“What’s the Lord’s Day?” Erinna asked.
The locals clucked, but Aristomache explained quickly and easily. “Instead of having Ides and Nones, we call each seven-day period a week, and the days of the week have names, and the seventh day of each week is the Lord’s Day, and a day of rest and religious worship.”
“How can you celebrate Easter before Yayzu is even born?” Maia asked.
“He is our eternal savior,” Aristomache said, serenely confident.
16
MAIA
People say I left the City of Amazons because I wanted comfort, but I have never loved comfort, only learning. I left for reasons of conscience—religious reasons.
I suppose the whole New Concordance was partly my fault, or rather Crocus’s, making Ikaros translate Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologica is really long, and of course because Ikaros shouldn’t have had the book he could only work on it in private, and when he had free time. It took him years. He still hadn’t finished it by the time I left. Ikaros was the ultimate synthesist, but he had a fast mind that was always racing ahead to the next thing. Needing to translate Aquinas for Crocus, slowly, over a long time, and then reading his translation aloud, and answering Crocus’s questions, forced him to keep coming back to it and thinking about it, instead of leaping on to something new.
Ikaros had found a way, in about 1500 A.D. from what I gather, to reconcile all the religions and philosophies in the world. He got into some considerable amount of trouble over this with the Pope and the Inquisition, and was saved, bizarrely enough, by Savonarola. I only know most of this secondhand through Lysias, who had heard of him before we came to the City. I barely know anything about Savonarola, or about the controversies of the Renaissance, and I can’t look it up because it falls into the area we decided to exclude from our library. We have plenty of Renaissance art, and Renaissance people, but not religion and politics, because we wanted the Renaissance re-imagining of the classical world, not what Lysias described as the “medieval remnants” of Christianity. So Ikaros’s Oration on the Awesomeness of Humanity, as Lysias calls it, saying that I could substitute “Pico della Mirandola” and “Dignity of Man” if I preferred, is not in the library, and neither are his nine hundred theses. His work was too Christian for the Library Committee. But excluding them didn’t keep them out. They were still in Ikaros’s head, and Ikaros’s brain was in Ikaros’s head, and what Ikaros’s brain did when it was idle was make up perfectly logical but utterly insane theories of religious reconciliation.
He had been thinking about this on and off the whole time, from the moment when he saw that Pallas Athene was real. He had told me before the Last Debate that he had found a way to make it all make sense. But it wasn’t until the first years in the City of Amazons, when he had to go through Aquinas line by line to translate it, that he came up with the rigorous and philosophically defensible thesis he called his New Concordance.
In the original city, where Sokrates and Tullius and Manlius and Ficino and all the other older Masters were there to sit on him, Ikaros couldn’t do much about his religious theories except have occasional debates. His debates were always very popular with everyone, but he had to find people who wanted to debate with him, and his metaphysical theories were never a particularly popular topic. Athene never showed up for them, though she almost always came to his debates on other topics. Most Platonists are quite happy with Plato’s metaphysics. Tullius was a Stoic. Even so, Ikaros is such a powerful orator, impassioned and fast-thinking and funny, that he could sometimes find people prepared to take on the more esoteric subjects. Even here, where everyone is trained in rhetoric, he stands out as surpassingly excellent. He’s good at coming up with memorable images and working them all the way through an argument. He has always been a joy to listen to, in either language.
Once we were in the City of Amazons there was nobody better—nobody even as good. Klio was very good, and so were Myrto and Kreusa. Myrto was his most effective opponent. It wasn’t until after she died, in the sixth year, that he gained complete sway over the city.
I could live in a city that has Ikaros in it, even though I disagreed with him a great deal. But I couldn’t live in a city that required me to follow his crazy religion. I could be a Christian—I had been for the first eighteen years of my life. Or I could be a Platonic pagan, as I had been for the next eighteen. I had met Pallas Athene, talked to her. I had no doubt that the Olympians were real. I knew the way we worshipped them in the City was acceptable to Athene, who existed, who had set up the City and brought us the Workers, and then lost her temper and turned Sokrates into a gadfly and took the Workers away again. In Athenia they think she was right. I don’t go as far as that, but I think what she did was understandable in the circumstances.
Athene thought we should be grateful to her for the opportunity to be in the City—and I was. I can’t imagine any life that could have been better for me personally that led on from the nineteen years of my life I lived in the nineteenth century. I would never stop being grateful for the rescue that allowed me to be myself, to be respected as a scholar and a teacher. My feelings about Christianity were conflicted, while my gratitude to Athene was unfailing. On the other hand, Sokrates made some valid points in the Last Debate. I continued to question whether she had the right to do what she had done. But I still prayed to her nightly, and to the other Olympians on appropriate occasions.
What Ikaros did was to build a whole logical edifice reconciling everything—Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Hedonism, Pythagoras, and sundry other ideas he’d picked up here and there. Bits of it were brilliant. For instance, he deduced from Athene saying that the City was just that justice must be a process, not a Form, and that reconciled contradictions between Plato and Aristotle’s views of justice as well as being a fascinating idea about dynamic ideals. In fact, all of it was brilliant, if you considered it as pure logic. The problem was his axioms.
