Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

Chapter 1.17

The Son of Rome

The Raging Heaven Cult was a series of connected estates and valence communities, growing like weeds around the foot of Kaukoso Mons. Similar to the Rosy Dawn in its construction, the various estates were connected by winding paths of stone carved into the mountain itself. Walking paths, staircases, and even arched bridges of stone could be found within its boundaries.

In an inversion of the Rosy Dawn, the most influential members of the cult lived at the lowest points, where the mountain met the earth. The junior initiates lived in quarters further up the mountain, perilously close to the storm. There was an ever-present sensation of malice and threat hung over the cult. The low roll of thunder was constant. I felt it in my bones.

The Storm That Never Ceased hung over the peak of Kaukoso Mons like a funeral veil, illuminating the mountain and its various estates at all hours of the day and night with flashes of chain lightning. Walking along the carved stone paths and looking up the mountain at that writhing monument to heaven’s fury, I wondered.

What could the act of building an entire human civilization on the face of such an edifice be called, if not hubris?

“It never stops?” I asked, though the answer was in the name. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. The clouds were impossible to see past, darkly foreboding. The crash of constant thunder was felt more than heard, most of its volume muted by something within the cult’s structures themselves. Beyond the gates of the Raging Heaven Cult, though, it was deafening.

“How could it?” Anastasia asked, glancing up only briefly at it. “The Storm That Never Ceases is a monument to the hubris of man, tribulation made manifest. Humanity tempts the Fates, and the thunder rolls. While one exists, the other must as well.”

She stepped lightly up the mountain, disdaining the stone stairs in favor of hopping and skipping like a mountain goat. Simply because she could.

“Setting up camp under it isn’t exactly a step in the right direction,” I observed. She glanced back at me, swinging her arms and smiling mischievously.

“True enough, your student was right about one thing. Audacity is the providence of cultivation - it’s what drives us to the ivory heights. And what could possibly be more audacious than forging our souls by the light of heavenly tribulation?”

The architecture of the cults of greater mystery, as well as the cities in which they resided, seemed to follow a particular theme. Alikos was called the Scarlet City for a reason - its fashions, its architecture, and its great works of art reflected that. The sanctuary state of Olympia was much the same, taking a brush of indigo to itself in varying degrees.

Electric blues and crimson reds abounded, mingling at points where roofs were shingled and robes were dyed to form a royal purple hue. The estates of the Raging Heaven followed a hierarchy of color that diverged from a vibrant indigo at the base of the mountain where the elders and core initiates resided, turning to distinct blues and reds as one progressed up to where the senior initiates and athletes did their cultivating, worked into the murals painted on the walls and the statues carved out of their pillars. Furthest up the mountain, where the juniors beat themselves bloody and ground down the stone steps day and night, those vibrant reds and blues rejoined to form imperfect shades of the elders’ royal purple.

I ran the tips of my fingers along a stone relief carved into the mountain beside our path, a man reclining in a vineyard drinking deeply from two cups. One in each hand. The twin streams of wine pouring into his mouth were veins of a muddled violet gem that glittered in the light of flashing lightning. Precious stone sitting in open air, unharvested.

“The more I see of this culture,” I said, almost to myself, “The less I understand it.” How many legionnaires would have given their lives in war for a bare sliver of these violet veins?

“Is it really so different in Rome?” Anastasia asked. She leapt from one outcropping of stone to another, a distance of over a hundred feet vertically up the mountain. Rather than trying to keep pace, I simply kept walking up the steps until I’d reached her again.

“There was excess,” I admitted, thinking back to the days of my childhood, when everything had been wonderful and nothing had been enough. Precious gems, fine silks, and ornaments of gold had been standard provisions for my mother and distant family. “But we could never afford to do the things I’ve seen done in the free cities. I’d like to hope that if we’d had that wealth, we wouldn’t have spent it so frivolously.”

“You would, would you?” she asked, hopping down and rejoining me on the steps. Her arms linked behind her back, the dark onyx robes of her cult fluttering in the gale winds of the Storm That Never Ceased.

“We don’t have artists or poets in the magnitudes that your Greeks do, I’ll admit, but I have yet to see a nation as virtuous as the republic. Our heroes are men of war, and of the fields. Not slayers of monsters, but defenders of law and order. Beholden to none but the Twelve Tables. Righteous.” My right hand clenched reflexively. “And strong.”

Anastasia considered me thoughtfully. “I confess that I don’t know much of the Roman mythos.”

