The Philosopher Kings (18 page)

“You said it's safe?” Maecenas asked.

“Safe enough. Leave a watch aboard, I'd say.”

Caerellia nodded and started giving orders, that the watch on duty would stay aboard. Everyone not part of the Hesperides watch started for the rail.

“Safe for old men and children,” Ficino said, taking my arm. I was surprised how thin his hand felt. I swung over the rail and he followed me more slowly.

“Wait,” Maecenas said.

We stopped and turned.

“I want you to help with negotiations,” Maecenas said to Ficino.

“That's never been one of my areas of interest,” Ficino said.

“No, but you're good with people,” Maecenas said.

Ficino sighed and took his hand off my arm. “Very well. But I insist on having time to explore Marissa, at least as much as we did at Delos.”

“I don't know how long we'll stay, but I won't keep you in negotiations every minute,” Maecenas said.

Ficino nodded and went with him.

I could see Father still surrounded by people. Erinna and Neleus had both stepped onto dry land, and were staggering a little, the same way I was. Maia was already striding off toward the statue. We followed after her.

Looking around, I found myself remembering the visit I had made to Sokratea with Mother a year ago. I touched Erinna's arm—it just wasn't possible to avoid touching her, but even the most normal things were charged with tingling erotic potential that I had to fight down. She turned to me. “Remember Sokratea?” I said, keeping my voice as even as I could. She nodded. “This feels the same, sort of. It's like the City but not like it, and everyone is a stranger.”

She nodded again. “In some ways it's stranger than those weird primitive villages, because it is like home. But it's not like Sokratea either. We've been in constant contact with Sokratea. We're allies. We have diplomatic relations, and trade. We were there on a recognized mission.”

“I was thinking that,” Neleus put in. “We haven't heard anything from the Goodness Group in all this time. How did Klymene decide to just trust them and bring the ship in?”

“Klymene and Pytheas,” Erinna said. She put her hand to her side where she kept a little knife for cutting ropes and whittling wood. Neleus did the same with his, and I realized as their eyes met that they were ephebes, they had gone through weapons training, and that whatever other uses they had every day, the knives at their sides were also weapons. I felt useless and young and unarmed. “Your father wants vengeance more than anyone,” she went on. “He wouldn't have called us in if he thought they were responsible.”

It was true. I looked over to him, still surrounded by Marissans. An old woman at his side said something and came toward us, or rather toward Maia and the statue. “Maia!” she called, clearly delighted. “Joy to you!” It must have been true what Ficino said about the Goodness Group having Masters in it, because she looked very old, almost as old as he was.

Maia turned. “Aristomache! Joy! How lovely to see you. What have you been doing?” They hugged each other

“Teaching, as always,” Aristomache said.

“Here?”

“Here, and in Hieronymos on the other side of the island. And before that in Lucia, our first city, on Lesbos. And you?”

“Teaching too, in Amazonia and now back in the original city. You have three cities?”

“We have eight, on three islands. And you have five, all on Kallisti, Pytheas says?”

“That's right,” Maia confirmed. “We've been calling you the Lost City, we never thought of you having so many!”

“Well, with only a hundred and fifty of us we had to find recruits, and when we saw how many people needed help we just kept on with it,” Aristomache said. “War's such a terrible thing. We do what we can.” She smiled. “Now who are these?”

“These are Neleus and Erinna and Arete, pupils of mine.”

Aristomache nodded to us in a friendly way. “I'll introduce you all to some pupils of mine.”

Maia smiled at her. “We'd like that.”

Aristomache peered more closely at Neleus. “Are you Simmea's son, young man, or don't you know? In any case, I was there the night you were born.”

“I am,” he said. “And Arete is my sister.”

She leaned forward and peered at me. “Good. There's a definite resemblance. I'm glad she left descendants. Pytheas told me what happened to her. Terrible.”

Erinna was looking up at the statue. Close up, it towered over us. It wasn't a colossus like Crocus's statues, but it was much larger than life size. Maia glanced up too. “What's this?” she asked Aristomache.

