I didn’t like the way he was approaching this, and I wasn’t reassured, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I looked back up at the beautiful trees. One of them had black bark and tiny yellow leaves falling in long strips like hair. “After twenty years, we found Kebes again, and the Lucian cities. That’s when Pytheas entered into the musical contest with Kebes.”
“Oh, I heard about that. Apollo won by playing the lyre upside-down, and then he flayed the other fellow to death. It doesn’t sound like him at all.”
“He cheated,” I said.
“Apollo?” Hermes sounded astonished.
“No, of course not. Kebes. It was a contest for original composition, but he played a song Grandfather recognized from a future time.” I didn’t want to look away from the colors of the leaves, and the pattern the branches made.
“How did Kebes know it?”
“We don’t know. Pytheas checked, and he couldn’t have learned it from anyone who went to Lucia with him, though it’s possible he could have learned it from one of the other Masters before he left—though they were so decidedly strict about musical modes it seems unlikely.”
“You really stick to only the Dorian and Phrygian, as Plato wrote?” Hermes asked.
“Yes, of course we do. The other modes are bad for people’s souls.” I looked up beyond the tree branches at the sky, which was an intense shade of blue I’d never seen before.
“And you don’t find it monotonous?”
The answer to that one was very easy, as it’s actually laid out in Plato so I could simply paraphrase. “Do you find a diet of healthy food monotonous so that you’d go out and eat unhealthy food and tasty poisons and make yourself sick? How much more so for the soul.”
Hermes laughed. “How pious you sound. Platonic piety.”
I looked back at him. For an instant he looked like a dappled animal with big eyes, and then he was himself again. “Well, it seems very strange to me to be saying these things, which are truths that everyone agrees about. Even in Lucia these days they accept limitations on the modes of music. I don’t think even in Sokratea, where they question everything all the time, they question that. If anyone had ever doubted it, the example of what happened with the Lucians proved that Plato was right about this.”
Hermes sat up a little and arched a brow. “Proved it? How?”
“Well, it’s obvious. They played music in the Mixolydian mode, and they tortured people to death and plagiarized. It led their souls away from justice.”
“It could be the other way around.”
I considered that for a moment, staring off at the trees again and the veins on the little yellow leaves. “I suppose it’s possible. The torture and plagiarism could have led to harmful music arising. But that’s no better.”
“There are a couple of good historical examples on Earth of changing the music and the whole culture changing. They’re much later than Plato though. One is Southern Gaul in the chivalric era, and the other is the phenomenon they call the Sixties.” He smiled. “They were both a lot of fun.”
“So you agree Plato was right?” I asked, looking directly into his eyes, which for an instant had red and yellow Saeli lids, looking strange in his human face.
“Well, maybe. But I think I’d get bored. And you’d be surprised how many people intoxicate themselves immoderately and eat things that are bad for them. Lots of people in other cultures don’t consider a party with quince paste and watered wine as exciting as you might.”
I thought about that, and wondered again about the humans on the ship. Would they be eating unhealthy food and drinking unmixed wine and listening to soul-destroying music? If so, how could we help them understand? What if they tried to introduce such things on Plato? Would there be people who would be tempted? Young people, feeling rebellious, who could find ammunition to do themselves real and lasting harm? I could hear a chirping music now, sounding like a small child learning to sing. I looked around for it and saw the bird, sitting on one of the branches, its beak open and its throat distended. I had of course read about birds singing. The music it made was safely in the Dorian mode. “I don’t find the idea of food that’s bad for me at all appealing.”
“That’s because you’ve never had any.” He was smiling and watching me through half-lowered lids.
“Maybe. But I find the idea of music that’s bad for my soul terrifying,” I said honestly.
“What if you hear some when we go to talk to Kebes?” Hermes asked teasingly.
“I hope I don’t, but if I do, I’ll listen to proper music to get my soul back into harmony when I get home,” I said. I was afraid, but my fear was held at arm’s length. I was here for Alkippe, after all, and the thought of her made me strong. If she sang to me in her clear high voice it would drive out any dangerous music.
“Very wise,” he said. “So Kebes sang a song and we don’t know where he learned it?”
“He didn’t sing, he played it on a syrinx, a kind of multiple flute thing. We don’t know where he got the syrinx from, either. Grandfather says Athene invented it. But Kebes always hated Athene.”
“Huh. So why did she choose him to have part of her puzzle?” Hermes asked.
I looked back at the bird. It had stopped singing but was sitting looking back at me, head cocked. I could see every feather. I wondered if they were hard or soft. “It’s hard to imagine Kebes co-operating with Athene over anything. His religion teaches that she’s a demon. And she’s the one who set up the City in the first place, and Kebes hated the City and Plato. Or that’s what I’ve always heard, from Pytheas and Arete and Dad, who were there. Dad helped Pytheas skin Kebes after the contest. He says it was disgusting but he learned a lot about anatomy.”
“Hmm. Where did this sanguinary musical contest happen? On Apollo’s volcanic cinder, or back in Greece?”
“Greece,” I said, ignoring his rudeness about my home. “Lesbos, the northeast corner. A city called Lucia.” The bird was still looking at me. The tilt of its head reminded me of the Saeli bow. “Hermes, what kind of bird is that? It’s not an owl, is it?”
He spun around quickly. The bird took alarm at his rapid movement, or perhaps his attention, and flew off, whirring through the branches. “No, it wasn’t an owl. It was a jay.”
“Was it spying on us? Who do jays belong to?”
“Probably not,” he said, leaning back. “And it’s gone now anyway. Go on. When did this contest happen?”
I brought my attention back to the conversation. “Oh, before I was born. It was immediately before the Relocation. Forty years ago.”
Hermes laughed. “We’re outside time, so there’s no ‘ago’ about it. But if it’s before Thera exploded then it’s more like four thousand years before the moment we stepped out of Hilfa’s sitting room.” He spread his hands demonstratively. I saw them as olive-skinned, and then black, and then green. I looked away at the trees, which stayed so reassuringly the same from moment to moment.
“It makes me feel dizzy to think about it,” I admitted. “I don’t understand how this works at all.”
“Time is like a place we can step in and out of. And we can be in time in many different times and places, though never twice in the same time. We’re outside time now. We could go back in to an instant after we left, either right now or after spending months or years of our personal experienced time here. Or we can go back in somewhere else, which is what we’re going to do, and later we can go back to your home time an instant after we left.” I kept my eyes on the vibrant green of the leaves as he spoke.
“So what you call time is the material world, the sensible world?” I asked.
“You could say that. And where we are now is another world, if you like, the next layer out.”