about a bird and a sunset, and the tune is marvelous.

Of course, Father being Father, he didn’t play that at all. He had written it, yes, but lots of the people there had heard it already. Erinna quite often sang it herself. What he sang was completely new. I’d never heard it before, and I’m fairly sure he composed it especially for the occasion, maybe even on the spot. It had a pretty, complex melody, with chords that would be much too hard for most people, and then the words made a harmony, twining around it. It was in the Phrygian mode, of course. From the first note everyone was caught in the silence. The song was about me. Or rather, it was about arete, about personal human excellence, and how it was what we all wanted to attain, and how, being human, we so often fell short but went on from there, and kept on trying, and achieved amazing things. The images were all about building cities and lives, using Plato’s parallel that sees cities and souls as analogous. I had tears in my eyes by the end of the first verse, and that was before the incredibly uplifting chorus.

It was such a wonderful song, and such a wonderful performance of it, that I almost forgot to look at Kebes. He stayed sitting there, smiling slightly, not at all worried. It made no sense. However good he was with his pipes, he couldn’t possibly top this. Did he think Father would hesitate to kill him? Or did he have a deeper plan?

When Father finished the crowd surged to their feet, clapping with all their hearts. Father bowed to them and stepped back, his face calm and composed, opening his hand to Kebes. And Kebes didn’t even wait for them to settle down, he grinned, blew a note, and then another, and then a whole ripple of clear fast notes, puffing out his cheeks.