Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.83

The Young Griffon

The Conqueror’s polis was not entirely abandoned.

The husk of a city - what Sol insisted had once been a military colony - was all but rubble now, nearly every structure bearing scars and infirmities. There was not a stone column remaining without a few cracks or missing chunks. Every wall was at least partially collapsed, every door torn down or left hanging morosely in its frame. Decorative carvings had been scraped away. Murals had been scoured off the walls or otherwise painted over. All in all, it was a desecration too complete to be the work of Kronos alone.

However, there was one building that still stood without any signs of wear. Ironically, in this abandoned city of scattered bricks and marble rubble, the only monument left intact was made of wood. A humble odeon - also known as a singing house. A smaller iteration of a Greek theater, with a shingled roof of sun-baked clay added onto the design to facilitate better acoustics.

A pair of Thracians sat at the entrance, one on either side. Scythas pulled ahead with his mare as they came into view, making a beeline towards them. As we drew closer I saw that one was a man and the other a woman.

The man was a typical example of his breed, red-haired and larger than the average unrefined Greek by the full span of a hand. The details of his physique were mostly obscured by his ridiculous Thracian pants and voluminous chiton, but his crossed arms were bare and layered with muscle. Vibrant blue tattoos stood out starkly from the man’s pale skin, patterned like ivy leaves growing up and down his arms.

The woman was a sharp departure from the mothers and wives we had seen tending to the children and men of Thracia’s wandering cities. Her clothes matched the style of the man beside her, as did the tattoos on her arms, and dark makeup shadowed her eyes while also coating her lips. Her brown hair fell freely without braids or cloth to bind it. The only ornament on her head was a crescent band of gold, less than a crown but more than a tiara. As we approached, I saw a pattern of hexagonal shapes pressed into the gold. Like it was made of honeycomb rather than metal.

Scythas stopped his dappled mare a respectful distance from the Thracians and the entry they were guarding. Sol and I shared a doubtful look.

“This… doesn’t seem promising,” Selene said quietly, leaning sideways to look around Sol at the wooden singing house. “I can’t sense anyone besides those two at the door.”

“Neither can I,” Sol confirmed, and I made a noise of my own agreement.

It was surprising enough that I could feel something from the two sitting guard. They were Thracians, that much was plain to see from their features and the clothes they were wearing, but even so I could feel it as their notice brushed over me and their influence parted around mine. The sensation of their vital essence was odd, familiar and yet alien. I was all but certain they were cultivators of some kind, but I couldn’t intuitively grasp their standing the way I could a Greek’s.

“It could be a veil of some kind,” I said, considering them as we drew closer. Thracian gatekeepers in a ruined Macedonian city. “Or it could be that everyone inside is unawoken.”

“Could be that there’s no one there at all,” Selene murmured. I glanced sidelong at the daughter of the Oracle, reaching across the distance with a pankration hand and lightly shoving her shoulder. She blinked, breaking her gloomy focus.

“We don’t need it to be packed full of rowdy barbarians,” I reminded the girl. “So long as there’s wine and a golden cup to pour it in, we’ll have found our way.”

“Scythas knows what he’s doing,” Sol assured her, and though the words were spoken at a solemn volume, I saw Scythas straighten up a fraction in his saddle up ahead.

“Our destination is inside,” the Hero informed us when we joined him, Sol on his left and myself on his right. “All that’s left to do is pay.” I looked down on the woman wearing a half-crown of honeycomb gold. She raised an eyebrow at me, expression disinterested.

“I have no money,” I told her. This close, I could count the combs of her half-crown and see the individual flakes of gold strung through the hem of her chiton - grape leaves, to accompany the black threads woven to look like vines.

I could also see the faint glitter of gold dust in the shadowed makeup around her eyes when she blinked and tilted her head.

“You have a horse.”

The price of doing business in Thracia. It seemed Scythas had been speaking more literally than I’d first thought.

