Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.61 [Stavros Aetos]

Youngest of the Convocation

“Lord Aetos-”

“Call me Anargyros! Or Gyro if there isn’t time,” Gyro said, cutting off the slave he had brought along and freed.

“Lord Anargyros,” he amended, to our brother’s exasperation. “I don’t think this is wise.” The man was doing his best to maintain the pace, though he was struggling nearly as much as Thon in his chains.

Through good fortune or shrewd attention, Damon and Fotios had both taken on slaves with prior experience in cultivation. Damon’s slave, now a free man, leveraged the pneuma of a fourth rank Citizen as he rowed - a notable achievement for a man that had spent his adult life shackled and suppressed. My twin’s slave was even more impressive, somehow having reached the seventh rank of the Civic realm before the Rosy Dawn had bound him body and soul. I had never cared to know the man’s story before today, but I resolved to ask Fotios about it when this was over.

In contrast to his fellow freedmen, Gyro’s companion had been enslaved young. He did what he could with the strength his vital breath provided, but the distance between a man that didn’t know his place in the world and an untrained citizen of the first rank wasn’t all that vast in many ways. Though it was infinite in others.

He was able to keep pace with the man Damon had brought, but it was clear to see the effort it took him. If things kept on the way they were, he might be the first to collapse - even before Thon.

Even so, he mustered up the breath to speak, and the courage to challenge the young pillars of the Rosy Dawn on top of that. I wouldn’t forgive him for laughing at me earlier, but I could at least respect what it took for a cultivator at the foot of the mountain to challenge a group of men half a step from the realm of legend and epic.

“Which portion of this isn’t wise, Menoeces?” Gyro asked gaily, tilting his head back to regard the man as he rowed. “The portion where my good older brother abandoned all his duties as the Young Aristocrat for days without warning? Perhaps the portion where we used a holy day of festivities as an excuse to gather materials and men? Or is it the portion where we built a ship without the permission of either kyrios and sailed it into danger after our uncle demanded our presence?”

“All of those things! But especially the last one!” the freedman wheezed and ducked his head into his shoulder, scrubbing the sweat from his eyes as best he could without letting go of his oar. “Your uncle will be furious. Worse than that, if the Rosy Dawn and the Burning Dusk decide to come together to answer Olympia’s call, and Yianni Scala discovers you took a ship alone that his initiates could have shared-”

“We did no such thing,” Damon said, and then, as an afterthought, “Pull.”

It was impossible to tell whether Gyro’s freedman was gasping like a landed fish at the exertion or at the thought of directly disagreeing with the Young Aristocrat.

“I beg the Young Aristocrat,” he finally decided. “Explain it so this one can understand. How is that so?”

“We didn’t take a ship that Scalla could have used,” Damon explained, the muscles of his shoulders and arms flexing smoothly as he worked his oar. Somehow, he wasn’t sweating at all. “Unfortunately for the Burning Dusk, there wasn’t a single vessel that would take them. Those that should have been present were pushed off their courses by the crisis we’re sailing towards.”

“But the Eos,” Gyro’s man pressed in frustration. “They could have used the Eos!”

“What gave you that idea?” Gyro asked. The man stared at his back, lost for words.

“The hands of Stavros Aetos pulled from their roots the trees that served as this ship’s timber,” Damon spoke, his voice carrying easily through the wind and the crashing of waves against the hull. “The hands of Fotios Aetos wove the sun-stained cloth that catches the wind and drives the ship forward. The hands of Anargyros Aetos guided the blade that cut these materials to size, refined them to their current state.”

“And the hands of Damon Aetos designed it all,” Gyro finished, kicking our eldest brother’s knee with a fond smile. Damon smirked faintly.

“This ship was built by filial sons,” he said, the concentric circles ringing his pupils almost too bright to look at as he turned to regard us all. “By the young generation of the Aetos, for the young generation of the Aetos. Her name is Eos, and she would sink herself before she carried the weight of the Burning Dusk Cult.”

“Aye!” Fotios crowed, while I stomped my feet against the deck in agreement.

“But that’s…” Gyros freedman bit his lip until it bled, unable to go on.

“That’s tempting the Fates,” Damon’s freed slave said, his first complete sentence since launching the ship. The fourth rank Civic cultivator met our eldest brother’s eyes squarely, unafraid. “The Young Aristocrat knows that better than any of us. He knows that his uncle would have the young pillars whipped and confined to the estates for this. He knows that if Yianni Scalla finds out, the Tyrant will shatter his ego along with his brothers’. And he knows that if the kyrios of the Burning Dusk Cult ever heard what he just said-”

“He would kill us all, and make our uncle thank him for the privilege.” Damon nodded. “I know.”

“Then why?” Gyro’s man asked helplessly. Fotios and I exchanged a look. Mingling with genuine concern for the sponsor that had broken his chains, there was also fear for himself. We young pillars knew what was at stake. That our crew would share our punishment went without saying. “Why go about it this way? You know what they’ll do when you return.”

“I know what they’ll try.”

My twin and I chuckled at the look on the freedman’s face.

“A Tyrant is only a man,” Gyro said, like a prayer.

“A Tyrant’s existence is no different from ours,” Damon agreed. “Only more, for better and for worse. A Tyrant in their domain might seem to be a god, but that doesn’t make it true. The kyrioi of the Scarlet City can be opposed. They can be maneuvered against. And they are still fallible - to greed, to pride, and to fear. Do you know what a Tyrant fears more than any distant divinity or thunderous tribulation?”

The sun dipped fully past the horizon, the silver glow of thousands upon thousands of stars above casting dim shadows across the deck.

