“That place doesn’t have a palisade,” Klymene said. “And they didn’t run off. We ought to be able to talk.”

“Wear armor,” Maecenas said.

So I had to put on a cuirass, and endure the envy of the entire ship’s company as I was rowed ashore. Samos has a natural deep harbor, and they had built a wooden wharf with poles—they were clearly used to receiving a big ship like ours. There was a crowd waiting to receive our little boat, and the armor didn’t feel like much protection.

Nobody looked familiar. Most of the crowd were young, and so I wouldn’t have expected to recognize anyone, but some of them were older, indeed aged. They were also the wrong mix of people to be the Goodness Group—all of these had what I think of as typical Ionian Greek looks. They could have been carved in marble. “Joy,” one of them said, a middle-aged man. “You have come early. Why do you stand off from shore? Is there sickness aboard Goodness?”

His accent was unusual, but he spoke good Greek.

“Joy to you. We’re not the Goodness,” Klymene said. “Our ship is called Excellence. We come from Kallisti. Who are you?”

The answer was surprising, and took a long time to elicit clearly. It turned out that they were a group of assorted refugees from wars in Greece and the islands who had been settled here by Kebes and his people to found a new city, which was called Marissa—after, they told us, the name of the mother of God. God himself was called Yayzu. They traded regularly with the Goodness, giving them food in return for manufactured items such as bowls and statues. They did not recognize the name Kebes, though when I said Matthias there was a general sigh and a smile of recognition. The thing they most wanted to discover from me, once I had said the words “Excellence” and “Kallisti,” were whether we were still in contact with Athene. When I told them that we hadn’t seen her since the Goodness left, they seemed very relieved, and admitted that they had two people in Marissa from the Goodness Group, the doctor and the teacher. These two came forward now through the crowd, visibly of our people. The teacher was much paler-skinned than anyone else, a Master I had known slightly called Aristomache, now in her seventies. The doctor, Terentius, was clearly one of the Children, much swarthier than most in the crowd. He seemed only vaguely familiar. They hugged us and asked for news of friends left in the City.

“Is it safe for us to bring the Excellence in?” Klymene asked.

Terentius looked surprised. “Of course! Why wouldn’t it be? Marissa is a civilized city. Well, semi-civilized. As civilized as any of our colonies,” he finished proudly.

“You have colonies?” Phaenarete asked. “How many?”

“Lots,” Terentius said, slightly cagily, though the appalling arithmetic positively leaped to mind—if they had two people in each one they could have seventy-five colonies like Marissa up and down the Aegean. “Are you all still on Kallisti trying to do Plato’s Republic?”

“Yes,” I said. “Though we have five cities there now, and lots of Young Ones. This is our first exploratory voyage.”

If I made us sound like five united cities, who can blame me? Kebes had been founding colonies. Who could imagine how large an army he might be ready to field if he thought we were divided and easy to conquer? I didn’t doubt that he would still hate us.

Klymene and Phaenarete started to signal to the ship that it was safe to come in. “One thing, Aristomache,” I said. “Marissa. Yayzu. Is this some primitive religion I’m not aware of, or are you really teaching them Christianity?”

“Christianity, of course,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye.

“What’s Christianity?” Dion asked.

“It’s the one true faith. It has been kept from you, so you could worship Plato, but it’s the only thing that can save your soul,” Aristomache said. Heads were nodding around her. Dion’s eyes widened.

“It hasn’t been kept from you at all. It’s that crazy religion Ikaros has in the City of Amazons,” I said, dismissively.

Dion was a sensible lad. He nodded politely at Aristomache. “Oh, that,” he said.

“God sent his son, his only son, down into the world to save everyone,” she said.

“Right, and Athene’s one of his angels,” Dion said. “I remember now. It’s popular in the City of Amazons. Here too, I see.”

Although we had thought a lot about what Kebes and the Goodness Group might have been doing, collecting refugees from Greece and settling them in colonies on uninhabited islands had never crossed our minds. And of course they were doing just exactly what everyone else I knew was doing, trying to live the Good Life in Plato’s Republic. It also hadn’t occurred to anyone that Kebes would try to do this in a Christian context, more than a thousand years before Christ. Ficino and Ikaros had managed to reconcile Christianity and Plato, and also in Ikaros’s case Christianity and the inarguable presence of Pallas Athene. I wondered how Kebes had done it. He wasn’t stupid, and he’d been trained by Sokrates, but didn’t have most of the structure they were starting from. He couldn’t have. He’d been ten.

“No, actually Athene’s a demon,” Aristomache said.

Dion shrugged as if he didn’t care either way. I hoped this would be the general reaction aboard, at least among the Young Ones.

I don’t have anything against Christianity. It’s a wonderful story. Indeed it’s a wonderful story that has been mostly wasted by Christians. It produced some incredible architecture and music, and some splendid visual art, especially in the Renaissance. But they have made surprisingly little art about what it’s like to be an incarnate god, suddenly subject to the pains of humanity, and then being tortured to death, before returning to sort things out in divine form. It’s the heart of the story, and I’d been thinking the whole time I’d been incarnate myself that they could have done so much more with it. Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Bach, yes, but who else had truly entered into the Mystery of it? For every Supper at Emmaeus there are thousands of Annunciations and Nativities, as if the interesting thing is that Jesus was born. Everyone is born. There’s a lot of focus on the Crucifixion, again mostly in the visual arts, but surprisingly little about how he experienced his life, before or after death. Fra Angelico came closest, I think. But you’d think in that whole era where Christianity was dominant, they’d have thought about the whole thing more, instead of getting obsessed with sin and punishment.

Faced with Aristomache’s pious mouthings here, I felt shaken for the first time. I knew time couldn’t be changed. But if it could … if it could and if Christianity could have taken root here, at the very beginning, then the world I cared about most deeply might never exist. Christianity was a religion with a good story and an appealing simplicity—forgive and be forgiven, be washed in the blood of the sacrifice and be saved. If it could catch on in the Aegean before the Trojan War then everything would be different. I knew time was fixed and unchangeable. I had lived outside it. But even so, I felt a chill.

Our ship was warping in toward the wharf. “Do you want to trade?” the old man asked me.

“Certainly we do, though that will be for our captain to negotiate,” I said, smoothly, still thinking about Christianity and Kebes.

“Tonight we will feast the Excellence!” the old man announced. The crowd cheered.

“Where are your other colonies?” I asked Terentius, as casually as I could. “Where’s your main city?”

“What are your intentions toward us?” Aristomache asked.

“Exploration, a little trade,” I said, spreading my hands peacefully. “Unless you raided us last autumn. Somebody raided us and killed Simmea.”

Aristomache looked shocked and put her hand on my arm. “Oh, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry. I remember you two were inseparable. I remember when she gave birth, you didn’t want to stop holding on to her hands. She told me how you were both practicing agape. What an awful thing to happen! It must have been pirates. There’s so much turmoil on the mainland, and some of them have ships. But we’d never do such a thing. It’s true we have been avoiding Kallisti to keep away from Athene, and philosophical trouble. But we’d never do anything like that.”