“I have quite enough going with Lysias,” I snapped. The trouble was that there was some truth in his accusation. I had always found Ikaros powerfully attractive. But that didn’t mean I wanted to be taken against my will, and he had shown me that he didn’t care what I wanted.
“What do you want me for then?” He grinned, and I scowled at him.
“Crocus wants Thomas Aquinas. In Greek. And he says you have it.”
Ikaros’s face changed in an instant to completely serious, as serious as I had ever seen him.
“I wasn’t going to do without books I needed,” he muttered.
“You took them when you were rescuing art?” I asked.
“You know I did. I got you that Botticelli book. It was more than anyone could bear, all those printed books, right there to my hand. I bought them, I didn’t steal them. And I didn’t contaminate the City with them.”
“Nobody says you did,” I said, but I shook my head. “You think rules are for everyone but you. How did you get them without Athene knowing?”
He ignored my question. “I have done no harm with the books.”
“You might be going to now. Who knows what Thomas Aquinas will do to Crocus?”
He grinned irrepressibly. “Have you read Thomas Aquinas?”
I shook my head. “I have never had the slightest interest in him, or anything else medieval. But I hear he’s extremely complicated, and you are going to have to translate him into Greek and read it all aloud.”
He looked horrified. “Do you know how long it is?”
“No,” I said, crisply. “Long, I hope. It’s what Crocus wants in return for making us glass bowls for lamps, and without them the lamps won’t give enough light for reading and working. So I think you’re going to do it, and as the book is still forbidden by the rules of this city as well as the original City, you’re not going to have any help doing it. And I think that’s going to be an appropriate punishment for bringing the book in the first place.”
It might have been unkind, but I couldn’t help laughing at the look on his face.
5
ARETE
For a long and terrible time, all that autumn and on into winter, Father insisted on getting vengeance for Mother and everybody else kept arguing with him because he clearly wasn’t being rational.
“It’s sad, and we’re all extremely sorry, but you’d think from the way you’re acting that we’d never lost anyone before,” Maia said.
Father didn’t say so to her, but the truth was that he’d never really lost anyone he cared about before, not lost them permanently the way he’d lost Mother. He said that to me and my brothers after Maia had left. He said it very seriously and as if he imagined that this would have been news to us.
“Who would have thought grief would crack Pytheas that way?” Ficino said to Maia, in Florentia, when he didn’t know I was listening.
It was true, though I didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was cracked, or at least cracking. It was a terrible thing to see. When he was alone with me he kept asking me if I could tell him why she’d stopped him saving her, and so I kept trying to think about that.
“Might she have been ready to go on to a new life?” I asked.
Father just groaned. After a moment he looked up. “She wasn’t done with this life. There was so much we still could have done. Sixty more years before she was as old as Ficino is!”
“Well, might there be something she felt she had to do and could do better in another life?”
“What?” he asked, staring at me from red-rimmed eyes. I had no idea and just shook my head.
Embassies were sent under sacred truce to the other cities. None of them admitted responsibility for the raid, or that they had the head of Victory. This was unusual, but it wasn’t unprecedented. They had lied before, on occasion. Only Father took it as proof that Kebes had stolen the head and killed Mother. The Goodness wasn’t sighted again, and then winter closed in, with storms that made the sea dangerous. When Father proposed organizing a naval expedition to find and destroy Kebes’s Lost City, even more people were sure he was cracked with grief. I wasn’t old enough to go to the Chamber or the Assembly, but people were talking about it everywhere.
The worst of it was that I was having to deal with Father being like this while also trying to cope with my own grief. It was bad enough that Mother wasn’t there to walk in and set everything right with a logical sensible explanation from first principles. But she also wasn’t going to finish embroidering my kiton or trim my bangs or teach me how to integrate volumes. My throat ached because I wanted to talk to Mother about Ficino’s project about assessing how philosophical cities were. But my grief, awful as it was to suffer, was cast into insignificance by the mythic scale of Father’s grief. It was all like the first afternoon when he was crying so much that I couldn’t cry at all. Her absence was like a presence, but Father’s grief was like a huge sucking whirlpool that threatened to sweep everything up and carry it away.
Another thing that didn’t help was that every one of the Children, my parents’ whole generation, had lost their home and parents when they were ten years old. Compared to that, losing Mother when I was fifteen shouldn’t have been anything to cry about. Only Maia seemed to understand. She took me for a walk along the cliffs and told me about losing her father, and how she had lost her whole world and her whole life with him, and all her books. “You still have your books,” she said, encouragingly. “You can still read and study. Philosophy will help.”
I thought about that. Reading did help, when it took me away from myself, when I had time to do it. But it was history I read, and poetry, and drama. Playing Briseis helped. It was a distraction. Philosophy required rigorous thought and didn’t seem to help at all. It all seemed wrong, but refuting it was always hard work. I knew Maia, who definitely had one of Plato’s philosophical souls, wouldn’t understand that. But there was something philosophical I thought she might be able to answer. “Plato says that people shouldn’t show their grief. It seems to me that Father is doing exactly what Plato says you shouldn’t do.”
