I knew how important having children was to Lysias, so I wasn’t at all surprised when he left me in the seventh year, though I was surprised that he left me for Lukretia, who was older than I was, and who had never shown any interest in him before that summer. I missed him surprisingly much. Even as we had been drawing apart he had always been courteous and friendly. Now I came home alone to a house that felt colder.

11. Arete

11

ARETE

That day for the first time I saw some other ships, three big ones with rows of oars, away to the east, heading southward. I called the news down, and there was some excitement, but we didn’t change course to intercept them. We reached Paros about mid-day.

At first it seemed deserted, because we reached it from the southwest, and the settlements were all on the northeastern coast. The shore party didn’t find anything inland, but we all saw the ones along the shore after we had sailed all the way around. I saw three of them, much like the one Kallikles had described on Naxos. I looked at them as hard as I could as we sailed by them, and so did everyone else aboard who wasn’t tending to the ship at that very instant. I didn’t see any people clearly, because they fled at the first sight of the ship. Paros was thickly wooded, and they ran off into the trees, mothers carrying wailing babies and everyone clutching their most precious possessions. “They must be expecting raiders,” Neleus said. “Maybe Kebes is nearby.”

“Or maybe more people like them. What would Kebes find to raid in a place like that?” The huts looked flimsy enough to push over at a touch. There was one square-built stone house on a little eminence, but even that looked filthy and shabby. The statues were strange, as Kallikles had said, festive and brightly colored when all the rest was so drab. They stared out at us with their huge painted eyes.

“That one has an owl,” Maia pointed out at the second village. The owl was not carved but painted onto the side of the statue. “Do you think it’s supposed to be Athene? Do you think they’re meant to be the gods? The Greek gods?”

“Who else would they worship?” Erinna asked.

“It seems so strange,” Maia said. I squeezed her hand, to show I understood what she meant. It was hard to think of these villagers as Greeks.