The Son of Rome

There and back again in just under two weeks. All told, it was one of the faster expeditions I’d been a part of.

It had taken us three days to sail around the southern tip of the Peloponnesian landmass where Olympia resided, and north up the full length of the Aegean Sea to the unmarked lands of Thracia. It had taken us four more days and four more nights of horseback riding and chthonic wandering to find our infernal drink and return to the Eos with golden cup in hand. We’d made good time sailing back thus far, despite the added weight of our cargo and the brief complication of Griffon breaking all the oars. By the dawn of our third day back at sea, the coast was on the ship’s starboard side once more.

Our last and maddest night in the land of indefinite boundaries had cut the four of us deeply, but time and the steady lapping of the waves had worn the edge of our mania away as surely as a seaside cliff. By the second night, I was able to sleep.

As the rosy dawn broke over our third morning back at sea, Selene revealed to us that Griffon wasn’t the only one on board with a sweet singing voice.

“Whenever Bakkhos comes, I lay my cares to rest,” she sang, swinging her legs idly over the deep blue waves of the Ionian. She spoke with a cultivator’s universal tongue, conveying the meaning of the words to every sailor’s ear. The men of the Eos belted out the following verse with bawdy enthusiasm.

“Bring me the cup, boy! Oh, bring me the cup!”

“I dream I’m rich as Croesus, and it makes me want to sing.” If Griffon’s voice was wine-dark deep and rolling smoke, then Selene’s was light like honeycombs and falling snow. More than charming enough to put a smile on every sailor’s face.

“Bring me the cup, boy! I said bring me that cup!”

Griffon and Scythas sat beside the horses at the rear edge of the deck, speaking more cordially than I had ever seen them before. It likely helped that half the Hero’s attention was committed to the mare, Kronia. I’d noticed back when he was buying the beasts that Scythas had an eye for horses born of passion.

That passion was on full display now, the Hero’s admiration for the white-haired beast of virtue clear to see. Kronia hadn’t allowed him to touch her at first, perhaps remembering what had happened to the last two horses he’d ridden, but Griffon had convinced her with some cajoling words and a vigorous massage with thirty formless hands. They both poked and prodded at the mare while they discussed the finer mechanics of beast cultivation, searching for changes in her body that had come from the consumption of a higher power.

Scythas hadn’t even bothered with Atlas. It was likely for the best.

“Ivy-garlanded I lie, but through my heart I walk the world.”

“Bring me the cup, boy! Boy, bring me the cup!”

For my part, I had taken to passing the time in my usual way.

Dice carved from a sea bream’s bones clattered and rolled across the deck. Eight dice in all, every one an octahedron with various number carved into each of their eight faces. They weren’t the prettiest, but I’d been working with substandard materials from the start.

And they looked pretty enough when they landed with the numbers I desired.

“I win!” a wiry pirate boy with vibrant red hair declared gleefully, already groping for the small pile of berries on the deck between us.

My hand came down, covering the mound of fruit before he could snatch it away. The boy’s grin immediately turned to a scowl. He scrabbled at my fingers, heaved with all his strength at my hand, but no matter what he did he could not lift my hand from the pile.

“Cheater!” he accused me. “You said the highest number gets the prize!”

“I did.”

“And I won!”

“Did you?”

The pirate child looked at me like I was simple. “Thirty-one beats thirty.”

“It does,” I agreed. “But thirty beats twenty-nine.”

“Wha-?”

I counted off the values of his dice, adding them as I went. “Five, seven, eight, sixteen, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five, twenty-nine.”

“Thirty-one!” the boy protested, jabbing a grimy finger at the last of the bone dice. “That’s a six! The I goes after the-” He blinked, abruptly realizing his mistake.

“The I goes before the V,” I corrected him, tapping the die in question. “If you look at it so that the I comes after, the V will be upside down. It’s a four, not a six. You lose.”

The boy slumped, his forehead thumping against the deck.

“I’m hungry,” he said pitifully. I hummed.

“Unfortunate.” I popped a raspberry into my mouth and savored its tang. The little pirate spat an oath and pounded his fists against the planks.

“Get it ready and I’ll drink: bring me the cup, boy!” Selene cheered, and the oarsmen brought the song home.

“Bring me the cup, boy! Now bring me that cup!”

