Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

The Young Griffon

Sorea returned before the sun fell, wheeling above the coastline off our starboard side. The virtuous beast shrieked once to make sure he had our attention and then dipped, diving back over the seaside hills and vanishing from our sight.

“Stop,” Sol commanded, and every oar froze. Scythas’ favorable winds went out of the Eos’ sail like a hitching of breath. Our humble sea dogs awaited their orders with grim resolve. “We’re getting off here.”

“We can’t leave the ship!” one of the men protested.

“Of course not,” I agreed. Several ragged sailors twisted and swiveled on their benches to regard me, opposite the ship from Sol. Beneath my healing hands, the Gadfly’s chest rose and fell - shallow, and slow. “We’re getting off here. The ten of you are sailing this beautiful vessel to kinder waters.”

“But, žibùtė-“

“We can’t-“

“Enough of barking dogs.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have a hand to spare towards waving them off. The old philosopher’s body was a nightmare mess of burns and blackened flesh. The Oracle’s daughter had brought honey from beyond the border of life and death, but its chthonic nature did not make it all-healing. We applied it anyway, and since then I had focused on doing what I could with what Anastasia had taught me.

It wasn’t enough. Not nearly. My eyes narrowed, looking but not focusing at what was in front of me, while I traced my pneuma’s path through the old man’s mangled body.

“Sail to another city,” Sol said, taking back their attention as he forced himself to his feet. “North or south. It doesn’t matter, so long as you aren’t here.” The ship dipped and listed to the side at the shifting of his weight.

For as long as I had known the Roman, he had lived his life as if with a yoke across his shoulders. That demeanor hadn’t changed when he shed his slave chains. It was a portion of what had convinced our companions of his ‘high’ standing. And now, it was as much literal as it was metaphorical. When he stood, the ship moved as if a far greater weight had shifted in its place, because a far greater weight had. The Roman’s shoulders tensed, and the muscles up and down his body flexed with the effort. Rising against a pressure that sought to press him down.

“Sir,” one of the men spoke furtively. He had an odd accent, Anatolian maybe. “What if you need a ship again? If your need is urgent, surely we’d be better suited pulling her ashore here?”

“No.” Sol’s voice was flat. Not dangerous, but with a promise of danger should he be disobeyed. Across the deck, behind me, Atlas rose to his feet to match his rider. The black stallion loomed over the men. “If our need is urgent, it means we’ve been found. You’ll be wiped out in an instant.”

“We can hide her in plain sight,” another sea dog suggested, with light brown hair sheared in rough patches from his skull and cheeks, leaving a bristling beard and mustache to grow freely. “Tear down her sails and bring her in at night.”

“I know a crone at the docks ‘makes paint,” another dog entreated the Roman. “We’ll give her a fresh coat, make her look brand new. We’ll park her in one of the gorgon’s breakers, no one’ll be the wiser-“

“Dozens of people saw us board this ship just last week,” Scythas said flatly. The sea dogs shared looks of a particular kind.

“Honored Hero,” one spoke, with careful respect. “Cultivators and fishmongers… they live in different worlds-“

Scythas cut him off. “If a Tyrant is asking, they will remember. They will talk. And you will be found.”

“If we-“

“It doesn’t matter how well you disguise the ship,” Sol said, shaking his head and turning to the rail. He lifted a foot with some effort and braced it on the rail. The wood groaned. “Sorea will find you if we need you. If he does, follow him. He’ll lead you back to us.” His words brooked no further argument. His tone dared any man to defy his judgement.

“What if the bird’s not fast enough? What if it’s dead, and the Tyrant finds you?” The mongrel pirate boy glared up at Sol. In Kabhur’s absence, he had taken up one of the oars as best he could. His face was nearly as red as his hair. “How will we know?”

“If our need is that urgent, it’s better you don’t know,” the Roman said frankly. “If Polyzalus finds us, he’ll burn the entire dock city to cinders - all of you included. Even the best ship is only wood and cloth in the end.”

The Eos dipped precariously as Sol stepped up onto the rail, the figurehead woman nearly kissing the surface of the waves, and then rocked back up as he stepped off into the sea. The sound of his impact was deeper than it should have been, like someone had dropped a boulder instead of a man off the side of the deck. Scythas followed close behind him, vaulting the rail and slipping soundlessly into the sea.

“I’ll bring him,” I informed the daughter of the Oracle, still hovering over the Gadfly. Her scarlet eyes flickered, along with her heart, but she nodded and dove over the side as well.

