It was a few months after that when a boy deliberately shoved me in the palaestra when I was lifting weights, knocking me off balance and making me fall. He wasn’t anyone I’d especially noticed before, a Florentine and not a Delphian. Yet he acted as if he had some grudge. I didn’t understand it. I tried to talk to him about it and he pretended it had been an accident. After that I thought about some other incidents that had seemed accidents—spilled food, spoiled work—and wondered about them.
I went to Axiothea, one of the two masters assigned to Delphi. She taught mathematics to both Delphi and Florentia. I believe she came from the first years of Girton. I told her about the incidents, and asked her if she had any idea why they had happened.
“There will always be some who see excellence and envy it instead of striving to emulate it,” she said. “We aim to eradicate that as far as possible, but you are children, after all.”
“But everyone loves Kryseis, and she’s the best at gymnastics,” I said.
“She’s terrible at music, and she laughs at herself,” Axiothea said. “You’re good at everything, and seemingly without trying.”
I shrugged. “I try.”
“You’re too old for your years. When the rest of them grow up a bit, you’ll make some friends.”
I hadn’t realized I didn’t have friends, but it was true. I had companions, people to wrestle with, people who asked me for help with their letters. I had six boys who slept in Laurel beside me whose jokes I endured. The problem was indeed that my mind was not twelve years old. The only real friend I had was Athene, and of course our friendship was thousands of years old and subject to the usual constraints of our history and context. Besides, she had the same problem. She dealt with it by taking on a strange status halfway between child and master, and retreating into the library, where she was always most at home. But she had a way out if she wanted one. She could transform herself back into a goddess at any moment. I didn’t have that luxury. Having taken it up I had to go through this life. I would have to die to resume my powers. That had seemed almost exhilarating at first, but it intimidated me now. Unlike mortals, I knew what happened after death. But unlike them, I had never died.
And then I tried to learn to swim, and I couldn’t. Always before, learning things had been easy, both as a god and as a mortal. But as a god I’d never known how to swim in human form—if I’d wanted to swim I’d always transformed into a dolphin. Now this earnest copper-skinned Florentine girl was telling me to relax and lie back on the water, and every time I tried, seawater went up my nose. It was the first time I had ever failed at anything when I wasn’t being directly thwarted by the will of another god—and over something as trivial as swimming. I couldn’t let it defeat me. I felt an actual lump in my throat—not tears in my eyes, which are as honourable and natural as breathing, but a hot lump in my throat, as if I would cry shameful tears of defeat and frustration. Then Simmea thought of another way to teach me, a dangerous way, dangerous to both of us, but she risked it. It was difficult and sensual and strange, but at last I swam, or half swam.
And I had made a friend, a courageous friend who would risk her life for my excellence. That felt like even more of a victory.
8
SIMMEA
I had lots of friends, but Pytheas was different. It took a long time to teach him to swim. He mastered it eventually through sheer force of will. He was never especially good at it, but he knew enough not to drown and could propel himself through the water with a surging stroke. I thought I would see less of him once he had mastered the art, but he continued to seek me out. We were, that year and the next, about the same weight for wrestling. But the thing that really brought us together was our shared love of art.
In the city, art was supposed to open our souls to beauty, and also to set a good example. When I looked at Michaelangelo’s bronze Theseus at the Isthmus, with his foot set on the head of the giant Kerkyon, I was supposed to want to emulate Theseus and kill giants to protect my homeland. Of course, I would willingly have gone up against any giant that was threatening Kallisti, had I not been trampled in the rush. But Kallisti was an island extremely lacking in giants or other such threats. There were no cities there but our city. We never saw strangers. Had it been needful, I would have given my life for it without a second thought. But this was not what I thought of when I saw the Theseus. My strongest emotion was an ache at how beautiful it was, and a great admiration for Michaelangelo’s skill in creating it. That humans could do such things made me long to emulate them, to follow them in creating beauty. If this was a possible thing, it was a thing I wanted to do.
Pytheas was constantly creating, though he did not always share what he made. He wrote poetry and songs. He could play the lyre and the zither better than anyone else I knew. Whenever he was set any exercise in music—whether music alone, music with words, or words alone—he excelled at it. He was marvellous in the Phrygian mode and even better in the Dorian. Under his influence I tried hard, and did improve at writing poetry and music.
My true love was given to the visual arts. I loved to embroider my kiton and cloak and to devise new patterns for this. I often embroidered for my friends. In the spring of the Year Three I was chosen to embroider a panel for the great robe of Athene. I chose blues and soft pinks and greys, and made a running pattern of owls and books. I loved this kind of work. Later that year I finally learned stone carving, and early in the year after metalwork, and finally painting. Painting was wonderful. It was what I had always wanted. It let me bring together color and line, and set down the pictures I could see in my head, even if they never came out quite the way I wanted them. At first I was terrible, but after I learned some technique I managed a sketch of Pytheas as Apollo playing the lyre, and a larger painting of Andromeda and Kryseis reaching the victory line in the games. I was almost happy with that as a composition. I had caught their expressions, and the contrast of light and dark in their hair and skin was pleasing. I would go back to eat in front of the Botticellis and know that I had so much to aspire to. Most days this would fill me with hope and delight, and only when I was bleeding or something had set me down would it seem an impossible burden to have a target so impossible to reach.
In the way the city was ordered, sculpture, painting and poetry were considered among the arts of bronze. I still wore the silver pin I had won in the races, but I began to look at the work of those whom the masters gave bronze pins, and think that I was not far from their standard. I made a mold for some cloak pins with a design of bees and flowers, and thought that they could be cast in any metal. Of course I continued to work in the palaestra and the library. That year we learned to ride and to camp, and saw much of the rest of the island. Most of it was set with crops, tended by diligent workers, but some of it was wilderness, especially around the mountain in the centre. The mountain sent up smokes and steams from time to time, and near the crest there were sometimes rivers of lava that were still warm. We always went barefoot. Laodike burned her foot once when we were running up there. Damon and I had to help her home and we got back long after dark.
Laodike was a good friend, and so was Klymene, who had a very sharp mind. She always had something funny to say about everything. I could go to them with my little troubles and uncertainties, and they would be ready to hug me and reassure me. Pytheas never did this. He didn’t seem equipped for it. If I forgot and complained to him about some little thing that was bothering me he never soothed me. He always wanted either to distract me or, if it was possible, to do something about it. This peculiarity stood out all the more because he was the only one who did understand about art. He didn’t think it was a charming decoration or a useful moral exemplar, he agreed that it really mattered. If I showed him my designs he never praised them unless he truly thought them good. His standards were exceedingly high. Often when I had something that would have been good enough for everyone else, I made it better because I knew he would see it.