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 mention 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.