Lifting the Gadfly gently with the hands of my intent, I looked over our sea dogs. They were conflicted, I could tell. Half a step from anguish.

“Arrogant dogs,” I scoffed. A few of them flinched. The pirate child clenched his fists, glaring mutinously. “We’ll be fine without you. Consider this your accounts settled, and the last offer you’ll get from either one of us - take your freedom and go. The old man was wise enough to return home the second time we told him. Follow his example. Live.”

I paused at the rail, considering our beasts. Atlas was standing stock still on the deck, eyes riveted on the waves between us and the shore. For a horse, he was rather expressive. I could see his mood getting darker by the second. His chest expanded and contracted feverishly, nostrils flaring and shooting steam.

“Drop the horses off by Krokos,” I decided. “They’ll find their way from there.” Then I stepped over the rail and into the sea with the Gadfly in tow.

I swam to shore swiftly, the Gadfly’s unconscious body bobbing on a raft of pankration hands behind me lest the salt water further irritate his burns. Somehow, I wasn’t the last one to reach the beach. Scythas was pacing the sands while Selene sat with her knees tucked up to her chest, both of them watching the waves between us and the distant Eos with mounting concern.

Just as Scythas seemed ready to go diving back in after him, the man in question came trudging out of the waves.

Walking. He was too heavy to swim.

Sol stalked past the Gadfly and I, the sunset rays above casting his shadow briefly across mine. I frowned faintly.

“Surely the legions taught you how to swim,” I said after a beat. He gave me an ugly look and carried on.

Sorea called out to us. Over the hills, but close enough.

“Alright.” Sol ran a hand through sea-soaked black hair, slicking it back. “Let’s fix this.”

As an initiate of the Rosy Dawn, I had seen more than my fair share of heinous burns - and suffered them just the same. I knew the scouring agony as well as I knew my name, and I had seen men die despite the best efforts of seasoned physicians because the fire had simply taken too much from them. In the end, some burns healed and others could be mended with ointments and good fortune.

But not burns like these.

We found Anastasia in a shadowed copse of firs, her eyes riveted on the skies above where Sorea was circling. She was whistling softly, an unassuming reply to each of the eagle’s cries, and her cultivator’s sense brushed against mine nearly before I’d noticed her. Her eyes swiveled to us at once, curious and bright burning green.

“Griffon? What’s this-?”

The acid burning waves of her influence brushed over the Gadfly’s body behind me, and her eyes flared in the dark of coming dusk. A moment later, she was behind me.

“Easy!” Scythas hissed, casting around with every sense available to him. We were far enough from the city of Olympia that I couldn’t sense anything of it, but that didn’t necessarily mean no one there could sense us. A Tyrant’s reach was long. In most cases, anyway.

“This is Socrates?” Anastasia asked. The damage was severe enough that it warranted question. I nodded, and she joined her hands to the mending effort. Immediately, she winced. “I heard the rumors, but this…”

I blinked, looking up from my work. “Rumors?”

“Can you heal him?” Scythas asked the Caustic Queen, tense but hopeful.

“If it were anyone else, I’d say it was impossible,” she said, kneeling in the dirt and pulling from a fold in her onyx silks the tools of her trade. Delicate surgical knives, one after another, that she handed off to my pankration hands with careful deliberation. “Burns like these should have killed him on the spot. But if the rumors are true, and it seems like they are, then he’s survived them for days. If it’s the Gadfly… perhaps.”

“What rumors?” I asked her again. Anastasia frowned.

“These rumors.” She nodded down at the charred old man, passing my healing hands the last of her surgical blades and laying her palms over his heart and his forehead respectively. “Rumors that the Tyrant Polyzalus and the Gadfly had a spat, and nearly burnt down the Scarlet City’s portion of the Raging Heaven estates in the process.”

“How could this have been a mere rumor?” I pressed, with growing suspicion. “How is the entire city not in flames?”

Anastasia glanced up at me with hooded eyes, distant in their calculations. “Why would it be?”

I felt the wrath build in the beating of my heart.

The old man was a liar.

“How do we fix this?” I asked my mentor in mending, forcing my fury aside. “He lacks the healthy skin for a graft, and the damage is too severe for anything else. Enlighten this lowly sophist - if not by balm, and neither by excision, how do we heal this man?”

“For this, excision is the only way,” she said, and drew her own surgical knife carefully through a blacked patch of skin. I watched her intently, and then mirrored the motion with each of the pankration hands she had armed with feather-thin obsidian blades. “A donation will be required.”

