The Philosopher Kings (6 page)

“Good!” Lysias said, relieved.

When we had set up the original city, most of the tech questions had been philosophical—we had to decide what we wanted to do and what was the best way to achieve it. We had the practical means, unlimited Worker resources, and the presence of Athene to give us divine intervention as needed. We didn't realize what a luxury these things had been until we had to manage without them. Now the problems were almost all practical, and the answers were almost all things we didn't like.

We made the most urgent decisions, and had drinking-fountains and latrine-fountains and wash-fountains enough for everyone, and fields prepared for animals and crops, and shelter from the elements before the first winter came. During that winter we began to manufacture lamps. We had a skilled potter, one of the Children from Ferrara, a girl called Iris. She made the bases, and Kreusa, of all people, knew how to make wicks from flax and instructed others. Crocus was still helping us finish off the city, and it fell to me to ask him if he would make us some clear glass bowls for the lamps.

It was raining. Crocus was putting a roof onto the hall in the southwest corner that was destined for our library. Some of us had, through practice, become quite skilled at masonry, but roofing was still a real challenge. “Joy to you, Crocus,” I said.

He stopped work and turned one of his hands to carve “Joy to you Maia!” into one of the damp marble blocks of the library wall. As was his custom, he carved the Greek words in Latin letters, which always looked peculiar.

I beckoned him over to where he could carve his responses in the paving stones of the street outside, some of which already bore his side of dialogues, sadly more practical and less philosophical than those that still lined the walks of the Remnant City. I asked him about the glass globes. “Can make,” he inscribed tersely. “How many?”

There were over two thousand of us Amazons, and we all desperately wanted light at night. We were used to it and hated doing without it. Some people had slunk back to the Remnant already for this reason, but most of us were made of sterner stuff. Everyone would want one. “Two thousand five hundred,” I said.

“In return?” he carved.

“What do you want?” I asked. How easily it turned to this, I thought, to trade and barter.

“Thomas Aquinas,” he carved.

“We don't have it,” I said, surprised. “We don't have any Christian apologetics. We didn't bring them. You know we didn't. We'll read you anything we have.”

“Ikaros owns forbidden books,” he carved.

“He does? How do you know?”

Crocus just sat there in the fine drizzle, huge, golden, mud-spattered. I'd say he was looking at me, but he didn't give any impression of having eyes or a head. With a shock of guilt I remembered my Botticelli book, full of forbidden reproductions of Madonnas and angels, with text in English. Of course. Ikaros had given it to me. What else might he have brought here?

“If he has it, then yes,” I said.

“Thomas Aquinas. In Greek,” Crocus wrote.

“If Ikaros has it, I'll make him agree to translate it and read it to you,” I said. “If not, we'll read you something else you want.”

“Display sculpture,” he inscribed.

“What? I don't understand.”

“I make sculpture, for display in Amazon plaza.”

“Oh Crocus, but we'd love that. You don't have to ask that as a favor. We'd regard it as an honor.”

“Will make bowls for lamps,” Crocus inscribed. He waited politely for a moment to see if I had anything else to say, then went back to his half-finished library roof. And there was his half of the dialogue, there in the marble for anyone to read. “Thomas Aquinas. Ikaros owns forbidden books.” Ikaros was no friend of mine. But I felt the urge to protect him nevertheless. No good could come of everyone knowing he had forbidden books. I took a piece of heavy wood from an unfinished house nearby and used it as a crowbar to pry up the heavy marble paving stone. Then I flipped it over so that the carving was on the underside and set it back in place. It was earth-stained and filthy compared to the other flags, but I hoped the rain would soon wash it clean. I went off to find Ikaros.

I wanted to talk to him in private, but I wasn't the stupid young girl who had gone off to the woods alone with him, unconscious of anything but my own burning desire for philosophical conversation. I was over thirty now. I sought Klio about the city. She knew about my Botticelli book, and about the rape. She was pressing olives with a crowd of Children and couldn't come immediately. She agreed to talk to Ikaros with me after dinner.

