“Will make bowls for lamps,” Crocus inscribed. He waited politely for a moment to see if I had anything else to say, then went back to his half-finished library roof. And there was his half of the dialogue, there in the marble for anyone to read. “Thomas Aquinas. Ikaros owns forbidden books.” Ikaros was no friend of mine. But I felt the urge to protect him nevertheless. No good could come of everyone knowing he had forbidden books. I took a piece of heavy wood from an unfinished house nearby and used it as a crowbar to pry up the heavy marble paving stone. Then I flipped it over so that the carving was on the underside and set it back in place. It was earth-stained and filthy compared to the other flags, but I hoped the rain would soon wash it clean. I went off to find Ikaros.

I wanted to talk to him in private, but I wasn’t the stupid young girl who had gone off to the woods alone with him, unconscious of anything but my own burning desire for philosophical conversation. I was over thirty now. I sought Klio about the city. She knew about my Botticelli book, and about the rape. She was pressing olives with a crowd of Children and couldn’t come immediately. She agreed to talk to Ikaros with me after dinner.

As luck would have it, I ran into him a few minutes later in the street. He was alone, coming toward me. It was raining more heavily now and my braid was so wet it was coming down from where it was bound up around my head. “I need to ask you something,” I said.

“Come inside,” he said, opening the door of a nearby house. “This is going to be Ardeia and Diomedes’s house.”

The house was complete, and held a large bed. “I don’t want to go inside there with you,” I said.

Ikaros rolled his eyes, half-smiling. “You’re not as irresistible as you imagine,” he said. “I have quite enough going with Lukretia.” Lukretia was a woman of the Renaissance. She had been the other master of Ferrara, and now she and Ikaros were sharing a house here. “But stand in the rain if you prefer. I shall keep dry.” He stepped inside, and I stood in the doorway, in view of anyone passing by. “Which of us are you afraid of, you or me?” he asked.

“I have quite enough going with Lysias,” I snapped. The trouble was that there was some truth in his accusation. I had always found Ikaros powerfully attractive. But that didn’t mean I wanted to be taken against my will, and he had shown me that he didn’t care what I wanted.

“What do you want me for then?” He grinned, and I scowled at him.

“Crocus wants Thomas Aquinas. In Greek. And he says you have it.”

Ikaros’s face changed in an instant to completely serious, as serious as I had ever seen him.

“I wasn’t going to do without books I needed,” he muttered.

“You took them when you were rescuing art?” I asked.

“You know I did. I got you that Botticelli book. It was more than anyone could bear, all those printed books, right there to my hand. I bought them, I didn’t steal them. And I didn’t contaminate the City with them.”

“Nobody says you did,” I said, but I shook my head. “You think rules are for everyone but you. How did you get them without Athene knowing?”

He ignored my question. “I have done no harm with the books.”

“You might be going to now. Who knows what Thomas Aquinas will do to Crocus?”

He grinned irrepressibly. “Have you read Thomas Aquinas?”

I shook my head. “I have never had the slightest interest in him, or anything else medieval. But I hear he’s extremely complicated, and you are going to have to translate him into Greek and read it all aloud.”

He looked horrified. “Do you know how long it is?”

“No,” I said, crisply. “Long, I hope. It’s what Crocus wants in return for making us glass bowls for lamps, and without them the lamps won’t give enough light for reading and working. So I think you’re going to do it, and as the book is still forbidden by the rules of this city as well as the original City, you’re not going to have any help doing it. And I think that’s going to be an appropriate punishment for bringing the book in the first place.”

It might have been unkind, but I couldn’t help laughing at the look on his face.

5

ARETE

For a long and terrible time, all that autumn and on into winter, Father insisted on getting vengeance for Mother and everybody else kept arguing with him because he clearly wasn’t being rational.

“It’s sad, and we’re all extremely sorry, but you’d think from the way you’re acting that we’d never lost anyone before,” Maia said.

Father didn’t say so to her, but the truth was that he’d never really lost anyone he cared about before, not lost them permanently the way he’d lost Mother. He said that to me and my brothers after Maia had left. He said it very seriously and as if he imagined that this would have been news to us.

“Who would have thought grief would crack Pytheas that way?” Ficino said to Maia, in Florentia, when he didn’t know I was listening.

It was true, though I didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was cracked, or at least cracking. It was a terrible thing to see. When he was alone with me he kept asking me if I could tell him why she’d stopped him saving her, and so I kept trying to think about that.

“Might she have been ready to go on to a new life?” I asked.

Father just groaned. After a moment he looked up. “She wasn’t done with this life. There was so much we still could have done. Sixty more years before she was as old as Ficino is!”

“Well, might there be something she felt she had to do and could do better in another life?”

“What?” he asked, staring at me from red-rimmed eyes. I had no idea and just shook my head.

Embassies were sent under sacred truce to the other cities. None of them admitted responsibility for the raid, or that they had the head of Victory. This was unusual, but it wasn’t unprecedented. They had lied before, on occasion. Only Father took it as proof that Kebes had stolen the head and killed Mother. The Goodness wasn’t sighted again, and then winter closed in, with storms that made the sea dangerous. When Father proposed organizing a naval expedition to find and destroy Kebes’s Lost City, even more people were sure he was cracked with grief. I wasn’t old enough to go to the Chamber or the Assembly, but people were talking about it everywhere.

The worst of it was that I was having to deal with Father being like this while also trying to cope with my own grief. It was bad enough that Mother wasn’t there to walk in and set everything right with a logical sensible explanation from first principles. But she also wasn’t going to finish embroidering my kiton or trim my bangs or teach me how to integrate volumes. My throat ached because I wanted to talk to Mother about Ficino’s project about assessing how philosophical cities were. But my grief, awful as it was to suffer, was cast into insignificance by the mythic scale of Father’s grief. It was all like the first afternoon when he was crying so much that I couldn’t cry at all. Her absence was like a presence, but Father’s grief was like a huge sucking whirlpool that threatened to sweep everything up and carry it away.

Another thing that didn’t help was that every one of the Children, my parents’ whole generation, had lost their home and parents when they were ten years old. Compared to that, losing Mother when I was fifteen shouldn’t have been anything to cry about. Only Maia seemed to understand. She took me for a walk along the cliffs and told me about losing her father, and how she had lost her whole world and her whole life with him, and all her books. “You still have your books,” she said, encouragingly. “You can still read and study. Philosophy will help.”

I thought about that. Reading did help, when it took me away from myself, when I had time to do it. But it was history I read, and poetry, and drama. Playing Briseis helped. It was a distraction. Philosophy required rigorous thought and didn’t seem to help at all. It all seemed wrong, but refuting it was always hard work. I knew Maia, who definitely had one of Plato’s philosophical souls, wouldn’t understand that. But there was something philosophical I thought she might be able to answer. “Plato says that people shouldn’t show their grief. It seems to me that Father is doing exactly what Plato says you shouldn’t do.”