The Philosopher Kings (13 page)

I was sharing a house with Lysias, and if the vote had gone the other way we had agreed to marry. When I came home exhausted after Porphyry's birth, he brought me apple porridge and rubbed my feet.

“We could have children now,” he said, looking up at me. “You're not too old. If you stopped taking the silphium.”

I shook my head. “It's not what I want.”

He looked disappointed and got up from the floor to sit beside me on the bed. “Why not?”

I had seen a great deal of childbirth, enough to put anyone off, but that wasn't it. “I want a life of the mind, not to be mired in domesticity. All that milk and washing.”

“But you have maternal instincts. You're such a good teacher.”

“I put my maternal instincts into being a teacher. The whole City is my baby—this city and the original. I don't want my own baby to love more than all the others. I think Plato's right that I would favor it.”

“I want children,” Lysias said. “I was prepared to do without to make the Republic, but what we're doing here is all compromised anyway. I want to help everyone, you know I do, but I want my own children to grow up here too, now that it's possible.”

“Would you want that if you had to be the mother rather than the father?” I asked. “If you were the one to stay home and sing them to sleep?”

“Yes,” he said, with no hesitation whatsoever. I was astonished. “Is that what you want?” He looked into my face.

“I was just being rhetorical. I never imagined you would agree. In the nineteenth century it would have been unthinkable for a man to do a woman's work that way.” I put my hand on his.

He smiled. “In the twenty-first century it was unusual but not unheard of. And we assigned some iron boys as nursery attendants. I would do it if that's how you wanted to arrange things.”

“I don't want to shrink my horizons to a baby,” I said. “In my own time, that was the end of all independent thought.”

“It needn't be that here,” Lysias said. “If we decided to have children, I'd certainly be willing to be the one to stay home with them. But we'll also have crèches to provide flexibility. Nobody's going to be forcing you to be a nineteenth-century mother.”

“I see that. But even so.”

“I truly want this. I want children. And I can't do it without your help. You have a womb and can grow a new person. I can't.”

I had never before thought of this as a form of female power that men lacked. No wonder they tried to control us in so many societies for so many years. (And no wonder Athene remained a virgin.) I still didn't especially want to have babies. But I didn't want to lose Lysias, and it seemed so important to him; and if he would take charge of the parts I didn't want to, then I thought that perhaps it didn't have to be something huge and life-changing for me.

So I agreed to stop chewing silphium, and I did stop. The next month when my blood came on time I was astonished, and the same the month after and the month after that. I knew that even at the festivals not every girl became pregnant every time, but I had expected Lysias's fervor to have had results. He had never wanted me so much or so enthusiastically. I saw now that he had seen sterile coupling as hardly worth doing. I wasn't comfortable about this change, but I didn't feel I could talk to him about it.

After six months with no result, I talked to Kreusa, and she reassured me that sometimes it could take many months to become pregnant, and that I shouldn't start to worry until it was a year.

After a year, I talked to her again, and she recommended green leaves, sunlight, relaxation, and prayers to Hera. I tried all of these, and never had my monthly blood arrive more than a day late. “Am I too old?” I asked her, a year after that, on a sunny autumn day while we were alone together on the shore smoking fish.

“What are you now, thirty-five, thirty-six? No, that's not too old. Old for a first time, but there shouldn't be any trouble. Lysias is a few years older, there might be problems on his side. Have him eat red meat when he can and abstain from fish.”

“Have you ever had a baby?” I asked her as I tossed some more wood onto the fire.

She frowned and paused, with a single fish in one hand and a stick with five more threaded on it in the other. “One, when I was young. My mistress beat me for being so careless with the silphium. I was lucky not to find myself out on the street. It was a boy, poor thing, and had to be exposed.” I remembered the baby I had exposed and how terrible I had felt, even though it couldn't have survived and it was not my own. I put out my hand toward Kreusa, but she didn't seem to see me. “I cried for days. By the time I had a house of my own and could have afforded a child, I'd found philosophy and didn't want one. I'm surprised you do, honestly.” She plunged the stick through the fish abruptly and turned to put it on the smoke rack.

“I don't, all that much,” I said. “Lysias really does. Now I've been trying for two years without getting anywhere, and he still feels strongly about it and I'm still ambivalent.”

“That's probably your problem,” she said, her face still turned toward the fish and the fire. “Your ambivalence. If you truly wanted it, you'd get pregnant.”

“But you didn't want to, that time back in Corinth.” I strung more fish onto another stick.

She shook her head without turning around. “I don't know why it should be. Lots of girls get caught when they don't want it at all, but lots of women trying without really wanting it can't manage it. And some who do desperately want it can't, and that's the saddest thing of all. I'd give up trying and fretting and just see what the gods send if I were you.”

“Lysias—”

“He's a funny one,” Kreusa said, turning back and picking up the stick I held out to her. “He's not Greek.”

“Neither am I,” I said.

“No, but you're not what he is either.” She sighed and put the fish on the rack. “It probably makes no difference. Some men want sons to be their heirs. If he comes from that kind of family, well. Or even if not, if he wants children so much there's nothing you can do about it. You're not too old. But time is not on your side.”

I picked up another fish and another stick. “He says he'll do all the work with the baby and leave me free for philosophy and teaching. Well, as free as I am now.”

She laughed. “Perhaps he will, but what will you do if he doesn't? Men, eh?”

“We're equal here,” I said. “In the City of Amazons there are more women than men, especially among the guardians. We can make a real difference.”

“And yet you're still trying to have a baby because your man wants one?” She laughed bitterly, then began to turn the fish before they started to scorch.

“It's very difficult,” I said.

