Necessity

by Jo Walton

  Nobody moved or spoke for a long moment. Then Marsilia made a retching sound and made a dash for the fountain room, looking seasick. The papers she had been holding scattered to the ground as she ran.

  12

  MARSILIA

  Hermes turned to me a second later, on the same quayside on a blazing hot summer afternoon, hotter than it ever was at home. “He recognized you. So we had already successfully got Athene’s note from him.”

  “So am I caught up in Necessity’s toils now as well?” I asked. I rubbed my eyes against the sun’s glare reflecting off the harbor water.

  Hermes looked intrigued. “Yes. But we can’t use that as a shield the way Apollo wants me to use Alkippe, because we need Athene’s explanation first, so don’t worry, we can clear it up quickly.”

  “But how does it work? Haven’t these things we’ve done always been in time, so that even before we left Plato, even before I was born these things happened? We always spoke to Kebes earlier, and took Athene’s message from him before that? If time can’t change except in extreme circumstances when Zeus intervenes, isn’t everything we do in time determined? Why are you uncomfortable about Alkippe, when it’s all like that?”

  “Well, things can change because of our actions. And once we know about them, we are bound to do them. It’s uncomfortable because I know about Alkippe.” He hesitated, frowning a little. “It’s like an itch I can’t reach, until I set it straight, a painful spreading itch. Or maybe it’s more like the feeling that I am constantly doing the wrong thing. I should be attending to that, so everything else I do feels bad and wrong. But it’s only because I know. If I didn’t know?” He shrugged. “I didn’t know until I saw her, and it didn’t bother me at all.”

  “So it has to do with awareness, with consciousness?” I asked. “Divine consciousness, or any consciousness?”

  “Only gods can go outside time, so mortal consciousness isn’t usually a problem this way. Your lives unfold in time, you do what you want to do, you can’t get tangled up in it unless we take you outside it, which Father wisely forbids.” He grinned.

  Yet here I was, in a time that was both forty years and four thousand years before the time when I was born. “Can you change things on purpose?”

  “Yes. But it gets harder the farther from our central concerns it is.”

  “And how about getting tangled up in Necessity? Can that be deliberate?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “No, not normally. Because it’s the consequences of actions. Well, there are ways one can, but nobody would. It feels horrible enough when it isn’t.”

  “And what if you never went back to conceive Alkippe?” I asked, my deepest fear. “Would she cease to exist?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody could withstand Necessity for long enough to find out. But maybe. We’re banking on her being protection for us, being a shield. But if I should be stuck out there, or killed, then I don’t really know what would happen to her.”

  “Well, that’s honest, thank you.” I blinked back tears. “You take it so lightly.”

  “I don’t know her as you do.”

  I tried to put it more clearly. “I didn’t mean that. I mean you seem to find everything funny, you keep laughing at things, and yet you say everything feels wrong.”

  “That’s my nature,” he said.

  That didn’t explain anything. “Let’s get on with it. When are we now, exactly?”

  “Five years earlier than when we spoke to Kebes before. The boat’s there.” He gestured towards it. “Goodness. What a name!”

  “What?” I was so used to it as a name that I’d never really considered it before. “It’s a great name!”

  “Very Platonic,” Hermes agreed, so I didn’t understand his previous objection.

  “Let’s try again,” I said. We walked over to the Goodness, which was tied up at the same spot. The same sailor was standing in a slightly different place on the deck, coiling a rope. One of the grey and white sea birds was perched on the rail in almost the same place. “Is Matthias aboard?” I asked. It reminded me of rehearsing a play, but of course the sailor didn’t recognize me, and didn’t know his lines.

  “Nope,” he said. “Went ashore.”

  “Do you know where I could find him?”

  The sailor looked from my face to my gold pin, and frowned. His pin was silver, I noticed. “Might be in the church,” he said, after a noticeable hesitation.

