She opened her hands and showed me her pin. Gold. I hugged her. “You deserve it,” I said. “You really really do.”
She couldn’t speak. Around us people were reading their scrolls. “It’s so great that the masters get to pick things for us, things we’re really good at and that suit us,” Laodike said, earnestly. “I’d hate to have to choose. And think how limited it is in other places, where people are mostly stuck doing what their parents did whether they want to or not.”
“We’re lucky to be here,” I agreed.
Andromeda opened her own scroll. “Childcare training? But how? There aren’t any children!”
“Yet,” Damon said. “There’s a festival of Hera this summer. Maybe by next year there will be a whole crop of children for you to tend. Better learn fast!”
“You sound as if you’re looking forward to it,” Andromeda said.
“Aren’t you? Hey, Simmea, if there are a thousand silvers, and a festival three times a year, how long before I’ve had sex with all of them?”
“Three hundred and thirty-three years,” I said at once, then thought about it some more. “No, wait, it’s more complicated than that. I’m not sure. It might never happen. But it wouldn’t work that way. Some women will get pregnant each time and not be available next time. And how do you know there are a thousand silvers?”
“Just a guess,” he said. I wondered how many would be gold. Would it be three hundred years before my name was drawn with Pytheas?
Eventually the ceremony dragged to a close and we went back to the our halls. Kebes came up and hugged and congratulated Klymene, who was the only person I knew who hadn’t gone into the ceremony feeling fairly sure where they belonged. Laodike was a trifle disappointed to be silver—she had enjoyed astronomy so much, and hoped for gold.
“I’m lucky we met Sokrates that night,” Kebes said to me.
“We both are.”
“You’d have been gold anyway. I’d probably have been iron.” Since we met Sokrates, Kebes had really appeared to be trying to be excellent. I’d heard Ficino saying that there never had been such an improvement in a boy.
I saw Septima, from the library, talking to Ficino. “She’ll be gold,” I said, confidently.
“Did they ever tell you they’d chosen your design?” Kebes asked.
“Master Ikaros told me last night. You were there.”
“I know, but did anyone officially tell you?”
I shook my head. “I expect they wanted it to be a surprise.”
“They should have announced it and given you the honor.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter. It’s enough of an honor that I’m going to see everyone wearing them.” I stroked mine. “And that they thought it good enough.”
The next day we cut our hair and made our vows at the temple of Zeus and Hera, to serve and protect the city. From then on we were considered adults, though we kept on calling ourselves children, to distinguish us from the masters.
Our days were different after that. For one thing the houses were restructured, so that everyone in a house was of the same metal. Klymene and I remained in Hyssop with five other girls, two from Delphi, Makalla and Peisis, one from Ferrara, Iphis, and one from Naxos, Auge. Andromeda and the others moved out to be with their own kind. It felt strange, but I was glad not to be the one who was moving. Maia said we could choose who would be the new watcher. At my suggestion, we chose Klymene.
The seven of us were all in the tribe of Apollo—nobody had changed tribes in the reorganization. They also continued to belong to their original cities. But they slept in Hyssop. This would have been more awkward except for the rule that we could now eat anywhere we were invited. It meant that they could eat in their old halls with their old friends when they wanted to, or eat in Florentia with us in the mornings when time was short. It was good—but it changed everything. It meant that we didn’t necessarily all see every other Florentine every day, and there were often different people in the hall, especially at dinner. Florentia was a popular dining hall, partly because of our food but mostly because it was so very beautiful. Eating where we were invited made us all mingle and know each other better. Before summer came I had eaten at least once in each hall. Venice had a wonderful Apollo and Juno by Veronese, Cortona had Signorelli’s The Court of Pan, and in Athens, where Septima took me one day with Pytheas, was a breathtaking statue of Lemnian Athena. Hardest to get into was Olympia, but eventually I met Aristomache with Sokrates and she invited me for dinner. Thus I got to see Phidias’s astonishing Nike, which if I were forced to choose is probably my favourite statue.
The other different thing was our schedules. Before this, almost all of Florentia did the same things at the same time every day, with a few exceptions like astronomy and the sessions with Sokrates. Now we were all doing different things. Some of us still had every moment scheduled. Others, and especially we golds, had a reasonable amount of flexibility as to how we spent our time. For music I did mathematics and read in the library. I had very little supervision in reading. Masters might suggest books to me, and occasionally a request for a book was denied. Otherwise I was free to read what I wanted to—which was mostly philosophy and logic. I still did mathematics with Axiothea, which was always fun. Art was something for my free time, which I experienced now for the first time. I could go to the studio and work on my paintings and designs whenever I wasn’t expected anywhere else, and I often did.
I continued to spend hours in the palaestra—but I decided which hours they would be. The way Maia explained this to me was that we were to pursue excellence as seemed best to us, now that we knew what it was and that we wanted it. Children need guidance; adults can learn to guide themselves. Most of all I pursued excellence by debating with Sokrates. Kebes and I took to following him around in the mornings, when he talked with anyone he ran into.
Soon, well before the summer, I perceived a problem. Before the new year, anyone whom Sokrates befriended was clearly destined to become a gold, and we all were duly awarded gold pins. After that, Sokrates continued to befriend people, but now their status was fixed. Only golds were supposed to study philosophy and rhetoric. But the masters couldn’t very well stop Sokrates from going up to people and asking them about their work. They couldn’t stop him from inviting whomever he chose to come back to Thessaly for conversation. Sokrates was famous. All of the masters revered him practically by definition—they were here specifically because they revered Sokrates, after all. They didn’t want to stop him behaving the way he had always behaved. They had loved to read in the Apology about how he was a gadfly sent by the gods to Athens. Now he was their gadfly, and they weren’t as happy about that. He was upsetting their neat system, and he knew it. He would laugh about it.
“How can they know who is the best?” he asked in one of our debates. The four of us were alone in the garden of Thessaly, eating delicious fried zucchini flowers stuffed with cheese that Kebes had brought from the Florentine kitchens.
“They observe us,” I said. “They see who is best fitted for each task. My friend Andromeda is motherly and loving, and she was assigned to learn childcare. I am interested in debate, and I am assigned to learn rhetoric with you.”
“Good. But how about Patroklus of Mycenae, who only became interested in debate the day before yesterday? He has been assigned to learn how to care for goats and sheep. Now he wants to debate.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s what he’s best suited for,” I said. “He might be best suited as a shepherd.”