“Good idea,” he said. “For one thing, it’s close. For another, Sokrates has been missing you. And thirdly, Sokrates knows. He’s the only one. I didn’t tell him. He recognized me.”
“Of course he did. I was there. And that’s why he immediately started off on whether we can trust the gods.” I felt stupid for not understanding at the time.
Pytheas took my hand. His hand didn’t feel any different from the way it always did—always when I was myself and cared about it, that is. “He can trust me,” he said. “And so can you.”
I looked at him sideways. “Those the gods love … tend to come to terrible ends.”
“That’s Father. And … some of the others, I suppose. But I do my best for my friends. I can’t do anything about Fate or Necessity, or directly against the will of other gods, but so far as I can, I always do my best for them.”
We started walking together towards Thessaly. I thought through all the stories I knew about Apollo. “What about Niobe?”
“She badmouthed my mother. Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t punish my enemies.” He was looking at me sideways, awkwardly.
“Well, being a god explains why you’re so hopeless at being a human being sometimes,” I said.
He laughed. “I was so worried about you finding out. I can’t believe you know and it doesn’t make any difference.”
“It makes a difference,” I said.
“But you’re talking to me the same way?” He seemed tentative.
“You’re still you.” That was what I felt very strongly. Pytheas was still Pytheas, the way he always had been. I just understood him better now. It was like the thing with Klymene. I didn’t feel that he’d been deceiving me, just that this was the thing he had kept quiet, a thing that helped me make sense of him. But the implications were still slowly sinking in. Maybe it was because my mind had been wrapped in wool for so long.
“And what you said to Athene?” he asked.
“That I’m a gold of this city and she’d better trust my word if she hasn’t been wasting her time here for eight years?”
Pytheas laughed. “That was perfect, though she’ll take a while to get over it. But I meant the other thing. That you’re my friend and my votary.”
“Yes.” I stopped walking, and he stopped too. “But you know that. You knew that before. What else were we talking about up on the wall? Except for you not mentioning the fact that you’re Apollo.”
“What it means for you to be my votary is that the other gods can’t do anything to you without my permission,” he said.
“I know. And you can do anything you want. I have read about this.” We started walking again. We were quite close to Thessaly now. “I’m walking with the gods,” I said, and giggled. Then I stopped. “What’s that?”
The marble slabs of the pathway stretching out before us, as far as Thessaly and further, stretching out up the street from there, were all cut with words. “It’s the workers’ halves of dialogues,” Pytheas said. “I did want to tell you, but you weren’t listening to anything anyone said.”
“They’re talking back?” I was delighted. “I knew it wasn’t Kebes.”
“They’re talking back to Sokrates at great length,” Pytheas said. “So it seems he was right and everyone else was wrong, not for the first time. They’ve had a major debate about slavery in the Chamber, and Sokrates is trying to persuade the workers to work, by first finding out what they want and then seeing whether we can offer it to them. It’s all terribly exciting. Aristomache apparently made a wonderful speech about Plato and freedom.”
“She’s great. I’m sorry I missed that. Did I miss anything else?”
“You’d have missed that anyway, it took place in closed Chamber. Sokrates told me about it afterwards.”
Just then we saw Sokrates, up the street a way past Thessaly. He was talking to a worker, who was carving replies into the marble. “Soon the whole city is going to be paved in Socratic dialogues,” Pytheas said. “It’s so appropriate that I’m amazed they didn’t think of it from the start.”
“It’s wonderful,” I said, starting to read some of it. Just then Sokrates saw us, said something to the worker he was talking to and bounded towards us.
“Simmea!” he said. “Joy to you! How wonderful to see you restored to yourself.”
“It’s wonderful to see you too. As for my restoration, it’s divine intervention,” I said.
His keen eyes went from Pytheas to me. “I see. Perhaps we should go into the garden and sit down and talk about this?”
“That would be excellent, but do you have anything to eat? I feel as if I haven’t eaten anything in half a year.”
Sokrates looked bemused as he opened the door. “I don’t think I do. Maybe I have some lemons?”
Pytheas reached into the fold of his kiton and produced a goat cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves. Sokrates led the way through to the garden. I sat on the ground by the tree, getting down easily, in a way that I’d taken for granted until recently. Pytheas leaned on the tree and I leaned back against him as I often did here. Sokrates came out with three slightly wizened lemons and handed us one each. I broke off chunks of the cheese and started to eat it.
“Do you want to hear about my success with the workers, or should we discuss the nature of the gods?” Sokrates asked.
“He says he’s Apollo and he always does his best for his friends, under the constraints of Necessity and Fate and other gods,” I said.
“I can still talk, you know,” Pytheas protested.
I stopped. “Go ahead then.”
“Is there anything new from the workers?” he asked.
Sokrates threw his head back and laughed, and I laughed too. Sokrates mopped his eyes with a corner of his kiton. “Why did you come here?” he asked.
“To talk to you,” Pytheas said.
“I didn’t mean this afternoon, double-tongued one, though it’s interesting that you want to talk to me about this now when you’ve been avoiding it for so long. Why did you come to the city? Unless you did that to talk to me?”
“That was part of the attraction,” Pytheas admitted. “But seriously, I wanted to experience being a mortal. I wanted to learn about volition and equal significance.”
“And have you been learning about them?” Sokrates asked.
“You know he has,” I said.
“Volition and equal significance,” Sokrates said. “What interesting subjects for a god to need to study!”
“You know we don’t know everything. Well, except for Father.”
“It’s just exactly what I’ve been thinking about with the workers,” Sokrates went on, as if Pytheas hadn’t spoken. His eyes were very sharp. “Both of those things. The masters were not prepared to see them in the workers, as the gods were perhaps not prepared to see them in us?”
“I don’t know what the other gods know about it. Athene knew.”
“Did she now? And still she chose to do this to us?”
Sitting as we were, I could feel Pytheas draw breath and then let it go before drawing breath again to speak. “Is this really the conversation you want to have with me?”
Sokrates laughed again, a short bark of a laugh. “Should I ask you instead what happens to souls before birth and after death?”
“I could tell you,” Pytheas said.
I sat up and moved to where I could see his face. “It’s what Plato wrote in the Phaedo, isn’t it?”
“That piece of misrepresentation,” Sokrates said, automatically, as he always did whenever that dialogue was mentioned.