The Young Griffon

I collapsed onto my back in the sand, breathing heavily. My body ached fiercely, satisfying as it throbbed. I ran my tongue over my bottom lip and prodded the split flesh. Sol had given it to me good with the first punch, I’d allow him that much. Of course, I’d given him twice as much in return.

I swallowed down blood and saliva, stretched my arms over my head and sighed as tension unwound from my body along with my soul.

“I think I needed that,” I said to the cloudless sky above. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.” Sitting beside me, Sol gingerly curled and uncurled the fingers of his left hand. He’d left his mark on me, but he’d cut two knuckles open on my teeth and bruised his hand in the process.

I saw from the corners of my eyes the nervous looks being sent our way by nearby members of the dock town. We hadn’t brought any real pneuma into our impromptu pankration, of course, but that didn’t really change things. Sol may have exchanged his indigo attire for a nondescript white chiton and a beaten bronze breastplate underneath, but I was as I was. Even the grimiest sailors and fishwives on the beach recognized the cult attire of the Rosy Dawn that hung from my waist.

Conflict between two cultivators was cause for concern no matter what. Just because pneuma was not involved now did not mean it would not be involved later. Fortunately for the mongrels on the docks, they were safe from the two of us.

“You didn’t tell me why the pearl city concerned you,” I said, going over the conversation in my mind again. Sol grimaced, looking distantly out over the Ionian. Somewhere else entirely.

“The Egyptians are… strange,” he eventually said, in such a way that I knew it was an understatement. “As different as the Cursus Honorum is from the Greek cultivator’s journey, the Egyptian way is a thousand times further removed. In some ways, it felt like they weren’t even reaching for the same goal at all.”

“They’re barbarians,” I said simply. He snorted.

“So am I.”

“Only half.” I waved an airy hand. “Your better half alone is worth more than any lesser culture’s best.”

“You really believe that?”

I offered him a sharp grin, bloodied by the lip he had split. “Until I’m given a reason not to.”

“Greeks,” he said, like a curse. “What about the Conqueror?”

“What about the Conqueror?”

“A Macedonian is a barbarian like any other, isn’t he? You and every other Greek that dare speak of Alexander have gone to great lengths to emphasize his separation from your culture. And yet despite being lesser to you, he terrifies you all so much that you won’t even say his name. You resent him so much that you refuse to offer aid to the home of one of your own greater mystery cults, simply because he was the man that built it. How can it be said that his people are lesser to yours, given that?”

“Exactly because of that.” Sol looked at me like I was simple. Sneering, I made it clear for the Roman half of him. “The free cities spit on the Conqueror at every turn. We denied him admittance to our Olympic Games even after he came riding into our lands with gifts of such riches that Croesus would have blushed to look upon them. We refused him admittance even after he made a fool of himself, lavishing us with praise for our works of architecture and the accomplishments of our thinking men. He all but begged us to let him compete for glory alongside our greatest heroes, claiming Greek ancestry that traced back to the free city of Levanta, and still we told him no.

“Tell me, Sol, what would you have done in his place? If you marshaled every scrap of wealth and ancestry that you could and sang your praises to the guards at the gate, only for them to spit in your open mouth, would you still want to pass through? In place of the Conqueror, would you still desire admittance to our culture after that?”

“I never desired it to begin with,” he said, and I laughed.

“Worthless Roman. At least you’re honest. But let’s say you did, and let’s say I’ve just spit in your face and thrown back all the gifts and riches you brought along to bribe me. Would you still want in?”

“You know I wouldn’t.”

“I do. Because you’re better than that. The Conqueror was not.

“No one can deny that he was a powerful brute, but a brute is all he was. When the free cities sent him back to Macedonia in shame without an olive leaf crown, he did not wash his hands of us. When he came back with his armies and tried to overtake us, he still valued the words of our holy women over his own. To the point of separating himself from his own men, risking his entire campaign for a word from an oracle worth listening to.

“And after that? Look no further than his pearl. After being cast out not once, but twice, he still knew his place. He could have kept the greater mystery of Scattered Foam for himself. He could have built his city over top of it and fortified it against any Greek incursion. Do you have any idea how much it would have tormented us? Knowing that another piece of our faith’s mangled mosaic had been found, knowing it was just across the Mediterranean Sea, and not being able to reach it?”

