The Just City (2 page)

“Exactly.”

“Equal significance?” I asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Interesting. I didn't know that.”

“Well then, that's what you learned from Daphne.” Athene started to get up.

“I'm thinking about becoming a mortal for a while,” I said, as the implications began to sink in.

She sat down again. “Really? You know it would make you very vulnerable.”

“I know. But there are things I could learn much more quickly by doing that. Interesting things. Things about equal significance and volition.”

“Have you thought about when?” she asked.

“Now. Oh, you mean
when
? When in time? No, I hadn't really thought about that.” It was an exciting thought. “Some time with good art and plenty of sunshine, it would drive me crazy otherwise. Periclean Athens? Cicero's Rome? Lorenzo di Medici's Florence?”

Athene laughed. “You're so predictable sometimes. You might as well have said ‘anywhere with pillars.'”

I laughed too, surprised. “Yes, that about covers it. Why, do you have a suggestion?”

“Yes. I have the perfect place. Honestly. Perfect.”

“Where?” I was suspicious.

“You don't know it. It's … new. It's an experiment. But it has pillars, and it has art—well, it has very Apollonian art, all light and no darkness.”

“Puh-lease.” (That wasn't supplication, it was sarcasm. The last time I used the word it was supplication, so I thought I'd better clarify. But this was sarcasm, with which I am more familiar.) “Look, if you're about to suggest I go to some high-tech hellhole where they've never heard of me because it'll be a ‘learning experience,' forget it. That's not what I want at all. I am Apollo. I
am
important.” I pouted. “Besides, if they think the gods are forgotten, why are they writing about us? Have you read those books? There's nothing more clichéd. Nothing.”

“I haven't read them and they sound awful, and the only thing I want to get from high-tech societies is their robots,” she said.

“Robots?” I asked, surprised.

“Would you rather have slaves?”

“Point,” I said. Athene and I have always felt deeply uneasy about slaves. Always. “So what do you want them for?”

Athene settled back on her elbows. “Well, some people are trying to set up Plato's Republic.”

“No!” I stared down at her. She looked smug.

“They prayed to me. I'm helping.”

“Where are they doing it?”

“Kallisti.” She gestured towards where Thera was at the moment we were sitting in. “Thera before it erupted.”

“They're doing it before the
Republic
was written?”

“I said I was helping.”

“Does Father know?”

“He knows everything. But I haven't exactly drawn it to his attention. And of course, that side of Kallisti all fell into the sea when it erupted, so there won't be anything to show long-term.” She grinned.

“Clever,” I acknowledged. “Also, doing Plato's Republic on Atlantis is … recursive. In a way that's very like you.”

She preened. “Like I said, it's an experiment.”

“It's supposed to be a
thought
experiment. Who are these people that are doing it?” I was intrigued.

“Well, one of them is Krito, you know, Sokrates's friend. And another is Sokrates himself, whom Krito and I dragged out of Athens just before his execution. If Sokrates can't make it work, who can? And then there are some later philosophers—Platonists, Plotinus and so on, and some from Rome, like Cicero and Boethius, and from the Renaissance, Ficino and Pico … and some from even later, actually.”

I was suspicious, and a little jealous. “And all of these random people in different times decided to pray to you for help setting up Plato's Republic?”

“Yes!” she sounded wounded that I doubted her. “They absolutely did. Every single one of them.”

“I have to go there,” I said. I wanted to try being a mortal. And this was so fascinating, the most interesting thing I'd heard about in aeons. Plato's
Republic
had been discussed over centuries, but it had never actually been tried. “Where are you getting the children?”

“Orphans, slaves, abandoned children. And volunteers,” she said, looking at me. “I almost envy you.”

“Come too?” I suggested. “Once you have it set up, what would stop you?”

“I'm tempted,” she said, looking tempted, the expression she has when she has a new book she very much wants to read right now instead of fulfilling some duty.

“Oh do. It'll be so interesting. Think what we could learn! And it wouldn't take long. A century or so, that's all. And it'll have libraries. You'll feel right at home.”

“It'll certainly have libraries. What will be in them is another question. There's some dispute about that at the moment.” She stared off at the clouds and the islands. “Being a mortal makes you vulnerable. Open. Love. Fear. I'm not sure about that.”

“I thought you wanted to know everything?”

“Yes,” she said, still staring out.

We didn't have the least idea in the world what we were letting ourselves in for.

 

2

S
IMMEA

I was born in Amasta, a farming village near Alexandria, but I grew up in the Just City. My parents called me Lucia, after the saint, but Ficino renamed me Simmea, after the philosopher. Saint Lucy and Simmias of Thebes, aid and defend me now!

When I came to the Just City I was eleven years old. I came there from the slave market of Smyrna, where I was purchased for that purpose by some of the masters. It is hard to say for sure whether this event was fortunate or unfortunate. Certainly having my chains struck off and being taken to the Just City to be educated in music and gymnastics and philosophy was by far the best fate I might have hoped for once I stood in that slave market. But I had heard the men who raided our village saying they were especially seeking children of about ten years of age. The masters visited the market at the same time every year to buy children, and they had created a demand. Without that demand I might have grown up in the Delta and lived the life the gods had laid out before me. True, I would never have learned philosophy, and perhaps I would have died bearing children to some peasant farmer. But who can say that might not have been the path to happiness? We cannot change what has happened. We go on from where we stand. Not even Necessity knows all ends.

