The Just City (29 page)

“Not far,” Aristomache said. “And it's good that they're this close together already. It means it'll be quicker.” We came to the nursery then. There were two steps up. “You can't come in,” she said to Pytheas. “You have to let go.”

“Yes,” he said, but he didn't let go. “You'll be all right. And the baby will be all right.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you. Let go now. I have to go in.”

“You'll have to let go first,” he said. I let go, and then he did and took a step back. I hadn't realised how tightly I'd been clutching his hands. He had white marks across all his fingers.

I turned then and went inside before the next pain came.

Klymene prided herself on only screaming once. I lost count of how many times I screamed during childbirth. Aristomache stayed with me for an endless while. She stopped saying that it would be over quickly. She helped me try to find positions that were more bearable—standing holding on to the bed was best, and lying flat was worst. She rubbed my back and talked to me rationally in between pains when I was able to talk. She was very concerned about the workers.

“It's going to be difficult to explain to the Chamber. Too many of the masters come from times when slavery was acceptable.”

“Sokrates said that slavery in Athens wasn't so bad.” I took a sip of water from the cup Aristomache had brought me. “That's not what it was like where I came from.”

“It's not what it was like where I came from either,” she said. “People barely thought of slaves as being human, and they had no realistic prospect of freedom. They'd sell a husband and wife apart, or a mother and her children. Their masters could kill them and not have to account to anybody. The whole system was rotten. And they couldn't even run away without being caught and brought back.”

“Even if they went to another city?” I asked.

“They were all dark-skinned, and the masters were all pale-skinned, so even if they went to another city they would be caught. They had to go to the places that let them be free, and that was a long hard journey. Some of us helped them escape. But the law could make them go back. It was the most unjust thing imaginable.”

“So just because of what I looked like I'd have been a slave?” I asked. “Because my grandmother was Libyan?”

“As a dark-skinned woman you'd have been—when I imagine it as you it's unbearable. But there were probably girls just as smart and talented as you in that terrible unjust situation.”

A pain came then and I held on to the bed while Aristomache supported me with her arm. I screamed. Afterwards I panted for a little while as the memory of the pain leaked away. “Were you a slave for long?” she asked, when I was capable of answering again.

“I'm supposed to have forgotten,” I reminded her.

“Never mind that. Were you?” Her brow was furrowed, but I could not tell whether it was distress or worry or anxiety.

“Not very long. They captured me in a raid on my village. I was on the ship, and then in the market. It was half a month, perhaps a little more. Long enough to see some terrible things.” I drank again and sat down on the bed. “My parents were farmers. We only had one slave, an old woman who helped my mother. She'd been born a slave. She'd been there my whole life. We loved her and she loved us, or I think she did, especially my older brothers. Her life wasn't all that different from ours. She was more like an old aunt than a servant. She used to tell us what to do, even my mother. But once when the harvest was short I heard my father talking about selling her. It didn't happen. But it could have.”

I don't know what she would have replied. I had to rush to the latrine-fountain, where both my bladder and my guts let go of the entirety of their contents in an imperative rush. Another pain took me when I was there. Afterwards I felt so unsteady I had to lean my head on the tiles of the wall for a moment. When I came back, Axiothea had joined Aristomache in the birthing room. They helped me up onto the bed, where I leaned back against the wall as they looked up my vagina. “Opening up slowly,” Axiothea said. “You'll get there, Simmea, don't worry.”

“She's being very brave,” Aristomache said, giving me some water.

“I'm not. I've been screaming.” I sipped the water. It felt good in my mouth but was difficult to swallow.

“That's normal,” Axiothea said, briskly. “I'll stay with you now for a while.”

“I'll see you in a day or two,” Aristomache said. She kissed me on the forehead. “I'll tell Sokrates and your friend that everything is going well.”

Axiothea stayed for some time, but in the end it was Maia who delivered my baby, late in the darkest part of the night, just before the dawn. I suppose it's true that birth is a Mystery, a Mystery of Ilythia and Hera. It was the thing in my life that made me feel most like an animal. I was so caught up in it, in the pain, in the urgency of it, that there was no getting away from it. Against pain like that, against the body's mystery, there is no philosophy. But I was in the hands of the goddesses, and while I can remember that there was pain and that it racked me, I can't remember what it felt like. I can remember finding positions to stand, and later squat. I gave birth squatting up on the bed. I remember talking to Aristomache, I remember Axiothea and Maia being kind and explaining to me what was happening. I remember the waters breaking in a great gush. I remember the urge to push, and holding Maia's hand as I did push, until she had to prise my fingers off to check on the progress of the baby's head.

The baby didn't look as I had imagined him. He was darker-skinned and chubbier, and smeared with blood. He howled indignantly as if the world was an affront. His eyes were screwed tightly closed, and at once I imagined how the light must hurt him, after living so long in the watery dark inside me. It was a revelation—light itself was new to him! Everything was. Absolutely everything. He had thrust himself out of me knowing nothing at all. He had everything to learn, light and darkness, eating, speaking. Even breathing was new to him. Everything was for the first time. And here he was, not in my time or Aristomache's, he was safe in the Just City, where he could become the best self he could be.

Maia put him down on the top of my belly, under my breasts. He was warm, which I hadn't expected. “Hold him there,” she said. “You're bleeding, and you have to push down hard again to get the placenta out.”

I put my hands on the baby, who quieted a little at my touch but continued yelling. The inside of his mouth was surprisingly pink, and he had no teeth. His hands were tiny but perfectly formed. He formed a fist and then opened his tiny fingers out. The palm of his hand was paler than the rest of his skin. Maia pushed down on my stomach and I pushed obediently again and expelled a huge disgusting mass which looked like a big piece of uncooked liver, complete with tubes. Maia looked at this horrid thing in a pleased way. “That's all of it. Good.” She went away with it and came back with a clean damp cloth. “Try to put him to the breast now and see if he'll take it, while I clean you up.”

