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.