Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

The Young Griffon

“The old man you’re here to punch,” whispered the little king, Leo, “it’s the Gadfly, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“We’ll help you,” the little king decided. “Won’t we, Pyr?” His loyal sentinel nodded.

“I don’t recall asking for your help.”

The boys shared a look behind my back, still clinging to me like monkeys as I ascended through the various estates of the Raging Heaven Cult.

“Where we’re from,” Pyr, the little sentinel, said, “a student has to prove himself before his mentor will take him on. The greater the student, the greater his deed will be.”

“The two of you assisted me in combat against a hero’s virtuous beast,” I said, patting them both on their cloth-covered heads with pankration hands. “I know philosophers that wouldn’t have the guts for such a thing. Was that not enough for you?”

“Of course not,” the little king hissed, indignant. “What sort of king stops short at a beast?”

I found myself smiling.

“You two remind me of my cousins,” I said, amused. I nodded at a trio of young philosophers as they walked past. Their eyes lingered on the Rosy Dawn attire hanging around my waist, on the laurel wreaths wrapped around each of my biceps, and on the pair of mongrel children hanging off my shoulders. I clearly saw their suspicion of me at war with their confidence in the men that guarded the mountain. I did not belong, but I could not possibly be here against the will of the Raging Heaven. They hesitantly nodded back and hurried down the steps.

“You have cousins?” the little sentinel asked.

“How many?” the little king asked eagerly.

“Five.”

“And how many siblings?”

“None that I know of,” I said lightly.

“That you know of?” the little king’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean?”

“It means my father is a worldly man. He traveled the Mediterranean to its furthest limits when he was my age. Who is to say how many seeds he planted along the way?”

“Is he a powerful cultivator?”

“Of course he was,” the little king answered his brother’s question scornfully. “Just look at his son. The proper question is how powerful is he? Griffon?”

“I wonder,” I mused, looking up past the amethyst veins of Kaukoso Mons, past the Storm

That Never Ceases, to the risen sun. “A thought occurs to me.” The boys leaned in attentively.

“You said that the greater a student is, the greater their offering will naturally be to a prospective mentor. I’m assuming in the city of your birth that such transactions are often more materialistic than what you’re suggesting. Riches rather than actions.”

Their silence spoke volumes. I chuckled and flicked them both on their noses.

“I have no issue being paid with virtue over vice. However, the other thing that occurred to me - if a hopeful student’s offering is scaled to their worth, then wouldn’t a prospective mentor’s price be scaled in the same way?”

“That’s true…” Pyr slowly agreed.

“What’s your point?” little Leo demanded.

“You’ve offered to take up arms against the Gadfly with me,” I reiterated, waiting for them both to signal their agreement. “To stand against the Scholar, an act that I’ve personally seen Heroic cultivators cringe away from as if I’d asked them to dive into the Styx. What you’ve offered is more than most men would ever willingly give.”

I tilted my head back, smiling languidly at the upstart vagrants from the city of conquerors. Home to the Scattered Foam Cult.

“What makes you think that is nearly good enough to be my students?”

“What!?” the little king shouted, pounding on my back. “That’s unreasonable! That’s beyond unreasonable, even for a king - and you’re no king!”

“Who told you that?” I asked curiously.

“... you are?” The little sentinel whispered.

“Of course.”

“King of what? King of where?” little Leo pressed me.

“King of the greatest kingdom among heaven and earth. King of the only kingdom that matters.”

“Where?”

“Tell us!”

I tilted my head up. “King of the rising sun.”

Then I threw them both through an open door.

A medical pavilion had no business being opulent, but here we were. The Raging Heaven had decorated its place for the ill and infirm with tapestries of the first physician and exquisitely stitched depictions of the greatest of his works. Alchemical processes and the distillation of medications were stitched into a visual format, recipes that were pleasing to the eye. Carved into each of the supporting pillars that held up the roof was a line from the Hippocratic oath, the same oath that I had taken with Anastasia as my witness in the forests outside of Olympia.

The boys scrambled to their feet amidst the scolding of physicians. A man in a pure white tunic with sashes of indigo and gold wrapped tightly around his forearms and hands stalked over from a nearby bed to berate them. Panicked, the little sentinel placed himself between his brother and the approaching surgeon. The little king grit his teeth and balled his fists.

