Clean, I dried myself on my kiton and wrapped it around me. Simmea did the same. “I should wash this one day soon,” she said, looking critically at a stain. Then she looked directly at me. “I was hoping to do this over a cup of wine after we’d finished with the cheese, but I wanted to ask you about the New Concordance,” she said.

I opened my mouth, but she held up a hand.

“I know you hate it. I want to understand. You know more about it than anyone here. Ikaros wants—well, the City of Amazons want—to send people here to preach. In the Foreign Negotiation Committee we’re debating whether it will do more harm to allow it or forbid it. We’re going to take it to Chamber.”

“I was a Christian before I came here,” I said.

“So was I,” Simmea said, surprising me.

“You remember?”

“Of course I remember.” We went out into the street again. “You told us to forget. Ficino said it had been a dream. But ten years of life isn’t a dream, and you can’t forget it.”

“I sometimes almost forget the years before I came here, and I was nineteen,” I said.

Simmea looked at me sideways with a patient expression. “New Concordance?”

“Sorry. It’s wrong. Literally and specifically wrong. Ikaros has built a whole complex structure based on incorrect axioms. He’ll debate any individual point, but I couldn’t get him to examine his axioms.” We walked down the broad diagonal street of Athene, passing others and nodding greetings to them from time to time.

“So what’s so appealing about it? Why did people convert, both historically and in the City of Amazons? Why was my village Christian? Why did Botticelli convert? He wasn’t an idiot. Anyone can see he thought hard about things.”

I blinked. “Botticelli was always a Christian. What made you think he converted?”

“Didn’t he paint the Seasons and the Aphrodite first, when he still believed in the Olympians, and then the Madonnas and things after his conversion?” she asked.

“No, he painted some pagan scenes even though he was always a Christian,” I said. “I don’t know all that much about Botticelli’s personal beliefs, but in the Renaissance almost everyone was Christian, although of course they admired the ancient world. They used pagan stories and imagery just as stories. But Christianity was the majority religion, and it was hardly even questioned. It was the same in my time.”

“Aphrodite wasn’t just a story to Botticelli, or the seasons either,” she said, sounding absolutely sure. “But go on, tell me what it is about it that’s appealing. I was a child. I remember chanting and prayers and some of the stories, but none of it was ever really explained clearly.”