bookpub Chapter 1.48
Chapter 1.48
chapter 1.48
the young griffon
“the old man you’re here to punch,” whispered the little king, leo, “it’s the gadfly, isn’t it?”
“it is.”
“we’ll help you,” the little king decided. “won’t we, pyr?” his loyal sentinel nodded.
“i don’t recall asking for your help.”
the boys shared a look behind my back, still clinging to me like monkeys as i ascended through the various estates of the raging heaven cult.
“where we’re from,” pyr, the little sentinel, said, “a student has to prove himself before his mentor will take him on. the greater the student, the greater his deed will be.”
“the two of you assisted me in combat against a hero’s virtuous beast,” i said, patting them both on their cloth-covered heads with pankration hands. “i know philosophers that wouldn’t have the guts for such a thing. was that not enough for you?”
“of course not,” the little king hissed, indignant. “what sort of king stops short at a beast?”
i found myself smiling.
“you two remind me of my cousins,” i said, amused. i nodded at a trio of young philosophers as they walked past. their eyes lingered on the rosy dawn attire hanging around my waist, on the laurel wreaths wrapped around each of my biceps, and on the pair of mongrel children hanging off my shoulders. i clearly saw their suspicion of me at war with their confidence in the men that guarded the mountain. i did not belong, but i could not possibly be here against the will of the raging heaven. they hesitantly nodded back and hurried down the steps.
“you have cousins?” the little sentinel asked.
“how many?” the little king asked eagerly.
“five.”
“and how many siblings?”
“none that i know of,” i said lightly.
“that you know of?” the little king’s brow furrowed. “what does that mean?”
“it means my father is a worldly man. he traveled the mediterranean to its furthest limits when he was my age. who is to say how many seeds he planted along the way?”
“is he a powerful cultivator?”
“of course he was,” the little king answered his brother’s question scornfully. “just look at his son. the proper question is how powerful is he? griffon?”
“i wonder,” i mused, looking up past the amethyst veins of kaukoso mons, past the storm
that never ceases, to the risen sun. “a thought occurs to me.” the boys leaned in attentively.
“you said that the greater a student is, the greater their offering will naturally be to a prospective mentor. i’m assuming in the city of your birth that such transactions are often more materialistic than what you’re suggesting. riches rather than actions.”
their silence spoke volumes. i chuckled and flicked them both on their noses.
“i have no issue being paid with virtue over vice. however, the other thing that occurred to me - if a hopeful student’s offering is scaled to their worth, then wouldn’t a prospective mentor’s price be scaled in the same way?”
“that’s true...” pyr slowly agreed.
“what’s your point?” little leo demanded.
“you’ve offered to take up arms against the gadfly with me,” i reiterated, waiting for them both to signal their agreement. “to stand against the scholar, an act that i’ve personally seen heroic cultivators cringe away from as if i’d asked them to dive into the styx. what you’ve offered is more than most men would ever willingly give.”
i tilted my head back, smiling languidly at the upstart vagrants from the city of conquerors. home to the scattered foam cult.
“what makes you think that is nearly good enough to be my students?”
“what!?” the little king shouted, pounding on my back. “that’s unreasonable! that’s beyond unreasonable, even for a king - and you’re no king!”
“who told you that?” i asked curiously.
“... you are?” the little sentinel whispered.
“of course.”
“king of what? king of where?” little leo pressed me.
“king of the greatest kingdom among heaven and earth. king of the only kingdom that matters.”
“where?”
“tell us!”
i tilted my head up. “king of the rising sun.”
then i threw them both through an open door.
a medical pavilion had no business being opulent, but here we were. the raging heaven had decorated its place for the ill and infirm with tapestries of the first physician and exquisitely stitched depictions of the greatest of his works. alchemical processes and the distillation of medications were stitched into a visual format, recipes that were pleasing to the eye. carved into each of the supporting pillars that held up the roof was a line from the hippocratic oath, the same oath that i had taken with anastasia as my witness in the forests outside of olympia.
the boys scrambled to their feet amidst the scolding of physicians. a man in a pure white tunic with sashes of indigo and gold wrapped tightly around his forearms and hands stalked over from a nearby bed to berate them. panicked, the little sentinel placed himself between his brother and the approaching surgeon. the little king grit his teeth and balled his fists.
“senior!” i greeted him gaily, stepping into the medical pavilion where mystikos of the raging heaven came to be made well. the man looked sharply my way as i entered. he was tan, shorter than scythas with a stockier build; cultivation had rendered him aesthetically rugged rather than runty. as his influence crested against mine, i identified him as a philosopher of the fifth rank. he was old enough to be my father.
this was a man that had gained entrance to the raging heaven through specialized knowledge of medicine alone, rather than through exceptional cultivation. which meant that he was an utterly unremarkable man in one sense, and a valuable resource in another.
“who’s your senior?” the irritated physician demanded, picking the little sentinel up by the back of his peplos. his younger brother tensed, and i saw murder in the coiling of his body. “i’ve never seen you in my life, and i’ve especially never seen these two-”
with the hands of my violent intent i struck the physician at a vulnerable juncture in his wrist, catching the little sentinel with pankration hands when the physician’s hand spasmed open, releasing him.
and i watched the fight go out of a man that had been defied in his own domain. defied by a lone junior he had never met, whose cultivation was lesser to his own.
i frowned.
