“These are marvellous,” I said, and then went on, forgetting that I should not talk about my earlier life. “My mother used cloths that were horrible to wash.”
“Mine too, and so did I before I came here,” Maia said. “This way of managing menstruation is one of the lost marvels of the ancient world. The sponges are natural. They grow under the sea. Workers harvest them for us.”
I turned the two clean sponges over in my hand. They were soft. “Am I a woman now?”
“You were born a woman.” Maia smiled. “Your body will be making some changes. Your breasts will grow, and you might want to pleat your kiton so it falls over them. If they grow very big so that they flop about and feel uncomfortable when you run, I will show you how to strap them up.”
“What will—” I stopped. “What happens here about marriage?” I realized I’d never heard a word about it, nor even thought about it since I had come here. All of the masters lived alone, and all of the rest of us were still children.
“When all of you are older there will be marriages, but they will not be like the marriages you … should not remember!” Maia said. “No need to worry about it yet. Your body is not ready to make children, even if bleeding has begun.”
“When will it be?” I asked.
Maia frowned. “Most of us think twenty, but some say sixteen,” she said. “In any case, a long time yet.”
Then she took down a book. “Long ago I promised to show you Botticelli’s Spring,” she said.
Spring was as marvellous and mysterious as the other three seasons. I tried to figure it out. There was a girl at the side, and a pregnant woman in the centre with flowers growing around her. “Who are they all?” I asked. “Are those the same flowers that are growing in Summer?” I glanced at the opposite page of text for help, and was astonished to see it was in the Latin alphabet, but a language unknown to me. I looked inquiringly at Maia.
“It’s the only reproduction I have. Nobody knows who they all are, though some think she’s the goddess Flora.”
I stared back at the picture, ignoring the mystery of the text. “I wish I could see the original at full size like the others.” I turned the page and gasped. It was Aphrodite rising from the waves on a great shell. Maia leaned forward, then relaxed when she saw what it was.
“I really wish you could have seen the original of that one,” she said. “It’s so much better than the reproduction. It fills a wall. There are strands of real gold in her hair.”
“When will we be taught to paint and sculpt?” I asked, touching the picture longingly. The paper was glossy to the touch.
“We don’t have enough masters who can teach those things,” Maia said. “Florentia should have a turn next year, or perhaps the year after. Ideally, you’d have been learning all along. Meanwhile, I was intending to ask you if you would teach some beginners to swim in the spring.”
“Of course,” I said. Growing up in the Delta, I’d been swimming for almost as long as I’d been walking. I had won the swimming race at the Hermeia, as well as coming in second in the footrace. I’d been given a silver pin for these accomplishments, which had been the proudest moment of my life. Silver meant bravery and physical prowess. Only gold, for intellectual attainment, ranked higher, and nobody I knew had a gold pin yet.
Maia put her hand out for the Botticelli book. I took a last look at the Aphrodite and gave it back. She turned the pages and showed me a portrait of a man in a red coat. “We don’t know who he was, some scholar of the time I’ve always thought.”
“I love his face,” I said. “Is that picture in Florentia too?”
“Yes,” Maia said.
“Perhaps I’ll travel there one day.”
“It wouldn’t do you any good. You know they haven’t been painted yet.” Maia smiled.
“Maybe I’ll go there in the time when they have been painted. When I’m grown up and finished being educated, I mean.”
“No.” Maia looked serious now. “No, we’ve been brought here out of time by Pallas Athene for a serious purpose. We’re here to stay now, all of us. We can’t go wandering about in time on expeditions to look at pictures.”
“Why not? Pictures are important.”
“Art is important only as a way of opening the mind to excellence,” Maia said, but she didn’t sound very sincere. She took the book back and closed it. In the seconds I could see it I noticed that it had a circular picture of the Madonna on the cover, surrounded by angels. She put it on a high shelf with other books.
“Oh, please!” I said.
“You know I can’t show you that. I probably shouldn’t have shown you this book at all.”
“How is it that we have the nine Botticelli paintings that we do have?” I asked.
“They were going to be destroyed and we rescued them,” Maia said.
“Mother Hera!” I didn’t often swear, but I couldn’t stop myself blurting it out. “Destroyed!”
“Yes, some terrible things happened in that future you’d like to visit to look at paintings! You’re much better off here. Now, go to bed, and let me know if you need any more sponges.”
I bade her joy of the night and went off thoughtfully down the street. The city looked especially beautiful by moonlight. I raised my arms and murmured a line of a praise-song to Selene Artemis. But my mind was buzzing, not with thoughts of menstruation and marriage, which I had almost forgotten, but with Botticelli. The mysterious figures gathered around in Spring. The smile of his Aphrodite. The thought that our nine paintings would have been destroyed. Was that true of all the art in the city, I wondered? Had Phidias’s gold and ivory Athene in the agora been rescued? How about the Herm I had been crowned before, the one with the mysterious smile? What about the bronze lion on the corner I always patted as I went by? I stopped to pat him now, and the moonlight found an expression of sadness on his bronze face that I had never seen before. His mane had fantastical curls, which I stroked, tracing the whorls. He seemed so real, so solid, so impossible to harm. It was my bleeding body making me sad for no reason, I told myself. My mother had talked about that. But it was true about the Botticellis, Maia had said so.
I gave the lion a last pat and turned to take the last few steps to Hyssop and my bed. All the art, saved, as we children had been saved? But saved for what purpose? Saved to make the city? A worker trundled past, unsleeping, off on some errand in the dark. Had they been saved too? And from where? I opened the door and wondered if I would ever have answers to these questions.
The next summer I taught eleven children to swim with no difficulty. The twelfth was Pytheas. He was a boy from Delphi, so I had seen him at the palaestra, and wrestled with him once or twice, but I did not know him well. I had noticed how beautiful he was, and how unconscious he seemed to be of it. He had an air of confidence that was not quite conceit. I had friends who disliked him because he was so lovely and seemed so effortlessly good at everything. I had been inclined to go along with them without examining why. Teaching him to swim made us friends.
As with the first eleven non-swimmers, I took Pytheas down the slope of the beach until we stood in chest-deep water. Then I had him lie back onto my hand, to learn how the water would support and cradle him. The problem was that he couldn’t relax. It didn’t help that he had essentially no body fat—every curve on his twelve-year-old body was muscle. But Mother Tethys is powerful; he would not have sunk lying back with my palm flat in the small of his back, if he could have found a way to do that. He tensed immediately, every time, and jerked back under the water. The exercise was meant to teach trust of the water, and he couldn’t trust it enough to learn it. Yet he wanted to learn, he wanted it fiercely.