I took my turn on watch, though it was as unlike the watch of the day before as anything could be. I sat at the masthead with nothing to see but Marissa on one side and the rippling sea at the other. Phaedrus came up part way through and told me the ship’s council were meeting, which didn’t surprise me. I hoped we’d go to Lucia and the music festival. I liked music, and I wanted to meet more of the Goodness Group. “Mother would have liked them,” I said to Phaedrus.
He nodded thoughtfully. “I think she would. Except maybe for the religious stuff.”
“But why couldn’t it be true? If Father’s incarnate now, why shouldn’t Yayzu have done the same thing in Roman times, the way Aristomache says?”
“Oh, interesting, I hadn’t thought of that.” Phaedrus put an arm around the mast and leaned out, looking over the city.
“Can you fly?” I asked, seeing that.
“Walk on the air like we did on Ikaria? I haven’t tried it this high up, but I’m sure I could.”
“No, really fly, swoop about like a bird. I feel I can, but I haven’t tried it because I don’t want anyone to see me.”
“No, it would be pretty conspicuous.” He grinned. “I don’t feel that I could, but I don’t feel that I couldn’t either. Have you found anything else you can do?”
“Understand languages I don’t know. Maia and Aristomache started speaking some strange language yesterday and I understood it clearly, though I’d definitely never heard it before.”
“Wow.” He looked impressed. “Hard to test. Though I suppose you could go around asking the Masters and the Children to say something in their birth languages. But they’re supposed to have forgotten them. I’ve never heard anyone speak in them. Maia’s usually so properly Platonic, too. Which of them started it?”
“Aristomache. I suppose in the Goodness Group things are different.”
“I don’t think they were the ones who raided us. They don’t even have any art that isn’t Christian, why would they want the head of Victory? But I hope Father believes that.”
“Who do you think it was?” I asked.
“Psyche or the Amazons, like normal,” he said. “I believe Alkibiades that it wasn’t Athenia, and Sokratea has never broken a treaty without a declaration.”
“Do you think Father will believe it?”
“There would have to be good evidence. But it should be easy enough to find out where the Goodness was at the time, once we catch up with them. I hope he will accept it. If not, it’s going to be exceedingly awkward. And if he does start to believe it, I hope he doesn’t want to go straight home and immediately get vengeance there. I hope we go to the music festival.”
“So do I. Will you do me a favor? When we get the chance, I want to go off somewhere and test flying, and test lifting you when I fly,” I said.
“Sure. I want to try that too. And the language thing. I wonder if we all have the same powers or if we all have different ones.” He sounded excited to find out. “The only thing I’ve tried is healing.”
“Who did you heal?”
“Caerellia had a bad tooth, and I fixed that. And one of the women at the feast last night had a growth in her belly. It felt uncomfortable being near them, and I knew what to do, so I just did it.”
“I haven’t felt anything like that. But maybe I just haven’t been near anyone who’s sick. Though Ficino’s awfully old and frail, there isn’t anything actually wrong with him, at least not as far as I know.”
“I’ll try walking by him and see if I feel anything, and if there is, put it right. By the dog, this is great!”
“Aren’t you worried about our powers at all?” I asked.
“I’m worried about Fate and Necessity, and screwing things up badly, like getting lost if I try to go outside time and that sort of thing,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m excited about the powers, though. I want to find out what we can do and how it works and have fun with it. I understand why old Kallikles is worried about telling Rhea. But we’ve never been like everyone else, really. This just makes it more solid.”
“Do you still want to develop an excellence of volcanoes?”
He took a step up onto the air and then back down onto the masthead beside me. “I really do. Imagine being able to direct the lava. Imagine bathing in it. Imagine having control over it.”
I shuddered, imagining burning up. The volcano had always frightened me. “You can definitely have that.”
Erinna called him to stop loitering and get about his duties, so he went back down to the deck, where she had him coiling rope. I stayed at the masthead. Now I was finally getting my free time to think, and I was a little bored.
When my watch was over and I went down to the deck, Phaedrus came up to me. “Nope,” he said. “Nothing wrong with Ficino that I can tell. Also, I got Maecenas and Ficino to say things in their old languages, and they were completely incomprehensible. But we’re going to the festival.”
“Good. What did you get Ficino to say?”
“Some poetry. It sounded a bit like Latin, but more sing-song. I could make out the occasional word that pretty much was Latin, but that’s all.”
I found sitting Ficino in the agora of Marissa, drinking wine and talking to a group of locals about Plato. He drew me deftly into the discussion, which was examining the question of whether this was a republic. It seemed to me quite clear that it was, and that it was as Maia had said the night before, one of the fabled republics Plato had heard of.
Sitting there, though, I realized that their classes were much more pronounced than ours. There’s a thing people say, that you can tell somebody is gold without checking their cloak pin. It means they are truly excellent, so much so that their quality really shows. People used to say it about my parents. In Marissa, you really could tell, but not because of shining excellence. The people talking to Ficino were all golds, and they were all free to sit drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon. They were cleaner and somehow glossier than the people working around us. I watched a man carrying a sack and a woman buying vegetables. Both of them wore bronze pins. Their kitons were shabbier, more faded, frayed at the edges. Of course, there are always people who let their clothes fall into disrepair. But this wasn’t a case of sloppy individuals or personal idiosyncrasy. The people sitting with us all had more embroidery on their kitons, and while none of them were fat they tended to be a little plumper than the others. I thought back to the feast the night before. Had everyone inside the hall been a gold? I thought perhaps they had. This visible class difference was nothing like the poverty in the Kyklades. But it was strange to me.
Just then a woman came up to our table with a pitcher. Because I’d been thinking about it I noticed that she was wearing a bronze pin, of the same design we used at home. I also saw that there was something odd about her attitude. She seemed somehow lacking in confidence. She refilled our wine cups, deferentially, and one of the men paid her—paid her with a coin. I had read about money, but not seen it before. I tried not to gape.
After a while, I persuaded Ficino to walk through the city with me. As we walked I drew him around to the subject of the verses he’d recited to Phaedrus. He repeated them to me patiently, they were by Petrarka on the subject of someone thinking about how people in future ages were deprived by not being able to see a woman called Laura. He then translated them into Latin for me. I had understood them perfectly. So, clearly my divine language ability worked on all languages. It seemed as if there would be places it would be more useful than on Kallisti, where everyone spoke Greek and Latin and nobody spoke anything else, but it still seemed like a fun ability. I wondered whether Father could do it. I wondered whether I could speak the other languages or only understand them. That would be hard to test without giving myself away, but maybe I could try it with Father.