1.17

The Son of Rome

The Raging Heaven Cult was a series of connected estates and valence communities, growing like weeds around the foot of Kaukoso Mons. Similar to the Rosy Dawn in its construction, the various estates were connected by winding paths of stone carved into the mountain itself. Walking paths, staircases, and even arched bridges of stone could be found within its boundaries.

In an inversion of the Rosy Dawn, the most influential members of the cult lived at the lowest points, where the mountain met the earth. The junior initiates lived in quarters further up the mountain, perilously close to the storm. There was an ever-present sensation of malice and threat hung over the cult. The low roll of thunder was constant. I felt it in my bones.

The Storm That Never Ceased hung over the peak of Kaukoso Mons like a funeral veil, illuminating the mountain and its various estates at all hours of the day and night with flashes of chain lightning. Walking along the carved stone paths and looking up the mountain at that writhing monument to heaven’s fury, I wondered.

What could the act of building an entire human civilization on the face of such an edifice be called, if not hubris?

“It never stops?” I asked, though the answer was in the name. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The clouds were impossible to see past, darkly foreboding. The crash of constant thunder was felt more than heard, most of its volume muted by something within the cult’s structures themselves. Beyond the gates of the Raging Heaven Cult, though, it was deafening.

“How could it?” Anastasia asked, glancing up only briefly at it. “The Storm That Never Ceases is a monument to the hubris of man, tribulation made manifest. Humanity tempts the Fates, and the thunder rolls. While one exists, the other must as well.”

She stepped lightly up the mountain, disdaining the stone stairs in favor of hopping and skipping like a mountain goat. Simply because she could.

“Setting up camp under it isn’t exactly a step in the right direction,” I observed. She glanced back at me, swinging her arms and smiling mischievously.

“True enough, your student was right about one thing. Audacity is the providence of cultivation – it’s what drives us to the ivory heights. And what could possibly be more audacious than forging our souls by the light of heavenly tribulation?”

The architecture of the cults of greater mystery, as well as the cities in which they resided, seemed to follow a particular theme. Alikos was called the Scarlet City for a reason – its fashions, its architecture, and its great works of art reflected that. The sanctuary state of Olympia was much the same, taking a brush of indigo to itself in varying degrees.

Electric blues and crimson reds abounded, mingling at points where roofs were shingled and robes were dyed to form a royal purple hue. The estates of the Raging Heaven followed a hierarchy of color that diverged from a vibrant indigo at the base of the mountain where the elders and core initiates resided, turning to distinct blues and reds as one progressed up to where the senior initiates and athletes did their cultivating, worked into the murals painted on the walls and the statues carved out of their pillars. Furthest up the mountain, where the juniors beat themselves bloody and ground down the stone steps day and night, those vibrant reds and blues rejoined to form imperfect shades of the elders’ royal purple.

I ran the tips of my fingers along a stone relief carved into the mountain beside our path, a man reclining in a vineyard drinking deeply from two cups. One in each hand. The twin streams of wine pouring into his mouth were veins of a muddled violet gem that glittered in the light of flashing lightning. Precious stone sitting in open air, unharvested.

“The more I see of this culture,” I said, almost to myself, “The less I understand it.” How many legionnaires would have given their lives in war for a bare sliver of these violet veins?

“Is it really so different in Rome?” Anastasia asked. She leapt from one outcropping of stone to another, a distance of over a hundred feet vertically up the mountain. Rather than trying to keep pace, I simply kept walking up the steps until I’d reached her again.

“There was excess,” I admitted, thinking back to the days of my childhood, when everything had been wonderful and nothing had been enough. Precious gems, fine silks, and ornaments of gold had been standard provisions for my mother and distant family. “But we could never afford to do the things I’ve seen done in the free cities. I’d like to hope that if we’d had that wealth, we wouldn’t have spent it so frivolously.”

“You would, would you?” she asked, hopping down and rejoining me on the steps. Her arms linked behind her back, the dark onyx robes of her cult fluttering in the gale winds of the Storm That Never Ceased.

