Father took a deep draught of his wine. “Arete’s going,” he said. “No more.”

“The problem with that is that we’re heroes,” Kallikles said, spreading his hands. “You know we are. And this is a heroic mission, where we will have the chance to prove ourselves. It’s like the voyage of the Argonauts. We all ought to have that chance. The Chamber gives us the chance, on our own excellence. If they turn us down, then they do. But if you speak against us they will turn us down.”

Father shook his head. “Not all of you,” he began, but wrathful Neleus interrupted.

“I insist on going, even though I’m not a hero!” He looked furiously at Kallikles.

We all looked at him. And suddenly I saw us all looking at him. It was strange. They were all my brothers, and I knew them well, Neleus among them, but now I saw them all with new eyes. Neleus sat alone on his bed, and we were all looking at him, and we were all one thing, and he was another. We all looked like Father, and he did not. We all had Father’s calm blue eyes and chiseled features. We had all shades of skin color—or all the shades of the Middle Sea, as Maia put it: Kallikles’s chalk pale, Father’s olive, mine brown, and Phaedrus’s near-black. We had hair that curled wildly and hair that lay flat as silk. Kallikles was short and Phaedrus was tall and I was a girl. We were an assorted set, but we were all Father’s children, children of Apollo, of a god. We knew we were all heroes, and Neleus knew he was not. My father and my brothers looked coolly at Neleus, and I looked with them, ranged myself with them in that moment. I had to whether I wanted to or not. I was a hero. I could not make myself be like Neleus. I was human—we were all human. But we all had something else in addition, and Neleus did not, and we all knew it.

“It shouldn’t make any difference,” Neleus said, into that long silence. His voice wavered a little.

“It shouldn’t,” Phaedrus said, gently enough. “But you have to see that it does.”

“You’re not any better than I am,” Neleus blazed.

Phaedrus lifted an eyebrow. “You know I am. I’m faster and stronger. We’re exactly the same age but I haven’t been able to wrestle with you in the palaestra since we were six.”

“It’s not fair!”

“It may not be fair, but it’s the way it is,” Kallikles said. He reached out a hand toward Neleus across the space between the beds, but Neleus ignored it.

“It’s not your fault,” Phaedrus said.

“Being heroes doesn’t make you better people,” Father said. He sounded immensely weary. “It might even make you worse. Knowing about it might. Simmea was afraid of that.”

“What does it mean, exactly?” I asked.

“Arete, even you must see that this isn’t the time for a Socratic debate clarifying terms!” Kallikles said, turning on me angrily.

“I don’t see that at all,” I said, keeping my voice even as Mother would have. “I think this would be a splendid time to discuss it properly. We all know we’re heroes, except Neleus, sorry Neleus, but we don’t know what that means in real and practical terms. We don’t know what difference it can make.”

Kallikles looked at Father, but Father was staring down at the blankets and said nothing.

“I’m going on the voyage,” Neleus said, in a calm and decided tone. “I appreciate that you all despise me, but I am going. I have more right than anyone, and more need to prove myself than any of you. If the Chamber won’t accept me for the voyage I’ll stow away. I am her son. I am Simmea’s only son, and I am going to avenge her.”

I made a little sound when he said he was her only son, because why should gender matter so much? But then I stopped myself from protesting, because he needed to be special, and when it came down to it he wasn’t a hero and I was.

There was another long silence. Then Father spoke. “Being a god made me worse at being a human being. She saw that. And she saw that being heroes might be a problem for you. And she was afraid that you would be unkind to Neleus because he isn’t, and that he’d suffer from that.” She had been right to worry about that, because we had been and he had. Father went on without hesitating, still looking down at the bed and not at any of us. “She thought that people needed more training to bring up children than we had had, but she understood that we had to bring you up and take responsibility for you. Most of the people with the training left after we voted to have families, and the rest were rushed off their feet.”

Now he looked up, and it was Neleus he looked at. “You are indeed her only son. She loved you very much. It almost killed her soul having you. She hated to give you up. She was so glad to get you back! I remember it so well, when we first brought all of you here.” He looked around the room, shaking his head at the memory. “She loved all of you, but Neleus was indeed her only son.”

Then he looked at me, and I saw he must have been aware of the little noise of protest I made. “You are her only daughter, and the only child of her milk.”

“What difference does milk make?” I asked, puzzled.

“All the difference in the world,” he answered, as if he thought I should know this already. “Mothers give their milk to their children, and with it their strength and their stamina, their ability to survive disease. There’s a bond in that milk.”

“And I didn’t have her milk?” Neleus asked in a small voice.

Phaedrus answered quickly. “You know you didn’t. You’ve read what Plato says, no mother shall set eyes on her own child—they went to the nurseries when their breasts were full and fed some random child who was there.” Phaedrus shook his head. “She might have fed me, but never you.”

Everyone except me had read the Republic. Reading it was now part of the adulthood rite for our city.

“She fed you the night you were born, Neleus,” Father said. “She told me so. But after that you were fed by any woman but your mother, and the same for the rest of you. No doubt Plato meant it to even out the advantages given by the milk, so that all could share with all.”

“Plato was crazy on some subjects, and that was one of them,” Kallikles said dismissively. “Father, where are you going with this line of argument?”

Father hesitated. “I don’t remember.” He looked over at Mother’s bed, where Phaedrus was sitting, and then quickly away. Mother often used to be able to see when Father got ahead of himself and give him his next point. She had a way of laughing as she did it that I could almost hear. Father wiped his eyes with the corner of his kiton. “I just can’t lose all of you as well as her.”

“You’d be lost too,” Phaedrus pointed out.

“I’d be back on Olympos, and you’d all be in Hades after having achieved very little in this life. You’re heroes. Arete asked what that means. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t live like heroes.”

“I’m going,” Neleus said, stubbornly. “I’m not a hero, but I am her son, and I am going on this voyage.”

“We’re all going,” Kallikles said. “It won’t be all of your sons, Father. Alkibiades and Porphyry and Euklides would still be on the island even if the ship sinks. And how can we live as heroes if we don’t get the chance to join the one heroic venture in our lifetimes so far?”

Father looked from one to the other of them, then he slowly set down his cup, got up, and went out of the street door.

“Where are you going?” Kallikles asked, but Father kept on walking and didn’t answer.

“Where is he going?” Phaedrus asked.

Since nobody else was going to, I got up and followed Father. He was walking aimlessly south down the middle of the street. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“To visit the lion,” he said.

I put my hand through his arm. “I’ll come too.” I knew the lion he meant. It was a bronze statue of a lion on a street corner near Florentia. Mother had been especially fond of it. One of my first memories was walking to visit the lion, one of my little hands held in each of my parents’ big ones. We walked down briskly through the night’s chill that made me wish for my cloak. Father felt warm, but then he always does. I don’t know if it was his divine fire burning even in his mortal incarnation or just a natural warmth. We reached the lion, and he patted it the way Mother used to. I patted it too. The lion’s face was very expressive, but it was hard to say just what it expressed. It seemed to change from time to time. Tonight the shadows made it seem worried. We turned around and walked back toward home.