I am not using that word lightly. Father’s face looked like a city that had been sacked and the fields sown with salt. He has a highly expressive face, the kind of face you see on statues of gods and heroes. Now you could have used it as a study for Niobe or grieving Orpheus. It wasn’t just that he had been weeping. He wept quite easily; I’d often seen him with tears in his eyes at something especially moving. Mother used to tease him about it a little sometimes—she’d say she could tell him a story about a child finding a lost goat and he’d tear up. But now his face was ravaged. I’d never seen anything like it. I sat up at once, closing the book. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Simmea,” he managed to say before he broke down again, and so I knew.

“Mother? Dead? How?” Having thought of Orpheus, my imagination went immediately to Euridike and the snake in the grass.

Father sat down beside me and put his arm around me in the most awkward, tentative way imaginable, as if he didn’t know how hard to squeeze, or was afraid of breaking me. “Art raid,” he said.

I wanted to cry, I wanted to fling myself on his chest and be held and comforted, but the openness of his grief made mine close up somehow. I felt it as a gulf inside myself, but I didn’t cry. An art raid. She had been killed by human greed and folly. And she had despised the art raids. “Instead of raiding each other for art, we should be making more,” she had said.

“I couldn’t save her, she wouldn’t let me,” he choked out.

“She wouldn’t let you?” I echoed. “Why not?”

“Can you think of any reason? I can’t,” he said.

I sat there in the awkward circle of his arm and tried to think. “Could you have saved her?”

“Easily, if I’d had my powers. And I could have had them before she was dead. I’d have been back in a moment.”

I shook my head. “She must have had a good reason.” I was only just starting to take it in that she was dead, that she wouldn’t be coming in soon to teach the calculus class, that I’d never be able to tell her I’d be Briseis. On that thought I started to cry sudden hot tears. I hadn’t really understood even then. I hadn’t started to think about the long term. I hadn’t even got any further than that afternoon.