I kept trying, but I couldn’t persuade the baby to suck. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it with babies who already know what to do, while this little scrap gets his nourishment from a mother who knows,” Maia said, lifting him off me and starting to wipe him clean. He began to wail again, and I ached to soothe him. He looked so small in her competent hands. Through the window the first red fingers of dawn were brightening the sky.
“Who chooses his name?” I asked.
Maia grimaced and put the baby against her shoulder, where he calmed to quiet whimpers. “Oh Simmea, you know perfectly well you should think of all the babies being born now as yours, and not this one in particular.”
“I know,” I said, surprised. “I do. I will. I didn’t mean anything like that. But … who does decide his name? You?”
“Ficino, generally, for the Florentine babies. He has a knack for naming and he likes doing it. He’ll come around after breakfast and name him.”
I liked the thought of Ficino choosing the name, if I couldn’t. “Ficino named me,” I said, comforted.
“You can’t name him. It would make too much of the connection.” She wrapped him in a white cloth, twisting it expertly.
“Choosing names for them would? Not carrying them in our bodies for all these months and then going through all that?”
She shook her head. “Choosing his name, knowing his name, would mean you’d single him out among the others as yours.”
“But I want to,” I said.
Maia was cradling my baby against her now, and he lay peacefully in her arms. “You need to think of all of them as yours. You’re a guardian. That doesn’t just mean you wear a gold pin and talk to Sokrates; that means you’ll eventually be one of those guiding the city. You want to do what’s best for everyone, not just for your own family. We don’t want you to favor this little boy because he’s yours when he might not be the best. We want you to choose the ones who are the best to be made gold when their time comes.”
“That makes sense,” I acknowledged. But even as I said so I could feel tears rolling down my cheeks.
“We do know there’s an instinctive bond,” she said. “But it’s better for everyone, for you, for him, for the city, to break it now. Love all your brothers and sisters, not one husband or wife. Love all the children, not just the ones of your body.”
“Love wisdom,” I said, sniffing. “I do love wisdom, Maia, and I love the city, and you’d better take him away now.”
She took him out of the room. I could hear him begin to howl again, then as she went away the sound of his wailing grew quieter. She came back with a different baby, a girl, much bigger, pale-skinned and blue-eyed. Maia showed me how to nurse her, and as she had said it helped that the baby already understood. “It’ll be a day or two before there’s proper milk, but this will help it come,” she explained.
She sat down beside me. “In my time, if you’d had a baby at eighteen it would have defined your life. You’d have had to look after it whether you knew how to or not. You’d never have had time to be a person or to think. You’d have been a mother and that’s all.”
“Aristomache said that. She said she had to choose between love and children, or a life of the mind.”
“Aristomache was one of the lucky ones who had the chance to choose. Lots of women were stuck without any choice. Here you can have the baby and still have your life. You don’t appreciate how fortunate that is, how few women have ever had that through all of history.”
It was true if I could trust them, and for the most part I truly did.
“Even here and now, more of the burden falls on women,” Maia went on. “I’m in here helping you right now, not in my room reading or thinking, where the male masters are. And you’re giving birth while whoever the father is sleeps peacefully. But you won’t be here helping the next generation through labor and wiping up the blood. You’ll be organizing which of the iron girls do that work.”
The pale baby let my nipple fall out of her mouth and Maia took her away. When she came back I had almost succumbed to exhaustion.
“Are you falling asleep?” Maia asked.
“Sorry. I was. I should go back to Hyssop.”
“You can sleep here. It’s probably not a good idea for you to walk just yet. Lie and rest where you are. But while you’re still awake I want to say something. You really are going to be one of the people making all the decisions here. Lots of the masters are old. Even those of us who were relatively young ten years ago are getting older. When these children grow up even we will be old. You’ll be the ones watching them and deciding who pursues excellence, who among them will be gold and silver, or bronze and iron. It’s a big responsibility.”
“It seems so far away when we can’t make any decisions at all now. We can’t even read the Republic, even though we’re going to be the ones making it work.”
“You’re still so young,” Maia said, pulling a cloak up over me. “You still have a lot to learn, and a lot of wisdom to acquire. But one of the things Plato says in the Republic is that the purpose of the city isn’t to make the guardians the happiest people in the world, it’s to make the whole city just. It’s absolutely true that you might be happier if you could have one lover or if you could know which was your own child. But the whole city would be less just. Think about that.”
My eyes were closing, and I let them close. I could hear her moving things around and then leaving the room. I could hear a baby, not mine, crying somewhere, and then the sound stopped. I was more exhausted than I had ever been from running in armor. I slipped down towards sleep. If Plato had been trying to maximize justice, what did that mean? This was the Just City, of course it was, we had always been told that. But why justice, not happiness, or liberty or any other excellence? What was justice really? I smiled. I’d have to debate it with Sokrates when next I saw him. I could be sure he’d be onto it like a terrier after a rat.
27
MAIA
I was exhausted before I arrived at Chamber. I would have skipped it and gone to bed, but Lysias had particularly asked everyone on the Tech Committee to be there. It was a little more than nine months after a festival of Hera, and so naturally we were coming to the end of birthing season. We were training some of the iron girls who’d given birth themselves in midwifery as well as childcare, but we didn’t have enough of them yet, and most of the burden of helping them through fell on us—specifically, on the female masters. Everyone agreed that birth was a female mystery. I agreed myself. Nobody wants men around at a time like that. But the constant work of midwifery wore me out.
The Chamber was busy. It was a big room. We had never filled it, and we didn’t now. But everyone seemed to be there. I spotted Lysias talking to Klio and went to join them. “Everything all right?” I asked.
“Up all night with babies,” she said. “And I’m leaving a girl in labor to be here—but she has one of her sisters with her who has been through it, and it seems to be uncomplicated so far. They know to send for me or Kreusa if they need to. How about you?”
“I think Florentia is done for this season, and there’s only one girl in Delphi who’s still due.”
“We need to space the festivals out more,” Lysias said. “Two a year. Or even just one.”
“I’ve been saying that for ages,” Klio said. “I suggested that the first time it was ever discussed. And Plato says as often as necessary, not three times a year.”