From Ikaria we sailed to Samos, and there we had our first solid news of Kebes. (I had the map with me. But I hadn’t shown it to anyone or even spoken about it.) There were no Samians in the Catalog of Ships. And the priests in Delos hadn’t known anything beyond “northeast” for Kebes. There was no sign of the Goodness. But there was a settlement here, where the city of Samos would one day stand. It wasn’t a mud-hut encampment either, like the primitive ones we had seen on Naxos and Paros and Mykonos. The buildings were made of well-mortared stone, with familiar pillars in the style it amused me to call archaeo-classical. Nor did it have the strange flat Kykladic statues, but rather a solid Renaissance-style statue of a goddess. The people didn’t run away or immediately attack us, though we saw a stir in the streets.

Maecenas dropped anchor just outside the harbor and immediately called a council meeting. Everyone who wasn’t part of the council looked enviously at us as we went down to Maecenas’s cabin. I was on the ship’s council because the Just City was an aristocracy—rule was by the best. And by the standards they were using, I was going to be selected as among the best on almost all occasions. I sometimes felt a bit of a fraud about this, as they were judging by human standards. But I was glad to be included in the council and have my voice heard.

“What do we do?” Maecenas asked bluntly. “This could be Kebes. Probably is. Do we attack? Or talk first?”

“Talk first,” Klymene said, a hair before me.

“We need to find out more,” I said, when she spread her hand to yield to me. “We don’t see the Goodness. It seems like a small place.”

“It’s as big as Psyche, and it has the same kind of look about it of something built without Workers but with our sensibilities,” Maecenas said. “And Kebes only took a hundred and fifty, and no Young Ones.”

“I don’t think this is it,” I said.

Everyone disagreed with me. As I didn’t want to tell them about the map, I couldn’t explain why I didn’t think so.

“It’s logical that it is,” Klymene summed up after a while.

“What we need is more information,” I said. “Whether this is Kebes or not, we need to talk. And if it is, we need to find out whether they raided us and took the head of Victory. We might be able to set up friendly relations, if not. And if it isn’t Kebes, we need to find out who they are.”

“Let’s go in then, and see,” Maecenas said. “If I send you, Pytheas, will you stay calm?”