It was only a brief reprieve. We distracted ourselves with pleasant things, got to know the men that had kept the Eos safe in our absence and amused ourselves with dice and fishing and idle talk. But though the passing days had dulled its edge, we still felt the echoes of that night spent in the Orphic House. It haunted each of us in its own way.

Griffon had insisted at the beginning of this Thracian venture that we keep going until the ingredients were gathered, but that had been before we’d seen for ourselves what one reagent alone required. If we had any hope at all of finding more, we’d need a light to guide us at the very least. Or, failing that, an old man’s wisdom.

It came to us unexpectedly - hours before the Eos would have reached Olympia’s southernmost dock.

A welcome cry from above heralded the return of my eagle, Sorea’s grand wingspan blotting out the sunlight briefly as he wheeled overhead. Selene jumped off her seat at the starboard rail and waved excitedly up at the bird, calling out his name.

I held out an arm and the messenger beast landed gracefully on it, curling his talons around my forearm and squeezing just tight enough not to cut through skin. His form of greeting, I supposed. I offered him a berry from my pile.

“I was wondering when you’d make it back. How was your-“

Atlas groaned and rose up, the muscles beneath his dark flank clenching and spasming around the wounds the gatekeepers and I had given him. His golden eyes glared daggers at the bird. After a long beat of silence, unbroken by the sailors that rightfully feared the devastation they could bring down upon a ship, he snorted threateningly. Despite the fact that we were far from the frozen lands of Thracia now, the air still left the charger’s nostrils as steam.

Scythas watched the stallion warily, ready to bolt out from his immediate reach if necessary. Griffon continued to stroke his mare’s head, glancing between the eagle and the stallion with naked curiosity. Selene, for her part, was too busy rummaging through barrels for scraps to feed Sorea to care.

Sorea cocked his head at the grandstanding horse and slowly, with deliberation, lifted his wings. Somehow, I felt like I could almost understand their silent exchange.

Atlas screamed a challenge. The oarsmen nearest to him shouted and scrambled away.

Disgusting, ugly pheasant! Who gave you permission to lay talons on my Roman?

Sorea shrieked his own reply.

Junior, you dare? He was mine long before he was yours!

Atlas dragged a hoof against the deck, carving furrows into the wood.

The little morsel is tempting the Fates. Apologize to this stallion a thousand-thousand times and I’ll consider breaking your neck before I eat you.

Why did I imagine both of them speaking with Griffon’s voice?

Wretched ass, you have much to learn of heaven and earth. Come, let’s exchange discou- ow, fuck!

Griffon flinched and recoiled from Selene’s penumbral spear, stabbed cleanly through his shadow. His shaded silhouette withdrew from mine, and the voices of ‘Sorea’ and ‘Atlas’ abruptly vanished from my mind.

I really should have known better.

Virtuous beasts were a natural phenomena well known to any cultivator, though what was known of them was dangerously vague. It was an issue in many ways similar to the delineation of cultivators - it was easy enough to differentiate the Legate from the Consul, the Consul from the Censor, just as it was to separate Philosophers from Heroes, and Heroes from Tyrants. But though it was the case that Caesar and Antony had reigned as Consuls together for a year’s time, they were far from the same political animal.

We had stories to roughly outline the scope of what a given animal was capable of becoming - tales of the Champion and his beastly labors most prominent among them. But the Nemean Lion was not the rule when it came to a lion with an awakened soul. It was only the standard, just as the Champion himself was the standard for a Heroic cultivator. Not every lion was the Nemean Lion. Not every Hero was the Champion. That variance made them unpredictable. It made them dangerous, in a way a mundane beast was not.

A war elephant was a terrifying sight, but it was a force that could be opposed. Through struggle and through wit, with the knowledge that countless men before us had suffered to accrue, they could be put down. They were terrifying. But they were a known quantity.

A war elephant that had woken its sleeping soul, though? That was an unknown terror. Somehow more primal, in spite of its refinement.

I had seen for myself what a virtuous beast was capable of, more than once in the course of my years. I knew that they were capable of incredible things.

They were still animals.

“Play nice,” I said, exasperated, and flicked the underside of Sorea’s beak mid-shriek. It snapped shut, choking off the beast’s impressive war cry. His talons dug into the flesh of my arm, threatening to draw blood. I didn’t need Griffon narrating in my head to know that he was offended.