As luck would have it, I ran into him a few minutes later in the street. He was alone, coming toward me. It was raining more heavily now and my braid was so wet it was coming down from where it was bound up around my head. “I need to ask you something,” I said.

“Come inside,” he said, opening the door of a nearby house. “This is going to be Ardeia and Diomedes's house.”

The house was complete, and held a large bed. “I don't want to go inside there with you,” I said.

Ikaros rolled his eyes, half-smiling. “You're not as irresistible as you imagine,” he said. “I have quite enough going with Lukretia.” Lukretia was a woman of the Renaissance. She had been the other master of Ferrara, and now she and Ikaros were sharing a house here. “But stand in the rain if you prefer. I shall keep dry.” He stepped inside, and I stood in the doorway, in view of anyone passing by. “Which of us are you afraid of, you or me?” he asked.

“I have quite enough going with Lysias,” I snapped. The trouble was that there was some truth in his accusation. I had always found Ikaros powerfully attractive. But that didn't mean I wanted to be taken against my will, and he had shown me that he didn't care what I wanted.

“What do you want me for then?” He grinned, and I scowled at him.

“Crocus wants Thomas Aquinas. In Greek. And he says you have it.”

Ikaros's face changed in an instant to completely serious, as serious as I had ever seen him.

“I wasn't going to do without books I needed,” he muttered.

“You took them when you were rescuing art?” I asked.

“You know I did. I got you that Botticelli book. It was more than anyone could bear, all those printed books, right there to my hand. I bought them, I didn't steal them. And I didn't contaminate the City with them.”

“Nobody says you did,” I said, but I shook my head. “You think rules are for everyone but you. How did you get them without Athene knowing?”

He ignored my question. “I have done no harm with the books.”

“You might be going to now. Who knows what Thomas Aquinas will do to Crocus?”

He grinned irrepressibly. “Have you read Thomas Aquinas?”

I shook my head. “I have never had the slightest interest in him, or anything else medieval. But I hear he's extremely complicated, and you are going to have to translate him into Greek and read it all aloud.”

He looked horrified. “Do you know how long it is?”

“No,” I said, crisply. “Long, I hope. It's what Crocus wants in return for making us glass bowls for lamps, and without them the lamps won't give enough light for reading and working. So I think you're going to do it, and as the book is still forbidden by the rules of this city as well as the original City, you're not going to have any help doing it. And I think that's going to be an appropriate punishment for bringing the book in the first place.”

It might have been unkind, but I couldn't help laughing at the look on his face.

 

5

ARETE

For a long and terrible time, all that autumn and on into winter, Father insisted on getting vengeance for Mother and everybody else kept arguing with him because he clearly wasn't being rational.

“It's sad, and we're all extremely sorry, but you'd think from the way you're acting that we'd never lost anyone before,” Maia said.

Father didn't say so to her, but the truth was that he'd never really lost anyone he cared about before, not lost them permanently the way he'd lost Mother. He said that to me and my brothers after Maia had left. He said it very seriously and as if he imagined that this would have been news to us.

“Who would have thought grief would crack Pytheas that way?” Ficino said to Maia, in Florentia, when he didn't know I was listening.

It was true, though I didn't want to acknowledge it. He was cracked, or at least cracking. It was a terrible thing to see. When he was alone with me he kept asking me if I could tell him why she'd stopped him saving her, and so I kept trying to think about that.

“Might she have been ready to go on to a new life?” I asked.

Father just groaned. After a moment he looked up. “She wasn't done with this life. There was so much we still could have done. Sixty more years before she was as old as Ficino is!”

“Well, might there be something she felt she had to do and could do better in another life?”

“What?” he asked, staring at me from red-rimmed eyes. I had no idea and just shook my head.

