Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.84

The Son of Rome

“If we’re going,” Scythas said, when the story had been told and the last strings had been plucked, “then now is the time. The hand guided me here, Solus. I promise you, if the reagent the Gadfly needs is anywhere in this nation, it’s here.” There was an undercurrent of desperation to the words. He wanted me to believe him, to believe in him, and worried that I wouldn’t.

From the beginning, I had seen a downtrodden reflection in him. A soldier that wanted nothing more than to be accepted into the ranks. To stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his peers and know that no matter how miserable the road ahead might be, he would not have to march it on his own. An outcast in search of belonging.

In the past, I might have been able to offer him that. Before, I could have brought him into the fold of a fraternal band unsurpassed among heaven and earth. But those days were gone. All I could offer him now was the bare minimum.

Scythas desired a Heroic peer by his side, that much was painfully apparent. He deserved the support that could only be found in the press of a shield wall. Brotherhood baptized in war. He needed it, for what he had ahead of him. The support of a first rank Philosopher with fractured foundations was a poor substitute for either of those things.

It was all that I could give him.

I nodded once. “I trust you.” The relief that overtook him at the words was painful to see.

Griffon ascended up the wooden steps without a word, a pensive air about him. As he passed between the two Thracians guarding the entrance to the singing house, the woman with shadows painted around her eyes and on her lips offered up her horn cup.

“For your thirst,” she offered. Griffon didn’t stop or look back, but one of his pankration hands took it and carried it up behind him.

“This is where we part ways,” I informed the black stallion that had served me thus far, more or less against his will. Dismounting, I stepped around the charger and met it glare for glare. The stallion’s nostrils flared threateningly.

“I have never seen such hatred in a horse before,” I confessed, as if it could understand me. “But I’ve seen your rage. I’ve seen that hungry look before.”

Before a Roman could lead his fellow man, he first had to master his horse. I had served as an equite long before I ever gave a legionary an order. To commemorate my promotion to the patrician rank of mounted cavalry, my great uncle had gifted me a horse himself. More than that, he had gifted me his own horse. A midnight charger, fearless and angrier than any I had ever seen before. When we took to the field, it felt less like I was driving him forward, and more like he was pulling me along.

Taking Caesar’s horse into battle had felt like riding a hurricane wind. Like the righteous fury of the Republic itself was delivering me forward. Without fear or hesitation, no matter what dark barbarism opposed us.

I had felt something nearly similar while suffering the Thracian stallion. The rage, though, was aimless and tainted by hatred. The beast’s belligerence was untempered. It did not fear because it had never encountered something worth fearing, not because it was brave. Maybe those imperfections could have been sanded away with time. A firm hand might have been enough.

It was too late for that now, though.

“It’s a shame,” I said quietly, gripping the back of the stallion’s neck and dragging it down to my level. Its fierce yellow eyes narrowed. “You’d have been happier at war.”

I turned away and climbed the steps, accepting the offered horn cup from the Thracian man with the tattooed scalp as I passed him. Scythas followed close behind, along with a girl that had covered herself with rags of anonymity as we approached and hadn’t made a sound since. We only had three horses to pay with, after all. One of us would have to sneak in. Thankfully, the philosopher’s rags were as effective now as they had been on the Eos-

“You haven’t paid, girl,” the Thracian woman said, glancing lazily sideways, directly at Selene.

The daughter of the Oracle froze. Scythas tensed, inhaling quietly and gathering his Heroic pneuma around himself. By this point, Griffon had reached the top of the steps and laid his palms flat against the gated doors of the singing house. So close.

“The stallion is worth two,” the scarlet son said. He turned his head just enough to regard the woman with a single scarlet eye.

She hummed. Shared a look with her fellow Thracian.

And shrugged.

“I suppose it is. Enjoy the Orphic House.”

Griffon snorted and pressed open the ivory gates leading into the decrepit theater of repurposed wood, striding inside. We followed him through.

Into the shadows.

We called him the Augur because he sang like a bird, and fortune followed him wherever he went.

His name was Orpheus, and there has never been a man more nimble with a lyre - mortal or divine. He could charm anything with those heavenly strings. Men, women, and children. Animals of every kind. Even the stones in the earth and the trees reaching fruitlessly up to the skies were helplessly enamored when he played.

