“It hadn’t been over for long,” I said. “And she was wounded, and I surprised her, drawing my knife, and maybe she just went with instinct, protecting me, getting between me and danger. Like Ficino. Like you. Like I did when I didn’t kill Kebes in the street the first day.”

“What a very human thing to do,” Arete said. “Poor Mother. Betrayed by instinct.”

“But we’ll never know,” Kallikles said, shaking his head. “It might have been that. She might have done that. Or she might have had some reason, the way you’ve been thinking. She wasn’t afraid of death, not the way so many people are. Ficino wasn’t either. They both knew they have souls that go on. She knew from you, and Ficino from Athene. And Mother knew how important you are. She’d been helping you be incarnate for years. She might have thought it would be good for your soul to understand human grief and sacrifice and…”

“And how to skin an enemy alive?” I finished, sarcastically. “All the useful things I have learned since she died.”

“She lived while she was alive, and she wasn’t afraid of death,” Arete said.

“She told you not to be an idiot. That means she was thinking,” Kallikles said.

“She could have just instinctively been telling me not to be an idiot,” I said glumly. “I am an idiot all too often.”

As I said that, I wished Sokrates could have been there. He’d have said “Apollo! What hyperbole!” and we’d all have laughed, even Kebes. Now I was the only one who could remember those dialogues in the garden. I couldn’t be missing Kebes, it wasn’t possible. I’d always hated him. Simmea never had, though, even after what he had done to her, even after she had made her definite choice of me and the City, she still spoke of him as a friend. She was a true philosopher. And now I had killed Kebes in the most revolting way, and he hadn’t told me anything, and the only good it had done had been to his soul, and perhaps to the Lucians who might lose their taste for public torture without the chief torturer. He might be better in his new life, and the world might be better without him. But I had thought vengeance would make me feel better, or anyway not worse.