Necessity

by Jo Walton

  “But Alkippe might be keeping all of us safe, the whole of our civilization even,” Marsilia said.

  “The whole of history, potentially, Thee,” Pytheas said.

  “I don’t care!” Thetis said. “You can’t take risks with her like that! How can you think of it? She’s only seven.”

  Marsilia looked at me pleadingly. I didn’t know what to say or do. I felt sorry for Thetis, but things were bad enough without getting upset about them. It seemed strange that she could hear about the potential unravelling of the world as calmly as any of us, but a threat to one child she loved overcame her this way.

  “I’m horrified too, but if it’s really keeping all of us safe, then the risk is no worse for Alkippe than for any of us, all of us,” I said.

  To my surprise Hilfa got up and put his arms awkwardly around Thetis, and she sank down on the bed and allowed him to hold her.

  “Are you Alkippe’s mother, Thetis?” Sokrates asked gently.

  Thetis shook her head.

  “No, I am,” Marsilia said quietly to Sokrates, as poor Thetis wept on Hilfa’s shoulder.

  “And you say you are all right with this, this risk to your child?” Sokrates asked.

  “She can’t be!” Thetis said, barely able to speak through her sobs.

  “I’m not all right, but it’s necessary. It’s what Jason said, the risk is the same. If she ceases to exist because Jathery doesn’t go back to conceive her, or she ceases to exist because the whole city, or all of history does, there’s no difference. And I have stayed as close to Jathery as I can since finding this out. It’s why I went with gla,” Marsilia said. Her face was set and brave. “I also love Alkippe very much—and I agree it’s terrible.”

  Sokrates patted her shoulder. “What a hard choice,” he said. “But if Jathery doesn’t go to rescue Athene—”

  “Then Alkippe may be safe from Necessity, but Zeus may bring down the Darkness of the Oak on all of us, Alkippe included,” Marsilia said.

  “Arete?” Pytheas asked, over the sound of Thetis’s sobbing. “Please?”

  Arete’s eyes widened. “All right, I’ll translate it. The shield of Necessity may be enough. Well, I will if Hilfa agrees.”

  “Hilfa?” I asked, surprised into speaking.

  “Hilfa is the anchor. He always was. He’s Athene’s anchor right now.”

  Hilfa kept his arms around Thetis. As he looked up I caught a flash of vivid orange and blue from his eyelids. “Like a boat anchor? What does it mean, for a person to be an anchor?”

  “It means you’re her connection back to this universe,” Arete said. “If Pytheas and Jathery go out there, they’ll need to follow the thread from you to her.”

  “You’re not only her message, but her anchor,” Jathery said.

  Hilfa was staring at Arete over Thee’s head. “Tell me what I am?”

  “You’re a hero, and what you make of yourself is your own choice. Like all Saeli, you have five parents. Jathery, a male human, the earth and water of Plato, and the spark of Athene’s mind,” Arete said.

  Ikaros made an uneasy motion, but did not speak. He took a step forward, then stopped.

  “So I belong to this planet? To Plato?” Hilfa asked, staring at Arete with the glint I thought was his real smile on his face.

  “Yes,” Arete said. “And you don’t object to being the anchor?”

  “It is what I was made for, how could I mind?” Hilfa asked. He let go of Thetis and stood up. Thee was getting herself under control. I sat down again and put my arm tentatively around her. She leaned into me as she had been doing with Hilfa.

  “Let’s do it and have done,” Pytheas said.

  “And if you don’t come back?” Arete asked. “Should I send—”

  “That will be up to you,” Pytheas said.

  “But we’re not sure how time out there relates to time here,” Ikaros said. “That was part of why Athene refused to take me. If you don’t come back, we should wait before going to Zeus with this.”

  “Wait how long?” Arete asked.

  “Ask Porphyry. The same way you have a connection with patterns of truth and language, he has a connection with the patterns of place and time. If we don’t reappear immediately, go to him tomorrow and ask him to go to Father when it feels right,” Pytheas said.

  “All right,” Arete said, walking back to the table. “Look, nobody can go except the gods, and none of the rest of us can do anything to help now. I think everyone else should go to bed. There’s still a human spaceship up there that we’ll have to deal with tomorrow, and it’s getting late.”

