I read everything she had written in the last notebook. Then I sat staring unseeingly at the bookshelves. She hadn’t written about the Last Debate. She had written about the conversation we had in the Garden of Archimedes, which I remembered very well, and then about the last Festival of Hera, the one in which she’d been paired with Kebes. My fingers clenched into fists reading it. She had told me it hadn’t been so bad. She said she didn’t want to discuss it, and I hadn’t pushed her about it. She had never told me that he had raped her, or I’d have killed him. I really would. I was ready to kill him now. She wrote that it wasn’t rape, that she had consented, but I knew better. She had said no, and asked him to stop, and he had gone on. He had bruised her. She had gone there willingly, for the City, like the philosopher she was, and he had tried to take her into his fantasy.

I got up and paced the library furiously. I wanted to kill Kebes, now, immediately, with my bare hands, but I didn’t know where he was. Simmea had written that I’d have been upset, but she had no idea how upset I would have been. I had learned what rape was, what it meant. I was also furious with Athene for pairing her with Kebes. It had been aimed at me, and I knew it, and Simmea knew it too. I would have killed him and left his body for the dogs and kites. He had tried to own her, and he had hurt her, my Simmea, my friend, my votary. She had told him I didn’t try to own her, and she had told Sokrates that she and I wanted each other to be our best selves. It was true. Worship was easy, commonplace. Beautiful women were everywhere. People who understood what I was talking about and could argue with me as equals were incredibly rare. How could he have done that? And why didn’t she tell me? Was it connected to the reason she had stopped me saving her life?

I was also furious that he had called her a scrawny, flat-faced, bucktoothed Copt. It was true, and she cared so little that she had laughed, but it galled me that he had dared to say it to her, to try to hurt her that way, through her looks. I always put up with Kebes because he was Simmea’s friend, and all that time he had imagined he owned her, owned some imaginary person called Lucia. She was Simmea, Plato’s Simmea, as Sokrates had said to her, as close to Plato’s ideal Philosopher King as anyone was likely to get. She had never told me about that conversation either. She had told me about Sokrates’s plan for what turned into the Last Debate, but not about the rest of what she had written, and how they had talked about the way they both loved me.

I missed Sokrates. Not the way I missed Simmea, as if half of myself had been amputated so that I was constantly reaching out with a missing limb. I hadn’t entirely lost him, either; there were days of his life before he came to the City when I could still visit him, in Athens, once I was back to myself. But I missed being able to just talk openly with him. He would have had wise advice for this situation, and nobody else would. Nobody else could even understand it. There was nobody I could remotely imagine talking to about it, except Simmea and Sokrates, and I couldn’t have either one of them. Sokrates had flown to me, after Athene had transformed him into a gadfly, and perched on my chest for a moment, then he had stung me and flown away, and nobody had seen him since.

I went back to Athene’s window seat. Nobody was in sight. A few people had been in the stacks, but they had fled when they saw my face. (Even without far-shooting arrows rattling on my shoulder, my wrath can have that effect on people.) I sat down and opened Athene’s secret compartment under the arm-rest. All I was thinking was of hiding Simmea’s notebooks. I wasn’t expecting anything to be there. Athene had been gone for almost twenty years. She’d had plenty of time to cover any traces she wanted to cover. But as I slid the notebooks in I felt that there was something there, stiff parchment, not paper. I pulled it out, curious.

It was a map of the Aegean, hand-drawn and colored, dolphins and triremes drawn in islandless spots on the lapis sea, but with all the islands and coasts drawn accurately. Kallisti was shown round, which meant it was a current map. The labeling was in the beautiful Renaissance Greek calligraphy that everyone in the City had learned, along with the corresponding Italic hand. Our city was marked, but not the other four cities on the island. There were cities marked in other places, some of them known to me, others strange. We didn’t have any maps like this, but anyone could have made it without too much trouble. We had parchment, we had the tools for making illuminated manuscripts, we even had accurate maps.

The thing that surprised me was the circle marked in red ink around a city on the northeastern edge of the island of Lesbos. The handwriting was entirely different from the rest of the map, it was a scrawl and nobody’s neat penmanship. This was clearly a later addition, drawn in after the map was made. “Goodness” it said. The handwriting was immediately recognizable. It was mine.

8

ARETE

There’s nothing like the feeling of a ship under full sail. It’s as if the ship is alive, every rope and piece of wood responding to the wind and the will of the sailor. It feels like magic when you are part of it. Before the voyage I had never been on any craft for more than a few hours. I’d learned the use of tiller and sail on the little fishing boats. I had been taken around the island on the Excellence twice, once a circumnavigation when I was quite young, with all the Young Ones my age, and once a year ago when Mother was going with an embassy to Sokratea and she took me with her. That was the trip where I’d really made friends with Erinna. Before that, she’d just been somebody my brothers’ age who I saw around sometimes. On that trip we’d talked properly for the first time. I’d been fourteen and she had been eighteen. I knew she saw me as a child. All the same, when I came aboard for this voyage and she waved to me, my heart swelled.

When we left I was wild with excitement, not to avenge Mother but to be moving, exploring, doing something different. Then, as soon as the ship had left the harbor and stood out to deep water, I was filled with the calm joy of the wave, as I had been both the other times I had been aboard ship. Dolphins came alongside and followed us. The water was so clear that I could see the whole pod, and the rush of water breaking along the side of the ship, and the gold and black sand far below on the sea bed. Yet when I looked up and out the sea was, well, wine-dark as Homer puts it. The sea was a deep dark blue of precisely the same reflective luminosity as rich red wine. And the white wave foaming along the ship’s side broke it, and the dolphins surfacing, and the shore of the island. I looked back at the City, which looked as small as a model even from this little distance. Above it the mountain was smoking, as it often did. Perhaps there would be a little eruption, a new stream of lava snaking down the side. Or perhaps the great eruption would come, the eruption that would carve away half the island and destroy the City and everything. I hoped that wouldn’t happen while I was away.

Phaedrus came over to me where I stood by the rail looking up at the mountain. All three of my brothers who had asked to go had been accepted by the Chamber to make the voyage, Phaedrus, Kallikles and, thank Hera, Neleus. I don’t know what he’d have done if they had refused him. “Is there a god of volcanoes?” Phaedrus asked.

“Hephaistos?” I ventured. “He’s supposed to have his forge in one. That Titian picture in the temple, remember?”

“But his main area is making things, isn’t it?”

“Yes, overlapping with Athene on technology. She designs things and he implements them. Athene overlaps with a lot of people on a lot of things. Ares on war, Fa—Apollo on learning. I suppose knowledge does cover a lot of ground.” I looked at Phaedrus, who was still looking at the mountain as the Excellence sailed east. I lowered my voice, although nobody was near enough the overhear us. “Have you been talking to Father about how to become a god?”