In this way he was a true friend of the soul, as Plato says, the friend who draws one on to excellence.
Sometimes I felt I couldn’t do as much for him; that once I had taught him to swim I had nothing left to do for him. Then I realized that I could help him be friends with the others. In many ways Pytheas was more like the masters than he was like the rest of us. He had an air sometimes of putting up with things that amused other people. This was why some people thought him arrogant. Once you were in the middle of a conversation with him it was often fascinating, but sometimes getting there was difficult for him, as if he didn’t know how to start. It was difficult for him to adapt what he knew and thought to other people’s interests and understanding. I could see both sides of it—I loved talking seriously, but I could also be childish sometimes and have fun. With my good friends I could have real conversations, and I could make a bridge between them and Pytheas so that he could be a part of these conversations. In that way I helped him by widening the circle of people with whom he could share some part of his mind. I would sometimes wonder about other ways I could help him. In the same way I thought about laying down my life for the city, I pictured doing it for Pytheas—if he had needed a kidney, or a lung, or my very heart, I would have lain down gladly before the knife.
The only one of my friends who refused to like Pytheas was Kebes, who persisted in seeing him as arrogant and sycophantic to the masters. In fact Pytheas was anything but sycophantic—he treated the masters as equals, or even inferiors. But he was polite to them and gave them consideration, even when they were not with us. Kebes continued to despise the masters and the city and everything about it. He mocked the masters when he was out of their hearing. He kept his hatred warm despite everything. He had even tried to run away once or twice in the early days, only to discover that we were on an island about twenty miles across and with no other islands in sight from the coast. He had, like all the children who had run, been found and brought back, and thereafter talked to about the benefits of staying. Kebes appeared to be reconciled, but he never truly was. He was waiting only until he became a man and could persuade others to steal one of the city’s two ships, the Goodness or the Excellence.
“What will you do with it?”
“Sooner or later they will have to teach us to sail them,” he said. “We will make for somewhere, either a civilization where we can live free, or a deserted island where we can found our own city.”
“What city could be better than this?” I asked.
“A free city, Lucia, where we could use our own names, and would not be forced into the molds of others.”
I liked the mold that was made for me, but Kebes could never be content under anyone’s direction. He had a silver pin for his prowess at wrestling, but he mocked it in private.
Pytheas, by fitting into the city, by speaking respectfully of the masters, and by being my friend, offended him by his very existence. Kebes could not legitimately wrestle Pytheas, being a head taller, but he said that if he did he would try to break his nose. I think this simple dislike had imperceptibly become jealousy. I was fifteen. Pytheas was fourteen, for he had told me that he had truly been ten when he was bought. I do not know how old Kebes truly was—sixteen or even seventeen, I think. Perhaps Kebes too found Pytheas attractive, and did not want to acknowledge being drawn to anything of the city. Or perhaps he was jealous of my attention to him. Once, when he came upon me making a charcoal sketch of Pytheas, he snatched the paper from me and tore it up. Before I grew to know Pytheas, Kebes had been my only close male friend.
I did not like to think that Kebes felt he owned me. Nor did I lie awake imagining scenarios in which I sacrificed myself to save Kebes’s life. But I liked him. And although I loved the city, I also liked to feel, through Kebes, that I was free—free to freely choose the city over Kebes’s idea of freedom. Kebes offered me an alternative, even if I rejected it. I never reported his talk to the masters or to Andromeda, as I knew I should have. It did no harm, I reasoned, it might even do him good to talk, and if he ever came to the point of being ready to steal a ship I could report it then—or let him go, why not? The City did not truly need two ships, and what use were unwilling minds?
In the autumn of the Year Four we held the great games of Artemis, which were celebrated by footraces and swimming races for girls, and by hunting. The hunting came first, so that the victims could be offered as a sacrifice and eaten at the festival. We went out as whole halls, seventy of us together, with our masters. Florentia and Delphi, who did most athletic things together, divided up into two roughly equal groups. I went with Ficino. We never came near a beast, but we had a wonderful time in the hills. Maia scrambled about with the rest of us, but Ficino rode. We took nets and spears and bows strapped onto another horse. I loosed an arrow at a duck once, but missed. We stopped by a spring and ate the rations we had brought, apples and nuts and cheese. Laodike got stung by a bee, and we managed to track down the hive and take the wild honey, at the cost of several more bee stings. Ficino considered the honey a worthy gift for Artemis and so declared the hunt over.
The other group’s hunt was from all accounts more dramatic. They actually found a boar in a thicket and faced it down with spears and nets. Accounts of what happened next differ. Axiothea refused to talk about it. Atticus told me that Pytheas behaved with exemplary bravery, and saved several lives. All Pytheas would say was that he had only done what anyone would have done. Klymene said that she had been a coward and could no longer face anyone. Trying to untangle all this, and get accounts from the others who had been there, it seems that Klymene had fled, exposing Axiothea, and Pytheas had leapt in and made the boar run up his spear, in the best poetic style. So far so good. But later Pytheas had said something to Klymene that she could not forgive, and neither of them would tell me what.
I tackled her alone in the wash-fountain shortly after dawn the next morning. “Did he call you a coward?”
“No. Well, yes. But I am a coward. I understand that now.”
“Anyone can panic in a moment like that, if the boar was rushing towards you,” I said, soaping myself to avoid looking her in the eye.
“Anyone with iron in their veins,” Klymene said. “But no. Anyone can call me a slave-hearted coward and I will just agree with them. I was tested and I fled.”
“I’ve never been in a situation like that. I might have done the same.”
“You! You’re always fierce.” Klymene shook her head. “You’d never have run. That’s one of the things that makes me so angry.”
“Then what did he say?” I really wanted to know.
“You’ll hate him if you know,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt your friendship. I know you really care about him.”
“I really like him, he is a soul friend. And I like you too and I want to reconcile the two of you if I can, but if I can’t at least I want to understand what happened!” I leaned back to rinse my hair. “If he is as bad as you say then I want to know that, and not give my friendship where it is unworthy.” I didn’t really think I was doing that.