The Philosopher Kings (20 page)

The New Concordance was generally very popular in the city, though I wasn't sure how many people even among its adherents really understood it properly.

I announced generally that I was leaving, though it hurt me to go. I had put eight years of my life into this city, this second attempt to do what Plato suggested, and I had a new generation of students growing up. I packed up my few possessions in my cloak: my comb, the notebooks where I was writing this autobiography, and my Botticelli book. I opened it and looked at the angels clustered around the
Madonna of the Pomegranates
. They were beautiful, and perhaps they were real, but Athene wasn't one of them. She was too much herself. She was real and imperfect and divine. She had rescued me from a life of unfulfilled emptiness and brought me to the City. I prayed to her now for guidance, and found myself thinking of my old house in the Remnant, and the rich colors of Botticelli's
Autumn
on the wall in Florentia, and Ficino's welcoming smile. I was right to leave. And I'd give this book to Simmea. That felt right too. I closed it and put it into my cloak, and went off to one last day's teaching. Other people would be taking over my classes the next morning.

“I've done you an injustice and I want to apologize,” Ikaros said.

“What?” He had surprised me, coming up behind me after a gymnastics class. I had been teaching the littlest ones how to fall and roll and come up again, while the older ones were practicing with the discus. Then I had escorted the children through the wash-fountain, and handed them over to another teacher for their lute lesson. I was standing alone in the palaestra drying my hair on my kiton. It was autumn, almost olive season, so my damp bare skin was covered in goosebumps. I felt at a disadvantage, and quickly twisted my kiton back on, which left my damp hair dripping down my back. I never seemed to have any dignity around Ikaros. But when I looked at him, he wasn't looking at me but down at the sand.

“I like you, Maia, and perhaps Providence meant us to be together, but I messed everything up between us at the beginning. I didn't understand that you were truly saying no. I thought you were making a show of modest protest. Klio has explained to me that you were not. I'm really sorry.”

I glared at him until he looked up at me. He wasn't laughing at me. He seemed sincere. “Klio had no right—why were you talking to her about me?”

“Because I want to understand why you oppose me so much.”

I was astonished that he was taking me so seriously. “And you're finally acknowledging that you did something wrong?”

“Yes. I said so. I truly misunderstood all this time.” He sat down on the wall that separated the palaestra from the street.

“I was screaming and struggling!”

“But your body—I thought—Klio has explained to me how I was wrong. It was a long explanation, but I do finally understand now.” He smiled ruefully up at me. “Perhaps I shouldn't have been talking to her about it, but I'd never in a hundred years have understood without all that. I was wrong. And I have been punished by being deprived of your friendship, and Klio's friendship, all this time.”

I didn't know what to say, so I just stared at him.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Klio tells me that in her day, philosophy has discovered that people have two minds, a reasoning mind and an animal mind. Your reasoning mind believes that you have logical disagreements with me, but it is your animal mind driving what you feel. You have to get them into alignment to become godlike. That's what Plato meant with the metaphor of the charioteer.”

“That is not what Plato meant!” I snapped, infuriated. At that moment, I'd have cheerfully turned him into a fly if I could. There's nothing more irritating than having somebody misinterpret my intentions and Plato's at the same time!

He went on. “Your animal mind wants to love me, the way your body wanted to love me that night under the trees. But your rational mind says no to love, because it's afraid to love, maybe because of what I did. So I want to persuade your rational mind.”

I crossed my arms and leaned back against a pillar. “Go ahead. My rational mind only listens to rational arguments, not all this animal mind nonsense! And I think saying that part of me loves you is the most arrogant thing I've ever heard, even from you. And I am not afraid to love!”

“Who do you love?” he asked, rhetorically. “Lysias? No. He's your friend, you sometimes used to share a bed, but that's all. There's no love, no real passion. He has told Lukretia, and she told me.”

I was furious with Lysias. “He had no right—”

Ikaros shrugged. “He feels passion for Lukretia, and she asked him about you.”

I still didn't understand what was going on with Lysias and Lukretia. I missed him.

There were more women than men in the City of Amazons, but not by a huge degree—the city was about sixty percent female. I've heard ridiculous stories in other cities about harems and men being waited on by women in return for sexual favors. This seems to me to say rather more about men's fantasies than about anything real in Amazonia. There was a slight surplus of single women, but when you consider women who prefer other women, and families that have more than two adult partners, and men who maintained relationships with each other or with several women—Ikaros among them—it didn't amount to much. Heterosexual men were not a scarce resource. I'd had one or two discreet offers myself since Lysias moved out. It wasn't sex I was feeling deprived of.

“He shouldn't have said anything to her about me, and even if he did, she shouldn't have said anything to you,” I said, as evenly as I could, braiding my damp hair and twisting it up on top of my head. “Is there any point to this scurrilous gossip?”

Ikaros ignored this. “So who do you love? Klio and Axiothea? Friends only, although they love each other. The children? You like them, you care about them, but you don't really love them. There's no love in your life, because you have closed off your soul, and that closes out the possibility of God's love. And that's why you won't consider the New Concordance.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “I love all those people. And the kind of love you're talking about is specifically what Plato tells us to avoid.”

“No it's not. It's what he thinks you can use to bring yourself closer to God.” He was leaning forward now, passionate. “It is by loving each other that our souls rise up and grow wings to approach heaven. It's in the
Phaedrus
.” He pushed back his hair, which was starting to silver now, making him better-looking than ever. “For a while, before I read Aquinas again and realized I was mistaken, I thought that love was enough. Now I see it isn't, that we need reason even more. But we do need love.”