A comment about Scythas’ skin being far too smooth for the Gadfly’s weathered body was on the tip of my tongue before I consciously realized it. I swallowed it down. The taste of it was sickening.

“If I must,” I said instead. But the Heroine only sighed and shook her head.

Anastasia reached back into the fold in logic within her onyx attire, and spoke a solemn oath.

“First, do no harm.”

And from that paradox logic, she pulled a corpse out of her robes.

Scythas cursed and lurched away from the body. I stared down at it. A man, shriveled and hunched in death - at a glance, old enough to be the Gadfly’s same age, though cultivation made it so he could have been centuries older or younger for all my eyes knew. I laid a hand of my own flesh and blood over his heart, coaxing my pneuma through the corpse. Seventy-eight years old.

I found the cause of death soon after. A lack of breath - the source, hemlock poisoning.

“Are you ready to learn?” Anastasia asked me, intent in a mountain cat’s way. Ready to fight.

All the world a tarnished iron.

“Always,” I said, and turned my blades upon the corpse.

The work was done when the Gadfly finally came to. It was night, and the stars were bright above the forest of firs. It was pleasantly cool, even by a mortal’s standards. A far cry from the frigid chill of northern Thracia.

Socrates returned to the world of the living reluctantly. As soon as his eyes cracked open, he scowled and sat up.

“Don’t,” Anastasia ordered, laying both hands carefully on his bandaged shoulders. The old philosopher grunted and shrugged her off like she was the gadfly instead of him.

“I’m fine, girl.” He rolled his shoulders, and flexed his fingers and toes, grimacing as he observed our work. Our robes were stained by his blood and the streaks of char his blackened flesh had left behind. The old man, by contrast, was wrapped up nearly head to toe in linens. Like an Egyptian corpse.

Socrates peeled back one of the bandages, ignoring Anastasia’s exasperation. His eyes narrowed.

“Whose skin is this?”

“Yours, now,” Scythas answered, peering down at us from the tallest tree in the grove. In the night, his eyes looked like a pair of distant planets.

The Gadfly sneered and dug a finger into the gastro thread we’d used to sew the grafted skin in place. He made to pry it out.

I struck him with the truth of my lived experience-

A Titan is to an Olympian what an Olympian is to a Man.

The oldest generation takes the youngest generation in their hands. You are torn apart, limb by limb, before you speak your first word. You scream in a voice so loud that their ears bleed and the heavens shake in their frame, but it is not enough to rouse your murdered mother. It is not enough to stir The Mother's wrathful heart.

The Titans consume you one limb at a time. They bite into your organs and split them like overripe fruit. They crack your bones open and suck out the marrow therein. They crush to pulp the lungs in your chest to silence your wailing.

-and then I punched him in the mouth.

Socrates’ back hit the dirt. I had only a split second to savor the stinging pain in my knuckles before the thousand-thousand whispering truths of his rhetoric surged and he lashed out at me with a donkey kick.

I slammed through the trunks of four separate firs and toppled every one of them before my momentum bled enough for the fifth one to catch my weight. Linen-wrapped legs appeared in my hazy vision, a raw red hand fisting through my hair. The Gadfly pulled me up to eye level, as irritated as he ever was. Even in the haze of my double vision, I could see the blood from his split lip. I smirked faintly.

“What was that?” the Gadfly demanded furiously, acting for all the world like he hadn’t been on death’s door just a few hours ago.

“If I attack you with reason you’ll just brush me off, because reason is your trade,” I explained, kneading with pankration hands at the spot on my hip where he’d kicked me. The bone was cracked but not broken. “But if I inundate you with mania, even the great Socrates must take a moment to separate himself from the madness. At least until you’ve built up a tolerance to it - like a cup of wine. Isn’t that so?”

Bakkhos had peddled in madness. Because of its very nature, it was difficult to picture an ability like that in your mind. The elements were simply in comparison - fire blinded and burnt, and could be made by any mortal man. The wind, while invisible to the eye, could be heard and felt within and without. But what of madness? How could the late kyrios of the Raging Heaven have struck out with madness in the same way that I struck out with the hands of my violent intent? How could he have scoured his enemies with madness the same way I did with flame?

It was exceedingly difficult to intuit.

But I was beginning to understand.

“You’re a pest,” the Scholar rendered judgement upon me.

“And you’re a liar,” I responded in kind.

“I’m a liar?”

