The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton Page A

was true, though I didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was cracked, or at least cracking. It was a terrible thing to see. When he was alone with me he kept asking me if I could tell him why she’d stopped him saving her, and so I kept trying to think about that.
    â€œMight she have been ready to go on to a new life?” I asked.
    Father just groaned. After a moment he looked up. “She wasn’t done with this life. There was so much we still could have done. Sixty more years before she was as old as Ficino is!”
    â€œWell, might there be something she felt she had to do and could do better in another life?”
    â€œWhat?” he asked, staring at me from red-rimmed eyes. I had no idea and just shook my head.
    Embassies were sent under sacred truce to the other cities. None of them admitted responsibility for the raid, or that they had the head of Victory. This was unusual, but it wasn’t unprecedented. They had lied before, on occasion. Only Father took it as proof that Kebes had stolen the head and killed Mother. The Goodness wasn’t sighted again, and then winter closed in, with storms that made the sea dangerous. When Father proposed organizing a naval expedition to find and destroy Kebes’s Lost City, even more people were sure he was cracked with grief. I wasn’t old enough to go to the Chamber or the Assembly, but people were talking about it everywhere.
    The worst of it was that I was having to deal with Father being like this while also trying to cope with my own grief. It was bad enough that Mother wasn’t there to walk in and set everything right with a logical sensible explanation from first principles. But she also wasn’t going to finish embroidering my kiton or trim my bangs or teach me how to integrate volumes. My throat ached because I wanted to talk to Mother about Ficino’s project about assessing how philosophical cities were. But my grief, awful as it was to suffer, was cast into insignificance by the mythic scale of Father’s grief. It was all like the first afternoon when he was crying so much that I couldn’t cry at all. Her absence was like a presence, but Father’s grief was like a huge sucking whirlpool that threatened to sweep everything up and carry it away.
    Another thing that didn’t help was that every one of the Children, my parents’ whole generation, had lost their home and parents when they were ten years old. Compared to that, losing Mother when I was fifteen shouldn’t have been anything to cry about. Only Maia seemed to understand. She took me for a walk along the cliffs and told me about losing her father, and how she had lost her whole world and her whole life with him, and all her books. “You still have your books,” she said, encouragingly. “You can still read and study. Philosophy will help.”
    I thought about that. Reading did help, when it took me away from myself, when I had time to do it. But it was history I read, and poetry, and drama. Playing Briseis helped. It was a distraction. Philosophy required rigorous thought and didn’t seem to help at all. It all seemed wrong, but refuting it was always hard work. I knew Maia, who definitely had one of Plato’s philosophical souls, wouldn’t understand that. But there was something philosophical I thought she might be able to answer. “Plato says that people shouldn’t show their grief. It seems to me that Father is doing exactly what Plato says you shouldn’t do.”
    Maia put her hand on my shoulder comfortingly. “It’s hard to argue that he isn’t! But you have to let Pytheas deal with his own grief while you deal with yours. He’s a grown man, and you shouldn’t be worrying about how he’s grieving. Simmea wouldn’t have wanted you to bottle it all up any more than she’d have wanted Pytheas to howl his out.”
    I stared away from her. Clouds were boiling up out of the east