The Philosopher Kings: A Novel

  Maecenas came back just then, with Phaedrus and our wounded. “We need to get everyone back aboard and do a headcount so we know how many we’re missing,” he said. “You four get started, find out exactly who’s aboard and what condition they’re in.”

  “Is Kebes dead yet?” Erinna asked.

  Maecenas shook his head. “Not when I left. It might take half the night. He started screaming ‘why are you tearing me apart?’ over and over, as if he hadn’t meant to do it to Pytheas, and as if he hadn’t done it to other people before. It’s one of their standard methods of execution, they tell me. They had one of those colosseums in Marissa too, didn’t they? I don’t know that we want to trade with these people after all.”

  22

  APOLLO

  On one of the last days of the Weimar Republic, I ran into my brother Dionysios unexpectedly in a nightclub in Berlin. He was leaning against the wall, half shadowed, a cup in his hand, talking to the piano player. He looked up as I came down the steps and greeted me with a half-smile. He was dressed in black leather, topped off with a leopardskin scarf. He was there for the same reason I was, to save as many as we could, in the teeth of Fate and Necessity. He said something quietly to the pianist, who looked to the saxophonist and played a low D. My brother and I danced together there, cheek to cheek, in that crowded little underground room on the desperate edge of destruction, amid the smoke that was like, and not like, the smoke of sacrifice, and the music that was like, and not like, the music Kebes played on his syrinx that day in the colosseum of Lucia.

  Kebes was an enemy, a breaker of guest friendship, a rapist, and a torturer who set up institutional torture in his republic. But none of that is why I turned my lyre upside-down in order to defeat him, or why I killed him in that horrible messy way. The contest was for original composition, any instrument. What Kebes played was not an original composition, it was Gershwin’s “Summertime.” It’s not that he broke the rules of the competition, although he did. He was a plagiarist. He cheated on art, passing off someone else’s work as his own, believing no one would know. Naturally, I would have had to punish that even if he had done nothing else. I sickened of the skinning early on, but I believed that if I kept on inflicting the agony with a promise of the release of death, he would tell me why Athene had given him the syrinx, and how he had learned the music. There were no Masters among the Goodness Group who came from late enough that they would have known or recognized jazz. I couldn’t reveal my knowledge of his plagiarism without giving myself away. Torture is irritatingly ineffective: he taunted me for as long as he could, but he refused to answer my questions and died without telling me. (How I eventually learned the answers is part of another story, which I may tell you one day.)

  After he was dead and vanished, and his tattered separated skin, removed with so much slow effort, had vanished with him, I plunged into the clean Aegean to wash off the blood. I emerged again to mortal problems and complications and the relentless mortal timescale where everything has to be dealt with in the instant, with no time to think through the consequences. I had a tiny cut on my thumb where the knife had slipped, and it stung with the salt of the sea water. All my human interactions felt just like that at that moment, raw and stinging and petty. It was all tension—between Lucia and the Excellence, between Kallikles and Klymene, and in the souls of my Young Ones as they tried to deal with their dual nature.

  I had been skinning Kebes all through the hours of darkness, and it was weary work; my mortal body needed sleep. But the sun was growing higher in the sky and sleep was far from me. I wanted to be away from the ship and mortal trivialities. I needed to recover from the contest, and the aftermath. I swam again, with Kallikles and Arete.

  Swimming always made me feel close to Simmea, because she taught me, because it was the first thing we had shared and the way we came to know each other. I hadn’t done it since she had died. Now, swimming, in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, felt almost like being with her, and yet painful because she wasn’t there and never would be.

  We swam out of sight of the ship and the city. I pulled myself up onto a rock, and the Young Ones climbed up and sat beside me, all of us naked in the warm light of my beloved sun. The rock was gray, but turned black where the seawater ran off our bodies to make it wet. The sea broke about it in a little frill of white foam on sapphire. Simmea would have wanted to paint it.

