The Just City

by Jo Walton

As with the first eleven non-swimmers, I took Pytheas down the slope of the beach until we stood in chest-deep water. Then I had him lie back onto my hand, to learn how the water would support and cradle him. The problem was that he couldn’t relax. It didn’t help that he had essentially no body fat—every curve on his twelve-year-old body was muscle. But Mother Tethys is powerful; he would not have sunk lying back with my palm flat in the small of his back, if he could have found a way to do that. He tensed immediately, every time, and jerked back under the water. The exercise was meant to teach trust of the water, and he couldn’t trust it enough to learn it. Yet he wanted to learn, he wanted it fiercely.

  “Human bodies were not made for this,” he muttered, as he went down spluttering one more time and I hauled him back to his feet.

  “Truly, you’ll be able to do it if you let yourself go.”

  “I know how dolphins swim.”

  “I love dolphins. They often swim out by the rocks, there where the sea darkens to wine. When you have learned to swim, you will be able to swim out to them.”

  I had never seen anyone try so hard and keep on failing. Pytheas could not float, but he couldn’t believe he could not. He watched me treading water and floating on my back, and couldn’t believe he couldn’t master the skill by sheer strength of will. I tried supporting him on his stomach, telling him it was more like the way dolphins do it, but it worked only a little better. He kept thrashing about and sinking. “Maybe we should try another day,” I said, seeing that he was growing cold and his fingers were wrinkling from the water.

  “I want to swim today.” He bit his lip and looked far younger than he was. “I understand I can’t master the art in one day, but I want to make a beginning. This is so stupid. I feel such a fool. I’ve wasted your whole afternoon when I know you want to be in the library.”

  “It isn’t a waste teaching you,” I said. “But how do you know that?”

  “Septima says you’re always reading in the library when you have a moment.”

  “Septima’s always in the library,” I said. It was true. Septima was a tall grey-eyed girl from the Athens hall who could read when she first came, and in the time since had made herself almost an assistant librarian. “Did you ask her about me?”

  “When I heard you were teaching swimming.”

  “But why her? How do you know her? She’s Athens and you’re Delphi.”

  He looked caught out, then raised his chin boldly. “I knew her before.”

  “Before you came here?” Even though we were out in the sea with nobody near us, I lowered my voice. “Now I think about it, you look alike. A kind of family resemblance, maybe?”

  “She’s my sister,” he admitted. “But here we’re all to be brothers and sisters, so what difference does it make? She’s my friend, and why shouldn’t she be?”

  “No reason she shouldn’t be,” I said. “So you asked her about me?”

  “I thought she’d know. I only knew you’d won the race. Now I know you’ve taught the others to swim, and you clearly understand the methods, and you’ve been very patient. I want to learn. I want to swim at least a little today. I can’t let it defeat me.”

  I think what did it was the way he blamed himself and not me, and the sheer force of his will. “All right, then,” I said. “There is another way, but it’s dangerous. Put your hands on my shoulders. Don’t clutch, and don’t panic and thrash, even if you go under. You could drown us both if you do. Let go of me if you feel yourself sinking. As long as you don’t panic, I can rescue you, but if you drive us both under and I can’t come up, we could both die.”

  “All right.” He stood behind me and put one hand on each of my shoulders.

  “Now I’m going to slide slowly forward, and I’ll tow you. Keep your arms still, and let your legs come up. I’ll be underneath you.” I slid forward and took one stroke with my arms, drawing him forward. I could feel the whole length of his body on top of mine. He did not clutch or panic, and I kicked my legs gently, swimming for perhaps six or seven strokes and drawing him along on top of me. I turned my head sideways. “Now keep your arms still but kick your legs just a little.” I was ready to put my own legs down and stand up if he panicked now—I knew the slope of the beach well, and I was still in my depth. I had done this before with my little cousins when they were very small. He began to move his legs, and I kept mine still but kept on swimming strongly with my arms, drawing us along parallel to the shore. At last I told him to stop, and put my feet carefully down. He went under for a second but did not panic or thrash.

