The Philosopher Kings (11 page)

“I think it must happen after the City is destroyed,” Ficino said, sitting down on a pile of canvas. “Otherwise we would not have been able to resist participating, knowing what we know.”

“On which side?” I asked. I also wanted to ask him how he could be so maddeningly calm about the City being destroyed, but I had asked him related questions before and found his answers entirely unsatisfactory. The real problem was that he was ninety-nine years old and he was sure he was going to die this year, and I was fifteen and I didn't ever want to die at all.

“What a fascinating question,” Ficino said. “To attack beside Achilles, or to defend beside Hector. The Greeks or the Latins. Which would you choose?”

“Neither side was entirely in the right,” I said. “And there's no question that it was all the fault of the gods in the first place. Helen—”

“It's possible that if we went to Argos now we might see the young Helen,” Ficino said. The boat had taken two groups of people in, and it was quite clear to me that it would be hours before it took us. I shuffled a little closer.

“Do you believe we're that close in time?” Maia asked.

“It has been thirty-two years since we came,” Ficino said. “How long before do you think she would have put us? Perhaps more than that. Perhaps Helen is not yet born. I said we might see Nestor as a young man, and he was a very old man at the time of the Trojan War. I'd love to go to Pylos and see. But we're not sailing in that direction, at least not this time. Perhaps we'll see Anchises as a young man. That would be marvelous.”

“I too would love to meet Homer's heroes,” I said. “But which side would you want to fight on, really?”

“I'm torn, but it would come down to the Latins and Troy,” Ficino said. “The beleaguered city holding out against the sea of enemies.”

Maia put her hand on his shoulder. “Florentia?” she asked.

Ficino smiled up at her. “Perhaps. My Florentia, like Troy, left a great legacy.”

“But our Florentia—” Maia began.

Just then a group of Young Ones including my brothers Neleus and Kallikles came running to the side of the ship, stripped off their kitons and dived into the water. They went racing off toward the shore. “Oh!” I said. I measured the distance between the ship and the shore. It wasn't all that far. “I'm going to swim too! Would you bring my kiton?” I shrugged it off and offered it to Maia.

“Let's all swim,” Maia said, dropping her kiton on the deck.

“It's too far for me,” Ficino said. “I'll go in the boat and bring your kitons to protect your modesty once you get ashore.”

People were diving all along the side of the ship. Maia and I joined them and began to swim toward the first shore I had ever seen that was not that of the island of my birth. All the while I was swimming, quickly outpacing Maia and almost catching up with my brothers, I kept thinking about which side I'd want to fight on. Troy, or the Achaeans? To rescue Helen, or to defend the city? For Agamemnon or for Priam? It wasn't a fair question. We knew Troy was doomed. But Ficino would have fought for her anyway. I ran ashore, and the land felt strange under me. It seemed to be rocking. Earthquake? Or was the island, like Delos long ago, not tethered to the sea-bed? Then I realized this was something Erinna had told me about: when we were used to the motion of the ship, solid land would seem to move. I got up and immediately hurt my feet walking on pine needles. I hoped Ficino would bring my sandals too. I looked back at the
Excellence
, sitting gracefully at anchor, and although I had longed to explore this new island she looked like the most beautiful and dearest thing imaginable. Troy, I thought, and then no, the black ships.

It was just as well we probably wouldn't be given the choice, when it was so hard to decide.

 

9

ARETE

After Amorgos we sailed to Ios, and from there to Naxos. We found no people on Ios, and no sign of Kebes. Life aboard became almost routine, up before dawn to take my watch, which I mostly spent up at the top of the mast. Watching the sun rise from up there was always incredibly beautiful. The sky slowly lightened and became pink, and the sea echoed the color and was rose-pink dotted with jade-green islands. I could see so far from the mast at dawn that the islands looked like leaping dolphins. Then sometime in the day we would come close to an island. A party would go ashore to explore, find nobody, and come back. The rest of us would go ashore to cook, hunt, and take on water. Then we'd come back aboard and either sail on overnight or stay in our fairly protected anchorage, depending on winds and what the captains thought.

