The Philosopher Kings: A Novel

  “And I can choose, whether to be a mortal or a god?” I felt as if the whole world was holding its breath before he answered.

  “Going ashore on Delos might help you. But time is the best gift.” He stared out over Delos again. “I don’t understand why she wanted to die. How she could have been ready. She told me not to be an idiot, but I don’t understand how I was wrong.”

  We’d had this conversation a hundred times already, but this time I thought of something new. “Why are you assuming she was right?”

  “What?”

  “You’re assuming she was right. Mightn’t she have been wrong? Mistaken?”

  He looked stricken. “But that would make everything worse! If she’d been wrong then I should have done it, and now it’s too late.”

  “Somebody’s coming up,” I said, as I felt it through the mast.

  It was Klymene. “Good to see something that looks halfway like civilization,” she said, after she had greeted us. “I’m leading the shore party today. I thought I’d come up and see if I could spot any signs of life.”

  “There’s smoke rising from the altar over there,” Father said, gesturing. It was a thin thread of gray smoke, almost invisible. I hadn’t seen it until he pointed it out. “I expect you’ll find a priest or two.”

  “Somebody who isn’t too terrified of us to talk would be good,” Klymene said. “And Kebes can hardly have avoided coming here if he came this way at all.”

  Father went down shortly after that, and Klymene followed him before long. I saw and announced the sails of fishing boats away to the northeast, where another island loomed in the blue distance. My eyes kept being drawn back to Delos. I longed to walk on it. I watched enviously as the shore party left. It was Erinna’s turn to go. Phaedrus and Kallikles had both contrived to join them, although it was not their turns. No doubt they felt the same affinity with the island I did.

  At last my watch was over and I joined Ficino and Maia on the deck to watch the boat return. Erinna was rowing. “There are two priests,” she called up to us, “and they say we can come ashore and cook and take on water and worship Apollo, but we should be back on the ship before dark.”

  Maecenas set a watch, for which Father volunteered. Those of us young and fit enough to swim hastily gave our kitons and sandals to friends old and frail enough to want to go in the boat. When my bare sole met the soil of Delos I felt a shock of joy that brought tears to my eyes. I felt I knew the place already. I knew where the cave was where they said Apollo had been born, and the plane tree on the mountain where he really had. I knew the altars and the temples, those already there and those not yet built. I found the words of the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo in my mouth as I came out of the water.

  Delos did not seem to move unsteadily beneath my feet. It felt like the most solid earth I had ever trodden, as if Ios and Amorgos and even Kallisti were hollow shells and Delos alone was firm.

  The sun was hot, and as I walked I saw lizards darting away from me. Kallisti was home, Amorgos and Ios felt like adventure, Naxos and Paros felt like somewhere I wanted to rescue. Delos felt like somewhere my soul had known before birth. “Mine,” Father had said, possessively. I felt that it was mine too; not just that it belonged to me, but it was mutual. I also belonged to it.

  I didn’t wait for my kiton but walked on, naked as in the palaestra, leaving the others behind. If we had to be back on the ship by nightfall, I didn’t have long. There was a spring I needed to find, and I knew where it was. I kept walking around shadow-buildings that didn’t exist yet, like the opposite of ruins, potentials. The spring was in a grove of trees, exactly where I had known it would be. I heard it before I saw it and pushed through the trees to come to it. When I came out into the clearing around the spring my two hero brothers were there, grave-faced, waiting in silence. Everything felt right, even that I was naked and they were clothed. We did not speak. Kallikles brought out a cup from the fold of his kiton, which he held out to me. I took it in both hands and dipped it into the pool, raised it high so that sunlight reflected into the water, then poured out a few drops on the ground and drank. I passed it to Phaedrus, who drank and passed it on to Kallikles. We kept on passing it around between the three of us until the cup was empty.

