The Philosopher Kings: A Novel

  Most of the arguments the crew made to me were variants on these three. Erinna was entirely pragmatic, asking what would happen to Arete if they took against us and attacked the ship. Maia was extremely Platonic. She told me that Ikaros had raped her when they’d been setting up the city, but she believed he didn’t understand what rape was. She hadn’t told anyone because she didn’t want to cause trouble, so she understood why Simmea hadn’t talked about it.

  “When Kebes said I’d personally sanctioned it, I felt as if he’d hit me,” she said. “Those Festivals of Hera. It didn’t give the girls any choice. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “It didn’t give the boys any choice either,” I said, remembering that awful time with Klymene. “Sometimes Plato had an idea that seemed good to him, but just doesn’t work at all when you try it with actual people.”

  “But it was a long time ago, and we had sanctioned it—we, the Masters. Me. I had sanctioned it.” Maia was never a coward; she faced her own responsibility squarely. She was pale but she went on. “And Simmea might not have made a complaint because she didn’t want everyone to know. But she didn’t tell you either. You know that means she didn’t want vengeance.” She hesitated, assessing how I was taking it, and then went on. “And Kebes might have learned better since. He seems to be doing good work here. Ikaros understands now. I have forgiven him.”

  This was the one argument that made me hesitate. I had learned better since Daphne had turned into a tree. I hadn’t understood what was happening with Daphne. Kebes gave every sign of failing to understand what he had done. But he wasn’t sorry. He had hurt her and gone on when she asked him to stop, and afterward he had insulted her. Now he seemed to have deluded himself again into believing, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that she was really his. He had named his city after her. He had insisted on knowing whether she’d had a child. He said she loved him. He kept on claiming her, over and over, when in fact she was … her own. (And, yes, all right, mine, but mine because she wanted to be. One of the reasons I hated Kebes was because he was my dark and twisted mirror, and forced me to confront these things. I do try to be just and pursue excellence.)

  I struggled to say some of this to Maia. “He didn’t sound as if he has learned better. He wasn’t acting as if he believed she had equal significance and was her own self. He thought he owned her. She wrote that he said that to her at the time, and I believe from what he said today that he still thinks that.”

  “But Pytheas, do you truly think it’s just to kill him for thinking that?”

  “What is justice, Maia? It took Plato ten books, and it’s taking us decades, and none of us has a proper answer.”

  I don’t know what she would have replied, because at that moment Ismene came up, and with her my son. He looked like me, and like his brothers. He was much taller than his mother. She was still pretty. I had never known her well. “Joy to you, Ismene,” I said. Maia turned to greet her.

  “This is Fabius,” she said, presenting the boy. He wished me joy gruffly, not knowing where to look. I looked at him, almost as much at a loss. I had met sons before who had been strangers, but they had always known who I was. Should I tell this boy he had a heroic soul? How could I, in front of Maia and his mother? And what could he make of the information in any case? He might not even believe me. It seemed kinder to leave him to make what he could of himself. So we had a limping uncomfortable conversation, and after a little while he and his mother went away together.

  “Another son,” Maia said, watching them go.

  “I can’t do anything for that one,” I said.

  “Oh Pytheas, do you really think you might lose tomorrow?”

  “That’s for the gods,” I said. “Are you thinking of going to talk to Kebes to urge him not to kill me if he wins?”

  “Yes,” she said, biting her lip. “But as he hates me just as much as he hates you, I can’t imagine it doing much good.”

  At sunset Arete insisted everyone leave me to rest before the competition, and she and the boys and I walked off up the beach. She had brought food from the city, roast lamb with herbs and colored eggs for Easter, but wise Neleus had brought dried meat and raisins from the ship which he shared with me. I had brought a jar of wine. We built a fire of driftwood and sat down by it

  “You’re not accepting their hospitality, then?” Arete said. “I thought not.”

