1.84

The Son of Rome

“If we’re going,” Scythas said, when the story had been told and the last strings had been plucked, “then now is the time. The hand guided me here, Solus. I promise you, if the reagent the Gadfly needs is anywhere in this nation, it’s here.” There was an undercurrent of desperation to the words. He wanted me to believe him, to believe in him, and worried that I wouldn’t.

From the beginning, I had seen a downtrodden reflection in him. A soldier that wanted nothing more than to be accepted into the ranks. To stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his peers and know that no matter how miserable the road ahead might be, he would not have to march it on his own. An outcast in search of belonging.

In the past, I might have been able to offer him that. Before, I could have brought him into the fold of a fraternal band unsurpassed among heaven and earth. But those days were gone. All I could offer him now was the bare minimum.

Scythas desired a Heroic peer by his side, that much was painfully apparent. He deserved the support that could only be found in the press of a shield wall. Brotherhood baptized in war. He needed it, for what he had ahead of him. The support of a first rank Philosopher with fractured foundations was a poor substitute for either of those things.

It was all that I could give him.

I nodded once. “I trust you.” The relief that overtook him at the words was painful to see.

Griffon ascended up the wooden steps without a word, a pensive air about him. As he passed between the two Thracians guarding the entrance to the singing house, the woman with shadows painted around her eyes and on her lips offered up her horn cup.

“For your thirst,” she offered. Griffon didn’t stop or look back, but one of his pankration hands took it and carried it up behind him.

“This is where we part ways,” I informed the black stallion that had served me thus far, more or less against his will. Dismounting, I stepped around the charger and met it glare for glare. The stallion’s nostrils flared threateningly.

“I have never seen such hatred in a horse before,” I confessed, as if it could understand me. “But I’ve seen your rage. I’ve seen that hungry look before.”

Before a Roman could lead his fellow man, he first had to master his horse. I had served as an equite long before I ever gave a legionary an order. To commemorate my promotion to the patrician rank of mounted cavalry, my great uncle had gifted me a horse himself. More than that, he had gifted me his own horse. A midnight charger, fearless and angrier than any I had ever seen before. When we took to the field, it felt less like I was driving him forward, and more like he was pulling me along.

Taking Caesar’s horse into battle had felt like riding a hurricane wind. Like the righteous fury of the Republic itself was delivering me forward. Without fear or hesitation, no matter what dark barbarism opposed us.

I had felt something nearly similar while suffering the Thracian stallion. The rage, though, was aimless and tainted by hatred. The beast’s belligerence was untempered. It did not fear because it had never encountered something worth fearing, not because it was brave. Maybe those imperfections could have been sanded away with time. A firm hand might have been enough.

It was too late for that now, though.

“It’s a shame,” I said quietly, gripping the back of the stallion’s neck and dragging it down to my level. Its fierce yellow eyes narrowed. “You’d have been happier at war.”

I turned away and climbed the steps, accepting the offered horn cup from the Thracian man with the tattooed scalp as I passed him. Scythas followed close behind, along with a girl that had covered herself with rags of anonymity as we approached and hadn’t made a sound since. We only had three horses to pay with, after all. One of us would have to sneak in. Thankfully, the philosopher’s rags were as effective now as they had been on the Eos-

“You haven’t paid, girl,” the Thracian woman said, glancing lazily sideways, directly at Selene.

The daughter of the Oracle froze. Scythas tensed, inhaling quietly and gathering his Heroic pneuma around himself. By this point, Griffon had reached the top of the steps and laid his palms flat against the gated doors of the singing house. So close.

“The stallion is worth two,” the scarlet son said. He turned his head just enough to regard the woman with a single scarlet eye.

She hummed. Shared a look with her fellow Thracian.

And shrugged.

“I suppose it is. Enjoy the Orphic House.”

Griffon snorted and pressed open the ivory gates leading into the decrepit theater of repurposed wood, striding inside. We followed him through.

Into the shadows.

We called him the Augur because he sang like a bird, and fortune followed him wherever he went.

His name was Orpheus, and there has never been a man more nimble with a lyre – mortal or divine. He could charm anything with those heavenly strings. Men, women, and children. Animals of every kind. Even the stones in the earth and the trees reaching fruitlessly up to the skies were helplessly enamored when he played.

He was a “kyrios” in his own right, you know. The founder and the prophet of a many-faced faith, our own Orphic mysteries. In the course of his years he erected more cults than there are greater Greek mysteries, and each time he did it himself – personally. He would find himself a sturdy place to sit wherever in the world he happened to be, and he would begin to pick and strum his humble lyre.

He roused the stones beneath the earth. He serenaded the trees that so ensconced him. And while the ivy wound itself adoringly around his arms, he would bid the earth itself to spring up around the subject of Orphic mystery that he had found. And every time, without fail, it would. Mausoleums and master craft estates would simply… grow. Sprout from the earth like vines. A gift from the mother that so loved her child’s music. A token for the Augur.

