That said, Night had no intention of correcting their thinking.
Or rather, for most people of this era, freely doing whatever they wished with the spoils of war and releasing their desires in whatever way they chose was simply the norm.
A custom that would carry on perfectly intact into Rome.
He stopped paying attention to the sailors' lamenting sighs and took out the divine lyre, closed his eyes slightly, and began to play.
As the flowing, sorrowful melody rose, a sound sending off those who had died, the voices of the sailors gradually quieted on their own.
Music was the thing most capable of reaching people.
Though Night said nothing,
The sailors seemed to begin understanding something of how he felt.
Moved by that sorrowful melody, in a drifting, half-aware state,
Something pressed against their chests, a faint sense that they might have done something wrong, and a quiet settled over them.
When the gilded excitement was stripped away and the thrill faded at last, pulled along by the music, they finally began to feel the grief of losing their companions.
Then someone felt a sudden rush of remorse.
They actually felt regret and longing for the very creatures that had torn apart their companions' throats.
Rather than that, they should have been thinking of revenge for those who died.
Afterward,
Everyone joined the mourning for the lost on their own, without being asked.
When the piece came to an end,
The final farewell for their companions, whose remains had already mixed completely with the blood of the sirens into the sea, was over.
Night led the sailors in gathering what remained of the shattered ship's structure. The goal was not a full repair but enough to build something seaworthy enough to get them away from this place.
As it turned out, there was actually someone among the sailors who knew how to build ships.
Telephus had truly assembled a well-rounded crew.
With an experienced hand directing the work, everyone moved quickly and got to it.
When planks needed to be cut or new timber shaped, Night would pluck the lyre strings to draw out its power, releasing something like a sonic wave, speeding the work along considerably.
Back when he first received the musician's gift, he had already thought about finding ways to use the lyre as a weapon.
Over the past few days that thinking had taken some shape, and while it had not yet been used in actual combat, cutting through trees was easy enough.
The sailors marveled at this strange ability.
Even a lyre could be used as a weapon?!
Faced with their cries of amazement and the curious, eager looks asking how it was done, Night simply said it was nothing particularly special, just ordinary musical performance.
He had only done what a musician was supposed to be able to do.
If your own musical skill reached a certain level one day, you would be able to do the same.
The sailors: "..."
What kind of musician?!
You are calling this something an ordinary musician can do?
A musician who punches siren skulls apart with his bare hands!
They had the strong sense he was being deliberately understated, and while they had every reason to say so, they could not quite find the words for this feeling of wanting to say something and having nowhere to put it.
In the end, with the help of that musician's power, the scale of the work shrank by at least nine-tenths.
What remained was the kind of detail work the sailors could handle perfectly well on their own.
And so, not long after, once a small vessel barely large enough to carry everyone had been pieced together, a new problem arose.
Because of the earlier storm at sea, the ship had lost its heading.
And after the siren attack on top of that, they had lost every tool capable of determining their position.
They had no sense of direction left and no way of knowing which way to go to reach Troy.
That was giving Night a headache.
He had finally gotten his hands on the entry ticket, and now he was lost halfway there.
Seriously?
Out on the open sea, aside from this small island underfoot, every direction looked exactly the same.
Find the right one, and things would be fine.
Pick the wrong one, and they might not just miss their way back to the Mysian coast; they could end up off the coast of Greece entirely or out in the Mediterranean.
But when Night lifted his head and looked out toward the horizon, he noticed where the sun was sitting, and an idea came to him.
"There is no need for despair yet, everyone. Look up. What do you see in the sky?"
He remembered that the position of the sun could still give them a rough idea of where they were.
His internal sense of time was precise, and by comparing the sun's position now against where it had been when he was sailing toward Troy earlier, even if he could not chart a perfect course, determining the general direction of Troy and continuing that way was manageable.
The thought brought him a measure of relief.
At last he would not be stuck on an isolated island with a crew whose heads were full of nothing but lust, the sort who could not even leave sirens alone.
In Greece, it wasn't just mortals whose sexual inclinations were questionable.
Quite a few gods were no different.
Stuck in one place long enough, he genuinely worried that one day some sailor might come running up trying to court him.
The sailors, completely oblivious to what Night was thinking, all looked up at the sky and found nothing.
Until someone suddenly had a realization. "Did you mean the sun, hero?"
"Exactly. The sun."
"Oh!! I understand now; you must mean we should pray to the great Lord Apollo, the sun god."
"To the merciful Lord of Light... pray and ask his radiance to guide us on the path forward."
"Right, we can ask the gods for help!"
The sailors grew animated, clearly quite taken with this idea.
And with a fair amount of genuine hope behind it.
After all, in Greece, as long as your sincerity was real and you were truly in trouble, the gods did not always answer every prayer.
But the chance of them taking pity was not small either.
And for something as simple as pointing out a direction, if a god heard the request, they would generally not be stingy about it.
So the whole group hurriedly knelt down in reverence, facing the direction of the sun, and began praising the sun, praising the god of light Apollo, and praying.
Watching the entire scene unfold,
"..."
Night fell silent for a moment.
Is there any possibility that when I said "sun," I meant to use it to figure out which direction we're facing, not to pray to the gods?
Relying on divine help through prayer is way too dependent on luck.
Gods don't have the spare time to care about ordinary people's lives every day, especially for something this trivial.
Well, if it's Apollo, he might actually respond.
The only reason Night could even entertain that thought was because he was the one who had received Apollo's blessing and was now stranded on an island.
Whether out of amusement or some particular interest in him, Apollo was probably watching this whole journey all along.
Even with his foot, Night could guess that god had most likely been peeking at everything he had done along the way.
Now that he was in trouble,
Apollo was not going to just watch him sit on this island and starve to death.
Fine.
Let them pray if they want to.
If Apollo helped point the way, great.
If he didn't come out, Night could always step in later.
And so,
Among the two gods who had been watching the longest from the shadows,
Both the sun god Apollo and the moon goddess Artemis seemed to light up at exactly the same moment.
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)