“I’ll work for it,” I offered instead, politely ignoring Sol’s disgusted sigh.

The Thracian woman was seated on the right hand side of the wooden stairs leading up to the singing house’s entrance. Aside from her maroon chiton and garishly patterned pants, she had nothing at hand to protect her from Boreas’ cruel winds or the snow covering the steps. Nothing but a hollow horn cup filled with white liquid, emitting no steam.

Yet her bare arms did not shiver, neither her fingers nor her naked toes were blackened by frost, and as she sipped from her frigid beverage she seemed entirely unbothered by the weather. I waited patiently while she considered my offer.

“No.”

“Don’t be fooled by my ugly cloak,” I said, plucking at the gift I had received from the men of the Korpiloi tribe. Manifesting the limbs of my violent intent, I blessed her briefly with the heat of my cult’s foundational mystery. “A Greek Philosopher is offering you his service in exchange for admittance to this derelict theater. Ask me any question and I’ll answer it truthfully. Assign me any task and I will see it done. You have my word.”

“Griffon,” Scythas snapped. I raised an eyebrow of my own at the gatekeeper. She took another sip from her horn.

“In that case- no.”

“No,” I echoed her, considering the barbarian woman. “But if I gave you this horse, that would be enough?”

The woman eyed my horse critically. Finally, she nodded. “Just barely.”

“So then,” I said mildly, continuing the thought. “What you’re telling me, ultimately, is that everything I am capable of saying and doing is worth less to you than a horse without a saddle.”

To her credit, she did not hesitate.

“Yes.”

I smiled sharply. “Tell me, barbarian, are you familiar with the concept of discourse? Would you like to exchange some?”

“Griffon,” Sol rumbled in low warning. I glanced left and saw the storm in his eyes. He was serious. His pneuma rose to match mine, an unspoken ultimatum - if I started another brawl here, he’d make good on his prior warning to join in on the opposing side. Doubtlessly, Scythas would join him over me. A hopeless fight.

I considered it.

“Enough.” Scythas growled. “Why are you trying to find another way? Acquiring horses we didn’t need and shackling ourselves to their pace, that was for this moment. You didn’t even pay for yours - I did.”

“That’s true,” I agreed.

“Then what’s the issue?”

I laid an open palm against the side of my slender runner’s head. She leaned into it, huffing softly. With my other hand, the one that I had fisted in her mane for lack of reins to hold, I thumbed the glossy black braids that I had decided suited her best.

“I was considering naming her,” I told the Hero. For a moment, he was lost for words.

“There…” Scythas sighed. “There will be other horses, Griffon. Unless you planned on making the rest of this journey over land at her pace, we wouldn’t have been able to take her with us anyway. She’d despise the Eos.”

“Perhaps.” I leaned forward, tapping the pure white mare to get her attention. Her dull yellow eye settled on me. “What say you? If I gave you a name and spared you this bleak fate, would you tolerate an unsteady deck and wide open seas?” I spoke each word carefully, enunciating with such clarity that my boyhood mentors would have wept tears of joy to hear it. I searched her eye for a hint of understanding. Some semblance of a spark, like the expectation in Sorea’s eyes whenever the eagle looked at Sol.

The Thracian mare stared back at me with an animal’s vacant curiosity. I frowned, leaned away, and dismounted. As I slid off her back, I pulled the fingers of my violent intent through the black hair of her mane and undid its braids.

“Fine. Take the beast. While you’re at it, tell me why I’m giving it to you before I change my mind.”

“Neither of us told you to come here, Greek,” the muscled Thracian man on the left edge of the stairs remarked. He raised his own horn of cold white liquid to his lips and drank noisily, eyes shut in languid bliss. He belched when he was done, and once his eyes finally drifted open to regard me, there was a dull enjoyment in them.

“You’ll have to excuse him,” his companion said with flagrant insincerity. “He was raised in a savage culture, you see. He doesn’t know any better.”