He was a “kyrios” in his own right, you know. The founder and the prophet of a many-faced faith, our own Orphic mysteries. In the course of his years he erected more cults than there are greater Greek mysteries, and each time he did it himself - personally. He would find himself a sturdy place to sit wherever in the world he happened to be, and he would begin to pick and strum his humble lyre.

He roused the stones beneath the earth. He serenaded the trees that so ensconced him. And while the ivy wound itself adoringly around his arms, he would bid the earth itself to spring up around the subject of Orphic mystery that he had found. And every time, without fail, it would. Mausoleums and master craft estates would simply… grow. Sprout from the earth like vines. A gift from the mother that so loved her child’s music. A token for the Augur.

The earth and all her children mourned the Augur when he died. But none, not even his own people, mourned the Hero Orpheus as deeply as his sworn brother. Bakkhos was the one to find Orpheus torn apart and scattered across the nation of his birth. Over the course of weeks and months, the mad vine keeper walked every step a man could walk in Thracia, gathering up the pieces of the Orphic corpse. Sobbing all the while, loud enough to wake the dead beneath the earth as he passed.

Bakkhos found the last of Orpheus here, the heart of the once great Hero still burning. He dumped the portions of the corpse that he had gathered and remade the Augur for his funeral. When with ivy and vines he bound the pieces together and covered the grotesque lines where they met, creating the facade of an Orpheus at rest - encircled by adoring vines as he had been in life.

The weeping vine keeper placed a coin in Orpheus’ mouth and a drink in his hand, and sent him off to the underworld a Hero made whole once again. In sorrow at his death and joy at his reunion, the earth rose up and enfolded the Orphic corpse in her embrace. A singing house sprung up over the burial mound just as all of the mausoleums and estates of the Orphic mysteries had.

Even the Augur’s swan song carried his charm.

Now, I can see you’re wondering about the contradiction. The story goes that the Orphic house built itself. But, as a Greek surely knows, not every truth is told in the strictest sense. A thing that one man experiences is not necessarily the same as what another will see.

The king of Macedonia came to this place in the earliest course of his campaigns, hardly more than a boy and yet already stronger than any man had a right to be. More fearsome than the mad one, and as brazen as they came. He broke the people of this place over his knee and when the battle was done he dragged their elders and their chiefs to a humble tomb enshrouded in ivy.

He forced old men and warrior kings all to their knees in front of the lonely tomb and demanded to know what they had done to the Orphic House that should have stood over top of it.

Yes. He had heard the story of Orpheus. It was why he’d come in the first place - to pay his respects to the man with the holy hands.

“We beg the Conqueror,” the wise men said, bowing their heads and scraping at the dirt in supplication. The warriors kneeling beside them were still young enough to value their pride, even then, but the elders had lost that along with their eyes.

“Understand that we couldn’t have touched what was never there to begin with,” opined one.

“The Orphic house was never built,” spoke another.

“Some stories are just that,” came a third.

The king of Macedonia, already greater than the greatest of them despite the fact that his years could be counted with fingers and toes, considered their words with reason and grace. Though his generals and his confidants urged him to punish the lot, he instead laid the blade of his sword on the back of a single neck.

Not the leader of the tribe, the king among kings. No. Alexander laid his blade against the neck of the tribe’s oldest man. The one with eyes like curdled milk, whose legs had failed him long before he was forced to kneel.

“You are nomads, are you not?” Alexander asked him, while the wise man’s grandchildren and great grandchildren howled and fought against their bindings.

“We are, young king.”

“When did you come to this place? How long have you been here, that the wheels have fallen off your wagons and such weeds have grown between their boards?”

When the ancient man spoke, even the loudest of his descendants paused their howling shouts. In perfect silence, his voice was only just barely heard.

“My eldest son was only a boy when I brought him here, so long ago that my eyes could still see. We’ve lived in this place ever since.”

“What compelled you to stay here, when no other valley or field could contain your kind for more than a season?”

“Point me to the tomb,” the old man commanded the king, and though the sons of Macedonia bared their teeth and promised him pain for his presumption, the king laid the flat of his blade against the blind man’s cheekand turned his head to face the ivy-covered tomb.

