Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.75

The Young Griffon

As a boy first learning how to sail beneath my father’s watchful eye, the Eos had seemed to me a daunting vessel. She was large for what she was. Not a trireme, not even a true war galley, but larger than any trade ship. My father had designed her in the Phoenician style - rather than the four-to-one ratio of a merchant vessel, or the eight-to-one ratio of a war galley, she was six-length to one-width. Too small to be a fighter, yet too large for one boy alone to comfortably manage her. Though, of course, I had in the end.

When the prodigal son of the late Anargyros Aetos first received my father’s blessing to venture out into the wider world, setting sail for greater shores, the Eos had seemed to me a lonely vessel. Nikolas, a senior Philosopher at the time, had led her over the horizon with the deft capability he showed in all things.

But even so, there had been something bleak to the sight. The Aetos family watched from the docks - my father and his brothers and their wives, all of my cousins and I, all of us waiting for the one and only son of the family’s broken pillar to vanish into the horizon. To sail into the rosy dawn as it reared up in the east, one young man captaining alone a ship that had been built by four to serve eight.

Nikolas Aetos left the Rosy Dawn, and with him he took the same spark that Anargyros Aetos had taken with him in his passing. My father sent him off with rare fondness. Weighed him down with trinkets and coins and told him never to return until he had six companions and a wife worth showing off to his family. He had hugged Nikolas tightly, and when my cousin drew me into the embrace as well it felt like I was the nephew instead of the son.

The experience drove Lydia and Heron to tears, diverted Castor from his chosen path and left Rena despondent. It woke Myron’s sleeping soul. My aunts and uncles saw him off with fierce encouragement and fond sorrow. They were proud of what he was and what they knew he would become, but even a temporary loss was a tragedy in its moment. For the brothers of the late Anargyros and for their wives, parting was bittersweet.

For me, it had only been bitter.

Half a decade passed before I saw the Eos again. I languished in those years. I paced up and down the eastern mountain range in search of greater purpose and found nothing. I foraged through the Scarlet City’s citizens and her mystikos in search of passion and found no one. I hunted within myself for a principle unmarred by apathy, and found every one of them was hollow.

The day my cousin came home, I saw that the Eos had changed again. She had been a tragedy on breaking waves the day that Nikolas took her out. Five years later, she returned as my deliverance.

I had been all but certain I’d never see her again after brightening Olympia’s shores, confident that it was our tale together concluded. I was wrong.

“Tell it to us again, žibùtė,” Khabur, the old Thracian who knew over a hundred sea shanties, urged me while we skimmed the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. “Tell us about the lightning!”

A chorus of cheers went up from the other nine sea dogs on deck, galley slaves that Sol and I had liberated from pirates the day we escaped the Rosy Dawn. The weeks since then had been kind to them. Each of them had gained much needed weight and the heavy lines of exhaustion had begun to smooth from their faces. Some marks were permanent, but those did nothing to dampen their high spirits.

“Again?” I raised an eyebrow, lounging with one leg crossed over the other and my right cheek propped up by a fist. My throne of rowing benches differed slightly from how I’d left it, but to the crew’s credit they had reassembled it as best they could without being prompted. “A story is never as good the second time you hear it, you know. Why ruin it with repetition?”

Groans and protestations were my response. I chuckled and obliged them. They had been working themselves to the bone the last few days, after all, hardly stopping to sleep and taking food and drink only while they rowed. Sol had told them to pace themselves and I had not disagreed, but there was a determination in each of those sea dogs that would not be stifled.

I supposed the least I could do was entertain them. And if telling the same story twice meant dampening its luster, then I’d simply tell a different one. The same event, but a different portion of it.

“The Raging Heaven Cult is an institution devoted to man’s hubris,” I began. “They decorate their bath houses with scenes of ruinous debauchery and fill their holy places with relics and idols of history’s greatest fools. As it turns out, their initiation rites are no different.

“Last time I told you of the Oracles that I convened with during my brief holiday in the immortal storm crown. This time, how would you dogs like to hear about the suffering memorials I encountered in my ascent - the cast down giants and disgraced kings punished personally by our own faceless divinity?”

The sailors whooped and hollered in reply.

I regaled them with stories of Sisyphus, twice risen king, of Porphyrion, Tyrant giant, as well as the rest of the tribulation statues that I had gathered my twenty iron blades from. Disgraced Minos and defiled Pasiphae, Aktaion the voyeur, the starving Tyrant Erysichthon, and of course Ixion on his burning wheel. The sailors listened hungrily, if nothing else wise enough to know that this was knowledge any Civic cultivator would kill for. Knowledge of the Raging Heaven’s rites.