  “Was I swimming?” he asked.

  “You’ve made a good beginning. And now you should go out and run around on the sand to stir your blood, and then we should both clean the salt off with oil. Tomorrow you’ll do better.”

  We ran up out of the water and raced on the beach with some other children who were there, none of them people I knew well. Then Pytheas sought me out with a jar of oil and a strigil and we oiled each other and scraped it off. This always feels good after swimming, much better than the wash-fountain, because salt water strips out the body’s oil.

  We were not encouraged to have erotic feelings towards the other children—indeed, the opposite, we were discouraged from ever thinking about sex or romantic love. Friendships were encouraged, and friendship was always held out to us as the highest and best of human relationships. Yet as I scraped the strigil down Pytheas’s arms I remembered the feel of his body above mine in the water, and I knew that what I felt was attraction. I was as much frightened by the feeling as drawn by it. I knew it was wrong, and I truly wanted to be my best self. Also, I did not know how to tell if he felt any reciprocal feelings. I said nothing and scraped harder.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, when we were done. “Same time. You’ll make a swimmer yet.”

  “I will,” he said, as if any alternative was unthinkable, as if he meant to attain all excellence or die trying. I raised my hand in farewell and took a step away, but he spoke. “Simmea?”

  I stopped and turned back. “Yes?”

  “I like you. You’re brave and clever. I’d like to be your friend.”

  “Of course,” I said, and stepped back towards him and clasped his hand. “I like you too.”

  7

  APOLLO

  Athene cheated. She went to the Republic as herself to help set it up, and then once all the work was done she transformed into a ten-year-old girl and asked Ficino to name her. He named her Septima, which I thought served her right for asking him. She knew he was obsessed with magic numbers.

  I, however, did the whole thing properly. I went down through Hades and set down my powers for the length of the mortal life I chose from the Fates. Clotho looked astonished, Lachesis looked resigned, and Atropos looked grim, so no change there. I then went on to Lethe, where I wet my lips, to allow me to forget the details of the future life I had chosen, though not, of course, my memories. (The river Lethe is full of brilliantly colored fish. Nobody ever mentions that when they talk about it. I suppose they forget them as soon as they see them, and so they are a surprise at the end and the beginning of each mortal life.) I went on into a womb and was born—and that in itself was an interesting experience. The womb was peaceful. I composed a lot of poetry. Birth was traumatic. I barely remember my first birth, and the images from Simonides’s poem about it have got tangled up in my real earliest memories. This mortal birth was uncomfortable to the point of pain.

  My mortal parents were peasant farmers in the hills above Delphi. I had wanted to be born on Delos again, for symmetry, but Athene pointed out that in most eras neither birth nor death are permitted on Delos, which would have made it difficult. I had to master my new tiny mortal body, so different from the immortal body I normally inhabited. I had to cope with the way it changed and grew, at an odd speed, entirely out of my control. At first I could barely focus my eyes, and it was months before I could even speak. I would have thought it would be unutterably boring, but in fact the se
nsations were all so vivid and immediate that it was intriguing. I could spend hours sitting in the sun looking at my own fingers.

  As I grew it was interesting to discover how much of what I had thought was will was affected by the flesh. Food and sleep weren’t just pleasures but necessities. I found my thoughts were clouded when I was hungry or tired.

  I grew fast and strong and my parents were loving and kind to me. Everything went according to plan, including the famine that came along a few months before my tenth birthday, which Athene and I had arranged to induce my loving parents to sell me into slavery. That didn’t go quite as planned. For one thing, I had no idea what famine really meant—needing to eat and starving instead is a form of pain. It was unbearable. I hate to remember it. The despair on my mortal father’s face when the last of the pigs died. The way my mortal mother wept when the slavers came and made their offer for me. I cared for them, of course I did, they had been my adoring worshipers for almost a decade. It broke my mortal mother’s heart to sell me. Athene and I had chosen all this and imposed it on them. They had not chosen to love a son and lose him in this terrible way, to be forced to choose between slavery for me and death for all three of us. I had never imagined how cruel we were being.

