“And it’ll be made into art?” I asked.

“Eventually, inevitably, yes,” he said. “Everything we do will be.”

“What?” Kallikles asked.

“I told Arete this. Our lives are art. It’s part of being a god.”

“And for a hero?” he asked.

Father shrugged. “It depends on their deeds.”

The three of us looked at each other, and then back at Father. He shook his head. “Just be careful. And try to be careful what other people see. They’ll react to you very differently if they know. Think carefully.”

“Rhea,” Kallikles said. Of course, she would be his first thought. “I’ll have to tell her as soon as we get back.”

Father looked at him sympathetically. “Maybe she’ll understand the way Simmea did.”

Erinna, I thought, sadly. There were already too many gulfs between us. My age, and Father’s nature, and her silver rank, and now this.

Then Phaedrus gasped, and we turned to him. He was a little way behind, and he was walking a handspan or so above the pine must of the forest. It didn’t seem strange, and then it did, to see my brother walking on air unsupported. Bold Kallikles took a leap and joined him. I hesitated, but Phaedrus put out his hands to me, grinning. I reached for his hand and took a step up onto nothing, and the nothing held me up, and we were all standing above the ground, walking on air. The strangest thing was that it didn’t take any effort and didn’t feel unnatural. It was as if I’d always been able to do it but had been shuffling away on the ground out of habit. I ran a few steps up the air, laughing, until my head was almost at the top of the pines. Then I saw Father, still scuffing his feet down in the must, and stopped.

“All right,” he said. “Now before you go any further up, show me how you’re going to come down.”

Coming down was difficult, much harder than going up. We couldn’t do it for a moment. I figured it out first—I took big exaggerated steps downward, as if descending an invisible staircase, and the boys copied me. When my feet touched the earth I felt unexpectedly heavy and almost fell. It reminded me of how walking on Amorgos felt strange after the motion of the ship. I took a cautious step, and then another. The boys were down now too, staggering and shaking their heads.

“What else?” Phaedrus asked. “What else can we do?”

“I really don’t know,” Father said. “You’ll have to find out for yourselves, find your limits. You should be looking for your domain, what you care about, where you have excellence. I told you about that. It’s different for everyone. And go slowly, be careful. Test what you do. Think like philosophers. Pursue excellence, in this as in all things.”

I wanted to try things. But I was afraid, too. I wanted to be a god, or I had thought that I did. Now I wasn’t sure. I could see a chasm opening between me and everyone but Father and my brothers. I didn’t need the warning to hide my new powers from the others. It was the same way I felt about growing up. I wanted to be grown up, of course I did, to vote in the Assembly and be assigned a metal—gold, of course, and there wasn’t much doubt I’d make it. At the same time I didn’t want to stop being a child, secure, looked after. There were ways that was comfortable. I’d always been the youngest in the family, and there were advantages to that. There were advantages to being human. Not the only one Father ever talked about, dying and being reborn as a completely new person. I couldn’t see that as an advantage at all! I liked being me, and I wanted to keep on doing it. The advantages I could see were more to do with being like everyone else, living the kind of life we all lived. Having somebody love me one day, even if it couldn’t be somebody as wonderful as Erinna. Being excellent but still relatively normal. Like Mother, I thought, instead of like Father. But I had the power now. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t.

“I want to be free and choose for myself,” I said, as we came out of the trees again just above the beach. I hadn’t disliked feeling in the hand of Fate. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to feel that again. Fate and Necessity are what binds the gods. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be bound that way.

“Then keep away from gods,” Father said, looking over his shoulder at me, half-smiling. Then suddenly he looked serious. “One thing you will have enough power to do now, all of you, is reach the gods with your prayers. Be careful what you pray, and what you ask and whose attention you draw.”

On the beach some people were preparing food, and others were racing and wrestling on the sand as if they were in the palaestra. The Excellence was bobbing sedately at anchor. Clouds were blowing up out of the west and glowing rose and violet in the rays of the lowering sun. (Since I’d left home I seemed to spend a lot of time looking at the sky. It was always changing, yet it was the one thing that was the same everywhere.) Nobody took any notice of us coming back, except Erinna, who waved happily as she caught sight of us, and Neleus, who raked us with a dark-eyed glance before turning back to the fire he was building.

13

APOLLO

I had guessed that Delos might have an effect on my Young Ones, but had not quite thought through what that would mean. I knew it when I saw them coming back aboard to sleep that night. The three of them had a new look about them that I nevertheless recognized. They were always beautiful, and always moved well—everyone brought up in the City knew how to move well. But now there was something about them, a certain sleekness, a not-quite-hidden glitter, as of a scarf draped carelessly over treasure. They looked like Olympians in disguise.

After the Last Debate, Simmea and I set up housekeeping together in Thessaly, which had been Sokrates’s house. We took all the children belonging to us—Neleus, and my three boys. I took Kallikles, Alkibiades and Phaedrus from the city crèches. Many people wanted their babies but couldn’t identify them. There was no difficulty with mine. I’d have known them by their heroic souls, but anyone could tell at a glance from their eyes and bone structure. Phaedrus’s blue eyes looked strange against his dark skin, especially then, when he was five months old. Alkibiades was nine months old, and Kallikles was just over a year.

We also collected Neleus, who was also five months old. Simmea frowned when I carried him into Thessaly. “I swore to Zeus and Demeter not to treat him differently from the others,” she said. “They’re all my children.”

“They’re all your children, and you won’t be prejudiced in his favor in any way, but here he is,” I said. Then she took him and hugged him as if she’d never let him go.

It only took a couple of days for Simmea to decide that Plato was right, or at least that the two of us couldn’t manage four lively boys all day and all night. We took to leaving them in the nursery for several hours in the day so that we could get things done. There they were being brought up according to the precepts of Plato, communally, by people trained in early infant care. It didn’t hurt them, or at least I don’t think it did.

I had always known all my children were mine, always known they were heroes, always been able to pick them out of a crowd. Power didn’t make any difference to that. I looked at them across the deck, trying to see where it did make a difference. Arete met my eyes, and as I looked away I recognized and identified my emotion.

I was envious, something I had rarely experienced. Envy is like jealousy, but quite distinct. Envy is when somebody else has something and you wish you had it too. Jealousy is when they have something and you wish you had it instead. I have felt jealous of people, usually when the thing I wished I had was somebody’s attention. It’s hateful, far and away my least-favorite emotion, because it makes me less than I could be. I dislike feeling it, and try to avoid it. Envy has been much rarer for me, because apart from people’s attention there’s normally very little that I want that I can’t just have, and very little of that is something anyone else could have anyway.