“That would be terrible,” Phaedrus said, immediately without any hesitation. Then he stopped. “Why would it be worse than if it did it when we were home?”
“Guilt at surviving.” Without meaning to, we both looked at Father as I said that. He was standing by Maecenas at the wheel, looking almost happy. Phaedrus and I looked back at each other, uneasily.
Just then Klymene came along and hustled us into a group learning to shoot from the mast. The first part of this consisted of learning to climb the mast, which was a skill we’d need to acquire in any case. The Excellence was sailed by wind-power, and it required a number of people able to scale the masts to rearrange the sails. We had been organized before we left into three watches, and each watch had officers and sailors, who were people like Maecenas and Erinna who already had the necessary skills. The rest of us would learn as we went along. Some of us knew how to sail fishing boats, but the skill of going aloft and managing the great sails was very different in practice, even though the theory was the same.
I loved everything about the ship that bore my name, the taut ropes, the sea breeze, the way she heeled through the water. I loved the solar-powered deck lamps that began to glow softly as dusk came on. I loved sleeping in a hammock and swaying with the sway of the ship. The voyage was the first time I ever slept aboard—the time we went to Sokratea, we slept in a guest house there. I loved learning the new skills, sail-setting and rope-coiling and mast-climbing. From the crosstrees at the top of the mast I could see for miles, in a wide arc as the mast moved. I volunteered to spend as much time there as I could and to be a lookout. “It’s good because you’re light, but you won’t like it so much in a gale and lashing rain,” Maecenas predicted. He was Father’s age, one of the Children, Captain of the Excellence. I was in his watch, the Eos watch, with Erinna, Phaedrus and Ficino. We came up an hour before dawn and worked until an hour after noon, when the Hesperides watch took over. Father and Kallikles were in that watch. The third watch, the Nyx, took over an hour after sunset. Neleus and Maia were assigned to that. There were thirty people in each watch. I have no idea how Kebes managed to fit a hundred and fifty people into the Goodness, because the Excellence felt crowded with ninety.
The Kyklades are a group of islands that circle Delos, the island where Father was born. At that time Delos floated on the water, but afterward it was attached to the sea-bed like other lands—or this is the story recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo. (Father says it’s poetically true, whatever that means.) Tiny Delos is the center of the Kyklades, and the other islands do form a rough circle around it. It’s possible to draw them so that they look even more like a circle, and to make Delos seem like the center of the whole Aegean, and the Aegean as the center of the whole world. It depends on your perspective, as Mother used to say. Kallisti is the southernmost of the Kyklades, and to get anywhere from there except Crete you have to sail north. North isn’t a good direction to go in Greece in the spring, because of the winds, so we went northeast, toward Amorgos, which we reached late on the evening of the first day out from home. There were no signs of life ashore, but we weren’t really expecting any. No Amorgians were mentioned in Homer’s Catalog of Ships.
We put down our anchor and slept aboard. Erinna showed me how to sling my hammock, next to hers, and how to get into it sideways. I slept better that night than I had any night since Mother was killed. Erinna woke me before dawn in time for our watch and I sprang out of my hammock, feeling fresh and ready for a new day.
“You seem better,” Erinna said as we came up on deck.
“I feel better. The sea is good for me. And doing different things. I still miss her, but it doesn’t weigh on me the same way. And you were right about writing the autobiography, too.”
“She was right about that,” Erinna said. She hugged me suddenly, and I hugged her back, tightly. “We can remember her without being sucked down into grief.”
“That would be wonderful,” I said. “If only Father could.”
The Nyx watch were ready to hand over to us then, and so we had to work. I swarmed up to the top of the mast and relieved the Nyx lookout there, who that morning was the Captain of the Nyx watch, a Child called Caerellia.
“No signs of life at all,” she said.
