In the autumn of the Year Four we held the great games of Artemis, which were celebrated by footraces and swimming races for girls, and by hunting. The hunting came first, so that the victims could be offered as a sacrifice and eaten at the festival. We went out as whole halls, seventy of us together, with our masters. Florentia and Delphi, who did most athletic things together, divided up into two roughly equal groups. I went with Ficino. We never came near a beast, but we had a wonderful time in the hills. Maia scrambled about with the rest of us, but Ficino rode. We took nets and spears and bows strapped onto another horse. I loosed an arrow at a duck once, but missed. We stopped by a spring and ate the rations we had brought, apples and nuts and cheese. Laodike got stung by a bee, and we managed to track down the hive and take the wild honey, at the cost of several more bee stings. Ficino considered the honey a worthy gift for Artemis and so declared the hunt over.

The other group’s hunt was from all accounts more dramatic. They actually found a boar in a thicket and faced it down with spears and nets. Accounts of what happened next differ. Axiothea refused to talk about it. Atticus told me that Pytheas behaved with exemplary bravery, and saved several lives. All Pytheas would say was that he had only done what anyone would have done. Klymene said that she had been a coward and could no longer face anyone. Trying to untangle all this, and get accounts from the others who had been there, it seems that Klymene had fled, exposing Axiothea, and Pytheas had leapt in and made the boar run up his spear, in the best poetic style. So far so good. But later Pytheas had said something to Klymene that she could not forgive, and neither of them would tell me what.

I tackled her alone in the wash-fountain shortly after dawn the next morning. “Did he call you a coward?”

“No. Well, yes. But I am a coward. I understand that now.”

“Anyone can panic in a moment like that, if the boar was rushing towards you,” I said, soaping myself to avoid looking her in the eye.

“Anyone with iron in their veins,” Klymene said. “But no. Anyone can call me a slave-hearted coward and I will just agree with them. I was tested and I fled.”

“I’ve never been in a situation like that. I might have done the same.”

“You! You’re always fierce.” Klymene shook her head. “You’d never have run. That’s one of the things that makes me so angry.”

“Then what did he say?” I really wanted to know.

“You’ll hate him if you know,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt your friendship. I know you really care about him.”

“I really like him, he is a soul friend. And I like you too and I want to reconcile the two of you if I can, but if I can’t at least I want to understand what happened!” I leaned back to rinse my hair. “If he is as bad as you say then I want to know that, and not give my friendship where it is unworthy.” I didn’t really think I was doing that.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!” I stepped forward out of the wash-fountain. “I don’t believe you are truly a coward, even if you did panic. But panicking in that moment probably does mean you need more practice facing dangerous things before you stand in the line of battle, assuming there ever is a battle. You should try to find dangerous things and face them down to get better at it. Practice courage. Running once in panic doesn’t mean you have a fearful soul, or that you are unworthy. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t care about you and still want to be your friend. And I want to know what Pytheas did, because helping interpret between Pytheas and the rest of the world is part of what I do, and I can’t do that if I don’t know.”

Klymene was crying, so she turned her face into the water to hide the tears. I waited until she turned back, then hugged her. “What did he say?”

“I thanked him for what he did, and he said he was just doing what was needed. And then he said I shouldn’t feel badly about having run because I was only a girl.”

“What!” I was horrified. I had never imagined anything like this. Some of the masters sometimes said things like this. Tullius of Rome was especially given to it, and Klio of Sparta had once had a formal debate with him on the subject which everyone held that she had won decisively. But I had never heard Pytheas say anything that even hinted that he thought such a thing. “Are you sure?”

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

“I’m going to kill him.” Then I turned back to her. “Telling me was very brave. I do think you could learn to be brave if you practiced. Like working with weights and building up.”

It was our turn in the palaestra directly after breakfast, which I could hardly eat, I was so full of fury. Pytheas was not yet there when I arrived, so I exercised with weights, hurling the discus farther than I ever had with the vigor of my wrath. When he arrived I ran over to him the second he had his kiton off and knocked him down into the sand. “Hey, give me a chance to set my feet!” he protested, slapping the sand to mark a fall. I threw myself onto his back, holding him down. There were no masters around to object. I could really have killed him before anyone could stop me, if that had been what I truly wanted. Of course, what I wanted was to understand.

“What did you mean, saying to Klymene that she was only a girl?”

“Am I going to lose all my friends over that?” he asked, so sadly that I immediately felt sorry for him, despite my anger.

“You are if you don’t explain it right now.” I thumped his arm hard. He wasn’t trying to shake me off or to fight at all. He had gone limp, which made it difficult for me to want to pummel him.

“Will you let me up if I agree to talk to you?”

I climbed off him and he got up. He had sand all over his front, which he did not brush off. “She was sad and needed comfort, and I never know what to say. I didn’t think and fell back on what I grew up hearing. Women—outside the city there’s a tendency in most places to think that women are soft and gentle and good at nurturing, that by nature they should be protected. You must remember that from before? She was crying, and she had run away, she was just acting the way women usually act. I put my arm around her. I’ve seen you do that. I know that’s right. But then I had to say something, and I was completely blank on what.”

“For somebody so intelligent, how can you be such a complete idiot?” I asked.

“Natural talent?” He wasn’t smiling. “Do you want to hit me again?”

“Would it make you feel better?”

“I almost think it would.”

“I won’t then,” I said. Then I relented, and twisted on the ball of my foot to thump him in the chest as hard as I could, so that he sat down abruptly. “Did that help?”

Even in that moment he automatically slapped the ground to mark the hit. “Yes, I think it did.”

“Did it help make you realize women aren’t just soft little doves to be protected?” I was still angry.

“That’s exactly how she seemed to me at the time,” he said, looking up at me. “A soft little dove who had been asked to act as a falcon, against her own nature. And why should everyone have to fight, if they’re not suited for it?”

“Would you have said to Glaukon that it’s all right for him to be a coward because he’s only a cripple?” Glaukon had lost a leg in the first year of the city. He had slipped in the woods, and his leg had been crushed beneath a worker’s treads.

Pytheas looked up at me guilelessly. “Well it doesn’t matter as much if he did happen to be one. But in fact he’s very brave.”

“But imagine how he’d feel if you said that to him. It’s not considering him as a person but as part of a class of inferior things. Klymene’s a coward, she says so herself. And our souls have parts in different balances—maybe she doesn’t have as much passion, and perhaps not everyone has it in them to stand in the line of battle—not that I see what enemies we’re going to need to fight anyway. But some of those who don’t are men, as everyone agrees. Every example of a coward we’ve ever heard about who was shamefully wounded in the back has been a man. And plenty of those who are brave and would stand firm are women. And by saying what you said you insult all women—you insult me!”