The Philosopher Kings (29 page)

Just then, surprising me utterly, Arete rose up off the rock, neat as Hermes, and flew through the air. It had been such a long time since I'd seen anyone really fly. When in my proper form I could hover in the air, and walk on it, naturally, but I've never been able to swoop about like a bird the way she was doing.

“Stand up and let me try carrying you,” she called to Kallikles.

He stood up at once and held his arms out. “Don't drop me!”

“I won't. But you'd land in the sea! Or if you don't want to, you could just walk down the air. Don't be a baby!”

She swooped down from behind and carried him up with her. I'd never seen anything like it. She made several loops in the air, with him dangling from her arms.

“Is he heavy?” I called.

“No! It's not difficult at all. I can barely feel his weight—not like holding up a person, more like carrying a baby.”

Kallikles blew a raspberry, and she swooped low and set him gently down beside me on the rock. Then she made one last circuit and perched again by my other side.

“I'm glad I had the chance to try that,” she said. “I don't feel tired at all. I think it's less tiring than running or swimming the same distance.”

“You did it yesterday,” I pointed out. “I saw you fly down onto the stage, and also fly over an attacker.”

“Erinna said it was a mighty leap,” she said. “Nobody understood it was flying.”

“Be careful if you want to stay secret,” I warned. “You all three used your powers yesterday. You need to be careful, even in front of people who believe in the gods. Once they know, there's no going back from it.”

“I didn't know whether the lightning would come,” Kallikles said. “They were getting ready to swarm up the side of the boat. I was out of arrows. I just struck out.”

“I think it was a splendid thing to do,” Arete said, admiringly.

“You weren't wrong to do it, but it's good you didn't blast all the attackers that way,” I said. It was difficult to have powers and not use them, and they were very young. If they revealed themselves, they'd also be revealing me.

“It's electricity, you know,” Kallikles said. “When we get home I'm going to experiment cautiously with what I can do with electrical things.”

“Be careful around Crocus and Sixty-One,” I said.

“I won't hurt them. But I want to try something with their feeding stations. There are enough stations to feed all the workers we had at the beginning. If I mess one up it won't hurt them.”

“It would hurt all of us and kill them if you destroyed all the electricity in the city, and you could. I think it all links together. Or you could kill yourself the way you killed the attacker yesterday.” I knew that lightning was akin to electricity, but I had never thought about it in that way before. “Be careful experimenting.”

“I will. But I think it can just flow through me.”

“And I'll talk to Phaedrus about being careful about people noticing the healing as well,” I said.

“He couldn't just let people die,” Kallikles said.

“Too many died as it was,” Arete said. “Poor Ficino.”

That reminded me that she had had her back turned and she might not properly understand what had happened. “Did you see what he did?”

“Who do you mean? Phaedrus or Ficino?”

“Ficino. He deliberately put himself in the way of a blow meant for you. The attacker was ignoring him and going for you from behind. I'd just got Kebes safely pinned to the stake, but I wasn't close enough to do anything to help you. Ficino put his body in the way of the blade.” I had been thinking about this ever since.

“For me?” she said, awed and amazed. “He died for me?”

“To protect you,” I clarified. “He didn't have a weapon or anything he could use as one. He probably didn't know how to use one anyway. I never saw him in the palaestra. He wasn't in the troop, he was too old. He just put himself in between you and the blade.”

Arete started crying. “He said he died defending arete, and I thought he meant excellence, but he meant me.”

“He meant both,” Kallikles said.

I put my arm around her, just as Simmea always did when people cried. “Would you have done that for him?” I asked.

“Yes,” Arete said through her tears, with no hesitation. “I'd have tried to do something more effective to stop the attacker, but if that's all there was to do, of course I would.” She paused. “I couldn't have answered that as clearly before the battle in the colosseum. I wouldn't have known. Now I know.”

“And for me?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said, just as fast, and then stopped, and pulled away from me as she realized what I meant. “Do you think that's what she was doing? Mother? But she knew you're a god.” She stared at me.

“So do you,” I pointed out.

“It's a strong instinct, to protect,” she said, thoughtfully. “I know you're a god, but I'd have put myself between you and a blade.”

“You flew down from where you were perfectly safe with Auge and her hammer,” I said.

“Leaped,” she corrected. “And it wasn't just you. They were heading for the judges.”

“Ficino, and Erinna,” I said.

“And Neleus,” she added.

“A very strong instinct,” I repeated, thinking about that. “A human instinct. One I don't possess at all.”

“But it's exactly what you were doing,” Arete said, surprised. “You were about to kill yourself for Mother, when she killed herself to stop you. If that's what she did.”

“It isn't the same,” I said, irritated. “I wouldn't have died. Well, yes, I would, but I wouldn't have lost
my life
by doing it, only this temporary mortal life. I'd still have been here, and remembered everything.”

“She had time to think,” Kallikles said. “The battle was over. She had an arrow in her lung, yes, but it wasn't the middle of a fight and going on split-second instinct.”

“It hadn't been over for long,” I said. “And she was wounded, and I surprised her, drawing my knife, and maybe she just went with instinct, protecting me, getting between me and danger. Like Ficino. Like you. Like I did when I didn't kill Kebes in the street the first day.”

“What a very human thing to do,” Arete said. “Poor Mother. Betrayed by instinct.”

“But we'll never know,” Kallikles said, shaking his head. “It might have been that. She might have done that. Or she might have had some reason, the way you've been thinking. She wasn't afraid of death, not the way so many people are. Ficino wasn't either. They both knew they have souls that go on. She knew from you, and Ficino from Athene. And Mother knew how important you are. She'd been helping you be incarnate for years. She might have thought it would be good for your soul to understand human grief and sacrifice and…”

“And how to skin an enemy alive?” I finished, sarcastically. “All the
useful
things I have learned since she died.”