  All this time, since my foot had first touched the shore, I hadn’t thought, only acted, and everything I had done had been inevitable, necessary, and right. Once the cup was empty that changed, and I was only myself again, not a vessel of divinity, but I didn’t want to speak and break the silence. Phaedrus put his hand on my shoulder, and without discussing it we all began to walk back toward the ship. By the time the sea was in sight I felt more nearly normal, though I noticed that we all kept avoiding the future-ghosts of temples.

  Ficino handed me my kiton, and I put it on. Unusually for him, he didn’t ask any questions, though his gaze was sharp. I sat down next to him. There was food ready, nut porridge and baked fish, and I ate it hungrily. The priests of Apollo, a man and a woman, came and blessed us, sprinkling water on us from branches with green leaves. I accepted their blessing with the others, avoiding my brothers’ eyes.

  Klymene came over and sat down by Kallikles, who made room for her. “Joy to you, son,” she said.

  “Joy,” he muttered.

  Klymene rolled her eyes and turned to Ficino. “They know Minos, and Troy, and Mycenae, but no names of kings we could offer,” Klymene said to Ficino. I was listening, but like my brothers I didn’t want to talk yet. I just sat there eating in silence.

  “Have they seen Kebes?” Ficino asked.

  “Not by name, but they know the Goodness. They say the captain is called Massias. Some people from the Goodness have been here for the festival, and behaved appropriately. They said they thought our ship was the Goodness at first. They don’t know the location of their city, but they come here from the northeast, so that gives us a direction.”

  “Northeast. Interesting,” Ficino said. “What’s northeast of Delos?”

  “Well, Mykonos close by,” Klymene said. “Beyond that, nothing much for a long way. Due east gets you to Ikaria and Samos. Northwest are Tinos and Andros. Northeast, well, a biggish gap of sea and after a while you get to Chios and Lesbos.”

  “And on the mainland, Troy,” Ficino pointed out.

  “Why would Kebes have gone to Troy?” Klymene asked.

  Ficino shook his head, as if to ask why anyone would go anywhere else.

  We went back to the Excellence before nightfall, as the priests had asked. Phaedrus was in the same boat I was. “What was that?” he whispered to me.

  I shrugged. “The island? We should ask Father, maybe.”

  “Our souls?” he asked.

  Ficino was looking at us curiously. “We should ask Father, when we can be quite sure we’ve got him alone,” I whispered.

  12

  ARETE

  I couldn’t sleep that night with thinking about what had happened. We sailed northeast to Mykonos, which had some scattered fishing settlements a little more civilized than those of Naxos and Paros, but only a little. A party tried to talk to them, again without success. I didn’t go ashore, and I couldn’t catch Father alone. We sailed on east to Ikaria, which we reached late on the next day. There was no sign of life visible from the ship. We anchored for the night and the next morning put down a shore party, which now felt routine. We sailed around another long thin island, and met up with the shore party in the late afternoon. They had seen nobody, and we concluded that Ikaria was deserted like Ios and Amorgos. We therefore went ashore as we had done there, and began to build fires to cook a meal.

  While we were ashore, the three of us cornered Father and took him off into the trees away from everyone to ask about Delos. There was a wonderful scent of pine needles all around us as we walked and scuffed up the droppings of years, a thick layer of pine must which felt as if it had never been disturbed before. Although it smelled amazing, it was uncomfortable to walk on the strange surface. My feet sank
in at every step and it took a real effort to move them. Old needles kept finding their way into my sandals and scratching my feet.

  “I’m glad to see you found the spring,” Father said, once we were well away.

  “Why didn’t you warn us?” Kallikles asked.

  “I didn’t know for sure Delos would affect you,” Father said. “And I didn’t want to disappoint you if it didn’t. I did tell Arete that it might help.”

  “Was it our souls?” I asked.

  “Your souls and my island,” he said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing much, really,” Phaedrus said. “We went to the spring and waited, and Arete came and gave us water. That’s all. But I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  “It felt right,” I said. “It felt like knowing what was right and doing it because it was inevitable. There wasn’t any choice.”

