The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “Yes. How are you going to get out of being paired off at the festival of Hera?”

  “I’m sick of the subject of the festival of Hera. It’s all anyone’s talking about. I may be getting a bit bored with this whole thing, actually. Anyway, I shall be chosen and walk off with somebody, and then they will fall asleep and dream they’ve had a pleasant afternoon with Septima, while I come back to the library.”

  “Do you need help with the dream?” I asked.

  “No thanks. There’s a perfectly good bit of Catullus.”

  I laughed, quietly because we were in the library. The funny thing was that she was so serious. She rolled her eyes. “Sorry,” I said. “I should have guessed you’d have a plan.”

  “Did you come to offer to help if I needed it?” she asked.

  “Well…” I felt caught out. “I knew you wouldn’t want to participate, and I hadn’t thought of a dream.”

  “Well thank you. I don’t need it. But I do appreciate the concern. I’d have thought you’d be looking forward to it. First sexual act in sixteen years?”

  “I’ve been continent for longer before,” I said. Though that was usually when I was focusing on something else and not noticing how long it had been. “And anyway, that isn’t quite true. This will be the first time mating with a woman, but there have been some sex acts with men.”

  “Boys?”

  “And masters.”

  “Not Pico?”

  “No. He’s never done more than look admiring.” I wondered why she was asking, but her expression did not invite questions.

  She picked up her book again and put her finger in it ready to open it. “So did you want me to influence the lots to get you whoever you have picked out for the festival?”

  “No. I thought I’d go with chance. That way I’ll learn something about choice.”

  She looked astonished. “I suppose that’s true, but I’m surprised to hear you say so. I’ve never seen you with anyone who wasn’t perfect. What will you do if it’s your funny little Simmea? She’s very smart, isn’t she? I was talking to her about the constraints of time the other night.”

  “She’s very smart,” I agreed. Of course I knew she was in love with me. “It’s extremely unlikely that we’d be chosen together, though.”

  Athene shook her head. “You’re changing.”

  “Learning things. That was the whole idea.”

  She started to read, and I left.

  The next day was the games, where I was careful to do well in everything without actually winning anything. Simmea came third in the swimming. I could swim now, but I didn’t even enter the races. Human bodies aren’t made for that kind of exercise. The day after was the festival. We wore flowered headdresses and danced in the plaza before the temple of Zeus and Hera. Phidias’s huge chryselephantine seated Zeus stood on one side of the steps, and a large Hera from Argos stood on the other. I wondered, eyeing them, what Father knew about this enterprise, and what he would say. Athene was his favorite daughter, but even so. It would be possible to argue that we were bending his rules all over the place.

  I avoided Simmea. I felt uncomfortable at the thought of her. I liked her very much. I admired her. I enjoyed her friendship. But Athene was right. In thousands of years I’d never mated with anyone who wasn’t perfect. I didn’t know if it was possible. If it turned out it wasn’t with some random girl, that didn’t matter all that much. With Simmea it could be a disaster.

  It turned out I was worrying about entirely the wrong thing.

  There’s a whole section in Book Five of the Republic about how the masters are supposed to cheat with the sex festival, to make sure the best get to have the best children. The children of the less good will be exposed anyway, but while everyone’s supposed to believe it’s entirely random, they naturally cheat for eugenics. I hadn’t forgotten this, but I had only thought it would mean that they’d be likely to match me with somebody beautiful after all. They did. But when I heard our names read out I froze.

  “Pytheas, Klymene!” old Ficino read. My friends were pushing me forward and laughing. I walked mechanically towards the steps. I saw Klymene coming from the other side, not looking at me. The garland was tied around our wrists and our arms raised. Our eyes had still not met. We walked together down the steps and off through the dancers and down the street.

  Eventually I looked at her. She was so pale and resolute that she’d have done for a portrait of Artemis. “I’m really sorry,” I said.