The glow of Damon’s eyes washed out all other color.

“A Tyrant fears subjugation.”

“But subjugation is a Tyrant’s trade, brother.” Gyro affected a puzzled voice. “Who subjugates the subjugator?”

“Who enslaves the enslaver?” Fotios echoed, laughing silently at the way the freedman jolted on his bench.

“It has to be a bigger fish,” I joined in. As one, on an unspoken signal, the four of us called up the Rosy Fingers of Dawn. The light spread across each of our oars, Hissing and throwing up steam where the paddles dipped into the Ionian. The oars didn’t burn, of course. Even I had finer control than that.

“A Tyrant fears the world outside of their domain.” Damon ran a hand through wild brown hair, gazing distantly at the shadowed horizon ahead. “Even more than that, they fear the world inside of a greater Tyrant’s authority.”

With a negligent hand, the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn pulled from a fold in his attire and threw over his shoulder the roll of papyrus sent from Olympia. It tumbled and unfurled in the air, headed for the edge of the ship. But as it passed the beam from which the sale hung, a thin lance of rosy light struck and nailed it to the mast. Damon flicked his middle finger again, and another shaft of light nailed down the bottom edge of the papyrus.

“The city of Olympia has issued a cry for help,” Damon said, repeating what we already knew from the contents of the message. “There are ravenous creatures in the Ionian, and one of them has decided to put its hunger before common sense. The docks that connect Alikos to the free Mediterranean have been empty for days because of it.”

It was a detail I hadn’t noticed until Gyro pointed it out, to my chagrin. It wasn’t uncommon for the docks to be empty during certain seasons, given most sea captains preferred the lavish dark towns of the Alabaster Isles or the city of Olympia over our own bare beaches. It was, however, uncommon for them to be empty in the days leading up to Kronia. Damon had noticed, and he had either assumed something outrageous because of it, or he put more stock in his gut than I thought he did.

“The Half-Step City doesn’t take kindly to reavers, but they also don’t care enough to chase them out of the seas,” Gyro chimed in. “So long as it isn’t their ships being sunk, it’s largely a colonial concern.”

Unfortunately, they had lost a ship in the end.

“Now that they’ve lost one of their charters, the kyrios of the Raging Heaven is concerned.”

Damon curled the fingers of his left hand, his influence brushing over the deck and seizing upon the two shafts of light pinning Olympia’s missive in place. At once, both constructs of lights began to melt like candle wax, the one at the bottom melting up in defiance of common sense. The trails of liquid light bent and curved as they trailed up and down papyrus, eventually meeting in the middle, having outlined every letter of the message. The call for help glowed in the night, every word of it.

Including the name signed at the bottom.

Bakkhos

“It’s been over a century since the first son to burn was torn down from his throne and dragged across the Ionian,” Damon continued. “Long before any of us were born. But not nearly long enough for the Burning Dusk or our own Rosy Dawn to forget it.”

“You can’t possibly- you intend to turn them against each other? The Tyrant of Tyrants and the kyrioi in Alikos?” Gyro’s freedman of the first Civic rank asked, aghast. “Are you mad?”

My pneuma rose along with Fotios’ beside me. Dymas and Thon froze in their rowing, not daring to even breathe despite their bodys’ demands for it. Gyro winced, and the fool’s blood drained from his face as he realized what he’d just said.

“I beg the Young Aristocrat-”

“Mad,” Damon mused, as we all but flew across the Ionian with nothing but the stars to guide us. “What do you think, brother?”

Gyro hummed. “I think insanity is your virtue, brother.”

“And am I a virtuous man?” Damon asked, amused.

“More than any other I know.”

“It’s part of your charm, brother,” I added. Fotios grunted in firm agreement, still glaring at the back of the lowly freedman’s head.

“A wise man in filthy rags once told me something,” the Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn said, contemplative. “I’ve carried it with me ever since.”

“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.”

It was a principle that he lived by. One of his ten as a captain of the Sophic Realm. Unmistakable once described, just as mine had been.

The freedman’s shoulders hunched. His hands trembled as they gripped his oar. “I understand,” he whispered.

“So you do. What I’m suggesting, then, is that the man that gathers Tyrants the way Tyrants gather Philosophers is a man worth knowing. Though I can’t say it with certainty, I am saying that stories paint him as an amiable man when things go his way, and as someone who is gracious when accepting favors - and generous when returning them.”

“You think he would oppose two Tyrants in their domains for this?” I asked, honestly curious. “Even if we find the goods and the pirates responsible, there’s no guarantee that they kept the ship intact.”

“Or any of its passengers alive,” Fotios added.

Damon and Gyro shared a look.

“I think the kyrios of the Raging Heaven would oppose anyone on this earth, given an excuse to do so,” Gyro eventually said.

“And we didn’t build this ship to chase pirates,” Damon added.

I blinked. Fotios tilted his head.

The message that the kyrios of the Raging Heaven had sent to the Scarlet City specified that a passenger transport with precious cargo on board had been waylaid at one of the micro islands located between the Scarlet City and the shores of Olympia. It had implored - in the same way that a lion implored a lamb - our Uncle as well as Yianni Scala to aid the Half-Step City in its efforts to salvage the ship’s contents before they were lost forever. What else could that have meant besides pirates and precious exports?

The hairs on the back of my neck rose.

“Damon,” I said in a low voice.

“Yes, brother?”

“When you said ravenous creatures and reavers, you were disparaging sea dogs. Right?” The Young Aristocrat of the Rosy Dawn smiled faintly. “You meant pirates, right?”

In the shadowed distance, a woman’s agonized shriek erupted from the waves.