He set about the whole thing properly, I have to admit. He wrote it all up, ordered his theses, and announced a great debate. He sent invitations to the other cities and arranged a festival. He debated everybody who came prepared to argue against his points, and when they won on any issue he accepted that and incorporated that into his argument. It’s just that the whole edifice was built on such terrible axioms. At first I had wanted it to be true, wanted the loving Father and Son I had grown up with to be real, as well as Athene. I wanted Jesus to be my savior, as I had believed as a child. But the more closely I looked at what Ikaros was doing, the less sense it made. His axioms were twisted. It was incredibly ingenious, and it all made perfect logical sense, each piece of the structure balanced on each other piece. But it was a castle of straws balanced on air. Athene just wasn’t an angel, and wasn’t perfect. Errors can be refuted, and as his errors were pointed out, by me and by others, he patched them. But his leaps of faith were not errors, and they were inarguable. I tried. Many of us tried. And it was all right as long as it was just a case of what Ikaros believed and tried to persuade people. It was when, after the festival, the Assembly of Amazons voted to make his New Concordance the official religion of the City of Amazons that I knew I had to leave. It would be practiced at festivals. I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t possibly teach it.
I’d told Klio and Axiothea that I was leaving, and they’d both tried to persuade me to stay. Axiothea was quite happy with the New Concordance. Klio had initially been even less in favor of it than I was, but once she began to study the logic she had been won over by the way Ikaros had integrated Platonic thought all through, and especially with his theory of dynamic ideals, which fit everything she believed. Klio had always disliked Ikaros, but now they began to work together on this project. They spent a lot of time together and became close. She told him about the religions and philosophies she knew about that were unfamiliar to him, and they worked together to reconcile them with everything else.
The New Conc
ordance was generally very popular in the city, though I wasn’t sure how many people even among its adherents really understood it properly.
I announced generally that I was leaving, though it hurt me to go. I had put eight years of my life into this city, this second attempt to do what Plato suggested, and I had a new generation of students growing up. I packed up my few possessions in my cloak: my comb, the notebooks where I was writing this autobiography, and my Botticelli book. I opened it and looked at the angels clustered around the Madonna of the Pomegranates. They were beautiful, and perhaps they were real, but Athene wasn’t one of them. She was too much herself. She was real and imperfect and divine. She had rescued me from a life of unfulfilled emptiness and brought me to the City. I prayed to her now for guidance, and found myself thinking of my old house in the Remnant, and the rich colors of Botticelli’s Autumn on the wall in Florentia, and Ficino’s welcoming smile. I was right to leave. And I’d give this book to Simmea. That felt right too. I closed it and put it into my cloak, and went off to one last day’s teaching. Other people would be taking over my classes the next morning.
“I’ve done you an injustice and I want to apologize,” Ikaros said.
“What?” He had surprised me, coming up behind me after a gymnastics class. I had been teaching the littlest ones how to fall and roll and come up again, while the older ones were practicing with the discus. Then I had escorted the children through the wash-fountain, and handed them over to another teacher for their lute lesson. I was standing alone in the palaestra drying my hair on my kiton. It was autumn, almost olive season, so my damp bare skin was covered in goosebumps. I felt at a disadvantage, and quickly twisted my kiton back on, which left my damp hair dripping down my back. I never seemed to have any dignity around Ikaros. But when I looked at him, he wasn’t looking at me but down at the sand.
“I like you, Maia, and perhaps Providence meant us to be together, but I messed everything up between us at the beginning. I didn’t understand that you were truly saying no. I thought you were making a show of modest protest. Klio has explained to me that you were not. I’m really sorry.”
I glared at him until he looked up at me. He wasn’t laughing at me. He seemed sincere. “Klio had no right—why were you talking to her about me?”
“Because I want to understand why you oppose me so much.”
I was astonished that he was taking me so seriously. “And you’re finally acknowledging that you did something wrong?”
“Yes. I said so. I truly misunderstood all this time.” He sat down on the wall that separated the palaestra from the street.
“I was screaming and struggling!”
“But your body—I thought—Klio has explained to me how I was wrong. It was a long explanation, but I do finally understand now.” He smiled ruefully up at me. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have been talking to her about it, but I’d never in a hundred years have understood without all that. I was wrong. And I have been punished by being deprived of your friendship, and Klio’s friendship, all this time.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared at him.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Klio tells me that in her day, philosophy has discovered that people have two minds, a reasoning mind and an animal mind. Your reasoning mind believes that you have logical disagreements with me, but it is your animal mind driving what you feel. You have to get them into alignment to become godlike. That’s what Plato meant with the metaphor of the charioteer.”
“That is not what Plato meant!” I snapped, infuriated. At that moment, I’d have cheerfully turned him into a fly if I could. There’s nothing more irritating than having somebody misinterpret my intentions and Plato’s at the same time!
He went on. “Your animal mind wants to love me, the way your body wanted to love me that night under the trees. But your rational mind says no to love, because it’s afraid to love, maybe because of what I did. So I want to persuade your rational mind.”
