The Just City

by Jo Walton

  And I had made a friend, a courageous friend who would risk her life for my excellence. That felt like even more of a victory.

  8

  SIMMEA

  I had lots of friends, but Pytheas was different. It took a long time to teach him to swim. He mastered it eventually through sheer force of will. He was never especially good at it, but he knew enough not to drown and could propel himself through the water with a surging stroke. I thought I would see less of him once he had mastered the art, but he continued to seek me out. We were, that year and the next, about the same weight for wrestling. But the thing that really brought us together was our shared love of art.

  In the city, art was supposed to open our souls to beauty, and also to set a good example. When I looked at Michaelangelo’s bronze Theseus at the Isthmus, with his foot set on the head of the giant Kerkyon, I was supposed to want to emulate Theseus and kill giants to protect my homeland. Of course, I would willingly have gone up against any giant that was threatening Kallisti, had I not been trampled in the rush. But Kallisti was an island extremely lacking in giants or other such threats. There were no cities there but our city. We never saw strangers. Had it been needful, I would have given my life for it without a second thought. But this was not what I thought of when I saw the Theseus. My strongest emotion was an ache at how beautiful it was, and a great admiration for Michaelangelo’s skill in creating it. That humans could do such things made me long to emulate them, to follow them in creating beauty. If this was a possible thing, it was a thing I wanted to do.

  Pytheas was constantly creating, though he did not always share what he made. He wrote poetry and songs. He could play the lyre and the zither better than anyone else I knew. Whenever he was set any exercise in music—whether music alone, music with words, or words alone—he excelled at it. He was marvellous in the Phrygian mode and even better in the Dorian. Under his influence I tried hard, and did improve at writing poetry and music.

  My true love was given to the visual arts. I loved to embroider my kiton and cloak and to devise new patterns for this. I often embroidered for my friends. In the spring of the Year Three I was chosen to embroider a panel for the great robe of Athene. I chose blues and soft pinks and greys, and made a running pattern of owls and books. I loved this kind of work. Later that year I finally learned stone carving, and early in the year after metalwork, and finally painting. Painting was wonderful. It was what I had always wanted. It let me bring together color and line, and set down the pictures I could see in my head, even if they never came out quite the way I wanted them. At first I was terrible, but after I learned some technique I managed a sketch of Pytheas as Apollo playing the lyre, and a larger painting of Andromeda and Kryseis reaching the victory line in the games. I was almost happy with that as a composition. I had caught their expressions, and the contrast of light and dark in their hair and skin was pleasing. I would go back to eat in front of the Botticellis and know that I had so much to aspire to. Most days this would fill me with hope and delight, and only when I was bleeding or something had set me down would it seem an impossible burden to have a target so impossible to reach.

  In the way the city was ordered, sculpture, painting and poetry were considered among the arts of bronze. I still wore the silver pin I had won in the races, but I began to look at the work of those whom the masters gave bronze pins, and think that I was not far from their standard. I made a mold for some cloak pins with a design of bees and flowers, and thought that they could be cast in any metal. Of course I continued to work in the palaestra and the library. That year we learned to ride and to camp, and saw much of the rest of the island. Most of it was set with crops, tended by diligent workers, but some of it was wilderness, especially around the mountain in the centre. The mountain sent up smokes and steams from time to time, and near the crest there were sometimes rivers of lava that were still warm. We always went barefoot. Laodike burned her foot once when we were running up there. Damon and I had to help her home and we got back long after dark.

  Laodike was a good friend, and so was Klymene, who had a very sharp mind. She always had something funny to say about everything. I could go to them with my little troubles and uncertainties, and they would be ready to hug me and reassure me. Pytheas never did this. He didn’t seem equipped for it. If I forgot and complained to him about some little thing that was bothering me he never soothed me. He always wanted either to distract me or, if it was possible, to do something about it. This peculiarity stood out all the more because he was the only one who did understand about art. He didn’t think it was a charming decoration or a useful moral exemplar, he agreed that it really mattered. If I showed him my designs he never praised them unless he truly thought them good. His standards were exceedingly high. Often when I had something that would have been good enough for everyone else, I made it better because I knew he would see it.

  In this way he was a true friend of the soul, as Plato says, the friend who draws one on to excellence.

  Sometimes I felt I couldn’t do as much for him; that once I had taught him to swim I had nothing left to do for him. Then I realized that I could help him be friends with the others. In many ways Pytheas was more like the masters than he was like the rest of us. He had an air sometimes of putting up with things that amused other people. This was why some people thought him arrogant. Once you were in the middle of a conversation with him it was often fascinating, but sometimes getting there was difficult for him, as if he didn’t know how to start. It was difficult for him to adapt what he knew and thought to other people’s interests and understanding. I could see both sides of it—I loved talking seriously, but I could also be childish sometimes and have fun. With my good friends I could have real conversations, and I could make a bridge between them and Pytheas so that he could be a part of these conversations. In that way I helped him by widening the circle of people with whom he could share some part of his mind. I would sometimes wonder about other ways I could help him. In the same way I thought about laying down my life for the city, I pictured doing it for Pytheas—if he had needed a kidney, or a lung, or my very heart, I would have lain down gladly before the knife.

