There are already songs on Olympos about the sorrows and miseries of humanity and how badly people deal with death, and certainly there are songs enough about those subjects sung by mortals. I had felt grief myself often before. But this grief resisted being transmuted to art. You have to understand that transmuting emotion into art is what I do. It’s one of the reasons I like emotions. But this emotion was bigger than I was. It’s not that I didn’t try to write songs for Simmea. I tried to write them, and for the first time my art failed me. I wrote songs, but they were pale thin things, they would not catch fire. They were true enough, but they left so much unsaid. I wanted vengeance, and yet at the same time as I struggled so desperately toward it I knew that revenge wasn’t really what I wanted. I knew that art would come. It always had. The depth of this grief was different and unusual, and so would be the songs that came of it. Her name would live forever, as would her soul. That was the only way I could comfort myself, and it was thin comfort. Meanwhile, I was making an even poorer job of being a human being than usual. I was developing more sympathy for Achilles than I ever had before.

About a month after she died I decided to open her chest and sort out her belongings. She didn’t have much—a winter cloak that doubled as a blanket, a pen and ink, some paints and brushes caught up in a scrappy paint-spattered rag, needles and thread, a scraper and a comb, another, finer comb with three broken teeth, a set of menstrual sponges. Underneath these things, all of which I had seen her use a million times and which seemed to miss the touch of her hands, was a pile of paper notebooks. I had seen her writing in them from time to time. “What are you doing?” I’d ask.