  “It’s random chance,” she said. “It’s not your fault any more than it is mine. It’s just Fortuna laughing at both of us.”

  “I mean I’m really sorry I said what I said to you on the mountain.”

  She looked at me now for the first time. “That’s the latest apology I ever had.”

  “Simmea said you didn’t want to talk to me. She beat me up. She made me realize what an idiot I was.”

  “She made me practice being brave until I could be brave again,” Klymene said. “Simmea’s a good friend. And I didn’t want to talk to you right away. But it has been a long time. Years.”

  “I didn’t know how long was long enough, and by then it had been a long time and it was awkward because of that.” I brushed my hair back off my face and realized that our hands were still bound together. I started to unwind the garland.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I thought—”

  “You thought I was a coward and wouldn’t go through with it?” she suggested.

  “I thought I was,” I said. “Do you want to?”

  “It’s not a case of want, it’s a case of our duty to the city and the gods. We were married in front of Zeus and Hera. All over the city today, everyone is being married in front of the gods, so that there can be more children for the city.”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “I don’t like you, Pytheas. I don’t trust you. It isn’t just what you said to me, it’s other things. You’re arrogant. You think so much of yourself. You don’t pay any attention to most people. I was only ever friends with you because I knew you were Simmea’s friend and she likes you. And when I had that cowardly moment you covered for me. That was good. But afterwards what you said just made me feel that you despised me—that you didn’t even see me. But this isn’t about you. This is about our sacred duty.”

  “I said you were right.”

  “Where are we going?”

  I stopped walking. “They told me there were empty practice rooms with beds in them.” I waved vaguely. We had passed the turning to the street of Dionysos and had to go back. We walked now without talking. She was a pretty girl with nice breasts, soft and dovelike, as I had always thought. I wondered what our son would be like—a hero, certainly, but what kind? How strange it would be to watch him grow up day by day. The masters wouldn’t let us know which child was which, of course, but I would know. If I didn’t instinctively know I could ask Athene, but I thought even incarnate I’d be able to tell.

  We came to the hall and went inside, hands still bound. Inside most of the doors were closed, but we found an open one far down the hall and closed the door. Only then did I unbind the garland. The wild rose branch twined in it had pricked my skin, leaving little beads of blood around my wrist. As I was licking them, Klymene dropped her kiton with as little fuss as if we were in the palaestra, and stood looking at me.

  I had never before mated with a woman when we hadn’t been playing the game of running away and catching. I had always been the one catching. I had mated for the joy of ecstasy, in a sudden passion for some woman, or to conceive children. Usually when I fell in love it was with men, who in my own time had minds with more to offer me. I have fallen in love with women, but it’s rare. Sometimes women have refused me. (Cassandra and Sibyl were out for what they could get and deserved what they did get. In my opinion.)

  This woman did not want me, but she was obedient to duty. I had to go to some considerable effort of imagination to want her, and
to find duty in myself and the desire for a son. It helped that this was her first time, so I could instruct her into a position where I didn’t have to look at her face. Her face was like stone, and would have made it impossible. It was probably more comfortable for her too. She didn’t want foreplay—in fact she specifically refused it. “Let’s get on with it,” she said. I arranged her face down on the bed.

  Father’s big on rape. He likes to turn himself into animals or even weirder things and swoop down on girls and carry them off. I’ve always liked the chase, whether it’s chasing a nymph through the woods or a seduction. Sometimes at the end of a seduction it’s been almost like that. I remember once in Alexandria, a woman called Lyra. Sunlight through a shuttered window falling across white sheets. She was a professional card player, and I’d beaten her in the game when she’d put herself in on cards she thought were unbeatable. She wore a veil and made up her eyes with kohl. There had been a moment when she let the veil fall that was almost like it was with Klymene. But once we were in bed she’d been greedy, more like a man, seeking her own pleasure, crying out. Klymene wasn’t like that at all.