“It’s not as exciting as Ríastrad or the Seven Sages,” I said, eyes unfocusing as I trudged up the steps. “Rome was only founded a few centuries ago. Younger than your kyrios.” And shorter lived. My teeth grit. “Our men are our mythos, cunning generals and wise senators. One of our greatest heroes was nothing more or less than a man that commanded the Legions when we needed him to, and returned to a life of quiet cultivation on his farm when we didn’t.”

“Cincinnatus was the first dictator, the one that every Roman adores,” Gaius told me as his eyes roamed over the sand table. We were alone, and so he let his frustrations slip. But only for a moment. “The heavens adored him, too. So much so that they placed all his enemies in front of him.”

“If we glorify contentment, how can we break past the boundaries of our mortality?” Anastasia asked quietly. Not directly opposing me, but closer now.

“Cultivation only makes us more of who we are.” It was a curse as much as it was a prayer. “And not every culture follows the same trail up the mountain. Even the barbarians have their own paths to providence.”

“Is that the Roman way, then? Cultivating fields when you’re not cultivating war?”

I snorted in spite of myself. “We also enjoy games.”

She nudged me with her shoulder. “You didn’t come to Olympia to play games, though.” Her eyes flickered, and she said, almost sadly, “And you’re not here to farm, either. Are you?”

“Everything that I am is the product of the men that mentored me,” I said eventually, remembering sunlit mornings in quiet vineyards, scorching afternoons in the sandpits and the surf, and cold, dark evenings in the command tent. Hunched over sand tables and inked dialogues. “They did what they could with the materials they were given, but I’m no hero. The good people of Rome are better than I could ever hope to be.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Anastasia denied me with a smile. She didn’t hesitate to do so. “But even so, I think I’d like to see this city for myself. See if it compares to my own Nkrí. Maybe one day you could bring me there,” she said slyly.

“Maybe one day I will,” I said, restraining with willpower alone the reaction that her words nearly evoked.

She didn’t know.

The baths at the Rosy Dawn had been works of native majesty, making use of the natural springs within the eastern mountain range of the Scarlet City to create soothing hot water pools and purifying steam rooms. They’d been minimally decorated, by the Greek standard, meaning they were utterly luxurious by the standards of the average Roman.

The Raging Heaven’s baths, on the other hand, were absurd by any metric.

There were as many bathing pavilions as there were estates on the mountain, all of them publicly available to the mystikos of the cult, and no doubt there were dozens of smaller private bathing suites besides. The one that Anastasia took me to was anointed in alabaster and ruby veins, two massive basins placed on the mountain, rather than carved out of it. They were ringed by corinthian pillars holding up a ceiling that was painted in maroon and fuschia shades to mimic the night sky at false dawn.

The alabaster tubs, each capable of fitting at least fifty men without any of them being forced to touch, were smooth and decorated with carved lines and rosettes that I realized represented the stars in the sky on two particular days - one pool for the winter equinox and the other for the spring.

Their temperatures were regulated by unnatural means, one of them so cold that thin flecks of ice floated on its surface, and the other hot enough to make the air above it shimmer and distort. It was a de facto way of separating the baths by rank, I supposed. At temperatures this extreme, even captains of the Civic realm would struggle to cope for more than a few minutes.

I could only imagine how bad it was in the baths at the foot of the mountain.

“You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself very much,” Anastasia observed, languidly turning her head to face me. We sat only a short distance apart at one edge of the basin, the rest of the tub full nearly to capacity with Sophic cultivators. Men and women bathed together, naked as the day they were born, jostling and exchanging discourse without care.

I abstained from the first answer that came to my mind, instead saying, “We do it in the reverse order back home.”

Anastasia blinked, small chips of ice fluttering from her eyelashes with the motion. “Hot bath, and then cold?”

I nodded.

“That’s barbaric.”

I glanced around the bathing pavilion, at the naked men and women mingling freely, and, in some cases, without any space between them. I looked to the pillars holding up the roof, each carved in the shape of a man or a woman engaged in debauched recreation.

“Barbarism is in the eye of the beholder,” I said, fighting a sneer.

“There are benefits to our way,” she explained, rather than take offense. “Medical boons. These waters were gathered from blessed springs across the free Mediterannean, and each has its own unique properties. A frigid shock to the system followed by searing heat has a cleansing effect on the body, and the spiritual properties of the water have a similar effect on the soul.”

That much, at least, I could not deny. My entire body was numb from the cold, and if not for the conditioning I had put it through in the Legions, I was sure it would be far past the point of discomfort. But the lingering, spiritual and bone-deep ache of the infected wounds on each of my shoulders had vanished completely as soon as I stepped in.