I was disappointed. I was hoping for people. Amorgos is about the easiest island to get to from Kallisti, in normal winds, and Neleus had made a very convincing argument that it was the most likely place for Kebes to have founded his city. We put an armed party ashore as soon as it was properly light, then we sailed around the island to collect them from the other side. I wasn’t allowed ashore. Phaedrus and Erinna went, and I looked down from the masthead with envy.
At the end of the Eos watch I stayed on deck, staring over at the Amorgian shore as it slipped past, glancing up occasionally at the Hesperides watch as they ran about trimming sails. Ficino came up to me as I was standing there. The sea-breeze ruffled his white hair where it stuck out under his old red hat. I saw him every day so I didn’t normally think much about it, but he really was the oldest person I had ever met.
He grinned at me. “Not feeling seasick?”
“Not even a twinge,” I replied.
“Good. Well then, it’s time for lessons, I think,” he said.
Ficino was nominally part of the Eos watch, but he had declined learning how to climb the masts and had learned only how to steer, which was both the easiest and the most fun. “Lessons? But surely I’m learning enough just being here. I’ve learned a lot about how the ship works already. And also geography, and I’ll learn history as soon as we locate some people.”
Maia laughed, and I jumped, because I hadn’t heard her come up and she was right next to me on my other side. “You need philosophy and rhetoric and history and mathematics,” she said, as if I wasn’t already ahead of her in mathematics.
“But we don’t have any books,” I said. I had my notebooks, though I had left behind the two I had filled already.
“We have sufficient books,” Ficino said. Trust them to bring books, I thought. “But for now, how about calculating the angle the ship’s bow makes?”
I calculated angles in my head for hours, until we had rounded the point of Amorgos and were tacking our way up the other side to where we hoped to meet the shore party. Ficino and Maia then began to make me work on rhetoric, aloud. “Plato says young people shouldn’t learn rhetoric, it makes them contradict their elders before they have wisdom,” I pointed out.
“You wouldn’t be studying it yet in Athenia,” Maia said. “But we think fifteen is old enough to begin.”
“I learn more the older I get,” Ficino said. “I’m glad I began so young.” His eyes were on the gentle curve of the shore we were slipping past. “I don’t sleep much these days. Growing older I need it less, perhaps as I need the time more to learn things and get the most out of every day. Learn what you can while you can. Learn, Arete.”
There are times when I wish my parents had given me a different name. Pursuing excellence and learning excellence are puns I am thoroughly sick of. Now we were on the ship there was even more opportunity for such jokes, of course. But Ficino was entirely serious.
Amorgos is a long thin island, and it took hours sailing back east around it before we found the shore party. They had built a fire by a stream as arranged, and the Hesperides masthead lookout spotted their smoke and called out. The shore party signaled that they had seen nobody, so we anchored again to take on fresh water. “We’re going to spend the night here,” Maecenas told Ficino as he went by. “You can go ashore if you want to.”
Everybody seemed to want to, just for the excitement of walking on a different island. There were crowds around the ship’s boat. I could see we wouldn’t be ashore soon.
“Where will we go next?” Maia asked Maecenas.
“Tomorrow we’ll make for Ios.”
“Will there be people there?” I asked.
Maecenas shrugged. “Homer doesn’t menti
on any, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. And Kebes may be there. It’s the next likeliest place, after here.” He moved on, trying to calm the people waiting to go ashore.
“When did the islands come to be inhabited?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Maia said. “We don’t have anybody here from before Plato, and Plato wrote a thousand years after this. Well, as far as we know when we are. Athene told us that we were here in the time before the Trojan War, but we don’t know exactly how long before, and we also don’t know the exact date of that war. We’re not even sure if it was real or mythical.”
“Real!” Ficino said.
“Both,” I said, staring over at the pine trees on the Amorgian shore.
I realized they were both looking at me. “What do you mean?” Ficino asked.
“Well, like Athene,” I said. “She was real, she lived in the City and brought everyone here and set it all up. But she’s a goddess, she’s also mythical. She’s in a lot of myths, and yet the two of you have had conversations with her.”
