Once I was back in my real form I’d be able to find her, watch all her different lives if I wanted to, and I did want to. But none of them would be my Simmea. Death of mortals I love is always hard for me to deal with. But this one was worse than the others. Since I was incarnate, I’d been there the whole time. There were no moments of Simmea’s life left for me to experience. I had been in time for all of them. I’m bound by Necessity. I can’t go back to times I’ve already visited, none of us can. I’ll never be able to speak with her again, or see her rolling her eyes at me, or hear her calling me an idiot. She knew I was the god Apollo. She’d known for years. It just didn’t make any difference. When she found out, practically the first thing she said was that it must be why I was so hopeless at being a human being.

It’s easy to be adored when you’re a god. Worship comes naturally to people. What I’d had with Simmea was a decades-long conversation.

I briefly considered killing myself and going back to Olympos anyway. But her last words and deed had been to stop me—she’d have figured out exactly what I was doing and why. She was extremely smart, and she knew me very well. She probably had some really good reason why I shouldn’t do that, which she’d have explained at length and with truly Socratic clarity, if only she’d had time. I might even have agreed. I tried to think what it might have been. My mind was completely blank.

As I couldn’t imagine why she’d stopped me killing myself and saving her life, I naturally began to think about vengeance.

“Who was it?” I asked Klymene. “Did we get any of them?”

Klymene has never liked me, and for extremely good reasons. Nevertheless, she is the mother of my son Kallikles. Her expression now was unreadable. Pity? Or did she perhaps despise me? Plato did not approve of giving way to strong emotion, especially grief, and at that moment I was rolling on the ground, clutching an arrow and weeping.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They came by boat. It could have been anyone. These art raids have been getting worse and worse. They got away—the rest of the troop went after them, except that I sent young Sophoniba for you and stayed with Simmea myself.”

“She always liked you,” I said. I could hardly get the words out past the lump in my throat.

“She did.” Klymene put her hand on my shoulder. “Pytheas, you should get up and go home. Will there be anybody there?”