Whether because I was more relaxed or because Hera smiled or for some other reason, I became pregnant at that festival. Klymene and Makalla were as big as houses and constantly groaning about their bellies and their swelling feet and their sense of exhaustion.

I was painting a fresco in Ithaka—by invitation. Aeschines suggested it first, and then Hermeios and Nyra, the masters there, formally asked me to do it. The fresco showed Odysseus coming into harbor, which I based on our own harbor. His ship was the Goodness. The dog Argo was visible on the quayside. I’d done the composition on paper first, and they had approved it. The whole thing filled a wall and was the most ambitious project I had ever done. It was fiddly, too, because the plaster dried so quickly and it was so hard to change anything. In the first month of my pregnancy the smell of the paint made me queasy.

Sokrates inquired into parenthood, the duties and responsibilities. I held that the only duty of a parent was to see the child brought up as well as possible—which in the city meant giving it to those best trained for the purpose. Sokrates agreed that we ought to love all children as if they were our own, but disputed the value of the training and education the city would give, and immediately we were back on familiar ground from a new angle.

Klymene’s baby was born the day before the feast of Hephaestus. When she went into labor in the middle of the night, I went for Maia. Maia helped her walk to the nursery. The rest of us lay awake, wondering how it was going. Four of us were pregnant, and the two who were not longed to experience it. “I can’t wait to get rid of this weight,” Makalla moaned.

I started to do arithmetic. How many babies did the city need? Another ten thousand and eighty? If each woman had two babies we would have that. But we were supposed to keep on having festivals every four months, or so I believed. If half the women got pregnant—no, if a third—a quarter? I would have to ask Sokrates how this was supposed to work. It was a silly situation where every master had read the Republic but no children had, in case it impaired our ability to live it. We were living it—we should be able to read it now. We weren’t children any longer. We were having children of our own. We’d need to be guiding them by what Plato said. It was ridiculous to keep it from us.

The next morning Klymene came back without the baby. Her belly didn’t look a great deal smaller, which surprised me. I’d expected her to go back to normal at once. “We are to go every day and feed them,” Klymene said, as if it were a comfort.

“Was it a boy or a girl?” I asked.

“A boy. The sweetest thing. He had black curls.” I wondered what my baby would look like, and if I would be sorry to leave it behind in the nursery.

Makalla’s baby was born four days later. She went into labor in the afternoon, so I did not know until I went to bed and she was missing from Hyssop. “I heard her screaming while I was over there feeding,” Klymene said.

“Screaming?” Auge asked, apprehensively, a hand on her belly.

“Everyone screams, they say,” Klymene said, quite composedly. “I didn’t, except once near the end.”

“How is your baby?” I asked.

“They keep bringing me different ones to feed every time I go. I haven’t seen my own baby since the first day. Still, I suppose it’s for the best. It stops me getting too attached, Maia says.”

“Don’t you want to be attached?” Auge asked.

“I want him to be his best self. That means leaving him to people trained to bring him up. I wouldn’t have any idea what to do with a baby.”

It was what I had said to Sokrates, but somehow it sounded different. And I knew if I brought that back to Sokrates, it would take us straight into the heart of the matter. Could we trust the masters? Could we trust Plato? Could we trust Pallas Athene? Trust them for what? Trust them to mean well and have our best interests at heart? Oh yes, I thought so. Trust them to know how best to bring up babies? That was a different question. And in seven months’ time, it was a question that I was going to have to answer. I put my arms around my belly as if that was going to protect the baby.

“How do you know it’s a different one?” Auge asked. “I thought they all looked alike.”

Klymene clicked her tongue. “They’re all different! And mine looked just like Pytheas, except for the hair.”

“Pytheas?” I asked. My stomach felt hollow. “You were drawn with Pytheas? And it was awful?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“You managed not to tell me for a long time. And he didn’t tell me either. Tell me now.” Pytheas had been politely evasive when I’d asked how it had gone, and I hadn’t wanted to linger on the subject either. We were friends. That there were times when I longed to reach out and touch him, or to see the expression on his face that I had seen on Aeschines, was my secret.

She sighed. “It was only awful because we hate each other. He’d have let me off—he still thinks I’m a coward. I forced him to go through with it. I just gritted my teeth. It wasn’t so bad. Nothing to childbirth. Good practice for it.”

Pytheas wasn’t in Laurel House, or in Delphi, or the palaestra, and he wasn’t in the library. He wasn’t in Thessaly, though Sokrates and Ikaros and Manlius and Aristomache were, sitting talking and drinking wine in a circle of light. “Why do you want him?” Sokrates asked.

“It’s personal,” I said.

“In that case I think we’d better accompany you!” Ikaros said. “Personal matters are always better sorted out—”

“With a debate team? No, thank you.”

Ikaros laughed. “Which horse is in charge of your chariot today, Simmea?”

Sokrates raised a hand then, stopping Ikaros immediately. Sokrates could cut right through one in debate but he was never cruel, and never allowed cruelty in his presence. “Is Ikaros right? Have you and Pytheas had a lover’s tiff?”

“We’re not lovers,” I protested. “And no, nothing like that.”

“It’s late. You’ve been running and your hair is disordered,” Ikaros pointed out. “And you said a personal matter. I wasn’t likely to assume a dispute on the nature of the soul.”

“You can be passionate enough in debate,” Aristomache said to him, sharply “Do others the courtesy of assuming the same.”

“I wanted to talk to him urgently about something I just found out,” I said. “And can something only be a matter of philosophy or of love, do you think, Master Ikaros? Are there no other subjects fit for conversation?”

“She has you there,” Sokrates said. “Let us consider the benefits and disadvantages of bisecting the world, and leave Simmea to quest for Pytheas in peace.”

I left, and walked decorously through the city, aware now of how I seemed to others. I smoothed my hair and breathed evenly. What was I upset about anyway? That Pytheas and Klymene had had their encounter? That was random chance, and I knew he’d been married to someone—to three people, as I had. What difference did it make that it was Klymene? None. What upset me was that he hadn’t told me, that he hadn’t brought it to me for dissection and examination. Whatever had happened with Klymene didn’t matter. It was his silence about it that threatened our friendship. Ten months, and he hadn’t said a word about it.

I found him at last coming out of a practice room, not the ones on the street of Dionysos which had been used for the marriages but the ones on the street of Hermes on the south edge of the city. “I’ve been making a song. Let’s go up on the wall,” he said when he saw me. We climbed up the steps and stood on the wall. It was late evening and there was nobody else there. The breeze was blowing from the mountain, bringing with it a slight smell of sulphur. The wall was twice the height of Pytheas and perhaps his height across, with a little parapet. It was possible to walk all around the city on top of the walls, because the walkways went over the tops of the gates. There were no sconces up here, but we could see by the lights below, and by starlight. The stars were particularly bright that night. I knew their names and histories and the orbits of all the planets. I could see Saturn very clearly. It gave me some perspective on my human problems.