The Just City

by Jo Walton

  Sokrates was wonderfully wise and full of twisty edges. He was honest in debate, always absolutely fair—he reminded me sometimes of Pytheas marking the point when I hit him. But it was rare to trap him—he thought too far ahead. I tried to do that too, but he was always ahead of me. I was always either really debating with Sokrates, or debating with Sokrates in my head. The real Sokrates was much better, even though I could win debates in my head. It wasn’t about winning, it was about finding the truth. Sokrates always thought of things I wouldn’t think of, things that came from directions nobody would expect. Often enough he let the three of us debate, just putting in questions now and then. His questions were always the best.

  One morning I went running up the mountain with Kryseis and Damon. The island of Kallisti had a diameter of about twenty miles, and it had many hills, some of them steep. “Running in the mountains” just meant an overland scramble. But when we said “the mountain” we meant only one thing, the volcano that stood behind the city. Up at the top was a constantly changing crater. Usually there were red cracks visible down through the fresh rock. Sometimes rock ran like streams over the edge. Occasionally the whole place seemed about to boil. That was when it sent up plumes of smoke that we could see from down below. When rain fell into the crater it sent up great clouds of steam.

  The three of us were serious about running, and close in ability. We ran up the sides of the steep rugged cone, pacing each other and keeping close. The terrain changed rapidly up here. It was a clear winter day with no clouds. When we came to the top I stopped and looked at the view. The sea was turquoise where the island sloped, and further out wine-dark all around, with a little froth of whitecaps where the winds stirred it, like diamonds on sapphire. To the north-east I could just barely make out a blue shadow in the water, as if there might be another island there. Kryseis was staring down into the crater. “They say it’ll explode one day and lava will cover the city.”

  “Not for a long time,” Damon said, reassuringly.

  “I wonder why they picked this site, knowing that?” I asked.

  “Ask them?” Damon suggested.

  I could, of course, but it was interesting to speculate about. I wondered what Sokrates would say.

  Damon climbed up onto the raised edge of the rock-rim of the crater and started to walk along it, balancing. I jumped up after him and did the same. “Come down, you fools,” Kryseis said. “You’d cook if you fell in.”

  “I’m not going to fall in,” Damon said. “It’s almost a handspan wide.”

  “What if it crumbles?” she called. “Come down!”

  I jumped down, but even as I did I realised that walking that dangerous edge reminded me of talking to Sokrates.

  What we debated so constantly that winter was whether the masters and Athene had been right to set up the Just City, and whether the Just City was the Just City or whether there could be one more just, and how that would be constituted. It was exciting and vitally important and deeply unsettling. “Are you debating like this with the masters?” I asked one day as we were leaving.

  “Some of them,” Sokrates said. “They are not united any more than you children are. Some of them are ninnies, and others, sadly, have too much respect for me to enter into serious debate. But a few I have invited to be my friends.”

  He spent his mornings wandering the city, falling into conversation with anyone and everyone, and his afternoons and evenings entertaining friends in Thessaly. He sometimes invited somebody else to join us for the hour we spent with him before dinner, but often it was just the four of us, as it had been the first day. He always seemed to pay a huge amount of attention to what Pytheas said, and to spend time considering it. I wondered sometimes as they sparred if they could have known each other before. But Pytheas would have been so young, it couldn’t be possible. Kebes and me he treated as colleagues in search of the truth. He did not teach by instruction but always by demonstration.

  “There’s nobody like him,” Pytheas said one evening as we were walking away from Thessaly. It was close to midwinter, and the sky was a clear luminous dark blue, like the mantle of the ikon of Botticelli’s Madonna on the cover of Maia’s book. Kebes had stayed with Sokrates, so we were alone. “There never has been.”

  “Nobody,” I said. “Not Ficino, not anybody. I doubt there ever could be. No wonder people remembered him for thousands of years. He’s better at challenging assumptions than anyone.”

  “He was challenging you a lot today.”

  I looked at him questioningly. “He always challenges me a lot. I like it. It makes me think through my ideas.”

  “You love this city,” Pytheas said. That was what we had been debating that day.

  “I do,” I said, spreading out my arms as if I could hug the entire city. “I love it. But Sokrates has made me see that it’s only the visible manifestation and earthly approximation of what I really love, the city of the mind. No earthly city, even with the direct help of the gods, can ever become that. But we’re doing pretty well here, I think.”

  “What do you think he and Kebes are doing now?”

  “Thinking about ways of destroying the city, probably,” I said. Pytheas started. “What? Did you think I didn’t know?”

  “You—I don’t know.” Pytheas looked disconcerted. “You’re not concerned?”

  “I said at the beginning that if debate can bring down the city, it deserves to fall. If they break it by debating it, then it’s not much of an approximation of the Just City, is it?” I asked.

  “How do you know they’re only debating?” Pytheas asked.

  “What would they be doing? Stealing quarrying explosives to blow up the walls?” I laughed. “Well, Kebes probably would, but Sokrates would think it was cheating, just as much as Krito dragging him off here was cheating. Sokrates hates cheating, he really does. He wants to do it all with dialectic, always, following logic through to where it leads. He wants to beat Athene.”