  I thanked him, then Hermes and I turned and walked away, up the steep hill in the blazing sunshine. I led the way towards the agora where I remembered the church standing in my own world. “Churches are a kind of Christian temple, and Kebes is some kind of permanent priest,” I remembered. “It’s going to be really hard to talk to him, to be friendly I mean.” I wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. When I’d been in Lucia before, the streets had been bustling. Now there was nobody in sight but an old man leading a laden donkey down the hill, and two little girls playing on a doorstep. The sea below was so still that birds were sitting floating on the water.

  “You said he believes Athene is a demon. Will he think I am a demon too?” Hermes looked quite pleased at the thought.

  “I expect so. The Ikarians say the Olympians are angels, and the Lucian church these days—I mean, in my own time, on Plato, has moved a lot closer to the Ikarians. I’ve never really paid that much attention—with Pytheas right there and his children being my uncles and aunt, and all of them saying Yayzu isn’t anything different, it’s hard to take contradictory beliefs seriously. Though the Ikarians claim it doesn’t contradict at all.” We came to a beautiful, slightly old-fashioned sculpture of Marissa, which I remembered from when I was in Lucia in my past and its future. I gestured to it. “But why have only one goddess, instead of all of them?”

  “It’ll probably be best if we don’t debate religion with him,” Hermes said.

  “Should we tell him who we are?” I asked.

  “If we don’t, how will he know to give us Athene’s message?”

  “How will he anyway? She can’t have known we’d be the ones to come. I mean she must have known Grandfather couldn’t come, because of being in two times at once. So he’d have to send someone, but Athene wouldn’t know who. She might have expected it would be Porphyry. He’s the only one of my uncles who goes in and out of time.” Or I suppose he could have asked another of the Olympians. Hermes was only helping because he happened to be there, wasn’t he? For the first time I wondered why he had come to Plato when he did.

  “I wonder why Athene chose a time she knew Apollo couldn’t reach? It can’t have been accidental. She must have had a reason. I think we should say we come from Athene, to collect what she left with him,” Hermes said. “If he asks who we are, we should simply tell him the truth.”

  “But we already know it didn’t go well,” I said. “The way he reacted when he saw us.”

  “If it’s not going to go well, then nothing we can think of will change that,” Hermes said.

  We walked on in silence as I pondered the ramifications of that. We soon came into the main part of the city and passed the sleeping house where I had stayed when I had spent my year in Lucia. It looked exactly the same, except that there was a pea vine covered in orange flowers growing up the white-painted wall which was new—or no, of course, old. The vine had probably died of cold before I was born.

  “It’s really quiet,” I said. “Where do you think everyone is?”

  “Napping in the heat of the day,” he said, gesturing towards the latched shutters. “It’s a normal thing in Greece. In summer everything gets done in the morning and the evening.”

  “That makes sense, because it is really hot,” I admitted. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been this hot.”

  “I might be able to help make you more comfortable.” My red kiton didn’t change, but it immediately felt lighter. I wondered if the weight and warmth of my fishing clothes had been in it until then. After a moment, a little breeze sp
rang up, ruffling the water, now far below us, and evaporating the sweat from my face. Hermes smiled.

  We came to the agora. A man and woman were sitting debating something at one of the tables outside the cafe, bending together over some papers. An old woman walked across the plaza carrying a whimpering toddler. Hermes wrinkled his nose at the freestanding wooden crucifix outside the church. I’d seen it before, so I pushed the door open and went inside.

  It was cool and dark and smelled of something heavy and sweet. I stood still for a moment while my eyes adjusted. There were high windows with no glass, which had contained lovely stained glass scenes of the life of Yayzu when I’d seen them before. The inside of the church had been lit with electricity then, too, and there had been paintings and statues. Now it was mostly bare. There was a shadowed altar, with a cloth and a gold cross on it, and four rows of benches. I thought for a moment that the sailor was wrong, or that Kebes must have left, because I couldn’t see anybody, then I realized that there was someone prostrate on the tiles in front of the altar. It seemed an uncomfortably intimate way to catch somebody unawares. I wished he had been on the boat. He must have heard the door creak as we came in, but he hadn’t moved. I looked at Hermes for advice. He spread his hands theatrically. My job, of course.

