Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.98

The Young Griffon

“You’re a Thracian,” Sol said, the pieces falling into place in his mind as they were in mine.

“I was born in Thracia,” Scythas corrected him, with the weariness of long practice. “I was raised in the Hurricane Heights. Since the day I stood under my own power, I’ve refined myself in the Greek style. In every way that matters, I am Greek.”

I began to understand. “And yet.”

“And yet,” Scythas murmured, “To the natural born citizens of the free cities, I am Thracian. I was, I am, and I will always be. The day my father died in Thracia, so long ago that I can’t even remember what he looked like, my mother bundled my newborn brother and I up in our wagon and rode our horse to death trying to reach the free cities. When the horse died she sold the wagon and all of its contents, everything we owned except for the clothes we were wearing and the meat from our horse. And she carried us the rest of the way.”

“Why?” Sol asked. Scythas shrugged.

“Prosperity, she told me. A better life. Her health was already at risk back then, having just recently given birth. The journey took most of her health from her, and when we reached the lands of northern Greece the squalls took what remained. She worked when she could find work to do, but the kind of work a weak and foreign woman is offered is sparse and often vile. It was difficult. We starved most days. The only reason she fed herself at all was because she knew my brother needed the milk. Once she had weaned him off of it, she hardly ate at all.”

Scythas sighed and looked up at the heavens. “My soul awoke the day she died. I was still too young to be worth anything as a laborer. Seven, maybe eight. I can’t remember. My brother had just learned how to walk. I was too young to be of use in the overturned breadbasket of the Free Mediterranean, but I was old enough to know it.

“My mother had always told me to seek the city in the sky, the City of Squalls and its Howling Wind Cult. That was prosperity. That was our salvation. Once every year the elders of the Howling Wind would descend from their airborne city and venture out into the mangled fields that had once served as the free world’s breadbasket, and they would sift through the detritus in search of promising souls. Those they found would be taken back to the city and subjected to the trials that preceded the rites. That was our only chance.

“We avoided the winds and lived off of scraps that I could find for us in the dirt until that the time for recruitment came. Men and women in cloth of vibrant green descended from their city, and all but one of them looked past us without hesitation.”

I scowled. But I wasn’t surprised. The Rosy Dawn turned away far more hopeful Civic cultivators than it admitted. The rest of the greater mystery cults were little different in the end.

“We were just skin and bones,” Scythas said, and oddly enough, his tone was almost fond as he recalled it. “Filthy and savage, hardly anything at all. Fortunately for us, one of the elders had no interest in leaving the eye of the storm, and was content to take me for no other reason than that my soul was awoken. He even let me bring my brother. For a moment, I thought I’d finally managed to grasp what my mother had been fruitlessly searching for since my father died.”

“But you failed,” I said, because I understood that attending the trials that preceded the rites in a mystery cult was not the same thing as becoming an initiate.

“I failed,” Scythas confirmed. “I was skin and bones, and I had never received a formal education. I had no idea how to cultivate. My first attempt at carving a block of spirit marble with my pneuma was hideous to behold.”

“What happened then?” Sol asked him quietly.

“When a hopeful initiate fails, they are encouraged to try again the next year and escorted from the city,” Scythas explained. “Another year down in the hurricane wastes would have been a death sentence for my brother and I. Thankfully, apathy saved us once again.”

It wasn’t funny at all, but I couldn’t help it. I chuckled.

“The elder didn’t want to escort you back down.”

Scythas’ lips twitched at their corners. He shook his head. “Elder Demeas was many things. Dutiful was not one of them. He took one look at me and my brother, both of us in tears - me because I’d failed and my brother because I was crying - and he just… waved us off. He knew we had nothing waiting for us down below, but he didn’t care enough to take us in. So he cast us out into the City of Squalls and told us to begone from his sight until the next year’s recruitment came around. If I was still alive by then, he’d sponsor my next attempt so that he could avoid descending from the city at all.”

“Kind of him,” I mused. “And cruel, as well. A foreigner is only ever welcome for their wealth.”

Scythas snorted. “A lesson I learned quickly.”

Scythas whistled a soft, errant note, and the winds traveling west along the surface of the Aegean abruptly shifted and whirled up into the Eos’ sail, filling it to its limit and doubling our pace alongside the rowing of my pankration hands.

“You made it to the next year’s trial,” Sol observed. “Did someone else take you in?”