  “If tomorrow comes,” Jathery said, with another bone-chilling laugh.

  All I’d have to deal with tomorrow, if it came, was the sea and the fish, but that was enough. “That sounds like good advice to me,” I said. “Sleep will help.”

  “As if I’d be able to sleep with Alkippe in danger,” Thetis said, mopping her eyes.

  “But we should try, Thee, because she’ll be awake and wanting breakfast, and your little ones will need you,” Marsilia said. I picked up Thetis’s cloak and wrapped it around her. She huddled into it.

  “We’ll let you all catch up on sleep,” Pytheas said. “We’ll come back and let you know what’s happened tomorrow evening.”

  “But you won’t want to wait … oh!” Arete said. They wouldn’t have to wait, of course, they could step back into time tomorrow evening as easily as today. It must be so incredibly strange to be a god.

  “I’m not tired. If you’ll tell me where Crocus is, I think I’ll go and find him,” Sokrates said. “I know the City, unless it has changed very much in being moved here.”

  “Crocus is out at the spaceport,” Marsilia said.

  Sokrates laughed. “Then it has changed more than I imagined!”

  “I’ll take you to the spaceport,” Arete said to Sokrates. “I want to go there anyway. I can be useful there. And it’ll be quicker for you to come with me than taking the train at this time of night.”

  “You have trains here now?” Ikaros asked.

  “What are trains?” Sokrates asked.

  “Trains are moving rooms—electrical conveyances that run on rails moving at fixed times to fixed places,” Marsilia explained. “And Ikaros, you could take one to the City of Amazons and be there in less than an hour, though there isn’t one now until morning.”

  “I know Rhadamantha would be pleased to see you,” Arete said. “She has children, your grandchildren.”

  “Could I do that and be back by tomorrow evening?”

  Pytheas shook his head at Ikaros. “Yes. But be here when we get Athene back.”

  “And then she’ll need me,” Ikaros said, resignedly.

  “You might want to go to Thessaly for the night. Porphyry’s there, or he was when I left,” Arete said.

  “In Thessaly? My house?” Sokrates asked.

  “Well, it’s been my house for the last sixty years,” Pytheas said, awkwardly. “I hope you don’t mind. Simmea and I moved in there as soon as we decided to allow families. But you can have it back now if you decide to stay here. You might prefer Sokratea, or the City of Amazons.” Then he grinned. “Ikaros, if you’re going to Thessaly, go along the street of Hermes. That way you can pass the Ikarian temple. I can’t wait to hear what you think of what they’ve made of your New Concordance.”

  Ikaros’s face expressed his consternation. Pytheas laughed.

  “They do insist on being called followers of the New Concordance. It’s only everyone else who called them Ikarians,” Marsilia said.

  Marsilia and Thetis and I moved towards the door. “Do I need to stay with you to be an anchor?” Hilfa asked.

  “You need to stay alive, and preferably on Plato,” Arete said. “Don’t worry. It isn’t something you have to do, it’s what you are.”

  “In that case, I will go to the Temple of Amphitrite and eat oatmeal,” Hilfa said.

  “I’ll go with you too, if I may,” Sokrates said. �
�Then when you’re done, Arete, you can find me there to take me to see Crocus. That way nobody but those who need to know will hear Athene’s dangerous message.”

  “Thank you,” Arete said.

  As he passed him, Sokrates put a hand on Pytheas’s arm. “Are you still trying to do your best for your friends?” he asked.

  “Always,” Pytheas said. “And for the world.”

  16

  MARSILIA

  I sat down again on the forest floor, which was soft and springy beneath me, with its now-familiar loamy scent. It felt comfortable to be outside time and in this grove. The air here was perfumed with the scent of fresh green growth. It was a delectable springlike temperature, warmer than Plato and cooler than Greece. The leaves moved overhead, casting a wavering stippled shadow down on us. Hermes lowered himself gracefully beside me. “Let me see it,” he said. I glanced at him. He was again changing disquietingly from shape to shape from moment to moment as the light dappled him—a Sael, a dark-skinned woman, a light-skinned woman, a different Sael, an animal, a child. Then he became himself, solid and gorgeous and so real beside me that it was hard to believe he had ever been anything else.

