The Philosopher Kings: A Novel

  “You?” Kallikles hazarded.

  “What I mean is, what did Simmea care most about?” I asked, Socratically.

  “Philosophy, and the City, and art, and you,” Arete answered promptly.

  “All of us,” I corrected. “She cared about our whole family, not just me.”

  “She did, but she cared more about you,” Kallikles said. “And that’s right, that’s how it should be. We’re growing up, we have our own lives, the two of you would have gone on together.”

  “And you’re Apollo,” Arete said. “You’re more important than we are.”

  “You seem to be choosing to become gods yourselves,” I said. “But whether you do or not, she’d have put herself in front of a blade for you. For Neleus as fast as any of you.”

  “Yes,” they both agreed, with no hesitation.

  “And of those things she cared about that much, the one she put her body in the way of was art.”

  “Yes,” Arete said.

  “Whoever killed her didn’t want to kill her the way Kebes and I wanted to kill each other. Not personally. They just killed her because her body was between them and art.” I stopped, to make sure this made sense. They nodded. “So we have to stop the art raids,” I concluded. “That’s what she’d want, far more than vengeance. They didn’t kill her because they wanted to kill her. They killed her because she put her body between them and the head of Victory.”

  “Stopping the art raids would be a really good thing, but I don’t know whether it’s possible,” Arete said. “People have tried before. Ficino and Mother tried. Manlius did.”

  “We’d have to go to all the cities,” Kallikles said.

  “We’re going to have to do that anyway, to tell them about the Lucian civilization,” I said. I sighed. “It won’t be easy. But it’s what she would have wanted, and it’s what we need to do.”

  We swam back to the ship. Even though I understood now why she had chosen to die, I still couldn’t die myself and go back to Olympos. There might be other things I needed to understand from incarnation to become my best self—there probably were, and most of them awful, to do with old age and grief. And now I had to stay alive and go through them and learn, without having Simmea to help. I felt tired thinking about it. But beyond that I had the terribly complicated task of resolving everything Simmea would have wanted resolved, the art raids, relations between the Republics, the situation with the Lucians. It was the kind of thing Simmea was really good at, and I really wasn’t. But that was the work that needed to be done.

  23

  MAIA

  Simmea and I were turning cheeses in brine when the mission from Psyche arrived. It was a hot summer day and we had been working hard. Cheese wheels are heavy, and if not turned they’ll start to rot. It was the kind of thing Workers had done for us, but which people can do perfectly well; the kind of thing Lysias used to try to persuade people to do, but which we never did as long as there were plenty of Workers to do it for us. The disappearance of all the others did mean that there were plenty of spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-one, but we only asked them to do the most important things, things that people couldn’t do.

  The smell of cheese was overpowering in the storehouse. It was good strong sharp goat cheese and I knew I’d be glad of it when winter came, but I wasn’t sorry to be interrupted.

  The messenger was one of the older Young Ones, a girl of about ten. She brought a written message for Simmea, and it was Simmea they wanted; she was on the Foreign Negotiations Committee. “A mission from Psyche,” she said, looking up from the note. “I’m going to have to go, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll finish up here,” I said, with a sigh.

  “No, come with me,” Simmea said, picking up her kiton from the heap where she had tossed it. “I want to talk to you. We can both come back and finish up afterward. Pytheas will watch Arete.” I had been back in the Remnant City for a couple of years. Arete was six. Simmea was just over thirty, all taut muscle and sinew. White stretch marks showed as fine seams on her flat brown belly and the sides of her breasts, the legacy of her two pregnancies. She had a very distinctive face, which many people found ugly but which I was so entirely used to that it just seemed to me Simmea’s face.

  “I think we should go through the wash fountain before appearing to visitors,” I said.

  Simmea laughed. “I got so used to the smell of the cheese that I’d stopped noticing it. But you’re right. You know, you taught me how to use the wash fountain on my very first day in the city.”

  “I always did that with new Florentine girls,” I said. “Easing them in.”

  I picked up my own kiton and we walked out together. It felt hotter out in the sun. “I don’t know how you coped with all of us,” she said. “I had a little taste of it when we brought the boys home, but they were so small. Ten thousand ten-year-olds doesn’t bear imagining.”

  “It was terrible,” I agreed.

  “And it’s not even what Plato suggests. He says take over an existing city and drive out everyone who is over ten—so you’d have had nine- and eight-year-olds, and so on down to babies.”

  “It seemed more practical,” I said, defensive as always when Children criticized the decisions the Masters had made. “It was Plotinus’s idea.”

  “If you’d got children of all ages from ten to newborn, that wouldn’t have been any easier,” she said, opening the door into Thessaly.

  I followed her across the room, tightly packed with beds, empty now because Pytheas was busy somewhere else and the children were at lessons. We went into the spacious fountain room, tiled in black and white diagonals. She turned on the water and we both stepped under. The shock of the cold water on my hot sweaty skin was delicious.

  Clean, I dried myself on my kiton and wrapped it around me. Simmea did the same. “I should wash this one day soon,” she said, looking critically at a stain. Then she looked directly at me. “I was hoping to do this over a cup of wine after we’d finished with the cheese, but I wanted to ask you about the New Concordance,” she said.