  “Matthias?” I called, uncertainly.

  He raised himself and turned, looking towards us for a second, then he leapt to his feet and came running up the aisle, his arms outspread as if to enfold me. “Simmea!” he shouted. “You came at last!”

  I had not known what to expect, but being mistaken for my long-dead grandmother was not on the list. I knew I looked a bit like her—several people had told me so, and I was familiar with Crocus’s colossus of her so I knew there was indeed a family resemblance between us. It must have been enough, with the light behind me, and Kebes’s imagination and memory.

  “I’m not Simmea,” I said hastily. I had been told he had been her friend and debate partner, and that he had raped her at a Festival of Hera. Nothing I had heard prepared me for the longing and hope in the way he called her name. I had always imagined him a monster, and I wasn’t prepared for the man.

  He stopped, and squinted at me. “Then who are you?”

  “We come from Athene,” Hermes said. “We want the message she left with you.”

  “Let me see you.” Kebes pushed open the church door. Hermes and I followed him out into the agora. The sunlight was blinding after the darkness within. He barely glanced at Hermes before staring at me avidly. I looked back at him. He was a burly man who seemed about my own age. He had a broad forehead from which his hair was starting to recede. “You look so much like her. Are you her daughter? Our daughter? Brought here out of time? What’s your name?”

  “My name’s Marsilia. Simmea was my grandmother,” I admitted. I felt sorry for him, which wasn’t anything I’d ever have predicted.

  “Your grandmother? And you live on Kallisti? In the original city? In the future?”

  “In the original city, yes.” The Relocation was too complicated to go into.

  Kebes was staring at me so delightedly that it made me uncomfortable. “And you’re a Gold?”

  My hand went to touch my pin, and I glanced automatically at his shoulder as he said this, and saw to my surprise that he wasn’t wearing any pin at all, though I knew he was a Gold. “I’m a Gold,” I confirmed. He was so different from the way I had expected.

  “Let’s sit down and have a drink,” he said. I looked at Hermes.

  “We only really want to take the message from Athene and go,” he said.

  “We need to talk about that. And I want to talk to my granddaughter,” Kebes said.

  “Then by all means let’s have a drink,” Hermes said. The little breeze was stirring up ankle-high swirls of dust in the empty agora. We walked across it to the tables outside the cafe. I wondered whether to tell Kebes I wasn’t his granddaughter. It seemed a cruel deception, but equally cruel to undeceive him now he had deceived himself this way.

  We sat down, and Kebes banged on the table, startling both me and the debating couple, who looked up at us for a moment before they turned back to their work. A woman came scurrying out from inside. She wore a bronze pin, and she looked tired and hot. “Wine, with water as cold as you can make it,” Kebes demanded. “And quickly!” I didn’t like the way he spoke to her, and I was made even more uncomfortable by the cringing way she smiled, as if she agreed with him that he was more important than she was. I watched her as she went back inside. Between this time and my own, things had definitely improved in Lucia in terms of how the classes interacted.

  Kebes turned to me and smiled. “Do you have family?” he asked.

  It seemed like such a normal question, the kind anyone might ask, and which I wasn’t expecting from a monster. “Yes. Parents, a sister and a daughter,” I said. I was used to saying this, but even so I couldn’t look at Hermes and I could feel my cheeks heating with embarrassment.

  “A daughter?” he asked. “How old is she?”

  “Seven,” I said.

  “She’d say seven and a half,” Hermes said. He was leaning back in his chair, completely relaxed.

  “Could you bring her here?” Kebes asked him.

  “Alkippe? Why?” I was horrified. I was taking these risks to keep her safe!

  “I thought you’d want her with you. You can have a lovely house, next to mine, with plenty of servants. We have public baths and—”

  “I’m not staying!” I interrupted before he said anything worse. Servants! I didn’t know what year it was, or how long it was before the Relocation, but I didn’t want to give up my life and live in Lucia deep in the past, nor was that where I wanted Alkippe to grow up. The thought was stifling, worse, terrifying.

  “But you can be free here, without all that evil nonsense,” Kebes said.