“Come on Maia, you
know
that Jesus Christ is your lord and savior,” Aristomache said. “You might have turned your back on him to worship demons and given Plato more honor than is due a philosopher, but you know in your soul that He is the resurrection and the life.”

“Demons! Nonsense. And for that matter, you must have prayed to Athene yourself,” Maia responded.

As Aristomache opened her mouth to answer, I realized that they had spoken in a language I didn't know, and that Neleus and Erinna's faces reflected their incomprehension. I had never heard this language before, but I understood it as clearly as if it were Greek or Latin. It must be one of the powers that Delos had awakened in me, though I had no idea how or why. I'd have to ask Father, and talk to Phaedrus and Kallikles to see if it was the same for them.

“Do you deny that he is your savior?” Aristomache asked, fiercely.

“I've had this same fight with Ikaros,” Maia said, turning red in the face.

Aristomache frowned, then nodded. “Ikaros…” she began, and then suddenly went back into Greek. “Yayzu came down to Earth to save us all.” Aristomache smiled all around, including all of us in the conversation.

I nodded politely.

“Tell me about him?” Erinna asked. “I love the statue.”

“Well that's a good place to start,” Aristomache said. “His mother was a virgin, and God sent her a son, his son and himself. He was born human, like all of us, and grew up, and taught, and was killed for his teaching, and then arose from the dead and taught again. He went through a human life and understands us. He's not playing with our lives for his own amusement like Athene. And through him we will have eternal life, in heaven.”

I'd heard about heaven from Ficino, so I knew it was a place like Hades that some people thought was an interlude between incarnations and others thought was the end-point of all incarnations, for souls that had purified themselves. It's mentioned in the
Phaedo
, though not with that name. My eyes went to Father, still deeply engaged in conversation on the other side of the agora. He had come down to earth and become mortal, and was learning about understanding human life. So there was no reason not to believe that Yayzu had done the same. And his mother, especially as Botticelli had painted her and Auge carved her, seemed like a perfectly nice goddess. The statue had a book in one hand. And I could certainly understand anyone who had been at the Last Debate being angry at Athene. I nodded and smiled at Aristomache.

 

15

ARETE

We were feasted by Marissa, and I believe in the process Maecenas came to some trade agreement, but I don't know the details. I know there are too many things that only the Workers can make, and everyone wants those things. But in Marissa they were making some of them and getting others from the
Goodness
, like glass. We trade Worker-made glass to all the other cities. But they didn't have any Workers and they were making their own. I saw it in some of their windows, and while it was thick and streaky, it was still pretty impressive that they were making it themselves. They were also making iron. And they had plumbing—they didn't have wash-fountains in every house the way we did, but they had public baths, and public drinking fountains, like Rome. I thought they were doing pretty well.

I also admired their outreach to the refugees. It was what I'd wanted to do the moment I'd seen the villages of the Kyklades, and the Goodness Group were doing what we'd talked about—rescuing people and teaching them hygiene and technology and how to read and think independently. They didn't have printing presses, but they had literacy and fairly advanced math. Aristomache was a good teacher. I was impressed by how much they had achieved, especially when we got Aristomache off the subject of Yayzu and his mother and onto the subject of how they'd done it.

We were all sitting in their eating hall—they only had one. Most people, most of the time, cooked and ate in their own houses, which had little kitchens for that purpose, unlike ours. When they had a big feast, the important people ate in the eating hall, which also served as their Chamber. It was a big room with a pillared portico that held about a hundred. The rest were feasted outdoors in the agora, where they held their Assembly. The feast began at sundown. It consisted of a savory wheat and milk porridge, followed by fresh sardines, followed by roast ox, which had been roasting all afternoon, of course, and piles of absolutely marvelous honey cakes, also made with wheat. We didn't have wheat cakes or porridge often at home, as most of the wheat we grew was made straight into pasta. Cakes made from wheat were quite different from cakes made from barley and nut flours, much lighter and more fluffy. Wine was served, about three-quarters water, the strength I usually drank, weaker than adults usually had it at home. It took us most of the meal to get Aristomache off religion and onto the subject of what the
Goodness
had done.

