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.

“What a fascinating question,” Ficino said. “To attack beside Achilles, or to defend beside Hector. The Greeks or the Latins. Which would you choose?”

“Neither side was entirely in the right,” I said. “And there’s no question that it was all the fault of the gods in the first place. Helen—”

“It’s possible that if we went to Argos now we might see the young Helen,” Ficino said. The boat had taken two groups of people in, and it was quite clear to me that it would be hours before it took us. I shuffled a little closer.

“Do you believe we’re that close in time?” Maia asked.

“It has been thirty-two years since we came,” Ficino said. “How long before do you think she would have put us? Perhaps more than that. Perhaps Helen is not yet born. I said we might see Nestor as a young man, and he was a very old man at the time of the Trojan War. I’d love to go to Pylos and see. But we’re not sailing in that direction, at least not this time. Perhaps we’ll see Anchises as a young man. That would be marvelous.”

“I too would love to meet Homer’s heroes,” I said. “But which side would you want to fight on, really?”

“I’m torn, but it would come down to the Latins and Troy,” Ficino said. “The beleaguered city holding out against the sea of enemies.”

Maia put her hand on his shoulder. “Florentia?” she asked.

Ficino smiled up at her. “Perhaps. My Florentia, like Troy, left a great legacy.”

“But our Florentia—” Maia began.

Just then a group of Young Ones including my brothers Neleus and Kallikles came running to the side of the ship, stripped off their kitons and dived into the water. They went racing off toward the shore. “Oh!” I said. I measured the distance between the ship and the shore. It wasn’t all that far. “I’m going to swim too! Would you bring my kiton?” I shrugged it off and offered it to Maia.

“Let’s all swim,” Maia said, dropping her kiton on the deck.

“It’s too far for me,” Ficino said. “I’ll go in the boat and bring your kitons to protect your modesty once you get ashore.”

People were diving all along the side of the ship. Maia and I joined them and began to swim toward the first shore I had ever seen that was not that of the island of my birth. All the while I was swimming, quickly outpacing Maia and almost catching up with my brothers, I kept thinking about which side I’d want to fight on. Troy, or the Achaeans? To rescue Helen, or to defend the city? For Agamemnon or for Priam? It wasn’t a fair question. We knew Troy was doomed. But Ficino would have fought for her anyway. I ran ashore, and the land felt strange under me. It seemed to be rocking. Earthquake? Or was the island, like Delos long ago, not tethered to the sea-bed? Then I realized this was something Erinna had told me about: when we were used to the motion of the ship, solid land would seem to move. I got up and immediately hurt my feet walking on pine needles. I hoped Ficino would bring my sandals too. I looked back at the Excellence, sitting gracefully at anchor, and although I had longed to explore this new island she looked like the most beautiful and dearest thing imaginable. Troy, I thought, and then no, the black ships.

It was just as well we probably wouldn’t be given the choice, when it was so hard to decide.

9

ARETE

After Amorgos we sailed to Ios, and from there to Naxos. We found no people on Ios, and no sign of Kebes. Life aboard became almost routine, up before dawn to take my watch, which I mostly spent up at the top of the mast. Watching the sun rise from up there was always incredibly beautiful. The sky slowly lightened and became pink, and the sea echoed the color and was rose-pink dotted with jade-green islands. I could see so far from the mast at dawn that the islands looked like leaping dolphins. Then sometime in the day we would come close to an island. A party would go ashore to explore, find nobody, and come back. The rest of us would go ashore to cook, hunt, and take on water. Then we’d come back aboard and either sail on overnight or stay in our fairly protected anchorage, depending on winds and what the captains thought.

The night on Amorgos we sang at the campfire, both kinds of songs, Phrygian and Dorian. Some songs we all sang together, and some people took turns singing. Father played the lyre and sang a new song he had written about Mother’s excellence and love of truth, which made everyone cry. Erinna and Phaedrus and I sang some of the choruses from The Myrmidons. It was like a festival, only better, because we hadn’t been preparing and rehearsing, it was all spontaneous. Then we all went back to the ship to sleep.

On Ios the shore party had killed a boar that ran out of the woods and attacked them. We roasted it and ate it under the stars, which seemed brighter from there than they were at home. We sang again after we had eaten. Phaedrus persuaded me to do Briseis’s duet with Patroklus. When we sat down again, Erinna leaned over from where she sat whittling and patted my arm. “You have a great voice.” My soul soared at praise from her.