“Caerellia had a bad tooth, and I fixed that. And one of the women at the feast last night had a growth in her belly. It felt uncomfortable being near them, and I knew what to do, so I just did it.”

“I haven’t felt anything like that. But maybe I just haven’t been near anyone who’s sick. Though Ficino’s awfully old and frail, there isn’t anything actually wrong with him, at least not as far as I know.”

“I’ll try walking by him and see if I feel anything, and if there is, put it right. By the dog, this is great!”

“Aren’t you worried about our powers at all?” I asked.

“I’m worried about Fate and Necessity, and screwing things up badly, like getting lost if I try to go outside time and that sort of thing,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m excited about the powers, though. I want to find out what we can do and how it works and have fun with it. I understand why old Kallikles is worried about telling Rhea. But we’ve never been like everyone else, really. This just makes it more solid.”

“Do you still want to develop an excellence of volcanoes?”

He took a step up onto the air and then back down onto the masthead beside me. “I really do. Imagine being able to direct the lava. Imagine bathing in it. Imagine having control over it.”

I shuddered, imagining burning up. The volcano had always frightened me. “You can definitely have that.”

Erinna called him to stop loitering and get about his duties, so he went back down to the deck, where she had him coiling rope. I stayed at the masthead. Now I was finally getting my free time to think, and I was a little bored.

When my watch was over and I went down to the deck, Phaedrus came up to me. “Nope,” he said. “Nothing wrong with Ficino that I can tell. Also, I got Maecenas and Ficino to say things in their old languages, and they were completely incomprehensible. But we’re going to the festival.”

“Good. What did you get Ficino to say?”

“Some poetry. It sounded a bit like Latin, but more sing-song. I could make out the occasional word that pretty much was Latin, but that’s all.”

I found sitting Ficino in the agora of Marissa, drinking wine and talking to a group of locals about Plato. He drew me deftly into the discussion, which was examining the question of whether this was a republic. It seemed to me quite clear that it was, and that it was as Maia had said the night before, one of the fabled republics Plato had heard of.