1.60 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Pull!”

“The oars in-to your guts un-til the tides are gray,” Gyro sang, volume and spirit filling the gaps a poor singing voice left.

“Pull!” we bellowed, bracing our feet on the benches in front of us and heaving on our oars with all our might.

“The stars, down from the sky, until the night is day!”

“Pull!” The Eos sailed across the waves as fast as an eagle flew. The product of four brothers’ labor seemed to nearly outpace the breeze, though the winds never fell out of her sails.

“The sword, out from the sheath, I feel the fight – it comes!” Gyro sang and worked his oar at once and in rhythm, neglecting neither in the process. He had mastered the hunting bird’s breath long before I had achieved proficiency – there wasn’t a single heavy pant to mark his exertion. As he braced and leaned back to pull, and then hunched forward again, the only signs of his effort were the sweat on his brow and the bulging veins in his neck.

“Pull!” I roared, determined to match him ‘till the end. To my right, on the bench adjacent, Fotios laughed wildly.

“The sun that’s reaching out, from under Tyrant’s thumb!”

“Pull,” Damon demanded, at the forwardmost bench beside Gyro’s, and we all fought the Ionian to obey.

Some of us more successfully than others. I gnashed my teeth, watching the wood-carved lady of the Eos drift sideways against the horizon as our ship’s pace was unbalanced once again.

Damon had distributed us evenly across the benches. There were two rows of four on the deck, one for every oar, and the eldest of the young pillars had taken the left and right benches up front for themselves. Behind Damon was the slave whose chains he’d broken, while Gyro’s slave sat behind him. Though Fotios and I had protested it vehemently, we sat the third row benches behind our older brothers’ slaves and watched their backs while they worked. Thon and Dymas, the slaves my twin and I had taken on at Damon’s suggestion, sat the rear benches behind us.

And as I watched our ship drift once more towards mine and Damon‘s side on the left, I began lamenting my choice.

“Pull!” I snarled, twisting as I pulled my oar to look back at Thon. My blood roared in my ears, such that I didn’t register Gyro’s next line at all.

“Pull! Damn you to the pits beneath the earth, like you mean it!” I shouted at the slave. Thon gasped raggedly, his ugly face contorting as he pulled back on his oar. Drenched in sweat and flushed from the tips of his ears to the divots of his collarbone, he looked for all the world like the hardest working man on the ship. And yet, with every cut of the oars, our course drifted further left.

I inhaled sharply, gathering up every scrap of pain and exertion that the hunting bird’s breath had dispersed throughout the channels of my body. My pneuma rose.

“I said -”

“Pull!”

“- yourself together, brother!” Fotios hollered, meeting the furious glare I turned upon him with wild cheer. The wings of our influence beat challengingly, true wind kicked up by formless pneuma buffeting us both and blowing back the damp curls of our hair. “You have no one to blame but yourself if he falters!”

“L-lord Ae-” my worthless slave tried to speak up, gasping the words, and I saw our side of the ship lose further ground as he diverted his efforts from the oar.

“I’ll-”

“Pull!”

“- your tongue out of your mouth! Be silent!” I beat the wings of my influence once. Thon’s teeth snapped together and he hissed through them, throwing his body back into the next pull.

“This is my fault, then!?” I demanded, rounding on my twin. “I’m to blame because the ugly wretch couldn’t -”

“Pull!”

“- a thought from his empty head, let alone an oar! That’s my burden!?”

Fotios rolled his eyes at me, his good cheer not faltering. I knew, in the way that only siblings that had shared a womb could know one another, that he was taking nearly as much joy from my anger as he was from this excursion itself. I tried to hold onto that knowledge. I tried to brace myself behind it like a shield, to resist my rising ire. I failed miserably.

“Choosing him is your burden,” my twin threw back. “Leaving him to suffer is your fault, asking him to -”

“Pull!”

“- a cultivator’s share without the breath to fill his lungs – that’s your blame to take!”

“Pull!”

Fotios took one hand off his oar and pointed it at me in condemnation. I stomped the bench in front of me in frustration when Dymas, the slave he’d chosen for himself, inhaled sharply and put twice the strength into his next pull. Compensating for my twin.

“Idiot brother,” Fotios condemned me, “you’re the only one whose slave is still in chains!”

“Pull!” the Young Aristocrat demanded. Seven cultivators of virtue and one bonded slave pulled their oars against the waves.

“What’s stopping you, Stavros?” Gyro called back across the deck, abandoning his next verse. “You liked him well enough to pick. Why not set him free?”

Damon had broken the shackles that bound his slave to the Rosy Dawn Cult before the Eos was even built. I knew it, because he hadn’t left the sun-bleached sands of the docks even once during the ship’s construction. He’d worked without sleep, without sustenance, from the moment the figurehead’s first grasping hand was carved and until the ship’s last rope was tied.