  Klymene wanted the result of this mating, but not the process. But enduring it was her choice. Having it happen at all was her choice. I would have undone the garland and gone off, and if we’d told nobody, nobody would ever have known, any more than Athene’s partner, dreaming of Catullus, would ever know. That would have been my choice, to regret this match and let her be. We were in this room and this bed and I was in her body because she had chosen it, because it was our duty. I thought of Lyra’s eyes above the veil. I tried not to think of Daphne. I thought of all the ones who had wanted me, who had met passion with passion and desire with desire, who fell in love with me and wrote poetry about it for the rest of their lives. Eventually, that was sufficient.

  20

  SIMMEA

  It was with a mixture of relief and disappointment that I greeted the arrival of my monthly blood at the next new moon. Of the seven of us in Hyssop, four bled and three did not. Klymene was one of the ones who did not. She had been unusually tight-lipped about her experience during the festival. “Well, it took all my accumulated bravery,” was all she had said in answer to my tentative question. Aeschines had eaten with us in Florentia twice and I had eaten with him in Ithaca once—sardines and bitter greens, delicious. I’d seen other new friendships that had come out of the festival. But not for Klymene.

  We were in the wash-fountain getting clean one morning when Makalla suddenly said: “Maia said we shouldn’t count on being pregnant even if we don’t bleed. We should wait until next month to be sure.” She sounded apprehensive.

  “I’m delighted to be pregnant,” Klymene said.

  “Because you won’t have to go through that again?” I asked, rinsing my hair.

  “Well, not for some time anyway,” Makalla said.

  “It wouldn’t be as bad as that another time,” Klymene said. “No, I’m just glad to be having a baby, to be doing my duty and making a new generation of citizens.”

  “I am too,” Makalla said. “I just don’t want to count on anything before I can be sure.”

  For a moment I was sorry I wasn’t pregnant too. I felt left out and lazy. Immediately I wondered what Sokrates would think about that and began to interrogate the feeling. It was nonsense. I’d tried as hard as anyone. Maybe next time it would work. It was a pity it wouldn’t be Aeschines again. I liked him and he liked me. But there was always the hope that it would be Pytheas.

  I spent that time working on the calculus with a small group Axiothea had drawn together of people who really liked higher mathematics for its own sake, and not as a means of mystical revelation. Mystical revelation through numerology was very popular, especially in halls that had Neoplatonist masters. What we worked on had no practical application I could see but the joy of learning it. I loved it.

  Of course I also painted a great deal, and debated constantly with Sokrates. Debating with Sokrates remained a delight and a terror. I was getting better at it, but he still surprised me frequently. It honed my mind, so that in debate with others, I was considered formidable. Pytheas and Kebes too learned Sokrates’s methods, and grew in debate. We began to wonder whether we could challenge the masters. Listening to debates was one of our most popular forms of entertainment—Tullius against Ikaros on the benefits of synthesis against original research, or Ficino against Adeimantus on the virtues of translation. I began to have an idea that I might one day challenge one of the younger masters, perhaps Ikaros or Klio.

  One day I went running in the mountains and met Laodike and Damon, returning from a run. I didn’t see them often any more; the division into silver and gold had made a difference. They looked awkward, and I tried hard to be especially friendly, sharing some figs I had brought. We sat in the shade of a rock to eat them. “You’re not running straight up the mountain any more, then?” I asked.

  “We’ve been doing a lot of cross-country scrambling,” Damon said. “It’s supposed to be good practice for war. Not that there’s anyone to fight.”

  “I can’t fight right now anyway,” Laodike said. She patted her stomach, which had a slight curve.

  “Joy to you!” I said. “Klymene’s pregnant too, you know.”

  “Maybe you’ll manage it next time,” she said. “There are definite advantages.”

  Damon shot her a worried glance. “I don’t think—”

  “Oh, Simmea’s our friend, she won’t tell anyone. And we know about her and Pytheas, just the same as you and me.”