Atlas’ lips peeled back from his teeth, and the black charger whinnied mockingly at my messenger bird. I took one of the bone dice I’d been rolling around in my hand and flicked hard enough across the deck and through his open mouth that I heard the wet ping of it striking the back of his throat. The stallion gagged, steam pouring out of his nostrils and from between his teeth as he choked.

The members of the crew watched in mingled horror and relief as the stallion collapsed, throat undulating as he tried and failing to dislodge the bone die from its obstructing place. His legs lashed out, large and strong enough to shatter the ship’s wooden benches and break bone if anyone had been close enough to get hit - Scythas dodged with his usual alacrity and Griffon just laid his head against his mare, where Atlas’ hooves miraculously never struck.

My horse choked one last time and fell still, his massive head hitting the deck with an echoing thump. The redheaded pirate boy inched towards him, reaching out a wary finger to poke the dead animal’s muzzle.

“I wouldn’t,” I warned him. One of the sailors lurched forward and grabbed him by the back of his chiton, tossing the boy back across the deck to safety. “Thank you. Now, you,” I said, shifting my arm so that Sorea was facing me. “What have you got for me?”

For the first time in my life, I saw an eagle grimace.

By the time Sorea was done vomiting, there were five scrolls of rolled papyrus on the deck of the Eos and even my ‘dead’ horse had cracked an eye open to stare in abject disgust at the bird. Selene rubbed the bird’s spine, murmuring soothing words to it.

“You could let us tie them to your legs,” I suggested. “I know you’re strong enough for it.” Sorea snapped his beak at me, close enough to my nose to feel the displacement of air, and then beat his wings and shot up to the top of the ship’s mast where he settled in to sulk.

“I was wondering where the bird went,” Griffon mused. “What has he brought us?”

I had a feeling I already knew, but I cracked each of them open and read the opening lines just to be certain. With each one, the tension in my frame relaxed a bit more. By the fifth, I felt a faint smile on my lips.

“Replies from our friends,” I said, and tossed three of them up into the air. Griffon caught two with pankration hands and the third with palm of flesh and blood. His brow furrowed as he read the first few lines. Abruptly, he unfurled the rest of the scroll and looked at the name signed at the bottom of it. His eyes widened.

“Elissa? Why is she-?”

“I wasn’t just making hidden conversation with Selene while I was writing those letters before,” I explained, shrugging. I unfurled one of the two I’d kept for myself, a written in a fine and flowing Greek script that that Babel shard translated as it hit my eyes. Welcome news from Anastasia, for once. “I was writing Jason and Anastasia anyway, so I thought I’d extend an olive branch to the other three.”

“And they responded.”

“They did,” I agreed. I glanced up from Anastasia’s message, eyeing him. For some reason, the Scarlet Son seemed to be almost at a loss. “Sometimes, a no isn’t really a no. Time and space apart to consider can be a more persuasive argument than any rhetoric. I had a feeling they’d come around in their own time, in their own ways.”

I had seen the truth of it when I’d looked around that table, in the aftermath of the story of the Brothers Aetos. Griffon’s three had been shaken, each for their own reasons, and they had wavered. For that precarious moment, they had balanced on the edge of throwing in with us and withdrawing entirely. They had needed a push, not from me, but from him. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been in a proper state of mind to give them one at the time.

But they couldn’t stay balanced on the knife’s edge forever. Left to their own devices, they would fall eventually. On one side or the other. I hadn’t known which side that would be, and I hadn’t known if reaching out through Sorea would push them to our side or away from it, or if it would have any effect at all.

I’d taken a gamble with stakes that weren’t mine to play. A bad habit. But this time, at least, it had paid off.

Slam.

Scythas jumped up in alarm a moment before everyone else, rushing to the port side of the ship and nearly flinging himself over the edge entirely as he lunged to grab whatever had hit us. What he pulled from the waves wasn’t a wayward swordfish or a crocodile far from home. It wasn’t a sea creature at all.

Scythas heaved the Gadfly up over the ship’s rail and onto the deck, scattering salt water and blood across the wood.

I lunged up and briefly saw stars, the wounds from my recent brush with tribulation and the weight on my shoulders nearly buckling my knees. I pushed through it and knelt heavily at the old philosopher’s side while he panted and bled across the deck.

“Socrates?” I hissed, unsure of where to touch him. His body was a mess of blood and blackened flesh. Griffon slid across the deck in a crouch, kneeling at his other side and laying hands of flesh and blood and pankration intent across the old philosopher’s body.

