Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza grew wild on the shores near the ancient port of Lindos until she was seven years old. Her father and mother let the sun and sea have their way with her, teaching her only what she was curious to know—which was a great deal.

She was a brown, bare-limbed wild thing, wide-eyed and elusive among the brown and white and faded gold battlements and columns and steps of the abandoned akropolis. From the bright expanse of the porch of the sanctuary of Athēnē Lindia, palms pressed against the crumbling walls, she stared down the cliffs into the azure unending sea, counting the steady, gentle march of waves against the rocks.

Sometimes she crept through the wooden door into the shed that housed the giant statue of Athēnē, rising thick-limbed and serene in the shadows, looking decidedly Asiatic, with her radiant brass crown (once gold) and her man-high stone shield. Few Lindians came up here; many thought it was haunted by the centuries-dead ghosts of Persian defenders, massacred when the Oikoumenē regained control of the island. Sometimes there were tourists from Aigyptos or the mainland, but not often. The Middle Sea was not a place for tourists any more.

The farmers and shepherds of Lindos saw her as Artemis and believed she brought them luck. In the village, her world seemed full of welcoming smiles from familiar faces.

On her seventh birthday, Berenikē, her mother, took her from Lindos to Rhodos. She did not remember much about the island’s biggest city besides the imposing bronze Neos Kolossos, re-cast and erected four centuries ago, and now missing all of one arm and half of another.

Her mother, with red-brown hair, as wide-eyed as her daughter, led her through the town to the whitewashed brick and stone and plaster home of the first-level Akademeia didaskalos—the master of children’s education. Rhita stood alone before the didaskalos in the warm sunny examination chamber, barefoot in a plain white shift, and answered his simple but telling questions. This was little more than formality, considering that her grandmother had founded the Akademeia Hypateia, but it was an important formality.

Later that day, her mother told her she had been accepted into the first school, her lessons to begin at age nine. Then Berenikē took Rhita back to Lindos, and life went on much as before but with more books and more lessons to prepare her and less time to run with wind and water.

They did not visit the sophē on that journey; she had been ill. Some said she was dying, but she recovered two months later. This all meant very little to young Rhita, who knew almost nothing about her grandmother, having met her only twice, in infancy and at age five.