  “They’ll forget the name Lucia,” I said. “This place was called Mithymna.” The sun was sliding into the sea before us, lighting the clouds a thousand shades of red and violet and gold. I looked along the curve of the hill where the moon, two days past full, was due to rise. I opened the wine and took a sip. Neat, it was as sweet as honey, and as strong. I handed it to Kallikles, who was on my right.

  Arete looked sideways at Neleus. “I can tell when people are telling the truth,” she said.

  Kallikles and Phaedrus looked interested. Neleus grunted, taking the wine. “Useful ability,” I said, carefully.

  “Kebes thought he might well win,” she said.

  “I noticed that,” I said. “Interesting, isn’t it? He was never known for his musical ability. But he didn’t act as if he was committing suicide, and the Lucians in the crowd didn’t act that way either. He said he had a new instrument. I wonder what it is?”

  “What happens if he wins?” Neleus asked, passing the wine on to Phaedrus.

  “He kills me, then he’ll get a real surprise when I kill him immediately afterward.” I smiled. I almost wanted it to happen. It would make everything so much simpler.

  “Isn’t that cheating?” Kallikles asked.

  “He raped Mother!” Neleus said.

  “Right, not cheating,” Kallikles said.

  “What will you do to him if you win?” Arete said. She was holding the wine jar, but she didn’t drink. Plato said nobody under the age of thirty should drink unmixed wine.

  “I’ll cut his throat. Get it over with as fast as possible.”

  “Why would he suggest this?” Phaedrus asked. “The winner doing what they want?”

  “I expect he wants to torture me to death,” I said.

  To my surprise, they were all shocked.

  “Kebes hates me,” I explained. “He always has. It’s partly because Simmea loved me, and partly because he hates excellence.” I knew this was right. Simmea had explained it to me.

  “How can anyone hate excellence?” Arete asked.

  “Ah, you didn’t realize quite what a wound your name was to him?”

  “I did, but I thought that was because of Mother choosing it, choosing you and the City and excellence over him and his choices.”

  “Yes. That too. But he hates Plato, and all of Plato’s ideas. He said he couldn’t become his best self because his best self would never have been enslaved or brought to the city, and what he had left was revenge.” I remembered him saying it. Kebes was older now, closing on forty like all the Children, but he was still exactly the same as the bull-headed boy he had been that day in the garden at Thessaly. “He wasn’t prepared to go on from where he was and make the best of what he could be. And he hates me because I do pursue excellence, and because Simmea chose me and excellence over him and his idea of freedom.”

  “He hates Plato?” Kallikles echoed, as if the words made no sense.

  “I’ve heard that they say harsh things about Plato sometimes in Sokratea,” Phaedrus said.

  “Most of the Goodness Group don’t hate Plato,” I said. “That’s clear. But Kebes does.”

  “But won’t the rest of them object to his torturing you?” Kallikles asked.

  “I’m sure he’s done it before. I expect they do it to criminals. I think that’s what Aristomache meant when she said it was barbaric without a judgment,” Arete said. “They have that statue. They have gladiatorial combats. They probably think it’s all right.”

  I nodded. “Yes, and Kebes introduced Christianity—which is about to put him in a bad spot. He’s a p
riest. They’re likely to be telling him it’s his Christian duty to forgive me. At least nobody offered me that kind of pap.”

  “What will you do if he does forgive you?” Arete asked.

  I took the wine jar from her and drank again. “If he could forgive me he wouldn’t be Kebes. He won’t forgive me. And he won’t win. And I’ll kill him.”

  “Is it what Mother would have wanted?” Phaedrus asked.

  “Not really,” I admitted. “If she’d wanted revenge she’d have told me right away and I’d have killed him then, that day, before the Last Debate. I’d have come up behind him in the dark and got a hold and told him who it was and what I was doing and then broken his neck and left him there, making it look as if he tripped.” It would have been so easy.

  “If she were here she’d be arguing about the nature of justice,” Arete said. “Though maybe she would want revenge. How dare he look at me and say you weren’t practicing agape!”

