“We founded Lucia pretty much where we’d landed, without doing any surveying or anything. There was water, which was all we really needed. There were olive trees too, which may mean there had once been a settlement there before, because olives usually mean people. We rescued goats and sheep from the mainland, and fortunately a lot of our refugees knew how to look after them and milk them and process wool, because we didn’t.” She laughed. “We had a lot to teach each other! That first winter was hard. Some of the girls were pregnant, some of ours from the festivals, and some of theirs, mostly from rape. They were all grateful because we’d rescued them—but what else could we have done? We had the weapons that were on the ship, of course, and we’d all had training.”

“Of course,” Erinna said, her eyes shining. “And you founded a city?”

“It wasn’t a proper city at first, but we all worked on a constitution, and building it, of course.”

“Why did you decide to call your city Lucia?” I asked. I knew I’d heard the name before, and I’d just remembered where. Father had said it had been Mother’s birth name. It seemed like a peculiar coincidence, but I couldn’t think of any possible connection.

“I think Matthias proposed it,” she said. “It means Light of course, and new light was what we all wanted. It was only afterward we thought of Saint Lucy and seeing everything with new eyes, which is what the name means to us now, our fresh start and our turning back to God. It was Providence, I suppose.”

“So how was it in the beginning?” Maia asked.

“We debated everything, like the philosophers we were, but sometimes the practical people we’d rescued had better ideas than any of us.” Aristomache smiled at one of the locals at the table, who looked down, clearly embarrassed. “They brought us back to Earth whenever we floated off too far. And it was that winter that we came back to God. That was Matthias’s proposal too.”

“Who’s Matthias, one of the people you rescued?” Maia asked.

Aristomache laughed and took another honey cake. “No, he’s the one who used to be called Kebes. He took his real name back. Some of us did that and some didn’t, according to what made us more comfortable. I didn’t want to be Ellen again.”

“We discussed that in the City of Amazons, too. I didn’t want to be Ethel,” Maia said, astonishing me. She seemed so very much a Maia that it didn’t seem possible she could ever have been called anything else. Ellen was clearly derived from Helen, but Ethel came from that strange language they had spoken together briefly. Maia was right, it emphatically didn’t suit her.