The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “Their souls will,” Ficino said.

  Eventually we won the day, which the three of us celebrated at dinner with cold water and barley porridge. Ficino and Ikaros shared memories of wines they had drunk together in Florence, and discussed how long it would be before the grapes the workers had planted could produce a vintage. We pretended to be mixing our water with wine, in best classical practice, and Ikaros pretended to grow a little drunk, whereupon Ficino reproached him by quoting Socrates on temperance, and Ikaros pretended to be abashed. I had never spent a pleasanter evening nor laughed so much.

  Back on the committee the next day, it became apparent that Ficino and Ikaros wanted to save everything.

  “The Library Committee is sending an expedition to the Great Library of Alexandria to rescue everything,” Ikaros said. He also served on that committee. “Manlius and I are going. We’re going to have it all, all the written work of antiquity, though we will of course control access to it. Why not all the art we can find?”

  “We have to be selective and make sure it fits what Plato wanted,” Atticus said.

  “How could it not?” Ficino asked.

  “Before we allow it into the city we need to examine everything to make sure it does,” Atticus insisted. We all agreed to this.

  We put together a complete program of art rescue through the centuries. It all had to fit the message we wanted the children to understand from it, and of course it had to be on classical themes. There was a huge amount of art potentially available from the ancient world—it was heartbreaking that so much had been destroyed. I entirely agreed that we should save as much as we could. There were many lost works available from the Renaissance which were also deemed likely to be worthy. Athene took the men of the Art Committee on several expeditions. To my astonishment and delight, they brought back nine lost Botticellis, snatched from the Bonfire of the Vanities.

  “At first I pretended to be a Venetian merchant and tried to buy them, but Savonarola wouldn’t listen. In the end we stole them and replaced them with worthless canvases we’d bought,” Atticus said, laughing.

  “Who ever met a Venetian who could only speak pure Classical Latin?” Ikaros teased.

  “Look at the Judgement of Paris,” Atticus gloated, taking it off with him to show Tullius.

  “Does that show good people performing good actions?” I asked, quietly, so that Atticus wouldn’t hear.

  Ikaros grinned at me. “Some of these show mysterious people performing mysterious actions. But they do lift the soul.”

  “They certainly do,” I said.

  Ficino spread out another, smiling. “These will hang in the Florentine dining hall,” he said.

  “Do you have a woman master for Florence yet?” I asked. “Because if not, I’d really like to volunteer.”

  “So you can see these every day?” Ficino asked, looking proudly at Winter.

  “Yes, and because, though I’m not a Florentine I loved Florence so much,” I said.

  “I’ll think about it. I should find out whether there’s anyone with a better claim,” he said. “What would you think would be the best Florentine building to emulate as the eating hall?”

  “Oh, it’s hard to choose, because it was all so beautiful,” I said. “Perhaps the Baptistry? It’s a shame the Uffizi wouldn’t really be practical, even though that would be the best setting for these wonderful Botticellis.”

  “The Uffizi is a symbol of Medici power and the loss of the freedom of the Florentine Republic,” Ficino said, frowning.

  “Then the Palazzo Vecchio,” I said, at once. “That was for the Republic, and it’s so beautiful.”

  “Much too big,” Ikaros said, cheerfully. “Now for Ferrara, Lukretia has suggested we can do half of the castle.”

  “How about the Palazzo Vecchio at half-size,” Ficino suggested, ignoring Ikaros and looking at me.

  “I think that would be splendid,” I said, as affirmatively as I could.

  “Or maybe we should have something in three parts, for the three parts of the soul,” he mused. “It’s going to be so wonderful to see the children grow up and the best of them really become philosopher kings.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I said. “It’s wonderful to think we’re getting everything ready for them. Did anyone tell you yet that the Tech Committee have decided to go with full printing in both languages for the reproduction of books? So everything will be available to all of us through the library. And first, immediately after the complete works of Plato, we’re going to print the things Ikaros and Manlius rescued from Alexandria, so that all of us can read them.”

