The Just City (11 page)

“No, I suppose it's Hedonist,” Ikaros said. “But what Plato says about festivals and everyone drawing lots is like that. Eros separate from philia and agape. And every word Plato says about agape is about love between men.”

“What he says about agape between men with no thought of love between men and women being like that makes me think he didn't know any women who were capable of being seen as equals. Which from what we know about Athens at the time is probably realistic—women kept cloistered, uneducated, except for hetairas. But … if he didn't know any women who were people, how could he have written about women being philosphers the way he did in the
Republic
? It's in the
Laws
too.” I'd only recently read the
Laws
. “He must have thought about it a lot. And nobody ever listened to him in all those centuries they were reading him. I wonder how did he come to that conclusion? It's stunning.”

“I don't know. I suppose he must have met somebody. You'd only have to really know one woman with the right kind of soul to change your mind about their capabilities.”

“Axiothea?” I suggested. “I don't mean our Axiothea, but the original. The woman who came to him in disguise as a youth and was admitted into the Academy? Perhaps she made him realise it's souls that matter.”

“No, she came because she'd read the
Republic
, the same way you came here. It's mentioned in Diogenes Laertius. So he must have met women with philosophical souls before that.”

“Showing a philosophical soul doesn't work on everyone, unfortunately,” I said. “I wish Tullius would deign to notice the souls of the women here.”

While I had been staring out over the sea and talking, Ikaros had moved so that he was right beside me again. “I know you are afraid,” he said. “But I also know that you want it. I saw you start. There's nothing wrong with what we're going to do.”

“No!” I said. “No, really no, Ikaros, I don't want to!”

“I am stronger than you and it's too late to run away,” he said. “And you don't really want to leave, do you?”

I did. I tried to get up, but it was true that he was stronger, and that he knew what he was doing, which I did not. He had no difficulty wrestling me to submission. I screamed as he pulled off my kiton. “Hush now, hush,” he said. “You know you want it. Your breast likes it, look.”

“I don't care what my breast likes, my soul doesn't like it, get off me!”

“Your soul is timid and has learned the wrong lessons.” He rolled on top of me, forcing my legs apart.

“It's
my
soul, and up to me to say what I want!” I said, and screamed again, hoping somebody would hear even though we were too far from the city.

Nobody heard. “There, see, you like it,” he said as he eased himself inside me. “You're ready. I knew you were. You want it.”

“I do not want it.” I started to cry.

“Your body is welcoming me.”

“My body is a traitor.”

He laughed. “You can't get away, and I have taken your virginity now. There's nothing to fight for. You might as well enjoy it.”

My body unquestionably enjoyed it. In other circumstances it would have been delightful. My mind and my soul remained entirely unconsenting. Afterwards, when he let me go, I turned my back on him and put my kiton back on.

“There, didn't you like it?”

“No,” I said. “Having my will overruled and my choices taken away? Who could enjoy that.”

“You liked it,” he said, a little less sure of himself now.

I ignored him and walked away. I did not run because I was under the pines and it was completely dark and I'd have been sure to have banged into a tree. I could hear him blundering behind me. I ran cautiously once I was out where I could see by starlight, and made it back to the city. Klio, who was to serve the Sparta hall, which was finished, already had a house of her own, where Axiothea and I slept most of the time until our own houses were ready. I went there and slammed the door. I was shaking and crying. It was so humiliating to think that my mother and my aunt and those who had insisted on protecting me had been right all along.

“What's wrong?” Klio asked, getting up and coming towards me.

“Ikaros raped me,” I said, still leaning on the door.

“Are you hurt?” She hesitated. “Should I get Kreusa? Or Charmides?” Charmides was our doctor, a man from the twenty-first century.

“I'm not really hurt. I mean there's a bit of blood.” I could feel it sticky on my thighs. “And a couple of bruises. But nothing I need a doctor for.”

“I'm surprised at Ikaros. I wouldn't have thought he was that type.” She hugged me and drew me into the room. “Are you going to tell people?”

