It was a map of the Aegean, hand-drawn and colored, dolphins and triremes drawn in islandless spots on the lapis sea, but with all the islands and coasts drawn accurately. Kallisti was shown round, which meant it was a current map. The labeling was in the beautiful Renaissance Greek calligraphy that everyone in the City had learned, along with the corresponding Italic hand. Our city was marked, but not the other four cities on the island. There were cities marked in other places, some of them known to me, others strange. We didn’t have any maps like this, but anyone could have made it without too much trouble. We had parchment, we had the tools for making illuminated manuscripts, we even had accurate maps.
The thing that surprised me was the circle marked in red ink around a city on the northeastern edge of the island of Lesbos. The handwriting was entirely different from the rest of the map, it was a scrawl and nobody’s neat penmanship. This was clearly a later addition, drawn in after the map was made. “Goodness” it said. The handwriting was immediately recognizable. It was mine.
8
ARETE
There’s nothing like the feeling of a ship under full sail. It’s as if the ship is alive, every rope and piece of wood responding to the wind and the will of the sailor. It feels like magic when you are part of it. Before the voyage I had never been on any craft for more than a few hours. I’d learned the use of tiller and sail on the little fishing boats. I had been taken around the island on the Excellence twice, once a circumnavigation when I was quite young, with all the Young Ones my age, and once a year ago when Mother was going with an embassy to Sokratea and she took me with her. That was the trip where I’d really made friends with Erinna. Before that, she’d just been somebody my brothers’ age who I saw around sometimes. On that trip we’d talked properly for the first time. I’d been fourteen and she had been eighteen. I knew she saw me as a child. All the same, when I came aboard for this voyage and she waved to me, my heart swelled.
When we left I was wild with excitement, not to avenge Mother but to be moving, exploring, doing something different. Then, as soon as the ship had left the harbor and stood out to deep water, I was filled with the calm joy of the wave, as I had been both the other times I had been aboard ship. Dolphins came alongside and followed us. The water was so clear that I could see the whole pod, and the rush of water breaking along the side of the ship, and the gold and black sand far below on the sea bed. Yet when I looked up and out the sea was, well, wine-dark as Homer puts it. The sea was a deep dark blue of precisely the same reflective luminosity as rich red wine. And the white wave foaming along the ship’s side broke it, and the dolphins surfacing, and the shore of the island. I looked back at the City, which looked as small as a model even from this little distance. Above it the mountain was smoking, as it often did. Perhaps there would be a little eruption, a new stream of lava snaking down the side. Or perhaps the great eruption would come, the eruption that would carve away half the island and destroy the City and everything. I hoped that wouldn’t happen while I was away.
Phaedrus came over to me where I stood by the rail looking up at the mountain. All three of my brothers who had asked to go had been accepted by the Chamber to make the voyage, Phaedrus, Kallikles and, thank Hera, Neleus. I don’t know what he’d have done if they had refused him. “Is there a god of volcanoes?” Phaedrus asked.
“Hephaistos?” I ventured. “He’s supposed to have his forge in one. That Titian picture in the temple, remember?”
“But his main area is making things, isn’t it?”
“Yes, overlapping with Athene on technology. She designs things and he implements them. Athene overlaps with a lot of people on a lot of things. Ares on war, Fa—Apollo on learning. I suppose knowledge does cover a lot of ground.” I looked at Phaedrus, who was still looking at the mountain as the Excellence sailed east. I lowered my voice, although nobody was near enough the overhear us. “Have you been talking to Father about how to become a god?”
He flushed. “You must have done the same or you wouldn’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it,” I said. “But volcanoes seem like a huge area.”
“But there isn’t anyone specific for them. Poseidon has earthquakes, and the ocean. It’s hard to think of anything that’s vacant. I could specialize in volcanoes, learn about them. We’ve grown up next to one, after all.”
“But how would you do it?” I couldn’t imagine how such a thing could possibly work, how Phaedrus could go from the young man at my side to becoming a patron deity of volcanoes. I couldn’t picture the intermediate steps at all. “It’s hard to see how you could develop an excellence of volcanoes.” I looked at the plume of smoke, being blown on the same wind that was drawing the ship. “I was just hoping it wouldn’t erupt and destroy the city before we get back.”
“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.