  “Then you were in the hand of Necessity, at the edge of your Fate, doing what was inevitable,” Father said. “All of you. Once you were on Delos, you had to go through that ritual, and you knew it and you did it. The sprinkling on the shore is the echo of that.”

  “I hated it,” Kallikles said. “Not at the time. At the time it just felt right, the way Arete said. But the more I think about it the more it felt like having my own self taken over. I wasn’t in control of what I did. And afterward when Klymene spoke to me it took a real effort to answer. I felt drained, even though all I’d done was walk through the woods and drink some water.”

  Father put his hand on Kallikles’s shoulder. “It’s hard for anyone to resist Fate and Necessity.”

  “I didn’t even try,” I said, and saw my brothers nod. None of us had tried.

  “What did it do?” Kallikles asked.

  “Connects you to me, to the world. If you weren’t my children it would mark you as votaries. As it is, it marks you as what you are. My children. Heroes.”

  “How does it work?”

  “It’s a Mystery.”

  “Mother always said you said that when you didn’t understand something,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what a Mystery is, something the gods don’t properly understand,” he said. “Fate and Necessity are the bounds set on us. All of us. Fate is the share our souls chose before birth. Necessity is the edges of that.”

  “If we were marked as heroes, did the others notice?” Phaedrus asked.

  “I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Did they?”

  “Ficino noticed something, but he didn’t say anything,” I said. “And maybe Klymene—she was looking at Kallikles in a funny way. But nobody said anything. Is it going to happen again?”

  He spread his hands. “I don’t know. If you go back to Delos, probably. And in Delphi, perhaps.”

  “You said it marks us,” Phaedrus said, coming back to that. “Who does it mark us to?”

  “The gods,” Father said, casually. “If you meet them, they will know what you are, now.”

  “But not Porphyry and Alkibiades and Euklides back on Kallisti?” Phaedrus asked.

  “I don’t know. The gods might recognize them as my sons. But they’d definitely know you three now.” Father put his hand against an especially large pine, patted it, then turned and started walking back toward the shore.

  “So we could have resisted it?” I asked, following, the pine must underfoot still resisting my every step. “What would have happened?”

  “If you’d been strong enough, you wouldn’t have gone through the ritual. If you’d tried to resist and not been strong enough, you’d have done it anyway. Why didn’t you resist?”

  “It felt so right,” I said, and my brothers nodded, though Kallikles was biting his lip.

  “But it wasn’t you,” Phaedrus said. “You’re here, you were on the ship. It wasn’t you making us do that.”

  “It was my power. Things done with my power keep on working, even though I’m here. I can’t intervene. But things that have been set up keep on working. Delos is full of my power.” He frowned. “I don’t have any power right now, myself. So I couldn’t give you any. But Delos could.”

  “We have power?” Phaedrus squeaked. I didn’t laugh at the way his voice came out because I felt the same myself.

  “You said it marked us, you didn’t say it gave us power,” Kallikles said, rolling his eyes, though you think he’d be used to Father by now. “What kind of power? Power to do what?”

  “Power according to your souls,” Father said, in that infuriating way he had, as if it were the most intuitive thing in the world and everyone knew it already.

  “To do what?” Phaedrus repeated.

  “To do whatever you want to, under Fate and Necessity,” Father said.

  “Heal people? Walk on lava?” I asked.

  “Yes, those sorts of things,” he confirmed. “But feel confident in your power before you try walking on lava! I don’t know how much power you have, I can’t tell without my own power. It may not be enough.”

  I looked at Phaedrus, who was the one who wanted to control volcanoes. He was staring at the backs of his hands as if he’d never seen them before.

  “I don’t know exactly how it works,” Father went on. “Whether Necessity woke up what was there already, or if some of my power from the island came into you. But right now you can do things I can’t.”

  “We could have healed Mother,” I said before I thought.

  “Too late,” Father said. “If I’d taken you there years ago, perhaps.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Kallikles asked. “If you knew it would do this?”

