“Will you swear to behave civilly to me in front of Simmea?”
He was silent for a moment. I kept the pressure on. “Yes,” he said at last. “Civilly.”
“Do you swear?”
“By what?”
“By all that you hold sacred,” I said. “Do it.”
“I swear by God and the Madonna and Saint Matthew and my own true name that I will be civil to you in front of Simmea,” he said, and I let him up. He spat blood onto the sand in front of me and stalked away. He was limping, but then so was I.
And that was Kebes. He hated and distrusted me, and when I made him swear an oath he swore truly, and kept it. It was strange. He swore only to get out of my power, but he put himself more into it than ever. If I had chosen to denounce him to the masters for the gods he had chosen to hold his words, he could have been punished—flogged, even cast out of the city. Perhaps that was what he wanted. But he kept the letter of his oath—he was thereafter just barely civil to me if Simmea was there.
If I had been my real self I would have thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the garden of Thessaly talking with Sokrates and giving double-tongued answers. As it was, there was a knife-edge of fear running under it all. It didn’t stop me enjoying it, it didn’t stop me being aware of the delight of dappled shade and sharp wits. It was just another thread underlining everything.
Don’t think I was upset that Sokrates wasn’t happy to be in the Republic, even if he might be actively trying to undermine it. Nobody actually thought this was going to work perfectly. Plato had thought of it as a thought experiment. He’d been trying to design what he thought of as a system for maximizing justice, according to his best understanding of the world. We knew his understanding of the world was flawed—look at what he believed about the gods. All the same, it was such a noble idea when Plato had it, such an improvement on any of the ways to live he saw around him. It was of the classical world, but better. His understanding of the world and the soul were mistaken. But his city had never been tried before. This was the experimental proof. It needed to be able to stand up to Sokrates.
Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn’t to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there. The masters were always envious of the children, that was obvious to me from the first. Athene and I certainly didn’t imagine it would really work the way Plato described it. We knew too much about the soul to hope for that. What was interesting was seeing how much of it could work, how much it really would maximize justice, and how it was going to fail. We could learn a lot from that.
“What will you teach?” Kebes asked Sokrates.
“I will teach rhetoric,” Sokrates replied. “It is a powerful weapon, in the right hands. I will teach small groups like this one, and I shall go about this city asking questions and discovering answers and seeing where those questions and answers lead us. For instance, who can we trust?”
Kebes looked at me, and I smiled cruelly back at him. The irony of the situation was not lost on me. Sokrates knew who I was. Kebes did not know who I was and did not trust me, nor did I trust him. Simmea did not know who I was and trusted all of us. She was looking from one to the other of us, leaning forward with her hands on her knees, looking like a chipmunk. “I think it’s the wrong question,” she said. “Trust isn’t an absolute. You can trust somebody for some things and not for others. I can trust Kebes not to break his word, but I can’t trust him to strive for excellence. I can trust Pytheas to do just that, always, but I can’t trust him to understand without an explanation why I am weeping if he finds me weeping.”
“So we might trust a person for one thing and not another?” Sokrates asked.
“Yes. And trust has an emotional component. When you asked me last night whether I trusted you and I replied that I did, that was an instinctive and emotional trust and only secondarily a logical one.”
“So before we can ask who we trust, we should ask in what way we can trust them, and in what way we do trust them.”
“Who do you trust?” I asked Sokrates.
“Have we established that the gods are divided and can be trusted in some circumstances and not in others?” he asked. “So that Odysseus was right to trust Athene and would have been wrong to trust Poseidon?”
“Yes, Sokrates,” I said obediently. “I believe we have established that.”
“Then I trust the gods who mean me well and distrust the gods who mean me harm. I have no way to distinguish them unless the gods themselves appear to me and disclose their intentions, or unless I send to ask an oracle. Perhaps I should do that, send to Delphi and Dodona and Ammon, those ancient oracles that are established even in this time. Then perhaps I would know if Apollo and Hera and Zeus were well disposed towards me.”
“You needn’t send to Delphi. You know Apollo has been well disposed towards you all your life,” I said, carefully. And it was true. Sokrates was one of my favourite people of all time.
“You said so in the Apology,” Simmea said, helpfully. “In your speech before the Athenians, that is. If Plato recorded accurately what you said.”
“Plato was there, though I don’t remember him taking notes,” Sokrates said. “I didn’t read that one. I remember that speech very well. It was only the other day.”
“So beyond Apollo—” Kebes began, but Sokrates interrupted, looking at me.
“I could trust Apollo in my mortal life, but I was brought here against my will by divine intervention, so can I still trust him?”
“Athene brought you here,” I said, which was weaseling really. I had known she intended to, and hadn’t objected to her doing it. But I loved him and certainly meant him well, and he was not wrong to trust me. “She brought everyone here. Many of the masters have talked to her, and have talked to us about talking to her.”
“She was on the ship when we came,” Simmea said. “Ficino called her Sophia.”
“That was Athene?” Kebes asked. “How do you know?”
“She had grey eyes.”
“Lots of people have grey eyes,” Kebes said, scornfully.
“And Ficino called her Sophia, which means wisdom.” Simmea went on, unruffled. “She was on the ship, and important, writing down names, and Ficino deferred to her. But she isn’t here. She isn’t one of the masters. She was owl-carrying Athene, and she was there to make the ship come here through time.”
“That does seem conclusive. I wish I’d known,” Kebes said. “I could have done something.”
“What?” Sokrates asked. “How would you fight a god?”
“Not by what I’d have done when I was twelve—not pushing her overboard or trying to tear her head off.” Kebes hesitated. “I don’t know how to fight a god. Do you know?”
“Until today I wasn’t sure whether the gods truly concerned themselves with us, and I only knew that they existed as part of a set of logical inferences which turn out to be based on a false assumption,” Sokrates said.
“What false assumption?” I asked, curious.
“That they were good,” he said, looking directly at me unsmilingly for a long moment. I don’t know what he saw in my eyes. The knife-edge had cut through me and it was very sharp.
“Good and well-meaning are different matters,” I said, after a moment.
“Wait, are you saying that to overthrow the masters we’d have to fight the gods?” Kebes asked.
Sokrates turned to him. “Ah, Kebes, I see that you have learned to trust, at least to trust that I will not report what you are saying.”