The Philosopher Kings (28 page)

I picked up Ficino's hat and left then. I'd seen enough—too much. I don't know how Father could stand it. He stood there skinning him alive, with parted lips and a half-smile, remote, intent on the work, peeling back the skin, seeming as calm as if he were composing music, repeating his questions. Neleus stayed beside him, spattered with blood, handing him new knives when he reached down for them. I couldn't have done it. Kebes deserved to die, yes, and I would have killed him myself. But if I had been Father I'd have let my knife slip when I was near an artery, and ended it quickly.

Erinna left with me, and Auge entrusted her children to us. “I don't think I could torture anyone to death,” I said as we went out. “Not even Kebes.” I could still hear his screams echoing around the marvelous acoustics of the colosseum.

“Kebes must have done it before. To other people,” Erinna said. “Did you know there were Young Ones killed today? And locals? There are
bodies.
Somebody will have to
bury
them.”

“Only murderers and heretics get flayed,” Auge's daughter said.

“They'll burn the bodies and put the ashes in urns,” Auge's son said.

I nodded. It was a sad necessity we'd experienced a few times at home after art raids. “What are heretics anyway?”

“People who think the wrong thing about God and Yayzu,” she said.

My eyes met Erinna's and we both grimaced. “And this seemed like such a nice place,” she said.

“How often did Matthias flay heretics?” I asked.

“Not often. Every year or so, here, less often in the other cities,” Auge's son said. “Some people like it, but I think it's horrible to watch. I hate screaming.”

“It's horrible. But Kebes deserves to end up that way,” I said.

The sun was setting as we came down to the harbor, sinking peacefully and splendidly into the sea, which spread out gold and blue like a bolt of shot silk, an even more beautiful sunset than the day before. Auge's children had invited us to their home, but we wanted to get back to our ship. The
Excellence
was still bobbing safely at her anchorage in the bay, but to our astonishment the
Goodness
was a smoldering wreck at the dockside.

I hadn't understood from what Kebes said about attacking the
Excellence
that this was something that he had arranged to have happen during the contest. Flaying suddenly seemed too good for him.

It seemed our little boat had been burned in the fighting, but Erinna persuaded one of the women who had a fishing boat ready to go out that she could do better ferrying people back to the
Excellence
. She gave her a coin. “Where did you get that?” I asked as the fisherwoman rowed us to the ship.

“Maecenas gave me a handful at Marissa, for buying stores. I have a few left.”

There had been a battle aboard, very bloody, but we had won and beaten off the Lucians. As in the colosseum, not all the Lucians had wanted to fight us, and the small number Kebes could organize to attack weren't all that many more than the watch Maecenas had left aboard.

Maia was standing at the rail with a bow slung as we came aboard. She had a cut on her forehead which had bled a great deal, staining her kiton, but she was otherwise unharmed. “I killed two people,” she said, shaken.

“I killed one in the fighting in the colosseum, and so did Neleus,” Erinna said. “I also wounded two people, but of course I don't know if they'll recover.” I was sure the man I'd pushed onto her blade would die. Maia hugged her, and then me too. She gave her bow to somebody else and we sat down together on the big coil of rope on the deck.

“What happened?” she asked. We started to tell her, the contest first, and then the fight. I was relieved that Erinna's description of my flight was that I took a great leap in the air and landed as easily as a cat.

“Ficino's dead,” I said, realizing for the first time that Maia didn't know. “He said he'd had a wonderful life and he had died defending excellence and we shouldn't grieve.” I began to weep as I remembered it. I pulled his hat out of my kiton and gave it to her.

She took it and turned it over in her hands. “He always said he'd die at ninety-nine,” Erinna said.

“Idiotic numerology,” Maia sniffed, wiping her eyes on her kiton.

“He said we were Amazons,” Erinna said. “And Trojan heroes.”

“It wasn't the way I imagined fighting side by side,” I said, only then realizing that we had indeed fought side by side, in a battle.

