Pytheas was constantly creating, though he did not always share what he made. He wrote poetry and songs. He could play the lyre and the zither better than anyone else I knew. Whenever he was set any exercise in music—whether music alone, music with words, or words alone—he excelled at it. He was marvellous in the Phrygian mode and even better in the Dorian. Under his influence I tried hard, and did improve at writing poetry and music.

My true love was given to the visual arts. I loved to embroider my kiton and cloak and to devise new patterns for this. I often embroidered for my friends. In the spring of the Year Three I was chosen to embroider a panel for the great robe of Athene. I chose blues and soft pinks and greys, and made a running pattern of owls and books. I loved this kind of work. Later that year I finally learned stone carving, and early in the year after metalwork, and finally painting. Painting was wonderful. It was what I had always wanted. It let me bring together color and line, and set down the pictures I could see in my head, even if they never came out quite the way I wanted them. At first I was terrible, but after I learned some technique I managed a sketch of Pytheas as Apollo playing the lyre, and a larger painting of Andromeda and Kryseis reaching the victory line in the games. I was almost happy with that as a composition. I had caught their expressions, and the contrast of light and dark in their hair and skin was pleasing. I would go back to eat in front of the Botticellis and know that I had so much to aspire to. Most days this would fill me with hope and delight, and only when I was bleeding or something had set me down would it seem an impossible burden to have a target so impossible to reach.

In the way the city was ordered, sculpture, painting and poetry were considered among the arts of bronze. I still wore the silver pin I had won in the races, but I began to look at the work of those whom the masters gave bronze pins, and think that I was not far from their standard. I made a mold for some cloak pins with a design of bees and flowers, and thought that they could be cast in any metal. Of course I continued to work in the palaestra and the library. That year we learned to ride and to camp, and saw much of the rest of the island. Most of it was set with crops, tended by diligent workers, but some of it was wilderness, especially around the mountain in the centre. The mountain sent up smokes and steams from time to time, and near the crest there were sometimes rivers of lava that were still warm. We always went barefoot. Laodike burned her foot once when we were running up there. Damon and I had to help her home and we got back long after dark.

Laodike was a good friend, and so was Klymene, who had a very sharp mind. She always had something funny to say about everything. I could go to them with my little troubles and uncertainties, and they would be ready to hug me and reassure me. Pytheas never did this. He didn’t seem equipped for it. If I forgot and complained to him about some little thing that was bothering me he never soothed me. He always wanted either to distract me or, if it was possible, to do something about it. This peculiarity stood out all the more because he was the only one who did understand about art. He didn’t think it was a charming decoration or a useful moral exemplar, he agreed that it really mattered. If I showed him my designs he never praised them unless he truly thought them good. His standards were exceedingly high. Often when I had something that would have been good enough for everyone else, I made it better because I knew he would see it.

In this way he was a true friend of the soul, as Plato says, the friend who draws one on to excellence.

Sometimes I felt I couldn’t do as much for him; that once I had taught him to swim I had nothing left to do for him. Then I realized that I could help him be friends with the others. In many ways Pytheas was more like the masters than he was like the rest of us. He had an air sometimes of putting up with things that amused other people. This was why some people thought him arrogant. Once you were in the middle of a conversation with him it was often fascinating, but sometimes getting there was difficult for him, as if he didn’t know how to start. It was difficult for him to adapt what he knew and thought to other people’s interests and understanding. I could see both sides of it—I loved talking seriously, but I could also be childish sometimes and have fun. With my good friends I could have real conversations, and I could make a bridge between them and Pytheas so that he could be a part of these conversations. In that way I helped him by widening the circle of people with whom he could share some part of his mind. I would sometimes wonder about other ways I could help him. In the same way I thought about laying down my life for the city, I pictured doing it for Pytheas—if he had needed a kidney, or a lung, or my very heart, I would have lain down gladly before the knife.

The only one of my friends who refused to like Pytheas was Kebes, who persisted in seeing him as arrogant and sycophantic to the masters. In fact Pytheas was anything but sycophantic—he treated the masters as equals, or even inferiors. But he was polite to them and gave them consideration, even when they were not with us. Kebes continued to despise the masters and the city and everything about it. He mocked the masters when he was out of their hearing. He kept his hatred warm despite everything. He had even tried to run away once or twice in the early days, only to discover that we were on an island about twenty miles across and with no other islands in sight from the coast. He had, like all the children who had run, been found and brought back, and thereafter talked to about the benefits of staying. Kebes appeared to be reconciled, but he never truly was. He was waiting only until he became a man and could persuade others to steal one of the city’s two ships, the Goodness or the Excellence.

“What will you do with it?”

“Sooner or later they will have to teach us to sail them,” he said. “We will make for somewhere, either a civilization where we can live free, or a deserted island where we can found our own city.”

“What city could be better than this?” I asked.

“A free city, Lucia, where we could use our own names, and would not be forced into the molds of others.”

I liked the mold that was made for me, but Kebes could never be content under anyone’s direction. He had a silver pin for his prowess at wrestling, but he mocked it in private.

Pytheas, by fitting into the city, by speaking respectfully of the masters, and by being my friend, offended him by his very existence. Kebes could not legitimately wrestle Pytheas, being a head taller, but he said that if he did he would try to break his nose. I think this simple dislike had imperceptibly become jealousy. I was fifteen. Pytheas was fourteen, for he had told me that he had truly been ten when he was bought. I do not know how old Kebes truly was—sixteen or even seventeen, I think. Perhaps Kebes too found Pytheas attractive, and did not want to acknowledge being drawn to anything of the city. Or perhaps he was jealous of my attention to him. Once, when he came upon me making a charcoal sketch of Pytheas, he snatched the paper from me and tore it up. Before I grew to know Pytheas, Kebes had been my only close male friend.

I did not like to think that Kebes felt he owned me. Nor did I lie awake imagining scenarios in which I sacrificed myself to save Kebes’s life. But I liked him. And although I loved the city, I also liked to feel, through Kebes, that I was free—free to freely choose the city over Kebes’s idea of freedom. Kebes offered me an alternative, even if I rejected it. I never reported his talk to the masters or to Andromeda, as I knew I should have. It did no harm, I reasoned, it might even do him good to talk, and if he ever came to the point of being ready to steal a ship I could report it then—or let him go, why not? The City did not truly need two ships, and what use were unwilling minds?