“So in one way, you and I are the only normal ones on this beach,” he said.
I blinked. It wasn’t a way I’d ever looked at it. The moon was rising now above the colosseum where the contest would be held tomorrow, silvering the pillars. It would eventually become an acropolis, and later a Venetian castle. The moon looked like a great glowing coin poised on the ridge. I remembered going there to talk to Artemis, standing on the dusty plains beside the lander from the ship that bore my name. “The gods have power. But humans have wonderful dreams and make them real, sometimes.”
Phaedrus took his hand out of the fire. “If only we had some fruit we wanted to bake,” Kallikles said. He put his own finger toward the flame and darted it back at once. “It’s funny how we all have different things.”
“Different freaky abilities,” Neleus said.
“Are you jealous?” Arete asked.
Neleus nodded. “How could I not be jealous? You all have magic god-powers, and you’ll get to live forever while I die. But on the other hand, I’m not a freak. You’ve always been faster and stronger than me. You’re weird. You scare people. I’m just strong and smart and, outside of this family, people like me.”
“We’ll have to die too,” Arete said, wisely sidestepping the issue of what happens afterward.
“And we like you,” Phaedrus said. He handed him the wine jar. “Or we do when you give us the chance.”
“That’s true,” Kallikles said. “When you give us the chance.”
“It just feels as if I have to be twice as good to be normal,” Neleus said.
“That’s what Simmea was afraid of,” I said. “When we brought you home. But you were smart enough to keep up. Not surprising, being her son.” I wasn’t good at this kind of thing. But it seemed to work. He smiled.
“So tomorrow,” I said, and their attention all switched back to me at once. “What do you think I ought to sing, to completely flatten Kebes, so much so that the judges will have no option but to be fair and give me the victory?”
20
ARETE
Phaedrus and I walked in with Father, a few minutes before the appointed hour.
Everyone was there from the Excellence, except for the watch that Maecenas had absolutely forced to stay aboard. Kallikles was one of those, though he had complained and protested until the last moment. It seemed as if the whole population of Lucia had turned out as well, even those who were old and sick. I saw people carried there in blankets, old people barely able to hobble, newborn babies, and pregnant women who looked on the point of popping. Everyone gathered in the colosseum, which was just like the one in Marissa.
It was a big space, but crowded now. The seats were packed with people when we arrived, more people than I had ever seen in one place before, perhaps more people than lived in the Remnant. Some were sitting on blankets and sharing picnics. A girl with a little piping flute was wandering through the crowd and being given presents—or no, I reminded myself, money. They used money here.
The nine judges were sitting on raised seats down on the stage. Neleus was among them. The other three from the ship were Klymene, Ficino, and Erinna. From the city were Nikias, immediately recognizable as Neleus’s father, Aristomache, and three strangers. I wondered if it would be good or bad that the ninth judge was from Lucia. It was the most likely outcome of choosing by lot. There were ninety of us and more than three thousand of them.
Father was wearing his cloak, pulled back over his shoulder to show the two swords through his belt. Phaedrus carried the lyre. Everyone fell silent when they saw us and then a murmur went through the crowd, which parted to let us pass. It was like a play, and I felt that we should have had time to make costumes before our grand entrance, or at least re-dye our kitons so that we all matched. I would have put us all in black and gold, but any unified color would have done. As it was we were hopeless. Father’s cloak was pink, embroidered with scrolls and suns, one of Mother’s favorite patterns. His kiton was plain white, as he generally preferred. Phaedrus’s kiton was blue, embroidered six inches deep with four different patterns, and mine was a faded yellow embroidered with red Florentine lilies.
There was no sign of Kebes.
We walked down one of the clear aisles and onto the stage. The judges were sitting toward the farther side, on a row of chairs. In the center was a strange piece of wood, almost as tall as I was and about half that broad, with two iron loops bolted into it at the top and another two near the bottom. It was just one straight upright, not a cross, but it had something of the same feel as the crucifix outside the temple. I had no idea what it was for.
Aristomache came forward and introduced the judges to us. The three strangers, two women and a man, were strangers to Father too, it seemed. Their names were Sabina, Erektheus, and Alexandra. Everyone wished each other joy. Erinna was biting her lip, looking very serious.
“I wonder if Kebes is even going to show up,” Phaedrus muttered, but just then there was a stir in the crowd, and there was Kebes at the top of the slope, still dressed in his costume from the day before, with the Phrygian cap pulled down on his broad forehead. A woman and a boy came with him, carrying a strange assortment of things I couldn’t quite figure out.
“Why would she have given him those?” Father murmured.
“Who? Mother?” Phaedrus asked.
Father laughed shortly. “No indeed. Athene. It’s an instrument she invented and then discarded because it made her look so ugly playing it. It’s called a syrinx, or pan-pipes.”
I’d never seen anything like it. It consisted of a set of hollow tubes of different lengths bound together. “Like a whole set of flutes?” I asked. Wind instruments were banned at home, because Plato thought they made people soft.
“Yes, sort of,” he said. “And what do the others bring?”
The woman was carrying a little folding stool. The boy had a bag, which he set down on the left of the wooden thing and unfastened. Inside were a set of leatherworking knives and a number of leather straps.
“Afraid, Pytheas?” Kebes asked.
Father laughed, because of course he wasn’t afraid at all. I wondered if he half-wanted Kebes to kill him so that he could go back to being a god and stop needing to figure out mortality from first principles. But what was the threat in a wooden pole and a set of little knives? The crowd seemed to know, because they had fallen silent as soon as the boy undid the bag. Torture, I thought, just as Father had said. Erinna was frowning at the bag. She asked Ficino something and screwed up her face at his reply. Klymene shook her head.
Kebes’s eyes swept over the judges. He nodded to the woman, and she and the boy moved back and climbed up the first set of stairs to sit down in a clear space on the first bench on the edge of the crowd. Father set down his swords on the opposite side of the wood from the bag, took his lyre from Phaedrus, and nodded coolly to us. “See you later.” Phaedrus moved back, but I moved forward to embrace him, being careful of the lyre. “Win,” I said. “What he said was an insult to the honor of all three of us.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “Fascinating as it might look in the art of later times, I find I have very little desire to be skinned alive.”
I looked back at the tools with a start of horror. Once he had pointed it out I could imagine it all too easily. Bound to the wood by the iron rings and the straps, and then skinned alive. How horrible! Even worse than crucifixion. Surely all incarnate gods didn’t have to end up dying in horrible ways? Surely? Aristomache said Yayzu had come back in his divine form, but she hadn’t mentioned what he’d done to the torturers afterward. I hoped it was something really appropriate.