“Whoever killed her didn’t want to kill her the way Kebes and I wanted to kill each other. Not personally. They just killed her because her body was between them and art.” I stopped, to make sure this made sense. They nodded. “So we have to stop the art raids,” I concluded. “That’s what she’d want, far more than vengeance. They didn’t kill her because they wanted to kill her. They killed her because she put her body between them and the head of Victory.”

“Stopping the art raids would be a really good thing, but I don’t know whether it’s possible,” Arete said. “People have tried before. Ficino and Mother tried. Manlius did.”

“We’d have to go to all the cities,” Kallikles said.

“We’re going to have to do that anyway, to tell them about the Lucian civilization,” I said. I sighed. “It won’t be easy. But it’s what she would have wanted, and it’s what we need to do.”

We swam back to the ship. Even though I understood now why she had chosen to die, I still couldn’t die myself and go back to Olympos. There might be other things I needed to understand from incarnation to become my best self—there probably were, and most of them awful, to do with old age and grief. And now I had to stay alive and go through them and learn, without having Simmea to help. I felt tired thinking about it. But beyond that I had the terribly complicated task of resolving everything Simmea would have wanted resolved, the art raids, relations between the Republics, the situation with the Lucians. It was the kind of thing Simmea was really good at, and I really wasn’t. But that was the work that needed to be done.

23. Maia

23

MAIA

Simmea and I were turning cheeses in brine when the mission from Psyche arrived. It was a hot summer day and we had been working hard. Cheese wheels are heavy, and if not turned they’ll start to rot. It was the kind of thing Workers had done for us, but which people can do perfectly well; the kind of thing Lysias used to try to persuade people to do, but which we never did as long as there were plenty of Workers to do it for us. The disappearance of all the others did mean that there were plenty of spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-one, but we only asked them to do the most important things, things that people couldn’t do.

The smell of cheese was overpowering in the storehouse. It was good strong sharp goat cheese and I knew I’d be glad of it when winter came, but I wasn’t sorry to be interrupted.