The Conqueror could have drawn all of the free Mediterranean into a war on his terms, on his continent. Or he could have proven all of us cowards if our city-states refused to rise to his challenge. Even if I tried, I couldn’t think of a more fitting retribution for the scorn he had received than that. Standing where the Conqueror stood, looking through his eyes like they were mine, I knew what the discovery of that scattered foam in Egypt would have seemed like to me.

Justice.

“He could have made us all suffer if he had only kept it for himself, the most natural thing a Tyrant can do,” I said, every word more scornful than the one that came before it. “But he didn’t. Even then, triumphant and proud, he knew Macedonia’s place among heaven and earth. So he bundled it up and presented it to us like he had the rest of his gifts when he first came to Olympia, and if I had to guess, he told himself that building a Macedonian city over a natural Greek phenomenon made it his.”

In that way, he could tell himself that he had contributed something to the greatest diaspora in the world. He could pretend he was one of us. But he wasn’t then, as he wasn’t now. As he never would be.

For a long moments, only the sounds of gently lapping waves and coastal industry hung between us.

“I knew Alexander occupied a large space within the Greek collective consciousness,” Sol eventually said, regarding me with naked interest. “But I didn’t realize you hated him personally.”

“I don’t.” What a ridiculous suggestion.

“That wasn’t hatred?” he asked, waving his bruised hand as if to encompass everything I’d just said. “I’ve seen judges sentence men to execution with less vitriol than that.”

“It was not,” I affirmed. “The lion has no hatred for barking dogs.”

“And between the two of you, you’re the lion,” he said doubtfully. “That’s what you think. Griffon above the Conqueror.”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t punch you that hard.”

“You aren’t funny,” I reminded him, lest he forget. “More importantly, haven’t we already agreed that strength alone is not the deciding factor?”

That night before my cousin’s wedding, while we drained the Aetos family’s filial pools with spoons, Sol and I had talked about all the places in the world that we would see if we had the chance. All the things that we would do. We had also talked about my family’s opinion of me, and the greater Greek perception of bottlenecks.

“You told me back at the filial pools that strength alone did not define virtue,” I mused. “If I had drowned you in one of those pools and ascended to the Sophic Realm because of it, that by itself would not have been enough to make the action righteous. You told me that and I agreed.”

Sol frowned thoughtfully.

“Cultivation is refinement of self,” I said. “The Conqueror was a nightmare and his armies were unlike any the free cities had seen before - I’ll never argue his strength. But strength was not the question. The Conqueror was powerful, yet forever unrefined by the standards of those that mattered. He knew it as we knew it. It’s why he tore the east apart, taking everything he could from better cultures. Because he knew he could never produce those wonders himself.

“So yes. He may have been the meanest dog in all the world, but he was still a dog. How could I hate him when I know that everything he accomplished was the least of what I am capable of? The Conqueror stood at the peak of what a barbarian could be, and from the day I was born that peak was so far below me that I could hardly see it looking down.”

Sol leaned away from me, as if I had pressed him back with pankration hands. He raised a hand to his forehead, dropped it, and raised it again.

“That is… breathtakingly arrogant.”

“Thank you,” I said modestly.

“Far beyond delusional.”

“So you say.”

“Where did all the heat come from, then? If he’s so far beneath you, why get worked up by the comparison at all?”

“I was already fighting a bad mood, and he does irritate me. He could have tormented us after he found the mystery of the Scattered Foam in Egypt. A barking dog is one thing, but he could have savaged us. Devouring was his only virtue, and the one time the dog should have eaten, it dropped its meal outside the lion’s den and fled east with its tail tucked.

“It’s not that he was too audacious,” Sol realized. “It’s that he wasn’t audacious enough. You revile him because you would have done things differently in his place.”

“That should have been obvious from the start. His culture is beneath mine, but how can I hate a man for hungering above his station? I’m exactly the same. That’s why the hound from Macedonia irritates me. Because he tried to charm what he should have taken.”