“No one.” Scythas shook his head. “Just the wind. There was no one in a city of Civic cultivators that would hire on a filthy Thracian street rat, no matter how well I spoke the language or how hard I swore to work. So I did the only thing I could do to keep my brother healthy and whole.”

“No one would give,” I mused. “So you took.”

The light behind the Hero’s eyes flickered, in time with the beating of his heart. Just the slightest bit mischievous. “In their own way, a thief can be a scholar of the wind as well. The breeze can mask noise as well as carry it. Carry the smell of a grimy street rat to an unsuspecting merchant’s nose, or otherwise away from it, depending on which direction they approached from. And in the City of Squalls especially, the wind can cut purse strings as well as any knife.

“When the initiation trials next came around, I had refined my cultivation several stages and was no longer skin and bones. Elder Demeas was intrigued enough by my progress and healthy appearance to personally advise me in the moments before I carved my spirit marble, and with his wisdom I passed. I gained admittance to the Howling Wind Cult, and in so doing secured a prosperous life for my brother and I. Just like my mother wanted.”

“If that’s so,” Sol said, knowing the false resolution for what it was, “Then why are you here?”

“As it turned out, the thieving life had done my body and my soul a service,” Scythas said, and the levity in his voice ran directly counter to the black wavering of his heart. “I was no longer skin and bones, and my rapid ascent through the early ranks of the Civic Realm had refined me into something less repulsive to the eye. After I’d had a proper bath and a set of cult robes allotted to me, a few of my fellow junior mystikos even remarked on my appearance.”

The Hero of the Scything Squall smiled, lovely as any marble beauty. “They said that I looked pretty. Almost like a girl.”

A lead weight settled in my stomach.

“I fell into the daily duties of a junior mystiko without issue. I struggled at first with the mathematical lessons, even with Elder Demeas doing his best to tutor me when he bothered to come out from behind closed doors. Still, I more than made up for it in my martial pursuits. The wind was with me from the start. My seniors said they’d never seen anything like it in someone my age. My peers envied or admired me, more often than not both.

“A year passed. Then two. Before I knew it I had become something of a rising star within the Howling Wind Cult. At twelve years old I ascended to the Sophic Realm. It was an achievement worth celebrating, even by the standards of a greater mystery cult. Worthy of an entire day’s celebration, with all of the cult in attendance. At the end of the feast, I was invited to approach the true Eye of the Storm, the kyrios’ own throne, to receive a reward for my efforts from the head of the cult himself.

“Naturally, as I had progressed through the Civic Realm, I had further refined my body - and grown older besides. By that point, it had become a running joke among my peers that I was easier on the eyes than any of the cult’s young beauties,” Scythas explained, rolling his eyes good-naturedly.

I leaned back into the ship’s wooden figurehead, away from the black thumping of his heart. Sol straightened up from his slouch against the rail. His expression steadily darkening.

“As it turned out, the kyrios agreed.”

“No,” I said, unable to believe it. I refused to believe it.

“As a reward for my exceptional efforts in refining my soul, I was gifted three clay jugs filled to their rims with the Howling Wind’s finest undiluted kykeon, as well as a sack full of spirit olives and a set of silk robes that only senior mystikos had the privilege of wearing. However, to my great fortune, the Tyrant that rose in the Hurricane Hierophant’s absence decided to reward the exceptional refinement of my body with an offer of personal tutelage.”

“What,” Sol said flatly. That storm was raging in his eyes.

“A Thracian boy with nothing to his name but what his cult had given him. How could I have been anything but thankful?” Scythas’ smile was an objectively beautiful thing. Yet the longer I looked at it, the more furiously sickened I became. “He took me under his wing, taught me the secrets hidden in the hurricane winds. For the next ten years, I served directly underneath him.”

Among heaven and earth, there were certain immutable truths. One of them was this.

“As his catamite.”

A Tyrant’s hunger was an insatiable thing.

The Hero of the Scything Squall pulled back the veil around his heart, locking eyes with me again. Just long enough for me to feel what he felt. Every oar in the Eos groaned and snapped out of its frame, wrenched to pieces by the clenching of my violent intent. Miraculously, the men of the ship didn’t stir at the mad cascade. For the same reason that the daughter of the Oracle hadn’t once stirred from her slumber since Scythas had spoken up, if I had to guess - the wind had carried the sound of it away at his request.

“I’m unfamiliar with the culture in Rome, Solus, so this may sound odd to you,” the Hero said to Sol while maintaining eye contact with me. “But in Greece, there is a practice known as pedarasty.”