  I didn’t say anything. If Simmea were alive, we wouldn’t have been here. And if we had been, and she’d been here, Kebes would have been civil to me in her presence, as he had promised years ago. And besides, I have never truly understood what Plato meant by agape, especially when it came to men and women. I wasn’t sure that Plato even really understood that men could fall in love with women, or that women could fall in love at all. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that Platonic love was interpreted that way. There aren’t any simple words for what Simmea and I were to each other. She was my friend and my votary. That was enough.

  “Why didn’t you just kill him?” Phaedrus asked. “When he said that and you hit him?”

  “I didn’t think,” I said, and it was true. I’d smashed him to the ground with a blow. I could just as easily have crushed his throat and watched him choke to death. I had acted entirely without thinking, and on that instinctive level I was used to drawing back and not killing Kebes.

  Neleus had the wine. I waited until he had swallowed. “I need you to help me,” I said to him. “You haven’t accepted their hospitality.”

  He nodded, eager. “I haven’t. Not here, and not at Marissa.”

  “Good. That was well thought through. The rest of you did accept it, didn’t you.”

  “Sorry,” Phaedrus said.

  “I didn’t think,” Kallikles said.

  “They’re not all Kebes. They’re good people, doing good work. Mother would have liked them,” Arete said.

  “They’ll be utterly forgotten,” I said, confident of it. I’d been shaken for a moment at Marissa, but I knew the future couldn’t be changed, that anything done here was nothing more to history than a marginal note. I’d been to the future, after all. On the beach where we were sitting there would one day be a wonderful little restaurant that made mouth-watering kalimari and grilled fish, crisp outside and moist within. “Forgotten. Kebes and all his works.”

  “Maia says they’re the cities Plato heard about. The ones that lived according to his rule, and then degenerated to timarchy and so on,” Arete said. “And they do show signs that way.”

  I laughed, amused. “Then maybe they are.”

  I looked back at Neleus. “Kebes said the judges couldn’t be our children—by which I assume he’s not practicing clerical celibacy and he has some children here. But you’re technically not my child, which is a good thing, because it means you can be one of the judges. And because you haven’t accepted their hospitality, you’re not restricted in what you can do. If Kebes tries to cheat, you’re free to act without any inhibitions.”

  Neleus grinned at me across the flames. “Do you think he has any chance of winning, though?”

  “He’s certainly seems to think he can. And he’s definitely going to try to get biased judges. So we may as well do what we can. He must think he has a chance, or he’d never have suggested it.”

  “I don’t understand how the judges are going to be able to judge fairly,” Arete said. “They’ll know they’re condemning one of you to death.”

  “It will all be done in public. Everyone will see. It will affect how relations go in future between Kallisti and the Goodness Group. They’ll want to be seen to be fair. So I think it will be a real competition.” I was actually looking forward to it. “And even if I lose, it doesn’t matter. If he kills me, I’ll just kill him right after. If that happens, don’t stand right next to him.”

  “Will you blast him with lightning?” Kallikles asked.

  “No, only Father can do that. But I will have the arrows of my wrath, which cannot miss.” I missed the weight of the quiver on my back. “I won’t use one of the ones that brings plague. But there won’t be much left of him. There may be a crater.” That would be very satisfying. But it would be even more satisfying to defeat him first, so that he had to understand before he died that I was better than he was.

  Kallikles was clearly pondering saying something. He looked at Neleus and then away.

  I went on. “The other thing, Neleus, is that your other father, Nikias, is here—I saw him in the crowd this morning.”

  “I had thought he might be, or if not here then in one of their other cities,” Neleus said, looking down.

  “It’s a good thing. Simmea liked him, and he liked her. They were friends, the same as she was friends with Aeschines. He’ll probably be pleased to meet you and know you. But he’ll also be an ally. If you can find him tonight, you might be able to persuade him to be one of their judges—there can’t be much competition for the job. And he might be able to tell us about Kebes’s mysterious instrument, and what things are really like here.”

