The Just City

by Jo Walton

  Maia called Charmides to me. He said I needed iron, and prescribed liver and cabbage, which I ate dutifully although it made me want to gag. Axiothea gave me iron lozenges to suck. Auge brought me figs and Klymene reported debates that I would normally have been sorry to miss. I could see that they were all genuinely concerned for me, but I couldn’t seem to rouse myself out of my stupor. I felt passive and stupid as if only half of my mind was working. I wondered idly if perhaps some of my soul had gone into the baby and left me this empty husk without passion or desires.

  I was tired absolutely all the time. The thought of resuming my life exhausted me. Maia told me I was commissioned to do a painting for a book cover, and instead of a joy and an honor it felt like an insurmountable burden. If I got up to go to the latrine-fountain I felt I had to rest when I came back to bed. The other girls in Hyssop, even those who had given birth, didn’t know what to make of me. I avoided Sokrates and Kebes and even Pytheas. I felt it unfair of them to demand more of me than I had. I had just enough energy to eat and sleep and feed babies. Conversation drained me. It was an effort not to cry and an effort not to snap with irritation. Making the effort left me more exhausted than ever.

  The iron, or something, helped with the bleeding, which began to ease off in the second month after I had given birth. I still fainted frequently and didn’t care about anything. I didn’t even care enough to be concerned that I didn’t care; or rather I was aware that there was a problem and I would usually care, but it was as if it were a message sent to me from far away in dubious characters about people I had read about once. “Pytheas was asking about you,” Klymene said one evening.

  “Tell him I’m just tired,” I said, and only much later thought how strange it was that Pytheas should have been driven to ask Klymene. Even as I thought it, I couldn’t bring myself to care. Just looking at the fact was an effort. He must really care about me, I thought, just when I don’t care about anything. How could I possibly be worthy of him, in this condition? I felt myself starting to cry. That was the other thing. It started immediately after the baby was born. I cried all the time as if my eyes had sprung a leak. Anything that would have sparked any emotion at all now made me weep.

  A few days after that, Pytheas lay in wait for me outside Hyssop. He could not enter the house, of course, or the nursery, but nobody could stop him waiting by the door for me to come out.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked as soon as he saw me.

  I started to cry immediately. “Nothing’s wrong,” I said.

  “You’re crying.”

  “Oh Pytheas, I’m too tired to explain it. It’s just nothing.” I felt exhausted at the thought of one of our usual conversations.

  “I haven’t seen you.”

  “I haven’t been fit to see.” My head began to spin. I took a deep breath, which sometimes helped. “Everything makes me tired.”

  Pytheas took my hand. “This isn’t right,” he said. “You shouldn’t feel like this. Where were you going?”

  “To the nursery. It’s time to feed the babies.” My breasts were tight and uncomfortable. I could feel Pytheas’s hand, which was warm in mine, but as if I felt it through layers of muffling cloth. I tried to smile but just cried harder.

  He frowned. “Simmea—look, I’m going to get Septima. I’ll bring her back here in an hour, all right?”

  “Why Septima?” I asked, but he had gone, running full tilt.

  I walked to the nursery, still in my haze of misery and exhaustion. Nothing seemed to matter. Maia had said I could have a baby and go on with my life, but it seemed my body had other ideas. I fed a baby Andromeda brought me, one of the small ones but not mine. I had not seen mine again. I did not know his name. I drank some cabbage soup and ate some barley bread, barely tasting it. I sucked obediently at one of the iron lozenges Axiothea had given me. When I went outside again Septima and Pytheas were waiting, sitting on the low wall by the currant bushes. Pytheas looked concerned, and Septima looked irritated. They weren’t talking as they waited, or even looking at each other. Seeing them together, they did have a clear family resemblance—their golden skin color, and the shape of their chins, and the way their eyes were set.

  “Here you are,” Pytheas said, getting up.

