The Philosopher Kings (10 page)

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?”

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.”

There are times when I wish my parents had given me a different name. Pursuing excellence and learning excellence are puns I am thoroughly sick of. Now we were on the ship there was even more opportunity for such jokes, of course. But Ficino was entirely serious.

Amorgos is a long thin island, and it took hours sailing back east around it before we found the shore party. They had built a fire by a stream as arranged, and the Hesperides masthead lookout spotted their smoke and called out. The shore party signaled that they had seen nobody, so we anchored again to take on fresh water. “We're going to spend the night here,” Maecenas told Ficino as he went by. “You can go ashore if you want to.”

Everybody seemed to want to, just for the excitement of walking on a different island. There were crowds around the ship's boat. I could see we wouldn't be ashore soon.

“Where will we go next?” Maia asked Maecenas.

“Tomorrow we'll make for Ios.”

“Will there be people there?” I asked.

Maecenas shrugged. “Homer doesn't mention any, but that doesn't mean there aren't any. And Kebes may be there. It's the next likeliest place, after here.” He moved on, trying to calm the people waiting to go ashore.

“When did the islands come to be inhabited?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Maia said. “We don't have anybody here from before Plato, and Plato wrote a thousand years after this. Well, as far as we know when we are. Athene told us that we were here in the time before the Trojan War, but we don't know exactly how long before, and we also don't know the exact date of that war. We're not even sure if it was real or mythical.”

“Real!” Ficino said.

“Both,” I said, staring over at the pine trees on the Amorgian shore.

I realized they were both looking at me. “What do you mean?” Ficino asked.

“Well, like Athene,” I said. “She was real, she lived in the City and brought everyone here and set it all up. But she's a goddess, she's also mythical. She's in a lot of myths, and yet the two of you have had conversations with her.”

“I have been on expeditions with her to steal art treasures,” Ficino admitted. “I have looted Byzantium in her company. She's real enough. She's glorious.”

“But she's also the Goddess Athene, she could move you through time and do all kinds of strange things. She had a mythic dimension. She was both at once.” And Father was the same, I thought, even without his powers. I thought of that strange moment when we all stared at Neleus. My brothers and I were also like that, to a certain extent. “And the Trojan War has to be like that too.”