“We’ve been doing a lot of cross-country scrambling,” Damon said. “It’s supposed to be good practice for war. Not that there’s anyone to fight.”

“I can’t fight right now anyway,” Laodike said. She patted her stomach, which had a slight curve.

“Joy to you!” I said. “Klymene’s pregnant too, you know.”

“Maybe you’ll manage it next time,” she said. “There are definite advantages.”

Damon shot her a worried glance. “I don’t think—”

“Oh, Simmea’s our friend, she won’t tell anyone. And we know about her and Pytheas, just the same as you and me.”

“I won’t tell anyone whatever it is, but Pytheas and I aren’t … whatever you think. We’re friends.” I felt blood heating my cheeks.

Laodike laughed. “Well, once you’re pregnant you can’t get more pregnant, so if you can find somewhere quiet to do it, like up here, you can safely copulate with your friend.”

I looked at the two of them. They both looked embarrassed now, and a little sheepish, but also happy in a way that stung my heart. Their hands crept together, intertwined, and clung. Plato said that friendship was good but adding sex to it was bad, but perhaps understandable in silvers. It wasn’t hurting anyone in any case. “I won’t tell anyone, and I’m glad it’s working for you. I’m so pleased I saw you. I miss you in Hyssop. We should do a run together before you get as big as a sleeping house.”

Shortly after that came the second festival of Hera. I had wondered how they were going to manage with some of the women being pregnant and unavailable but all of the men still being free. The answer was that the women were carefully counted, in each class, and that number of men were selected to participate, partly at random and partly by merit. The merit consisted in doing well either in the athletic contests or in their work in the four months since the last time. Then every man who didn’t qualify by merit had his name set in an urn and they were chosen by lot.

Pytheas’s name was second drawn. He was matched with Kryseis and they went off together, seeming content. I drew Phoenix, of Delphi, whom I already knew quite well—we had often raced and wrestled together. He wasn’t as considerate as Aeschines, and much faster. He also wanted me to suck his penis with my mouth, which I refused, because it reminded me of the slave ship. He sulked about this, and said that his previous partner had done it and that the boys all did it for each other. The encounter wasn’t much fun, and I didn’t invite him for dinner in Florentia afterwards.

Nor was it productive. Auge became pregnant, but I didn’t and nor did any of the rest of us in Hyssop. Makalla and Klymene were four months along, showing big breasts and big bellies already, and excused from exercise in the palaestra. Charmides said that swimming would be good for them and that they should take regular gentle walks. Klio taught them vaginal exercises.

“How does she know them?” Makalla giggled. “Has she ever had a baby?”

There was no way to know about the lives of the masters before they came to the city. Klio might have had several children. None of them were here. I wondered if she missed them. I thought about what Septima had said about time.

Auge found her early pregnancy difficult—she vomited every morning. She complained that she was too weak to move marble—she sculpted, and was very good, but now she felt cut off from her art. She broke up with her lover and cried herself to sleep, then when Iphis went to comfort her they ended up beginning a passionate friendship that Klymene found difficult to deal with. They said, giggling, that it was Platonic agape. Klymene had to insist that they each slept in their own bed. It was unsettling. I missed Laodike and Andromeda, who were much more comfortable to live with and who had truly felt like sisters.

21

MAIA

Klymene came to me late one night. I encouraged all the Florentines to come to me any time they had a problem, so I wasn’t very surprised when I opened the door and saw her there. Lysias was curled up asleep in my bed, so I went out to her. It was a cool night with an edge of chill in the air. “Let’s go to my office in Florentia,” I said. “We can be comfortable and you can tell me whatever it is.”

We went to the kitchen first and took plates. We each helped ourselves to some olives, slices from a half-cut round of goat cheese, and some barley bread left over from supper. “As good as a feast,” Klymene said.

“It’s good to see you want it,” I said.

“Yes, I was so sick for the first three months.” She patted her belly, which was just starting to show. We were all excited about the first babies. “Now I’m starving all the time.”

We settled ourselves in my study. There was a new hanging on the wall in gold and green and brown which some of the Florentines I’d been teaching weaving had given to me. The cloth wasn’t as even as the worker-made cloth, but they had sewn the different coloured stripes together in a charming way. I stroked the edge of it as I sat down. “Problems in Hyssop?” I asked.

Klymene swallowed her bread. “No. Well, yes, the same thing, Auge and Iphis, you know. Nothing different.”

“You should insist that they sleep in their own beds,” I said.

“I do. But it disrupts everybody. And even needing to keep insisting is disruptive. I wonder sometimes—well, that’s what I came to see you about.” She took a deep breath. “Who decided which metals were strongest in our souls?”

“Ficino and I did,” I said. “With advice from other masters who knew you.”

“Do you think you might have made any mistakes?” she asked.

“We thought about it very hard and talked about it a lot, and we don’t think we did. Why are you asking? Is it because you think Auge and Iphis aren’t behaving like philosophers?”

“No,” she said. “It’s me. This is so difficult.”

“You’re only seventeen,” I said. “Nobody expects you to be perfect right away. You have new responsibilities, and they’re difficult, but you’re dealing with them. It can be easy to feel discouraged when things go wrong, but philosophy will help. And we weren’t just looking at how you are now, we were looking at how you’re going to develop.” It was why it had been so difficult and such a tremendous responsibility.

“You don’t understand.” Klymene picked up an olive and turned it over and over in her hand, staring down at it. “Can I talk about before we came here?” she asked, not looking up.

“You shouldn’t,” I said. “But you can if you really need to. If it will help me understand what you’re worried about.”

“I was a slave,” she said, as if it cost her an effort to admit it. After she said it, she looked up from the olive at last to meet my eyes.

“There’s no shame in that. You all were,” I said, surprised.

“But I was born a slave. Most of the others were captured, or sold into captivity quite a short time before they were brought here. My mother was a slave, and I was born one and grew up one. All that time, I never even imagined being free. I think it did something to me. I think I have shackles on my soul and a slave’s heart, and I’m not really worthy to be a gold.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, gently. I ate a piece of cheese while thinking what to say. “You’ve been here for seven years, you’ve been trained. You were very young when you came. Nothing that happened before counts.”

“Yes, it does,” she said. She was close to tears. “Can I please explain?”

“Go on then,” I said.

“My name has always been Klymene. I was born in Syracuse, at the time of the Carthaginian wars. My mother was a bath slave. She was Carthaginian. Her name was Nyra. I don’t know who my father was, but it was probably our master, whose name was Asterios.”

I listened, trying to imagine a life like that. “Was he unkind to you?”