“Senior!” I greeted him gaily, stepping into the medical pavilion where mystikos of the Raging Heaven came to be made well. The man looked sharply my way as I entered. He was tan, shorter than Scythas with a stockier build; cultivation had rendered him aesthetically rugged rather than runty. As his influence crested against mine, I identified him as a Philosopher of the fifth rank. He was old enough to be my father.

This was a man that had gained entrance to the Raging Heaven through specialized knowledge of medicine alone, rather than through exceptional cultivation. Which meant that he was an utterly unremarkable man in one sense, and a valuable resource in another.

“Who’s your senior?” The irritated physician demanded, picking the little sentinel up by the back of his peplos. His younger brother tensed, and I saw murder in the coiling of his body. “I’ve never seen you in my life, and I’ve especially never seen these two-”

With the hands of my violent intent I struck the physician at a vulnerable juncture in his wrist, catching the little sentinel with pankration hands when the physician’s hand spasmed open, releasing him.

The physician’s pneuma flooded the medical pavilion. In the light of the risen sun, pure white sheets seemed to glow as they fell to the marble floor - patients that could move threw off their covers as a cultivator’s fury roused them from a dead sleep. I saw his peers, men and women of varying rank within the Sophic Realm, prepare themselves for a fight. Some immediately made their way over. Others hastened to finish up their current work, bound by the first physician’s oath.

“Perhaps an introduction to start,” I said, raising my flesh and blood hands in friendly surrender.

“You come into my asclepieia,” the stout physician said furiously, advancing on me while the boys stood their ground at my side. “Disrupt my patients. Strike the hand with which I heal-”

“My name is Griffon,” I said, offering him a hand. He slapped it aside, standing nose-to-nose with me. He had to crane his neck back to do it, of course, but the sentiment was there.

“I don’t know who you think you are, and I don’t care to know either,” he said dangerously, the waves of his pneuma crashing against mine. I weathered it without retaliation, raising an eyebrow. “But around here, juniors do not strike a physician’s hands. You think this entire mountain is yours to torment? It’s not. You would-be soldiers need to remember who it is that makes you whole again after tribulation strikes you down.”

I met his furious eyes, and a broader picture began to form inside my mind. I flooded the healing house with my violent intent, thirty hands of roaring pneuma that flexed and grasped at the open air. The tension grew thick enough that I felt I could open my mouth and take a bite out of it. The healing man in front of me, a physician that had no doubt devoted his life to mending rather than harming, did not falter for even an instant.

So it was like that.

“My apologies,” I said, bowing my head, and with each hand forced the boys to bow theirs as well. “This one is not yet familiar with a physician’s conventions.”

I didn’t raise my head or allow the boys to raise theirs until the physician stepped back, having found the sincerity in my gesture that he was looking for. I smiled brightly, and he scowled. His brow was heavy, as was his jaw. His eyes were dark slits as they regarded me.

“A serene environment is as important as any medicine where the humors are concerned,” he said flatly. “Your brothers and sisters within this cult depend on that serenity to heal. For some of them, it’s the difference between life and death. Do your roughhousing outside.”

“Of course, senior.”

“Otus,” he snapped. “It’s Otus. Now get out of my pavilion.”

“That I can’t do,” I said, and it was then that Otus the physician realized I still hadn’t dismissed the manifestations of my violent intent. Instead, they had found purchase on blankets and hanging veils of silk used for privacy. They ripped and they tore.

“What-!”

“I’m here to visit a patient,” I said mildly. The boys looked up at me, confused. Ah. There she was.

A beautiful woman that could have been five years older than me, or fifty, pulled the sheets up to her neck as two of my pankration hands tore her veil of silk down from around her bed, revealing her to the rest of us.

“There you are,” I said, stepping through the physician. He stumbled back against another patient’s bed, the ill mystiko reaching out to study the stout doctor.

“Who are you?” the woman in the bed demanded. She dragged herself up into a sitting position, moving with her arms. From the waist down she was motionless. “I’ve never seen you before.”

Her pneuma lashed out, but it was crippled. It broke before it reached me, hardly more than a ripple in a still pond. Her body was broken and her cultivation had broken with it.

“How did you know I was here?” Her eyes darted to the myriad physicians present in the healing house. Somehow, none of them stopped me. There was an expectant dread in the asclepieia. Somehow, even Otus seemed to be waiting for something.

