Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.82

The Son of Rome

After three days and four nights spent wandering the boundless lands of Thrace, we found our first true city. More than just a collection of brutal nomads and whatever burdens they could carry - like a haggard Roman legion with no clear chain of command - or a system of mountain passes and caves overflowing with hulking redheads, this was a permanent settlement. One built to last.

Unsurprisingly, it was a Macedonian addition.

Even less surprising than that, it was a desecrated shell of what Alexander had first ordered built.

Honest fortifications, walls and ramparts of sun baked brick, were betrayed by a lack of Macedonian souls to man them. What remained of the city's southern gate hung agape, broken and kept open indefinitely by stakes in the earth and rubble stacked against it as stoppage weight. We rode side-by-side, three mounted horses passing through with room to spare in between.

“This is Ionic architecture,” Selene murmured as we progressed. Her burning scarlet eyes roved over the works that remained, fascinated.

There were decorative arches, grand columns topped by stone ornaments like unfurled scrolls that the Ionic aesthetic labeled volutes, and triangular pediments atop those voluted columns in most of the public constructions. Some of those pediments still retained a portion of their painted and carved reliefs, hinting at past purpose, but Kronos had long since drawn his thumb across their finer details.

I caught glimpses of what this place had been before, here and there in portraits of urban decay. There, frozen pools of tainted still water in massive stone basins, the city’s once proud baths. Here, an inner courtyard garden revealed through the gaping wound of a residential estate’s collapsed outer walls - a pristine peristylium, in its day, constructed in the same style as the one containing the Aetos family’s filial pools. But the garden in this abandoned home had long since spilled over its cultivated boundaries. Gnarled, frost-covered vines strangled every column and rail that lined the courtyard.

The more suggestions I saw of the once proud polis, long since dead, the worse my throat ached and the worse the chambers of my nose burned. The lash too far was the facade of a statue in the center of the broken city, a wide-open pavilion that might have once served the same purpose as a forum or an agora. As soon as I spotted it in the distance, I nearly choked on soot.

“Here,” Selene said quietly, removing one arm from around my waist just long enough to pull the canteen out from a fold in her silks. Two shells of polished iron joined in the middle by copper bands. I drank deeply from it, ignoring the flavor. I had seen her fill it with clean, crisp river water just a few hours ago.

Yet somehow, it tasted like the Adriatic.

“There aren’t any Greek colonies this far from the Aegean,” Griffon said, picking the ruins apart with his eyes and his wandering pankration hands. He sifted idly through rubble as he rode, illuminating remnant signs of what had once been. “Junior.”

“Yes, senior?” Selene replied. They had decided to stick with that dynamic, apparently.

“Do you know where we are?”

“No clue at all.”

The former Young Aristocrat hummed and continued with his search. We rode, a slow and wary plodding toward that central pavilion.

“You aren’t going to ask me?” Scythas seemed to regret the words even as he spoke them.

“Of course not.”

The Hero scowled. But he didn’t look our way. Since their last conversation, he had kept his horse either in front of ours or on the other side of mine, avoiding even a glimpse of the scarlet son. For once, Griffon had ignored the opportunity to prod an open wound and let him be.

“Do you recognize this place, Scythas?” Selene asked, for his sake as much as ours. The daughter of the Oracle had been subdued as well since that baring of hearts, more the version of herself she had been when Scythas first came to us in Bakkhos’ courtyard. Tempered and grave.

“In a way,” he answered, nodding. “This is one of the places where Bakkhos used to live. Before he came to Greece.”

“How can you tell?”

“The hand,” Griffon answered in his place. “The hand is still pointing him the way.”

Scythas blinked, and for the first time in several hours looked past me towards Griffon.

“How did you-?”

“Just a feeling.”

Scythas looked at him strangely.

“We’ve been together this whole time,” Selene pointed out. “There hasn’t been an opportunity for you to summon it again, not without us seeing.”

After a beat, hazel eyes and golden coals flickered and turned to us. “I don’t have to summon again what was never fully dismissed. It’s taking a different form than what you saw in that vineyard, but it’s still here. And it has been the entire time.”

“The wind,” Griffon guessed. “A whisper so faint, none but the Hero of the Scything Squall could possibly hear it.”

Scythas’ jaw flexed.

“The kyrios told me once,” he ground out, ignoring the statement with some effort, “that in his day, he had seen wonders the likes of which the world no longer offers. Not because it will not, but because it can not. What the Gadfly sent you out to scavenge ingredients for, Bakkhos called his brew. In his words, it was the closest approximation he could manage to a flavor long since lost to time. A pleasant echo.”

