The Philosopher Kings (33 page)

“Just listen to this first,” I said, and drew my lyre into place.

It couldn't have been more different from the colosseum in Lucia, the banked rows of spectators, Kebes's hate burning hot, the judges uneasy in their seats, and my own soul longing to escape. Now I was at home, my soul was sure of the work set before it, and the audience were my own children, who loved me. In my memory Sokrates and Simmea and Kebes also populated the garden. Simmea sat intent, leaning forward, bursting with ideas; Sokrates was running his fingers through his hair distractedly; Kebes was frowning and drawing breath to speak. I smiled and let go of them. All of their souls had gone on to start again and learn new things. It was the solid and present Young Ones I wanted to reach with this song.

“Simmea asked me to write this song when we were fourteen years old,” I said. Before she had met Sokrates, before we had discussed our agape, before we knew the Workers were people. “It's called ‘The Glory of Peace.'”

I knew I had them before the end of the first verse. By the final chorus, they were all openly weeping. The best of it was, the song didn't mention either Simmea or the art raids directly. It was all about the things worth fighting to defend and being our best selves.

Neleus, who had fought in art raids, was the first to speak after the last chord had died away. His voice was choked. “Is that really what we were doing? Were we going against Plato and making ourselves worse?”

“Yes, we evidently were,” Euklides said, wiping his eyes. I didn't know him well, and I hadn't known until that moment that he had fought in them.

“The art raids are a falling away from excellence,” Phaedrus said. “Toward timarchy. Fighting for honor instead.”

Arete looked at me with awe in her eyes. “Maybe you really could stop the art raids! If people hear that, they might understand. It gives us a different way to think about it. And it's really true.
The dreams shared with a friend
,” she quoted.

“And that's what Mother died for,” Neleus said.

They all looked a little stunned. “I'll have to sing it to harder audiences,” I said. “But stopping the art raids is what this song is for. And that's the best thing I can do now in memory of Simmea.”

“Not just stopping the pointless deaths, but bringing the City closer to excellence,” Neleus said, seeing the point at once, as Simmea would have done.

“All the cities,” Arete said.

I nodded. “All the cities. I want to teach you to sing the harmony, so you can sing it with me when we go.”

“There's a harmony?” she asked.

“Yes. Why are you looking at me like that?” They were all staring at me with eyes wide open in astonishment.

“You never write songs with multiple parts,” Phaedrus said. “You always write things you can perform alone.”

“Well, this song can be sung alone, as you've just heard, and it will sound even better with Arete singing the harmony, and it also has an arrangement that can be sung as a choral ode with parts for a whole chorus, which I am planning to have sung before the conference. But you're going to have to rehearse them, Phaedrus, because Arete and I will be going around to the other cities to persuade them to come.”

They still looked stunned. I smiled, and sat down and began to eat a lemon.

“Have you ever written something for a chorus before?” Neleus asked. “Ever, ever? I know you haven't done it in the City.”

“I haven't, and it was an interesting challenge, especially without any privacy on the boat to work on it. But you wait until you hear the choral version, with the men's chorus singing low down
home and hearth and love and life
and the women's chorus singing high up
worth the cost of risking life
and the lines working with and against each other.” I sang the lines as I quoted them. They kept on staring at me. “Yes, it's a new thing for me. But life is about moving forward and learning new things.”

“You've stopped being cracked,” Arete said.

“Yes, I think I finally have. I haven't stopped missing her. But I'm whole again. I'm finally doing what she wanted.”

“Stopping the art raids?” Euklides asked.

“That's part of it,” I said.

 

27

ARETE

In our absence, my brother Euklides had run away from Psyche and sworn a new oath to the Remnant City. He was staying in Thessaly and drilling with the Delphian troop. His armor stood on a stand in the corner, and he had moved things around in the house. He apologized for disturbing things, and said he didn't know whether he was host or guest, welcoming us back. It was wonderful to see him, but on the second day after our return he discovered that Kallikles and Phaedrus and I had powers.

“You have to take me to Delos,” he said to Father, as soon as he understood how it had happened.

“It isn't an unmitigated blessing,” Kallikles said. He hadn't found a way to tell Rhea about his powers yet.

Euklides looked at Kallikles with cold dislike. “Let me be the judge of that.”

Phaedrus wasn't home because he was going around the city healing everyone. I missed his friendly presence in the family argument. Neleus wasn't home either, but then I'd barely seen him since the first afternoon when we came back, when Father had sung to us in the garden. He was spending a lot of time with Nikias, and also with Erinna. He was also working hard, with Maia and Manlius, on arranging the conference.

“If there's another voyage, and if I have any say, I'll make sure you get to visit Delos,” Father said. “And Alkibiades and Porphyry if they want to go. And maybe I should arrange it for Fabius in Lucia too.”

“If there isn't another voyage, could we get there anyway?” Euklides asked. “Could you fly that far with me, Arete?”

“I don't know. It's a long way.”

“Could you fly to Amorgos and rest, and then to Naxos, and so on?” Kallikles suggested.

“I don't know. I've never flown carrying anyone for longer than that time with you by the rock. There's a big difference between flying for a few minutes and flying for hours. I'd want to try it somewhere I could land if I needed to rest, not over the open sea!”

“It's a possibility anyway,” Euklides said.

“I hope it won't come to that,” Father said. “They'll have to send the Lucians home at the very least. And I expect we'll have trade voyages, and missions of mercy helping the Lucians.”

“I wonder what powers I'll have,” Euklides mused. “It seems so random.”

Perhaps it wasn't as random as it seemed. I couldn't quite see how my own powers fit together, but my brothers' were beginning to make sense to me. I had spent one morning up on the mountain with Phaedrus, standing on the edge of the lava ready to swoop down and rescue him if he got into trouble. It didn't bother me to see him walk through the lava, or when he diverted the flowing stream around himself. But I could hardly look when he lay down and sank into it.

