Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.49

The Son of Rome

Solus. The wind carried my name to me, a whisper with no visible source. I grunted and stood up, shrugging the weight of command off my shoulders.

“Ninety-three?” Selene asked, disappointed. She was perched on her scarlet tripod, legs kicking beneath her while she kept count of my repetitions. “I was sure you’d break a hundred today.” One hundred repetitions of any given exercise was the mark Socrates had set for me and my physical training. Once I could do a hundred I increased the weight of gravitas until I could barely do one, and then I worked my way back up.

“The spirit is willing, but the body is weak,” I lied, standing tall and stretching. When I winced it was only partly an act. I could have pushed through and reached a hundred today, but I would have suffered for every last repetition.

As an excuse it would do. I glanced meaningfully at the Scarlet Oracle as I stretched. Her head tilted, golden hair spilling over one shoulder.

“Would the barbarian like a massage?” As always, the old crone of the Broken Tide read my intentions before anyone else in the courtyard. The ancient woman leered at me with her blind, trisected eyes. “How conceited, to think your ugly, rugged body worthy of an Oracle’s holy hands.”

“Oh!” Selene’s back straightened suddenly, the girl drawing her golden veil back down over her face. “I see. Well, I suppose…”

“You don’t have to force yourself, dear. These things are difficult for a girl your age,” came the sympathetic sounds of a woman with nothing but bad intentions. I stared flatly at the Oracle from the Alabaster Isles, a woman named Chara with lips painted white-gold, with a line of the same color running from the tip of her tongue to the back of her throat. She smiled, her right leg curled up against her chest with her cheek resting on her knee. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. Come and let this one ease your aching body.”

Slim hands wrapped around my bicep, and before I could respond Selene had already pulled me halfway to the Scarlet Oracle’s private quarters with the overwhelming strength of a Heroic cultivator. Melodious laughter and ugly cackling followed us all the way into the room, ceasing only when Selene slammed the door shut behind us.

Each of the oracles enjoyed the privilege of a personal living space, tucked away behind the walls of the late kyrios’ octagonal courtyard within Kaukoso Mons.

Before the Tyrant’s death these quarters had been reserved for sleeping and bathing only. The kyrios wasn’t cruel enough to require the holy women to do their bathing and sleeping in his presence, but he also wasn’t kind enough to give them private leisure. If an oracle was not asleep, in a bath, or in her public temple where mystikos and made men could seek her wisdom, the kyrios had decided she would be in his courtyard. Waiting on one of the tripods he had chiseled himself - in case he ever had a need for her.

Though there was no one left to enforce it after the kyrios’ death, some of the oracles still maintained the habit. For them - the oracles from the City of Squalls, the Alabaster Isles, and the Coast - I assumed it was the inertia of long practice as much as it was a desire for company. The other holy women mostly kept to themselves in their private quarters.

Whether that was because of my continued presence, I couldn’t say. It hardly mattered. Unlike Griffon, I hadn’t come to Olympia in search of an Oracle’s wisdom.

Selene pressed her back against the door to her personal quarters, the entire piece a broad slab of bone-white wood with dyed carvings of a bisected sun sprawled across it. Her veiled face pointed towards me. For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

“How did I do?” she hesitantly asked. I smirked.

“Well enough.”

The Scarlet Oracle slumped in relief, and the torchlights in the room shifted as Scythas stepped out of the open air beside me.

“Were you seen?” I asked him. He shook his head.

“No further than the stairway to heaven.”

“Even by the elders?”

“I swung wide around each of their domains,” he said firmly. “And I waited until the Oracle was lost in her fumes before I moved.”

Thus far, the veil of shifting wind that Scythas had been using to obscure his movements around the mountain had been flawless. Though he wasn’t confident in much, the Hero of the Scything Squall had been adamant that he could avoid detection better than Selene. It was the only reason I had allowed him to leave the kyrios’ estate - if he was to be believed, the only entities on the mountain that he couldn’t slip past with his veil were the tyrants in their domains and the Oracle of his own Howling Wind Cult.

It was for that reason that we never met outside of his Oracle’s working hours, while her senses were addled by the toxic fumes that holy women used to invoke prophecy. It was common knowledge that the oracles could no longer deliver prophecies, but the old practices had their own timeless momentum.

“Good.” I sat down heavily on a cushioned lounge, snapping off the buckles and straps affixing my breastplate to my body with practiced motions. A gift from Socrates, insomuch as he was capable of giving gifts. I’d asked the old philosopher how much it had cost him, where it had come from, but he’d only waved me off and thrown rhetoric in my eyes for my trouble.

It was a good piece of armor. Strong, scraped and worn but undeniably whole. It was carved in the usual fashion, in the image of a man’s bare torso. Moving in it while I trained was comforting in a way that I couldn’t explain.

