Gymnastics was fun. It was done naked in the palaestra. There was a palaestra shared between each two eating halls. Our palaestra was Florentia and Delphi, and it had rows of Doric columns for Delphi along the back and two sides, and exuberant Renaissance columns along the front, with a very elaborate fountain. I felt proud that Florentia had contributed the fountain. It was easy to love and feel pride in Florentia, that great city, with so many great scholars, writers, and artists. Ficino himself came from Florentia. When we came to dye and embroider our kitons, I embroidered mine with a running pattern of lilies, the Florentine symbol, and above them snowflakes, leaves, and roses, for Botticelli’s three seasons, which remained my favourite pictures. Above those I put a pattern of interspersed books and scrolls, in blue and gold, which so many people admired and asked permission to copy that it became quite commonplace.
Our palaestra stood open to the air, naturally, and the ground inside was made of white sand, which the hundred and forty of us churned up every day and the workers raked smooth every night. I soon stopped feeling conscious of nakedness—we all took off our kitons when we went into the palaestra, it was just what we did. I learned to use the weights, both lifting and throwing, and to wrestle, and to run. I was good at running, and was always among the first at races, especially at long distances. I soon learned that I would never excel at wrestling, being small and wiry, but found it good fun when matched against somebody my own weight. Weights, once I had learned how to handle them, were a delight, though there were always people who could throw the discus further and lift heavier weights than me.
The odd thing about gymnastics was that we didn’t really have enough teachers. Only the younger masters could teach it, and not even all of them. This oddity made me realise how few masters there were. There were two masters assigned to each dining hall, and just a handful of others. There were a hundred and forty-four dining halls, now completed with seventy children in each. That meant there were only two hundred and eighty-eight masters in all, or perhaps three hundred at most, to ten thousand and eighty children. I thought about the implications of this, and decided not to point this out to Kebes. He still muttered about wanting to overthrow the masters, but I was happy.
How could I not have been happy? I was in the Just City, and I was there to become my best self. I had wonderful food—porridge and fruit every morning, and either cheese and bread or pasta and vegetables every night, with meat or fish on feast days, which came frequently. On hot days in summer we often had iced fruit. I had regular congenial exercise. I had friends. And best of all, I had music, mathematics, and books to stretch my mind. I learned from Maia and Ficino, from Axiothea and Atticus of Delphi, from Ikaros and Lucina of Ferrara, and from time to time from other masters. Manlius taught me Latin. Ikaros, one of the youngest men among the masters, set us to read provocative books, and asked fascinating questions about them. Sometimes he and Ficino would debate a question in front of us. I could almost feel my mind growing and developing as I listened to them. I was twelve years old. I still missed my parents and my brothers, sometimes, when something recalled them to me. But little did. My life was so different now. Sometimes it truly felt as if I had slept beneath the soil until I awakened in the City.
In the winter of that year, Year Two of the Just City, just before I turned thirteen, I began my menstruation, and Andromeda, who was still the watcher for Hyssop, took me to Maia. Maia had a little house of her own near Hyssop, with a neatly tended garden of herbs and flowers. Maia made me a peppermint tea, and gave me three sponges and showed me how to insert them into my vagina. “One of these will last you for an hour or so on the first day, longer than that afterwards. You can probably leave the same one in all night unless you’re bleeding very heavily. You can clean them in the wash-fountains, never in drinking water. If you hold it under the running water all the blood will wash out. Insert a fresh one and let the first one dry in sunlight on the windowsill. Store them in your chest when you are not using them. Never use anyone else’s sponge or share yours with your sisters. Three should be all you need, but if you find you are bleeding too heavily and needing to change them often on the first day so that there is not a sponge dry when you need it, let me know and I will give you a fourth.”
“These are marvellous,” I said, and then went on, forgetting that I should not talk about my earlier life. “My mother used cloths that were horrible to wash.”
“Mine too, and so did I before I came here,” Maia said. “This way of managing menstruation is one of the lost marvels of the ancient world. The sponges are natural. They grow under the sea. Workers harvest them for us.”
I turned the two clean sponges over in my hand. They were soft. “Am I a woman now?”
“You were born a woman.” Maia smiled. “Your body will be making some changes. Your breasts will grow, and you might want to pleat your kiton so it falls over them. If they grow very big so that they flop about and feel uncomfortable when you run, I will show you how to strap them up.”
“What will—” I stopped. “What happens here about marriage?” I realized I’d never heard a word about it, nor even thought about it since I had come here. All of the masters lived alone, and all of the rest of us were still children.
“When all of you are older there will be marriages, but they will not be like the marriages you … should not remember!” Maia said. “No need to worry about it yet. Your body is not ready to make children, even if bleeding has begun.”
“When will it be?” I asked.
Maia frowned. “Most of us think twenty, but some say sixteen,” she said. “In any case, a long time yet.”
Then she took down a book. “Long ago I promised to show you Botticelli’s Spring,” she said.
Spring was as marvellous and mysterious as the other three seasons. I tried to figure it out. There was a girl at the side, and a pregnant woman in the centre with flowers growing around her. “Who are they all?” I asked. “Are those the same flowers that are growing in Summer?” I glanced at the opposite page of text for help, and was astonished to see it was in the Latin alphabet, but a language unknown to me. I looked inquiringly at Maia.
“It’s the only reproduction I have. Nobody knows who they all are, though some think she’s the goddess Flora.”
I stared back at the picture, ignoring the mystery of the text. “I wish I could see the original at full size like the others.” I turned the page and gasped. It was Aphrodite rising from the waves on a great shell. Maia leaned forward, then relaxed when she saw what it was.
“I really wish you could have seen the original of that one,” she said. “It’s so much better than the reproduction. It fills a wall. There are strands of real gold in her hair.”
“When will we be taught to paint and sculpt?” I asked, touching the picture longingly. The paper was glossy to the touch.
“We don’t have enough masters who can teach those things,” Maia said. “Florentia should have a turn next year, or perhaps the year after. Ideally, you’d have been learning all along. Meanwhile, I was intending to ask you if you would teach some beginners to swim in the spring.”
“Of course,” I said. Growing up in the Delta, I’d been swimming for almost as long as I’d been walking. I had won the swimming race at the Hermeia, as well as coming in second in the footrace. I’d been given a silver pin for these accomplishments, which had been the proudest moment of my life. Silver meant bravery and physical prowess. Only gold, for intellectual attainment, ranked higher, and nobody I knew had a gold pin yet.