  “Excellent,” Ficino said. “I shall volunteer to work on translations so that I can see things early.”

  “New plays by Sophokles!” Ikaros exulted. “And the original works of Epicurus, and the Hedonists! I’m going to read them the second they’re printed.” He grinned. “I’m on the Censorship Committee, so I’ll get to them before anyone.”

  6

  SIMMEA

  I learned to read, first in Greek and then in the Latin alphabet. Before the end of a year I was reading both languages fluently, though I had not known Latin before. There were many native Latin speakers among the masters, which made it easy to pick up. Even those who were not native Latin speakers knew it well, for, as they told us, it had been the language of civilization for centuries. I was soon speaking and reading both languages easily. I no longer noticed the slurring and softening accent so many masters had, or even the use of B for V. I had begun to speak Greek like that myself.

  I began to learn history before they began to teach it to me, and I knew without examining it that this was the history of the future. We were living, they told us, in the time before the Trojan War. King Minos ruled in Crete and Mycenae was the greatest city on the mainland. Yet, although it had yet to happen, we knew all about the Trojan War—a version of the Iliad was one of our favorite books. We knew about the Peloponnesian War, for that matter, and the wars of Alexander, and the Punic Wars, and Adrianople, and in less detail about the fall of Constantinople, and the Battle of Lepanto. When I asked Ficino what happened after Lepanto he said it was after his time, and when I asked Axiothea, who taught us mathematics, she said that history got boring after that and was nothing but a series of inventions, the laws of motion, and telescopes, and electricity, and workers, and so on.

  From the beginning, and by design, we rarely had a free moment. Our time was divided equally between music and gymnastics. Music came in three parts—music itself, mathematics, and learning to read, later superseded by reading. Gymnastics also had three parts—running, wrestling, and weights.

  Gymnastics was fun. It was done naked in the palaestra. There was a palaestra shared between each two eating halls. Our palaestra was Florentia and Delphi, and it had rows of Doric columns for Delphi along the back and two sides, and exuberant Renaissance columns along the front, with a very elaborate fountain. I felt proud that Florentia had contributed the fountain. It was easy to love and feel pride in Florentia, that great city, with so many great scholars, writers, and artists. Ficino himself came from Florentia. When we came to dye and embroider our kitons, I embroidered mine with a running pattern of lilies, the Florentine symbol, and above them snowflakes, leaves, and roses, for Botticelli’s three seasons, which remained my favourite pictures. Above those I put a pattern of interspersed books and scrolls, in blue and gold, which so many people admired and asked permission to copy that it became quite commonplace.

  Our palaestra stood open to the air, naturally, and the ground inside was made of white sand, which the hundred and forty of us churned up every day and the workers raked smooth every night. I soon stopped feeling conscious of nakedness—we all took off our kitons when we went into the palaestra, it was just what we did. I learned to use the weights, both lifting and throwing, and to wrestle, and to run. I was good at running, and was always among the first at races, especially at long distances. I soon learned that I would never exce
l at wrestling, being small and wiry, but found it good fun when matched against somebody my own weight. Weights, once I had learned how to handle them, were a delight, though there were always people who could throw the discus further and lift heavier weights than me.

  The odd thing about gymnastics was that we didn’t really have enough teachers. Only the younger masters could teach it, and not even all of them. This oddity made me realise how few masters there were. There were two masters assigned to each dining hall, and just a handful of others. There were a hundred and forty-four dining halls, now completed with seventy children in each. That meant there were only two hundred and eighty-eight masters in all, or perhaps three hundred at most, to ten thousand and eighty children. I thought about the implications of this, and decided not to point this out to Kebes. He still muttered about wanting to overthrow the masters, but I was happy.

