“If there isn’t another voyage, could we get there anyway?” Euklides asked. “Could you fly that far with me, Arete?”
“I don’t know. It’s a long way.”
“Could you fly to Amorgos and rest, and then to Naxos, and so on?” Kallikles suggested.
“I don’t know. I’ve never flown carrying anyone for longer than that time with you by the rock. There’s a big difference between flying for a few minutes and flying for hours. I’d want to try it somewhere I could land if I needed to rest, not over the open sea!”
“It’s a possibility anyway,” Euklides said.
“I hope it won’t come to that,” Father said. “They’ll have to send the Lucians home at the very least. And I expect we’ll have trade voyages, and missions of mercy helping the Lucians.”
“I wonder what powers I’ll have,” Euklides mused. “It seems so random.”
Perhaps it wasn’t as random as it seemed. I couldn’t quite see how my own powers fit together, but my brothers’ were beginning to make sense to me. I had spent one morning up on the mountain with Phaedrus, standing on the edge of the lava ready to swoop down and rescue him if he got into trouble. It didn’t bother me to see him walk through the lava, or when he diverted the flowing stream around himself. But I could hardly look when he lay down and sank into it.
“Didn’t you need to breathe?” I asked, when he came up after what felt like a long time.
“I could tell when I needed to,” he said. “And I did start to burn, but I healed myself.” And he had been thinking about developing an excellence of volcanoes before we went to Delos.
As for Kallikles, lightning and weather working certainly fit together. “Perhaps Zeus will devolve weather to you,” I suggested, when Kallikles demonstrated his lightning by blasting a rowan tree on the lower slopes of the mountain. There was nothing left of the tree but blackened roots at the edge of the little pool.
“I wish I could do that to Klymene,” was all Kallikles said. He wasn’t getting over his anger at his mother. He was having fun with electricity, though. He could make the light-beams in Thessaly come on without touching the switches.
My own abilities didn’t seem in any way coherent. They also weren’t very useful. Nobody on Kallisti spoke different languages, so I never had the chance to use that ability. I already knew Greek and Latin. And I could only fly when I was sure I was unobserved. The truth recognition was useful, and I think that was why Father decided to take me with him on his missions to the other cities. Well, that and wanting me to sing the harmonies to “The Glory of Peace.”
Over the course of the next month I went on four embassies, accompanying Father on his new quest to end the art raids. His proposal was radically simple—everyone would return everything they had stolen, and then the art would be fairly distributed according to population. This had been Psyche’s original proposition, which we had rejected with scorn the first time we had heard it. Mother had wanted to accept it, but back then she couldn’t persuade enough people. Then the raids had started, and the honor of people and cities had become tangled up with them.
Father had three advantages in stopping the art raids now. First was the song, which really was a wonderful tool. It made people stop and think. We’d been trained to fight, but we’d also been trained to think and debate, and the song broke the cycle of raids and revenge by making people question why they were fighting and whether it was worth it. Secondly, because people generally liked and respected Father, and because he had been so vehemently in favor of vengeance for so long, his renouncing that now was very powerful—especially at home in the Remnant, where everyone had seen the force of his madness. Everyone had also heard what he’d done to Kebes, from those of us who had been there. To go from that to singing about peace and civilization and excellence made a powerful statement on its own. And thirdly, there were the Lucians. The specific way the Lucians were falling into timarchy was easy for us to see—the bloodsports and torture, and their focus on the physical side of life over the intellectual side. But their horror at our wars made us see that we were doing the same thing in our own way. The existence of the Lucians, and the need to do something about them, provided a new factor that made everyone refocus.
The people who really needed to be persuaded most were our own people at home in the Remnant. Most of the art was still safely there, and people had no desire to part with any of it. People tended to be especially attached to the art in their own eating halls. It wasn’t difficult to get people to agree that the art in the temples and streets should be shared, but they tended to feel that the art in their eating hall belonged to them personally. I had heard Mother talking about this since the art raids began.
What Father proposed was that there should be an art conference, combined with a Kallisti-wide conference on deciding what to do about the Lucians. This was clever, because the Lucians were, or could be made to appear to be, a common enemy. Everyone in Chamber agreed on the foreign conference, and Father and Maia made the art conference seem like the thing that would make all the other cities agree to come.
We went to Sokratea first. Sokratea was our closest ally. They had never been much engaged in art raids against us, though they had raided the other cities. I had been there before, on a mission with Mother. This was not all that different. We sailed there on the Excellence, which remained in the harbor there while we stayed in a guest house.
Sokratea was a strange place. In some ways it was the least Platonic of all the republics, including Lucia’s Christian Platonism. They didn’t have classes, and they didn’t separate out guardians from other people. They wanted to examine life, in the Socratic spirit, and they did that. They believed that Sokrates had been entirely right in the Last Debate. They read Plato, but in no very respectful spirit. They banned Masters from their city, but otherwise they had complete free speech and freedom of publication, and voted on everything, all the time. When Father addressed them he addressed the whole city from the rostrum in the agora—they had no Chamber and no committees.
“Doesn’t public business get unwieldy?” I asked Patroklus, one of the Children whom I’d met the last time I’d been there. He came to our guest house and took us to eat with him in his eating hall, which was called simply “Six.” Their streets too were numbered.
“It does get unwieldy. It takes a lot of time,” he admitted. “But we find it’s worth it.” The food was good; they gave us fish and cabbage and pasta. They had plenty of Young Ones, and lots of Children of course, but because they had refused entry to Masters, no old people at all. Nobody was any older than Father and Patroklus, and that felt strange to me as soon as I’d noticed it.
Father and I sang to their Assembly. I was nervous, even though I knew the harmonies really well by then. I’d never performed to so many strangers—and as Briseis I’d been wearing a mask. Now it was just my naked face. I felt a little sick before we started. But once Father played the first chord the music carried me with it. And it was all true. Peace was worth fighting for, defending, and in some circumstances attacking—to help another city put down a tyrant, for instance.
The people of Sokratea were moved by the music, and by Father’s arguments. They agreed to send envoys to the conference, and, after much spirited and public debate, to send their art. “Not the art we have made here!” one woman insisted.
“Nobody is asking for that,” Father said. “Though some of it is excellent, and if you chose to circulate it I think everyone would be truly impressed by it.”
I stood in the crowd after we’d finished singing, watching the speakers, ready to let Father know if they were lying. Apart from some forgivable hyperbole, they were not.