“It's one of those things that's better in stories,” Erinna said.

“We can put up a monument to Ficino when we get home,” I said, trying to comfort Maia, who was trying to stifle her sobbing. “In Florentia, which he loved so much.”

“I've seen his tomb,” Maia said, wiping her eyes again. “Years ago, of course, before I came here. He's buried in the Duomo, a temple in the heart of the original city of Florentia. It's a Renaissance building based on a classical original, which couldn't be more appropriate for him. He was buried with the greatest honor his people could give him.”

“Good,” I said. “And we will do the same. But I miss him. I miss him like I miss Mother. Of course we'll honor their memory, and of course their souls have gone on to new lives, but I hadn't finished talking to them in
this
life.” I knew what death meant now. It was conversations cut off.

“I know what you mean. He was my friend from the first day I met him,” Maia said, steadying her chin with her hand. “Without him both the Renaissance and the Republic would have been poorer. But that we can honor. It's the twinkle in his eye that I'll really miss.”

I hugged her. It was odd, but in a way I felt closer to Maia than anyone else. Father was Father, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that. And for Mother, of course, he came first, second, and third, while the rest of us came somewhere around ninth. That's why Maia and Ficino were both so important to me. I'd realized that since Mother died. They both really did put their pupils first, after philosophy and the City. I was on the edges of Father and Mother's lives, but I was in the heart of theirs. And that was reasonable, was all right, because after all Father was the god Apollo, and how could I possibly be as important as that? Even if now I had divine powers, and maybe I was going to be a god. (But a god of what? Flight was taken. Was there a god of translation?)

The deck lights came on. The
Goodness
was plainly sinking, but a few of her lights also flickered on even as she foundered. “What happened in the fighting here?” Erinna asked.

“They used a fireship,” Maia said. “But the wind changed. And they came to board us, but we stood them off. I shot one. Only a few of them got aboard. Caerellia was killed, fighting, and young Phaenarete.”

Maecenas came back just then, with Phaedrus and our wounded. “We need to get everyone back aboard and do a headcount so we know how many we're missing,” he said. “You four get started, find out exactly who's aboard and what condition they're in.”

“Is Kebes dead yet?” Erinna asked.

Maecenas shook his head. “Not when I left. It might take half the night. He started screaming ‘why are you tearing me apart?' over and over, as if he hadn't meant to do it to Pytheas, and as if he hadn't done it to other people before. It's one of their standard methods of execution, they tell me. They had one of those colosseums in Marissa too, didn't they? I don't know that we want to trade with these people after all.”

 

22

APOLLO

On one of the last days of the Weimar Republic, I ran into my brother Dionysios unexpectedly in a nightclub in Berlin. He was leaning against the wall, half shadowed, a cup in his hand, talking to the piano player. He looked up as I came down the steps and greeted me with a half-smile. He was dressed in black leather, topped off with a leopardskin scarf. He was there for the same reason I was, to save as many as we could, in the teeth of Fate and Necessity. He said something quietly to the pianist, who looked to the saxophonist and played a low D. My brother and I danced together there, cheek to cheek, in that crowded little underground room on the desperate edge of destruction, amid the smoke that was like, and not like, the smoke of sacrifice, and the music that was like, and not like, the music Kebes played on his syrinx that day in the colosseum of Lucia.

Kebes was an enemy, a breaker of guest friendship, a rapist, and a torturer who set up institutional torture in his republic. But none of that is why I turned my lyre upside-down in order to defeat him, or why I killed him in that horrible messy way. The contest was for original composition, any instrument. What Kebes played was not an original composition, it was Gershwin's “Summertime.” It's not that he broke the rules of the competition, although he did. He was a plagiarist. He cheated on art, passing off someone else's work as his own, believing no one would know. Naturally, I would have had to punish that even if he had done nothing else. I sickened of the skinning early on, but I believed that if I kept on inflicting the agony with a promise of the release of death, he would tell me why Athene had given him the syrinx, and how he had learned the music. There were no Masters among the Goodness Group who came from late enough that they would have known or recognized jazz. I couldn't reveal my knowledge of his plagiarism without giving myself away. Torture is irritatingly ineffective: he taunted me for as long as he could, but he refused to answer my questions and died without telling me. (How I eventually learned the answers is part of another story, which I may tell you one day.)

