“These are Neleus and Erinna and Arete, pupils of mine.”

Aristomache nodded to us in a friendly way. “I’ll introduce you all to some pupils of mine.”

Maia smiled at her. “We’d like that.”

Aristomache peered more closely at Neleus. “Are you Simmea’s son, young man, or don’t you know? In any case, I was there the night you were born.”

“I am,” he said. “And Arete is my sister.”

She leaned forward and peered at me. “Good. There’s a definite resemblance. I’m glad she left descendants. Pytheas told me what happened to her. Terrible.”

Erinna was looking up at the statue. Close up, it towered over us. It wasn’t a colossus like Crocus’s statues, but it was much larger than life size. Maia glanced up too. “What’s this?” she asked Aristomache.

“Come on Maia, you know that Jesus Christ is your lord and savior,” Aristomache said. “You might have turned your back on him to worship demons and given Plato more honor than is due a philosopher, but you know in your soul that He is the resurrection and the life.”

“Demons! Nonsense. And for that matter, you must have prayed to Athene yourself,” Maia responded.

As Aristomache opened her mouth to answer, I realized that they had spoken in a language I didn’t know, and that Neleus and Erinna’s faces reflected their incomprehension. I had never heard this language before, but I understood it as clearly as if it were Greek or Latin. It must be one of the powers that Delos had awakened in me, though I had no idea how or why. I’d have to ask Father, and talk to Phaedrus and Kallikles to see if it was the same for them.

“Do you deny that he is your savior?” Aristomache asked, fiercely.

“I’ve had this same fight with Ikaros,” Maia said, turning red in the face.

Aristomache frowned, then nodded. “Ikaros…” she began, and then suddenly went back into Greek. “Yayzu came down to Earth to save us all.” Aristomache smiled all around, including all of us in the conversation.

I nodded politely.

“Tell me about him?” Erinna asked. “I love the statue.”

“Well that’s a good place to start,” Aristomache said. “His mother was a virgin, and God sent her a son, his son and himself. He was born human, like all of us, and grew up, and taught, and was killed for his teaching, and then arose from the dead and taught again. He went through a human life and understands us. He’s not playing with our lives for his own amusement like Athene. And through him we will have eternal life, in heaven.”

I’d heard about heaven from Ficino, so I knew it was a place like Hades that some people thought was an interlude between incarnations and others thought was the end-point of all incarnations, for souls that had purified themselves. It’s mentioned in the Phaedo, though not with that name. My eyes went to Father, still deeply engaged in conversation on the other side of the agora. He had come down to earth and become mortal, and was learning about understanding human life. So there was no reason not to believe that Yayzu had done the same. And his mother, especially as Botticelli had painted her and Auge carved her, seemed like a perfectly nice goddess. The statue had a book in one hand. And I could certainly understand anyone who had been at the Last Debate being angry at Athene. I nodded and smiled at Aristomache.

15

ARETE

We were feasted by Marissa, and I believe in the process Maecenas came to some trade agreement, but I don’t know the details. I know there are too many things that only the Workers can make, and everyone wants those things. But in Marissa they were making some of them and getting others from the Goodness, like glass. We trade Worker-made glass to all the other cities. But they didn’t have any Workers and they were making their own. I saw it in some of their windows, and while it was thick and streaky, it was still pretty impressive that they were making it themselves. They were also making iron. And they had plumbing—they didn’t have wash-fountains in every house the way we did, but they had public baths, and public drinking fountains, like Rome. I thought they were doing pretty well.

I also admired their outreach to the refugees. It was what I’d wanted to do the moment I’d seen the villages of the Kyklades, and the Goodness Group were doing what we’d talked about—rescuing people and teaching them hygiene and technology and how to read and think independently. They didn’t have printing presses, but they had literacy and fairly advanced math. Aristomache was a good teacher. I was impressed by how much they had achieved, especially when we got Aristomache off the subject of Yayzu and his mother and onto the subject of how they’d done it.

We were all sitting in their eating hall—they only had one. Most people, most of the time, cooked and ate in their own houses, which had little kitchens for that purpose, unlike ours. When they had a big feast, the important people ate in the eating hall, which also served as their Chamber. It was a big room with a pillared portico that held about a hundred. The rest were feasted outdoors in the agora, where they held their Assembly. The feast began at sundown. It consisted of a savory wheat and milk porridge, followed by fresh sardines, followed by roast ox, which had been roasting all afternoon, of course, and piles of absolutely marvelous honey cakes, also made with wheat. We didn’t have wheat cakes or porridge often at home, as most of the wheat we grew was made straight into pasta. Cakes made from wheat were quite different from cakes made from barley and nut flours, much lighter and more fluffy. Wine was served, about three-quarters water, the strength I usually drank, weaker than adults usually had it at home. It took us most of the meal to get Aristomache off religion and onto the subject of what the Goodness had done.

We were seated at tables of ten, all nibbling honey cakes. Father and Maecenas and Ficino were at the top table with Terentius and some of the kings of Marissa. Aristomache, Maia, Erinna and I were with some of the members of the Chamber. All of the tables were mixed that way. Klymene and Neleus and the rest of the Nyx watch were back aboard, but we were assured that food was being sent to them.

“When we left, we sailed north. We wanted to get away from Kallisti, and we didn’t know where we wanted to go exactly,” Aristomache said. “We went to the mainland of Ionia, near Troy, and found a war going on. Not a Persian invasion, or even a Trojan one, just a petty civil war. The ship was really full, so we ferried most of our people over to Lesbos and set them down, then went back to rescue refugees. It was a purely humanitarian mission, we weren’t thinking about anything else. They were mostly women and children who would have been enslaved. Of course we thought about Hekabe and Andromache, but we seem to be too early for them. The King of Troy is called Laomedon.” She took a sip of wine.

“We founded Lucia pretty much where we’d landed, without doing any surveying or anything. There was water, which was all we really needed. There were olive trees too, which may mean there had once been a settlement there before, because olives usually mean people. We rescued goats and sheep from the mainland, and fortunately a lot of our refugees knew how to look after them and milk them and process wool, because we didn’t.” She laughed. “We had a lot to teach each other! That first winter was hard. Some of the girls were pregnant, some of ours from the festivals, and some of theirs, mostly from rape. They were all grateful because we’d rescued them—but what else could we have done? We had the weapons that were on the ship, of course, and we’d all had training.”

“Of course,” Erinna said, her eyes shining. “And you founded a city?”

“It wasn’t a proper city at first, but we all worked on a constitution, and building it, of course.”