The night on Amorgos we sang at the campfire, both kinds of songs, Phrygian and Dorian. Some songs we all sang together, and some people took turns singing. Father played the lyre and sang a new song he had written about Mother's excellence and love of truth, which made everyone cry. Erinna and Phaedrus and I sang some of the choruses from
The Myrmidons
. It was like a festival, only better, because we hadn't been preparing and rehearsing, it was all spontaneous. Then we all went back to the ship to sleep.

On Ios the shore party had killed a boar that ran out of the woods and attacked them. We roasted it and ate it under the stars, which seemed brighter from there than they were at home. We sang again after we had eaten. Phaedrus persuaded me to do Briseis's duet with Patroklus. When we sat down again, Erinna leaned over from where she sat whittling and patted my arm. “You have a great voice.” My soul soared at praise from her.

“We're fortunate that all of Pytheas's children seem to have inherited his singing abilities,” Maia said. Neleus frowned at that, because he could never seem to sing in tune. I didn't think singing was a particularly heroic ability. Erinna's singing voice was clear and true.

Naxos at first seemed no different from Amorgos and Ios. When the shore party signaled that they had found people we were astonished, as if we had believed we were alone in the time of the dinosaurs. I didn't meet the Naxians or see their settlement, so at first their presence felt like a disappointment, because they prevented me from going ashore. Those of us left aboard waited impatiently for the shore party to return, running through all the facts about Naxos we knew. “Isn't it where Theseus abandoned Ariadne?” Erinna asked. “Could that have happened already?”

Ficino nodded. “It should have happened in the last generation. Theseus's sons by Phaedra fought at Troy. Ariadne might still be alive.”

“We don't know exactly when we are,” Maia reminded him. “We might have a better idea when they come back. Ariadne might be there, or she might not have come yet, or she might be dead. How long did she live after being abandoned?”

“Dionysios is supposed to have come for her and taken her away,” Ficino said. “So she might be gone.”

Father was staring fixedly at a little island just offshore as if he were remembering something. I wanted to ask him about it, but there were too many people about. It was hard to get privacy aboard, and even harder when everyone was lining the rail impatiently waiting for the shore party.

“We don't know when we are at all,” he said. “I have a feeling it might be much earlier than you're assuming. ‘Before the Trojan War' doesn't necessarily mean immediately before.”

Even though I'd been thinking about dinosaurs, I was surprised and disappointed. “No Anchises?”

“We'll have to wait and see.”

“Here they come!” Erinna said.

The official report was that they had made contact and the locals didn't have any useful information. “Miserable primitive place,” Maecenas said, pushing through the crowd of questioning people. “Council meeting. Now.”

The ship had a council of six that was supposed to make decisions, and Maecenas called them together in his cabin. The rest of us had to wait. As we weren't going ashore and therefore couldn't cook, dinner was cold, smoked fish and olives washed down with water lightly flavored with wine. After the feasts and singing of the previous nights it felt like a letdown. A group of us sat down to eat in the bows, where we could watch the sun setting over the sea. Erinna and I sat together on a coil of rope. “If we leave soon we could reach Paros in a few hours,” I said. “I can see it from the top of the mast.”

“Do we know if it's inhabited?” Phaedrus asked.

“Not in the Catalog of Ships, but they quarried marble there, so it seems it might be,” Maia said. “I expect we'll stay here until morning.”

Kallikles came up to join us. He had been in the shore party, so we greeted him with enthusiasm. “Tell us what it was like?” I urged, as Erinna moved toward the rail so that he could sit down beside me.

“It's not a proper city, it's very small, maybe a village is the proper term. They live inland, out of sight of the shore, though they have boats. They keep chickens and goats and pigs, and let them run in and out of their houses. The houses are really primitive, not much more than huts. There's a wooden palisade around the village, and an entry blocked with thorn bushes. We didn't go inside, but it isn't very big and we could see everything. There's just one plaza, with houses around it in a circle—no roads at all, no paving stones, just dirt. There are strange statues set up in the plaza, half-carved marble, sort of flat, with huge heads and weird noses, painted, dressed and decorated with beads. They're not like anything I've ever seen. Very bright colors. I can't even decide whether or not they were beautiful.”