  I walked over to them, forcing myself to do it, though all I wanted was to go back to Hyssop and lie down and stare unthinkingly at the wall.

  “What’s the matter?” Septima asked.

  “Lethargy,” I said. “Exhaustion. A tendency to weep and a tendency to faint. Charmides says it’s a thing that happens and it will go away in time.”

  “He’s right,” she said, not to me but to Pytheas. “It’s not a curse. It’s a medical thing. She’ll get over it eventually.”

  “I think now would be a good time for her to get over it,” he said, sharply.

  Septima rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why you’re asking me, it’s not my department at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and tears started to roll down my cheeks again. “I didn’t ask him to bother you about it. I know I’ll get over it. Axiothea also says so. She says some women have this after childbirth, and I need iron and rest.”

  “You’ve been resting, and it’s doing no good,” Pytheas said. “I need you. Sokrates needs you.”

  Septima put her hand on my arm. “You should go to the temple of Asklepius and pray for healing,” she suggested.

  “Come on,” Pytheas said.

  “I’m so tired,” I whined. “Can’t I lie down now? I’ll go later. Tomorrow.”

  The temple of Asklepius was close to Thessaly, halfway across the city. I couldn’t face the thought of walking that far. “You’re going now,” Pytheas said. He put his arm around me, supporting me. Again I could both feel it and not feel it. It was as if there was something in the way of sensation, as if my sense of touch had eyelids and they were closed across it. The purely physical warmth of his arm came through my kiton, but the touch itself was muffled, and I certainly felt none of the accompanying happiness that his touch usually brought. “Come on.”

  “All right,” I said. It was easier to walk than resist, so I walked. I fainted once on the way. It was hard to tell when I was going to faint, because I felt strange and dizzy all the time, as if I was holding on to consciousness by a thread. Sometimes the thread parted. Pytheas held me up, or at least, when I opened my eyes I saw his, blue above me in his perfect chiseled face. There had been times when I would have given anything to have been in his arms. Now it was merely comforting in a mild animal way. I did not feel desire—I felt no desire at all for anything, except sleep.

  We walked on towards the temple. There was nobody there in the late afternoon. It was small and simple, just a circle of plain marble Ionic pillars with a canted roof. Inside there was nothing but a statue of the god with an archaic smile, and a little burner for offerings. Pytheas helped me up the steps.

  “Pray to Asklepius,” Septima said. “Aloud. Ask for healing.”

  I didn’t ask if I could rest first, it was clear from her tone that she wasn’t going to let me. I obeyed. I raised my arms, palm up and then palm down. In the city we didn’t kneel groveling before the gods as I remembered doing in church as a child, but prayed standing before them. I didn’t know what to say. I had celebrated Asklepius on his feast days, naturally, but I had never sought him out before. I had never been ill.

  Out loud, Septima had said. I tried my best. “Asklepius, wisest son of shining Apollo, help me now. Restore me to health.”

  “Asklepius, hear her,” they both said in chorus, from behind me. Their words echoed in the empty temple.

  I hadn’t thought what divine healing would be like, or even really considered whether it might work. I was doing this only because they wouldn’t let me rest until I did, and out of a faint memory of my agape for Pytheas. I stood there with my arms outstretched towards the statue of the god, and between one instant and the next my sickness was removed from me.

  It wa
s like waking up, or perhaps more like diving into the sea from a cliff and hitting the cold water all at once. I was alert and vibrating. All the lethargy was gone. I had my mind back. My soul was my own. My body was strong again. I no longer wanted to sleep. I didn’t feel faint, and the queasiness that had been with me for so long that I no longer consciously noticed it had also gone. I was ravenous. I could have run up the mountain, or danced all night, or debated a really chewy subject with Sokrates. I wanted to. I laughed.

  “Thank you, Lord Asklepius, divine healer,” I said, and my words were heartfelt and willed, the first truly willed words I had said since I had slipped into sleep the night the baby was born.