  “In debate?” Pytheas asked.

  “Yes, I think so. But I don’t think he’s ready yet. Meanwhile I’m painting and running and debating—if this isn’t the good life, what is?” Daringly I reached out and took his hand. He let me, and even squeezed my hand once before letting go. Sometimes I wondered if what Pytheas and I had was close to being Platonic agape or if he really didn’t want to touch me. We didn’t talk about it. But seeing him every day was part of what made this the good life for me.

  “Do you want to eat with us?” he asked. For the last month we had been allowed to invite guests to our dining halls. I almost never turned down an invitation, not because I wanted different food—the food was very similar, and our Florentine food was undoubtedly the best—but because I wanted to see all the pictures. I’d eaten in Delphi several times and admired the wall paintings of the Sack of Troy and Odysseus in the Underworld.

  “No, tonight I’d rather look at Botticelli,” I said. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “I’d rather look at Botticelli too,” he admitted. “But there’s Klymene.”

  “Have you really never spoken to her since the day of the hunt?”

  “Never. She doesn’t speak to me, and I can’t start it.” He hesitated. “I suppose I could apologize, but it seems a little late.”

  “She’s braver than anyone now,” I said. “She has spent the last couple of years facing up to everything, going out of her way to find ways to train in courage. She’s braver now than somebody born brave.”

  “Good. But…” he looked uncomfortable.

  “Oh, come and look at the Botticellis and we won’t sit with Klymene,” I said. “I think it’ll be pasta with goat cheese and mushrooms tonight.”

  At midwinter the Year Six began, and with it the ceremonies of Janus, the open door that swings both ways, to past and future. I always found it an unsettling festival, the hinge of the year. That year for the first time we were given wine, well mixed with water. I did not think it had affected my reactions, but when we went
out to the fire at midnight I found that the lights of the sconces and the fire were brighter than they usually were, and the faces of my companions more beautiful. There was to be a dance around the fire, and Laodike and Klymene had been chosen to be part of it. I wished them good fortune and stepped back alone to join the spectators.

  Sokrates was among them, talking with Kebes and Ikaros of Ferrara. Almost as many people had crushes on Ikaros as on Pytheas—he was young, for a master, and very good-looking, with a shock of chestnut hair and a smile that lit up his whole face. He had never taken any notice of me, except once when he commended my sketch of Pytheas. They seemed deep in debate, and I did not want to interrupt. I looked around for Pytheas, and found him on the other side of the fire and surrounded. One especially beautiful girl was at his side—the blond girl who had been chained next to me long ago in the slave market. Her name was Euridike, and she belonged to Plataea. Pytheas was attending to whatever she was saying, but when he saw me his eyes softened and he began to make his way towards me through the crowd.

  At that moment Sokrates too noticed me and greeted me. “Do you know Simmea?” he asked Ikaros. “She has a very sharp mind and she thinks things through.”

  I glowed with his praise and was speechless.

  Ikaros nodded to me. “She has a good eye for design too. Did you know we chose your cloak pins? With the bees?”

  “Chose them to be the real design?” I asked, thrilled. Ikaros nodded. Then Pytheas came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder, and Sokrates began to introduce him.

  “I may not always have this, but I have this now,” I thought. “I am perfectly happy in this moment and I know it.” It wasn’t the wine, though the wine might have helped me recognize it.

  Then the dance began, very beautiful and precise, which it had to be with with lifted torches and flowing draperies.

  The next morning there was a great assembly in the Agora, in the exact center of the city. The city was laid out in a grid, with two diagonal streets crossing it. Whenever one street met another there was a little plaza, and often a temple or other building that was open to the whole city, and it was in those plazas that artworks usually stood. The Agora was the plaza in the centre of the city, where two straight roads and both diagonal roads all crossed. The Chamber was there, where the council met, and the big library and the temples of Apollo and Athene, and the civic offices where records were kept. It was the only space in the city big enough for all ten thousand of us to gather, and it had been designed for the purpose, being shaped as an auditorium with a rostrum at the end where speakers could be heard.

  Today Krito and Tullius were at the rostrum. The other masters stood with their halls. The few who were not assigned to any one city, and Sokrates, stood behind the rostrum. Sokrates was clearly scanning the children as we stood gathered in halls and tribes, looking at all of us. It was a chilly morning and we were all in our cloaks. Our breath steamed as we stood there. I wondered if there would be snow—there had been snow in the winter of the Year Two, all melted away by mid-morning, and I had never seen it since. I thought of Botticelli’s painting, which was my only real conception of winter somewhere colder than Greece.

  Tullius and Krito both made speeches welcoming us to adulthood. Then they called the name of each city, and each city advanced to the rostrum, where each child’s name was called and the child given their pin. This took hours—from just after breakfast until almost dinnertime. We cheered each name, but the cheers grew thinner as we grew colder and wearier. Florentia came about halfway through. I had known I would be given a gold pin since Sokrates had chosen me, but I still choked up as I was handed it. It was partly that it was my own design, and partly that it was gold, after all, the most precious metal. I was going to be a guardian of the city. I hardly heard how many people cheered for me. I tucked my scroll inside my kiton and fastened my cloak with the pin at once. I was very pleased, but I didn’t feel the rush of joy I had felt at the fire.