I hadn't thought about that. “I don't know. He'll say I wanted it.”

“You went off with him alone,” she said. “Lots of people would think you did want it. It would be your word against his, and I don't know what people would decide. Lots of the older men don't really see us as equals. And once everyone knows, everyone knows. You can't undo that. And you can't leave. There's nowhere to go.”

I understood what she meant. “I won't tell anyone. I never want to see him again.”

“I'm going to smack him myself when I get the chance,” she said, sounding really fierce.

“I thought he was my friend!”

“He thought you wanted it.” Klio sat down on the bed, drawing me down with her. “Men, especially confident bastards like Ikaros, always try to get their friends into bed. But actual rape? Did you say no?”

“I said no in both languages and at great length.” She snorted. “I screamed. He thought I was afraid because of Christian morality and that I wanted it really.” I wiped my eyes. “I don't know whether some part of me did want it. My body did. But not like that!”

“Not like that, no.”

“Does that mean he was right and I did want it? I felt that my body was a traitor. Does it make me a hetaira?”

“No.” She sounded really fierce. “If you didn't agree, then you didn't agree and it was rape, whatever your body thought about it.”

“Can I use your wash fountain?”

“Of course. Clean him off you. Wait—when did you have your period?”

“Last week,” I said.

“That's good.” I looked at her blankly. “You're probably not pregnant,” she expanded. “I'm assuming you didn't chew silphium beforehand, as you weren't planning on it.”

“No,” I said.

Klio frowned. “Do you think Ikaros would do it again? To someone else? Because if so then we should tell people, to protect them.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I don't expect anyone is as naive as I was, to go off with him like that, without realizing.”

“I can put the word around that women should be careful of him, without mentioning your name or the word rape,” she said. “Go on, shower.”

I didn't tell anyone else. I resigned from the Art Committee. I did not speak much to Ikaros on the Tech Committee. He kept saying things and giving me looks, clearly confused. Once I was sure I wasn't pregnant, I tried to forget about it. I made sure not to be alone with men, any men, ever. We were busy. It wasn't difficult.

A few days after my house was ready and I had moved into it, delighted to have a bed and privacy again, Ikaros waited for me after a meeting of the Tech Committee. Klio stayed with me, glaring at him. His confidence withered a little before the concerted force of our glares

“I've just come back from an art expedition,” Ikaros said. “I have something for you.” He gave me a big book wrapped in muslin. “Don't open it here.” He left.

Klio and I went back to my house, where I unwrapped it. It was a book of reproductions of Botticelli paintings, in English, printed on glossy paper and with a publication date of 1983. On the cover was the
Madonna of the Magnificat.

 

10

S
IMMEA

In Year Five of the city, when we were all nominally fifteen, it was finally Florentia's turn to learn astronomy. I'd been looking forward to it ever since Axiothea told us that it would involve more geometry. We began one crisp autumn afternoon in the Garden of Archimedes on the western edge of the city, where the big orrery and telescopes were. There were only nineteen of us. Astronomy wasn't considered essential, and as always we were short of masters. Only those selected could pursue it.

I enjoyed the orrery, and calculating the motions of the planets. Archimedes's own orrery was there, with his gearing, and another, not as beautiful, which Axiothea said was Keplerian and which showed the motion of the planets as ellipses. When darkness fell I enjoyed seeing the planets exactly where we had predicted they would be. I loved looking through the telescope and learning how to adjust it. Kebes was there, and my close friend Laodike, but not Pytheas. Delphi had studied astronomy the season before.

That first night they showed us all the spectacular things—the moons of Jupiter and the extra sisters in the Pleiades and the great galaxy of Andromeda. Walking back through the dimly lit city, I bade joy of the night to Laodike when we came to her house, which was Thyme, on the street of Demeter. Kebes came up beside me as we walked on. Our ways lay together almost all the way back. His sleeping house was Violet, which lay just beyond Hyssop, on the street of Hera. “You really enjoyed that.”