“I have been on expeditions with her to steal art treasures,” Ficino admitted. “I have looted Byzantium in her company. She’s real enough. She’s glorious.”
“But she’s also the Goddess Athene, she could move you through time and do all kinds of strange things. She had a mythic dimension. She was both at once.” And Father was the same, I thought, even without his powers. I thought of that strange moment when we all stared at Neleus. My brothers and I were also like that, to a certain extent. “And the Trojan War has to be like that too.”
“I think it must happen after the City is destroyed,” Ficino said, sitting down on a pile of canvas. “Otherwise we would not have been able to resist participating, knowing what we know.”
“On which side?” I asked. I also wanted to ask him how he could be so maddeningly calm about the City being destroyed, but I had asked him related questions before and found his answers entirely unsatisfactory. The real problem was that he was ninety-nine years old and he was sure he was going to die this year, and I was fifteen and I didn’t ever want to die at all.
“What a fascinating question,” Ficino said. “To attack beside Achilles, or to defend beside Hector. The Greeks or the Latins. Which would you choose?”
“Neither side was entirely in the right,” I said. “And there’s no question that it was all the fault of the gods in the first place. Helen—”
“It’s possible that if we went to Argos now we might see the young Helen,” Ficino said. The boat had taken two groups of people in, and it was quite clear to me that it would be hours before it took us. I shuffled a little closer.
“Do you believe we’re that close in time?” Maia asked.
“It has been thirty-two years since we came,” Ficino said. “How long before do you think she would have put us? Perhaps more than that. Perhaps Helen is not yet born. I said we might see Nestor as a young man, and he was a very old man at the time of the Trojan War. I’d love to go to Pylos and see. But we’re not sailing in that direction, at least not this time. Perhaps we’ll see Anchises as a young man. That would be marvelous.”
“I too would love to meet Homer’s heroes,” I said. “But which side would you want to fight on, really?”
“I’m torn, but it would come down to the Latins and Troy,” Ficino said. “The beleaguered city holding out against the sea of enemies.”
Maia put her hand on his shoulder. “Florentia?” she asked.
Ficino smiled up at her. “Perhaps. My Florentia, like Troy, left a great legacy.”
“But our Florentia—” Maia began.
Just then a group of Young Ones including my brothers Neleus and Kallikles came running to the side of the ship, stripped off their kitons and dived into the water. They went racing off toward the shore. “Oh!” I said. I measured the distance between the ship and the shore. It wasn’t all that far. “I’m going to swim too! Would you bring my kiton?” I shrugged it off and offered it to Maia.
“Let’s all swim,” Maia said, dropping her kiton on the deck.
“It’s too far for me,” Ficino said. “I’ll go in the boat and bring your kitons to protect your modesty once you get ashore.”
People were diving all along the side of the ship. Maia and I joined them and began to swim toward the first shore I had ever seen that was not that of the island of my birth. All the while I was swimming, quickly outpacing Maia and almost catching up with my brothers, I kept thinking about which side I’d want to fight on. Troy, or the Achaeans? To rescue Helen, or to defend the city? For Agamemnon or for Priam? It wasn’t a fair question. We knew Troy was doomed. But Ficino would have fought for her anyway. I ran ashore, and the land felt strange under me. It seemed to be rocking. Earthquake? Or was the island, like Delos long ago, not tethered to the sea-bed? Then I realized this was something Erinna had told me about: when we were used to the motion of the ship, solid land would seem to move. I got up and immediately hurt my feet walking on pine needles. I hoped Ficino would bring my sandals too. I looked back at the Excellence, sitting gracefully at anchor, and although I had longed to explore this new island she looked like the most beautiful and dearest thing imaginable. Troy, I thought, and then no, the black ships.
It was just as well we probably wouldn’t be given the choice, when it was so hard to decide.