  “What nonsense?” I asked warily.

  “Festivals of Hera, and Plato, and worshipping demons,” he said, with a glance at Hermes. “You could get married properly. You’re my family, and we can be together. You can help with our great work of rescuing and resettling people. And most importantly, you can come to know the true God. Yayzu can save your soul.”

  “No!” I protested. “You know nothing about me, and you’re trying to take control of my life without any idea of who I am or what I want.”

  Kebes drew breath to reply, but as he did the woman came back with a tray with the two jugs, the mixer, and three cups. Kebes kept quiet but otherwise ignored her, as if she were an animal moving about. She set the things down carefully on the table. I smiled at her, and she smiled uncertainly back. Kebes was reaching for a coin, but I was faster, pulling one out of the purse Hermes had given me, glad now that I had it. “No change,” I said. She thanked me profusely. I took hold of the jugs and mixed the wine half and half, as Plato recommends, and then added a bit more water, and poured it into the cups. The utensils were plain but sturdy and well shaped.

  Kebes took a cup. Although I had paid for the wine, I didn’t want to drink with him and make him my guest-friend. I drew a cup towards me but did not pick it up. Hermes did the same, twisting the stem in his long fingers. The woman went over to the other table and answered some query they had.

  The pause had given me time to think what to say. “I appreciate that you mean well, but I don’t worship demons. I am perfectly happy with Plato and festivals. I am a Gold, and this year I’m consul. I’m an important person at home. People want me to make decisions and sort things out. I spent a year as envoy to Lucia in my own time, and it’s thriving, but I was glad to go home again. I already know about Yayzu. We have Ikarian temples in the City; we have freedom of worship. I could marry at home, if there were anyone I wanted to marry. I have my own complicated life and you don’t know anything about it. I have no desire to be uprooted from it and come here.”

  “But I’m your grandfather! Family should be together.”

  “I don’t think you are my grandf
ather,” I said, gently. It seemed absurd in any case as we were about the same age. “And I am close to the family I know.” They all felt extremely dear to me now, even though Ma never approved of anything I did and Thetis drove me crazy regularly.

  “Athene promised me, a descendant of mine and Simmea’s,” he said.

  “She did?” I wouldn’t have thought she’d be so cruel. Then as he moved his head and I saw the breadth of his forehead, I remembered how he had reminded me of Ma when I had seen him on the boat. There was something about his chin too that was like her, especially now that he was leaning forward. Ma was festival-born and didn’t know either parent. Kebes had participated in festivals when he’d been in the City, so he could possibly be her father. Ma had hated him the one time they’d met, so I knew she’d be absolutely horrified if I mentioned this theory to her. But if he was her father, since Simmea was Dad’s mother, then it was possible that Thetis and I could be descended from both of them. But even if this was true, it was an unkind trick of Athene’s to make him believe he’d had a child with Simmea, when it clearly meant so much to him. Then I remembered that if it had existed, it would have been a child of rape, and stopped feeling sorry for him.

  “Athene can’t have promised you Marsilia would stay here,” Hermes said, picking up his cup.

  “But I want her to,” he said. “And she’ll like it when she gets the chance to know it. I won’t give you the message otherwise.”

  “No,” Hermes said, putting his cup down again firmly. I was relieved he was being so staunch, and then I remembered that moment on the harbor earlier in my time but later for Kebes. Hermes knew I wouldn’t have to stay, and so did I. What a relief! Being caught up by Necessity suddenly felt wonderful. “What did Athene say?”

  “That if I would do as she and Necessity asked me, and keep the message for her, then a descendant of mine and Simmea’s would come for it,” Kebes said, sulkily.

  “How could she know?” I wondered aloud.

  “She gave you Hilfa, she knew you and Thetis would be involved. If I hadn’t brought you, I could have gone to get one of you, and either of you would have agreed,” Hermes said. He turned back to Kebes. “Marsilia came. You’ve seen her. You know she’s happy, and she doesn’t want to live here and now. She has told you Lucia is thriving in her own time. Now, give us the message.”