  “I didn’t know. I thought it might. And you were all so young. And we wanted you to be your best selves. I didn’t know what that would be. It wasn’t until you said you wanted to come on this voyage that any of you said you wanted to be heroes.”

  “So we could do the kind of thing gods do? Like transforming people into things?” Phaedrus said, pensively.

  “Yes, but it’s not usually a good idea,” Father said. I saw an expression on his face that I hadn’t seen since before Mother died. He was worried. “You have power. You might be able to do that. But please don’t!”

  “How do we use it?” Kallikles asked.

  Father’s brow furrowed a little. “You just reach out and use it. You’ll work it out. You’ve all learned logic and self-control.”

  “Not like the gods,” Phaedrus said, and laughed.

  “How about time travel?” I asked.

  “Don’t try that!” He looked really worried now. “That does take experience. It isn’t time travel. You step outside time and then back in. Being outside time isn’t like being in it. Look, please don’t try that until after I have my own powers and I can show you how to do it. Terrible things could happen to you. You could get lost forever.” He laughed suddenly. “This reminds me of when the boys were all starting to walk at once! Suddenly nothing was safe, and we had no idea what you could get into or do. Simmea—am I ever going to stop missing Simmea?”

  “Ever is a long time for a god,” I said. “Can we use this power to keep from dying?”

  “Your body will have to die, eventually. But you can keep it healthy meanwhile. And you don’t have to stay dead, if you choose to be a god.”

  It was such a scary thought. “You’ll help us?” Phaedrus asked.

  “What, I have to run entry-level divinity classes now? Of course I will.” He hesitated. “You’re heroes. In some ways, you have more ability to use your powers than I do mine, even when I have mine. Gods are bound by Fate and Necessity, of course, but we’re also under the edicts of Zeus—we can’t use our powers to interfere in human affairs unless we’re asked. You can keep right on interfering as much as you want because you’re still mortal for the time being.”

  “What?” Phaedrus sounded affronted. “What about what Athene did setting up the Republic? Wasn’t that interfering in human affairs?”

  “The Masters prayed to her for help doing it,” Father said. “She could grant their prayers. She co
uldn’t have done it alone.”

  “And buying the Children?” I asked.

  “The Masters decided to do it. She just chose to help. It was all human action and the consequences of human action.” He looked helpless.

  “And what she did to Sokrates?” Kallikles asked.

  “He was her votary. You can do whatever you want to your votaries. And no other gods can do anything to them.” He looked ashamed. “We don’t always behave as well as we should.”

  “And it’ll be made into art?” I asked.

  “Eventually, inevitably, yes,” he said. “Everything we do will be.”

  “What?” Kallikles asked.

  “I told Arete this. Our lives are art. It’s part of being a god.”

  “And for a hero?” he asked.

  Father shrugged. “It depends on their deeds.”

  The three of us looked at each other, and then back at Father. He shook his head. “Just be careful. And try to be careful what other people see. They’ll react to you very differently if they know. Think carefully.”

  “Rhea,” Kallikles said. Of course, she would be his first thought. “I’ll have to tell her as soon as we get back.”

  Father looked at him sympathetically. “Maybe she’ll understand the way Simmea did.”

  Erinna, I thought, sadly. There were already too many gulfs between us. My age, and Father’s nature, and her silver rank, and now this.

  Then Phaedrus gasped, and we turned to him. He was a little way behind, and he was walking a handspan or so above the pine must of the forest. It didn’t seem strange, and then it did, to see my brother walking on air unsupported. Bold Kallikles took a leap and joined him. I hesitated, but Phaedrus put out his hands to me, grinning. I reached for his hand and took a step up onto nothing, and the nothing held me up, and we were all standing above the ground, walking on air. The strangest thing was that it didn’t take any effort and didn’t feel unnatural. It was as if I’d always been able to do it but had been shuffling away on the ground out of habit. I ran a few steps up the air, laughing, until my head was almost at the top of the pines. Then I saw Father, still scuffing his feet down in the must, and stopped.