  So, as you see, I had already learned quite a lot about mortal life and equal significance and meaningful choices before I even came to the Republic.

  Athene was on the ship Excellence when I was brought aboard with a line of other children. She recognized me at once, although she had never seen this body before. She is my sister, after all. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Never better,” I said. “You have to do something for my mortal parents. Cure the disease on their crops, send somebody through selling new livestock cheaply, and most of all let them have another baby as soon as possible.”

  “I will,” she said, calmly. I hadn’t heard that tone of Olympian calm for ten years. She was dispassionate. She nodded to me, and inscribed my name in her ledger without asking me what it was. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “It’s barely been ten years. Did you get attached?”

  “It feels like a lifetime,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “You’ll never understand this unless you do it,” I warned her.

  “I’ll do it one day,” she said. “Right now they need my help too much.”

  Part of my plan in experiencing mortal life from the beginning had been to avoid all the inevitable squabbling and mess involved with getting the City set up. Of course I could have stayed on Olympos and arrived as a ten-year-old at the moment the other children came, but I know that if I’d stuck around Athene would have made me run all over everywhere collecting things and getting involved in the arguments. This part worked perfectly. By the time I reached the city, everything had been built and decided. They had laid it out harmoniously, according to principles of proportion and balance. They had made some odd choices, like the half-size copy of the Palazzo Vecchio, but it all worked. It was full of variety and yet was all of a piece. Nobody could ask more of a city.

  It was full of artworks Athene had rescued from disasters of history—she’d been everywhere from the Fourth Crusade to the Second World War. There were temples to all twelve gods—mine was particularly splendid, with a Praxiteles from Delos I’d always been fond of. The color choices were interesting. On the whole they had gone for white marble and unpainted statues, Renaissance style, but here and there you’d see a painted statue, or one dressed in brightly colored cloth. The kitons everyone wore were dyed and embroidered, so that the effect was of brightly coloured people in a chiaroscuro landscape. There were trees and gardens, of course, which helped soften things.

  With a fine sense of irony, Athene had me assigned to Laurel house, in the dining hall of Delphi, in the Tribe of Apollo. There were twelve tribes, each devoted to a particular god, with twelve dining halls each. Each dining hall was made up of ten houses of seven children each. (These numbers weren’t in the Republic. They had some complicated Neoplatonist relevance, and had doubtless taken somebody a long time to work out. I was so glad I’d missed that discussion.) There were ten thousand and eighty children—a number which could, should one wish to, be evenly divided by every number except eleven.

  Those first years in the Republic were fun. My body was a child’s body still, but it was my body, and now properly under my control. I was young and growing and I had music and exercise. I had the amusement of seeing where there were cracks in the structure that seemed so solid. Bringing together that many children with so few adults was something only somebody who knew nothing about children would have suggested. The children were wild and hard to control, and much more of this wildness was necessarily tolerated than Plato had imagined. The masters tried to set up a system where the children monitored each other, which had some limited success. But to track all the children the way they really wanted they could have done with four times as many adults—but they were limited to those who not only thought they wanted to set up the Republic, but who had read Plato in the original and prayed to Athene to help. There were probably a lot of good Christians who would have liked to have been there. As it was, there were more people from the Christian eras than I’d have guessed. I do have friends and votaries everywhere, but some times and places I seldom visit, largely for aesthetic reasons.

  The thing that surprised me about the masters when I got to know them was that so few of them were from the Enlightenment. I’d have thought that era, so excitingly pagan after so much dull Christianity, would have produced a whole crop of philosophers who’d want to be here. I talked to Athene about it one day when I caught her reading Myronianus of Amastra, curled up on her favorite window seat in the library.

  “There’s practically nobody here from the Enlightenment because they didn’t want this. The crown of the Republic is to get everything right, to produce a system that will produce Philosopher Kings who will know The Good.”

  “With Capital Letters,” I said.