Maia put her hand on my shoulder comfortingly. “It’s hard to argue that he isn’t! But you have to let Pytheas deal with his own grief while you deal with yours. He’s a grown man, and you shouldn’t be worrying about how he’s grieving. Simmea wouldn’t have wanted you to bottle it all up any more than she’d have wanted Pytheas to howl his out.”
I stared away from her. Clouds were boiling up out of the east and the sea was the color of cold lava, flecked with little white wave-caps. It was hard to believe it was the same sea where I swam in summer, warm and blue. I could see the rocks where Mother and I had often pulled ourselves up to sit for a while before turning back, where I had first been introduced to dolphins. The sea was lashing them now, an angry note of black rock and white spray. The wind was cold and I was glad of my cloak. “It’s so difficult,” I said. “And I can’t just ignore Father. But no ships can sail in this weather.”
“Even Pytheas doesn’t want to send out his expedition until spring,” Maia said.
“I don’t think she would have wanted vengeance,” I said. I had tears in my eyes, but the cold wind carried them away to fall salt into the salt sea.
“I don’t think so either, but I don’t know how to convince Pytheas of that. He calls it justice, but it’s vengeance he means. He just won’t listen—he seems to listen and then he just goes on as if I hadn’t said anything. I don’t understand it. After my father died I didn’t want revenge. But then, there wasn’t anything to revenge myself on—he died of disease. If there had been something, maybe it would have been different. It’s natural to grieve.”
“But it’s not natural to howl?”
Maia shook her head. “It may be natural, but it’s not philosophical. And Simmea was a true philosopher. I miss her too.” She hesitated. “I don’t think any of us understood quite how much Pytheas needed her. This excessive grief doesn’t seem like what I’d have expe
cted of him. He has always been so calm.”
My brothers were no help at all. They had their own grief, of course. “Why did I fight with her so much?” Kallikles asked rhetorically.
“I wish I’d told her how much I loved her,” Phaedrus said.
“I keep wanting to tell her things, and then realizing she’s not there to tell,” Neleus said.
But none of them could really understand how I felt, or how Father felt. They all wanted to join his revenge, once he organized it. I did too. Wrestling and throwing weights in the palaestra gave me a temporary relief. I did feel sometimes that it might have made me feel better to go out with a spear and something clearly marked as an enemy to stick it into. But I knew enough philosophy already to know that it wouldn’t help much. Mother would still be dead no matter how many enemies we sent down to Hades after her. And how could it be just to want vengeance, to return evil for evil?
Erinna was a great comfort, when she had time for me. She was nineteen, a silver, and she had real work to do, learning to sail the Excellence and fighting in the Platean troop. She was my friend, and she had loved Mother. She was lovely-looking, with olive skin and fair hair, which, since she had been assigned to the ship, she wore cut short on the nape of her neck but still curling up over her broad forehead. When she was free she listened to me talk and often did things with me to distract me. She even organized our calculus class into working on our own. Axiothea, one of the Masters from Amazonia, came over once to help us. Erinna was really kind to me during this time, and I treasured every moment I could spend with her. But she was frequently busy, and much in demand, and I didn’t want to waste too much of her precious free time. And naturally, I couldn’t explain to her about Father properly, because really explaining about Father would have meant talking about his true nature.
Erinna is the one who suggested that I should try to write an autobiography. She said that writing things down sometimes helped her to come to terms with them. She said that Mother had told her that, years before. Because it was her advice, and before that Mother’s, I began it, and I found that like wrestling, it helped at the time. So I dealt with my grief by writing autobiography, working hard at the palaestra, and reading history.
The other person who really helped was Crocus. Crocus is a Worker, a robot, and he had been a close friend of Mother’s. We had long ago worked out a way for the Workers to write in wax so there wasn’t a permanent engraved record of every time they wished somebody joy, but he always carved what he wrote about Mother into the paving stones. He wanted to talk about debates they had shared, and he took me to the places where they’d had them. His responses were engraved into the marble, and it comforted us both when he engraved what Mother had said beside them, making them into full dialogues. He knew all about death and what happened to human souls—at least as much as anyone else. But he worried about his own soul, and Sixty-One’s, and the souls of the Workers Athene had taken with her after the Last Debate. We had enough spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-One to last indefinitely, but he wondered whether he should want his soul to move on. He wondered if he would become a human or an animal or another Worker. He mused about why Plato never mentioned Workers. Crocus could always distract me from my own thoughts. Sometimes he would come into Florentia and join me and Ficino when we were debating.
He had built a number of statues—we called them colossi, because they were so immense. They combined hyperrealism—you could see all the hairs up Sokrates’s nose in his Last Debate—with strange outbreaks of fantasy—in that same statue, one of Sokrates’s eyes is already a fly’s multifaceted eye. Parts of them were painted and parts of them were plain marble or other stone. He had decided to make a sculpture of Mother, but he hadn’t decided where. We went together to look at various places in the city he thought might be appropriate. I know he tried to talk to Father about this too. But Father was too sunk in grief to give an opinion—though he did sensibly agree with me that having a colossus of Mother in the garden at Thessaly would be a bad idea.