“Does ivy still embrace it?” he asked the king.

“Ivy strangles it,” Alexander answered, and the ground beneath their feet trembled at his ire.

“Ivy protects it,” the ancient Thracian corrected the Macedonian king, against all common sense. “You’ve seen the state of our wagons yourself. The seasons here are not kind, and neither is the passage of time. The ivy preserves the Orphic corpse in its place of rest. There, and nowhere else for days and days at a swift horse’s pace, the ivy grows thick and with purpose.”

The old man reached up and laid frail fingers on the flat face of the king’s blade that was pressed against his cheek. His warrior descendants shouted threats at the king while his junior wisemen pleaded for him to stop. Instead, he traced blind fingers up the blade, to the hilt and the hand that held it. The Macedonian king did not stop him, knowing he had nothing to fear.

When the ancient Thracian found Alexander’s hand, he gripped it tight. The trembling of his own hand had nothing to do with fear or bloodlust. It was simply an effort for a man submerged up to his waist in the underworld.

“Look upon the Augur’s tomb and be at ease. There was truth to the stories you heard. Do not confuse an epic’s exaggeration with falsehood - the echoes of his song may not have been enough to charm an Odeon from the earth, but that ivy shroud is proof he was adored. Look upon it, young king, and see that it’s enough.”

“No,” Alexander decided, withdrawing his blade. “It isn’t.”

Then, to the confusion of all men present, he went to the nearest defunct wagon and heaved it up out of the earth and the vines that had overtaken it. He returned to the tomb and the Thracian leaders awaiting their execution, dropped the wagon unceremoniously to the ground, and went off to grab the next.

Each Macedonian soldier he passed straightened and saluted, but did not ask if he required help. His presence was too vast and unapproachable to the rank and file man. His highest officers, the men that had known him personally as a friend before he was the king, watched him work with calm patience. They knew him well enough to leave him to his inspiration.

When the last wagon had been salvaged and the Thracian leaders had been surrounded by towering piles of time-addled wood, Alexander set about ripping them apart. Plank by plank, with his own two hands.

“What is the young king doing?” The most ancient elder asked, and the Alexander answered for himself.

“The Orphic legend was not wrong, and neither were its details exaggerated. The nature of the tragic resolution is what you and I have misunderstood, elder. I see now that resolution was a prophecy. History’s greatest musician has been waiting all this time on the turning of the wheel.”

The chiefs and lesser elders shared furtive and bewildered looks, while the king’s officers smiled and chuckled knowingly. The ancient Thracian’s blind eyes were thoughtful.

The king continued.

“I have heard the echoes of his swan song, and so I have come. The legend says that the stones themselves could be charmed by Orpheus’ lyre, that all the bounties of the earth were enthralled when he played. So enthralled, in the end, that the earth itself rose up in his absence and built him a singing house, a fell memorial to catch the echoes while he plucked his strings in the underworld.

“I am Alexander, the man who will inherit this earth. The legend says the earth itself will know his charm, and sure enough I was enthralled. The legend swears that Orphic echo will compel the earth to rise and manifest a singing house.”

Alexander, risen king of Macedonia, planted the first weathered plank before the tomb.

“And lo, I’ve come to build it.”

Entering the odeon with the Thracian gatekeeper's tale still ringing in my ears, I looked upon the fruits of Alexander’s labor.

“No,” Scythas breathed.

The ivory gates slammed shut behind us.

“It’s empty?” Selene whispered, the scarlet flames behind her eyes shedding some small light on the empty benches and unclaimed seats.

I stopped beside Griffon. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, the pensive look in his eyes unchanged. Together, we appraised the odeon’s rundown interior.

Descending tiers of benches built in the Greek inspired Macedonian style made up the bulk of the seating. There were more than a few wooden chairs, though, situated in balconies that looked like they could barely support the dust coating them. Support beams, composed of the thickest portions of a wagon all nailed together, bore the weight that the rafters could not. Cobwebs and wood rot abounded.

The singing house was as quiet as a corpse, and smelled something like one too. The only signs of life lay on the stage at the bottommost tier of the horseshoe benches.

On the tomb, enshrouded by vibrant green ivy.