An approximation. What Socrates called divine nectar, Bakkhos called an approximation. Was the Gadfly overestimating the elixir's ability to heal? Wasting our time on purpose, perhaps? It seemed too cruel for him. I hadn’t known the master of my master’s master for more than a few weeks, and the circumstances of our first meeting had been far from ideal, but somehow I felt confident about that much. Socrates was a Gadfly through and through, a critical old man with little patience for most things. But he wasn’t malicious. Not in the way a man would have to be to deceive an ill mother’s child into thinking they could have her back healthy and whole.

If the Gadfly was telling the truth as he saw it, though. If this pleasant echo he called nectar truly was potent enough to make well what the finest physicians could not even diagnose, then what did that say about the late kyrios’ standard? How high had he set his sights?

What had Bakkhos been drinking before?

“The only reason he was able to come as close as he did to that past pleasure, so he said, was because there were still some that remembered what the earth had long since forgotten,” Scythas continued, his focus drifting into recollection. “Dwelling beneath it.”

Two nights ago, in a voice that was not his own, Scythas had called upon a chthonic hero. Chthonic. Another word for infernal. Both descriptors of those that dwelled beneath, in the bleak underworld. And in response to the call, a dead man had answered him.

“He gathered his materials from the dead,” Griffon mused. “From the only fields that no man alive could harvest. From the only markets that wouldn’t accept any man’s mortal currency.”

“It would explain why he was the only one to brew it,” I said, taking another pull of freshwater that tasted like brine.

“Bakkhos forbade its synthesis,” Selene reminded me. “For as long as he lived, even in his kinder years, he made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate that sort of challenge.”

“Bakkhos was hated as much as he was loved,” I replied. “Likely even more so. If the materials were readily available, someone would have puzzled out the steps to synthesize it eventually. Someone would have taken the risk. But they weren’t available, were they? Not above ground.”

“Not here, at least,” Scythas confirmed. “The other locations marked on that map… I’m not sure. I might have a few ideas we can test, but none are as promising as this one here.” It was why he’d volunteered to come, rather than split off to cover more ground as Jason had. Our first destination was the one he felt he’d be most useful in.

“A golden cup of spirit wine,” Selene murmured. “Why from here?”

Scythas shrugged. “The kyrios had a saying he liked to share from time to time. As an Oracle in his care, I’m sure you’re even more familiar with it than I am.” The Hero of the Scything Squall cleared his throat, and once again spoke in a voice that was not his own. “The space where other tyrants keep their hunger-”

“I instead reserve for my thirst,” Selene finished, nearly groaning the words in her exasperation. “Yes, I’m familiar.”

“Exactly. To hear him tell it, his early years were an endless revel. He claimed once to have walked every step there was to walk in the land of his birth, drinking whatever there was to drink, wherever there was a drink to be found. Supposedly, the only reason Thracia is still spoken of as a land without boundaries is because he was never sober enough to mark them on a map. His words, naturally.

“In his mad wandering, he made his friends and he made his enemies. By the time he claimed his place in Olympia as the Tyrant Riot, the only difference between the two was how he’d laid their corpses to rest.”

My brow furrowed. “You don’t mean…”

“He didn’t kill them. At least, he didn’t kill his friends as far as I know. He didn’t have to. The kyrios was old by any standard. He was a man that had outlived his own era, drinking on while his contemporaries perished by the blade or by the bolt. Those that mortal wounds and tribulation could not strike down, Kronos took for himself in the end. Bakkhos simply outlived his peers until he was the only one left to bury them.”

How old was Bakkhos, really? the raven in my shadow asked the one in Griffon‘s. Under the cover of night, our shades could still mingle freely without Selene noticing.

Old enough, Griffon’s raven cawed while he contemplated the wreckage surrounding us.

“He buried his friends with full honors,” Scythas continued. “He gave them coin to cross the infernal river and refreshment to last them the journey, promising each in their passing to someday share a drink again. And though he never joined them-”

“Until he did,” Griffon remarked distractedly. Scythas scowled furiously.

“And though he never joined them, he still made good on his promises. He came back when it was within his power to summon them, though so much had been lost in the passage of time that the wine he brought to share was hardly worth the name, compared to what he’d buried them with. And in sympathy for the fond friend that had paid their way across the river, those long forgotten heroes returned the favor he had once done for them. They gave him a drink.”

