Now he looked up, and it was Neleus he looked at. “You are indeed her only son. She loved you very much. It almost killed her soul having you. She hated to give you up. She was so glad to get you back! I remember it so well, when we first brought all of you here.” He looked around the room, shaking his head at the memory. “She loved all of you, but Neleus was indeed her only son.”
Then he looked at me, and I saw he must have been aware of the little noise of protest I made. “You are her only daughter, and the only child of her milk.”
“What difference does milk make?” I asked, puzzled.
“All the difference in the world,” he answered, as if he thought I should know this already. “Mothers give their milk to their children, and with it their strength and their stamina, their ability to survive disease. There’s a bond in that milk.”
“And I didn’t have her milk?” Neleus asked in a small voice.
Phaedrus answered quickly. “You know you didn’t. You’ve read what Plato says, no mother shall set eyes on her own child—they went to the nurseries when their breasts were full and fed some random child who was there.” Phaedrus shook his head. “She might have fed me, but never you.”
Everyone except me had read the Republic. Reading it was now part of the adulthood rite for our city.
“She fed you the night you were born, Neleus,” Father said. “She told me so. But after that you were fed by any woman but your mother, and the same for the rest of you. No doubt Plato meant it to even out the advantages given by the milk, so that all could share with all.”
“Plato was crazy on some subjects, and that was one of them,” Kallikles said dismissively. “Father, where are you going with this line of argument?”
Father hesitated. “I don’t remember.” He looked over at Mother’s bed, where Phaedrus was sitting, and then quickly away. Mother often used to be able to see when Father got ahead of himself and give him his next point. She had a way of laughing as she did it that I could almost hear. Father wiped his eyes with the corner of his kiton. “I just can’t lose all of you as well as her.”
“You’d be lost too,” Phaedrus pointed out.
“I’d be back on Olympos, and you’d all be in Hades after having achieved very little in this life. You’re heroes. Arete asked what that means. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t live like heroes.”
“I’m going,” Neleus said, stubbornly. “I’m not a hero, but I am her son, and I am going on this voyage.”
“We’re all going,” Kallikles said. “It won’t be all of your sons, Father. Alkibiades and Porphyry and Euklides would still be on the island even if the ship sinks. And how can we live as heroes if we don’t get the chance to join the one heroic venture in our lifetimes so far?”
Father looked from one to the other of them, then he slowly set down his cup, got up, and went out of the street door.
“Where are you going?” Kallikles asked, but Father kept on walking and didn’t answer.
“Where is he going?” Phaedrus asked.
Since nobody else was going to, I got up and followed Father. He was walking aimlessly south down the middle of the street. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“To visit the lion,” he said.
I put my hand through his arm. “I’ll come too.” I knew the lion he meant. It was a bronze statue of a lion on a street corner near Florentia. Mother had been especially fond of it. One of my first memories was walking to visit the lion, one of my little hands held in each of my parents’ big ones. We walked down briskly through the night’s chill that made me wish for my cloak. Father felt warm, but then he always does. I don’t know if it was his divine fire burning even in his mortal incarnation or just a natural warmth. We reached the lion, and he patted it the way Mother used to. I patted it too. The lion’s face was very expressive, but it was hard to say just what it expressed. It seemed to change from time to time. Tonight the shadows made it seem worried. We turned around and walked back toward home.
It was a cold night and the stars were burning bright and clear, so distinct that I could see colors in some of them. “I can see all the stars in Orion’s belt,” I said.
“We’ll go there one day,” Father said.
I looked at him, startled. “You and me?”
“People,” he clarified. “They’ll settle planets out around those distant suns, one day, far ahead. I haven’t been there yet. I’m always reluctant to leave the sun. But eventually I will, and you will too. I promised your mother I’d see her out there one day.” He wiped his eyes.
“But what does it mean?” I asked. “She might be out there on another planet far in the future, but she won’t remember us, or her life here.”
“No,” he agreed, sadly.
“And the civilization that settles the stars won’t be our civilization. They won’t have learned anything from this experiment, they won’t know anything about the Just City except the legend of Atlantis in the Timaeus and Critias.”
“Time is so vast—they probably wouldn’t anyway,” he said. But as he stared up at the stars he began to weep again. We walked on in silence.
“I had not meant this grief to unman me so,” he said quietly, when we were getting close to Thessaly.
“It might be better on the ship. Here everything reminds us of her,” I said.
“The boys are right. They are men, and heroes, and they have to act as they think best. I can’t keep them children, or keep them safe.”
“I’m going,” I said, guessing where this conversation might be going. “The Chamber have approved me. I’m going!”
“Arete,” he said, then stopped and began again in a different tone. “And you have to decide for yourself too. Equal significance means letting people make their own choices. But it’s so difficult! Do you think she wanted me to learn this and that’s why she stopped me?”
“It’s possible,” I said. And then I dared to say what I’d been thinking for a long time now. “She would want you to command your grief with philosophy.”
“I know,” he said, bleakly. “Oh yes, I do know that. I shouldn’t be sad and I shouldn’t indulge my grief. She is gone on to a better life. I should remember her and love the world for her. I know all that. I really do know it. But knowing it doesn’t actually help at all when I want to talk to her so much my whole body aches.”
“I know,” I said. “I miss her every day.”
“I wish I understood why she wouldn’t let me heal her. It might all make more sense if I could understand that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I shivered.
“Come on, we should go in and tell the boys they can ask the Chamber if they can go on the voyage.” He was trying to sound cheerful. “And we can have more wine. Arete—do you think revenge will actually help me feel better?”
“No,” I said, surprised into honesty.
7
APOLLO
“How now shall I sing of you, though you are a worthy subject for song?” That’s from the Homeric hymn to me—the same line is in both Homeric hymns to me actually, the Delphian and the Delian. Mortals find it intimidating to write about me, sometimes. It’s as if they think I’ll be listening over their shoulder. I find myself thinking it writing this, about Simmea and Sokrates, about Ficino and Maia and Pico. How shall I sing of you? I promised Father there would be songs.
There are already songs on Olympos about the sorrows and miseries of humanity and how badly people deal with death, and certainly there are songs enough about those subjects sung by mortals. I had felt grief myself often before. But this grief resisted being transmuted to art. You have to understand that transmuting emotion into art is what I do. It’s one of the reasons I like emotions. But this emotion was bigger than I was. It’s not that I didn’t try to write songs for Simmea. I tried to write them, and for the first time my art failed me. I wrote songs, but they were pale thin things, they would not catch fire. They were true enough, but they left so much unsaid. I wanted vengeance, and yet at the same time as I struggled so desperately toward it I knew that revenge wasn’t really what I wanted. I knew that art would come. It always had. The depth of this grief was different and unusual, and so would be the songs that came of it. Her name would live forever, as would her soul. That was the only way I could comfort myself, and it was thin comfort. Meanwhile, I was making an even poorer job of being a human being than usual. I was developing more sympathy for Achilles than I ever had before.