The Son of Rome

“Arrogant, belligerent child,” Socrates muttered as he stalked out of the rugged chamber with its shard of tongues. “I’ll box his ears until they fall off. Split foundations. Split foundations!”

For a long moment, I continued to stare at the shifting text chiseled into the man-size tablet, incomprehensible to me with both eyes open. I still felt that primordial shifting behind my eyes, in my skull, even in my tongue. But the bulk of it had slowed down when I stopped reading, and instinct told me that the process was not yet finished.

“My master is a good man,” I said quietly, nearly to myself. Beside me, Selene gripped the arm I had over her shoulder.

“I believe you, Solus.”

“He did the best that he could with the materials he was given, and the time that he had.” I had said it before to Griffon, and then to Socrates. “That I am what I am is not a condemnation of him. My failings are my own.”

“But you credit him with your successes, don’t you?” Selene gently prodded me. I glanced sidelong at her. At some point, she had lifted her golden veil from her face, revealing fine features, burning scarlet eyes and hair like spun gold.

“It isn’t the same,” I said.

“Why isn’t it?” Socrates called, his irritated voice drifting in from the adjacent chamber. “What differs?”

I gripped my spear and forced myself to stand, my thoughts far too tangled to keep on reading with any real focus. Selene quickly stood up with me, bearing the brunt of my weight with nothing but an encouraging huff. I sighed softly and let her do it, the two of us turning and limping out of the untarnished room.

“In the legions, accountability is king,” I said flatly, watching as Socrates rifled through one of the late Kyrios’ sleeping chambers. “It isn’t within a mentor’s power to live my life for me. Aristotle provided me with the tools that I needed to succeed, and so I credit a part of all my successes to him.”

“And why not your failures?” Socrates asked, overturning several large, woven reed baskets onto a feather bed covered in silk sheets of indigo and white. Clothing spilled out, tunics and sashes, dress robes for cult business, as well as formal attire for mortal affairs.

“Why should I?” I bit back. “Say that a farmer gives me a scythe and tells me to harvest a crop by sundown, and I return to him with only half the work done because I decided to do it with my hands instead. Is it his fault or mine?”

“Yours, surely enough,” Socrates agreed. “But what about a huntsman?”

“What about a huntsman?”

“A scythe’s function is self-evident when you’re standing in a wheat field at harvest- that’s clear enough. But what about the workings of a bow and arrow? If a hunter presents you with a bow and a quiver and tells you to bag him a fine buck by sundown, is it his fault or yours when you return empty-handed?”

“Mine.”

“Is that so? The man that knows how to track deer, how to stalk them without being spotted, and how - as well as where - to shoot them. That man presents you with a bow and some arrows and a stern demand, and you believe that it’s your fault for not living up to his expectation? And if you do, somehow, by the grace of the gods manage to bring something down through your own ingenuity, he deserves a portion of the credit for the kill?”

Socrates held up a tunic of white cloth with crimson arch designs sewn along its edges. He looked between it and me, squinting. I glared back at him.

“The comparison isn’t fair.”

Socrates threw the tunic at my face. Selene caught it just before it could hit me, and the sound of it striking her palm left me confident that it would have knocked me clean off my feet if it had hit.

“In all three scenarios, each of the masters provided their student with the tools needed to succeed,” he said, but waved a hand to brush the argument away from him. “But fine, we’ll discard the huntsman. What of the fisherman?”

I unwound my arm from Selene’s shoulder, ignoring her protest, and leaned heavily onto the celestial bronze spear I had stolen from the temple of the father. I considered the scenario.

“What’s provided?” I asked, finally. Without a set of the parameters, I knew he could wind me into a knot until the end of time.

“A net and a spear,” he said, holding a broad leather belt in his hand, considering me before grunting and tossing it back into a basket.

I exhaled, annoyed. “Fishing isn’t that hard. Acquiring the tools is more difficult than learning how to use them.”

“I know men that would disagree, but let’s say you’re right. If I gave you a net right now and told you to take that pretty spear of yours and catch me dinner, how many fish could I expect from you by sundown?”

I thought hard about it. Fishing had been a curiosity when I was a boy, a non-issue when I was a soldier in the legions. There was always someone else to do that work. Always more important things to be done. But my time at the Rosy Dawn had humbled me in many ways, and re-introduced me to many tasks I hadn’t practiced since my father had taught them to me. Fishing was one such task.

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So, I considered the time of day, the distance from here to Olympia‘s port city, and nodded sharply.

“Thirty.”

“Good.” Socrates reached into a fold in his tunic, and inexplicably, pulled from it an entire fishing net. He tossed it at my chest with only slightly less force than he had thrown the tunic. “Come back with one hundred by sundown.”

I staggered back a step as the net hit my chest, but managed to keep my feet. I pretended not to notice the way that Selene hovered behind me, her hands just barely not touching my back. I stared hard at the master of my master’s master, temper boiling.

“I can’t catch one hundred by sundown,” I said quietly.

“I can,” Socrates said, turning away from the Kyrios’ clothes and moving on to the pots and jars scattered about, perched on high tables and shelves. Each of them was painstakingly painted with images of epics, comedies, tragedies, and more benign depictions of everyday life and nature. He reached into one and pulled out several rolls of bandage cloth, flinging them negligently over his shoulder. Selene leaned past me and caught them all in one hand.

“I can’t,” I repeated.

“What does that matter? It’s possible, because I can do it, and all I would need are the tools I’m giving you. A net, a spear, and a long afternoon. Why can’t you bring me one hundred fish, boy?”