I supposed I might as well deliver it to them.

How had I known she’d be here?

“A raven told me.”

The woman whose name was Harmodius paled. The woman who had once been a Crow before my worthless Roman brother threw her off Kaukoso Mons slumped back down on her bed, chest heaving as she began to panic.

“None of that, now.” Burning pankration hands whirled through the healing house, causing physicians to flinch and stumble as they swept past and settled themselves all across the crippled woman’s body. “I’ve only come to talk, I promise you that.”

“You,” she gasped, chest heaving. “You.”

“I,” I agreed, and flooded her pneuma with my own.

I had wondered, briefly, when my instruction with Anastasia first began, whether the process of healing would be identical to the subsuming of self that the Reign-Holder’s starlight marrow had tried to inflict upon me and Sol. In the end, it hadn’t been the same process at all. It hadn’t even been close.

Where the marrow had burned and forced its way past all natural barriers within us, my pneuma simply flowed. I allowed the currents of her own vital breath to guide me, and slowly, her frenzied gasps slowed to match my own deep, steady inhalation. I tracked my pneuma’s progress through her body, each pankration hand pressed against her skin acting as another eye.

Serenity. Balance between the four biles. No matter which path was taken, the destination was ever the same. Eukrasia. Healthy equilibrium. For now, while I was still a student in this field, it was enough to know that the problem would reside where the biles were in greatest flux.

I found it immediately.

“Your spine is broken,” I said quietly. The boys clambered up onto the bed by her legs, watching the flames dance on my pankration hands without burning the sheets.

“I already know that.” Panic gave way to defeat.

“So you’re a physician as well as a thug?” Otus said, standing just far enough from the bed for it to be clear that he wasn’t involved. Yet there was rage in those words. In the shaking of his clenched fists.

“Not yet,” I admitted. “Anastasia isn’t finished with me yet.”

It was interesting to see how people reacted to a demon’s name. Physicians and patients alike tensed, gasped, averted their eyes and turned away from me. Before this moment I had been a danger sent from an unknown party. But now I was known. The shadow my caustic mentor cast was long.

Otus, for his part, only became angrier.

“This is a safe place,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. I watched his eyes dart across me, across the hands of my intent. Sizing me up, gauging his odds were he to strike. My respect for him rose, just a bit. “This is a safe place, like all of the Raging Heaven is meant to be but is not. Like the city of Olympia is meant to be, but is not. Can your power plays not wait until the woman is healed?”

“No, they can’t,” I said frankly, and Harmodius moaned in quiet despair. “Because I’ve come to speak to a woman on the mend, and instead I’ve found a cripple.”

Otus’ brow furrowed.

“She’s crippled? Where?” the little king asked, concerned. He patted the former crow’s legs and arms, In the gaps where my pankration hands were not covering her.

I smacked him on his head and gave his older brother a look. The little sentinel took it for what it was, yanking his brother back to the edge of the bed and hushing his complaints.

“If I tell you she’s crippled, why would your first impulse be to touch her?” I asked him. “I know Lefteris hasn’t set the best example, but try to use your head.”

“Don’t talk about Theri like that,” the little king said petulantly. I snorted, turning back to my senior in the field of mending.

He was staring hard at me. Trying to unravel something behind my eyes. “You’re Anastasia‘s student?”

“In medicine,” I confirmed. “Otherwise, she’s a friend.” I watched him absorb that, watched the muscles in his cloth-wrapped arms flex as he fought the urge to punch me in my mouth.

And I watched the fight go out of a man that had been defied in his own domain. Defied by a lone junior he had never met, whose cultivation was lesser to his own.

I frowned.

“How many times has this happened?” I asked.

“Has what happened?” he asked. I watched him steadily, until he looked away.

“How many times has this happened since the kyrios died?” I clarified. A nearby physician, a woman with gentle hands and flowers braided in her hair, shivered and turned away.

The head physician shook his head. “Too many times.”

“And how many of the visits lead to immediate discharges of your patients? To permanent discharges?”

All of them, his silence said.

I took that in. Accepted it into myself.

My pneuma rose.

“Physician,” I murmured. He grit his teeth. I waved a hand at Harmodius, the Crow we had crippled. “Why isn’t this woman healed yet? It’s been days.”