“And his enemies?” I asked.

Scythas tried for a smile, but it was an uneasy thing. “Thracia is famous for its vineyards. Once, when he was ruinously drunk, Bakkhos explained to me that he had cultivated those vineyards himself, that he was as much the cause of their thriving as the nation’s fertile land. According to him, a grape vine’s growth was a question of nurture as much as it was nature.”

“‘It’s all in what you feed them’,” Selene concluded with her chin laid on my shoulder, a calm recitation of a mad Tyrant’s quote.

Ah.

“That’s not important, though. What’s important is how he buried his friends.”

“And where,” Griffon realized. He looked at our bleak surroundings with new eyes. “One of them is buried here. That’s why this place looks like a Greek built it with a Thracian’s hands. Bakkhos came back a more civilized man to visit the friend he’d buried, and when he did, he built a city over his corpse.”

I shook my head. Griffon blinked.

“Ho? Am I wrong?”

“Half wrong. Bakkhos didn’t build this city.” The signs and Scythas’ own words pointed to a chthonic friend being buried somewhere in the area, that we agreed on. But I had known from the moment we entered it that this city was a ruin entirely separate from the Greek diaspora. In spite of its similarities. Because of its similarities.

“And you know who did?” Griffon pressed me, skeptical. I nodded. “I suppose you know what they named it, too?”

“More likely than not.”

“You do?” Scythas asked, surprised.

“Tell us,” Selene urged me, squeezing my waist just hard enough to make me wince. “What’s the name?”

There was only one man that could have inspired the tragedy I’d seen in the wood of that gaping southern gate. When it came to naming his cities, he tended to follow a trend.

“Alexandropolis,” I named it. Scythas flinched at the word, and Selene’s grip tightened reflexively around my waist, hard enough to make me briefly see stars.

Griffon turned narrow eyes upon me. The raven in his shadow spread wide its wings and let loose an eerie, gurgling cry.

“What led you to that conclusion?”

“On the face of the gate when we entered,” I recalled, waving back the way we had come. “There was a symbol. A star with sixteen rays, or a wheel with sixteen spokes depending on who you ask. The mark of the Argead dynasty.”

“There was no such thing,” the former Young Aristocrat immediately denied. “I looked.”

“And you saw it. You just didn’t realize that you did, because someone had already scoured it from the gate. Burnt it beyond all recognition.”

“Beyond all recognition but yours?”

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug, making Selene’s head bob. “I’ve seen ruins like these before. They all bear similar marks.” I lifted my chin, gesturing up ahead.

The broken facade of a once grand statue loomed close enough now to see the finer details of it even in the dark. The statue was missing its entire upper half, but what remained still stood proud and tall. It was bare now, but I knew that in the past, when the tragedy of this city was still fresh, it had been draped with fine fabrics and whatever ornaments of wealth could be balanced on its frame. There would have been flowers. Copious offerings of food and blood. There would have been sorrow.

Those material markers had long since eroded or been stolen away. All that remained now was the echo of their hopeless pleas.

Griffon brandished rosy palms of violent intent, illuminating the broken sculpture. In the clarity of the dawn, the words carved into the marble base of the statue were plain to see.

Here at your feet we beg your forgiveness.

Won’t you turn the wagon around?

Won’t you come back for us, Alexander?

- Your cast off sons of Macedonia

“This was a military colony,” I said with certainty, because I had seen its like before. “Built by the Macedonians, for the Macedonians.”

“And someone tore it apart,” Scythas whispered, staring wide-eyed at the desperate inscription in the marble. “Who would dare-?”

“No one,” I said wearily. “No one but themselves.”

In the course of my travels, I had seen these sites before. I had seen for myself these haunted, broken places, hollowed out by the same hands that had first built them. I had seen Argead Stars scoured off of every surface, as well as bleak appeals carved into every holy monument. The empty cries of abandoned children.

These broken shell cities of Macedonia had unsettled me when I first beheld them as a legionary of a vibrant, thriving Republic. Now, they were worse. Now they hurt.

It had seemed absurd to me at the time, the idea that after everything they had done, a nation as great and powerful as Macedonia could fall to civil war in the end. How could internal strife be the blade that pierced their heart, when every external foe had only made them stronger? What could have possibly compelled them to castthemselves down on the precipice of unprecedented glory? I hadn’t understood it. Not then.

I understood it now.

Standing in the rubble of a Macedonian city’s corpse, all I could see was Rome.