The Philosopher Kings: A Novel

  “All right,” he said. “Now before you go any further up, show me how you’re going to come down.”

  Coming down was difficult, much harder than going up. We couldn’t do it for a moment. I figured it out first—I took big exaggerated steps downward, as if descending an invisible staircase, and the boys copied me. When my feet touched the earth I felt unexpectedly heavy and almost fell. It reminded me of how walking on Amorgos felt strange after the motion of the ship. I took a cautious step, and then another. The boys were down now too, staggering and shaking their heads.

  “What else?” Phaedrus asked. “What else can we do?”

  “I really don’t know,” Father said. “You’ll have to find out for yourselves, find your limits. You should be looking for your domain, what you care about, where you have excellence. I told you about that. It’s different for everyone. And go slowly, be careful. Test what you do. Think like philosophers. Pursue excellence, in this as in all things.”

  I wanted to try things. But I was afraid, too. I wanted to be a god, or I had thought that I did. Now I wasn’t sure. I could see a chasm opening between me and everyone but Father and my brothers. I didn’t need the warning to hide my new powers from the others. It was the same way I felt about growing up. I wanted to be grown up, of course I did, to vote in the Assembly and be assigned a metal—gold, of course, and there wasn’t much doubt I’d make it. At the same time I didn’t want to stop being a child, secure, looked after. There were ways that was comfortable. I’d always been the youngest in the family, and there were advantages to that. There were advantages to being human. Not the only one Father ever talked about, dying and being reborn as a completely new person. I couldn’t see that as an advantage at all! I liked being me, and I wanted to keep on doing it. The advantages I could see were more to do with being like everyone else, living the kind of life we all lived. Having somebody love me one day, even if it couldn’t be somebody as wonderful as Erinna. Being excellent but still relatively normal. Like Mother, I thought, instead of like Father. But I had the power now. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t.

  “I want to be free and choose for myself,” I said, as we came out of the trees again just above the beach. I hadn’t disliked feeling in the hand of Fate. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to feel that again. Fate and Necessity are what binds the gods. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be bound that way.

  “Then keep away from gods,” Father said, looking over his shoulder at me, half-smiling. Then suddenly he looked serious. “One thing you will have enough power to do now, all of you, is reach the gods with your prayers. Be careful what you pray, and what you ask and whose attention you draw.”

  On the beach some people were preparing food, and others were racing and wrestling on the sand as if they were in the palaestra. The Excellence was bobbing sedately at anchor. Clouds were blowing up out of the west and glowing rose and violet in the rays of the lowering sun. (Since I’d left home I seemed to spend a lot of time looking at the sky. It was always changing, yet it was the one thing that was the same everywhere.) Nobody took any notice of us coming back, except Erinna, who waved happily as she caught sight of us, and Neleus, who raked us with a dark-eyed glance before turning back to the fire he was building.

  13

  APOLLO

  I had guessed that Delos might have an effect on my Young Ones, but had not quite thought through what that would mean. I knew it when I saw them coming back aboard to sleep that night. The three of them had a new look about them that I nevertheless recognized. They were always beautiful, and always moved well—everyone brought up in the City knew how to move well. But now there was something about them, a certain sleekness, a not-quite-hidden glitter, as of a scarf draped carelessly over treasure. They looked like Olympians in disguise.

  After the Last Debate, Simmea and I set up housekeeping together in Thessaly, which had been Sokrates’s house. We took all the children belonging to us—Neleus, and my three boys. I took Kallikles, Alkibiades and Phaedrus from the city crèches. Many people wanted their babies but couldn’t identify them. There was no difficulty with mine. I’d have known them by their heroic souls, but anyone could tell at a glance from their eyes and bone structure. Phaedrus’s blue eyes looked strange against his dark skin, especially then, when he was five months old. Alkibiades was nine months old, and Kallikles was just over a year.

  We also collected Neleus, who was also five months old. Simmea frowned when I carried him into Thessaly. “I swore to Zeus and Demeter not to treat him differently from the others,” she said. “They’re all my children.”

  “They’re all your children, and you won’t be prejudiced in his favor in any way, but here he is,” I said. Then she took him and hugged him as if she’d never let him go.

  It only took a couple of days for Simmea to decide that Plato was right, or at least that the two of us couldn’t manage four lively boys all day and all night. We took to leaving them in the nursery for several hours in the day so that we could get things done. There they were being brought up according to the precepts of Plato, communally, by people trained in early infant care. It didn’t hurt them, or at least I don’t think it did.

  I had always known all my children were mine, always known they were heroes, always been able to pick them out of a crowd. Power didn’t make any difference to that. I looked at them across the deck, trying to see where it did make a difference. Arete met my eyes, and as I looked away I recognized and identified my emotion.

  I was envious, something I had rarely experienced. Envy is like jealousy, but quite distinct. Envy is when somebody else has something and you wish you had it too. Jealousy is when they have something and you wish you had it instead. I have felt jealous of people, usually when the thing I wished I had was somebody’s attention. It’s hateful, far and away my least-favorite emotion, because it makes me less than I could be. I dislike feeling it, and try to avoid it. Envy has been much rarer for me, because apart from people’s attention there’s normally very little that I want that I can’t just have, and very little of that is something anyone else could have anyway.