The earth and all her children mourned the Augur when he died. But none, not even his own people, mourned the Hero Orpheus as deeply as his sworn brother. Bakkhos was the one to find Orpheus torn apart and scattered across the nation of his birth. Over the course of weeks and months, the mad vine keeper walked every step a man could walk in Thracia, gathering up the pieces of the Orphic corpse. Sobbing all the while, loud enough to wake the dead beneath the earth as he passed.

Bakkhos found the last of Orpheus here, the heart of the once great Hero still burning. He dumped the portions of the corpse that he had gathered and remade the Augur for his funeral. When with ivy and vines he bound the pieces together and covered the grotesque lines where they met, creating the facade of an Orpheus at rest – encircled by adoring vines as he had been in life.

The weeping vine keeper placed a coin in Orpheus’ mouth and a drink in his hand, and sent him off to the underworld a Hero made whole once again. In sorrow at his death and joy at his reunion, the earth rose up and enfolded the Orphic corpse in her embrace. A singing house sprung up over the burial mound just as all of the mausoleums and estates of the Orphic mysteries had.

Even the Augur’s swan song carried his charm.

Now, I can see you’re wondering about the contradiction. The story goes that the Orphic house built itself. But, as a Greek surely knows, not every truth is told in the strictest sense. A thing that one man experiences is not necessarily the same as what another will see.

The king of Macedonia came to this place in the earliest course of his campaigns, hardly more than a boy and yet already stronger than any man had a right to be. More fearsome than the mad one, and as brazen as they came. He broke the people of this place over his knee and when the battle was done he dragged their elders and their chiefs to a humble tomb enshrouded in ivy.

He forced old men and warrior kings all to their knees in front of the lonely tomb and demanded to know what they had done to the Orphic House that should have stood over top of it.

Yes. He had heard the story of Orpheus. It was why he’d come in the first place – to pay his respects to the man with the holy hands.

“We beg the Conqueror,” the wise men said, bowing their heads and scraping at the dirt in supplication. The warriors kneeling beside them were still young enough to value their pride, even then, but the elders had lost that along with their eyes.

“Understand that we couldn’t have touched what was never there to begin with,” opined one.

“The Orphic house was never built,” spoke another.

“Some stories are just that,” came a third.

The king of Macedonia, already greater than the greatest of them despite the fact that his years could be counted with fingers and toes, considered their words with reason and grace. Though his generals and his confidants urged him to punish the lot, he instead laid the blade of his sword on the back of a single neck.

Not the leader of the tribe, the king among kings. No. Alexander laid his blade against the neck of the tribe’s oldest man. The one with eyes like curdled milk, whose legs had failed him long before he was forced to kneel.

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“You are nomads, are you not?” Alexander asked him, while the wise man’s grandchildren and great grandchildren howled and fought against their bindings.

“We are, young king.”

“When did you come to this place? How long have you been here, that the wheels have fallen off your wagons and such weeds have grown between their boards?”

When the ancient man spoke, even the loudest of his descendants paused their howling shouts. In perfect silence, his voice was only just barely heard.

“My eldest son was only a boy when I brought him here, so long ago that my eyes could still see. We’ve lived in this place ever since.”

“What compelled you to stay here, when no other valley or field could contain your kind for more than a season?”

“Point me to the tomb,” the old man commanded the king, and though the sons of Macedonia bared their teeth and promised him pain for his presumption, the king laid the flat of his blade against the blind man’s cheek and turned his head to face the ivy-covered tomb.

“Does ivy still embrace it?” he asked the king.

“Ivy strangles it,” Alexander answered, and the ground beneath their feet trembled at his ire.

“Ivy protects it,” the ancient Thracian corrected the Macedonian king, against all common sense. “You’ve seen the state of our wagons yourself. The seasons here are not kind, and neither is the passage of time. The ivy preserves the Orphic corpse in its place of rest. There, and nowhere else for days and days at a swift horse’s pace, the ivy grows thick and with purpose.”

The old man reached up and laid frail fingers on the flat face of the king’s blade that was pressed against his cheek. His warrior descendants shouted threats at the king while his junior wisemen pleaded for him to stop. Instead, he traced blind fingers up the blade, to the hilt and the hand that held it. The Macedonian king did not stop him, knowing he had nothing to fear.

When the ancient Thracian found Alexander’s hand, he gripped it tight. The trembling of his own hand had nothing to do with fear or bloodlust. It was simply an effort for a man submerged up to his waist in the underworld.

“Look upon the Augur’s tomb and be at ease. There was truth to the stories you heard. Do not confuse an epic’s exaggeration with falsehood – the echoes of his song may not have been enough to charm an Odeon from the earth, but that ivy shroud is proof he was adored. Look upon it, young king, and see that it’s enough.”