Ficino looked away from the sunset and stared at Kallikles. “I want to see them!”

“I don't know whether you'll be able to. Maecenas wasn't talking about going back. The people weren't friendly at all. They ran into the village and barricaded themselves in when they saw us coming. The men were armed with bronze spears with weird flat blades. They wouldn't speak to us, they kept waving their spears. Then an old woman came forward to talk. She had a huge sore on her face with pus coming out of it. She spoke Greek of a kind, but it was hard to make ourselves understood. She kept telling us to go away, that she wouldn't give us anything, and she couldn't seem to understand we didn't want anything except information, which she didn't want to give either. Maecenas offered her a silver cup, which she snatched, but even after that she didn't want to be friendly. They didn't let us in or offer hospitality at all. They held on to their weapons and we held on to ours.”

I was trying to picture it. “What were the houses made of?”

“Stone and wood. It wasn't the materials that were primitive, it was the style.”

“You've never seen anything that wasn't classical,” Ficino said, smiling.

“I've been to Psyche,” Kallikles said.

Maia laughed. “Psyche is also classical. All our cities are.”

“It wasn't built by Workers,” Kallikles protested. “But you're right, this was a different style entirely. No pillars. Primitive. Odd. I was really uncomfortable looking at the place. Chickens pecking around their feet, a toothless old woman bent over grinding wheat by hand in a quern, and everyone frightened, the men with their weapons, half cringing and half defiant. I've never seen poverty like that.”

“It sounds like a village in India or Africa in my time,” Maia said, thoughtfully. “I'd never imagined Greece like that, full of savages. But I suppose it must have been once.”

“Don't build too much on one primitive fishing village,” Ficino said. “There were places not too far from Florentia in my own day that the boy would have described the same way—toothless peasants with sores, and animals running in and out.”

“I can't even imagine it,” Erinna said. I couldn't either. When I'd thought about the difficulties of Mycenaean Greece it was in terms of women not being equal, and lack of books, not sores and poverty. Homer talks about cities, and I had imagined cities like our cities.

“Did they give any useful information about the date?” Ficino asked.

“They'd heard of King Minos, but not of Kebes, nor Mycenae nor Troy, at least as far as we were able to make ourselves understood.”

“Minos,” Ficino said thoughtfully, turning back to the west. The sun was on the horizon now, gilding the rippling sea and lighting the clouds purple and gold. “Crete. Maybe we should go there.”

“Pytheas wants to go north,” Maia said. “He's sure Kebes went that way, though whether from something Kebes said years ago or just out of his obsession I don't know.”

“Father isn't a fool,” I protested.

“You have to admit he hasn't been entirely rational since Simmea died,” Maia said.

“This crushing grief is strange in a man with so much excellence, a man who we've all been accustomed to look to as one of the very best among the golds,” Ficino said.

I nodded. Erinna, who was behind me, put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed in a comforting way. It did comfort me, but it also sent an unsettling jolt of energy through me. My breath caught in my throat. I liked it too much. Everything I'd ever read about bodily love came back to me, and I moved away as she dropped her hand. I could feel my face was burning hot and there was heat too between my legs. I stared out over the sea. The first star appeared in the east, silver against violet. “Let me not be unworthy,” I prayed to it. Kallikles was still talking, and I tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

“It wasn't clear whether the old woman properly understood what we were asking, or if she thought we were saying we were from Minos,” Kallikles said. “It was horrible. I wanted to help them somehow. Give them my knife, or better, teach them how to make iron and wash. Teach them philosophy! But at the same time I couldn't wait to get away. The way the old woman was talking to Maecenas, ducking her head as if she thought he'd strike her!” He shook his head.