  How could I not have been happy? I was in the Just City, and I was there to become my best self. I had wonderful food—porridge and fruit every morning, and either cheese and bread or pasta and vegetables every night, with meat or fish on feast days, which came frequently. On hot days in summer we often had iced fruit. I had regular congenial exercise. I had friends. And best of all, I had music, mathematics, and books to stretch my mind. I learned from Maia and Ficino, from Axiothea and Atticus of Delphi, from Ikaros and Lucina of Ferrara, and from time to time from other masters. Manlius taught me Latin. Ikaros, one of the youngest men among the masters, set us to read provocative books, and asked fascinating questions about them. Sometimes he and Ficino would debate a question in front of us. I could almost feel my mind growing and developing as I listened to them. I was twelve years old. I still missed my parents and my brothers, sometimes, when something recalled them to me. But little did. My life was so different now. Sometimes it truly felt as if I had slept beneath the soil until I awakened in the City.

  In the winter of that year, Year Two of the Just City, just before I turned thirteen, I began my menstruation, and Andromeda, who was still the watcher for Hyssop, took me to Maia. Maia had a little house of her own near Hyssop, with a neatly tended garden of herbs and flowers. Maia made me a peppermint tea, and gave me three sponges and showed me how to insert them into my vagina. “One of these will last you for an hour or so on the first day, longer than that afterwards. You can probably leave the same one in all night unless you’re bleeding very heavily. You can clean them in the wash-fountains, never in drinking water. If you hold it under the running water all the blood will wash out. Insert a fresh one and let the first one dry in sunlight on the windowsill. Store them in your chest when you are not using them. Never use anyone else’s sponge or share yours with your sisters. Three should be all you need, but if you find you are bleeding too heavily and needing to change them often on the first day so that there is not a sponge dry when you need it, let me know and I will give you a fourth.”

  “These are marvellous,” I said, and then went on, forgetting that I should not talk about my earlier life. “My mother used cloths that were horrible to wash.”

  “Mine too, and so did I before I came here,” Maia said. “This way of managing menstruation is one of the lost marvels of the ancient world. The sponges are natural. They grow under the sea. Workers harvest them for us.”

  I turned the two clean sponges over in my hand. They were soft. “Am I a woman now?”

  “You were born a woman.” Maia smiled. “Your body will be making some changes. Your breasts will grow, and you might want to pleat your kiton so it falls over them. If they grow very big so that they flop about and feel uncomfortable when you run, I will show you how to strap them up.”

  “What will—” I stopped. “What happens here about marriage?” I realized I’d never heard a word about it, nor even thought about it since I had come here. All of the masters lived alone, and all of the rest of us were still children.

  “When all of you are older there will be marriages, but they will not be like the marriages you … should not remember!” Maia said. “No need to worry about it yet. Your body is not ready to make children, even if bleeding has begun.”

  “When will it be?” I asked.

  Maia frowned. “Most of us think twenty, but some say sixteen,” she said. “In any case, a long time yet.”

  Then she took down a book. “Long ago I promised to show you Botticelli’s Spring,” she said.

  Spring was as marvellous and mysterious as the other three seasons. I tried to figure it out. There was a girl at the side, and a pregnant woman in the centre with flowers growing around her. “Who are they all?” I asked. “Are those the same flowers that are growing in Summer?” I glanced at the opposite page of text for help, and was astonished to see it was in the Latin alphabet, but a language unknown to me. I looked inquiringly at Maia.

  “It’s the only reproduction I have. Nobody knows who they all are, though some think she’s the goddess Flora.”

  I stared back at the picture, ignoring the mystery of the text. “I wish I could see the original at full size like the others.” I turned the page and gasped. It was Aphrodite rising from the waves on a great shell. Maia leaned forward, then relaxed when she saw what it was.

  “I really wish you could have seen the original of that one,” she said. “It’s so much better than the reproduction. It fills a wall. There are strands of real gold in her hair.”

  “When will we be taught to paint and sculpt?” I asked, touching the picture longingly. The paper was glossy to the touch.