“I never said I couldn’t bring you one hundred fish,” I corrected him, eyes narrow. “I said I couldn’t catch them.”

“Ho? Will you buy them, then? Steal them, perhaps?”

I shrugged. “You gave me a spear and a net,” I said wryly. Selene chuckled softly behind me.

“That I did, that I did. So, in summation, without the accompanying experience, the tools alone are not enough to accomplish the task before you. Leaving you no choice but to cheat or steal your way to success.”

Selene laid gentle hands on my shoulders, and I realized that they were horribly tense, my pneuma rising precipitously. I forced myself to relax, to be realistic with the state of my body and the strength of my enemy, and allowed the Scarlet Oracle to guide me down into a nearby chair.

“Life is not something that can be summed up in a single neat scenario,” I said tiredly. Socrates laughed.

“Exactly right. What Aristotle did to you is not equal to the huntsman nor the fisherman. It is worse. Do you know why it is that cultivators so often die young, despite having the potential to live unfathomably long lives?”

I did.

“The ideal of cultivation is to begin at the foot of the mountain and end at the peak,” I said, brushing off Selene when she went to touch my wounded leg and taking the roll of bandage cloth from her hand. “The experience of cultivation, on the other hand, is the reverse.”

“Beginning at the peak?” The girl in the sun ray silks asked, curious. I nodded.

“Cultivation is a chariot teetering on the peak of a mountain. Once it starts rolling, there’s no stopping it until it hits the bottom.”

“In pieces, or otherwise,” Socrates mused. I grunted in agreement. “A greater understanding than most men your age have. But that only means you have more reason to see my meaning.”

I kept my silence, peeling back bloodsoaked cloth from my left leg and going to work with the bandages provided. It was stubborn of me. It was prideful. But it was who I was.

“A person’s failings don’t invalidate their virtues,” Selene said quietly, kneeling beside me.

My shoulders slumped, pressed down by the weight of three thousand dead men.

Salt and ash.

“Of course they do.”

“Aristotle may not have been the one to place you in that chariot,” Socrates said. “He may not have even been the one to push you down the mountain. But he changed your trajectory, and he split your wheels. When you take upon yourself the mantle of mentor to another, you’re to blame for a portion of everything that follows. The good and the ill.”

The great philosopher shook his head, emptying out the last clay jar in the room and sighing in disgust at what he found.

“Greedy old dog,” he muttered.

“What are you looking for?” Selene asked. “I may be able to help.”

“Can’t find what isn’t here,” he said. “The late lord decided to take all of the advantages he could with him to heaven. Or Tartarus, as it turned out. His stores of nectar and ambrosia are all gone. It’ll be the long road to recovery for you, boy.”

I looked down at the bandages wrapped tight around my left thigh, already staining red. The hand that I had broken in catching a punch for Griffon throbbed incessantly, something distant but inescapable. The rest of my body felt like one all encompassing bruise.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Good, because you have some work ahead of you. You’ve made a mess of things, and I won’t be cleaning it up for you.” Socrates pulled a handful of cloths from the pile and began wrapping them haphazardly around himself, constructing his veil of inconsequence before our eyes. “You’ll stay here for the time being.”

I reached for anger, I reached for rage. All I found was bone deep exhaustion. “First you beat me like a dog, and now you cage me like one, too.”

“It’s safe inside this cage,” he said, turning and stepping through the next door, out into the underground courtyard with its ivory and gold mosaic floor. “You’ve been snapping at lions’ heels. If I hadn’t stepped in when I did, you and your friend both would have been dead before the changing of the seasons. You might still be.”

“What do I do here, then? Twirl my thumbs and await your pleasure? I have to speak to the others. If nothing else, I can save you the trouble of them coming after you.”

Socrates scoffed, not even bothering to look back. “Not everyone in this city is as uninformed as you. Even fewer are as flagrant. I have nothing to fear from a handful of lost souls.”

“Griffon will come for you,” I said with rock solid certainty. “At least let me speak to him.”

“You’re free to speak to whoever you like,” he said, turning just before stepping through the archway leading back out of the mountain. “So long as you don’t leave this place.” And then he was gone, moving without particular haste up the steps. Eventually, even the sound of his footsteps faded.

I sighed and leaned back in my chair, letting my head loll.

“I can carry a message for you, Solus,” Selene offered with mingled hesitance and excitement.

In lieu of a response, I pursed my lips and whistled a sharp, clarion call. It echoed in the vast courtyard outside the room, reverberating throughout the mountain. I inhaled deeply the scent of cypress smoke and waited, ignoring my aches and pains with long practice.

Only when I heard the beating of wings did I finally tilt my head, meeting Selene‘s curious gaze.

“He forbade me from leaving, but he didn’t say anything about my bird.”

I found my lips curling, just the slightest bit, as the girl’s face lit up and she turned to welcome Sorea as the messenger bird of prey came swooping down into the bowels of the mountain.

I would need to find some papyrus and ink, but it would be enough to send the others a letter for now. Once I shook off the worst of my injuries, I'd find Griffon and we would regroup. I had what felt like a thousand things to tell him, and instinct told me that he would have just as much to say when he came down from the Storm That Never Ceased.

That he would return alive wasn’t even a question. Socrates had allowed it as a possibility, and if it was possible, Griffon would see it done.

“Selene,” I said, lifting my head with some effort and watching her croon to Sorea as the great eagle shuffled around on the floor, surveying the Kyrios’ estate.

The girl in the sunray silks looked back at me, eyes burning merrily. “Yes, Solus?”

“Do you want to hear a story?”

Her smile was dazzling.