“Yes,” he said, with no hesitation whatsoever. I was astonished. “Is that what you want?” He looked into my face.

“I was just being rhetorical. I never imagined you would agree. In the nineteenth century it would have been unthinkable for a man to do a woman’s work that way.” I put my hand on his.

He smiled. “In the twenty-first century it was unusual but not unheard of. And we assigned some iron boys as nursery attendants. I would do it if that’s how you wanted to arrange things.”

“I don’t want to shrink my horizons to a baby,” I said. “In my own time, that was the end of all independent thought.”

“It needn’t be that here,” Lysias said. “If we decided to have children, I’d certainly be willing to be the one to stay home with them. But we’ll also have crèches to provide flexibility. Nobody’s going to be forcing you to be a nineteenth-century mother.”

“I see that. But even so.”

“I truly want this. I want children. And I can’t do it without your help. You have a womb and can grow a new person. I can’t.”

I had never before thought of this as a form of female power that men lacked. No wonder they tried to control us in so many societies for so many years. (And no wonder Athene remained a virgin.) I still didn’t especially want to have babies. But I didn’t want to lose Lysias, and it seemed so important to him; and if he would take charge of the parts I didn’t want to, then I thought that perhaps it didn’t have to be something huge and life-changing for me.

So I agreed to stop chewing silphium, and I did stop. The next month when my blood came on time I was astonished, and the same the month after and the month after that. I knew that even at the festivals not every girl became pregnant every time, but I had expected Lysias’s fervor to have had results. He had never wanted me so much or so enthusiastically. I saw now that he had seen sterile coupling as hardly worth doing. I wasn’t comfortable about this change, but I didn’t feel I could talk to him about it.

After six months with no result, I talked to Kreusa, and she reassured me that sometimes it could take many months to become pregnant, and that I shouldn’t start to worry until it was a year.

After a year, I talked to her again, and she recommended green leaves, sunlight, relaxation, and prayers to Hera. I tried all of these, and never had my monthly blood arrive more than a day late. “Am I too old?” I asked her, a year after that, on a sunny autumn day while we were alone together on the shore smoking fish.

“What are you now, thirty-five, thirty-six? No, that’s not too old. Old for a first time, but there shouldn’t be any trouble. Lysias is a few years older, there might be problems on his side. Have him eat red meat when he can and abstain from fish.”

“Have you ever had a baby?” I asked her as I tossed some more wood onto the fire.

She frowned and paused, with a single fish in one hand and a stick with five more threaded on it in the other. “One, when I was young. My mistress beat me for being so careless with the silphium. I was lucky not to find myself out on the street. It was a boy, poor thing, and had to be exposed.” I remembered the baby I had exposed and how terrible I had felt, even though it couldn’t have survived and it was not my own. I put out my hand toward Kreusa, but she didn’t seem to see me. “I cried for days. By the time I had a house of my own and could have afforded a child, I’d found philosophy and didn’t want one. I’m surprised you do, honestly.” She plunged the stick through the fish abruptly and turned to put it on the smoke rack.

“I don’t, all that much,” I said. “Lysias really does. Now I’ve been trying for two years without getting anywhere, and he still feels strongly about it and I’m still ambivalent.”

“That’s probably your problem,” she said, her face still turned toward the fish and the fire. “Your ambivalence. If you truly wanted it, you’d get pregnant.”

“But you didn’t want to, that time back in Corinth.” I strung more fish onto another stick.

She shook her head without turning around. “I don’t know why it should be. Lots of girls get caught when they don’t want it at all, but lots of women trying without really wanting it can’t manage it. And some who do desperately want it can’t, and that’s the saddest thing of all. I’d give up trying and fretting and just see what the gods send if I were you.”

“Lysias—”

“He’s a funny one,” Kreusa said, turning back and picking up the stick I held out to her. “He’s not Greek.”

“Neither am I,” I said.

“No, but you’re not what he is either.” She sighed and put the fish on the rack. “It probably makes no difference. Some men want sons to be their heirs. If he comes from that kind of family, well. Or even if not, if he wants children so much there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re not too old. But time is not on your side.”

I picked up another fish and another stick. “He says he’ll do all the work with the baby and leave me free for philosophy and teaching. Well, as free as I am now.”

She laughed. “Perhaps he will, but what will you do if he doesn’t? Men, eh?”

“We’re equal here,” I said. “In the City of Amazons there are more women than men, especially among the guardians. We can make a real difference.”

“And yet you’re still trying to have a baby because your man wants one?” She laughed bitterly, then began to turn the fish before they started to scorch.

“It’s very difficult,” I said.

I persuaded Lysias to eat more meat and less fish, even though he preferred fish, but it didn’t make any difference. My blood continued to come with infuriating regularity. At first we consoled each other, and then we stopped talking about it, until at last we only talked about philosophy and politics and other neutral subjects. All in all we tried to conceive a child for six years, with no result at all. Other women seemed to have no difficulty conceiving, even other Masters. I continued to help as a midwife as our birth rate rose, along with teaching and working and serving on committees. Ikaros and I opposed each other almost as a matter of course all this time. Axiothea joked that if we ever did agree then the matter was sure to be settled.

I knew how important having children was to Lysias, so I wasn’t at all surprised when he left me in the seventh year, though I was surprised that he left me for Lukretia, who was older than I was, and who had never shown any interest in him before that summer. I missed him surprisingly much. Even as we had been drawing apart he had always been courteous and friendly. Now I came home alone to a house that felt colder.

11

ARETE

That day for the first time I saw some other ships, three big ones with rows of oars, away to the east, heading southward. I called the news down, and there was some excitement, but we didn’t change course to intercept them. We reached Paros about mid-day.

At first it seemed deserted, because we reached it from the southwest, and the settlements were all on the northeastern coast. The shore party didn’t find anything inland, but we all saw the ones along the shore after we had sailed all the way around. I saw three of them, much like the one Kallikles had described on Naxos. I looked at them as hard as I could as we sailed by them, and so did everyone else aboard who wasn’t tending to the ship at that very instant. I didn’t see any people clearly, because they fled at the first sight of the ship. Paros was thickly wooded, and they ran off into the trees, mothers carrying wailing babies and everyone clutching their most precious possessions. “They must be expecting raiders,” Neleus said. “Maybe Kebes is nearby.”

“Or maybe more people like them. What would Kebes find to raid in a place like that?” The huts looked flimsy enough to push over at a touch. There was one square-built stone house on a little eminence, but even that looked filthy and shabby. The statues were strange, as Kallikles had said, festive and brightly colored when all the rest was so drab. They stared out at us with their huge painted eyes.