  I had tucked the paper into my kiton, but it seemed that now I was wearing my sea-gear again. I unsnicked my jerkin and to my relief found the paper in the inside pocket, along with a drawing Alkippe had made of a gloater on a plate. I took Athene’s message out reluctantly and handed it to Hermes. “I can’t read it,” I said. “I don’t even know the alphabet.”

  He frowned down at it. “It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen. Some of these strange characters are Viking runes. Or they’re like runes anyway. And some of them are Saeli, but … no. I can’t make anything of it. I suppose she wrote it like this so Kebes wouldn’t be able to read it.” He ran his finger over the back. “Good paper.”

  “It seems like ordinary paper to me,” I said.

  “Then maybe she found it in your city.” Hermes handed the paper back to me, and I put it away next to Alkippe’s drawing. Here, outside time, I no longer felt tired. I was aware that I ought to, that I had been exhausted moments before in the agora of Lucia, but it had all fallen away from me. Did people sleep here, I wondered? My complex feelings about Kebes also seemed to be held at arm’s length, and even the disconcerting way Hermes had flickered from form to form didn’t upset me the way it would elsewhere. I liked the way my sensations and emotions felt a little detached. I wondered whether Thetis, who revelled in emotion, would hate it, and whether she’d ever have the opportunity to find out.

  “Kebes couldn’t read it, but we can’t read it either,” I said.

  “No. Maybe she wanted that too. Maybe I’ll be able to read it when we have it all together.” He sighed and leaned back on his elbow, displaying the whole length of his lovely body. “What an unpleasant person Kebes was. You dealt with him extremely well.”

  “Thank you,” I said, slightly flustered by the approval in his face. “Can you not mention to Thetis and the others—especially Thetis—what he said about being my grandfather?”

  “I don’t think we need to mention it. But why?”

  “Well, in the City we always talk about him as if he’s a kind of monster, and nobody would like to think they were descended from him. Pytheas killed him. I think it would upset Ma and Thetis a lot to know. And it might not be true anyway.”

  Hermes shook his head. “Athene wouldn’t lie outright. She deceived him anyway, letting his wishes affect what he thought she said. But that’s as far as she’d go. And if you prefer that I don’t tell the lovely Thetis, then I won’t.”

  There was something teasing about the way he said the lovely Thetis. I looked at him. He was smiling and looking up at me sideways, invitingly. The shadow of the leaves moved over his perfect body. With no thought or intention beyond answering the challenge of the moment I leaned over and kissed him. It’s always such an interesting experience, lips, so full of sensation, pressed against other lips, which move independently, closed but with the possibility of opening, dry, but with the immanence of moisture. And it’s strange, when you examine it, to put a mouth, used for speech and eating, so close to another mouth, to invite such intimacy.

  When Poimandros and I had been married at Festival eight years before, we had been in the City, in one of the practice rooms in the hall on the street of Dionysos. Even then, on a solid planet, not knowing he was a god, and in a context where we both knew what was expected of us, it had been wonderful, powerful, numinous. Now as I kissed him in the grove on Olympos, not knowing whether he wanted it, or even whether this was really what I wanted, that familiar-strange sensation of lips touching seemed almost overwhelming. I moved my head away. He was smiling, and again the smile was both strange and familiar. I had seen it before, not only on his face but on statues. He was looking at me, not through me, as statues did. I looked down. His penis was half awake. It gave a little bounce as I looked. I put my hand on it, and felt it swell delightfully in my grasp.

  “We’re guest-friends, Marsilia,” he said. “I shouldn’t take advantage.”

  “But I want to,” I said. I did. I felt the gathering tightening twitch of my own sexual desire.

  “But it would be un-Platonic,” he said, laughing.

  I took my hand off his penis, now fully awake and pointing towards me. “All right,” I agreed, feeling a little ashamed of myself. “You’re right. It would be. So, Phila.”

  “Phila, yes,” he said, sounding a little disconcerted. I had no idea why. He was right, and I had acknowledged as much.