9
ARETE
After Amorgos we sailed to Ios, and from there to Naxos. We found no people on Ios, and no sign of Kebes. Life aboard became almost routine, up before dawn to take my watch, which I mostly spent up at the top of the mast. Watching the sun rise from up there was always incredibly beautiful. The sky slowly lightened and became pink, and the sea echoed the color and was rose-pink dotted with jade-green islands. I could see so far from the mast at dawn that the islands looked like leaping dolphins. Then sometime in the day we would come close to an island. A party would go ashore to explore, find nobody, and come back. The rest of us would go ashore to cook, hunt, and take on water. Then we’d come back aboard and either sail on overnight or stay in our fairly protected anchorage, depending on winds and what the captains thought.
The night on Amorgos we sang at the campfire, both kinds of songs, Phrygian and Dorian. Some songs we all sang together, and some people took turns singing. Father played the lyre and sang a new song he had written about Mother’s excellence and love of truth, which made everyone cry. Erinna and Phaedrus and I sang some of the choruses from The Myrmidons. It was like a festival, only better, because we hadn’t been preparing and rehearsing, it was all spontaneous. Then we all went back to the ship to sleep.
On Ios the shore party had killed a boar that ran out of the woods and attacked them. We roasted it and ate it under the stars, which seemed brighter from there than they were at home. We sang again after we had eaten. Phaedrus persuaded me to do Briseis’s duet with Patroklus. When we sat down again, Erinna leaned over from where she sat whittling and patted my arm. “You have a great voice.” My soul soared at praise from her.
“We’re fortunate that all of Pytheas’s children seem to have inherited his singing abilities,” Maia said. Neleus frowned at that, because he could never seem to sing in tune. I didn’t think singing was a particularly heroic ability. Erinna’s singing voice was clear and true.
Naxos at first seemed no different from Amorgos and Ios. When the shore party signaled that they had found people we were astonished, as if we had believed we were alone in the time of the dinosaurs. I didn’t meet the Naxians or see their settlement, so at first their presence felt like a disappointment, because they prevented me from going ashore. Those of us left aboard waited impatiently for the shore party to return, running through all the facts about Naxos we knew. “Isn’t it where Theseus abandoned Ariadne?” Erinna asked. “Could that have happened already?”
Ficino nodded. “It should have happened in the last generation. Theseus’s sons by Phaedra fought at Troy. Ariadne might still be alive.”
“
We don’t know exactly when we are,” Maia reminded him. “We might have a better idea when they come back. Ariadne might be there, or she might not have come yet, or she might be dead. How long did she live after being abandoned?”
“Dionysios is supposed to have come for her and taken her away,” Ficino said. “So she might be gone.”
Father was staring fixedly at a little island just offshore as if he were remembering something. I wanted to ask him about it, but there were too many people about. It was hard to get privacy aboard, and even harder when everyone was lining the rail impatiently waiting for the shore party.
“We don’t know when we are at all,” he said. “I have a feeling it might be much earlier than you’re assuming. ‘Before the Trojan War’ doesn’t necessarily mean immediately before.”
Even though I’d been thinking about dinosaurs, I was surprised and disappointed. “No Anchises?”
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Here they come!” Erinna said.
The official report was that they had made contact and the locals didn’t have any useful information. “Miserable primitive place,” Maecenas said, pushing through the crowd of questioning people. “Council meeting. Now.”
The ship had a council of six that was supposed to make decisions, and Maecenas called them together in his cabin. The rest of us had to wait. As we weren’t going ashore and therefore couldn’t cook, dinner was cold, smoked fish and olives washed down with water lightly flavored with wine. After the feasts and singing of the previous nights it felt like a letdown. A group of us sat down to eat in the bows, where we could watch the sun setting over the sea. Erinna and I sat together on a coil of rope. “If we leave soon we could reach Paros in a few hours,” I said. “I can see it from the top of the mast.”