  The only one of my friends who refused to like Pytheas was Kebes, who persisted in seeing him as arrogant and sycophantic to the masters. In fact Pytheas was anything but sycophantic—he treated the masters as equals, or even inferiors. But he was polite to them and gave them consideration, even when they were not with us. Kebes continued to despise the masters and the city and everything about it. He mocked the masters when he was out of their hearing. He kept his hatred warm despite everything. He had even tried to run away once or twice in the early days, only to discover that we were on an island about twenty miles across and with no other islands in sight from the coast. He had, like all the children who had run, been found and brought back, and thereafter talked to about the benefits of staying. Kebes appeared to be reconciled, but he never truly was. He was waiting only until he became a man and could persuade others to steal one of the city’s two ships, the Goodness or the Excellence.

  “What will you do with it?”

  “Sooner or later they will have to teach us to sail them,” he said. “We will make for somewhere, either a civilization where we can live free, or a deserted island where we can found our own city.”

  “What city could be better than this?” I asked.

  “A free city, Lucia, where we could use our own names, and would not be forced into the molds of others.”

  I liked the mold that was made for me, but Kebes could never be content under anyone’s direction. He had a silver pin for his prowess at wrestling, but he mocked it in private.

  Pytheas, by fitting into the city, by speaking respectfully of the masters, and by being my friend, offended him by his very existence. Kebes could not legitimately wrestle Pytheas, being a head taller, but he said that if he did he would try to break his nose. I think this simple dislike had imperceptibly become jealousy. I was fifteen.
Pytheas was fourteen, for he had told me that he had truly been ten when he was bought. I do not know how old Kebes truly was—sixteen or even seventeen, I think. Perhaps Kebes too found Pytheas attractive, and did not want to acknowledge being drawn to anything of the city. Or perhaps he was jealous of my attention to him. Once, when he came upon me making a charcoal sketch of Pytheas, he snatched the paper from me and tore it up. Before I grew to know Pytheas, Kebes had been my only close male friend.

  I did not like to think that Kebes felt he owned me. Nor did I lie awake imagining scenarios in which I sacrificed myself to save Kebes’s life. But I liked him. And although I loved the city, I also liked to feel, through Kebes, that I was free—free to freely choose the city over Kebes’s idea of freedom. Kebes offered me an alternative, even if I rejected it. I never reported his talk to the masters or to Andromeda, as I knew I should have. It did no harm, I reasoned, it might even do him good to talk, and if he ever came to the point of being ready to steal a ship I could report it then—or let him go, why not? The City did not truly need two ships, and what use were unwilling minds?

  In the autumn of the Year Four we held the great games of Artemis, which were celebrated by footraces and swimming races for girls, and by hunting. The hunting came first, so that the victims could be offered as a sacrifice and eaten at the festival. We went out as whole halls, seventy of us together, with our masters. Florentia and Delphi, who did most athletic things together, divided up into two roughly equal groups. I went with Ficino. We never came near a beast, but we had a wonderful time in the hills. Maia scrambled about with the rest of us, but Ficino rode. We took nets and spears and bows strapped onto another horse. I loosed an arrow at a duck once, but missed. We stopped by a spring and ate the rations we had brought, apples and nuts and cheese. Laodike got stung by a bee, and we managed to track down the hive and take the wild honey, at the cost of several more bee stings. Ficino considered the honey a worthy gift for Artemis and so declared the hunt over.

  The other group’s hunt was from all accounts more dramatic. They actually found a boar in a thicket and faced it down with spears and nets. Accounts of what happened next differ. Axiothea refused to talk about it. Atticus told me that Pytheas behaved with exemplary bravery, and saved several lives. All Pytheas would say was that he had only done what anyone would have done. Klymene said that she had been a coward and could no longer face anyone. Trying to untangle all this, and get accounts from the others who had been there, it seems that Klymene had fled, exposing Axiothea, and Pytheas had leapt in and made the boar run up his spear, in the best poetic style. So far so good. But later Pytheas had said something to Klymene that she could not forgive, and neither of them would tell me what.

  I tackled her alone in the wash-fountain shortly after dawn the next morning. “Did he call you a coward?”

  “No. Well, yes. But I am a coward. I understand that now.”

  “Anyone can panic in a moment like that, if the boar was rushing towards you,” I said, soaping myself to avoid looking her in the eye.

  “Anyone with iron in their veins,” Klymene said. “But no. Anyone can call me a slave-hearted coward and I will just agree with them. I was tested and I fled.”

  “I’ve never been in a situation like that. I might have done the same.”