I crossed my arms and leaned back against a pillar. “Go ahead. My rational mind only listens to rational arguments, not all this animal mind nonsense! And I think saying that part of me loves you is the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard, even from you. And I am not afraid to love!”
“Who do you love?” he asked, rhetorically. “Lysias? No. He’s your friend, you sometimes used to share a bed, but that’s all. There’s no love, no real passion. He has told Lukretia, and she told me.”
I was furious with Lysias. “He had no right—”
Ikaros shrugged. “He feels passion for Lukretia, and she asked him about you.”
I still didn’t understand what was going on with Lysias and Lukretia. I missed him.
There were more women than men in the City of Amazons, but not by a huge degree—the city was about sixty percent female. I’ve heard ridiculous stories in other cities about harems and men being waited on by women in return for sexual favors. This seems to me to say rather more about men’s fantasies than about anything real in Amazonia. There was a slight surplus of single women, but when you consider women who prefer other women, and families that have more than two adult partners, and men who maintained relationships with each other or with several women—Ikaros among them—it didn’t amount to much. Heterosexual men were not a scarce resource. I’d had one or two discreet offers myself since Lysias moved out. It wasn’t sex I was feeling deprived of.
“He shouldn’t have said anything to her about me, and even if he did, she shouldn’t have said anything to you,” I said, as evenly as I could, braiding my damp hair and twisting it up on top of my head. “Is there any point to this scurrilous gossip?”
Ikaros ignored this. “So who do you love? Klio and Axiothea? Friends only, although they love each other. The children? You like them, you care about them, but you don’t really love them. There’s no love in your life, because you have closed off your soul, and that closes out the possibility of God’s love. And that’s why you won’t consider the New Concordance.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I love all those people. And the kind of love you’re talking about is specifically what Plato tells us to avoid.”
“No it’s not. It’s what he thinks you can use to bring yourself closer to God.” He was leaning forward now, passionate. “It is by loving each other that our souls rise up and grow wings to approach heaven. It’s in the Phaedrus.” He pushed back his hair, which was starting to silver now, making him better-looking than ever. “For a while, before I read Aquinas again and realized I was mistaken, I thought that love was enough. Now I see it isn’t, that we need reason even more. But we do need love.”
“I don’t oppose you because I don’t have enough love. I oppose you because I disagree with you. Because you’re wrong. I started off half-wanting to believe Athene was an angel, and that God was still there. The more I hear your proofs and arguments, the less I’m prepared to consider it.”
He rubbed his eyes again, and I noticed that they were red-rimmed from too much rubbing. “Maia, you’re one of the few people here who really can follow my thought, who’s really capable of being an equal. So it’s very frustrating when you disagree without a logical reason behind it. Won’t you forgive me and let us start again?”
I considered that. “I don’t know whether I can trust you,” I said. Perhaps it was true that before Klio explained he just wasn’t capable of understanding. His world had shaped him as badly as mine had shaped me. In a better world, in the City we both wanted to build, we could both have been philosopher kings. Perhaps then we could have loved each other as Plato wanted.
“Are you afraid of me? I don’t want you to be afraid.”
The children were mangling their scales behind us. Crocus went past carrying the window glass for the new crèche. “I’m not afraid that you’re about to ravage me here and now. But you make me very uneasy. Today is the first time you’ve ever acknowledged what you did. You always laughed about it and dismissed it.”
“I didn’t understand.
In my time women had no way to say yes to anything except marriage and keep their self-respect, so they had to make formal protests without really meaning them. That’s what I thought you were doing. Klio had to explain to me that if people can’t say yes, they can’t say no either. It was a new idea.”
“I understand that,” I acknowledged. “But I’m afraid you’re apologizing now because you want something, that you’re trying to manipulate me. And you’re making up all these theories about why I disagree, just like you make up all these theories about the gods, and none of it has any basis in reality. What do you want from me?”
“I want you to be my friend,” he said, with no hesitation at all. “And I would like you to forgive me, if you can. And I don’t want you to leave this city.”
I stopped and thought for a moment, trying to examine my own feelings with philosophical rigor. It wasn’t easy. I asked myself whether I could forgive him. I found that I could—I did understand what he had been thinking, and also I appreciated the effort he had made now to understand what he had done and accept that it was wrong. “I don’t know whether it’s possible for me to trust you enough to be your friend,” I said, after a moment. “But I do understand what you did, what you were thinking. And I suppose I forgive you.” He closed his eyes for a moment when I said that and his face went slack. I realized that my forgiveness really did matter to him. He was so naturally playful, even at his most serious. It was rare to see him this unguarded.
He opened his eyes again and looked at me. “So if I’m wrong about my theories about why you disagree, and you disagree logically, what’s wrong with my logic?” he asked.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, and sat down tailor-fashion on the wall, leaning back against the pillar. “It’s not your logic-structures, it’s your axioms. I’ve said this before. Examine your assumptions. You say Athene is an angel, and you say angels are perfect. I can’t see how you can believe that after the way Athene behaved in the Last Debate.”