  I turned around. Pytheas and Septima were still standing there, of course, and I saw them in my newfound clarity. I knew. I recognized them. I gasped.

  It all made sense, in that instant, where Athene had gone, and why Pytheas was the way he was, why he had the excellences he did and the flaws he did, why he laughed when Sokrates swore by Apollo, why Sokrates had been surprised when he said his parents lived above Delphi, why my prayer to Athene had sent me to Septima in the library. I just stood gaping at the two of them, and for a long moment they both stared back at me in silence. The grey eyes and the blue, the chiseled features, so similar, the truly Olympian calm. But Pytheas—Pytheas, even the name, Pythian Apollo, his Delphic title. They were gods, gods in mortal form and standing there. Septima was Pallas Athene and Pytheas, my Pytheas, was the god Apollo! I almost wished I still felt like fainting, because it would have been one of the very few appropriate responses.

  29

  MAIA

  During the month before the debate on slavery, evidence for the intelligence of the workers piled up. Sokrates was openly and visibly engaging them in dialogue, and their halves of the dialogue remained written in stone for anyone to read later. It was no longer possible for anyone to believe it was a hoax, unless they accused Sokrates of being in on it, which was unthinkable.

  I was on my way home from the palaestra one day when I saw Sokrates squatting beside a worker in the middle of the street. I hesitated, curious. We had all agreed when Sokrates first arrived that we would not treat him like a celebrity but allow him to select his own friends. I had never been one of those chosen, nor had I expected to be. He concentrated on teaching the children, those who could really hope to become philosopher kings, and those among the masters who were the most brilliant and who had something to teach him. I had seen him in Chamber, and around the city. We’d exchanged a few words from time to time, naturally. But I didn’t know him well. Now, as I walked around him, he looked up from what the worker was engraving and grinned at me. His face had always reminded me of a Toby jug, and from above, with him grinning like that, the resemblance was unavoidable. But amid all that ugliness, his eyes were very keen.

  He straightened up. “Joy to you. I’m trying to get him to understand the concept of names. Are you busy, or can I use you as an example? It might take a few minutes.”

  “Of course,” I said, slightly flustered. “And joy to you. I have a little while before I’m due to teach my weaving class.”

  “Good. Thank you.” He turned back to the worker. “You see this human?” he asked.

  The worker wrote something. I craned to see what. Sokrates moved slightly so that I could read it. “Master.” It wrote the Greek word in Latin letters, as we had all been told they did.

  “Yes. Good. She’s a master,” Sokrates said. “And her name is Maia.”

  “Master Maia,” it wrote.

  “How does it know I’m a master?” I asked.

  “They’ve been told to take orders from masters and not children, so they recognize you as being part of the class of people called masters,” Sokrates explained.

  “But I practically never give them orders,” I protested.

  “That doesn’t matter. Say something to him now,” Sokrates instructed me.

  “Joy to you, worker,” I said to it, awkwardly.

  It underlined where it had written my name, and began to write neatly underneath. “Sokrates means only-you, Maia means only-her?” it engraved. And as easily as that, I was convinced. It didn’t matter what Lysias said, the worker was obviously thinking and putting ideas together. He might be huge and yellow and have treads and four arms with tools at the end of them, but he was a philosopher all the same.

  “That’s right,” Sokrates said. “Well done. These are names. And what name means only you?”

  The worker was still for a moment, and then he inscribed a long number. After it, he wrote the word “Worker.”

  Sokrates pulled a little notebook out of his kiton, one of the standard buff notebooks we all used. He opened it up and checked the number against a list he had written down. “Is that what other workers call you?” he asked as he read. He found the number and put a little check mark against it.

  “No,” he wrote.

  “What name do they call you?”

  “Call?”

  “To address you, or talk about you when you’re not there,” Sokrates said, stuffing the notebook and pencil back into his kiton. “Watch how we use names. Joy to you, Maia. How are you, Maia?”

