“Marsilia,” Hermes began, in a warning tone.

“Does this displease you?” Phila asked him, deferentially.

“This is important,” I said.

“Very well, speak freely,” Hermes said, with a sigh.

“Then perhaps, ideally, it should be determined by aptitude,” Phila said to me. She looked uneasily at the slaves now as one set down oil and bread, and the other cheese and preserves. I was impressed how quickly they had brought us such a substantial meal. “But in practice, our lives are determined by where we are born.”

“Some people have to do the heavy work, but it’s wrong for one person to own another,” I said.

“How could we make them do it, if we didn’t own them?” she asked.

“You could pay them,” I said, with only a hazy idea how this could work, or how payment motivated people to do work they disliked. “Or you could find people who enjoyed that work.”

She snorted. “It may be unjust, but it couldn’t be changed.”

“But you could change it. You have power.” The boy brought us cups of wine. I took mine and held it in my hand.

“I?” Phila shook her head. “My father had power. My brother does. My father-in-law, my husband. Not I. I could free my own slaves, but then I’d need to buy more. And my family would think I was insane and lock me up if I freed them all.”

“You could make conditions better for them, and give them education,” I suggested.

“Widening education is one of my intentions, once things are established and the wars are over,” Phila said, taking up her own wine. “Drink, eat, be welcome, my guest-friends.”

I took a polite sip of wine then set my cup down. It was smooth, but mixed strong, as I had suspected it might be. I took a piece of bread and dipped it in the oil. “Widening education seems like a truly good idea, and a fine place to start,” I said. The bread was chewy, and made of stone-ground wheat. Who had ground it?

“Everyone needs to learn Greek, read Homer, the poets, philosophy, especially in the newly conquered lands,” Phila said. She loaded her bread with pickles and preserves, and Hermes did the same. I didn’t recognize some of the dishes.

“Excellent mushrooms,” Hermes said. Then the slaves came back laden with yet more food, cold slices of some kind of pale meat, little birds on skewers, many kinds of fruit, several kinds of fish, and more dishes of different kinds of sauce for dipping. There were also plates of pastries and little cakes of different kinds. I had never seen as many kinds of food on one table at the same time. Even for a festival this would have seemed excessive. There was enough food here to feed two sleeping houses at least. The bread I had taken seemed to swell and fill my mouth. She had read Plato, how could she want to eat this way?

“What else should people learn, when I establish schools?” Phila asked me.

I swallowed, with difficulty. “Gymnastics, music and mathematics. It’s all in Plato. Logic, when they’re older, and philosophy when they’re ready for it.”

“And you think there should be schools for girls too, and that they should be open to everyone?” She dipped a plum in honey and popped it into her mouth.

“Yes,” I said. “And you should remember that everyone has equal significance, even though we are all different. You may really need slaves, you’re right that I don’t understand the conditions here properly, but if you must have them, you should be aware that they are people, like you. It hurts you too if you don’t, it diminishes your soul to treat them that way.”

“My soul?” Phila asked, sounding astonished, as if she had never realized she had a soul until I mentioned it.

Hermes crunched up one of the little birds, and took up a pastry. “We should not tell you too much,” he said.

Phila dipped a slice of meat into one of the sauces and bit into it. “Perhaps not, perhaps it is bad for us to know these things. You gave me a safe journey.”

Hermes smiled and took a bite out of his pastry, which oozed honey. The slave boy came up to refill our cups. I shook my head, as mine was still almost full.

“Now we are friends, it would be pleasant to count on such safe travel in future,” Phila said, carefully, her head a little on one side as she looked assessingly at Hermes.

He finished his pastry, then looked up at her and nodded.

“And the same for my family. It would be good not to worry about the hazards of travel for them.”

“You have a large family,” he remarked, staring down at a bunch of grapes he was turning between his fingers.

She glanced at me and back to him. “The Antigonids are my family now. Demetrios will be coming here from Athens soon. My husband, and my sons? It’s a small thing for you, but a great one for me.”

“I can do that, though it is greater than you think,” he said. “My blessing on all their voyaging, which will be remarkable.”

It would, too, I knew; the area the Antigonids controlled would move all over Greece and Asia Minor. But they’d never keep control anywhere for long, always needing to move. I wondered if this was a blessing or a curse. Hermes was smiling. He set down the grapes on the table and took up another of the skewered birds. He dipped it into a thick dark red sauce then put it in his mouth. We watched in silence as he crunched and swallowed it. I felt a combined horror and fascination, and absolutely no desire to eat one myself. “You keep a good table,” he said. “But you charge a high price to sit at it.”

Phila laughed. “Thank you,” she said. She clapped her hands. The slaves came running. “Water and a towel,” she said to them, with no more acknowledgement of their humanity than before. She looked at me. “I will think about what you have said, and dream of your city.”

The slaves brought a bowl of water, and she used it to wash the sauce off her fingers. Then she dried her hands carefully. The slave brought the bowl to me, and I dipped my fingers, although I had no need to. I tried to smile at the slave, but he would not meet my eyes. Phila drew a flat box out of her kiton. She opened it with a key. Inside was a leather pouch, and from inside that she drew out a folded sheet of paper, much like the one Kebes had given us. I took this one as she offered it to us, and glanced at it. It was covered with the incomprehensible writing, like the other, as I had expected. “Go in,” she said to the slaves, and as they scurried off, “I will free these three, who have waited on the gods.”

“It is a small thing for you, and it’s a drop in the ocean, but it will make a huge difference to those three people to be free. Thank you,” I said. “And try to remember you share humanity with them, and as Aristotle was wrong about women so he was wrong about slaves. And don’t forget about the importance of education.”

I tucked the paper inside my kiton with the other, and then, with no warning or sense of transition, we were abruptly back in Hilfa’s sitting room.

17

CROCUS

I. On First Contacts

I did not usually spend much time at the spaceport. It had been designed and built by Sixty-One, with the help of some of the other Workers, who were then only partway to self-awareness. Shuttles landed there from Amarathi and Saeli starships in orbit, and there were both automated and worker-operated facilities for loading and unloading. There were warehouses for storage, a station for the rail-link for passengers and supplies to the city, and a large observation and waiting space, with a curved glass window looking out over the field. There was also a communications, control, and administrative building. All these had been built on a suitable scale for Workers. It was a pleasant thing to have more buildings we could comfortably fit inside. The whole spaceport was set inside an old caldera, for sound deadening, and additional sound-deadening baffles had been erected around the rim. The rock of the mountains and the runways was black basalt, and Sixty-One had chosen to make the buildings out of the same material, except for the pillars and pediments and baffles, which were red scoria, fluted ionically. It gave the place a unified, distinctive feel. The frescoes in the admin building were all on space subjects—nebulas, galaxies, ringed planets; but the mosaic in the entrance hall was of Apollo in his sun-chariot.