“And later we can consider your Mysteries,” Sokrates said.
32
SIMMEA
We walked to Florentia and talked, and ate dinner and talked, and walked back to Thessaly and talked, and then Pytheas walked back to Hyssop with me in the dark, still talking. In addition to the questions of Pytheas and of the workers, it seemed that all ten thousand and eighty children and roughly three hundred masters in the city wanted to come up to wish me joy and tell me how pleased they were that I was better. That’s hyperbole, but only a little—it was good to know that I had so many friends and that I’d been missed.
“You were like a line-drawing,” Ficino said at dinner. “A thin rubbed cartoon of yourself.”
“Asklepius restored me,” I said. That’s what I told everyone, and it was the truth. Axiothea thought the iron lozenges probably helped. Everyone was delighted. If I’d still been sick I’d have wept at all the emotion they poured onto me. As it was I ate voraciously, three helpings of pasta and two of shrimp. Kebes came in when I was on my second plate and came to sit with us, filling in details about the workers as Sokrates talked. “I’m so glad to be able to talk to you, Simmea,” he said. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” I said, and it was true. “I was just too tired to care.”
When I’d finished eating, I filled the fold of my kiton with apples and cheese for later. As I did it, I realised something else that had changed. “My breasts! They aren’t full of milk!” I pulled down the front of my kiton to examine them. They were back to their normal small size and they didn’t hurt. There were pale marks on the sides of them, similar to the ones on my stomach where the skin had stretched, but otherwise they were as they had been before the pregnancy.
“Your melancholy must have been connected with the milk,” Ficino said. “How unusual. Well, there will be enough other mothers to feed all the babies, don’t worry.”
I hadn’t been worried until then.
As I pulled my kiton back up, I noticed Kebes looking away uncomfortably. I felt awkward. I hadn’t thought about it. Everyone had seen me naked in the palaestra, and this seemed no different.
Late that night, after all the conversation, alone in bed in Hyssop, I tried to settle to sleep, and couldn’t. It was as if I’d slept all the sleep in my exhaustion and there was none left. Whenever I started to doze I’d suddenly remember that Pytheas was Apollo and start fully awake. Apollo! How could I not have noticed? Now I knew there were so many indications.
Eventually I did manage to sleep. The next morning, immediately after eating two big bowls of lovely grain porridge with milk and honey, I went to the nurseries and explained to Andromeda that I had been cured of my lethargy and had no more milk to offer. She was incredulous even after she examined my breasts. She was pregnant herself now, and I sat with her for a little while, listening to her symptoms and being sympathetic. Then I went towards the palaestra. There was writing inscribed on the path, in Greek but in Latin letters.
“Want to make build. Want to make art. Want to talk. Want to decide.” There was a manifesto, I thought. Sokrates had explained the night before that the workers were being provisionally considered people, but not yet citizens. Would they all be iron and bronze, I wondered, or might some of them become silver and even gold? If Sokrates befriended them, surely they would. I smiled at the thought.
In the palaestra I exercised with weights, rejoicing in feeling back in form. Women who had given birth were not allowed to wrestle for six months, so I didn’t try, though I felt fit for it. I ran around and around and wasn’t winded. There was a chill wind blowing, but exercise soon warmed me. At last Pytheas came. He looked so delighted to see me that I ran over and hugged him, at which he looked even more delighted. “You’ve been exercising. Let me scrape you off,” he said.
We went over by the fountain with oil and a scraper. Pytheas and I had oiled each other hundreds, thousands of times, but this time I was acutely aware of the sensations. It was as if my sense of touch, from being deadened, was now twice as alive. “I’m so glad you’re better,” he said.
“Athene said it wasn’t a curse,” I said, as he scraped the oil off my legs. “But how could sickness affect my mind so that I lost all my animation?”
“Your mind is in your body, and there are a lot of things happening in bodies with pregnancy,” Pytheas said. “It’s one reason many men have claimed women cannot be philosophical.”
“It’s true that I couldn’t be philosophical when I was like that.” I hated the thought. “I couldn’t be anything. I could barely manage to hold out my shape in the world.”
“No. You couldn’t be. And you are sad one day every month, I have observed it.” Pytheas shook his head. “But the rest of the time you’re absolutely the most philosophical person I know, excepting only Sokrates.”
“And I’ve lost my milk. Ficino said it must have been connected to the illness, perhaps making me ill.”
“There are enough mothers still to feed the babies,” Pytheas said, scraping my breasts and stomach now. “Your little one won’t starve.”
“Have you seen him?”
He barely hesitated. “I have. He’s thriving.”
“What did Ficino call him? No, wait, don’t tell me. I’m not sure I ought to know.”
“Neleus,” Pytheas said, firmly. A good name, and I was glad to know. I swore in my heart to Zeus and Demeter that I wouldn’t act any differently towards him, but it was good to know in any case. “And your next son will be mine.”
“I’m not sure I can face going through that again,” I said. “Not so much the pregnancy and birth as the sickness after, now that I’ve shaken it off.”
Pytheas stopped scraping. “You’ll have to do it at least once more. All the women will have to have two children, and some of them will have to have three, because even if they’re not exposing them, some will surely die.” He sounded far too calm about it.
“Well, if I have to then—wait, would a son of yours be a hero?”
“Of course.” He sounded entirely confident.
“You’re the god Apollo,” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper and shaking my head. “I can’t get over it. You are, and you take it for granted.”
“I’m used to it,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”
Even Sokrates was used to it. He’d had three years to accustom himself to the idea, even if Pytheas hadn’t been talking to him about it. It was only to me that the idea was new and strange.
“What made you decide to become Pytheas? I know it was volition and equal significance, but what made you realise you needed to understand them?”
“That’s a long story, and I’d really like to talk to you about it, but not here where someone might overhear. Let’s go down to the water.”
I retrieved my kiton and shrugged it around me. I couldn’t believe how well I felt. I wanted to bounce and run and get all sweaty again now that all the old sweat was scraped off. We walked together down to the gate of Poseidon and down the curve to the harbor and the beach. As we went past the temple of Nike we could see the sea change colour out in the bay, where the deep water was, and the dolphins. “You couldn’t swim because normally when you want to you became a dolphin,” I said, realising.
“Human bodies aren’t made for it,” he agreed. “Dolphins are. I always said so.”
“But you wouldn’t give in,” I said. It was the first thing I had admired about him.