“You shouldn’t be telling them this,” Scythas muttered, leaning against the ship’s mast and looking out at the distant coast off our port side. We’d made good time to Thracia thus far. The sea dogs were giving it their best, and the hands of my pneuma were pulling right alongside them.

“I heard you the last time,” I acknowledged.

“I’m serious. This, and that memory you smacked our faces with down in Bakkhos’ estate. You may not care, but they will when they let slip the stories you’ve told them in the wrong company, and a cultivator tears them to pieces for their knowledge. Knowledge they shouldn’t have.”

I considered that. Cast of glance over the sea dogs, suddenly a bit more somber than before.

“Show of hands,” I said, raising my own demonstratively. “Who here knows how to keep their mouth shut?” All ten of the former slaves raised a hand from their oars.

“Put your hand down,” Sol ordered me from his place at the front of the ship. I smirked and offered him a sacred family gesture.

“Knowing how and choosing to are entirely separate questions,” I said. To Scythas, I added, “and what a man does with a gift he is given has nothing to do with the giver. My experiences are mine and no one else’s - I am free to share them, as these sea dogs are free to hear them.”

“You know that isn’t true,” Scythas disagreed, scowling at distant Thracia. “Every mystiko swears the same oath the day they’re inducted - a vow of secrecy against outsiders. How can those experiences be yours to share when experiencing them at all was contingent on keeping your mouth shut?”

“I never swore any such oath.”

Scythas spat on the deck my father’s hands had built.

“Then enlighten this lowly sophist. How did you experience these things at all?” ‘Or did you?’ went unsaid.

“You found me after the Gadfly split us up,” Sol explained for my benefit, though he didn’t look up from the letter he was writing. “Socrates dragged me down the mountain to Bakkhos’ estate alone, but before that Griffon and I confronted him together. For his cheek, Socrates beat him bloody and tossed him up into the storm crown.”

Scythas blinked, visibly processing that. I had specified for the sailors that I was alone when describing my audience with the Oracles, but I had not given them the context leading up to my plunge into baptismal lightning. Scythas alone had not been present at Elissa’s home when I came down the mountain, nor had he been at the bathhouse when Socrates first confronted us.

Why are you only just now telling him this? the raven in my shadow asked the raven in Sol’s curiously, the two connected by the dark silhouette cast by the Eos’ sail.

I had other things on my mind.

Liar.

Sol quietly sighed, glancing up from his writing just long enough to pin me with a flat stare across the deck. I had other things on my mind, such as the Tyrant Aleuas that sent him to assassinate me in the first place.

Ho? Now there was an interesting revelation. You fought Scythas and you didn’t tell me? I think I might spit blood.

It didn’t come to that. Largely because he thought I was a greater man than I actually am. He was willing to join me over Aleuas because he thought I was equally capable. If I had told him in that moment that Socrates had just recently wiped the floor with me and my ‘student’ both, that illusion would have been shattered.

The raven in my shadow laughed. The noise it produced was odd, a deep and gurgling caw. I wouldn’t be so sure.

In the wake of Chilon’s story, Sol had decided to do the righteous thing for once and told the truth to our companions. As far as he was concerned, his captain's speech had finally clarified the matter of his strength for the six Heroic cultivators that had been wondering since meeting us. He didn’t mind revealing what he perceived as weakness now because he assumed that Scythas had been stripped of all his delusions.

I am no Tyrant, Sol had so furiously declared. I refuse to be associated in such a way with your elders.

Sol had been so caught up in his own wrath at the Raging Heaven’s injustice that he had failed to notice the implication of his wording, just as he had failed to properly answer Kyno when the Heroic Huntsman asked him what realm he occupied within the Roman eight.

I will tear your free cities apart, drink whatever divine elixir your gods fill their cups with, and topple all of your Tyrants if that is what it takes to gain the strength that I need. He had promised a room full of Heroes and Heroines this. Promised that he would destroy their homes, steal bread from the mouths of their gods, and cast down the pillars of their holy institutions. He had promised them ruin with that storm in his eyes, and dared them all to do something about it.

And they hadn’t.

Sol thought his Heroic three had chosen to stick with him after that for the sake of camaraderie, born of mutually bleak circumstances - and that might have even been part of it. But looking back on it days later, I suspected it was far from the deciding factor.

Fortunately for my idiot Roman brother, the weakness he now felt comfortable exposing was hardly a weakness at all so far as Scythas was concerned. The Gadfly had beaten us black and blue, but that was to be expected. A Tyrant in his domain was nearly a god, but as far as our companions were concerned, the Tyrant Solus had left his domain behind when he came to Olympia.