“Boy love,” Sol echoed, as disgusted as I’d ever seen him. Scythas inclined his head.

“A physical union between a man and a boy, with the offer of mentorship often implied. For ten years, this was my arrangement with the kyrios of the Howling Wind Cult. Under him, I grew and climbed the ranks of the Sophic Realm, all the way to the peak that lingers at the edge of mortality - Captain of the Sophic Realm, and only just over twenty years old. A magnificent feat. During that time, my brother grew older and awakened his own soul. Close as the kyrios kept me, it was only a given that my brother would be accepted into the cult as well.

“Our lives were prosperous. We’d found our salvation,” Scythas explained, while his heart bled black bile over my new sensory perception. I muscled down the urge to gag.

“In the end, my brother inherited our mother’s fine features as well.”

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. I felt ill.

“Ten years I suffered his touch.” The Hero’s expression cracked, the truth of his heart showing in the gaps between it. His voice hitched, but only for a moment. “And I was content with that. My brother was healthy and whole, thriving as much as any Young Aristocrat - he’d been so young during our starving days that he couldn’t even remember them. That made it worthwhile. As far as I was concerned, that was the scale balanced.

“But when the Eye of the Storm turned away from me to look at him, that was a step too far. If he laid his hands on my brother as he had on me, then all of it was for nothing. All of it was for nothing. I was defiled for no one. My virtuous heart wouldn’t allow it.

“The moment I heard the whispers that the kyrios had offered my brother a private lesson in his own estate, I flew into a rage. I went to his quarters immediately and I told him I would strike him down where he stood if he ever laid a hand on my brother.”

I stared at the image of a Hero that I had never seen before. In the scything winds that whipped through the sea around our ship like blades, tearing gouges from the waves like a giant’s lashing dagger, I heard the promise of retribution. In his furious hazel glare, run through by veins of shining gold, I saw the surety of glory. And in the thunderous beating of his heart, I felt the hurricane’s wrath.

“A Philosopher threatening a Tyrant is a ludicrous thing,” Scythas said softly, murder in every word. “But a Captain of the Sophic Realm is more than just a Philosopher. He is a threat of retribution. Only half a step from glory. And all the more likely in their inexperience to be reckless with that glory once they’ve grasped it.

“I promised the man that led the Howling Wind that I would cast him down if he ever touched my brother, even if I had to burn my heart to ashes in the process. He believed me.”

Of course he did. I would have believed it in his place.

“He hated me for it, of course. Lashed out, called me every name that had been whispered in the halls of the cult for the last ten years - they all had the same meaning in the end. Boy whore. They were nothing new, and because of that they couldn’t hurt me. But when I made him swear our oath on the Styx, made him swear it beneath the view of raging heaven, he went a step further than that. He found the words that could still cut me.

“Closer to a Scythian than a Greek.”

He said it in another man’s voice. One that I hadn’t heard before - the Eye of the Storm’s voice. The kyrios of the Howling Wind Cult.

I engraved it in my memory.

“He called into question my right to invoke the Styx. He called into question my identity as a Greek, when that was all I’d thought of myself as since the bleakest early days of my life. It surprised me how much it stung.”

Scythas splayed his hands, offering the truth up to me in all its ugly splendor. “When those bees stung me, I dreamt I was a boy again. I dreamt that all the world had been consumed by the hurricane, and all that remained was the Eye of the Storm. I dreamt that I was in his quarters, and felt his hands on my body. I dreamt I was a catamite once more.”

All at once, the veil slammed down over his heart once more and the Hero sagged back on his rowing bench like he’d just run a hundred marathons.

“I wasn’t Scythas when I came to Olympia,” he muttered, cradling his head in his hands and rubbing at his temples. “Not until Bakkhos took me into his confidence and shared his story with me. I don’t know how much he knew explicitly, and how much of it was just a feeling. But he… he understood. Not every element of it, maybe, not personally. But he understood.

“Everywhere you go, you’ll be the foreigner,” Scythas said in Bakkhos’ voice. “Accept it now or when you’re dead. That truth will never change.” He chuckled faintly. “He was never soft, but he was kind in his own way. He was the one that told me a name chosen was worth just as much as a name received. Sometimes more. He told me I could take a Greek name to replace the Thracian one that my mother gave me. He said it might help, at least in the cities where I wasn’t known.”

I shook my head, marveling at the audacity of it. “So you chose the most Thracian name that you possibly could, short of Thrascas.”

Scythas. The Scythian.

In every way that mattered, closer to a Scythian than a Greek.