  “Clean at last,” I said, inspecting my hands.

  “Do you feel any better now that Kebes is dead?” Kallikles asked.

  I thought about it for a long moment. “Yes. No. I’m glad I defeated Kebes and I’m glad I killed him, even if it was so slow and messy. He deserved it even before he cheated and broke guest friendship.” I had wanted him dead, and he was dead, and off to a new beginning. Meanwhile, everything else was still here, and more complicated than ever.

  “Did he even break it?” Arete asked. “Auge immediately started shouting that he had, but we were formally welcomed to Marissa, not here, and they are independent cities in the same league.”

  “They offered us all guest friendship when we arrived,” Kallikles said. “I was one of guards with the envoys. That was clearly and plainly stated.”

  “I never accepted it, but they offered it to all of us, and when they attacked everyone they definitely broke it. You had eaten their food, and they attacked you anyway. Kebes organized that attack, so he broke it,” I said. “Besides, that music wasn’t original. It came from the twentieth century. He was cheating and he thought nobody would know.”

  Arete drew in her breath sharply, and Kallikles gasped. “How did he know it?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. It must be some god interfering.”

  “I’m glad you punished him for it,” Kallikles said.

  “Yes. And now that’s over. Done with. Settled.” I tried to feel it was true as I said it. But no matter how much I wanted it to be, nothing felt settled by Kebes’s death, and it gave me no relief.

  “What about the Goodness?” Kallikles asked.

  “Let them build triremes,” I said, lying back, deliberately trying to relax. They weren’t my people, or my responsibility, or anything to do with me. “Let Yayzu look after them. How surprised he will be when he takes notice of them praying to him from here!”

  The sun was warm, and after a little while I did begin to relax a little. The Young Ones sat quietly in the sun. I kept feeling that I had left something unfinished. Not skinning Kebes. I had done that thoroughly, made a proper job of the whole messy business. And now he wasn’t walking around gloating about raping Simmea, or sneering at Arete, or passing off other people’s art as his own. His soul was free for a new beginning, and the world was a better place without him. All the same, I felt as if something was missing. Absent or present, Kebes had been a rival for a long time. I felt emptier without him.

  Just then, surprising me utterly, Arete rose up off the rock, neat as Hermes, and flew through the air. It had been such a long time since I’d seen anyone really fly. When in my proper form I could hover in the air, and walk on it, naturally, but I’ve never been able to swoop about like a bird the way she was doing.

  “Stand up and let me try carrying you,” she called to Kallikles.

  He stood up at once and held his arms out. “Don’t drop me!”

  “I won’t. But you’d land in the sea! Or if you don’t want to, you could just walk down the air. Don’t be a baby!”

  She swooped down from behind and carried him up with her. I’d never seen anything like it. She made several loops in the air, with him dangling from her arms.

  “Is he heavy?” I called.

  “No! It’s not difficult at all. I can barely feel his weight—not like holding up a person, more like carrying a baby.”

  Kallikles blew a raspberry, and she swooped low and set him gently down beside me on the rock. Then she made one last circuit and perched again by my other side.

  “I’m glad I had the chance to try that,”
she said. “I don’t feel tired at all. I think it’s less tiring than running or swimming the same distance.”

  “You did it yesterday,” I pointed out. “I saw you fly down onto the stage, and also fly over an attacker.”

  “Erinna said it was a mighty leap,” she said. “Nobody understood it was flying.”

  “Be careful if you want to stay secret,” I warned. “You all three used your powers yesterday. You need to be careful, even in front of people who believe in the gods. Once they know, there’s no going back from it.”

  “I didn’t know whether the lightning would come,” Kallikles said. “They were getting ready to swarm up the side of the boat. I was out of arrows. I just struck out.”

  “I think it was a splendid thing to do,” Arete said, admiringly.

  “You weren’t wrong to do it, but it’s good you didn’t blast all the attackers that way,” I said. It was difficult to have powers and not use them, and they were very young. If they revealed themselves, they’d also be revealing me.