“how many times has this happened?” i asked.
“has what happened?” he asked. i watched him steadily, until he looked away.
“how many times has this happened since the kyrios died?” i clarified. a nearby physician, a woman with gentle hands and flowers braided in her hair, shivered and turned away.
the head physician shook his head. “too many times.”
“and how many of the visits lead to immediate discharges of your patients? to permanent discharges?”
all of them, his silence said.
i took that in. accepted it into myself.
my pneuma rose.
“physician,” i murmured. he grit his teeth. i waved a hand at harmodius, the crow we had crippled. “why isn’t this woman healed yet? it’s been days.”
“you said it yourself,” he bit out, hating every word. he didn’t question how i’d known about her admittance. he didn’t have to. “her spine is broken. she’s lost the use of her body below the waist. such an injury... it goes beyond the balancing of humors. it goes beyond mending that any of us are capable of.”
“and what could mend it?” i asked, tracing my pneuma as it wound through her body, through channels she had forged over the course of a lifetime. by tracing those channels, anastasia had taught me how to gauge a cultivator’s true age. like counting the rings on a tree stump.
harmodius was thirty-seven years old. lying hopeless and in tears on this bed, she looked younger than me.
otus scowled ferociously, though this time it was not at me. not at anyone, for that matter. the stout healer withdrew into his own mind, thinking furiously over my question, and my respect for him rose again. when he spoke, it was with finality.
“for her, taking into account the break and the extremities lost- time, if she had the proper mentor and a mind for philosophy. if reason and spirit advance far enough, the body is bound to follow. the tripartite soul naturally seeks balance.”
i hummed. “otherwise?”
“nectar,” he said at once. “that, or ambrosia.”
the food and drink of the faceless divinity. i sighed heavily, leaning back on the bed. “and where do they sell divine sustenance in this city? is there a stall i can go to?”
“the kyrios had his stores,” otus said, and if he took any satisfaction from the way i perked up, pleasantly surprised, he didn’t show it. “if he left any behind it would be in his quarters.”
“fantastic,” i said, favoring him and our grounded crow with a smile. “i was heading there anyway.”
“you were-” otus inhaled deeply, held it for a long beat which i did not interrupt, and then exhaled. “there’s one other possibility. something your master might be able to do.”
“ho?”
“surgery,” he said. “it’s dangerous, and in the case of a spinal injury, far from assured. but if it works then it’s just as effective as ambrosia, and nearly as quick.”
“and you can’t do that?” i asked. otus sighed heavily, crossing wrapped arms.
“you were a fighter before you were a physician,” he declared. i hummed. “you ascended to the sophic realm through violence, or discourse, or any number of methods. and along the way you became familiar with other types of martial cultivation. true?”
“true,” i confirmed.
“just as there are a thousand ways to do violence, there are a thousand ways to mend it. you use hands of pneuma to do your dirty work. if i asked you to instead use pneuma feet, here and now, could you do it? having never done it before?”
i thought about it.
the boys shuffled on the bed beside me. harmodius pulled her sheet up further, to her nose.
“well?” otus demanded.
“i’m thinking.”
he made a disgusted sound and swiped a hand through the air. “no! you couldn’t! what we do is as different from surgery as a foot is from a hand! we balance humors, mend what can be mended without causing further harm. we’ve sworn to never take up the knife without the proper training, as you have, and we have not been trained.”
“surely the raging heaven possesses at least one surgeon,” i reasoned.
“we do,” the nearby physician said, the woman who had ducked her head. her hands shook faintly as she tipped a cup of spirit wine into a patient’s open mouth, but she didn’t spill a drop. “most are away from the cult. but there is one.”
“there was one,” otus corrected the woman, though his voice was far more gentle than it had been with me.
“was?” i asked.
“before she was stolen away in the night,” he said. “now, only her captor knows where anastasia is. and perhaps her student.”
i smiled, ever so slightly.
“boys,” i said, rising to my feet. “we’re going.” the little king and his sentinel scrambled off the bed. behind me, harmodius gasped and forced the sheet back over her crippled legs, it having been displaced by the boys and my own pankration hands.
but it was too late. i’d already seen the color of her cult attire.
which king do you serve? i’d asked her the night we threw her off the side of the mountain. she’d refused to answer then, and sol hadn’t allowed me the time to press her further. now i knew.
grass-green silks, the same as scythas’. the howling wind cult. i added the elder from the city of squalls to my list of powerful people scorned.
i glanced back and saw that she knew that i knew. she slumped in despair, eyes clenched shut. a woman that had given her life and her identity in the pursuit of power, of renown - and in the end, given the use of her legs. i watched the tears she’d been fighting break through and trail down pale cheeks.
i’ll mend your legs“,” i decided. her eyes snapped open. “with nectar or ambrosia, if i can find it. and if not, with the surgeon’s knife. i promise you that.”
i turned and walked out of the healing house, the boys close behind.