  I opened my mouth, but she held up a hand.

  “I know you hate it. I want to understand. You know more about it than anyone here. Ikaros wants—well, the City of Amazons want—to send people here to preach. In the Foreign Negotiation Committee we’re debating whether it will do more harm to allow it or forbid it. We’re going to take it to Chamber.”

  “I was a Christian before I came here,” I said.

  “So was I,” Simmea said, surprising me.

  “You remember?”

  “Of course I remember.” We went out into the street again. “You told us to forget. Ficino said it had been a dream. But ten years of life isn’t a dream, and you can’t forget it.”

  “I sometimes almost forget the years before I came here, and I was nineteen,” I said.

  Simmea looked at me sideways with a patient expression. “New Concordance?”

  “Sorry. It’s wrong. Literally and specifically wrong. Ikaros has built a whole complex structure based on incorrect axioms. He’ll debate any individual point, but I couldn’t get him to examine his axioms.” We walked down the broad diagonal street of Athene, passing others and nodding greetings to them from time to time.

  “So what’s so appealing about it? Why did people convert, both historically and in the City of Amazons? Why was my village Christian? Why did Botticelli convert? He wasn’t an idiot. Anyone can see he thought hard about things.”

  I blinked. “Botticelli was always a Christian. What made you think he converted?”

  “Didn’t he paint the Seasons and the Aphrodite first, when he still believed in the Olympians, and then the Madonnas and things after his conversion?” she asked.

  “No, he painted some pagan scenes even though he was always a Christian,” I said. “I don’t know all that much about Botticelli’s personal beliefs, but in the Renaissance almost everyone was Christian, although of course they admired the ancient world. They used pagan
stories and imagery just as stories. But Christianity was the majority religion, and it was hardly even questioned. It was the same in my time.”

  “Aphrodite wasn’t just a story to Botticelli, or the seasons either,” she said, sounding absolutely sure. “But go on, tell me what it is about it that’s appealing. I was a child. I remember chanting and prayers and some of the stories, but none of it was ever really explained clearly.”

  I thought for a moment as we walked past a smithy, with the scent of quenched iron hanging heavily on the air. “I think what’s so appealing, both then and now, is the idea of forgiveness for sin. If you’re genuinely sorry for what you’ve done, you can be forgiven and your wrongdoing taken away.”

  “You give up responsibility for it?” She was frowning hard.

  “Yes. You’re washed clean of it.”

  “Without making restitution to people you harmed?” she asked.

  “It’s the spiritual side of it,” I said, feebly. “But you’re right of course, it’s between you and God, not you and whoever you wronged.” But Ikaros had come to apologize to me. My forgiveness had been important to him, not just God’s forgiveness.

  “And God is all-powerful?”

  “Yes. That’s appealing. And of course, there’s the whole thing where everyone is really sure, and there’s the hope of an eternal afterlife.”

  “We’re really sure about Athene.” She was still frowning. “And Jesus incarnated himself as a human?”

  “Yes, that’s also part of the appeal. Think of a god doing that, giving up his powers, to live like us, to redeem us.”

  Simmea laughed. “If that’s why he did it! Maybe he just had questions he wanted answered.”

  I was startled. “Questions?”

  “About being human. Assuming he was ever real and actually did it. But thank you, I do see now why people might like it. Do you have an opinion on whether we ought to allow it?”

  We walked past Crocus’s colossal statue of Sokrates Awakening the Workers. I was almost used to it by now. “Banning it gives it too much power. And it would be impossible to keep it out entirely now that it’s the official religion of the City of Amazons, if we’re going to have any contact with them at all. Forbidding it might make it seem attractive to rebellious Young Ones,” I said.

  Simmea sighed. “Alkibiades is being rebellious, though not in religious directions, which considering everything is a good thing.”

  “I think we ought to allow it but laugh at it, and keep showing how silly it is. Because it is silly. There are a whole lot of absurdities. And we know Athene is real and has real but limited abilities and knowledge. We can deduce certain things from that, but not that there’s an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity who wants us all to become angels.”

  “I’ve read some of Ikaros’s theses, but only some of them. They make my eyes cross. And of course they don’t have their holy book. Having a holy book nobody can read but which you can quote from whenever you want is a bit too convenient!”

  “Lots of people here would know if Ikaros were misquoting,” I said. “I would myself—except that the Bible was a long book, longer than the Republic. If he misquotes the Sermon on the Mount, he’s going to be corrected, even after twenty years. But he’s much less likely to be caught out on verses from the book of the prophet Amos.” And of course, Ikaros probably did have a copy of the Bible among his forbidden books. But he wouldn’t be able to admit that.

  Simmea sighed. “Will you talk to the committee and say what you’ve just said?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “We’re meeting next on the day after the Ides.” She grinned. “Letting them in and ridiculing them seems like a terrific strategy. Forbidden fruit is sweet, but nothing is appealing if people mock it.”