  “It’s electricity, you know,” Kallikles said. “When we get home I’m going to experiment cautiously with what I can do with electrical things.”

  “Be careful around Crocus and Sixty-One,” I said.

  “I won’t hurt them. But I want to try something with their feeding stations. There are enough stations to feed all the workers we had at the beginning. If I mess one up it won’t hurt them.”

  “It would hurt all of us and kill them if you destroyed all the electricity in the city, and you could. I think it all links together. Or you could kill yourself the way you killed the attacker yesterday.” I knew that lightning was akin to electricity, but I had never thought about it in that way before. “Be careful experimenting.”

  “I will. But I think it can just flow through me.”

  “And I’ll talk to Phaedrus about being careful about people noticing the healing as well,” I said.

  “He couldn’t just let people die,” Kallikles said.

  “Too many died as it was,” Arete said. “Poor Ficino.”

  That reminded me that she had had her back turned and she might not properly understand what had happened. “Did you see what he did?”

  “Who do you mean? Phaedrus or Ficino?”

  “Ficino. He deliberately put himself in the way of a blow meant for you. The attacker was ignoring him and going for you from behind. I’d just got Kebes safely pinned to the stake, but I wasn’t close enough to do anything to help you. Ficino put his body in the way of the blade.” I had been thinking about this ever since.

  “For me?” she said, awed and amazed. “He died for me?”

  “To protect you,” I clarified. “He didn’t have a weapon or anything he could use as one. He probably didn’t know how to use one anyway. I never saw him in the palaestra. He wasn’t in the troop, he was too old. He just put himself in between you and the blade.”

  Arete started crying. “He said he died defending arete, and I thought he meant excellence, but he meant me.”

  “He meant both,” Kallikles said.

  I put my arm around her, just as Simmea always did when people cried. “Would you have done that for him?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Arete said through her tears, with no hesitation. “I’d have tried to do something more effective to stop the attacker, but if that’s all there was to do, of course I would.” She paused. “I couldn’t have answered that as clearly before the battle in the colosseum. I wouldn’t have known. Now I know.”

  “And for me?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, just as fast, and then stopped, and pulled away from me as she realized what I meant. “Do you think that’s what she was doing? Mother? But she knew you’re a god.” She stared at me.

  “So do you,” I pointed out.

  “It’s a strong instinct, to protect,” she said, thoughtfully. “I know you’re a god, but I’d have put myself between you and a blade.”

  “You flew down from where you were perfectly safe with Auge and her hammer,” I said.

  “Leaped,” she corrected. “And it wasn’t just you. They were heading for the judges.”

  “Ficino, and Erinna,” I said.

  “And Neleus,” she added.

  “A very strong instinct,” I repeated, thinking about that. “A human instinct. One I don’t possess at all.”

  “But it’s exactly what you were doing,” Arete said, surprised. “You were about to kill yourself for Mother, when she killed herself to stop you. If that’s what she did.”

  “It isn’t the same,” I said, irritated. “I wouldn’t have died. Well, yes, I would, but I wouldn’t have lost my life by doing it, only this temporary mortal life. I’d still have been here, and remembered everything.”

  “She had time to think,” Kallikles said. “The battle was over. She had an arrow in her lung, yes, but it wasn’t the middle of a fight and going on split-second instinct.”

  “It hadn’t been over for long,” I said. “And she was wounded, and I surprised her, drawing my knife, and maybe she just went with instinct, protecting me, getting between me and danger. Like Ficino. Like you. Like I did when I didn’t kill Kebes in the street the first day.”

  “What a very human thing to do,” Arete said. “Poor Mother. Betrayed by instinct.”