“Didn't you need to breathe?” I asked, when he came up after what felt like a long time.

“I could tell when I needed to,” he said. “And I did start to burn, but I healed myself.” And he had been thinking about developing an excellence of volcanoes before we went to Delos.

As for Kallikles, lightning and weather working certainly fit together. “Perhaps Zeus will devolve weather to you,” I suggested, when Kallikles demonstrated his lightning by blasting a rowan tree on the lower slopes of the mountain. There was nothing left of the tree but blackened roots at the edge of the little pool.

“I wish I could do that to Klymene,” was all Kallikles said. He wasn't getting over his anger at his mother. He was having fun with electricity, though. He could make the light-beams in Thessaly come on without touching the switches.

My own abilities didn't seem in any way coherent. They also weren't very useful. Nobody on Kallisti spoke different languages, so I never had the chance to use that ability. I already knew Greek and Latin. And I could only fly when I was sure I was unobserved. The truth recognition was useful, and I think that was why Father decided to take me with him on his missions to the other cities. Well, that and wanting me to sing the harmonies to “The Glory of Peace.”

Over the course of the next month I went on four embassies, accompanying Father on his new quest to end the art raids. His proposal was radically simple—everyone would return everything they had stolen, and then the art would be fairly distributed according to population. This had been Psyche's original proposition, which we had rejected with scorn the first time we had heard it. Mother had wanted to accept it, but back then she couldn't persuade enough people. Then the raids had started, and the honor of people and cities had become tangled up with them.

Father had three advantages in stopping the art raids now. First was the song, which really was a wonderful tool. It made people stop and think. We'd been trained to fight, but we'd also been trained to think and debate, and the song broke the cycle of raids and revenge by making people question why they were fighting and whether it was worth it. Secondly, because people generally liked and respected Father, and because he had been so vehemently in favor of vengeance for so long, his renouncing that now was very powerful—especially at home in the Remnant, where everyone had seen the force of his madness. Everyone had also heard what he'd done to Kebes, from those of us who had been there. To go from that to singing about peace and civilization and excellence made a powerful statement on its own. And thirdly, there were the Lucians. The specific way the Lucians were falling into timarchy was easy for us to see—the bloodsports and torture, and their focus on the physical side of life over the intellectual side. But their horror at our wars made us see that we were doing the same thing in our own way. The existence of the Lucians, and the need to do something about them, provided a new factor that made everyone refocus.

The people who really needed to be persuaded most were our own people at home in the Remnant. Most of the art was still safely there, and people had no desire to part with any of it. People tended to be especially attached to the art in their own eating halls. It wasn't difficult to get people to agree that the art in the temples and streets should be shared, but they tended to feel that the art in their eating hall belonged to them personally. I had heard Mother talking about this since the art raids began.

What Father proposed was that there should be an art conference, combined with a Kallisti-wide conference on deciding what to do about the Lucians. This was clever, because the Lucians were, or could be made to appear to be, a common enemy. Everyone in Chamber agreed on the foreign conference, and Father and Maia made the art conference seem like the thing that would make all the other cities agree to come.

We went to Sokratea first. Sokratea was our closest ally. They had never been much engaged in art raids against us, though they had raided the other cities. I had been there before, on a mission with Mother. This was not all that different. We sailed there on the
Excellence
, which remained in the harbor there while we stayed in a guest house.

Sokratea was a strange place. In some ways it was the least Platonic of all the republics, including Lucia's Christian Platonism. They didn't have classes, and they didn't separate out guardians from other people. They wanted to examine life, in the Socratic spirit, and they did that. They believed that Sokrates had been entirely right in the Last Debate. They read Plato, but in no very respectful spirit. They banned Masters from their city, but otherwise they had complete free speech and freedom of publication, and voted on everything, all the time. When Father addressed them he addressed the whole city from the rostrum in the agora—they had no Chamber and no committees.

“Doesn't public business get unwieldy?” I asked Patroklus, one of the Children whom I'd met the last time I'd been there. He came to our guest house and took us to eat with him in his eating hall, which was called simply “Six.” Their streets too were numbered.

“It does get unwieldy. It takes a lot of time,” he admitted. “But we find it's worth it.” The food was good; they gave us fish and cabbage and pasta. They had plenty of Young Ones, and lots of Children of course, but because they had refused entry to Masters, no old people at all. Nobody was any older than Father and Patroklus, and that felt strange to me as soon as I'd noticed it.

Father and I sang to their Assembly. I was nervous, even though I knew the harmonies really well by then. I'd never performed to so many strangers—and as Briseis I'd been wearing a mask. Now it was just my naked face. I felt a little sick before we started. But once Father played the first chord the music carried me with it. And it was all true. Peace was worth fighting for, defending, and in some circumstances attacking—to help another city put down a tyrant, for instance.

The people of Sokratea were moved by the music, and by Father's arguments. They agreed to send envoys to the conference, and, after much spirited and public debate, to send their art. “Not the art we have made here!” one woman insisted.

“Nobody is asking for that,” Father said. “Though some of it is excellent, and if you chose to circulate it I think everyone would be truly impressed by it.”

I stood in the crowd after we'd finished singing, watching the speakers, ready to let Father know if they were lying. Apart from some forgivable hyperbole, they were not.

The next day we moved on to Psyche. Psyche had been built entirely by humans, with no Worker assistance, and it bore a certain resemblance to Marissa and the other Lucian cities. They had lots of art visible, almost all of it stolen from us. The city was arranged in concentric rings around a small hill, and consequently was very difficult to navigate. It was supposed to be the physical model of the soul, but if so my soul didn't understand it.