“So do I. Will you do me a favor? When we get the chance, I want to go off somewhere and test flying, and test lifting you when I fly,” I said.

“Sure. I want to try that too. And the language thing. I wonder if we all have the same powers or if we all have different ones.” He sounded excited to find out. “The only thing I’ve tried is healing.”

“Who did you heal?”

“Caerellia had a bad tooth, and I fixed that. And one of the women at the feast last night had a growth in her belly. It felt uncomfortable being near them, and I knew what to do, so I just did it.”

“I haven’t felt anything like that. But maybe I just haven’t been near anyone who’s sick. Though Ficino’s awfully old and frail, there isn’t anything actually wrong with him, at least not as far as I know.”

“I’ll try walking by him and see if I feel anything, and if there is, put it right. By the dog, this is great!”

“Aren’t you worried about our powers at all?” I asked.

“I’m worried about Fate and Necessity, and screwing things up badly, like getting lost if I try to go outside time and that sort of thing,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m excited about the powers, though. I want to find out what we can do and how it works and have fun with it. I understand why old Kallikles is worried about telling Rhea. But we’ve never been like everyone else, really. This just makes it more solid.”

“Do you still want to develop an excellence of volcanoes?”

He took a step up onto the air and then back down onto the masthead beside me. “I really do. Imagine being able to direct the lava. Imagine bathing in it. Imagine having control over it.”

I shuddered, imagining burning up. The volcano had always frightened me. “You can definitely have that.”

Erinna called him to stop loitering and get about his duties, so he went back down to the deck, where she had him coiling rope. I stayed at the masthead. Now I was finally getting my free time to think, and I was a little bored.

When my watch was over and I went down to the deck, Phaedrus came up to me. “Nope,” he said. “Nothing wrong with Ficino that I can tell. Also, I got Maecenas and Ficino to say things in their old languages, and they were completely incomprehensible. But we’re going to the festival.”

“Good. What did you get Ficino to say?”

“Some poetry. It sounded a bit like Latin, but more sing-song. I could make out the occasional word that pretty much was Latin, but that’s all.”

I found sitting Ficino in the agora of Marissa, drinking wine and talking to a group of locals about Plato. He drew me deftly into the discussion, which was examining the question of whether this was a republic. It seemed to me quite clear that it was, and that it was as Maia had said the night before, one of the fabled republics Plato had heard of.

Sitting there, though, I realized that their classes were much more pronounced than ours. There’s a thing people say, that you can tell somebody is gold without checking their cloak pin. It means they are truly excellent, so much so that their quality really shows. People used to say it about my parents. In Marissa, you really could tell, but not because of shining excellence. The people talking to Ficino were all golds, and they were all free to sit drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon. They were cleaner and somehow glossier than the people working around us. I watched a man carrying a sack and a woman buying vegetables. Both of them wore bronze pins. Their kitons were shabbier, more faded, frayed at the edges. Of course, there are always people who let their clothes fall into disrepair. But this wasn’t a case of sloppy individuals or personal idiosyncrasy. The people sitting with us all had more embroidery on their kitons, and while none of them were fat they tended to be a little plumper than the others. I thought back to the feast the night before. Had everyone inside the hall been a gold? I thought perhaps they had. This visible class difference was nothing like the poverty in the Kyklades. But it was strange to me.

Just then a woman came up to our table with a pitcher. Because I’d been thinking about it I noticed that she was wearing a bronze pin, of the same design we used at home. I also saw that there was something odd about her attitude. She seemed somehow lacking in confidence. She refilled our wine cups, deferentially, and one of the men paid her—paid her with a coin. I had read about money, but not seen it before. I tried not to gape.

After a while, I persuaded Ficino to walk through the city with me. As we walked I drew him around to the subject of the verses he’d recited to Phaedrus. He repeated them to me patiently, they were by Petrarka on the subject of someone thinking about how people in future ages were deprived by not being able to see a woman called Laura. He then translated them into Latin for me. I had understood them perfectly. So, clearly my divine language ability worked on all languages. It seemed as if there would be places it would be more useful than on Kallisti, where everyone spoke Greek and Latin and nobody spoke anything else, but it still seemed like a fun ability. I wondered whether Father could do it. I wondered whether I could speak the other languages or only understand them. That would be hard to test without giving myself away, but maybe I could try it with Father.

“Why are you and Phaedrus suddenly interested in Italian poetry?” Ficino asked.

I gaped at him, entirely without an answer. If I’d known Petrarka had written in Italian as well as Latin, I could have said I was interested because of that, but I’d had no idea. “We were just wondering what it sounded like,” I said, feebly. “It’s beautiful. And that’s such an interesting thought. Did you see her?”

He smiled. “She’d been dead for almost two hundred years before I read the poem.”

“It’s hard to understand the time things take, chronology, that kind of thing. The vast expanses of history.”

We had walked through the streets so that we were now outside the marble pillars of the entrance to the colosseum. Ficino stopped. “It’s especially hard because we’re at the wrong end of it, and because you’ve met people from so many different times. Why shouldn’t I have seen Laura, when we both lived in Florentia in the Renaissance, as if it was all one big party?”

“She could be here, or Petrarka could at least,” I said.

“Too good a Christian, for all that he loved classical learning,” Ficino said. “And he didn’t know Greek, so he couldn’t have read Plato. Before I translated his work, Plato was only a legend in Italy.”

“It’s so hard to imagine,” I said. “Ages without Plato. How wonderful that you could bring him back.” I wondered if my language gift could be used in that way.

Ficino smiled, and gestured to the colosseum. “Shall we go in?”

Inside, the colosseum descended in banks of earthwork seats down to a raked sand oval. They clearly used it as a palaestra, as there were weights stacked up ready for use. It was empty, and Ficino and I walked down the steps that divided seating sections from each other. I walked out onto the sand and sang a couple of lines from one of Father’s praise songs. “Good acoustics,” I said. “I expect they use it as a theater too.” Looking up, I saw that it was built of earth and marble, not concrete the way the colosseum in Rome is described.

“Probably they use it for all kinds of things,” Ficino said. “There are grills on the gates there, look.”

We walked over to the gates. There was a strange smell there too, musky and acrid. “Animals,” I said. “Do you think they have animal fights in here?”

“The Romans did,” Ficino said. “And clearly they do.” He was peering in through the grill. “I can see what might be a trident. Maybe they have Roman gladiatorial combat too.”

“But they seem so nice,” I said. I had to step back because the smell was making me feel queasy.