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.