The Gadfly grunted and waved a burnt hand at the former Young Aristocrat. “Off.”

All thirty pankration hands were blasted away as if by Scythas’ gale winds. Griffon sneered. “Old man, I’m trying to mend you.”

“Not yet. Turn this ship around first. Now.”

“What?” Scythas asked, alarmed. “Why?”

“Because all of you except the girl are going to die if you dock it at Olympia.”

“What?” Selene hissed, the scarlet flames behind her eyes flaring up. “Why!? What’s going on-“

Socrates lashed out with an arm nearly as black as coal, long fracturing lines cracking the skin apart, and grabbed Selene by her sunray silks. She yelped as he yanked her down, baring his teeth furiously.

“Because you didn’t listen. Because three days ago you died, and Old Polyzalus came howling for my head. Your father has left his domain, girl. Nowhere in Olympia is safe for these men. Nowhere.”

His eyes were glassy. He had Selene’s face nearly pressed to his, but he wasn’t really looking at her. Could he see her at all? Could he see anything at all?

“How did you find us?” I asked him urgently, as the energy slowly but surely slipped out of him. His grip slackened and fell away, releasing Selene and allowing her to draw back.

“Átta did this to you?” the daughter of the Oracle whispered, horrified.

“Socrates! How did you find us?”

“Followed your bird,” the Scholar muttered. His sun-blinded eyes drifted shut. “Turn the ship around…”

“Socrates? Socrates?” I slapped him in the face, but the old man didn’t respond. “Griffon!”

Thirty pankration hands and two of flesh and blood settled over the old man’s burnt and battered body. Within moments, the Scarlet Son snarled a curse and pulled back.

“This is beyond me. Son of a bitch.”

“Do any of you know anything of medicine? Anyone?” I cast around, but found no salvation among the sailors. Scythas shook his head silently, eyes darting up and down the philosopher’s mangled frame. I looked to Selene.

“Honey,” she whispered in a choked voice. “I have honey.”

“Will it be enough?”

Steam drifted up from the corners of her eyes. “No.”

“Sorea!” I snapped. The eagle landed on a bench beside the Gadfly, looking down at in a brief, distantly curious sort of way, before turning expectantly to regard me. “Can you get me Anastasia?”

Somehow, I knew he was offended that I’d even had to ask.

“Go. Now!”

The virtuous beast spread his wings wide and surged up into the sky, rocking the Eos with the force of his departure. He left us with a parting shriek that I chose to interpret as assurance. He’d find her, and he’d bring her to us. There was no other way.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Griffon snapped, and I turned to see two of the oarsmen freeze, halfway across the deck. Halfway across to the opposite benches, where two men already sat manning their oars.

“We-“ The first to speak hesitated.

The second finished. “We’re going to help them correct on their side. It’ll turn us faster-“

“We’re not turning around,” I declared. Further down the line of benches, another man protested.

“But the man said-“

I rose. The deck groaned beneath my feet. Every freedman fell silent, staring at me in naked trepidation.

“This man is my mentor,” I told them, lining every word with steel. “He is my mentor, as he was the mentor of my mentor’s mentor. My actions brought this harm to him, so it will have to be my actions that see it delivered from him. There is a physician in Olympia that can mend him. We are not turning around.”

“Solus,” Scythas said quietly, laying a hesitant hand on my shoulder. “There are physicians in other cities. If Griffon mans the oars and I fill the sails with wind, we can be at Krokos by dusk-“

“No,” I said, just as quietly. “Look at him, Scythas. Do you think he’ll last long enough for us to find another Anastasia?” Burning hazel eyes met mine, searching.

Whatever Scythas found in my eyes, it was enough. He nodded shallowly.

“Row.” I commanded the crew. Nine men and one pirate boy heaved against their oars, shouting in unified effort. An inexplicably kind wind began to fill the sails, rising in tandem with the Hero’s pneuma. Selene and Griffon were still knelt at the old philosopher’s side, spreading honey over his wounds from a beehive that she’d pulled out of her silks.

“Old ‘Zalus thinks we killed his daughter,” Scythas told me in grim resignation while the Eos picked up speed. “If he did this to the Gadfly… when he finds us, he’ll burn us all to cinders before we can explain a word.”

Griffon looked up from his healing work, scarlet eyes alight with wrath.

“He’ll try.”

Heat and cinders smoldered up from underneath the deck.