  “We don’t have enough masters who can teach those things,” Maia said. “Florentia should have a turn next year, or perhaps the year after. Ideally, you’d have been learning all along. Meanwhile, I was intending to ask you if you would teach some beginners to swim in the spring.”

  “Of course,” I said. Growing up in the Delta, I’d been swimming for almost as long as I’d been walking. I had won the swimming race at the Hermeia, as well as coming in second in the footrace. I’d been given a silver pin for these accomplishments, which had been the proudest moment of my life. Silver meant bravery and physical prowess. Only gold, for intellectual attainment, ranked higher, and nobody I knew had a gold pin yet.

  Maia put her hand out for the Botticelli book. I took a last look at the Aphrodite and gave it back. She turned the pages and showed me a portrait of a man in a red coat. “We don’t know who he was, some scholar of the time I’ve always thought.”

  “I love his face,” I said. “Is that picture in Florentia too?”

  “Yes,” Maia said.

  “Perhaps I’ll travel there one day.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good. You know they haven’t been painted yet.” Maia smiled.

  “Maybe I’ll go there in the time when they have been painted. When I’m grown up and finished being educated, I mean.”

  “No.” Maia looked serious now. “No, we’ve been brought here out of time by Pallas Athene for a serious purpose. We’re here to stay now, all of us. We can’t go wandering about in time on expeditions to look at pictures.”

  “Why not? Pictures are important.”

  “Art is important only as a way of opening the mind to excellence,” Maia said, but she didn’t sound very sincere. She took the book back and closed it. In the seconds I could see it I noticed that it had a circular picture of the Madonna on the cover, surrounded by angels. She put it on a high shelf with other books.

  “Oh, please!” I said.

  “You know I can’t show you that. I probably shouldn’t have shown you this book at all.”

  “How is it that we have the nine Botticelli paintings that we do have?” I asked.

  “They were going to be destroyed and we rescued them,” Maia said.

  “Mother Hera!” I didn’t often swear, but I couldn’t stop myself blurting it out. “Destroyed!”

  “Yes, some terrible things happened in that future you’d like to visit to look at paintings! You’re much better off here. Now, go to bed, and let me
know if you need any more sponges.”

  I bade her joy of the night and went off thoughtfully down the street. The city looked especially beautiful by moonlight. I raised my arms and murmured a line of a praise-song to Selene Artemis. But my mind was buzzing, not with thoughts of menstruation and marriage, which I had almost forgotten, but with Botticelli. The mysterious figures gathered around in Spring. The smile of his Aphrodite. The thought that our nine paintings would have been destroyed. Was that true of all the art in the city, I wondered? Had Phidias’s gold and ivory Athene in the agora been rescued? How about the Herm I had been crowned before, the one with the mysterious smile? What about the bronze lion on the corner I always patted as I went by? I stopped to pat him now, and the moonlight found an expression of sadness on his bronze face that I had never seen before. His mane had fantastical curls, which I stroked, tracing the whorls. He seemed so real, so solid, so impossible to harm. It was my bleeding body making me sad for no reason, I told myself. My mother had talked about that. But it was true about the Botticellis, Maia had said so.

  I gave the lion a last pat and turned to take the last few steps to Hyssop and my bed. All the art, saved, as we children had been saved? But saved for what purpose? Saved to make the city? A worker trundled past, unsleeping, off on some errand in the dark. Had they been saved too? And from where? I opened the door and wondered if I would ever have answers to these questions.

  The next summer I taught eleven children to swim with no difficulty. The twelfth was Pytheas. He was a boy from Delphi, so I had seen him at the palaestra, and wrestled with him once or twice, but I did not know him well. I had noticed how beautiful he was, and how unconscious he seemed to be of it. He had an air of confidence that was not quite conceit. I had friends who disliked him because he was so lovely and seemed so effortlessly good at everything. I had been inclined to go along with them without examining why. Teaching him to swim made us friends.