The baby didn't seem interested in my nipple when I tried to coax it between his lips, but he stopped howling. I kept trying as Maia wiped between my legs. The cloth looked alarmingly bloody when she was done.

“Am I all right?” I asked.

“Do you feel bad?”

“I feel terribly sore down there, and I'm about as exhausted as I have ever been.”

“That's normal,” she said, smiling. “You've been here all evening and most of the night. You're bleeding, but not too much, and I don't think you need stitching. You'll bleed for a while, probably half a month. Today and tomorrow you should use these paper pads bound between your legs. After that you can probably use your normal sponges.”

I kept trying, but I couldn't persuade the baby to suck. “Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it with babies who already know what to do, while this little scrap gets his nourishment from a mother who knows,” Maia said, lifting him off me and starting to wipe him clean. He began to wail again, and I ached to soothe him. He looked so small in her competent hands. Through the window the first red fingers of dawn were brightening the sky.

“Who chooses his name?” I asked.

Maia grimaced and put the baby against her shoulder, where he calmed to quiet whimpers. “Oh Simmea, you know perfectly well you should think of all the babies being born now as yours, and not this one in particular.”

“I know,” I said, surprised. “I do. I will. I didn't mean anything like that. But … who does decide his name? You?”

“Ficino, generally, for the Florentine babies. He has a knack for naming and he likes doing it. He'll come around after breakfast and name him.”

I liked the thought of Ficino choosing the name, if I couldn't. “Ficino named me,” I said, comforted.

“You can't name him. It would make too much of the connection.” She wrapped him in a white cloth, twisting it expertly.

“Choosing names for them would? Not carrying them in our bodies for all these months and then going through all that?”

She shook her head. “Choosing his name, knowing his name, would mean you'd single him out among the others as yours.”

“But I want to,” I said.

Maia was cradling my baby against her now, and he lay peacefully in her arms. “You need to think of all of them as yours. You're a guardian. That doesn't just mean you wear a gold pin and talk to Sokrates; that means you'll eventually be one of those guiding the city. You want to do what's best for everyone, not just for your own family. We don't want you to favor this little boy because he's yours when he might not be the best. We want you to choose the ones who are the best to be made gold when their time comes.”

“That makes sense,” I acknowledged. But even as I said so I could feel tears rolling down my cheeks.

“We do know there's an instinctive bond,” she said. “But it's better for everyone, for you, for him, for the city, to break it now. Love all your brothers and sisters, not one husband or wife. Love all the children, not just the ones of your body.”

“Love wisdom,” I said, sniffing. “I do love wisdom, Maia, and I love the city, and you'd better take him away now.”

She took him out of the room. I could hear him begin to howl again, then as she went away the sound of his wailing grew quieter. She came back with a different baby, a girl, much bigger, pale-skinned and blue-eyed. Maia showed me how to nurse her, and as she had said it helped that the baby already understood. “It'll be a day or two before there's proper milk, but this will help it come,” she explained.

She sat down beside me. “In my time, if you'd had a baby at eighteen it would have defined your life. You'd have had to look after it whether you knew how to or not. You'd never have had time to be a person or to think. You'd have been a mother and that's all.”

“Aristomache said that. She said she had to choose between love and children, or a life of the mind.”

“Aristomache was one of the lucky ones who had the chance to choose. Lots of women were stuck without any choice. Here you can have the baby and still have your life. You don't appreciate how fortunate that is, how few women have ever had that through all of history.”

It was true if I could trust them, and for the most part I truly did.

“Even here and now, more of the burden falls on women,” Maia went on. “I'm in here helping you right now, not in my room reading or thinking, where the male masters are. And you're giving birth while whoever the father is sleeps peacefully. But you won't be here helping the next generation through labor and wiping up the blood. You'll be organizing which of the iron girls do that work.”

The pale baby let my nipple fall out of her mouth and Maia took her away. When she came back I had almost succumbed to exhaustion.

“Are you falling asleep?” Maia asked.

“Sorry. I was. I should go back to Hyssop.”

“You can sleep here. It's probably not a good idea for you to walk just yet. Lie and rest where you are. But while you're still awake I want to say something. You really are going to be one of the people making all the decisions here. Lots of the masters are old. Even those of us who were relatively young ten years ago are getting older. When these children grow up even we will be old. You'll be the ones watching them and deciding who pursues excellence, who among them will be gold and silver, or bronze and iron. It's a big responsibility.”

“It seems so far away when we can't make any decisions at all now. We can't even read the
Republic
, even though we're going to be the ones making it work.”

“You're still so young,” Maia said, pulling a cloak up over me. “You still have a lot to learn, and a lot of wisdom to acquire. But one of the things Plato says in the
Republic
is that the purpose of the city isn't to make the guardians the happiest people in the world, it's to make the whole city just. It's absolutely true that you might be happier if you could have one lover or if you could know which was your own child. But the whole city would be less just. Think about that.”

My eyes were closing, and I let them close. I could hear her moving things around and then leaving the room. I could hear a baby, not mine, crying somewhere, and then the sound stopped. I was more exhausted than I had ever been from running in armor. I slipped down towards sleep. If Plato had been trying to maximize justice, what did that mean? This was the Just City, of course it was, we had always been told that. But why justice, not happiness, or liberty or any other excellence? What was justice really? I smiled. I'd have to debate it with Sokrates when next I saw him. I could be sure he'd be onto it like a terrier after a rat.

 

27

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