The next morning Klymene came back without the baby. Her belly didn’t look a great deal smaller, which surprised me. I’d expected her to go back to normal at once. “We are to go every day and feed them,” Klymene said, as if it were a comfort.
“Was it a boy or a girl?” I asked.
“A boy. The sweetest thing. He had black curls.” I wondered what my baby would look like, and if I would be sorry to leave it behind in the nursery.
Makalla’s baby was born four days later. She went into labor in the afternoon, so I did not know until I went to bed and she was missing from Hyssop. “I heard her screaming while I was over there feeding,” Klymene said.
“Screaming?” Auge asked, apprehensively, a hand on her belly.
“Everyone screams, they say,” Klymene said, quite composedly. “I didn’t, except once near the end.”
“How is your baby?” I asked.
“They keep bringing me different ones to feed every time I go. I haven’t seen my own baby since the first day. Still, I suppose it’s for the best. It stops me getting too attached, Maia says.”
“Don’t you want to be attached?” Auge asked.
“I want him to be his best self. That means leaving him to people trained to bring him up. I wouldn’t have any idea what to do with a baby.”
It was what I had said to Sokrates, but somehow it sounded different. And I knew if I brought that back to Sokrates, it would take us straight into the heart of the matter. Could we trust the masters? Could we trust Plato? Could we trust Pallas Athene? Trust them for what? Trust them to mean well and have our best interests at heart? Oh yes, I thought so. Trust them to know how best to bring up babies? That was a different question. And in seven months’ time, it was a question that I was going to have to answer. I put my arms around my belly as if that was going to protect the baby.
“How do you know it’s a different one?” Auge asked. “I thought they all looked alike.”
Klymene clicked her tongue. “They’re all different! And mine looked just like Pytheas, except for the hair.”
“Pytheas?” I asked. My stomach felt hollow. “You were drawn with Pytheas? And it was awful?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“You managed not to tell me for a long time. And he didn’t tell me either. Tell me now.” Pytheas had been politely evasive when I’d asked how it had gone, and I hadn’t wanted to linger on the subject either. We were friends. That there were times when I longed to reach out and touch him, or to see the expression on his face that I had seen on Aeschines, was my secret.
She sighed. “It was only awful because we hate each other. He’d have let me off—he still thinks I’m a coward. I forced him to go through with it. I just gritted my teeth. It wasn’t so bad. Nothing to childbirth. Good practice for it.”
Pytheas wasn’t in Laurel House, or in Delphi, or the palaestra, and he wasn’t in the library. He wasn’t in Thessaly, though Sokrates and Ikaros and Manlius and Aristomache were, sitting talking and drinking wine in a circle of light. “Why do you want him?” Sokrates asked.
“It’s personal,” I said.
“In that case I think we’d better accompany you!” Ikaros said. “Personal matters are always better sorted out—”
“With a debate team? No, thank you.”
Ikaros laughed. “Which horse is in charge of your chariot today, Simmea?”
Sokrates raised a hand then, stopping Ikaros immediately. Sokrates could cut right through one in debate but he was never cruel, and never allowed cruelty in his presence. “Is Ikaros right? Have you and Pytheas had a lover’s tiff?”
“We’re not lovers,” I protested. “And no, nothing like that.”
“It’s late. You’ve been running and your hair is disordered,” Ikaros pointed out. “And you said a personal matter. I wasn’t likely to assume a dispute on the nature of the soul.”
“You can be passionate enough in debate,” Aristomache said to him, sharply “Do others the courtesy of assuming the same.”
“I wanted to talk to him urgently about something I just found out,” I said. “And can something only be a matter of philosophy or of love, do you think, Master Ikaros? Are there no other subjects fit for conversation?”
“She has you there,” Sokrates said. “Let us consider the benefits and disadvantages of bisecting the world, and leave Simmea to quest for Pytheas in peace.”
I left, and walked decorously through the city, aware now of how I seemed to others. I smoothed my hair and breathed evenly. What was I upset about anyway? That Pytheas and Klymene had had their encounter? That was random chance, and I knew he’d been married to someone—to three people, as I had. What difference did it make that it was Klymene? None. What upset me was that he hadn’t told me, that he hadn’t brought it to me for dissection and examination. Whatever had happened with Klymene didn’t matter. It was his silence about it that threatened our friendship. Ten months, and he hadn’t said a word about it.
I found him at last coming out of a practice room, not the ones on the street of Dionysos which had been used for the marriages but the ones on the street of Hermes on the south edge of the city. “I’ve been making a song. Let’s go up on the wall,” he said when he saw me. We climbed up the steps and stood on the wall. It was late evening and there was nobody else there. The breeze was blowing from the mountain, bringing with it a slight smell of sulphur. The wall was twice the height of Pytheas and perhaps his height across, with a little parapet. It was possible to walk all around the city on top of the walls, because the walkways went over the tops of the gates. There were no sconces up here, but we could see by the lights below, and by starlight. The stars were particularly bright that night. I knew their names and histories and the orbits of all the planets. I could see Saturn very clearly. It gave me some perspective on my human problems.
“Klymene told me,” I said, quite calm now.
“Oh.” He stared out into the darkness. “I’ve been wanting and wanting to talk to you about it, but it was so awkward if she didn’t want you to know.”
He couldn’t have said anything better. The hurt and anger went out of me. I sat down on the parapet and he sat down on the flat slab of the walkway below me.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you about it, but now I don’t know what to say. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” I said. “She’s had the baby. It’s a boy. She says he looks exactly like you.”
“I can’t wait to see him,” he said. “And Kryseis is pregnant too.”
“So am I,” I said.
“Wonderful. Congratulations. It’ll be so nice to have another generation of children.”
“I was wondering how many they want. The same number, surely, which means two children each, but if they want to have a festival every four months then there’ll be a lot more than that.”
“We should ask Sokrates,” he said. “A city of heroes. What a thought.”
“Klymene said it was horrible. She didn’t talk about it. But she said it was good preparation for childbirth.”
He shuddered. I could feel it. “She willed it, but she didn’t want it,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, and I think that’s what it was. I didn’t want it and I could barely summon the will. She hates me.”
“I don’t think she’ll ever be able to forgive you.”
“The whole thing’s so horribly awkward, even when you don’t get matched with somebody who hates you.”
“Oh yes,” I agreed fervently.
“And it doesn’t even work. Half the people I know have actually paired off and are sneaking off to meet up in hiding to keep doing it. Some of them are in love and some just want to have more sex.” He shook his head.