How could she have deliberately left me alone to go through all this? But caring as she did about my excellence, how could she have let me go back to being a god without learning something so important? I put one foot down into the cold clear water of the sea, then drew it back up, making a wet black footprint on the hot gray rock. It was distinct for a moment, then immediately began to fade and dry. Soon there would be no sign that it had ever been there.
I had always protected myself against mortal death. When time is a place you can enter at will, it’s easy to do that, to save some moments so the ones we love are never wholly lost. Even with Hyakinthos there are moments left I can visit and savor. I can see him smile again, and if I choose I can spend decades of my own personal time illuminated by that smile, working, planning, contemplating, knowing there will come a next instant, another breath, when I am ready to take it. There are whole days I did not spend with him that I hoard against my future loneliness. That has always been my strategy, and it has always protected me. Simmea knew that, we’d talked about it after we lost Sokrates. She loved me. But that never made her go easy on me. And that was one of the best things about her.
She wouldn’t have killed herself just to have me endure mortal grief. But she drew out the arrow rather than have me go back to being a god without learning about it. I couldn’t understand it until I saw Ficino, old and unarmed, unhesitatingly put himself between Arete and a sword. He died of the blow. Simmea did the same for my own personal arete. Of course she did. What else would she have been willing to die for?
That was a very good question. I sat up with a jerk. Kallikles and Arete turned to me in surprise “I’ve been an idiot,” I announced. They exchanged glances. “What did she put her body in the way of?”
“You?” Kallikles hazarded.
“What I mean is, what did Simmea care most about?” I asked, Socratically.
“Philosophy, and the City, and art, and you,” Arete answered promptly.
“All of us,” I corrected. “She cared about our whole family, not just me.”
“She did, but she cared more about you,” Kallikles said. “And that’s right, that’s how it should be. We’re growing up, we have our own lives, the two of you would have gone on together.”
“And you’re Apollo,” Arete said. “You’re more important than we are.”
“You seem to be choosing to become gods yourselves,” I said. “But whether you do or not, she’d have put herself in front of a blade for you. For Neleus as fast as any of you.”
“Yes,” they both agreed, with no hesitation.
“And of those things she cared about that much, the one she put her body in the way of was art.”
“Yes,” Arete said.
“Whoever killed her didn’t want to kill her the way Kebes and I wanted to kill each other. Not personally. They just killed her because her body was between them and art.” I stopped, to make sure this made sense. They nodded. “So we have to stop the art raids,” I concluded. “That’s what she’d want, far more than vengeance. They didn’t kill her because they wanted to kill her. They killed her because she put her body between them and the head of Victory.”
“Stopping the art raids would be a really good thing, but I don’t know whether it’s possible,” Arete said. “People have tried before. Ficino and Mother tried. Manlius did.”
“We’d have to go to all the cities,” Kallikles said.
“We’re going to have to do that anyway, to tell them about the Lucian civilization,” I said. I sighed. “It won’t be easy. But it’s what she would have wanted, and it’s what we need to do.”
We swam back to the ship. Even though I understood now why she had chosen to die, I still couldn’t die myself and go back to Olympos. There might be other things I needed to understand from incarnation to become my best self—there probably were, and most of them awful, to do with old age and grief. And now I had to stay alive and go through them and learn, without having Simmea to help. I felt tired thinking about it. But beyond that I had the terribly complicated task of resolving everything Simmea would have wanted resolved, the art raids, relations between the Republics, the situation with the Lucians. It was the kind of thing Simmea was really good at, and I really wasn’t. But that was the work that needed to be done.
23
MAIA
Simmea and I were turning cheeses in brine when the mission from Psyche arrived. It was a hot summer day and we had been working hard. Cheese wheels are heavy, and if not turned they’ll start to rot. It was the kind of thing Workers had done for us, but which people can do perfectly well; the kind of thing Lysias used to try to persuade people to do, but which we never did as long as there were plenty of Workers to do it for us. The disappearance of all the others did mean that there were plenty of spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-one, but we only asked them to do the most important things, things that people couldn’t do.
The smell of cheese was overpowering in the storehouse. It was good strong sharp goat cheese and I knew I’d be glad of it when winter came, but I wasn’t sorry to be interrupted.
The messenger was one of the older Young Ones, a girl of about ten. She brought a written message for Simmea, and it was Simmea they wanted; she was on the Foreign Negotiations Committee. “A mission from Psyche,” she said, looking up from the note. “I’m going to have to go, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll finish up here,” I said, with a sigh.
“No, come with me,” Simmea said, picking up her kiton from the heap where she had tossed it. “I want to talk to you. We can both come back and finish up afterward. Pytheas will watch Arete.” I had been back in the Remnant City for a couple of years. Arete was six. Simmea was just over thirty, all taut muscle and sinew. White stretch marks showed as fine seams on her flat brown belly and the sides of her breasts, the legacy of her two pregnancies. She had a very distinctive face, which many people found ugly but which I was so entirely used to that it just seemed to me Simmea’s face.
“I think we should go through the wash fountain before appearing to visitors,” I said.
Simmea laughed. “I got so used to the smell of the cheese that I’d stopped noticing it. But you’re right. You know, you taught me how to use the wash fountain on my very first day in the city.”
“I always did that with new Florentine girls,” I said. “Easing them in.”
I picked up my own kiton and we walked out together. It felt hotter out in the sun. “I don’t know how you coped with all of us,” she said. “I had a little taste of it when we brought the boys home, but they were so small. Ten thousand ten-year-olds doesn’t bear imagining.”
“It was terrible,” I agreed.
“And it’s not even what Plato suggests. He says take over an existing city and drive out everyone who is over ten—so you’d have had nine- and eight-year-olds, and so on down to babies.”