I persuaded Lysias to eat more meat and less fish, even though he preferred fish, but it didn't make any difference. My blood continued to come with infuriating regularity. At first we consoled each other, and then we stopped talking about it, until at last we only talked about philosophy and politics and other neutral subjects. All in all we tried to conceive a child for six years, with no result at all. Other women seemed to have no difficulty conceiving, even other Masters. I continued to help as a midwife as our birth rate rose, along with teaching and working and serving on committees. Ikaros and I opposed each other almost as a matter of course all this time. Axiothea joked that if we ever did agree then the matter was sure to be settled.

I knew how important having children was to Lysias, so I wasn't at all surprised when he left me in the seventh year, though I was surprised that he left me for Lukretia, who was older than I was, and who had never shown any interest in him before that summer. I missed him surprisingly much. Even as we had been drawing apart he had always been courteous and friendly. Now I came home alone to a house that felt colder.

 

11

ARETE

That day for the first time I saw some other ships, three big ones with rows of oars, away to the east, heading southward. I called the news down, and there was some excitement, but we didn't change course to intercept them. We reached Paros about mid-day.

At first it seemed deserted, because we reached it from the southwest, and the settlements were all on the northeastern coast. The shore party didn't find anything inland, but we all saw the ones along the shore after we had sailed all the way around. I saw three of them, much like the one Kallikles had described on Naxos. I looked at them as hard as I could as we sailed by them, and so did everyone else aboard who wasn't tending to the ship at that very instant. I didn't see any people clearly, because they fled at the first sight of the ship. Paros was thickly wooded, and they ran off into the trees, mothers carrying wailing babies and everyone clutching their most precious possessions. “They must be expecting raiders,” Neleus said. “Maybe Kebes is nearby.”

“Or maybe more people like them. What would Kebes find to raid in a place like that?” The huts looked flimsy enough to push over at a touch. There was one square-built stone house on a little eminence, but even that looked filthy and shabby. The statues were strange, as Kallikles had said, festive and brightly colored when all the rest was so drab. They stared out at us with their huge painted eyes.

“That one has an owl,” Maia pointed out at the second village. The owl was not carved but painted onto the side of the statue. “Do you think it's supposed to be Athene? Do you think they're meant to be the gods? The Greek gods?”

“Who else would they worship?” Erinna asked.

“It seems so strange,” Maia said. I squeezed her hand, to show I understood what she meant. It was hard to think of these villagers as Greeks.

The shore party managed to speak to some Parians, but with no more conclusive results than we had had at Naxos. We left as soon as they came back. That night we sailed on. I had managed to suppress my erotic longings for Erinna, or I thought I had. I was sure she didn't feel like that about me, and I knew that I wanted to increase her excellence, as Plato says, so it was all right for me to love her as long as I didn't act out of lust. Mostly it was nice to just think how much better the world was because she was in it, and to see her sometimes, adjusting the sails or teaching people how to steer. When she smiled at me, my heart turned over.

We came to Delos at sunrise on the fifth day out from home. I was at the mast-top, in the crosstrees where there was a little platform for sitting. There was a huge wing of thin cloud in the eastern sky, striated like wool pulled out for carding, and the sun had lit it pink and then gold. The sky was paling from pink as we came into the natural harbor of Delos and dropped anchor there below the temples. I could feel somebody climbing the mast below me so I scooted over to make room for whoever it was. My heartbeat faster thinking that it might be Erinna. I was surprised when it turned out to be Father.

He looked out over the island. “It's such a long time since I've seen it,” he said. “No lions yet.”

“It looks deserted. Or is everyone still asleep?”

“It's only used for the festival at this date. There'll probably be a few priests, I should think.”

“The temples look like proper buildings.”

He smiled his kouros smile. “They may have had inspiration.”

“But not those poor villagers on Naxos and Paros?”

He looked impatient. “I can't be everywhere taking care of everything all at once. Yes, I could spend all my time curing people of boils and teaching them to read, but instead I set up centers of healing and learning, to teach doctors and scholars. I gave Greece an oracle where they could come and ask their questions. I sent Sokrates a daimon to watch out for him, but I can't do that for everyone. I'm constantly inspiring people, but only people who can do something with the inspiration. I do the best I can within what Fate allows. Don't confuse me with Ficino's ideas of God, Arete!”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Besides, I didn't know anything about them. They didn't pray to me,” he said, still staring out over Delos, toward the mountain in the center of the little island where he had been born long before. “Those people in the Kyklades. I didn't know they were there. There weren't any statues of me, did you notice?”

“But this is so close,” I said, gesturing at Delos, the first and oldest center of the worship of Apollo in the world.

“How often do you think they leave their petty islands?” Father asked, shaking his head. “Probably they haven't ever been any further out to sea than they need to catch fish. I'll do what I can to help them, now. I'll argue in Chamber in favor of Kallikles's idea of sending out missions to them. You're absolutely right that it's what Simmea would have wanted to do.”

“And it won't change anything?”

“It might get the Naxians to build that pleasant temple I remember on the little island,” he said. “But it won't change the future. There's only one world. We're in prehistory here. We hardly know the names of kings. Nobody knows for sure what happened on any given day, or when people learned about sanitation or philosophy, or even metal smelting. This isn't the generation before the Trojan War, it's more like four or five generations before. And even Troy—ask Ficino exactly where it was. He doesn't know. They forgot where it was until it was rediscovered late in the nineteenth century.”

“Really?” I was astonished. “How could they lose Troy?”

“There's a lot of history. When it isn't recorded, things drop out. There are entire civilizations that are forgotten. Troy's lucky. It had Homer.”

“Why do you suddenly seem so sure about when we are? I thought you didn't know either?”

“I didn't until now. But look at Delos,” he said, gesturing. “I pay attention to Delos. It's
mine.
I know when things were built here. This is early Minoan. I should have guessed Athene wouldn't have put us immediately before the eruption.”