“I don't oppose you because I don't have enough love. I oppose you because I
disagree
with you. Because you're
wrong
. I started off half-wanting to believe Athene was an angel, and that God was still there. The more I hear your proofs and arguments, the less I'm prepared to consider it.”

He rubbed his eyes again, and I noticed that they were red-rimmed from too much rubbing. “Maia, you're one of the few people here who really can follow my thought, who's really capable of being an equal. So it's very frustrating when you disagree without a logical reason behind it. Won't you forgive me and let us start again?”

I considered that. “I don't know whether I can trust you,” I said. Perhaps it was true that before Klio explained he just wasn't capable of understanding. His world had shaped him as badly as mine had shaped me. In a better world, in the City we both wanted to build, we could both have been philosopher kings. Perhaps then we could have loved each other as Plato wanted.

“Are you afraid of me? I don't want you to be afraid.”

The children were mangling their scales behind us. Crocus went past carrying the window glass for the new crèche. “I'm not afraid that you're about to ravage me here and now. But you make me very uneasy. Today is the first time you've ever acknowledged what you did. You always laughed about it and dismissed it.”

“I didn't understand. In my time women had no way to say yes to anything except marriage and keep their self-respect, so they had to make formal protests without really meaning them. That's what I thought you were doing. Klio had to explain to me that if people can't say yes, they can't say no either. It was a new idea.”

“I understand that,” I acknowledged. “But I'm afraid you're apologizing now because you want something, that you're trying to manipulate me. And you're making up all these theories about why I disagree, just like you make up all these theories about the gods, and none of it has any basis in reality. What do you want from me?”

“I want you to be my friend,” he said, with no hesitation at all. “And I would like you to forgive me, if you can. And I don't want you to leave this city.”

I stopped and thought for a moment, trying to examine my own feelings with philosophical rigor. It wasn't easy. I asked myself whether I could forgive him. I found that I could—I did understand what he had been thinking, and also I appreciated the effort he had made now to understand what he had done and accept that it was wrong. “I don't know whether it's possible for me to trust you enough to be your friend,” I said, after a moment. “But I do understand what you did, what you were thinking. And I suppose I forgive you.” He closed his eyes for a moment when I said that and his face went slack. I realized that my forgiveness really did matter to him. He was so naturally playful, even at his most serious. It was rare to see him this unguarded.

He opened his eyes again and looked at me. “So if I'm wrong about my theories about why you disagree, and you disagree logically, what's wrong with my logic?” he asked.

I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding, and sat down tailor-fashion on the wall, leaning back against the pillar. “It's not your logic-structures, it's your axioms. I've said this before. Examine your assumptions. You say Athene is an angel, and you say angels are perfect. I can't see how you can believe that after the way Athene behaved in the Last Debate.”

“She's an angel, and she's perfect. What she did may seem imperfect to us, but that's because our perceptions are imperfect. If we had complete knowledge, we'd be able to understand what she did.”

“That doesn't make any sense. We know she exists. We know we can trust what she told us directly. And she said in the Last Debate that the gods don't know everything, and that part of her motivation in setting up the City was to see what happened. That's not something we don't understand because we're not perfect.”

“She's of a lesser order of perfection than the Persons of the Trinity,” he said. “But she's still perfect.”

“She turned Sokrates into a gadfly!” I said.

“If we understood more, we'd understand why.”

“I have no difficulty understanding why. How can you possibly argue that she was justified in what she did to him? She lost her temper. I have lost my own temper with students often enough to recognize that. It isn't the slow ones that make me do it, it's the insolent ones. Sokrates had some good arguments, but he was behaving like an insolent ephebe pushing the limits. He wanted to make her angry, and he did. But anger and power go badly together, and she is a goddess. Power comes with responsibility. She killed him, or the next thing to it. She was wrong to do what she did and walk away.”

Ikaros rubbed his eyes again. “She is wisdom. She had reasons we don't understand. She must have.”

“Why is it hard to understand that she lost her temper?” I asked. Kreusa went by with two of her apprentices, all carrying baskets of herbs. She nodded to me, and I waved.

“You're trying to understand her as if she were human. But she's an angel,” Ikaros said.

“It seems to me that she's a Homeric god, acting exactly the way Homer described the gods acting. We know that gods exist, gods like Athene, who have incredible powers that nevertheless have limits. We know they can make mistakes, and lose their tempers. We might think they should be more responsible, but we can't affect that. We also know they can be open to persuasion. For instance, Athene agreed to take us to rescue art treasures for the city, though she hadn't wanted to at first. She changed her mind. We know they can be kind to their worshippers. Athene brought all of the Masters here because we prayed for it. For me it was a rescue, and for most of the others too.”

“For me, certainly,” he acknowledged. “I was dying. She brought me here and healed me. But this is part of her goodness, her perfection.”

“But we also know she can be unkind and imperfect, as witness losing her temper. You have to acknowledge that too.”

He frowned, and reached toward his eyes then drew his hand back. “We don't understand everything she did, so it seems to us unkind. But if we knew more, we would understand. Exactly like the way Klio explained my actions so that I understand I committed an injustice, only the other way around. If it were explained to us properly, we would see that what she did was just, however it seems.”

“I don't think there's any need for such an explanation—” He rubbed his eyes hard and I broke off. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

“Just a little tired and sore from so much close work. It's getting all the theses straight all day, and then working by lamplight translating Aquinas. I'm nearly done. At this rate I'll be done by spring. Or next summer anyway.” He sighed, and squinted at me.

“You should try bathing them in warm milk at night,” I suggested.

“Does that work?”

“It's what my father used to do.” I could remember him so clearly, dabbing at his tired eyes when we'd been poring over a book all day.