He stopped work and turned one of his hands to carve “Joy to you Maia!” into one of the damp marble blocks of the library wall. As was his custom, he carved the Greek words in Latin letters, which always looked peculiar.
I beckoned him over to where he could carve his responses in the paving stones of the street outside, some of which already bore his side of dialogues, sadly more practical and less philosophical than those that still lined the walks of the Remnant City. I asked him about the glass globes. “Can make,” he inscribed tersely. “How many?”
There were over two thousand of us Amazons, and we all desperately wanted light at night. We were used to it and hated doing without it. Some people had slunk back to the Remnant already for this reason, but most of us were made of sterner stuff. Everyone would want one. “Two thousand five hundred,” I said.
“In return?” he carved.
“What do you want?” I asked. How easily it turned to this, I thought, to trade and barter.
“Thomas Aquinas,” he carved.
“We don’t have it,” I said, surprised. “We don’t have any Christian apologetics. We didn’t bring them. You know we didn’t. We’ll read you anything we have.”
“Ikaros owns forbidden books,” he carved.
“He does? How do you know?”
Crocus just sat there in the fine drizzle, huge, golden, mud-spattered. I’d say he was looking at me, but he didn’t give any impression of having eyes or a head. With a shock of guilt I remembered my Botticelli book, full of forbidden reproductions of Madonnas and angels, with text in English. Of course. Ikaros had given it to me. What else might he have brought here?
“If he has it, then yes,” I said.
“Thomas Aquinas. In Greek,” Crocus wrote.
“If Ikaros has it, I’ll make him agree to translate it and read it to you,” I said. “If not, we’ll read you something else you want.”
“Display sculpture,” he inscribed.
“What? I don’t understand.”
“I make sculpture, for display in Amazon plaza.”
“Oh Crocus, but we’d love that. You don’t have to ask that as a favor. We’d regard it as an honor.”
“Will make bowls for lamps,” Crocus inscribed. He waited politely for a moment to see if I had anything else to say, then went back to his half-finished library roof. And there was his half of the dialogue, there in the marble for anyone to read. “Thomas Aquinas. Ikaros owns forbidden books.” Ikaros was no friend of mine. But I felt the urge to protect him nevertheless. No good could come of everyone knowing he had forbidden books. I took a piece of heavy wood from an unfinished house nearby and used it as a crowbar to pry up the heavy marble paving stone. Then I flipped it over so that the carving was on the underside and set it back in place. It was earth-stained and filthy compared to the other flags, but I hoped the rain would soon wash it clean. I went off to find Ikaros.
I wanted to talk to him in private, but I wasn’t the stupid young girl who had gone off to the woods alone with him, unconscious of anything but my own burning desire for philosophical conversation. I was over thirty now. I sought Klio about the city. She knew about my Botticelli book, and about the rape. She was pressing olives with a crowd of Children and couldn’t come immediately. She agreed to talk to Ikaros with me after dinner.
As luck would have it, I ran into him a few minutes later in the street. He was alone, coming toward me. It was raining more heavily now and my braid was so wet it was coming down from where it was bound up around my head. “I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Come inside,” he said, opening the door of a nearby house. “This is going to be Ardeia and Diomedes’s house.”
The house was complete, and held a large bed. “I don’t want to go inside there with you,” I said.
Ikaros rolled his eyes, half-smiling. “You’re not as irresistible as you imagine,” he said. “I have quite enough going with Lukretia.” Lukretia was a woman of the Renaissance. She had been the other master of Ferrara, and now she and Ikaros were sharing a house here. “But stand in the rain if you prefer. I shall keep dry.” He stepped inside, and I stood in the doorway, in view of anyone passing by. “Which of us are you afraid of, you or me?” he asked.
“I have quite enough going with Lysias,” I snapped. The trouble was that there was some truth in his accusation. I had always found Ikaros powerfully attractive. But that didn’t mean I wanted to be taken against my will, and he had shown me that he didn’t care what I wanted.
“What do you want me for then?” He grinned, and I scowled at him.
“Crocus wants Thomas Aquinas. In Greek. And he says you have it.”
Ikaros’s face changed in an instant to completely serious, as serious as I had ever seen him.
“I wasn’t going to do without books I needed,” he muttered.
“You took them when you were rescuing art?” I asked.
“You know I did. I got you that Botticelli book. It was more than anyone could bear, all those printed books, right there to my hand. I bought them, I didn’t steal them. And I didn’t contaminate the City with them.”
“Nobody says you did,” I said, but I shook my head. “You think rules are for everyone but you. How did you get them without Athene knowing?”
He ignored my question. “I have done no harm with the books.”
“You might be going to now. Who knows what Thomas Aquinas will do to Crocus?”
He grinned irrepressibly. “Have you read Thomas Aquinas?”
I shook my head. “I have never had the slightest interest in him, or anything else medieval. But I hear he’s extremely complicated, and you are going to have to translate him into Greek and read it all aloud.”
He looked horrified. “Do you know how long it is?”
“No,” I said, crisply. “Long, I hope. It’s what Crocus wants in return for making us glass bowls for lamps, and without them the lamps won’t give enough light for reading and working. So I think you’re going to do it, and as the book is still forbidden by the rules of this city as well as the original City, you’re not going to have any help doing it. And I think that’s going to be an appropriate punishment for bringing the book in the first place.”
It might have been unkind, but I couldn’t help laughing at the look on his face.
5
ARETE
For a long and terrible time, all that autumn and on into winter, Father insisted on getting vengeance for Mother and everybody else kept arguing with him because he clearly wasn’t being rational.
“It’s sad, and we’re all extremely sorry, but you’d think from the way you’re acting that we’d never lost anyone before,” Maia said.
Father didn’t say so to her, but the truth was that he’d never really lost anyone he cared about before, not lost them permanently the way he’d lost Mother. He said that to me and my brothers after Maia had left. He said it very seriously and as if he imagined that this would have been news to us.
“Who would have thought grief would crack Pytheas that way?” Ficino said to Maia, in Florentia, when he didn’t know I was listening.
It was true, though I didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was cracked, or at least cracking. It was a terrible thing to see. When he was alone with me he kept asking me if I could tell him why she’d stopped him saving her, and so I kept trying to think about that.
“Might she have been ready to go on to a new life?” I asked.
Father just groaned. After a moment he looked up. “She wasn’t done with this life. There was so much we still could have done. Sixty more years before she was as old as Ficino is!”