  Florentia filed back into our places and Delphi went up. “They should have done it in the halls at breakfast,” Damon grumbled behind me. “There’s no need to keep all of us standing here in the cold.”

  “What did you get?”

  “Silver,” he said. “No surprise. There aren’t any surprises. This wasn’t worth making a fuss over. I think everyone knows where they belong.” He unrolled his scroll. “Weapon training. That’ll be fun. Horse training. Great!”

  “I’m hoping for training with weapons too,” I said. Then I cheered as Pytheas was announced. Gold, of course. The sun came out for a moment as he put up his hand for his pin and made it flash. I pulled out my scroll and read it. It said only that I was to study philosophy and keep up my work at music and gymnastics. Did that mean no more art, I wondered, or did that count as one of the parts of music?

  I was about to ask Klymene if she knew when I realized she was weeping. I put my arm around her. “What’s wrong? Did they make you iron after all?”

  She opened her hands and showed me her pin. Gold. I hugged her. “You deserve it,” I said. “You really really do.”

  She couldn’t speak. Around us people were reading their scrolls. “It’s so great that the masters get to pick things for us, things we’re really good at and that suit us,” Laodike said, earnestly. “I’d hate to have to choose. And think how limited it is in other places, where people are mostly stuck doing what their parents did whether they want to or not.”

  “We’re lucky to be here,” I agreed.

  Andromeda opened her own scroll. “Childcare training? But how? There aren’t any children!”

  “Yet,” Damon said. “There’s a festival of Hera this summer. Maybe by next year there will be a whole crop of children for you to tend. Better learn fast!”

  “You sound as if you’re looking forward to it,” Andromeda said.

  “Aren’t you? Hey, Simmea, if there are a thousand silvers, and a festival three times a year, how long before I’ve had sex with all of them?”

  “Three hundred and thirty-three years,” I said at once, then thought about it some more. “No, wait, it’s more complicated than that. I’m not sure. It might never happen. But it wouldn’t work that way. Some women will get pregnant each time and not be available next time. And how do you know there are a thousand silvers?”

  “Just a guess,” he said. I wondered how many would be gold. Would it be three hundred years before my name was drawn with Pytheas?

  Eventually the ceremony dragged to a close and we went back to the our halls. Kebes came up and hugged and congratulated Klymene, who was the only person I knew who hadn’t gone into the ceremony feeling fairly sure where they belonged. Laodike was a trifle disappointed to be silver—she had enjoyed astronomy so much, and hoped for gold.

  “I’m lucky we met Sokrates that night,” Kebes said to me.

  “We both are.”

  “You’d have been gold anyway. I’d probably have been iron.” Since we met Sokrates, Kebes had really appeared to be trying to be excellent. I’d heard Ficino saying that there never had been such an improvement in a boy.

  I saw Septima, from the library, talking to Ficino. “She’ll be gold,” I said, confidently.

  “Did they ever tell you they’d chosen your design?” Kebes asked.

  “Master Ikaros told me last night. You were there.”

  “I know, but did anyone officially tell you?”

  I shook my head. “I expect they wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “They should have announced it and given you the honor.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter. It’s enough of an honor that I’m going to see everyone wearing them.” I stroked mine. “And that they thought it good enough.”

  The next day we cut our hair and made our vows at the temple of Zeus and Hera, to serve and protect the city. From then on we were considered adults, though we kept on calling ourselves children, to distinguish us from the masters.

  Our days were different after
that. For one thing the houses were restructured, so that everyone in a house was of the same metal. Klymene and I remained in Hyssop with five other girls, two from Delphi, Makalla and Peisis, one from Ferrara, Iphis, and one from Naxos, Auge. Andromeda and the others moved out to be with their own kind. It felt strange, but I was glad not to be the one who was moving. Maia said we could choose who would be the new watcher. At my suggestion, we chose Klymene.

  The seven of us were all in the tribe of Apollo—nobody had changed tribes in the reorganization. They also continued to belong to their original cities. But they slept in Hyssop. This would have been more awkward except for the rule that we could now eat anywhere we were invited. It meant that they could eat in their old halls with their old friends when they wanted to, or eat in Florentia with us in the mornings when time was short. It was good—but it changed everything. It meant that we didn’t necessarily all see every other Florentine every day, and there were often different people in the hall, especially at dinner. Florentia was a popular dining hall, partly because of our food but mostly because it was so very beautiful. Eating where we were invited made us all mingle and know each other better. Before summer came I had eaten at least once in each hall. Venice had a wonderful Apollo and Juno by Veronese, Cortona had Signorelli’s The Court of Pan, and in Athens, where Septima took me one day with Pytheas, was a breathtaking statue of Lemnian Athena. Hardest to get into was Olympia, but eventually I met Aristomache with Sokrates and she invited me for dinner. Thus I got to see Phidias’s astonishing Nike, which if I were forced to choose is probably my favourite statue.