“Tell me what you’ve heard,” I bid Scythas, setting aside the armor and rolling my shoulders, gripping the juncture between my collarbone and my neck when the muscles clenched painfully. I didn’t allow it to show on my face. Not in front of him.

I tensed as slim hands brush mine aside, digging into the knots and snarls of overburdened muscle. I glanced up at Selene. Her veil still covered her face, golden silk with vibrant red threads winding through it like sun rays.

Her hands froze as I looked up at her. Then, slowly, they resumed their kneading.

“Selene,” I said quietly. “The massage was just a cover to get us in here.”

“Certainly.” Her voice was light, gently amused. “But the best lie is a truth repurposed. What will we do if Chara notices you’re still stiff when we leave the room?”

The better question was what I would do if I had to continue living among handsy Greeks. I let it be, returning my attention to the first hero I’d met in this city. The first man to suspect Griffon and I of malintent, and now the first man to act as my scout within the cult.

“Things have slowed down since the two of you encountered the Gadfly,” he said, and there was still a bit of wonder there. He hadn’t fully believed it until I’d told him myself, despite tracking me through the rumors spread about Socrates walking me down the mountain. “If the other elders are anything like mine, things would have escalated very quickly if the two of you had kept on the way you were. Especially after you got the others involved.”

He shook his head, leaning against the wall beside me. He still looked exhausted, with dark bags beneath his eyes, but the flecks of color in those hazel flames had brightened from copper to gold again.

“The Raging Heaven is an institution that attracts men from all over the continent,” he said. “There’s always been a large portion of initiates with no ties to any other cult, success stories from nameless settlements or cultivators recovering from disgrace in other institutions. When the kyrios was alive they served directly under his banner, like everyone else. But now they have no master to serve. The elders are focusing on these initiates first.”

“Jason mentioned coercion through lectures.” I noted the way his eyes flickered when I said the name. “They’ve moved fully onto that?”

He nodded. “It’s… The situation has not improved at night, but it’s stopped escalating. I don’t think they intended to be this far out in the open this early on with their Crows, but you left them no choice. Now it’s a question of who will withdraw first.”

“Hardly a question at all.” How could any of them, when the game had only just begun?

“Exactly. But for the moment, it isn’t getting any worse. Instead the senior philosophers are out in force, offering lectures on every topic under the sun. It’s a good time to be a junior in search of knowledge.”

“And if the lecture happens to lead into other topics, how can a man be blamed for following the natural flow of discourse,” I concluded. “What else?”

“Preparations for the Games are underway. The kyrios was already in talks with the city's officials, foreign dignitaries, the other city-states and their cults - but with his passing, negotiations are up in the air. The men of the city offered to shoulder the burden while the Raging Heaven mourns, of course, but the elders couldn’t allow them to carry that alone.”

It was a unique bitterness with which the Howling Wind’s Hero spoke. I remembered the night of the funeral, when Scythas was the only one out of all his peers to defend the elders’ intentions. That hadn’t been so long ago, but the events that followed had tainted that optimism.

Scythas had held onto one hope above all - that no matter the machinations of ravenous tyrants, a greater man’s death was something they could all come together to respect. His elders had not wasted any time correcting him. It was a lesson I’d been forced to learn early on in the legions. It was a lesson every man had to learn, sooner or later.

“And whoever takes the most commanding role in negotiating logistics adds another notch to his belt,” I said, just to have it in the open. “Will the other kyrioi come?”

Scythas hesitated. A vein bulged in his neck, and I knew that there was still a trace of that bleak optimism within him. A remnant that the Raging Heaven had not yet stomped dead. He didn’t want to answer, because he didn’t want to believe the answer.

So instead, I consulted the Oracle. “Selene. Did you attend the last Olympic Games?”

“I did,” she answered, nimble fingers pressing insistently against the point where my jaw met my ear. I tilted my head obligingly, refusing to let slip the relief I felt wherever her fingers went.

“Were the kyrioi there?”

“No. None of them.”

“Why not?” I asked, watching Scythas intently.

Selene hummed, scarlet light flickering behind her veil. “For many city-states, the kyrios of the local mystery cult is their greatest deterrent to would-be invaders.”

“I was told that conflict in the free Mediterranean stopped once the games began.”

“It’s supposed to be that way. It is that way, for the most part. But things have been… tense, recently.”

“Because the kyrios died?”

Selene shook her head, golden hair brushing against my cheek. It smelled of cypress.

“Not quite that recent,” she corrected herself. “This was before I was born. Before you were born, maybe.” The last line was spoken with obvious intent. If we had been alone in the room I probably would have answered the unspoken question about my age. But we weren’t. So I didn’t.

