It was just as well we probably wouldn’t be given the choice, when it was so hard to decide.

9. Arete

9

ARETE

After Amorgos we sailed to Ios, and from there to Naxos. We found no people on Ios, and no sign of Kebes. Life aboard became almost routine, up before dawn to take my watch, which I mostly spent up at the top of the mast. Watching the sun rise from up there was always incredibly beautiful. The sky slowly lightened and became pink, and the sea echoed the color and was rose-pink dotted with jade-green islands. I could see so far from the mast at dawn that the islands looked like leaping dolphins. Then sometime in the day we would come close to an island. A party would go ashore to explore, find nobody, and come back. The rest of us would go ashore to cook, hunt, and take on water. Then we’d come back aboard and either sail on overnight or stay in our fairly protected anchorage, depending on winds and what the captains thought.

The night on Amorgos we sang at the campfire, both kinds of songs, Phrygian and Dorian. Some songs we all sang together, and some people took turns singing. Father played the lyre and sang a new song he had written about Mother’s excellence and love of truth, which made everyone cry. Erinna and Phaedrus and I sang some of the choruses from The Myrmidons. It was like a festival, only better, because we hadn’t been preparing and rehearsing, it was all spontaneous. Then we all went back to the ship to sleep.

On Ios the shore party had killed a boar that ran out of the woods and attacked them. We roasted it and ate it under the stars, which seemed brighter from there than they were at home. We sang again after we had eaten. Phaedrus persuaded me to do Briseis’s duet with Patroklus. When we sat down again, Erinna leaned over from where she sat whittling and patted my arm. “You have a great voice.” My soul soared at praise from her.

“We’re fortunate that all of Pytheas’s children seem to have inherited his singing abilities,” Maia said. Neleus frowned at that, because he could never seem to sing in tune. I didn’t think singing was a particularly heroic ability. Erinna’s singing voice was clear and true.