“Scythas,” Selene spoke up behind us. “Are you sure the hand was pointing you here?”

“It was. I know it was. As soon as I stepped inside I felt it fall away. This is where we’re meant to be. This has to be it.”

The Hero of the Scything Squall passed us, descending down the benches two at a time. Selene followed him, the lights of their heart flames dwindling the further they moved away. Without the rosy light of Griffon‘s palms, the shadows rushed to enclose us in their absence.

“Do we need another sacrifice? Could that be it?” Though she faced away from us, Selene‘s voice carried easily, almost reverberating off the walls and vaulted ceiling.

“I don’t know,” Scythas snapped, the torch lights of his eyes sweeping across the empty stands and unoccupied balconies. “That shouldn’t be it. A sacrifice here… it doesn’t make sense. The way he explained it-”

The Hero froze, and turned to face the ivy tomb atop the stage. He cleared his throat, and spoke his next words in another man’s voice.

“I’ve come to visit, old friend. Care to split a drink?”

The Heroic cultivators below us held their breath, awaiting the chthonic Hero’s response.

In the bleak silence of their eroding hope, Griffon’s raven reached out to mine.

The more I see, the more that I am vexed.

I’ve noticed, I replied, while I watched Scythas’ shoulders slump a fraction more with every passing moment.

I was certain that escaping the Rosy Dawn was all it would take to step out from the cave. The world seemed so bright that it was nearly blinding, when I was looking out at it from the confines of the Scarlet City. When I met you and saw what even a barbarian state could produce, it felt like the point proven. When Nikolas returned and I saw what the wider world had done for his soul, I knew that I had to leave or nothing would ever change.

And yet, the raven in my shadow warbled. Selene went back to searching and Scythas sat heavily on an empty bench.

And yet. The further that I’ve ventured and the more that I have seen, the less this world resembles what I know that it should be.

The world, I mused, or the people that inhabit it?

For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

I feel as if I never left that cave, he finally admitted. Quietly, every raw word a confession. Lately, I’ve wondered if there was ever a cave at all - whether those shadows I saw were shadows at all, or whether they were simply lies.

Piercing scarlet eyes observed the Hero Scythas as he leaned forward on his bench, covering his face with his hands.

You’re worried that everyone you meet will disappoint you, I said in summation. Even the legends that define your culture.

I was. A part of me still is. Griffon uncrossed his arms, taking the horn cup from his unburning hand of pankration intent. But now, I’m wondering if the fault lies with my own interpretation.

Go on, I said, though I was confident our idea was the same.

I can’t hear the faintest echo of the Augur’s music in this worthless shack, but maybe that’s my own failing. It’s possible the sound would disappoint me, even if I could. Maybe the taste of nectar, too. Another echo of something that was better long before I was born. Maybe all the world is like that.

Griffon looked to me. I met his searching gaze without judgment.

Are we the shadows, Sol?

There was only one way to find out.

As one, we pulled our shadows over our heads and donned our mantels of ravenous hunger. My ragged cloak of midnight black, and his tattered robes of the same color - hanging down around his waist, exposing his bare torso and the blood red tattoos winding across it.

We stepped into the Orphic House together.

I heard the lyre.

Emerging from the shadows, we beheld a singing house at full capacity. Every bench was lined by men and women of varying creed, wearing cloth and armor from every corner of the modern world and every era to precede it. Thracians, Greeks, Macedonians and Asians and Africans. Torches lit their faces, revealing the creases at the corners of their eyes as they smiled and laughed and sang.

Griffon sighed in slow satisfaction.

“Welcome to the odeon, boys,” a man spoke beside us, carrying a tray of ivory cups and grapes. He offered them to us like an attendant, despite the fact that he was dressed in threads of spun gold and every one of his teeth was an implant of carved alabaster. “Care for a drink?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you.”

“We brought our own,” Griffon explained, and we each held up our horn cups. The attendant dipped his head, the flames behind his eyes flickering mirthfully to match his smile.

“So I see. Then by all means, enjoy the show.”

I didn’t need to see the smile behind Griffon’s raven veil to know it was there.

“I intend to,” he said. We moved with purpose into the crowded stands.

Down on stage, Orpheus plucked his scarlet strings.