  “But we’ll never know,” Kallikles said, shaking his head. “It might have been that. She might have done that. Or she might have had some reason, the way you’ve been thinking. She wasn’t afraid of death, not the way so many people are. Ficino wasn’t either. They both knew they have souls that go on. She knew from you, and Ficino from Athene. And Mother knew how important you are. She’d been helping you be incarnate for years. She might have thought it would be good for your soul to understand human grief and sacrifice and…”

  “And how to skin an enemy alive?” I finished, sarcastically. “All the useful things I have learned since she died.”

  “She lived while she was alive, and she wasn’t afraid of death,” Arete said.

  “She told you not to be an idiot. That means she was thinking,” Kallikles said.

  “She could have just instinctively been telling me not to be an idiot,” I said glumly. “I am an idiot all too often.”

  As I said that, I wished Sokrates could have been there. He’d have said “Apollo! What hyperbole!” and we’d all have laughed, even Kebes. Now I was the only one who could remember those dialogues in the garden. I couldn’t be missing Kebes, it wasn’t possible. I’d always hated him. Simmea never had, though, even after what he had done to her, even after she had made her definite choice of me and the City, she still spoke of him as a friend. She was a true philosopher. And now I had killed Kebes in the most revolting way, and he hadn’t told me anything, and the only good it had done had been to his soul, and perhaps to the Lucians who might lose their taste for public torture without the chief torturer. He might be better in his new life, and the world might be better without him. But I had thought vengeance would make me feel better, or anyway not worse.

  Ficino had said it would be bad for my soul to kill Kebes, and I’d dismissed the thought because I’d killed people and taken vengeance before. But maybe it had been. Had it made me worse, instead of better? I kept trying to be less unjust, but did I ever really improve? All my deeds will become art. Now that this was done, I wondered how later ages would see it: the god of music against a man with a syrinx, and then such a slow unpleasant death.

  I thought again of Ficino, putting his body between Arete and the blade. And Simmea had done the same for me. I was anguished all over again. There was no question that she’d have sacrificed her life for me if it were necessary. It’s just difficult to envision a scenario in which it would be necessary. But she would also give her life for my excellence. That’s the first thing she ever did for me: when she was teaching me to swim, she risked her life to increase my excellence. I could see how she would believe that enduring all this would increase my knowledge
and my understanding of mortal life, and therefore my excellence. And that’s agape, that’s what Plato wrote about and Simmea believed, the love that wants to increase the excellence of the beloved. But I also wanted to increase her excellence. She hadn’t come to the end of herself. And she knew I needed her. Needing her and not having her was such a hard thing to have to learn.

  How could she have deliberately left me alone to go through all this? But caring as she did about my excellence, how could she have let me go back to being a god without learning something so important? I put one foot down into the cold clear water of the sea, then drew it back up, making a wet black footprint on the hot gray rock. It was distinct for a moment, then immediately began to fade and dry. Soon there would be no sign that it had ever been there.

  I had always protected myself against mortal death. When time is a place you can enter at will, it’s easy to do that, to save some moments so the ones we love are never wholly lost. Even with Hyakinthos there are moments left I can visit and savor. I can see him smile again, and if I choose I can spend decades of my own personal time illuminated by that smile, working, planning, contemplating, knowing there will come a next instant, another breath, when I am ready to take it. There are whole days I did not spend with him that I hoard against my future loneliness. That has always been my strategy, and it has always protected me. Simmea knew that, we’d talked about it after we lost Sokrates. She loved me. But that never made her go easy on me. And that was one of the best things about her.

  She wouldn’t have killed herself just to have me endure mortal grief. But she drew out the arrow rather than have me go back to being a god without learning about it. I couldn’t understand it until I saw Ficino, old and unarmed, unhesitatingly put himself between Arete and a sword. He died of the blow. Simmea did the same for my own personal arete. Of course she did. What else would she have been willing to die for?

  That was a very good question. I sat up with a jerk. Kallikles and Arete turned to me in surprise “I’ve been an idiot,” I announced. They exchanged glances. “What did she put her body in the way of?”