“We don’t have artists or poets in the magnitudes that your Greeks do, I’ll admit, but I have yet to see a nation as virtuous as the republic. Our heroes are men of war, and of the fields. Not slayers of monsters, but defenders of law and order. Beholden to none but the Twelve Tables. Righteous.” My right hand clenched reflexively. “And strong.”

Anastasia considered me thoughtfully. “I confess that I don’t know much of the Roman mythos.”

“It’s not as exciting as Ríastrad or the Seven Sages,” I said, eyes unfocusing as I trudged up the steps. “Rome was only founded a few centuries ago. Younger than your kyrios.” And shorter lived. My teeth grit. “Our men are our mythos, cunning generals and wise senators. One of our greatest heroes was nothing more or less than a man that commanded the Legions when we needed him to, and returned to a life of quiet cultivation on his farm when we didn’t.”

“Cincinnatus was the first dictator, the one that every Roman adores,” Gaius told me as his eyes roamed over the sand table. We were alone, and so he let his frustrations slip. But only for a moment. “The heavens adored him, too. So much so that they placed all his enemies in front of him.”

“If we glorify contentment, how can we break past the boundaries of our mortality?” Anastasia asked quietly. Not directly opposing me, but closer now.

“Cultivation only makes us more of who we are.” It was a curse as much as it was a prayer. “And not every culture follows the same trail up the mountain. Even the barbarians have their own paths to providence.”

“Is that the Roman way, then? Cultivating fields when you’re not cultivating war?”

I snorted in spite of myself. “We also enjoy games.”

She nudged me with her shoulder. “You didn’t come to Olympia to play games, though.” Her eyes flickered, and she said, almost sadly, “And you’re not here to farm, either. Are you?”

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“Everything that I am is the product of the men that mentored me,” I said eventually, remembering sunlit mornings in quiet vineyards, scorching afternoons in the sandpits and the surf, and cold, dark evenings in the command tent. Hunched over sand tables and inked dialogues. “They did what they could with the materials they were given, but I’m no hero. The good people of Rome are better than I could ever hope to be.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Anastasia denied me with a smile. She didn’t hesitate to do so. “But even so, I think I’d like to see this city for myself. See if it compares to my own Nkrí. Maybe one day you could bring me there,” she said slyly.

“Maybe one day I will,” I said, restraining with willpower alone the reaction that her words nearly evoked.

She didn’t know.

The baths at the Rosy Dawn had been works of native majesty, making use of the natural springs within the eastern mountain range of the Scarlet City to create soothing hot water pools and purifying steam rooms. They’d been minimally decorated, by the Greek standard, meaning they were utterly luxurious by the standards of the average Roman.

The Raging Heaven’s baths, on the other hand, were absurd by any metric.

There were as many bathing pavilions as there were estates on the mountain, all of them publicly available to the mystikos of the cult, and no doubt there were dozens of smaller private bathing suites besides. The one that Anastasia took me to was anointed in alabaster and ruby veins, two massive basins placed on the mountain, rather than carved out of it. They were ringed by corinthian pillars holding up a ceiling that was painted in maroon and fuschia shades to mimic the night sky at false dawn.

The alabaster tubs, each capable of fitting at least fifty men without any of them being forced to touch, were smooth and decorated with carved lines and rosettes that I realized represented the stars in the sky on two particular days – one pool for the winter equinox and the other for the spring.

Their temperatures were regulated by unnatural means, one of them so cold that thin flecks of ice floated on its surface, and the other hot enough to make the air above it shimmer and distort. It was a de facto way of separating the baths by rank, I supposed. At temperatures this extreme, even captains of the Civic realm would struggle to cope for more than a few minutes.

I could only imagine how bad it was in the baths at the foot of the mountain.

“You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself very much,” Anastasia observed, languidly turning her head to face me. We sat only a short distance apart at one edge of the basin, the rest of the tub full nearly to capacity with Sophic cultivators. Men and women bathed together, naked as the day they were born, jostling and exchanging discourse without care.

I abstained from the first answer that came to my mind, instead saying, “We do it in the reverse order back home.”

Anastasia blinked, small chips of ice fluttering from her eyelashes with the motion. “Hot bath, and then cold?”

I nodded.