Free Necessity by Jo Walton Page B

tell—” He stopped and took a deep breath in the way he often did when he wanted to change the subject. “There’s a lot more of this wood than I thought there would be.”
    â€œTrees often seem bigger when they are down.”
    â€œBigger and smaller both. I’m sad to see it go. It was a link with Sokrates and Simmea. We used to sit in this garden and talk. It was so different then. Warmer. Sokrates made that herm, you know. He’d stopped working as a sculptor before the attack on the herms, but he took up his tools again for that.”
    â€œI knew he made the herm. It makes me happy that he was a sculptor too, though I did not know it when I knew him.”
    â€œHe’d have been excited by your work, as I am,” Pytheas said.
    It made me happy to hear this said. But then Pytheas looked around sadly at the chilly space the garden had become.
    â€œWe will plant more green things out here. It’s sad that the lemon tree couldn’t survive the winters,” I said. “But the wood will be useful to make many good things. I could make you a comb, and when you used it you could think of them.”
    â€œI’d like that,” he said.
    â€œAnd a pen,” I added.
    He nodded. He was no longer mad with grief, the way he had been immediately after Simmea’s death, but he still felt it, as I did myself. Now that I had comforted him, or at least made an effort towards trying, I wanted to get back to the conversation. “If Plato was wrong,” I said, and we both glanced at the arch over the door where the words could have been incised, “why did he imagine the gods that way?”
    â€œHe was wrong about the purpose of the gods,” Pytheas said. “He imagined that we existed as inspiration, examples, much the same way he imagined art.” He laughed. “He was wrong about art too.”
    â€œAnd why do you exist?” I asked.
    â€œI haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. “Not why we exist, or why humans do, or Workers either. I’m sure Father knows, but he probably wouldn’t tell me.” He smiled at me, the smile that wasn’t like anyone else’s smile. “Plato might have been wrong a lot of the time, but at least he was trying to figure important things out. He deserves credit for that.”
    VII. On Friendship
    The reason why Pytheas only joked about it and didn’t have me inscribe Plato Was Wrong over his doorway was to avoid distressing his friends, especially Maia and Aristomache.

 
    5
    JASON
    Walking through the city with Thetis, I kept wanting to pinch myself so I could be sure it wasn’t a dream. Except that if it was a dream, I didn’t want to wake up, so there was that. I had my arm around her, around the outside of her cloak that is, which was fairly thick, whatever shimmery stuff it was made out of. But as we walked through the streets behind the harbor she sort of half-leaned into me, as if she couldn’t have managed to walk without my help. The sun was down now, not that we’d seen a glimpse of him since the morning. The clouds had been low out on the water. It had been grey all day, and raining on and off. Now twilight was closing in as we made our way through the streets, and a cold wind was coming up from the southwest. At first Thetis was crying, but after a little while, as we started heading uphill, she stopped. She wiped her face, took a deep breath, then turned her lovely eyes on me expectantly. “Well?”
    â€œI don’t know what to say,” I admitted, completely at a loss. “It would be wrong to tell you to cheer up, when you’ve so recently lost your grandfather.”
    â€œYou don’t think it’s un-Platonic of me to grieve?” she asked.
    I couldn’t remember what Plato had said about it. I’d read the Republic when I was an ephebe, like everyone else, but that was a while ago and I’d been busy since.