“I did.” I was still bouncing with excitement. “Just think. We can tell where Mars will be in a thousand years. In ten thousand years.”

“Who cares?”

I looked at him blankly. I couldn't see his face in the darkness. “I care.”

“Lucia,” he said, very softly. I started guiltily at the name. He stepped closer as we came to a sconce on the wall of the temple of Hestia. I could see his eyes glint. “Don't you see it doesn't matter? We're never going to Mars. Humanity may, one day. It may already have gone there, in the far future that they won't tell us about. But we've been deliberately brought into a sterile backwater of history where nothing we do can achieve anything.”

“We've been lucky enough to be brought to the Just City to have the one opportunity of growing up to be our best selves, Matthias,” I said, saying his old name as deliberately as he said mine.

“Oh, you're hopeless,” he said, walking on into the darkness. “They brought us here against our will, all of us. But you've swallowed it all whole. They've made you over into one of them.”

“And you aren't prepared to trust that anyone has good intentions, or anything at all!”

Just then a voice came from what I had taken for a statue of an old man next to a pillar on the steps of the temple. “What aren't you prepared to trust?” he asked Kebes.

“You,” Kebes blurted.

“Me?” the old man asked, coming out into the street and falling into step with us. “Well, you don't know me, you've never seen me before, I am a stranger who has only just come to this place, you have no reason to trust me. But you have no reason to distrust me either, so it seems that the maiden is correct in her assessment that you trust nothing. How did you come to such a position?”

“From meeting a great deal of deception,” Kebes said.

“Then you are judging a stranger by your past experience of humanity, that they are untrustworthy, and assuming that I am the same?”

“Yes,” Kebes said.

“Well, and you believe that the maiden is the opposite, that she is overly trusting?”

Kebes looked at him sideways and said nothing. The old man turned his bright gaze on me. There was something about the way his bright dark eyes met mine that reminded me of Ficino. But he really was a stranger, which was astonishing. I had never seen strangers come to the city since we had all come here at the beginning, over the course of a few days, five years before. There were masters I knew more or less well, and many of the children in other halls I barely knew at all, but after this time in which we had all been in the city they were all generally familiar to me by sight. This old man was entirely new to me. “So, do you trust everything as the youth says?”

“No,” I said. “I trust what I have found trustworthy.”

“And do you trust me?”

“I do,” I said. It was true, up to a point. I did instinctively feel that I could trust him. But this was a dangerous conversation. Although he was a stranger, he was an old man and must therefore be a master, and the real subject that Kebes and I had been discussing was about trusting the masters. Kebes could get into serious trouble if they knew what he had said. When he had run away before he had been a boy, now he was a youth on the edge of manhood. He'd be showing them that he hadn't changed, that they couldn't trust him. He could be punished.

“On what basis do you judge me trustworthy? Because I am a stranger to you just as much as to the youth here, who does not trust me enough even to enter deeply into dialogue with me.”

I thought hard about what I wanted to say, and spoke the truth but phrased it carefully. “I trust you because you wish to have a dialogue to discover the truth. And I trust you because you remind me of Master Ficino.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Ficino would like that!” he said. “So you judge me by your previous experience of humanity and it has been good, so you are in all ways the opposite of your companion.”

“No, wait. I don't have a good opinion of all humanity, but of Ficino, whom you resemble. And from what you say it seems you know him well, which gives me an even better opinion of you.”

“I have met him. I would not say I know him well. In what particulars do I seem to you to resemble him?”

We had come to Hyssop house, and I stopped in the pool of light from the sconce over the door. “Not in superficial details. For instance, he habitually wears a red hat and your head is bare. I trust Ficino, but because of that I would not necessarily trust any man in a red hat. You are both old men, but that's not important either. I wouldn't necessarily trust any old man without evidence of his trustworthiness. Your eyes are like Ficino's, and eyes are the mirror of the soul, or so I have read. Therefore I will say that your soul, in so far as I can discern it in the short time we have been conversing, resembles Ficino's, and on what better grounds could one assess the trustworthiness of a man than on his soul?”