The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton Page B

get the most out of every day. Learn what you can while you can. Learn, Arete.”
    There are times when I wish my parents had given me a different name. Pursuing excellence and learning excellence are puns I am thoroughly sick of. Now we were on the ship there was even more opportunity for such jokes, of course. But Ficino was entirely serious.
    Amorgos is a long thin island, and it took hours sailing back east around it before we found the shore party. They had built a fire by a stream as arranged, and the Hesperides masthead lookout spotted their smoke and called out. The shore party signaled that they had seen nobody, so we anchored again to take on fresh water. “We’re going to spend the night here,” Maecenas told Ficino as he went by. “You can go ashore if you want to.”
    Everybody seemed to want to, just for the excitement of walking on a different island. There were crowds around the ship’s boat. I could see we wouldn’t be ashore soon.
    â€œWhere will we go next?” Maia asked Maecenas.
    â€œTomorrow we’ll make for Ios.”
    â€œWill there be people there?” I asked.
    Maecenas shrugged. “Homer doesn’t mention any, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. And Kebes may be there. It’s the next likeliest place, after here.” He moved on, trying to calm the people waiting to go ashore.
    â€œWhen did the islands come to be inhabited?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” Maia said. “We don’t have anybody here from before Plato, and Plato wrote a thousand years after this. Well, as far as we know when we are. Athene told us that we were here in the time before the Trojan War, but we don’t know exactly how long before, and we also don’t know the exact date of that war. We’re not even sure if it was real or mythical.”
    â€œReal!” Ficino said.
    â€œBoth,” I said, staring over at the pine trees on the Amorgian shore.
    I realized they were both looking at me. “What do you mean?” Ficino asked.
    â€œWell, like Athene,” I said. “She was real, she lived in the City and brought everyone here and set it all up. But she’s a goddess, she’s also mythical. She’s in a lot of myths, and yet the two of you have had conversations with her.”
    â€œI have been on expeditions with her to steal art treasures,” Ficino admitted. “I have looted Byzantium in her company. She’s real enough. She’s glorious.”
    â€œBut she’s also the Goddess Athene, she could move you through time and do all kinds of strange things. She had a mythic dimension. She was both at once.” And Father was the same, I thought, even without his powers. I thought of that strange moment when we all stared at Neleus. My brothers and I were also like that, to a certain extent. “And the Trojan War has to be like that too.”
    â€œI think it must happen after the City is destroyed,” Ficino said, sitting down on a pile of canvas. “Otherwise we would not have been able to resist participating, knowing what we know.”
    â€œOn which side?” I asked. I also wanted to ask him how he could be so maddeningly calm about the City being destroyed, but I had asked him related questions before and found his answers entirely unsatisfactory. The real problem was that he was ninety-nine years old and he was sure he was going to die this year, and I was fifteen and I didn’t ever want to die at all.
    â€œWhat a fascinating question,” Ficino said. “To attack beside Achilles, or to defend beside Hector. The Greeks or the Latins. Which would you choose?”
    â€œNeither side was entirely in the right,” I said. “And there’s no question that it was all the fault of the gods in the first place. Helen—”
    â€œIt’s possible that if we went to Argos now we might see the young Helen,” Ficino said. The boat had taken