  The mission from Psyche had been housed in an empty sleeping house near the agora. Maecenas, one of the captains of the Excellence, and another member of the Foreign Negotiations Committee, was entertaining them. They looked relieved when we came in, and so did the envoys. The envoys were all men, of course. Psyche did not admit women to full citizenship. But they accepted that the other cities did, and dealt with us when they had to. Two of them were Masters, whom I knew, and the third was one of the Children whom I only vaguely recognized.

  “Joy to you,” Simmea said.

  “Joy to you, Hermeias, Salutius,” I said, then inclined my head to the third man. “I’m Maia.”

  “Aurelius,” he said.

  We all sat down. I fetched wine and mixed it. “Have you had a pleasant journey?” Simmea asked, when we had all drunk a toast to Plato.

  “Very smooth and comfortable,” Hermeias said, inclining his head to Maecenas. “We called at the City of Amazons, where I had a dispute with Ikaros.”

  Simmea laughed. “Maia and I were just discussing the New Concordance.”

  “It’s the most ridiculous misunderstanding of Iamblikius you could possibly imagine,” Hermeias said, stroking his beard. “I’m glad he didn’t live to see it. I managed to refute a few of Ikaros’s theses, and he was good enough to thank me for it.”

  “Will you allow them to preach in Psyche?” she asked.

  “We’ll agreed to allow them to debate, which is a slightly different thing,” Aurelius said. “It’s hardly likely to win many converts in a city made up of Platonists.”

  “It does seem unlikely,” Simmea said.

  “So what brings you here?” Maecenas said, blunt as ever.

  Hermeias and Aurelius looked at Salutius, who had been quiet since exchanging greetings. “Art,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Simply put. You have it all, except for what has been produced by us since we left. The original art was brought to the City by Athene and the Art Committee.” He nodded to me, as the only member of the original Art Committee present. He had been serving on the committee designing the physical shape of the city at the time, and the one on Children. “It stayed in the Remnant City by default, and you have no more claim on it than the rest of us do. We of Psyche have decided that we ought to have a proportionate share of it. We have just over a thousand people, and we should therefore have ten percent of the art.”

  I could hardly believe his effrontery in coming here and asking for it. Maecenas’s eyebrows were lost in his hair, and Simmea blinked several times before answering. “That’s a question we’ll have to debate in full committee, and probably in Chamber too,” she said. “I’m sure you see that it’s something where we can’t be expected to give an immediate response.”

  “Indeed,” Salutius said. “We’ve done without it for ten years, after all. We’re not in a tearing hurry. But we have various proposals about how it could be equitably distributed.” He turned to Aurelius, who brought out a notebook which he handed to Simmea. She took it but did not open it.

  “Am I right in thinking you mean that all the cities want a share in the art, not just Psyche?” she asked.

  “Ikaros was most interested,” Hermeias said.

  “How is this different from when the Athenians asked for a share of the technology ten years ago?” Maecenas asked.

  The Psychians exchanged glances, and Aurelius replied. “We agreed about technology because we don’t really understand it, and because it’s all one thing and difficult to distribute. You argued that if we tried to share it out we’d risk losing what we had, and the very life of the Workers. And you agreed to help us make printing presses, and other such necessities.”

  “Which you have done, according to treaty,” Hermeias put in. “But art is different. A statue can be in one city and a painting in another city. It isn’t all needed in the same place to get any of it working properly like technology.”

  “I see,” Maecenas said.

  Simmea was chewing her lip with her big front teeth. “I think—I can’t say anything until I’ve talked to the whole committee. But I personally feel it would be better for all of us to be making new art than arguing over the art we have.”

 
Salutius nodded courteously. “I know your own work. But we do feel very strongly in Psyche that we’re entitled to our proper share of the rescued ancient art.”

  “I’ll put it to the committee,” Simmea said. “And meanwhile, be welcome to the Just City. This sleeping house is at your disposal. You may eat in Florentia, or anywhere you are invited by friends, of course. I’ll call an immediate meeting of the committee and talk to you again tomorrow or the day after.”

  We all parted with great courtesy and formality. Once back in the street, Maecenas turned to Simmea. “You sounded as if you were considering it!”

  “Well, what’s the alternative?” she asked. “I think we’re going to have to give it to them, if they insist. Some of it, anyway.”

  “Never!” Maecenas said. “Nobody made them leave, nobody makes them stay away. If they want to share our art, they can come back.”

  Simmea looked at me. “How do you feel about it?”

  “Much the same as Maecenas,” I admitted. “Think how horrible it would be to divide it all up. Think of only having half the Botticellis in Florentia.”

  Simmea winced. “I’d hate that. But would you fight to keep them?”

  “Yes, I certainly would,” Maecenas said, without a heartbeat’s hesitation.

  Simmea shook her head. “Being on the Foreign Negotiation Committee I’ve developed a sense for when people will and won’t give way on issues. This seems to me like something they won’t give way on.”

  “Surely it would never really come to fighting over art?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine. But Plato gives rules for warfare. And it could come to that.”

  24

  ARETE

  Father came back at dawn. I saw him from the masthead where Erinna and I were both looking out. Maecenas had sent us both aloft as soon as we came on watch. “Let me know of anything unusual, on land or sea,” he said.

  Erinna was very quiet.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.