I was eleven. I had rarely left the farm. Then the pirates came. My father and brothers were killed immediately. My mother was raped before my eyes and then led off to a different ship. I have never known what happened to her. I spent weeks chained and vomiting on the ship they threw me onto. I was given the minimum of bad food and water to keep me alive, and suffered many indignities. I saw a woman who tried to escape raped and then flogged to death. I threw buckets of seawater over the bloodstains on the deck and my strongest emotion was relief at breathing clean air and seeing daylight. When we arrived at Smyrna I was dragged onto the deck with some other children. It was dawn, and the slope of the shore rising out of the water was dark against the pink sky. At the top some old columns rose. Even then I saw how beautiful it was and my heart rose a little. We had been brought up on deck to have buckets of water thrown over us to clean us off for arrival. The water was bone-chillingly cold. I was still standing on the deck as we came into the harbour.

“Here we are, Smyrna,” one of the slavers said to another, taking no more notice of us than if we were dogs. “And that was the temple of Apollo.” He gestured at the columns I had seen, and more fallen pillars that lay near them.

“Artemis,” one of the others corrected him. “Lots of ships here. I hope we're in time.”

From the harbour they brought us all naked and chained into the market, where there were men and women and children of every country that bordered on the Middle Sea. We were divided up by use—women in one place, educated men in another, strong men who might serve to row galleys in another. Between the groups were wooden rails with space for the buyers to walk about and look at us.

I was chained with a group of children, all aged between about eight and twelve, of all skin colours from Hyperborean fair to Nubian dark. My grandmother was a Libyan and the rest of my family all Copts, so I was slightly darker than the median shade of our group. There were boys and girls mixed indiscriminately. The only thing we had in common besides age was language—we all spoke Greek in some form. One or two of the others near me had been on my ship, but most of them were strangers. I was starting to realize how very lost I was. I had neither home nor family. I was never going to wake up and find that everything was back as it had been. I began to cry and a slaver backhanded me across the face. “None of that. They never take the snivelling ones.”

It was a hot day and tiny flies rose all around and plagued us. With our hands bound before us at waist level we could not prevent them from getting into our eyes and noses and mouths. It was a tiny misery among many great miseries. I almost forgot it when the boy chained immediately behind me began to poke at me with his bound hands. I could not reach him except by kicking backwards, which he could see and I could not. I landed one hard kick on his shin but after that he dodged, almost pulling the whole line of us over. He taunted me as he did this, calling me fumble-foot and clumsy-cow. I held my silence, as I always had with my brothers, waiting for the right moment and the right word. I could have poked the girl in front of me, who was one of the pale ones, but saw no purpose in it.

When the masters came we knew at once that they were something special. They were dressed like merchants, but the slavers bowed before them. The masters acted towards the slavers as if they despised them, and the slavers deferred to them. It was clear in their body language, even before I could hear them. The slavers brought the masters straight towards our group. The masters were looking at us and paying no attention to the adult slaves bound in the other parts of the market. I stared boldly back at them. One of them wore a red hat with a flat top and little dents at the sides, which I noticed at once, before I noticed his eyes, which were so surprisingly penetrating that once I had seen them I could look at nothing else. He saw me looking and smiled.

The masters spoke to each of us in Greek, asking questions. Several of them spoke strangely, with an odd lisping accent that slurred some of the consonants. The master with the red cap came to me, perhaps because I had caught his eye. “What is your name, little one?” He spoke good Italianate Greek.

“Lucia the daughter of Yanni,” I replied.

“That won't do,” he muttered. “And how old are you?”

“Ten years old,” I said, as the slavers had instructed us all to say.

“Good. And you have good Greek. Did you speak it at home?”

“Yes, always.” This was nothing but the truth.

He smiled again. “Excellent. And you look strong. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“I had three older brothers, but they are all dead.”

“I am sorry.” He sounded as if he truly was. “What's seven times seven?”

“Forty-nine.”

“And seven times forty-nine?”

“Three hundred and forty-three.”

“Very good!” He looked pleased. “Can you read?”

I raised my chin in the universal sign for negation, and saw at once that he did not understand. “No.”

He frowned. “They so seldom teach girls. Are you quick to learn?”

“My mother always said so.”

He sketched a symbol in the dust. “This is an alpha,
ah.
What words begin with alpha?”

I began to list all the words I could think of that began with alpha, among them, either because he himself put it into my mind or because I had heard it from the slaver as we came in, the name of the old god Apollo. Just as I said it the slaver came up. “This is a good girl,” he said. “No trouble. Still a virgin, she is.”

This was technically true, for virgins fetch more at the market. Yet that very man had emptied himself into my mouth the night before on the ship. My jaw was still sore from it as he spoke. The master with the red hat turned on the slaver as if he guessed that. “I should think so, at ten years of age!” he snapped. “We will take her.”

I was unchained and taken aside. About half the group were selected, among them the extremely fair girl and the boy who had been poking at me. I was glad to see a red mark on his shin from the one good kick I had given him.

The masters paid what the slavers asked, unquestioningly. I could see how delighted the slavers were, although of course they tried to hide it. They had made more for each of us children than they would have for a beautiful young woman or a strong man. We were roped together and led down to a ship.

I had grown up on the shifting shore of the Delta, seeing ships only far out to sea, before the pirates had come in to attack us. Since then I had seen only their slave ship. I could tell that this ship was different, but not in what way. It had no banks of oars and no great square sail, but two masts and a series of stepped sails. I later learned that she was a schooner, and sailed by wind and tide alone. Her name was
Goodness
.

On the deck of the ship a woman was sitting with her legs crossed, a book in her hand. One of the masters unbound the ropes from our hands and legs as we came aboard and we were led up to her in pairs. The woman seemed to be writing down the names of the children, after which they were led to a hatchway and disappeared. My own master, he of the red hat, led me up to her with my tormentor. “These two have saints' names,” he said. “Will you name them, Sophia?”

She looked up, and I saw that her eyes were grey. “Not I. You should know better than to ask, Marsilio. You name them.”