  “I had an idea,” I said.

  “Good. I don’t know much about her.”

  He was flickering between forms again. I looked away from him and stared up at the branches crossing above us. So many kinds of leaves, each one so beautiful, green and gold and red. I took a deep breath and focused. Phila. “Phila was the daughter of Antipatros, who was Alexander the Great’s regent in Macedon when he went off to conquer the world. She was married to one of Alexander’s generals, but he died. Then after Alexander’s death she married Demetrios the Besieger, who was the son of Alexander’s general Antigonas. In the chaos years, she helped Demetrios and Antigonas administer their shifting empire. She was powerful in her own right, and she was educated. It’s not surprising Athene would like her. But my thought is that she was a Hellenistic woman, and she frequently traveled between Macedon and Asia Minor. She must have prayed to you for safe journeys. Couldn’t you give her one, and then show up to claim the paper?”

  I glanced back at him. The look he gave me contained respect. “That should work. Come on!”

  I scrambled to my feet and took his offered hand. We stood again in the intense heat and brilliant light of a Greek afternoon, made even brighter by the way the sun reflected from the sparkling water. Another harbor—did all of Earth consist of harbors and blue water? Another boat, this one low in the water with banks of oars. Perhaps it was a fabled trireme; I wouldn’t know. She had a ram at the front, and a slanted mast with a pale purple sail. Sailors were swarming all over her. One group of people were beginning to disembark. I’d never seen any of them before, but I had no difficulty telling which one was Phila. She was tall and stately, with a huge bosom and red hair. She was wearing the kind of women’s clothing you see on dressed statues sometimes, a long draped kiton with some kind of long cloak over it. Her clothes were good quality, and she had more jewelry than the other women in the group, but I could tell she was the important one by her bearing. She moved with the dignity of a woman who is used to exercising power. At home, I’d have unhesitatingly guessed she was a Gold. Here I wasn’t sure whether she’d even classify herself as a philosopher—and yet she ruled. We must be only about forty years after Plato’s death. And I had thought Lucia was strange.

  “Welcome to Cyprus,” Hermes said. I saw that he was wearing a kiton, so I looked down and saw that my own clothes had transformed again, this time to a long kiton like Phila’s, and a cloak. My k
iton was red again. The cloak was cream, with red embroidery. It was pinned with my gold pin, my only ornament, though Hermes was wearing heavy jewelry in the same style as the men crowded around Phila. I was glad he hadn’t changed that for me.

  Phila was off the boat now and coming closer, still surrounded by her entourage, who I thought must be her attendants, secretaries and assistants perhaps. There were soldiers leading the way, and I could see servants coming along behind with bundles and baggage. As I glanced at them, I realized that all of the well-dressed people around Phila were pale-skinned, and only among the servants and the sailors did I see anyone as dark as I was. Also, every one of the soldiers was a man. It was easy to forget this kind of thing when reading about history.

  I wondered how Hermes was going to attract her attention. We stood there as they bustled up to us and past us. “Ideally we want to catch her alone,” Hermes murmured as they were met by an official-looking group of men. A child gave Phila flowers, which she handed off to one of her female attendants. “Let’s give her a couple of hours.”

  The shadows changed, and so did our position. We were in a walled garden. There was an equestrian statue in the center, surrounded by a bed of pink and white flowers. Phila was sitting alone on a stone bench, looking at some papers wearily. Hermes drew me forward.

  “Joy to you, Phila, daughter of Antipatros,” he said.

  She started, visibly. “No strangers should be in here,” she said. Her voice was higher than I had expected, for her size.

  “We did not come past your guards,” Hermes said. His clothes vanished, so she could see the wings on his ankles and on his hat. She gasped and put a hand to her throat. “You had safe travel, as you asked. Now I require the paper Athene gave you for safekeeping.”

  Phila set down her papers with commendable calm. I’m not sure I’d have done as well if a naked god had interrupted me unexpectedly. She looked at him, then at me, then back at him. She raised her arms, palms up, towards Hermes, and I could see they were trembling slightly, but she kept her voice even. “Joy to you.”