“‘Polyzalus has left his domain. Nowhere in Olympia is safe.’” I repeated his delirious words from before, mocking him even as he threw me to the ground. I caught myself with pankration hands and rose. “You made us think he was on the warpath. You made us think he was coming for us. You lied.”

“He did leave his domain, when the girl’s statue first broke apart. He came after me, and he put me through my paces. And I had little choice but to suffer it, because in my old age I was foolish enough to assure him his daughter wouldn’t come to harm with the two of you around her. Every word I said was true enough. None of it was a lie.”

The Gadfly crossed his bandaged arms over his bandaged chest and sneered at me.

“Is that sort of truth not good enough for you, boy?”

These hands of mine had made him whole. They could take him apart again just as well.

“You’re going to pull the grafts out of your body if you don’t rest,” Anastasia warned the philosopher, though she maintained a safe distance from him as she paced through the wreckage left in my passing to kneel beside me. Searing heat wound through my body, coalescing in my hip where the Gadfly had struck me. Distantly, as if an afterthought, she said to me, “You dug out new channels while you were gone.”

I traced the paths left behind by the starlight marrow months ago and realized she was right. They had changed again. They were further linked, now, every strand connected. A more refined network.

A wheel.

“I stretched the truth, I’ll give you that much,” the Gadfly admitted, settling into a cross-legged seating position across from me and rubbing irritably at the bandages on his thighs. He didn’t tear them off, though. “But tell me this - has the girl gone running back to her father?”

“She has,” Scythas answered, a whisper that all of us heard despite the fact that he was still up in his distant tree.

“Then all is well. The girl is stubborn and foolish, and stronger than she has any right to be thanks to the meddling of old men, but she’s still a girl. My wounds frightened her, and the thought of what her father would do to any of you if he got his hands on you frightened her more. She’d have dug her heels into the earth and fought me every step of the way if I tried to drag her back to her father the honest way, but like this, she’ll return to him herself.”

“You convinced Old ‘Zalus to wait,” I said, knowing in my gut that it was true. “He burnt you, but he didn’t kill you. And he didn’t leave the mountain. Just his room.”

Socrates shrugged. “Even that much was a torment for him. He hates to leave his wife unattended.”

“You knew we wouldn’t turn the ship around,” I continued.

“I hoped you would.”

I scoffed. “You played us.”

“Sometimes, even if a child knows that a thing is just and correct, they won’t do it unless they believe it was their idea to do it first.”

The Gadfly had led us to believe that all of Olympia was a danger above any other, that a wrathful Tyrant could be hiding behind every corner. He had made us believe that none of us were safe from Polyzalus - and by association, none of the people we had associated with up until now in the city of Olympia. Anyone that we had spoken to that could feasibly be used to find us.

And in so doing, he had made a mistake.

“You’ve erred, wise man.”

“Is that so?” the Gadfly waved a hand. “Enlighten me.”

“You’ve made an assumption that, in fairness, greater men than you have made. But just because you’re in esteemed company doesn’t make you any less wrong.”

“And what assumption is that?”

I leaned forward.

“You assumed that I was the mad one of the two of us.”

I watched his brow furrow, his lips pull down into a frown. To his credit, it was only a brief moment of confusion that preceded realization.

The Scholar rose abruptly to his feet.

“Where is the boy?”

I clapped with hands of flesh and blood, and when that wasn’t enough I clapped with thirty more of my intent.

“You played us like a lyre, old man,” I praised him, while understanding slowly dawned on Anastasia’s face. She had been wondering about Sol’s absence, but she hadn’t taken the further step to ask about it until now. “You put on such a show, put such a horrifying image of a mourning father’s wrath in our heads, we couldn’t help but believe you. Selene was so distraught at the idea of her father doing to another innocent what he had done to you that she went straight home.”

The Gadfly’s pneuma rose. I smiled mercilessly in the face of his panic and his rage, returning it with my own. The waves of our influence slammed together and roared like tidal waves.

“Sol was mad enough to blame himself for allowing the girl to sneak aboard our ship in the first place,” I continued, my smile shifting with every word. Until, in the end, it was nothing but a pleasant snarl. “He took your death upon his shoulders. And so, to avoid any more casualties, he went with her. To bargain.”

“With Polyzalus?” Socrates thundered, shaking the trees.

“No,” the wind replied. Above us, Scythas gazed grimly in the direction of the distant Half-Step City. “With Aleuas.”

A Tyrant for a Tyrant.