He flushed. “You must have done the same or you wouldn’t know what I was thinking.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it,” I said. “But volcanoes seem like a huge area.”

“But there isn’t anyone specific for them. Poseidon has earthquakes, and the ocean. It’s hard to think of anything that’s vacant. I could specialize in volcanoes, learn about them. We’ve grown up next to one, after all.”

“But how would you do it?” I couldn’t imagine how such a thing could possibly work, how Phaedrus could go from the young man at my side to becoming a patron deity of volcanoes. I couldn’t picture the intermediate steps at all. “It’s hard to see how you could develop an excellence of volcanoes.” I looked at the plume of smoke, being blown on the same wind that was drawing the ship. “I was just hoping it wouldn’t erupt and destroy the city before we get back.”

“That would be terrible,” Phaedrus said, immediately without any hesitation. Then he stopped. “Why would it be worse than if it did it when we were home?”

“Guilt at surviving.” Without meaning to, we both looked at Father as I said that. He was standing by Maecenas at the wheel, looking almost happy. Phaedrus and I looked back at each other, uneasily.

Just then Klymene came along and hustled us into a group learning to shoot from the mast. The first part of this consisted of learning to climb the mast, which was a skill we’d need to acquire in any case. The Excellence was sailed by wind-power, and it required a number of people able to scale the masts to rearrange the sails. We had been organized before we left into three watches, and each watch had officers and sailors, who were people like Maecenas and Erinna who already had the necessary skills. The rest of us would learn as we went along. Some of us knew how to sail fishing boats, but the skill of going aloft and managing the great sails was very different in practice, even though the theory was the same.

I loved everything about the ship that bore my name, the taut ropes, the sea breeze, the way she heeled through the water. I loved the solar-powered deck lamps that began to glow softly as dusk came on. I loved sleeping in a hammock and swaying with the sway of the ship. The voyage was the first time I ever slept aboard—the time we went to Sokratea, we slept in a guest house there. I loved learning the new skills, sail-setting and rope-coiling and mast-climbing. From the crosstrees at the top of the mast I could see for miles, in a wide arc as the mast moved. I volunteered to spend as much time there as I could and to be a lookout. “It’s good because you’re light, but you won’t like it so much in a gale and lashing rain,” Maecenas predicted. He was Father’s age, one of the Children, Captain of the Excellence. I was in his watch, the Eos watch, with Erinna, Phaedrus and Ficino. We came up an hour before dawn and worked until an hour after noon, when the Hesperides watch took over. Father and Kallikles were in that watch. The third watch, the Nyx, took over an hour after sunset. Neleus and Maia were assigned to that. There were thirty people in each watch. I have no idea how Kebes managed to fit a hundred and fifty people into the Goodness, because the Excellence felt crowded with ninety.

The Kyklades are a group of islands that circle Delos, the island where Father was born. At that time Delos floated on the water, but afterward it was attached to the sea-bed like other lands—or this is the story recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo. (Father says it’s poetically true, whatever that means.) Tiny Delos is the center of the Kyklades, and the other islands do form a rough circle around it. It’s possible to draw them so that they look even more like a circle, and to make Delos seem like the center of the whole Aegean, and the Aegean as the center of the whole world. It depends on your perspective, as Mother used to say. Kallisti is the southernmost of the Kyklades, and to get anywhere from there except Crete you have to sail north. North isn’t a good direction to go in Greece in the spring, because of the winds, so we went northeast, toward Amorgos, which we reached late on the evening of the first day out from home. There were no signs of life ashore, but we weren’t really expecting any. No Amorgians were mentioned in Homer’s Catalog of Ships.

We put down our anchor and slept aboard. Erinna showed me how to sling my hammock, next to hers, and how to get into it sideways. I slept better that night than I had any night since Mother was killed. Erinna woke me before dawn in time for our watch and I sprang out of my hammock, feeling fresh and ready for a new day.

“You seem better,” Erinna said as we came up on deck.

“I feel better. The sea is good for me. And doing different things. I still miss her, but it doesn’t weigh on me the same way. And you were right about writing the autobiography, too.”

“She was right about that,” Erinna said. She hugged me suddenly, and I hugged her back, tightly. “We can remember her without being sucked down into grief.”

“That would be wonderful,” I said. “If only Father could.”

The Nyx watch were ready to hand over to us then, and so we had to work. I swarmed up to the top of the mast and relieved the Nyx lookout there, who that morning was the Captain of the Nyx watch, a Child called Caerellia.

“No signs of life at all,” she said.

I was disappointed. I was hoping for people. Amorgos is about the easiest island to get to from Kallisti, in normal winds, and Neleus had made a very convincing argument that it was the most likely place for Kebes to have founded his city. We put an armed party ashore as soon as it was properly light, then we sailed around the island to collect them from the other side. I wasn’t allowed ashore. Phaedrus and Erinna went, and I looked down from the masthead with envy.

At the end of the Eos watch I stayed on deck, staring over at the Amorgian shore as it slipped past, glancing up occasionally at the Hesperides watch as they ran about trimming sails. Ficino came up to me as I was standing there. The sea-breeze ruffled his white hair where it stuck out under his old red hat. I saw him every day so I didn’t normally think much about it, but he really was the oldest person I had ever met.

He grinned at me. “Not feeling seasick?”

“Not even a twinge,” I replied.

“Good. Well then, it’s time for lessons, I think,” he said.

Ficino was nominally part of the Eos watch, but he had declined learning how to climb the masts and had learned only how to steer, which was both the easiest and the most fun. “Lessons? But surely I’m learning enough just being here. I’ve learned a lot about how the ship works already. And also geography, and I’ll learn history as soon as we locate some people.”

Maia laughed, and I jumped, because I hadn’t heard her come up and she was right next to me on my other side. “You need philosophy and rhetoric and history and mathematics,” she said, as if I wasn’t already ahead of her in mathematics.

“But we don’t have any books,” I said. I had my notebooks, though I had left behind the two I had filled already.

“We have sufficient books,” Ficino said. Trust them to bring books, I thought. “But for now, how about calculating the angle the ship’s bow makes?”

I calculated angles in my head for hours, until we had rounded the point of Amorgos and were tacking our way up the other side to where we hoped to meet the shore party. Ficino and Maia then began to make me work on rhetoric, aloud. “Plato says young people shouldn’t learn rhetoric, it makes them contradict their elders before they have wisdom,” I pointed out.

“You wouldn’t be studying it yet in Athenia,” Maia said. “But we think fifteen is old enough to begin.”

“I learn more the older I get,” Ficino said. “I’m glad I began so young.” His eyes were on the gentle curve of the shore we were slipping past. “I don’t sleep much these days. Growing older I need it less, perhaps as I need the time more to learn things and get the most out of every day. Learn what you can while you can. Learn, Arete.”