“She lived while she was alive, and she wasn't afraid of death,” Arete said.

“She told you not to be an idiot. That means she was thinking,” Kallikles said.

“She could have just instinctively been telling me not to be an idiot,” I said glumly. “I am an idiot all too often.”

As I said that, I wished Sokrates could have been there. He'd have said “Apollo! What hyperbole!” and we'd all have laughed, even Kebes. Now I was the only one who could remember those dialogues in the garden. I couldn't be missing Kebes, it wasn't possible. I'd always hated him. Simmea never had, though, even after what he had done to her, even after she had made her definite choice of me and the City, she still spoke of him as a friend. She was a true philosopher. And now I had killed Kebes in the most revolting way, and he hadn't told me anything, and the only good it had done had been to his soul, and perhaps to the Lucians who might lose their taste for public torture without the chief torturer. He might be better in his new life, and the world might be better without him. But I had thought vengeance would make me feel better, or anyway not worse.

Ficino had said it would be bad for my soul to kill Kebes, and I'd dismissed the thought because I'd killed people and taken vengeance before. But maybe it had been. Had it made me worse, instead of better? I kept trying to be less unjust, but did I ever really improve? All my deeds will become art. Now that this was done, I wondered how later ages would see it: the god of music against a man with a syrinx, and then such a slow unpleasant death.

I thought again of Ficino, putting his body between Arete and the blade. And Simmea had done the same for me. I was anguished all over again. There was no question that she'd have sacrificed her life for me if it were necessary. It's just difficult to envision a scenario in which it would be necessary. But she would also give her life for my excellence. That's the first thing she ever did for me: when she was teaching me to swim, she risked her life to increase my excellence. I could see how she would believe that enduring all this would increase my knowledge and my understanding of mortal life, and therefore my excellence. And that's agape, that's what Plato wrote about and Simmea believed, the love that wants to increase the excellence of the beloved. But I also wanted to increase her excellence. She hadn't come to the end of herself. And she
knew
I needed her. Needing her and not having her was such a hard thing to have to learn.

How could she have deliberately left me alone to go through all this? But caring as she did about my excellence, how could she have let me go back to being a god without learning something so important? I put one foot down into the cold clear water of the sea, then drew it back up, making a wet black footprint on the hot gray rock. It was distinct for a moment, then immediately began to fade and dry. Soon there would be no sign that it had ever been there.

I had always protected myself against mortal death. When time is a place you can enter at will, it's easy to do that, to save some moments so the ones we love are never wholly lost. Even with Hyakinthos there are moments left I can visit and savor. I can see him smile again, and if I choose I can spend decades of my own personal time illuminated by that smile, working, planning, contemplating, knowing there will come a next instant, another breath, when I am ready to take it. There are whole days I did not spend with him that I hoard against my future loneliness. That has always been my strategy, and it has always protected me. Simmea knew that, we'd talked about it after we lost Sokrates. She loved me. But that never made her go easy on me. And that was one of the best things about her.

She wouldn't have killed herself just to have me endure mortal grief. But she drew out the arrow rather than have me go back to being a god without learning about it. I couldn't understand it until I saw Ficino, old and unarmed, unhesitatingly put himself between Arete and a sword. He died of the blow. Simmea did the same for my own personal arete. Of course she did. What else would she have been willing to die for?

That was a very good question. I sat up with a jerk. Kallikles and Arete turned to me in surprise “I've been an idiot,” I announced. They exchanged glances. “What did she put her body in the way of?”

“You?” Kallikles hazarded.

“What I mean is, what did Simmea care most about?” I asked, Socratically.

“Philosophy, and the City, and art, and you,” Arete answered promptly.

“All of us,” I corrected. “She cared about our whole family, not just me.”

“She did, but she cared more about you,” Kallikles said. “And that's right, that's how it should be. We're growing up, we have our own lives, the two of you would have gone on together.”

“And you're Apollo,” Arete said. “You're more important than we are.”

“You seem to be choosing to become gods yourselves,” I said. “But whether you do or not, she'd have put herself in front of a blade for you. For Neleus as fast as any of you.”

“Yes,” they both agreed, with no hesitation.

“And of those things she cared about that much, the one she put her body in the way of was art.”

“Yes,” Arete said.

“Whoever killed her didn't want to kill her the way Kebes and I wanted to kill each other. Not personally. They just killed her because her body was between them and art.” I stopped, to make sure this made sense. They nodded. “So we have to stop the art raids,” I concluded. “That's what she'd want, far more than vengeance. They didn't kill her because they wanted to kill her. They killed her because she put her body between them and the head of Victory.”

“Stopping the art raids would be a really good thing, but I don't know whether it's possible,” Arete said. “People have tried before. Ficino and Mother tried. Manlius did.”

“We'd have to go to all the cities,” Kallikles said.

“We're going to have to do that anyway, to tell them about the Lucian civilization,” I said. I sighed. “It won't be easy. But it's what she would have wanted, and it's what we need to do.”

We swam back to the ship. Even though I understood now why she had chosen to die, I
still
couldn't die myself and go back to Olympos. There might be other things I needed to understand from incarnation to become my best self—there probably were, and most of them awful, to do with old age and grief. And now I had to stay alive and go through them and learn, without having Simmea to help. I felt tired thinking about it. But beyond that I had the terribly complicated task of resolving everything Simmea would have wanted resolved, the art raids, relations between the Republics, the situation with the Lucians. It was the kind of thing Simmea was really good at, and I really wasn't. But that was the work that needed to be done.