A Tyrant was still a Tyrant whether or not you found him on his throne, of course. But the Gadfly was the Gadfly just as well.

“If that’s true,” Scythas finally, reluctantly, spoke, “then I suppose telling ten mortal men secrets that the Raging Heaven would kill them for knowing is only cruelly reckless, rather than cruelly reckless and a violation of oaths.”

I nodded graciously.

“However.” The Hero of the Scything Squall abruptly turned his head and leveled a finger at my face. “That doesn’t excuse the oath you broke when you assaulted us down in that courtyard. You may not have betrayed the Raging Heaven, but you did betray the Rosy Dawn.”

My eyes rolled. “I told you once already. I never swore such an oath.”

“And I suppose the Rosy Dawn’s mystery was forced upon you just like the Raging Heaven’s was?”

“You saw it for yourself,” I said, annoyed now. I had inundated all of them with my memory of first meeting the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god. In that moment my reality had become theirs and they had experienced it as I had experienced it, a three year old cradled in his father’s arm.

What sort of oath did he think a three year old could swear themselves to?

They can’t remember what you showed us, Sol’s raven informed mine. Not that vividly

Are you calling my rhetoric crude?

No. Though it is.

Scythas frowned. “Solus. Is he telling the truth?”

“He is.”

The frown deepened. “How? Under what circumstances?”

“You’d have to ask Damon Aetos,” Sol said simply, rolling up his completed message and binding it before starting on another. Scythas grimaced, but didn’t press further.

Why wouldn’t they remember that memory, when I still recall yours of the Conqueror’s pearl city like I was there myself? My shadow demanded while my mind raced. I had recreated Chilon’s rhetoric perfectly, I knew that like I knew the sun rose each day. The fault was theirs, or else I had overlooked something. But what?

When our rites ended and we emerged from the eastern mountain range, there was a tear in my chiton that hadn’t been there before. I assume it caught on something jagged while we were down there.

You assume?

I assume. Because I don’t remember anything of that night except for the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god and your father looming over it. For all that I remember, you could have torn it. I forgot everything of myself in that moment. I think the only reason I can remember what you showed us is that I’d already seen the corpse once before.

Scythas is an initiate of the Howling Wind Cult. He witnessed greater mystery long before he met us.

Maybe he did, Sol’s raven croaked. Maybe it doesn’t matter that he did. Maybe resistance to one has nothing to do with resistance to another.

A thought that was as interesting as it was irritating. I grunted, banishing it from my mind for the moment.

“These men are free,” I decided, encompassing all ten of the sea dogs that Sol and I had liberated. Each of them nodded and voiced vehement agreement in ten different tongues. “If they choose to hang themselves with what I’ve offered them, that is their prerogative. But I suppose if it bothers you that much, I can stop handing them more rope.”

“Thank you.” The Hero’s tone was exasperated, but the words were genuine.

“It might even be for the best,” I mused. “I can’t say their judgement is sound.”

“žibùtė!” Khubar the Thracian protested, along with a few others. I flicked the old man’s temple with a pankration hand, making him yelp.

“I told you ugly dogs that the Scarlet City would reward you handsomely for returning this ship. Yet here I find you over a month later, just as ugly and nearly as poor as you were before. The Hero raises a fair point, the longer that I think about it. How can I trust you to act in your own best interests now when you didn’t before?”

“It wasn’t that simple!”

“We owe you a debt-”

“What would we do if they took us for thieves?”

“We’re all equally far from home-”

Amidst the deluge of excuses, I tilted my head and looked curiously to the rear of the ship.

“And why did you choose to stay?” I asked the redheaded pirate boy currently scrubbing the deck. The crew hadn’t kept him against his will, I’d made sure of that as soon as I saw him on board. They had him doing the worst sort of grunt work, but they had assured Sol and I up and down that it was his choice to do it. The boy hadn’t disagreed.

The former pirate looked up from his work, scowled and shot me an ugly look. “Where else was I supposed to go?”

“The bottom of the sea,” I suggested.

“Don’t bully the child,” Sol called.

“He’s not a child,” I called back. “He’s a bastard.”

“As if you were any better then,” he said, rolling up and sealing another message before tossing it into the air. Perched on the Eos’ figurehead, Sorea snapped it up and swallowed it down.

“As if you’re any better now,” Selene added lightly, pulling a translucent shawl from her head and abruptly existing beside Sol. My mind went curiously blank. Scythas flinched back and slammed his head against the mast. Some of the sea dogs dropped their oars, others cursed, and one screamed shrilly.

“… is there something on my face?” The daughter of the oracle whispered loudly to the only man on the ship not surprised to see her there. Sol snorted.