  She looked down her nose at me, which wasn’t easy, since with both of us eleven years old, she was shorter than me. “Exactly. The Good with capital letters, the Truth, the one unchanging Excellence that stays the same forever. Once that’s established, the system goes on the same in ideal stasis for as long as it can continue to do so, with everyone agreeing on what is Good, what is Virtue, what is Justice, and what is Excellence. For the first time in the Enlightenment, they had the idea of progress, the idea that each generation will find its own truth, that things will keep on changing and getting better.” She hesitated. “They do pray to me, some of them. Just not for this. I find it fascinating in its own way. It’s bewildering. It’s one of those things I keep coming back to. I know I’ll never get tired of it. But you won’t find them here.”

  “There are people here from ages with a notion of progress, though,” I pointed out.

  “Mostly women,” Athene said. “You’ll always have the odd man who loves Plato so much he doesn’t care about progress. But the women—well, in those times women fortunate enough to be educated in Greek—and there aren’t that many of them—they have horrible circumscribed lives, and they read the Republic and they get to the bit about equality of education and opportunity and then they pray to me to be here so fast their heads spin. We have almost equal numbers of men and women among the masters, and that’s why. Many of the women are from later periods.”

  “It makes sense,” I said. “And what you say about the Enlightenment is fascinating. I’ll go and hang out with Racine some more when I get home and get a better feel for it.”

  It was a few months after that when a boy deliberately shoved me in the palaestra when I was lifting weights, knocking me off balance and making me fall. He wasn’t anyone I’d especially noticed before, a Florentine and not a Delphian. Yet he acted as if he had some grudge. I didn’t understand it. I tried to talk to him about it and he pretended it had been an accident. After that I thought about some other incidents that
had seemed accidents—spilled food, spoiled work—and wondered about them.

  I went to Axiothea, one of the two masters assigned to Delphi. She taught mathematics to both Delphi and Florentia. I believe she came from the first years of Girton. I told her about the incidents, and asked her if she had any idea why they had happened.

  “There will always be some who see excellence and envy it instead of striving to emulate it,” she said. “We aim to eradicate that as far as possible, but you are children, after all.”

  “But everyone loves Kryseis, and she’s the best at gymnastics,” I said.

  “She’s terrible at music, and she laughs at herself,” Axiothea said. “You’re good at everything, and seemingly without trying.”

  I shrugged. “I try.”

  “You’re too old for your years. When the rest of them grow up a bit, you’ll make some friends.”

  I hadn’t realized I didn’t have friends, but it was true. I had companions, people to wrestle with, people who asked me for help with their letters. I had six boys who slept in Laurel beside me whose jokes I endured. The problem was indeed that my mind was not twelve years old. The only real friend I had was Athene, and of course our friendship was thousands of years old and subject to the usual constraints of our history and context. Besides, she had the same problem. She dealt with it by taking on a strange status halfway between child and master, and retreating into the library, where she was always most at home. But she had a way out if she wanted one. She could transform herself back into a goddess at any moment. I didn’t have that luxury. Having taken it up I had to go through this life. I would have to die to resume my powers. That had seemed almost exhilarating at first, but it intimidated me now. Unlike mortals, I knew what happened after death. But unlike them, I had never died.

  And then I tried to learn to swim, and I couldn’t. Always before, learning things had been easy, both as a god and as a mortal. But as a god I’d never known how to swim in human form—if I’d wanted to swim I’d always transformed into a dolphin. Now this earnest copper-skinned Florentine girl was telling me to relax and lie back on the water, and every time I tried, seawater went up my nose. It was the first time I had ever failed at anything when I wasn’t being directly thwarted by the will of another god—and over something as trivial as swimming. I couldn’t let it defeat me. I felt an actual lump in my throat—not tears in my eyes, which are as honourable and natural as breathing, but a hot lump in my throat, as if I would cry shameful tears of defeat and frustration. Then Simmea thought of another way to teach me, a dangerous way, dangerous to both of us, but she risked it. It was difficult and sensual and strange, but at last I swam, or half swam.