“When’s Easter?” I asked.

“It’s—” Aristomache and Maia began together, then caught each other’s eyes and giggled, exactly as if they were both ephebes. “It’s the first Lord’s Day after the first full moon after the spring equinox,” Aristomache finished alone. “So it’s soon.”

“What’s the Lord’s Day?” Erinna asked.

The locals clucked, but Aristomache explained quickly and easily. “Instead of having Ides and Nones, we call each seven-day period a week, and the days of the week have names, and the seventh day of each week is the Lord’s Day, and a day of rest and religious worship.”

“How can you celebrate Easter before Yayzu is even born?” Maia asked.

“He is our eternal savior,” Aristomache said, serenely confident.

16

MAIA

People say I left the City of Amazons because I wanted comfort, but I have never loved comfort, only learning. I left for reasons of conscience—religious reasons.

I suppose the whole New Concordance was partly my fault, or rather Crocus’s, making Ikaros translate Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologica is really long, and of course because Ikaros shouldn’t have had the book he could only work on it in private, and when he had free time. It took him years. He still hadn’t finished it by the time I left. Ikaros was the ultimate synthesist, but he had a fast mind that was always racing ahead to the next thing. Needing to translate Aquinas for Crocus, slowly, over a long time, and then reading his translation aloud, and answering Crocus’s questions, forced him to keep coming back to it and thinking about it, instead of leaping on to something new.

Ikaros had found a way, in about 1500 A.D. from what I gather, to reconcile all the religions and philosophies in the world. He got into some considerable amount of trouble over this with the Pope and the Inquisition, and was saved, bizarrely enough, by Savonarola. I only know most of this secondhand through Lysias, who had heard of him before we came to the City. I barely know anything about Savonarola, or about the controversies of the Renaissance, and I can’t look it up because it falls into the area we decided to exclude from our library. We have plenty of Renaissance art, and Renaissance people, but not religion and politics, because we wanted the Renaissance re-imagining of the classical world, not what Lysias described as the “medieval remnants” of Christianity. So Ikaros’s Oration on the Awesomeness of Humanity, as Lysias calls it, saying that I could substitute “Pico della Mirandola” and “Dignity of Man” if I preferred, is not in the library, and neither are his nine hundred theses. His work was too Christian for the Library Committee. But excluding them didn’t keep them out. They were still in Ikaros’s head, and Ikaros’s brain was in Ikaros’s head, and what Ikaros’s brain did when it was idle was make up perfectly logical but utterly insane theories of religious reconciliation.

He had been thinking about this on and off the whole time, from the moment when he saw that Pallas Athene was real. He had told me before the Last Debate that he had found a way to make it all make sense. But it wasn’t until the first years in the City of Amazons, when he had to go through Aquinas line by line to translate it, that he came up with the rigorous and philosophically defensible thesis he called his New Concordance.

In the original city, where Sokrates and Tullius and Manlius and Ficino and all the other older Masters were there to sit on him, Ikaros couldn’t do much about his religious theories except have occasional debates. His debates were always very popular with everyone, but he had to find people who wanted to debate with him, and his metaphysical theories were never a particularly popular topic. Athene never showed up for them, though she almost always came to his debates on other topics. Most Platonists are quite happy with Plato’s metaphysics. Tullius was a Stoic. Even so, Ikaros is such a powerful orator, impassioned and fast-thinking and funny, that he could sometimes find people prepared to take on the more esoteric subjects. Even here, where everyone is trained in rhetoric, he stands out as surpassingly excellent. He’s good at coming up with memorable images and working them all the way through an argument. He has always been a joy to listen to, in either language.

Once we were in the City of Amazons there was nobody better—nobody even as good. Klio was very good, and so were Myrto and Kreusa. Myrto was his most effective opponent. It wasn’t until after she died, in the sixth year, that he gained complete sway over the city.

I could live in a city that has Ikaros in it, even though I disagreed with him a great deal. But I couldn’t live in a city that required me to follow his crazy religion. I could be a Christian—I had been for the first eighteen years of my life. Or I could be a Platonic pagan, as I had been for the next eighteen. I had met Pallas Athene, talked to her. I had no doubt that the Olympians were real. I knew the way we worshipped them in the City was acceptable to Athene, who existed, who had set up the City and brought us the Workers, and then lost her temper and turned Sokrates into a gadfly and took the Workers away again. In Athenia they think she was right. I don’t go as far as that, but I think what she did was understandable in the circumstances.

Athene thought we should be grateful to her for the opportunity to be in the City—and I was. I can’t imagine any life that could have been better for me personally that led on from the nineteen years of my life I lived in the nineteenth century. I would never stop being grateful for the rescue that allowed me to be myself, to be respected as a scholar and a teacher. My feelings about Christianity were conflicted, while my gratitude to Athene was unfailing. On the other hand, Sokrates made some valid points in the Last Debate. I continued to question whether she had the right to do what she had done. But I still prayed to her nightly, and to the other Olympians on appropriate occasions.

What Ikaros did was to build a whole logical edifice reconciling everything—Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Hedonism, Pythagoras, and sundry other ideas he’d picked up here and there. Bits of it were brilliant. For instance, he deduced from Athene saying that the City was just that justice must be a process, not a Form, and that reconciled contradictions between Plato and Aristotle’s views of justice as well as being a fascinating idea about dynamic ideals. In fact, all of it was brilliant, if you considered it as pure logic. The problem was his axioms.

He set about the whole thing properly, I have to admit. He wrote it all up, ordered his theses, and announced a great debate. He sent invitations to the other cities and arranged a festival. He debated everybody who came prepared to argue against his points, and when they won on any issue he accepted that and incorporated that into his argument. It’s just that the whole edifice was built on such terrible axioms. At first I had wanted it to be true, wanted the loving Father and Son I had grown up with to be real, as well as Athene. I wanted Jesus to be my savior, as I had believed as a child. But the more closely I looked at what Ikaros was doing, the less sense it made. His axioms were twisted. It was incredibly ingenious, and it all made perfect logical sense, each piece of the structure balanced on each other piece. But it was a castle of straws balanced on air. Athene just wasn’t an angel, and wasn’t perfect. Errors can be refuted, and as his errors were pointed out, by me and by others, he patched them. But his leaps of faith were not errors, and they were inarguable. I tried. Many of us tried. And it was all right as long as it was just a case of what Ikaros believed and tried to persuade people. It was when, after the festival, the Assembly of Amazons voted to make his New Concordance the official religion of the City of Amazons that I knew I had to leave. It would be practiced at festivals. I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t possibly teach it.