1.82

The Son of Rome

After three days and four nights spent wandering the boundless lands of Thrace, we found our first true city. More than just a collection of brutal nomads and whatever burdens they could carry – like a haggard Roman legion with no clear chain of command – or a system of mountain passes and caves overflowing with hulking redheads, this was a permanent settlement. One built to last.

Unsurprisingly, it was a Macedonian addition.

Even less surprising than that, it was a desecrated shell of what Alexander had first ordered built.

Honest fortifications, walls and ramparts of sun baked brick, were betrayed by a lack of Macedonian souls to man them. What remained of the city’s southern gate hung agape, broken and kept open indefinitely by stakes in the earth and rubble stacked against it as stoppage weight. We rode side-by-side, three mounted horses passing through with room to spare in between.

“This is Ionic architecture,” Selene murmured as we progressed. Her burning scarlet eyes roved over the works that remained, fascinated.

There were decorative arches, grand columns topped by stone ornaments like unfurled scrolls that the Ionic aesthetic labeled volutes, and triangular pediments atop those voluted columns in most of the public constructions. Some of those pediments still retained a portion of their painted and carved reliefs, hinting at past purpose, but Kronos had long since drawn his thumb across their finer details.

I caught glimpses of what this place had been before, here and there in portraits of urban decay. There, frozen pools of tainted still water in massive stone basins, the city’s once proud baths. Here, an inner courtyard garden revealed through the gaping wound of a residential estate’s collapsed outer walls – a pristine peristylium, in its day, constructed in the same style as the one containing the Aetos family’s filial pools. But the garden in this abandoned home had long since spilled over its cultivated boundaries. Gnarled, frost-covered vines strangled every column and rail that lined the courtyard.

The more suggestions I saw of the once proud polis, long since dead, the worse my throat ached and the worse the chambers of my nose burned. The lash too far was the facade of a statue in the center of the broken city, a wide-open pavilion that might have once served the same purpose as a forum or an agora. As soon as I spotted it in the distance, I nearly choked on soot.

“Here,” Selene said quietly, removing one arm from around my waist just long enough to pull the canteen out from a fold in her silks. Two shells of polished iron joined in the middle by copper bands. I drank deeply from it, ignoring the flavor. I had seen her fill it with clean, crisp river water just a few hours ago.

Yet somehow, it tasted like the Adriatic.

“There aren’t any Greek colonies this far from the Aegean,” Griffon said, picking the ruins apart with his eyes and his wandering pankration hands. He sifted idly through rubble as he rode, illuminating remnant signs of what had once been. “Junior.”

“Yes, senior?” Selene replied. They had decided to stick with that dynamic, apparently.

“Do you know where we are?”

“No clue at all.”

The former Young Aristocrat hummed and continued with his search. We rode, a slow and wary plodding toward that central pavilion.

“You aren’t going to ask me?” Scythas seemed to regret the words even as he spoke them.

“Of course not.”

The Hero scowled. But he didn’t look our way. Since their last conversation, he had kept his horse either in front of ours or on the other side of mine, avoiding even a glimpse of the scarlet son. For once, Griffon had ignored the opportunity to prod an open wound and let him be.

“Do you recognize this place, Scythas?” Selene asked, for his sake as much as ours. The daughter of the Oracle had been subdued as well since that baring of hearts, more the version of herself she had been when Scythas first came to us in Bakkhos’ courtyard. Tempered and grave.

“In a way,” he answered, nodding. “This is one of the places where Bakkhos used to live. Before he came to Greece.”

“How can you tell?”

“The hand,” Griffon answered in his place. “The hand is still pointing him the way.”

Scythas blinked, and for the first time in several hours looked past me towards Griffon.

“How did you-?”

“Just a feeling.”

Scythas looked at him strangely.

“We’ve been together this whole time,” Selene pointed out. “There hasn’t been an opportunity for you to summon it again, not without us seeing.”

After a beat, hazel eyes and golden coals flickered and turned to us. “I don’t have to summon again what was never fully dismissed. It’s taking a different form than what you saw in that vineyard, but it’s still here. And it has been the entire time.”

“The wind,” Griffon guessed. “A whisper so faint, none but the Hero of the Scything Squall could possibly hear it.”

Scythas’ jaw flexed.

“The kyrios told me once,” he ground out, ignoring the statement with some effort, “that in his day, he had seen wonders the likes of which the world no longer offers. Not because it will not, but because it can not. What the Gadfly sent you out to scavenge ingredients for, Bakkhos called his brew. In his words, it was the closest approximation he could manage to a flavor long since lost to time. A pleasant echo.”

An approximation. What Socrates called divine nectar, Bakkhos called an approximation. Was the Gadfly overestimating the elixir’s ability to heal? Wasting our time on purpose, perhaps? It seemed too cruel for him. I hadn’t known the master of my master’s master for more than a few weeks, and the circumstances of our first meeting had been far from ideal, but somehow I felt confident about that much. Socrates was a Gadfly through and through, a critical old man with little patience for most things. But he wasn’t malicious. Not in the way a man would have to be to deceive an ill mother’s child into thinking they could have her back healthy and whole.

If the Gadfly was telling the truth as he saw it, though. If this pleasant echo he called nectar truly was potent enough to make well what the finest physicians could not even diagnose, then what did that say about the late kyrios’ standard? How high had he set his sights?

What had Bakkhos been drinking before?

“The only reason he was able to come as close as he did to that past pleasure, so he said, was because there were still some that remembered what the earth had long since forgotten,” Scythas continued, his focus drifting into recollection. “Dwelling beneath it.”

Two nights ago, in a voice that was not his own, Scythas had called upon a chthonic hero. Chthonic. Another word for infernal. Both descriptors of those that dwelled beneath, in the bleak underworld. And in response to the call, a dead man had answered him.

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“He gathered his materials from the dead,” Griffon mused. “From the only fields that no man alive could harvest. From the only markets that wouldn’t accept any man’s mortal currency.”

“It would explain why he was the only one to brew it,” I said, taking another pull of freshwater that tasted like brine.

“Bakkhos forbade its synthesis,” Selene reminded me. “For as long as he lived, even in his kinder years, he made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate that sort of challenge.”

“Bakkhos was hated as much as he was loved,” I replied. “Likely even more so. If the materials were readily available, someone would have puzzled out the steps to synthesize it eventually. Someone would have taken the risk. But they weren’t available, were they? Not above ground.”

“Not here, at least,” Scythas confirmed. “The other locations marked on that map… I’m not sure. I might have a few ideas we can test, but none are as promising as this one here.” It was why he’d volunteered to come, rather than split off to cover more ground as Jason had. Our first destination was the one he felt he’d be most useful in.

“A golden cup of spirit wine,” Selene murmured. “Why from here?”

Scythas shrugged. “The kyrios had a saying he liked to share from time to time. As an Oracle in his care, I’m sure you’re even more familiar with it than I am.” The Hero of the Scything Squall cleared his throat, and once again spoke in a voice that was not his own. “The space where other tyrants keep their hunger-”

“I instead reserve for my thirst,” Selene finished, nearly groaning the words in her exasperation. “Yes, I’m familiar.”