“Do they have many bath houses in Rome, Solus?” Anastasia asked me, curious.

“We do,” I said, something painful and joyous in equal measure about speaking of home in the present tense. “Hundreds of them, each a work of human ingenuity in place of natural fortune, fed by aqueducts that span entire countrysides and mountain ranges. Simple, compared to this, but finely built.”

“I would be surprised if they were as gaudy as these,” Anastasia said lightly. “Even the baths where I live aren’t like these. I would say they’re closer to yours - reliably built, and comfortable. We carve them from pewter and warm them in the heat of our flaming mountains.”

“Do you bathe together there as you do here?” I asked wryly. Anastasia laughed. It was a pleasant sound, throaty and musical.

“Dual cultivation has its own benefits, you know,” she said slyly. I rolled my eyes in disgust. “Besides, I told you already that these baths have medicinal properties, as all good baths do. Where better to exchange discourse than in such a place, where your body and mind are at their best?”

I eyed a pair across the pool, a man with long brown hair that floated on the icy surface and a young woman with pale skin covered in tattoos of whirling purple ink. They were whispering in each other’s ears, the woman sitting on the man’s lap, both giggling every so often.

“I see.”

“Are all Romans as uptights as you, Solus?” Anastasia teased.

“Are all soldiers as tightly wound as you, husband?”

I stood abruptly from the bath.

The hot bath felt colder than the ice bath when I first stepped into it, but that soon gave way to an almost agonizing heat and a rush of tingling sensation on my skin, numbness giving way to warmth. I exhaled roughly, letting it wash over me. Air filled my lungs easier than usual, more fully, and my pneuma circulated freely throughout my body. It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as jumping into an ice cold pool after sweating for hours in a hot bath, but it was pleasant in its own way.

“I apologize,” Anastasia murmured, slipping in beside me. “I meant no offense.” She had two cups of cool water in her hand, and she offered me one. I took it mechanically, staring straight ahead for all the good it did me. No matter where I looked, I saw degeneracy, and degeneracy saw me. The vile sensation of eyes roaming across my naked chest assaulted me from all sides.

“I’m married,” I said, not trusting myself to say more.

“Is that so?” Anastasia hummed. “What’s her name?”

I realized why I was so at ease with Anastasia compared to the others. Even Griffon, who had approached conversation with her as a challenge to be overcome.

They had the same schemes in their eyes.

“Luna,” I said, and in the mirage heat of the baths, I could almost see her sitting across from me. Smiling in that way of hers.

“Is she back in Rome?”

Salt and ash.

“She is.”

“A shame for her, then,” the Heroine mused, shifting just so in the water, so that I felt the waves. “Your student had another point, audacious as he was in making it. We cultivators are greedy existences. We see something we want, and we take it. Even if it’s off-limits to us. Especially if it’s off-limits to us.”

I glanced sidelong at her. Schemes. Schemes and naked interest.

Not subtle at all.

“You don’t want me,” I said, because I’d never had patients for scheming. “Not for that.”

Green eyes crinkled and the interest deepened.

“Don’t be so sure,” she said lightly. She leaned back against the alabaster basin of the scorching hot bath, eyes flicking from one mystiko to another as she surveyed the pavilion. “Either way, I’ve brought you to one of the Raging Heaven Cult’s bastions of rhetoric. Do you see what you’re looking for?”

“No.” I’d known that from the moment we arrived.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she pressed. “Anyone, perhaps?”

I considered deflecting or lying, but decided it didn’t matter in the end. “I’m looking for my mentor. He used to live in this city, years ago.”

“Truly?” Anastasia asked, surprised. “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have taken you to a place like this. The elders never venture this far up the mountain outside of the initiation rites.”

“He wasn’t an elder,” I said, shaking my head. “At least I don’t believe so. Your elders are all Heroes and Tyrants, aren’t they?”

“You’re saying…”

“My mentor was a great man, but he was only a Philosopher.” I shrugged. Perhaps that was too much information for my cover, perhaps not. I’d soon find out.

“Only a Philosopher,” Anastasia muttered, in the same tone that Griffon had used when I told him about my father, in a different bath in the Scarlet City. “Well, the Raging Heaven Cult has no shortage of those. I’m sure he’s around here somewhere. And if he is, I can surely find him. What was his name?” she asked, drinking gracefully from her cup.

I told her.

The Heroine choked.