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be worse. Our matriarchs understand that, and so do I. That’s why I will keep the truce I have agreed with my brother as long as I possibly, possibly can. I shall not leave. I shall look after my people, and my beloved Serifos, but I won’t fight him.”
    We squatted there on the beach, just a grandfather playing with a child, and watched the fragile island of sand disappear. Maybe I only understood his lesson the way a child understands, but I would never forget that swift, deadly onrush of darkness.
    Now I picked a stem of dry grass and sat on the dock with my legs dangling, swishing my harmless weapon through the air. Papa Dicty was still keeping the truce. Polydectes was still up there in the High Place, lording it over us. But something had changed.
    Our so-called king had been unpleasantly interested in my mother, ever since he’d found out that the castaway with the baby was actually a princess. Polydectes thought our peaceful island ways were weak and backward. He wanted to
be
a Greek, and best of all, an Achaean! Dicty had never regarded that threat as serious. The king treated his own people brutally, but he wouldn’t risk taking Danae as his “wife” against her will. That might not have gone down well with his Mainland friends. But now I was nearly a man and Papa Dicty’s adopted grandson,and that was different. Polydectes had a right to see me as his direct rival for the throne.
    The calm of the night was an illusion. Serifos was full of turmoil under the surface, and so was I. Things I didn’t understand about myself (what does it mean to be
the son of a Supernatural?)
churned and swirled in my head, along with the threat of war, the portent of a great earthquake and—above all—the beautiful stranger who called herself Girl. I relived the dreadful embarrassment of showing that poky little room to the girl who wore solid gold. I wanted to die of shame because our kitchen yard smelled of fish. I was a rebellious seven-year-old again. I felt the whole world was against me. I wanted to yell out,
She’s mine! You can’t take her!
Who was I shouting at? I didn’t know. I wanted to know what Kore was thinking. What did she think of me? I wanted to touch her; I wanted to fight battles for her, be a hero for her: make her a queen. But she was cold and proud; she had let me know I was not wanted. I would
never, never
dare to let her know how I felt.
    Back at Dicty’s the yard geese gargled and muttered as the kitchen gate opened, but they knew me. The restaurant was empty except for a couple of quietly incapable sailors, and a lingering party of swells from the High Place (we were the enemy, but we were also the best taverna on the island). Dicty and my mother were sitting at our family table with Anthe and the local residentEgyptian, a friend of ours. They were showing him the Egyptian “red carrots” that Moumi and I had brought back from Naxos.
    Our local Egyptian was a strange man who claimed he came from a country nobody had heard of, on the other side of an ocean that was not the River Ocean beyond the Pillars of the West, and not the fabled Eastern Ocean either. He said he’d been shipwrecked on the southern tip of Africa on a giant raft, as a young boy. His companions had stayed down there, but he had made his way north, through many adventures and many strange nations, to the Middle Sea.
    His personal name was unpronounceable. We called him Aten, because he was blatantly an Egyptian, in spite of the tall stories (which we enjoyed). He had that hairless brown skin, same color all year; and the slick black hair. Also, a clinching point, he never wore a cloak or a tunic, but always just a white linen kilt. Which everyone knows is the way Egyptians dress.
    He was married to a Naxian woman who’d moved here after some political trouble at home. They had a farm in the valley behind Seatown, and were famous as growers of the exotic yellow-fleshed tubers called “opotatos,” which Aten had brought