“Well, might there be something she felt she had to do and could do better in another life?”
“What?” he asked, staring at me from red-rimmed eyes. I had no idea and just shook my head.
Embassies were sent under sacred truce to the other cities. None of them admitted responsibility for the raid, or that they had the head of Victory. This was unusual, but it wasn’t unprecedented. They had lied before, on occasion. Only Father took it as proof that Kebes had stolen the head and killed Mother. The Goodness wasn’t sighted again, and then winter closed in, with storms that made the sea dangerous. When Father proposed organizing a naval expedition to find and destroy Kebes’s Lost City, even more people were sure he was cracked with grief. I wasn’t old enough to go to the Chamber or the Assembly, but people were talking about it everywhere.
The worst of it was that I was having to deal with Father being like this while also trying to cope with my own grief. It was bad enough that Mother wasn’t there to walk in and set everything right with a logical sensible explanation from first principles. But she also wasn’t going to finish embroidering my kiton or trim my bangs or teach me how to integrate volumes. My throat ached because I wanted to talk to Mother about Ficino’s project about assessing how philosophical cities were. But my grief, awful as it was to suffer, was cast into insignificance by the mythic scale of Father’s grief. It was all like the first afternoon when he was crying so much that I couldn’t cry at all. Her absence was like a presence, but Father’s grief was like a huge sucking whirlpool that threatened to sweep everything up and carry it away.
Another thing that didn’t help was that every one of the Children, my parents’ whole generation, had lost their home and parents when they were ten years old. Compared to that, losing Mother when I was fifteen shouldn’t have been anything to cry about. Only Maia seemed to understand. She took me for a walk along the cliffs and told me about losing her father, and how she had lost her whole world and her whole life with him, and all her books. “You still have your books,” she said, encouragingly. “You can still read and study. Philosophy will help.”
I thought about that. Reading did help, when it took me away from myself, when I had time to do it. But it was history I read, and poetry, and drama. Playing Briseis helped. It was a distraction. Philosophy required rigorous thought and didn’t seem to help at all. It all seemed wrong, but refuting it was always hard work. I knew Maia, who definitely had one of Plato’s philosophical souls, wouldn’t understand that. But there was something philosophical I thought she might be able to answer. “Plato says that people shouldn’t show their grief. It seems to me that Father is doing exactly what Plato says you shouldn’t do.”
Maia put her hand on my shoulder comfortingly. “It’s hard to argue that he isn’t! But you have to let Pytheas deal with his own grief while you deal with yours. He’s a grown man, and you shouldn’t be worrying about how he’s grieving. Simmea wouldn’t have wanted you to bottle it all up any more than she’d have wanted Pytheas to howl his out.”
I stared away from her. Clouds were boiling up out of the east and the sea was the color of cold lava, flecked with little white wave-caps. It was hard to believe it was the same sea where I swam in summer, warm and blue. I could see the rocks where Mother and I had often pulled ourselves up to sit for a while before turning back, where I had first been introduced to dolphins. The sea was lashing them now, an angry note of black rock and white spray. The wind was cold and I was glad of my cloak. “It’s so difficult,” I said. “And I can’t just ignore Father. But no ships can sail in this weather.”
“Even Pytheas doesn’t want to send out his expedition until spring,” Maia said.
“I don’t think she would have wanted vengeance,” I said. I had tears in my eyes, but the cold wind carried them away to fall salt into the salt sea.
“I don’t think so either, but I don’t know how to convince Pytheas of that. He calls it justice, but it’s vengeance he means. He just won’t listen—he seems to listen and then he just goes on as if I hadn’t said anything. I don’t understand it. After my father died I didn’t want revenge. But then, there wasn’t anything to revenge myself on—he died of disease. If there had been something, maybe it would have been different. It’s natural to grieve.”
“But it’s not natural to howl?”
Maia shook her head. “It may be natural, but it’s not philosophical. And Simmea was a true philosopher. I miss her too.” She hesitated. “I don’t think any of us understood quite how much Pytheas needed her. This excessive grief doesn’t seem like what I’d have expected of him. He has always been so calm.”
My brothers were no help at all. They had their own grief, of course. “Why did I fight with her so much?” Kallikles asked rhetorically.
“I wish I’d told her how much I loved her,” Phaedrus said.
“I keep wanting to tell her things, and then realizing she’s not there to tell,” Neleus said.
But none of them could really understand how I felt, or how Father felt. They all wanted to join his revenge, once he organized it. I did too. Wrestling and throwing weights in the palaestra gave me a temporary relief. I did feel sometimes that it might have made me feel better to go out with a spear and something clearly marked as an enemy to stick it into. But I knew enough philosophy already to know that it wouldn’t help much. Mother would still be dead no matter how many enemies we sent down to Hades after her. And how could it be just to want vengeance, to return evil for evil?
Erinna was a great comfort, when she had time for me. She was nineteen, a silver, and she had real work to do, learning to sail the Excellence and fighting in the Platean troop. She was my friend, and she had loved Mother. She was lovely-looking, with olive skin and fair hair, which, since she had been assigned to the ship, she wore cut short on the nape of her neck but still curling up over her broad forehead. When she was free she listened to me talk and often did things with me to distract me. She even organized our calculus class into working on our own. Axiothea, one of the Masters from Amazonia, came over once to help us. Erinna was really kind to me during this time, and I treasured every moment I could spend with her. But she was frequently busy, and much in demand, and I didn’t want to waste too much of her precious free time. And naturally, I couldn’t explain to her about Father properly, because really explaining about Father would have meant talking about his true nature.
Erinna is the one who suggested that I should try to write an autobiography. She said that writing things down sometimes helped her to come to terms with them. She said that Mother had told her that, years before. Because it was her advice, and before that Mother’s, I began it, and I found that like wrestling, it helped at the time. So I dealt with my grief by writing autobiography, working hard at the palaestra, and reading history.
The other person who really helped was Crocus. Crocus is a Worker, a robot, and he had been a close friend of Mother’s. We had long ago worked out a way for the Workers to write in wax so there wasn’t a permanent engraved record of every time they wished somebody joy, but he always carved what he wrote about Mother into the paving stones. He wanted to talk about debates they had shared, and he took me to the places where they’d had them. His responses were engraved into the marble, and it comforted us both when he engraved what Mother had said beside them, making them into full dialogues. He knew all about death and what happened to human souls—at least as much as anyone else. But he worried about his own soul, and Sixty-One’s, and the souls of the Workers Athene had taken with her after the Last Debate. We had enough spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-One to last indefinitely, but he wondered whether he should want his soul to move on. He wondered if he would become a human or an animal or another Worker. He mused about why Plato never mentioned Workers. Crocus could always distract me from my own thoughts. Sometimes he would come into Florentia and join me and Ficino when we were debating.