  “Did you think Aristomache was lying?” Arete asked. “Because she wasn’t.”

  “Aristomache would no more lie than lay an egg,” I said. “But good people can be deceived, more easily than bad people sometimes.”

  “You can tell whether people are lying, can’t you?” she asked.

  “I can tell whether they’re sincere,” I said.

  Neleus looked at her, and at me. “You’re not talking about something people can do. You’re talking about some kind of hero thing? Because I can also usually tell when people are telling the truth just by the way they talk, and where they look when they talk.”

  “I can do that too,” Arete said. “But just recently I’ve started being sure.”

  “Yes, that’s a power,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

  “We’ve all been getting powers,” Kallikles said. “I don’t want to keep it from you, Nel. I don’t want to hurt you by making you feel different either, but keeping it secret is worse. Ever since we went to Delos, we’ve been able to do some things.”

  “Like what?” he asked, looking at the three of them. “I knew there was something.”

  “Healing,” Phaedrus said. “And heat.” He put his hand into the fire and left it there. “I don’t burn. And I can walk on air.”

  “I can walk on air too. And I have lightning, just a little.” Kallikles held his hands a few inches apart and a tiny bolt of lightning jumped between them. “I found out in the storm. I can control weather. I think that’s why the storm was so bad. I was drawing it by mistake. I think I have it under control now, though.”

  “And you?” Neleus asked Arete.

  “The truth thing. And I can understand other languages. I can walk on air too, and I can also fly. And I think I could fly carrying somebody, if I had to. That’s all.” Fly? Simmea and I had imagined that she’d be a philosophical hero. There’s never any control over how children will come out. I thought again of the unknown boy Fabius.

  “That seems like enough!” Neleus said. “Fly?”

  “I’ve only tried it once, but yes,” she said. She looked along the beach. We were still in sight from the ship, if anyone was looking. “I don’t want anyone to see me, but I’ll show you when it gets darker, if you like.”

  “It won’t get much darker. The afterglow is fading, but the moon’s close enough to full that when she’s up people would be able to s
ee you.” There was already a silver glow behind the hill where the moon was about to rise.

  “I’ll show you another time, then,” Arete said. “It’s not weird—it’s just like being able to do math in your head, or knowing how to swim.”

  “Not weird? Being able to walk on air and heal people and fly?” Neleus’s voice rose. “It’s about as weird as things get!” He looked at me suddenly. “I’ve never seen you do anything like that.”

  “I gave up my powers to become incarnate,” I said. “You know that. I can’t do anything like that now.”

  “So in one way, you and I are the only normal ones on this beach,” he said.

  I blinked. It wasn’t a way I’d ever looked at it. The moon was rising now above the colosseum where the contest would be held tomorrow, silvering the pillars. It would eventually become an acropolis, and later a Venetian castle. The moon looked like a great glowing coin poised on the ridge. I remembered going there to talk to Artemis, standing on the dusty plains beside the lander from the ship that bore my name. “The gods have power. But humans have wonderful dreams and make them real, sometimes.”

  Phaedrus took his hand out of the fire. “If only we had some fruit we wanted to bake,” Kallikles said. He put his own finger toward the flame and darted it back at once. “It’s funny how we all have different things.”

  “Different freaky abilities,” Neleus said.

  “Are you jealous?” Arete asked.

  Neleus nodded. “How could I not be jealous? You all have magic god-powers, and you’ll get to live forever while I die. But on the other hand, I’m not a freak. You’ve always been faster and stronger than me. You’re weird. You scare people. I’m just strong and smart and, outside of this family, people like me.”

  “We’ll have to die too,” Arete said, wisely sidestepping the issue of what happens afterward.

  “And we like you,” Phaedrus said. He handed him the wine jar. “Or we do when you give us the chance.”

  “That’s true,” Kallikles said. “When you give us the chance.”

  “It just feels as if I have to be twice as good to be normal,” Neleus said.