  But at that moment when I saw my Young Ones coming back aboard full of power, I wanted access to my own power. And I could even have had it, if I really wanted it, far more power than my children had. I could return to being my whole self at any time, at the cost of this mortal life. I considered it for a moment, there on the deck. I could swim to where my priests were standing on the Delian shore watching the ship maneuvering out. I could sacrifice myself there—dying, as was poetically appropriate, where I had been born. I could return moments later in my full power. I just had to want it enough to give up my incarnation—and that meant wanting it more than I wanted to fulfill Simmea’s dying wish.

  It was tempting, but only fleetingly. I looked down at the choppy sunset-hued sea between the ship and the shore. Simmea had taught me to swim. And Simmea had wanted me to stay in mortal form. She had some reason, and I felt sure she was right, whatever that reason was. Until I understood it and fulfilled it, or until I happened to die naturally, I would stay incarnate, even if it was inconvenient. Even when it hurt. Envy wasn’t pleasant, but it did teach me something about myself, even if it was something I didn’t much like. I was glad to have time to compose myself before there was a chance to talk to the Young Ones. I wouldn’t want them to know I suffered from such a mean emotion.

  My priests were still standing on the Delian shore, looking toward the Excellence as the watch on duty brought her head around so her sails could catch the wind. I leaned out on the rail, smiling, and waved to them. They looked at each other in consternation, then back at me in dawning affirmation. They waved back emphatically. I was glad I’d been able to make somebody happy.

  I was tempted to take up my powers again on Ikaria—not out of envy for the Young Ones’ power. I had thoroughly dealt with that annoying emotion by then. No, on Ikaria the urge came purely out of a desire to protect them. They were children,
and there was so much trouble they could get into! With divine power there were so many things it was easy to get into and difficult to get out of. The things they thought of—walking on lava! Time travel! I didn’t want them burned up by lava, but far less did I want them stepping outside time and not being able to negotiate what they found there.

  I tried to remember my own childhood. I’d had Mother and a whole set of goddesses shielding and teaching me. (That may be why I have always lived solitary since.) What I chiefly remembered were bounds set around my power, bounds for me to test, to encourage me to develop safely. From the moment I was born I had the power to destroy the world (I had the sun), and they shielded me until I had the judgment to understand that destroying the world would be unutterably stupid. They knew what I was to be. The other Olympians wanted me—well, except Hera, who didn’t want me or anything like me. They shaped me to fill the place in the pantheon meant for me. I like to think I have done better than that already, fulfilled far more than the promises and prophecies. And I am still trying to increase my excellence, and the world’s excellence.

  If there were places destined for my children I did not know what they were. I wasn’t aware of any prophecies or expectations. They had to find their own way. I could give them advice and prohibitions and information. I couldn’t use my power to teach them, or to give them safe boundaries to work in, because right now when they needed it I didn’t have any power. It felt like letting them down. And yet, Simmea had wanted me to stay incarnate, at the cost of her own life. Could this be why? Could they need to learn without boundaries? As soon as I thought it I knew that this was insane. Simmea hadn’t known anything about the powers of a god except what I’d told her. She hadn’t known about Delos or what they would need. She was going on the information she had at the time, most of which I must have and some of which I might be able to discover if we ever caught up with Kebes. (Or whoever had killed her, if it wasn’t Kebes.)

  I did feel like an idiot whenever I thought about it. What could I do, incarnate, that I couldn’t do as a god? I usually asked the question the other way around, for there were so many things I could do as a god that I couldn’t do as a human. I had become human to learn about will and consequences and the significance of mortal life. There were things I had learned, and no doubt there was more to learn. But as for things I could do better incarnate—beyond learning that it seemed to amount to suffering, and waiting. Perhaps there was something else Simmea wanted me to learn. But she had seemed so urgent—don’t be an idiot, she had said, as if her reason was obvious and imperative. She let herself die, she gave up her memories and our life together and the future we could have had. The least I could do was try not to be more of an idiot than I could help.

  From Ikaria we sailed to Samos, and there we had our first solid news of Kebes. (I had the map with me. But I hadn’t shown it to anyone or even spoken about it.) There were no Samians in the Catalog of Ships. And the priests in Delos hadn’t known anything beyond “northeast” for Kebes. There was no sign of the Goodness. But there was a settlement here, where the city of Samos would one day stand. It wasn’t a mud-hut encampment either, like the primitive ones we had seen on Naxos and Paros and Mykonos. The buildings were made of well-mortared stone, with familiar pillars in the style it amused me to call archaeo-classical. Nor did it have the strange flat Kykladic statues, but rather a solid Renaissance-style statue of a goddess. The people didn’t run away or immediately attack us, though we saw a stir in the streets.

  Maecenas dropped anchor just outside the harbor and immediately called a council meeting. Everyone who wasn’t part of the council looked enviously at us as we went down to Maecenas’s cabin. I was on the ship’s council because the Just City was an aristocracy—rule was by the best. And by the standards they were using, I was going to be selected as among the best on almost all occasions. I sometimes felt a bit of a fraud about this, as they were judging by human standards. But I was glad to be included in the council and have my voice heard.