“Do you find my manners distasteful?” the man asked me. Upon further inspection, I saw hints of blue ink on his scalp in the gaps where his hair naturally parted. More than just his arms, the Thracian had tattooed his own scalp.

“I find nearly everything about you distasteful,” I told him honestly. He chortled around his next sip.

“What is this place?” Sol asked, remaining on his stallion while Scythas joined me in dismounting and began stripping his mount of her fastenings.

“This is a sanctuary of various faces,” the Thracian man answered him, waving languidly at the destitute odeon behind them. “A place to sing, a place to take shelter from the storm, a place to be lost-”

“-And a place to be found,” his companion added. He tipped his horn cup to her.

“Certainly that,” he agreed. “This here is the first monument built in our humble settlement, and the last one left intact. The Orphic House, should it suit your pleasure.”

“Orphic,” Sol muttered, immediately making the connection to the story I had told him just a couple nights before. I nodded fractionally, confirming it. He turned doubtful eyes on the wooden construction. “Of all the structures torn down, this was the only one to escape the fall unscathed? The oldest of them, built of the least enduring material? It looks-”

“Ramshackle,” I said, pressing my foot down on the first wooden step and listening to it groan. My glowing pankration palms flitted over the southern face of the singing house, illuminating the discolorations and impurities in its wooden panels.

“It’s in the best shape of any building here. However.” Even Scythas couldn’t fully ignore the state of it. “Infirm would be a kind word for it.”

I sneered, disgusted the more of it I saw. This was where we were meant to find our golden cup of sacred wine? It lacked sanctity. It lacked presence. Why bother maintaining a vigil here after the rest of the city fell to ruin if these barbarians weren’t going to maintain it? Where had they found the audacity to refuse my payment and take my horse for admittance to a glorified barn house? Why did it look like we’d arrived here centuries too late?

“Why does it look like it was made of broken wagons?” I demanded, unable to endure in silence.

“Because it was.”

The Thracian woman reached back, towards the ink-black silhouette cast by my rosy palms, and Scythas sucked in a sharp breath as her arm plunged elbow-deep into her own shadow. She watched me with hooded eyes as she rooted through it, the specks of gold dust in her eyeshadow catching the rosy light.

Her gaze held mine and then drifted, slowly and deliberately, down. Settling on my own silhouette.

She blinked, breaking the spell, and pulled a kithara from her shadow. An instrument with seven strings, like a lyre, but larger and with a body better suited to professional play. The lyre’s modern sibling. Unlike its humble brother, it was one that not just any Greek aristocrat could be expected to know how to play.

The mongrel woman laid the sophisticated instrument across her lap with its neck pressed to her shoulder, and she began to strum. The sound that sprung forth was undeniably pleasant.

“A word for the wise, and another to the uninitiated,” the Orphic gate keeper said in a lilting tone. Her fingers danced across the strings.

“This is a holy place, as much as it is a humble one,” the crude man opposite her on the steps spoke. He set his horned cup aside and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, assuming the role of orator to match her kitharode. “A great man lays here at rest. He was buried by an even greater man, a sworn brother that mourned him more than most. And later, much later, an even greater man than that built this humble mausoleum over his tomb as a tribute to his memory.

“The reason the Orphic House stands where all the rest inside these walls have fallen,” the gatekeeper informed Sol, answering his prior question, “is that the sons of Macedon love their king more than they hate themselves. In their grief and in their rage upon returning from the east, they tore this city apart and drove their own wives and children from their homes. That was one thing. They didn’t think twice about it. But tearing down the Orphic House was entirely another. Not even the most inconsolable soldier would have considered it.”

“Why?” I asked, suspecting the answer as I did.

The Thracian tilted his head, back to the destitute singing house built out of broken wagons.

“This place is special, unlike any other building in the city. The king that ordered this colony erected, the man you call the Conqueror - he built this one himself.”