Embassies were sent under sacred truce to the other cities. None of them admitted responsibility for the raid, or that they had the head of Victory. This was unusual, but it wasn't unprecedented. They had lied before, on occasion. Only Father took it as proof that Kebes had stolen the head and killed Mother. The
Goodness
wasn't sighted again, and then winter closed in, with storms that made the sea dangerous. When Father proposed organizing a naval expedition to find and destroy Kebes's Lost City, even more people were sure he was cracked with grief. I wasn't old enough to go to the Chamber or the Assembly, but people were talking about it everywhere.

The worst of it was that I was having to deal with Father being like this while also trying to cope with my own grief. It was bad enough that Mother wasn't there to walk in and set everything right with a logical sensible explanation from first principles. But she
also
wasn't going to finish embroidering my kiton or trim my bangs or teach me how to integrate volumes. My throat ached because I wanted to talk to Mother about Ficino's project about assessing how philosophical cities were. But my grief, awful as it was to suffer, was cast into insignificance by the mythic scale of Father's grief. It was all like the first afternoon when he was crying so much that I couldn't cry at all. Her absence was like a presence, but Father's grief was like a huge sucking whirlpool that threatened to sweep everything up and carry it away.

Another thing that didn't help was that every one of the Children, my parents' whole generation, had lost their home and parents when they were ten years old. Compared to that, losing Mother when I was fifteen shouldn't have been anything to cry about. Only Maia seemed to understand. She took me for a walk along the cliffs and told me about losing her father, and how she had lost her whole world and her whole life with him, and all her books. “You still have your books,” she said, encouragingly. “You can still read and study. Philosophy will help.”

I thought about that. Reading did help, when it took me away from myself, when I had time to do it. But it was history I read, and poetry, and drama. Playing Briseis helped. It was a distraction. Philosophy required rigorous thought and didn't seem to help at all. It all seemed wrong, but refuting it was always hard work. I knew Maia, who definitely had one of Plato's philosophical souls, wouldn't understand that. But there was something philosophical I thought she might be able to answer. “Plato says that people shouldn't show their grief. It seems to me that Father is doing exactly what Plato says you shouldn't do.”

Maia put her hand on my shoulder comfortingly. “It's hard to argue that he isn't! But you have to let Pytheas deal with his own grief while you deal with yours. He's a grown man, and you shouldn't be worrying about how he's grieving. Simmea wouldn't have wanted you to bottle it all up any more than she'd have wanted Pytheas to howl his out.”

I stared away from her. Clouds were boiling up out of the east and the sea was the color of cold lava, flecked with little white wave-caps. It was hard to believe it was the same sea where I swam in summer, warm and blue. I could see the rocks where Mother and I had often pulled ourselves up to sit for a while before turning back, where I had first been introduced to dolphins. The sea was lashing them now, an angry note of black rock and white spray. The wind was cold and I was glad of my cloak. “It's so difficult,” I said. “And I can't just ignore Father. But no ships can sail in this weather.”

“Even Pytheas doesn't want to send out his expedition until spring,” Maia said.

“I don't think she would have wanted vengeance,” I said. I had tears in my eyes, but the cold wind carried them away to fall salt into the salt sea.

“I don't think so either, but I don't know how to convince Pytheas of that. He calls it justice, but it's vengeance he means. He just won't listen—he seems to listen and then he just goes on as if I hadn't said anything. I don't understand it. After my father died I didn't want revenge. But then, there wasn't anything to revenge myself on—he died of disease. If there had been something, maybe it would have been different. It's natural to grieve.”

“But it's not natural to howl?”

Maia shook her head. “It may be natural, but it's not philosophical. And Simmea was a true philosopher. I miss her too.” She hesitated. “I don't think any of us understood quite how much Pytheas needed her. This excessive grief doesn't seem like what I'd have expected of him. He has always been so calm.”

My brothers were no help at all. They had their own grief, of course. “Why did I fight with her so much?” Kallikles asked rhetorically.

“I wish I'd told her how much I loved her,” Phaedrus said.