  “What do we do?” Maecenas asked bluntly. “This could be Kebes. Probably is. Do we attack? Or talk first?”

  “Talk first,” Klymene said, a hair before me.

  “We need to find out more,” I said, when she spread her hand to yield to me. “We don’t see the Goodness. It seems like a small place.”

  “It’s as big as Psyche, and it has the same kind of look about it of something built without Workers but with our sensibilities,” Maecenas said. “And Kebes only took a hundred and fifty, and no Young Ones.”

  “I don’t think this is it,” I said.

  Everyone disagreed with me. As I didn’t want to tell them about the map, I couldn’t explain why I didn’t think so.

  “It’s logical that it is,” Klymene summed up after a while.

  “What we need is more information,” I said. “Whether this is Kebes or not, we need to talk. And if it is, we need to find out whether they raided us and took the head of Victory. We might be able to set up friendly relations, if not. And if it isn’t Kebes, we need to find out who they are.”

  “Let’s go in then, and see,” Maecenas said. “If I send you, Pytheas, will you stay calm?”

  “If I am an envoy, I will behave as an envoy,” I said, standing up and bumping my head on the cabin roof.

  “I wasn’t challenging your honor, man,” Maecenas said. “Sit down. You go, and Klymene, and take Phaenarete and Dion. We’ll stay anchored right here, in bowshot. If there’s trouble, we’ll hear. But if there’s trouble, get back here as fast as you can.” Phaenarete and Dion were older Young Ones, strong, and well-trained with weapons.

  “That place doesn’t have a palisade,” Klymene said. “And they didn’t run off. We ought to be able to talk.”

  “Wear armor,” Maecenas said.

  So I had to put on a cuirass, and endure the envy of the entire ship’s company as I was rowed ashore. Samos has a natural deep harbor, and they had built a wooden wharf with poles—they were clearly used to receiving a big ship like ours. There was a crowd waiting to receive our little boat, and the armor didn’t feel like much protection.

  Nobody looked familiar. Most of the crowd were young, and so I wouldn’t have expected to recognize anyone, but some of them were older, indeed aged. They were also the wrong mix of people to be the Goodness Group—all of these had what I think of as typical Ionian Greek looks. They could have been carved in marble. “Joy,” one of them said, a middle-aged man. “You have come early. Why do you stand off from shore? Is there sickness aboard Goodness?”

  His accent was unusual, but he spoke good Greek.

  “Joy to you. We’re not the Goodness,” Klymene said. “Our ship is called Excellence. We come from Kallisti. Who are you?”

  The answer was surprising, and took a long time to elicit clearly. It turned out that they were a group of assorted refugees from wars in Greece and the islands who had been settled here by Kebes and his people to found a new city, which was called Marissa—after, they told us, the name of the mother of God. God himself was called Yayzu. They traded regularly with the Goodness, giving them food in return for manufactured items such as bowls and statues. They did not recognize the name Kebes, though when I said Matthias there was a general sigh and a smile of recognition. The thing they most wanted to discover from me, once I had said the words “Excellence” and “Kallisti,” were whether we were still in contact with Athene. When I told them that we hadn’t seen her since the Goodness left, they seemed very relieved, and admitted that they had two people in Marissa from the Goodness Group, the doctor and the teacher. These two came forward now through the crowd, visibly of our people. The teacher was much paler-skinned than anyone else, a Master I had known slightly called Aristomache, now in her seventies. The doctor, Terentius, was clearly one of the Children, much swarthier than most in the crowd. He seemed only vaguely familiar. They hugged us and asked for news of friends left in the City.

  “Is it safe for us to bring the Excelle
nce in?” Klymene asked.

  Terentius looked surprised. “Of course! Why wouldn’t it be? Marissa is a civilized city. Well, semi-civilized. As civilized as any of our colonies,” he finished proudly.

  “You have colonies?” Phaenarete asked. “How many?”

  “Lots,” Terentius said, slightly cagily, though the appalling arithmetic positively leaped to mind—if they had two people in each one they could have seventy-five colonies like Marissa up and down the Aegean. “Are you all still on Kallisti trying to do Plato’s Republic?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Though we have five cities there now, and lots of Young Ones. This is our first exploratory voyage.”

  If I made us sound like five united cities, who can blame me? Kebes had been founding colonies. Who could imagine how large an army he might be ready to field if he thought we were divided and easy to conquer? I didn’t doubt that he would still hate us.

  Klymene and Phaenarete started to signal to the ship that it was safe to come in. “One thing, Aristomache,” I said. “Marissa. Yayzu. Is this some primitive religion I’m not aware of, or are you really teaching them Christianity?”

  “Christianity, of course,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye.

  “What’s Christianity?” Dion asked.

  “It’s the one true faith. It has been kept from you, so you could worship Plato, but it’s the only thing that can save your soul,” Aristomache said. Heads were nodding around her. Dion’s eyes widened.