  “Joy to you Sokrates. I am well. How are you, Sokrates?” It felt very unnatural, and he laughed at my wooden delivery.

  “I am very well. How is Simmea?”

  I forgot what we were supposed to be doing and spoke normally. “Simmea is a little better, I think, but she’s still very low and bleeding a great deal, and she keeps fainting. Charmides says she’ll get over it, but I’m worried about her.”

  Sokrates frowned. “Tell her I miss her,” he said.

  The worker was writing something. We bent over to read it.

  “Workers do not call names,” the worker had written.

  “How about what the masters call you when they want you to do something?” Sokrates asked.

  “Do not call name.”

  “I don’t think Lysias and Klio distinguish between them very much,” I said. “Lysias never seems to when he’s talking about them. He thinks of them as interchangeable, except when they break down.”

  “They’re not interchangeable, they’re definitely individuals and different from each other,” Sokrates said. “They’ve all been given permission to talk, but only some of them do.”

  “Only-me,” the worker carved. “Individual. No name.”

  “You should have a name,” I said. “A proper name, not a number.”

  “What name only-me?” he asked.

  I looked at Sokrates, and he shrugged. “How do you usually choose names?”

  “From Plato’s dialogues, or from mythology,” I said. “And we keep names unique. I don’t know all the ones that have been used already. Ficino would know. He chooses the names for Florentia.”

  “It’s easy enough to think of appropriate mythological names,” Sokrates said, patting the worker. “But what kind of name would you like?”

  He didn’t answer, and then he inscribed a circle, twice. Then underneath he neatly inscribed the word “Write.”

  “You can’t be called Write,” Sokrates said. “A name can have meaning, but that’s too confusing.”

  “Learn?” he suggested.

  I looked at Sokrates. “Does he really want to be called write, or learn?”

  “He’s just learning what names are, you can’t expect him to understand at once what kind of things work for them,” Sokrates said.

  “I understand that. But that those are the things he wants to be called speaks very well of him.” I was impressed.

  “He has come to understanding in your city; naturally he is a philosopher,” Sokrates said.

  “Give name?” the worker inscribed.

  “You want me to give you a name?” Sokrates asked.

  “Want Sokrates give name means only-me.”

  I was moved, and Sokrates plainly was too. “You are the worker who answered me with the bulbs,” he said.

 
“Yes,” he wrote.

  “Then I will call you Crocus,” Sokrates said. “Crocus is the name of that spring flower you planted. And that was the first action of any worker that replied to me, that showed what you were. I’ll name you for your deeds. And nobody else in the city will have that name.”

  “Worker Crocus,” he wrote, and then repeated the long serial number. “Only-me,” he added.

  Then, without a word of farewell he trundled off up the street and began to rake the palaestra. I stared after him. “That is unquestionably a person,” I said.

  “Now if only I can persuade him to give three hundred such demonstrations to each of the masters individually,” Sokrates said, smiling. “Sometimes they’re not as clear as that,” he went on. “My dialogues with them can be very frustrating sometimes when I can’t explain what things mean.”

  “Well, that was clear to me. He’s a person and a philosopher,” I said.

  “A lover of wisdom and learning, certainly. If that is what makes a philosopher.”

  “Plato said they had to have that and also be just and gentle, retentive, clever, liberal, brave, temperate, and have a sense of order and proportion.” Then I looked at Sokrates. “But you must know that. You said it yourself.”

  “Nothing in the Republic is anything I ever said, or thought, or dreamed. The Apology is fairly accurate, as is the account of the drinking party after Agathon’s first victory at the Dionysia. But even there Plato was inclined to let his imagination get the better of him.”

  I wasn’t exactly shocked, because I’d heard it before, though never so directly. “He just used your name when he wanted to express the wisest views.”

  “Yes, that’s the kind way of thinking about it. And I was dead and couldn’t be harmed by it.” He sighed. “Not until I came here, anyway.”