After he was dead and vanished, and his tattered separated skin, removed with so much slow effort, had vanished with him, I plunged into the clean Aegean to wash off the blood. I emerged again to mortal problems and complications and the relentless mortal timescale where everything has to be dealt with in the instant, with no time to think through the consequences. I had a tiny cut on my thumb where the knife had slipped, and it stung with the salt of the sea water. All my human interactions felt just like that at that moment, raw and stinging and petty. It was all tension—between Lucia and the
Excellence
, between Kallikles and Klymene, and in the souls of my Young Ones as they tried to deal with their dual nature.

I had been skinning Kebes all through the hours of darkness, and it was weary work; my mortal body needed sleep. But the sun was growing higher in the sky and sleep was far from me. I wanted to be away from the ship and mortal trivialities. I needed to recover from the contest, and the aftermath. I swam again, with Kallikles and Arete.

Swimming always made me feel close to Simmea, because she taught me, because it was the first thing we had shared and the way we came to know each other. I hadn't done it since she had died. Now, swimming, in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, felt almost like being with her, and yet painful because she wasn't there and never would be.

We swam out of sight of the ship and the city. I pulled myself up onto a rock, and the Young Ones climbed up and sat beside me, all of us naked in the warm light of my beloved sun. The rock was gray, but turned black where the seawater ran off our bodies to make it wet. The sea broke about it in a little frill of white foam on sapphire. Simmea would have wanted to paint it.

“Clean at last,” I said, inspecting my hands.

“Do you feel any better now that Kebes is dead?” Kallikles asked.

I thought about it for a long moment. “Yes. No. I'm glad I defeated Kebes and I'm glad I killed him, even if it was so slow and messy. He deserved it even before he cheated and broke guest friendship.” I had wanted him dead, and he was dead, and off to a new beginning. Meanwhile, everything else was still here, and more complicated than ever.

“Did he even break it?” Arete asked. “Auge immediately started shouting that he had, but we were formally welcomed to Marissa, not here, and they are independent cities in the same league.”

“They offered us all guest friendship when we arrived,” Kallikles said. “I was one of guards with the envoys. That was clearly and plainly stated.”

“I never accepted it, but they offered it to all of us, and when they attacked everyone they definitely broke it. You had eaten their food, and they attacked you anyway. Kebes organized that attack, so he broke it,” I said. “Besides, that music wasn't original. It came from the twentieth century. He was cheating and he thought nobody would know.”

Arete drew in her breath sharply, and Kallikles gasped. “How did he know it?”

“He wouldn't tell me. It must be some god interfering.”

“I'm glad you punished him for it,” Kallikles said.

“Yes. And now that's over. Done with. Settled.” I tried to feel it was true as I said it. But no matter how much I wanted it to be, nothing felt settled by Kebes's death, and it gave me no relief.

“What about the
Goodness
?” Kallikles asked.

“Let them build triremes,” I said, lying back, deliberately trying to relax. They weren't my people, or my responsibility, or anything to do with me. “Let Yayzu look after them. How surprised he will be when he takes notice of them praying to him from here!”

The sun was warm, and after a little while I did begin to relax a little. The Young Ones sat quietly in the sun. I kept feeling that I had left something unfinished. Not skinning Kebes. I had done that thoroughly, made a proper job of the whole messy business. And now he wasn't walking around gloating about raping Simmea, or sneering at Arete, or passing off other people's art as his own. His soul was free for a new beginning, and the world was a better place without him. All the same, I felt as if something was missing. Absent or present, Kebes had been a rival for a long time. I felt emptier without him.