  “You! You’re always fierce.” Klymene shook her head. “You’d never have run. That’s one of the things that makes me so angry.”

  “Then what did he say?” I really wanted to know.

  “You’ll hate him if you know,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt your friendship. I know you really care about him.”

  “I really like him, he is a soul friend. And I like you too and I want to reconcile the two of you if I can, but if I can’t at least I want to understand what happened!” I leaned back to rinse my hair. “If he is as bad as you say then I want to know that, and not give my friendship where it is unworthy.” I didn’t really think I was doing that.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!” I stepped forward out of the wash-fountain. “I don’t believe you are truly a coward, even if you did panic. But panicking in that moment probably does mean you need more practice facing dangerous things before you stand in the line of battle, assuming there ever is a battle. You should try to find dangerous things and face them down to get better at it. Practice courage. Running once in panic doesn’t mean you have a fearful soul, or that you are unworthy. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t care about you and still want to be your friend. And I want to know what Pytheas did, because helping interpret between Pytheas and the rest of the world is part of what I do, and I can’t do that if I don’t know.”

  Klymene was crying, so she turned her face into the water to hide the tears. I waited until she turned back, then hugged her. “What did he say?”

  “I thanked him for what he did, and he said he was just doing what was needed. And then he said I shouldn’t feel badly about having run because I was only a girl.”

  “What!” I was horrified. I had never imagined anything like this. Some of the masters sometimes said things like this. Tullius of Rome was especially given to it, and Klio of Sparta had once had a formal debate with him on the subject which everyone held that she had won decisively. But I had never heard Pytheas say anything that even hinted that he thought such a thing. “Are you sure?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “I’m going to kill him.” Then I turned back to her. “Telling me was very brave. I do think you could learn to be brave if you practiced. Like working with weights and building up.”

  It was our turn in the palaestra directly after breakfast, which I could hardly eat, I was so full of fury. Pytheas was not yet there when I arrived, so I exercised with weights, hurling the discus farther than I ever had with the vigor of my wrath. When he arrived I ran over to him the second he had his kiton off and knocked him down into the sand. “Hey, give me a chance to set my feet!” he protested, slapping the sand to mark a fall. I threw myself onto his back, holding him down. There were no masters around to object. I could really have killed him before anyone could stop me, if that had been what I truly wanted. Of course, what I wanted was to understand.

  “What did you mean, saying to Klymene that she was only a girl?”

  “Am I going to lose all my friends over that?” he asked, so sadly that I immediately felt sorry for him, despite my anger.

  “You are if you don’t explain it right now.” I thumped his arm hard. He wasn’t trying to shake me off or to fight at all. He had gone limp, which made it difficult for me to want to pummel him.

  “Will you let me up if I agree to talk to you?”

  I climbed off him and he got up. He had sand all over his front, which he did not brush off. “She was sad and needed comfort, and I never know what to say. I didn’t think and fell back on what I grew up hearing. Women—outside the city there’s a tendency in most places to think that women are soft and gentle and good at nurturing, that by nature they should be protected. You must remember that from before? She was crying, and she had run away, she was just acting the way women usually act. I put my arm around her. I’ve seen you do that. I know that’s right. But then I had to say something, and I was completely blank on what.”

  “For somebody so intelligent, how can you be such a complete idiot?” I asked.

  “Natural talent?” He wasn’t smiling. “Do you want to hit me again?”

  “Would it make you feel better?”

  “I almost think it would.”

  “I won’t then,” I said. Then I relented, and twisted on the ball of my foot to thump him in the chest as hard as I could, so that he sat down abruptly. “Did that help?”

  Even in that moment he automatically slapped the ground to mark the hit. “Yes, I think it did.”

  “Did it help make you realize women aren’t just soft little doves to be protected?” I was still angry.

  “That’s exactly how she seemed to
me at the time,” he said, looking up at me. “A soft little dove who had been asked to act as a falcon, against her own nature. And why should everyone have to fight, if they’re not suited for it?”

  “Would you have said to Glaukon that it’s all right for him to be a coward because he’s only a cripple?” Glaukon had lost a leg in the first year of the city. He had slipped in the woods, and his leg had been crushed beneath a worker’s treads.

  Pytheas looked up at me guilelessly. “Well it doesn’t matter as much if he did happen to be one. But in fact he’s very brave.”

  “But imagine how he’d feel if you said that to him. It’s not considering him as a person but as part of a class of inferior things. Klymene’s a coward, she says so herself. And our souls have parts in different balances—maybe she doesn’t have as much passion, and perhaps not everyone has it in them to stand in the line of battle—not that I see what enemies we’re going to need to fight anyway. But some of those who don’t are men, as everyone agrees. Every example of a coward we’ve ever heard about who was shamefully wounded in the back has been a man. And plenty of those who are brave and would stand firm are women. And by saying what you said you insult all women—you insult me!”