We were seated at tables of ten, all nibbling honey cakes. Father and Maecenas and Ficino were at the top table with Terentius and some of the kings of Marissa. Aristomache, Maia, Erinna and I were with some of the members of the Chamber. All of the tables were mixed that way. Klymene and Neleus and the rest of the Nyx watch were back aboard, but we were assured that food was being sent to them.

“When we left, we sailed north. We wanted to get away from Kallisti, and we didn't know where we wanted to go exactly,” Aristomache said. “We went to the mainland of Ionia, near Troy, and found a war going on. Not a Persian invasion, or even a Trojan one, just a petty civil war. The ship was really full, so we ferried most of our people over to Lesbos and set them down, then went back to rescue refugees. It was a purely humanitarian mission, we weren't thinking about anything else. They were mostly women and children who would have been enslaved. Of course we thought about Hekabe and Andromache, but we seem to be too early for them. The King of Troy is called Laomedon.” She took a sip of wine.

“We founded Lucia pretty much where we'd landed, without doing any surveying or anything. There was water, which was all we really needed. There were olive trees too, which may mean there had once been a settlement there before, because olives usually mean people. We rescued goats and sheep from the mainland, and fortunately a lot of our refugees knew how to look after them and milk them and process wool, because we didn't.” She laughed. “We had a lot to teach each other! That first winter was hard. Some of the girls were pregnant, some of ours from the festivals, and some of theirs, mostly from rape. They were all grateful because we'd rescued them—but what else could we have done? We had the weapons that were on the ship, of course, and we'd all had training.”

“Of course,” Erinna said, her eyes shining. “And you founded a city?”

“It wasn't a proper city at first, but we all worked on a constitution, and building it, of course.”

“Why did you decide to call your city Lucia?” I asked. I knew I'd heard the name before, and I'd just remembered where. Father had said it had been Mother's birth name. It seemed like a peculiar coincidence, but I couldn't think of any possible connection.

“I think Matthias proposed it,” she said. “It means Light of course, and new light was what we all wanted. It was only afterward we thought of Saint Lucy and seeing everything with new eyes, which is what the name means to us now, our fresh start and our turning back to God. It was Providence, I suppose.”

“So how was it in the beginning?” Maia asked.

“We debated everything, like the philosophers we were, but sometimes the practical people we'd rescued had better ideas than any of us.” Aristomache smiled at one of the locals at the table, who looked down, clearly embarrassed. “They brought us back to Earth whenever we floated off too far. And it was that winter that we came back to God. That was Matthias's proposal too.”

“Who's Matthias, one of the people you rescued?” Maia asked.

Aristomache laughed and took another honey cake. “No, he's the one who used to be called Kebes. He took his real name back. Some of us did that and some didn't, according to what made us more comfortable. I didn't want to be Ellen again.”

“We discussed that in the City of Amazons, too. I didn't want to be Ethel,” Maia said, astonishing me. She seemed so very much a Maia that it didn't seem possible she could ever have been called anything else. Ellen was clearly derived from Helen, but Ethel came from that strange language they had spoken together briefly. Maia was right, it emphatically didn't suit her.

“We didn't force anyone to worship God, but Matthias wanted to build a church and become a priest, and most of us had originally been Christian and many of those who hadn't saw the light and wanted to be saved. I don't think any of us had worshipped the Greek gods seriously back in the Just City, and if we had it was because of being taken in by Athene.”

“And your local recruits?” Erinna asked.

“They saw the sense in it, after the cruel things their gods had done to them. They understood the value of a god of forgiveness who understands us.”

Some of the locals around the table were nodding. “A god who accepts everyone, even slaves and women,” one of them said, shyly.