One day when it was my turn to help cook dinner in Florentia, I came out to eat late and saw Maia and Aeschines sitting with Father and Phaedrus. I took my plate over to join them. Father wasn’t crying at that moment, but his face still had that devastated look. Maia looked firm. Aeschines was looking troubled. He was one of the Children, and father of my friend Baukis. He had been a good friend of Mother’s, though not especially of Father’s. Father found him slow. He was a member of the Chamber, and on a number of important committees.
“Nobody is going to agree to a voyage of vengeance,” Maia was saying as I put my plate down.
Father looked up. “Arete. Joy to you.”
“Joy,” I echoed, though joy was the furthest thing from either of our voices.
“Joy to you, Arete,” Aeschines said. “I haven’t seen you in a long time. You must come and eat with me and Baukis in Ithaka one of these days.”
“Joy, and thank you,” I said. There was a fresco at Ithaka that Mother had painted when she’d been young. When Aeschines invited me, I was suddenly filled with a need to see it. She had painted it so long ago, and she had done better work since, as she always said. But I liked it, especially the way she had shown Odysseus in the harbor that was our own harbor. “I’ll come one day soon,” I promised.
“Baukis will be glad.” He smiled at me in a friendly way, as if he genuinely liked me.
Meanwhile Father had turned back to Maia. “Maybe nobody wants a voyage of vengeance. But how about a voyage of exploration? It’s ridiculous when you think about it, nonsensical for us to be here and know so little about what’s out there right now. Finding Kebes would be an advantage, if we could, whether or not he’s responsible for … for killing Simmea.” His face crumpled up.
“Exploration, yes, maybe,” Aeschines said, briskly. “But it would leave us without a ship here.”
“What’s the use of a ship that takes up so much maintenance but which nobody ever uses?” Father countered.
Aeschines nodded. “We use it for training, and visiting the other cities, but I do see your point. It would also mean a number of people wouldn’t be here if we were attacked. I assume you’d want to take a troop?”
“I think so. It could be dangerous. And if we did find Kebes, well, we’d definitely need a troop. But we wouldn’t be looking for danger or vengeance or anything. We’d just be trying to find out what was there. If that was Kebes, well…”
“What you’re a lot more likely to find is a lot of Minoan and Mycenaean settlements,” Maia said.
“Well, wouldn’t it be useful to see if they’re where they’re listed as being in the Catalog of Ships?” Father asked.
“I want to come,” my brother Phaedrus said. “I want to see something that isn’t just this island.”
“So do I,” I said.
“You’re much too young,” Maia said.
“Too young for a voyage of vengeance, true,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I’m not yet an ephebe, I haven’t taken up arms or been chosen for a metal. But I’m old enough to go on a voyage of exploration.”
“Good point,” Aeschines said. “Would this be a safe voyage of exploration, safe enough to take children, or would it be a dangerous voyage of vengeance?”
Father looked at me, then back at Aeschines. Before he could speak, Ficino came over to join us. He’d finished eating, but he had a cup of wine in his hand. The red hat he almost always wore was askew. “You all look very solemn,” he said, after he’d greeted those of us he hadn’t already seen that day.
“We’re discussing sending out a voyage of exploration in the spring,” Aeschines said. “Arete wants to go, and—”
“Splendid!” Ficino said, unexpectedly, beaming at me. “I want to go too.”
“Old men and children,” Phaedrus said dismissively.
Ficino laughed. “What better explorers could there be? How far will we go, Pytheas? Do you mean to get to Ithaka?”
Aes
chines laughed, and Father actually smiled, for the first time in months. “I hadn’t thought we’d go as far as that,” he said. “Around the Kyklades, and north to the Ionian islands. Maybe touching the mainland at Mycenae.”
“Mycenae!” Ficino said. “I really have been extraordinarily lucky all my life, and now to have this voyage proposed at the very end of it! How about Pylos? Nestor might be there as a young man. Or Troy itself? Imagine meeting the young Priam, perhaps attending his wedding to Hekabe.” Maia reached over and straightened his hat.
“We know so much about the future, and so little about this time where we’re living,” I said. Ficino grinned at me.
“We want to find Kebes,” Phaedrus said.
“Kebes is probably the least interesting thing in the whole Aegean,” Ficino said. “Though no, it would be interesting to know what kind of city the Goodness Group have come up with, to compare it with the others.”
“Kebes couldn’t found a city without other people out there hearing rumors of it,” I said.
“We have,” Maia said.
“Well, but we’re on an island, and we had divine help,” Father said.
“Kebes may be on an island,” Phaedrus said.
Father leaned forward. “He probably is. But he doesn’t have enough people or enough resources to stay on an island and entirely out of contact. He must have been trading or raiding, and if he has, we’ll hear about him.”
“Also, we don’t know whether or not there are rumors out there about us. If we’re supposed to inspire the legend of Atlantis, there probably are,” Aeschines said.
“I don’t think Kebes was responsible for the raid,” Maia said. “He’s never been involved in art raids before, or contacted us at all. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Father looked stubborn. “Everyone else has denied it.”