“You said it yourself,” he bit out, hating every word. He didn’t question how I’d known about her admittance. He didn’t have to. “Her spine is broken. She’s lost the use of her body below the waist. Such an injury… it goes beyond the balancing of humors. It goes beyond mending that any of us are capable of.”

“And what could mend it?” I asked, tracing my pneuma as it wound through her body, through channels she had forged over the course of a lifetime. By tracing those channels, Anastasia had taught me how to gauge a cultivator’s true age. Like counting the rings on a tree stump.

Harmodius was thirty-seven years old. Lying hopeless and in tears on this bed, she looked younger than me.

Otus scowled ferociously, though this time it was not at me. Not at anyone, for that matter. The stout healer withdrew into his own mind, thinking furiously over my question, and my respect for him rose again. When he spoke, it was with finality.

“For her, taking into account the break and the extremities lost- time, if she had the proper mentor and a mind for philosophy. If reason and spirit advance far enough, the body is bound to follow. The tripartite soul naturally seeks balance.”

I hummed. “Otherwise?”

“Nectar,” he said at once. “That, or ambrosia.”

The food and drink of the faceless divinity. I sighed heavily, leaning back on the bed. “And where do they sell divine sustenance in this city? Is there a stall I can go to?”

“The kyrios had his stores,” Otus said, and if he took any satisfaction from the way I perked up, pleasantly surprised, he didn’t show it. “If he left any behind it would be in his quarters.”

“Fantastic,” I said, favoring him and our grounded Crow with a smile. “I was heading there anyway.”

“You were-” Otus inhaled deeply, held it for a long beat which I did not interrupt, and then exhaled. “There’s one other possibility. Something your master might be able to do.”

“Ho?”

“Surgery,” he said. “It’s dangerous, and in the case of a spinal injury, far from assured. But if it works then it’s just as effective as ambrosia, and nearly as quick.”

“And you can’t do that?” I asked. Otus sighed heavily, crossing wrapped arms.

“You were a fighter before you were a physician,” he declared. I hummed. “You ascended to the Sophic realm through violence, or discourse, or any number of methods. And along the way you became familiar with other types of martial cultivation. True?”

“True,” I confirmed.

“Just as there are a thousand ways to do violence, there are a thousand ways to mend it. You use hands of pneuma to do your dirty work. If I asked you to instead use pneuma feet, here and now, could you do it? Having never done it before?”

I thought about it.

The boys shuffled on the bed beside me. Harmodius pulled her sheet up further, to her nose.

“Well?” Otus demanded.

“I’m thinking.”

He made a disgusted sound and swiped a hand through the air. “No! You couldn’t! What we do is as different from surgery as a foot is from a hand! We balance humors, mend what can be mended without causing further harm. We’ve sworn to never take up the knife without the proper training, as you have, and we have not been trained.”

“Surely the Raging Heaven possesses at least one surgeon,” I reasoned.

“We do,” the nearby physician said, the woman who had ducked her head. Her hands shook faintly as she tipped a cup of spirit wine into a patient’s open mouth, but she didn’t spill a drop. “Most are away from the cult. But there is one.”

“There was one,” Otus corrected the woman, though his voice was far more gentle than it had been with me.

“Was?” I asked.

“Before she was stolen away in the night,” he said. “Now, only her captor knows where Anastasia is. And perhaps her student.”

I smiled, ever so slightly.

“Boys,” I said, rising to my feet. “We’re going.” The little king and his sentinel scrambled off the bed. Behind me, Harmodius gasped and forced the sheet back over her crippled legs, it having been displaced by the boys and my own pankration hands.

But it was too late. I’d already seen the color of her cult attire.

Which king do you serve? I’d asked her the night we threw her off the side of the mountain. She’d refused to answer then, and Sol hadn’t allowed me the time to press her further. Now I knew.

Grass-green silks, the same as Scythas’. The Howling Wind Cult. I added the elder from the City of Squalls to my list of powerful people scorned.

I glanced back and saw that she knew that I knew. She slumped in despair, eyes clenched shut. A woman that had given her life and her identity in the pursuit of power, of renown - and in the end, given the use of her legs. I watched the tears she’d been fighting break through and trail down pale cheeks.

I’ll mend your legs“,” I decided. Her eyes snapped open. “With nectar or ambrosia, if I can find it. And if not, with the surgeon’s knife. I promise you that.”

I turned and walked out of the healing house, the boys close behind.