He had appealed to higher power.

“At any rate, we’ve strayed from the topic at hand,” I said, and Sol blinked, seeing for himself how far the ship had drifted off its course. “The Egyptians are bizarre, even more so to a Roman than a Roman is to a Greek. Elaborate.”

His lips thinned while he searched for the words. I rolled over onto my stomach and laid my cheek on crossed arms, waiting patiently.

“They’re old,” he began. “Their golden age ended thousands of years before the first Greek city was built. Rome, by comparison, was nothing but an infant colony. Their perception of the world is ancient, and their morality is matched to it.”

“Meaning?”

“They gut their dead,” Sol explained, haunted. I wondered what I would see if I could look through the same memories he was at that moment. “In a process they call embalming, they hollow out the corpse and harvest all its organs except for the heart. They drag the brain out through the nose with metal hooks, because cracking open the skull is apparently one desecration too far. The harvested organs are stored in jars and the body is laid out on a bed of salt for weeks. Stuffed with it, if the corpse was wealthy enough in life to afford such treatment.”

“For what purpose?” I asked, my nose wrinkling at the thought. I had no intention of ever dying, but that didn’t mean I was without manners. Death was a sacred tragedy - even a corpse was owed its dignity.

“It dries the body, draining it of its liquids so it won’t rot. When it’s done they rinse the corpse with wine and stuff it full of spices and aromatics. Like it’s a meal.”

“Why?”

He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “They sew it up after that, wrap it in linen and lavish it with decorative jewelry before sealing it away. They bury the corpse with its valuables so that it can take them with it into the immortal thereafter. The greatest of them, Egyptians of high standing, even took their servants with them.”

“How long does this process take?” I asked.

“Two months. Sometimes more.”

“But not more than three,” I clarified, and he shook his head. “Then when you say they take their servants with them…”

That wasn’t nearly a long enough time frame for even a shackled slave to die a natural death.

“The newly risen queen offered Gaius an unprecedented honor after the battle was won,” Sol said bleakly. “A proper Egyptian burial for the legionnaires that we’d lost, guaranteeing life after death for every one of them. To that end, she invited him to join her privately in observing the embalming of one of the fallen Egyptian generals. So he could see for himself the profundity of what he was being offered.”

“He brought you along with him,” I concluded.

“The general took three servants with him into the afterlife,” Sol explained, confirming it without pausing. “They stripped each of them down, and before our eyes they cut open their throats as the slaves prayed over their master’s corpse. Then they gutted them all.”

“I take it your uncle opted out of that one,” I murmured.

“We burnt the corpses that day. The queen assured us there was more than enough land available to bury them intact, but we didn’t trust the Egyptians not to go digging them up after.”

“Disgusting savages.” For once, Sol readily agreed to my sentiment.

“They don’t view even intrinsic things the same way that you and I do,” he went on. “Life and death are hardly distinct concepts to them at all - their cultivators don’t measure success in the avoidance of death, but in the execution of it. Their model of the soul has eight parts rather than the Broad’s three, and they believed that if a man led a virtuous life and his corpse was properly observed, his vital breath would find its way back to his body after death. Reanimate it and change its form.”

“Naturally. And I’m sure you saw the truth of that in motion,” I said wryly. When he didn’t respond, I raised myself up on my elbows, eyes widening. “You did? Truly?”

“I don’t know.” He scowled, more at himself than at me. “Some of the things that I saw there… I can’t explain them, even now. Gaius told me once that the worst institutions of any culture are generally also the ones that linger. All I can say of Egypt is that it’s had more time than any living nation to accrue those ugly institutions.”

I reached up and laid a hand on his shoulder, feeling the tension beneath his skin. “Infernal or not, they can’t be that bad,” I assured him. “You managed to bring them down, after all.” He sighed.

“Maybe.” That storm built slowly in his eyes. “Or maybe we just didn’t recognize their victory when we saw it in their hands.”

The eddies of a Hero’s influence washed over us, and Sol’s expression cooled as he turned to regard the source. Burying the memories once again.

“Solus!” Scythas called out to us from far down the beach, waving an arm emphatically. “I’ve found a ship!”

About time.