The scarlet oracle softly huffed, continuing on, “The second time that I attended the games, I asked my father that same question about the kyrioi. Spectacular guests are bound to attend no matter what, and the athletes themselves are a joy to behold, but the kyrioi occupy a special place in the heart of our culture. If they could trust their rivals to observe the truce while their best were gathered in Olympia to compete, why couldn’t they come themselves?”

Within the free city-states of Greece, the children of Helen had long agreed that anyone willing to disdain the Olympic pact of peace did not deserve their place among heaven and earth. The threat of unrestrained cooperation between the free cities was something no man had the courage to face - not since Alexander took his armies east.

“What did your father say?” I asked, and Scythas himself tilted his head, the hands of his influence reaching out through the space between us. One of his wind techniques, the kind that allowed him to overhear. He didn’t want to miss a word.

A tyrant’s wisdom was a currency that no man could ever be rich enough in.

“He said that having trust is like being lost at sea,” she said, rubbing her thumbs into the base of my neck. “There’s no end to it, no destination to reach, and if there was then no one on board would know how to get there. All you can do is work your oar and pray the others on board do as well. Because even if they don’t, you still need to get home.”

“Someone has to pull, or thirst will take them all,” I mused.

“One man pulling alone will work himself to death,” Scythas added. “Two won’t fare much better. It has to be everyone.”

“It has to be everyone,” Selene agreed. “He said that if one man sat back while all the rest pulled, it was only natural that he’d be cast off the ship. The same for two, or three. So long as those rowing in good faith maintained the majority.”

“But the majority do still observe the pact,” I said, following the analogy to its natural conclusion. “The free cities have been at peace for over a century now. Haven’t they?”

“I asked the same question,” Selene said sadly. “And my father told me that our trust wasn’t broken by the majority. He told me there were other ways as well. Things one man could do alone to ruin what all the rest had labored for.” Her fingers paused. Drew away.

“He could throw out their oars while they were sleeping,” she whispered. “He could condemn them all to the Fates.”

Scythas slid down the wall until he was sitting with his knees pressed against his chest.

“One man ruined it for all the rest,” he said, defeated. “The kyrioi haven’t attended the games in decades because a lack of war does not always mean an abundance of peace. Since I was old enough to understand all of the conversations that I wasn’t meant to hear, the people of the Hurricane Heights have been living their lives on eggshells. A storm swept through the Mediterranean before we were born and the city-states have only just started to recover from it.”

I nearly asked what he meant, but paranoia stopped me short. Something about the way he said it, the look in his eyes, told me this was something the man he imagined me to be would know. Something I should have known. I kept the question to myself, and resolved to ask Griffon about it when we reunited.

Instead, I said the words I knew would crack him open like an oyster.

“And yet.”

“And yet,” he echoed miserably, “these Games are different now. The kyrios of the Raging Heaven Cult is dead, and the elders have already decided to hold these Games in his memory. It was acceptable that none of the kyrioi left their cults and their cities to attend his funeral, held so soon after his death. But they still have months to prepare for the Games.”

“Skipping the Games means insulting his memory,” I said, the strands connecting one by one. The more that I learned about him, the more absurd the late kyrios became. The an insult to his memory could carry such weight. “But there’s more to it than that.”

Scythas clenched his eyes shut, and I mercilessly struck down on what was left of his bleak optimism.

“There’s more to it,” I said again, layering Gravitas into the words and forcing them through the curtain of wind he’d subconsciously summoned up around his ears. “Because there’s nothing to say that the next kyrios of the Raging Heaven has to be a citizen of Olympia.”

“Yes,” he whispered, finally. Accepting what had been in front of him all this time. “The tyrants on this mountain are readying Olympia for the games, but they’re also readying themselves for a power struggle. Once the kyrioi come… I don’t know. But they’ll be here, all of them. They can’t afford the alternative.”

I burned his expression into my memory. I wouldn’t coddle him for it. Wouldn’t acknowledge it, not now. But I’d never forget it either. I had sent him out to find information where I could not, knowing the state he was in. And now here he was. Here was the fruit of the captain’s labor.

“You’ve done well, Scythas,” I said quietly. The least I could give him now was the truth. And it was all that I’d give him.

Now then.

I reached out to the empty space in Selene’s quarters, the space that Scythas’ eyes had flickered to when I spoke a pirate’s name, and clenched my fist.

Every piece of furniture in the room scraped across the floor towards me, clay pots shattering as they fell. Bolts of sunray silks and papyrus sheets covered in drawings scattered through the air.

The Hero of the Alabaster Isles stumbled out of the empty air as Scythas’ veil broke apart beneath gravitas. Jason stared down at his now visible hands and then back up at me, wide-eyed.

“I lied, before.” Scythas waved a hand at his fellow Hero, too broken down to be ashamed at being caught in the act. “I was followed.”