  “I won’t tell anyone whatever it is, but Pytheas and I aren’t … whatever you think. We’re friends.” I felt blood heating my cheeks.

  Laodike laughed. “Well, once you’re pregnant you can’t get more pregnant, so if you can find somewhere quiet to do it, like up here, you can safely copulate with your friend.”

  I looked at the two of them. They both looked embarrassed now, and a little sheepish, but also happy in a way that stung my heart. Their hands crept together, intertwined, and clung. Plato said that friendship was good but adding sex to it was bad, but perhaps understandable in silvers. It wasn’t hurting anyone in any case. “I won’t tell anyone, and I’m glad it’s working for you. I’m so pleased I saw you. I miss you in Hyssop. We should do a run together before you get as big as a sleeping house.”

  Shortly after that came the second festival of Hera. I had wondered how they were going to manage with some of the women being pregnant and unavailable but all of the men still being free. The answer was that the women were carefully counted, in each class, and that number of men were selected to participate, partly at random and partly by merit. The merit consisted in doing well either in the athletic contests or in their work in the four months since the last time. Then every man who didn’t qualify by merit had his name set in an urn and they were chosen by lot.

  Pytheas’s name was second drawn. He was matched with Kryseis and they went off together, seeming content. I drew Phoenix, of Delphi, whom I already knew quite well—we had often raced and wrestled together. He wasn’t as considerate as Aeschines, and much faster. He also wanted me to suck his penis with my mouth, which I refused, because it reminded me of the slave ship. He sulked about this, and said that his previous partner had done it and that the boys all did it for each other. The encounter wasn’t much fun, and I didn’t invite him for dinner in Florentia afterwards.

  Nor was it productive. Auge became pregnant, but I didn’t and nor did any of the rest of us in Hyssop. Makalla and Klymene were four months along, showing big breasts and big bellies already, and excused from exercise in the palaestra. Charmides said that swimming would be good for them and that they should take regular gentle walks. Klio taught them vaginal exercises.

  “How does she know them?” Makalla giggled. “Has she ever had a baby?”

  There was no way to know about the lives of the masters before they came to the city. Klio might have had several children. None of
them were here. I wondered if she missed them. I thought about what Septima had said about time.

  Auge found her early pregnancy difficult—she vomited every morning. She complained that she was too weak to move marble—she sculpted, and was very good, but now she felt cut off from her art. She broke up with her lover and cried herself to sleep, then when Iphis went to comfort her they ended up beginning a passionate friendship that Klymene found difficult to deal with. They said, giggling, that it was Platonic agape. Klymene had to insist that they each slept in their own bed. It was unsettling. I missed Laodike and Andromeda, who were much more comfortable to live with and who had truly felt like sisters.

  21

  MAIA

  Klymene came to me late one night. I encouraged all the Florentines to come to me any time they had a problem, so I wasn’t very surprised when I opened the door and saw her there. Lysias was curled up asleep in my bed, so I went out to her. It was a cool night with an edge of chill in the air. “Let’s go to my office in Florentia,” I said. “We can be comfortable and you can tell me whatever it is.”

  We went to the kitchen first and took plates. We each helped ourselves to some olives, slices from a half-cut round of goat cheese, and some barley bread left over from supper. “As good as a feast,” Klymene said.

  “It’s good to see you want it,” I said.

  “Yes, I was so sick for the first three months.” She patted her belly, which was just starting to show. We were all excited about the first babies. “Now I’m starving all the time.”

  We settled ourselves in my study. There was a new hanging on the wall in gold and green and brown which some of the Florentines I’d been teaching weaving had given to me. The cloth wasn’t as even as the worker-made cloth, but they had sewn the different coloured stripes together in a charming way. I stroked the edge of it as I sat down. “Problems in Hyssop?” I asked.

  Klymene swallowed her bread. “No. Well, yes, the same thing, Auge and Iphis, you know. Nothing different.”