“The Uffizi is a symbol of Medici power and the loss of the freedom of the Florentine Republic,” Ficino said, frowning.
“Then the Palazzo Vecchio,” I said, at once. “That was for the Republic, and it’s so beautiful.”
“Much too big,” Ikaros said, cheerfully. “Now for Ferrara, Lukretia has suggested we can do half of the castle.”
“How about the Palazzo Vecchio at half-size,” Ficino suggested, ignoring Ikaros and looking at me.
“I think that would be splendid,” I said, as affirmatively as I could.
“Or maybe we should have something in three parts, for the three parts of the soul,” he mused. “It’s going to be so wonderful to see the children grow up and the best of them really become philosopher kings.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said. “It’s wonderful to think we’re getting everything ready for them. Did anyone tell you yet that the Tech Committee have decided to go with full printing in both languages for the reproduction of books? So everything will be available to all of us through the library. And first, immediately after the complete works of Plato, we’re going to print the things Ikaros and Manlius rescued from Alexandria, so that all of us can read them.”
“Excellent,” Ficino said. “I shall volunteer to work on translations so that I can see things early.”
“New plays by Sophokles!” Ikaros exulted. “And the original works of Epicurus, and the Hedonists! I’m going to read them the second they’re printed.” He grinned. “I’m on the Censorship Committee, so I’ll get to them before anyone.”
6
SIMMEA
I learned to read, first in Greek and then in the Latin alphabet. Before the end of a year I was reading both languages fluently, though I had not known Latin before. There were many native Latin speakers among the masters, which made it easy to pick up. Even those who were not native Latin speakers knew it well, for, as they told us, it had been the language of civilization for centuries. I was soon speaking and reading both languages easily. I no longer noticed the slurring and softening accent so many masters had, or even the use of B for V. I had begun to speak Greek like that myself.
I began to learn history before they began to teach it to me, and I knew without examining it that this was the history of the future. We were living, they told us, in the time before the Trojan War. King Minos ruled in Crete and Mycenae was the greatest city on the mainland. Yet, although it had yet to happen, we knew all about the Trojan War—a version of the Iliad was one of our favorite books. We knew about the Peloponnesian War, for that matter, and the wars of Alexander, and the Punic Wars, and Adrianople, and in less detail about the fall of Constantinople, and the Battle of Lepanto. When I asked Ficino what happened after Lepanto he said it was after his time, and when I asked Axiothea, who taught us mathematics, she said that history got boring after that and was nothing but a series of inventions, the laws of motion, and telescopes, and electricity, and workers, and so on.
From the beginning, and by design, we rarely had a free moment. Our time was divided equally between music and gymnastics. Music came in three parts—music itself, mathematics, and learning to read, later superseded by reading. Gymnastics also had three parts—running, wrestling, and weights.
Gymnastics was fun. It was done naked in the palaestra. There was a palaestra shared between each two eating halls. Our palaestra was Florentia and Delphi, and it had rows of Doric columns for Delphi along the back and two sides, and exuberant Renaissance columns along the front, with a very elaborate fountain. I felt proud that Florentia had contributed the fountain. It was easy to love and feel pride in Florentia, that great city, with so many great scholars, writers, and artists. Ficino himself came from Florentia. When we came to dye and embroider our kitons, I embroidered mine with a running pattern of lilies, the Florentine symbol, and above them snowflakes, leaves, and roses, for Botticelli’s three seasons, which remained my favourite pictures. Above those I put a pattern of interspersed books and scrolls, in blue and gold, which so many people admired and asked permission to copy that it became quite commonplace.
Our palaestra stood open to the air, naturally, and the ground inside was made of white sand, which the hundred and forty of us churned up every day and the workers raked smooth every night. I soon stopped feeling conscious of nakedness—we all took off our kitons when we went into the palaestra, it was just what we did. I learned to use the weights, both lifting and throwing, and to wrestle, and to run. I was good at running, and was always among the first at races, especially at long distances. I soon learned that I would never excel at wrestling, being small and wiry, but found it good fun when matched against somebody my own weight. Weights, once I had learned how to handle them, were a delight, though there were always people who could throw the discus further and lift heavier weights than me.
The odd thing about gymnastics was that we didn’t really have enough teachers. Only the younger masters could teach it, and not even all of them. This oddity made me realise how few masters there were. There were two masters assigned to each dining hall, and just a handful of others. There were a hundred and forty-four dining halls, now completed with seventy children in each. That meant there were only two hundred and eighty-eight masters in all, or perhaps three hundred at most, to ten thousand and eighty children. I thought about the implications of this, and decided not to point this out to Kebes. He still muttered about wanting to overthrow the masters, but I was happy.
How could I not have been happy? I was in the Just City, and I was there to become my best self. I had wonderful food—porridge and fruit every morning, and either cheese and bread or pasta and vegetables every night, with meat or fish on feast days, which came frequently. On hot days in summer we often had iced fruit. I had regular congenial exercise. I had friends. And best of all, I had music, mathematics, and books to stretch my mind. I learned from Maia and Ficino, from Axiothea and Atticus of Delphi, from Ikaros and Lucina of Ferrara, and from time to time from other masters. Manlius taught me Latin. Ikaros, one of the youngest men among the masters, set us to read provocative books, and asked fascinating questions about them. Sometimes he and Ficino would debate a question in front of us. I could almost feel my mind growing and developing as I listened to them. I was twelve years old. I still missed my parents and my brothers, sometimes, when something recalled them to me. But little did. My life was so different now. Sometimes it truly felt as if I had slept beneath the soil until I awakened in the City.
In the winter of that year, Year Two of the Just City, just before I turned thirteen, I began my menstruation, and Andromeda, who was still the watcher for Hyssop, took me to Maia. Maia had a little house of her own near Hyssop, with a neatly tended garden of herbs and flowers. Maia made me a peppermint tea, and gave me three sponges and showed me how to insert them into my vagina. “One of these will last you for an hour or so on the first day, longer than that afterwards. You can probably leave the same one in all night unless you’re bleeding very heavily. You can clean them in the wash-fountains, never in drinking water. If you hold it under the running water all the blood will wash out. Insert a fresh one and let the first one dry in sunlight on the windowsill. Store them in your chest when you are not using them. Never use anyone else’s sponge or share yours with your sisters. Three should be all you need, but if you find you are bleeding too heavily and needing to change them often on the first day so that there is not a sponge dry when you need it, let me know and I will give you a fourth.”