The Petros Chronicles Boxset

by Diana Tyler

  I smile as I unsheathe my knife and hold it out for him to take. He laughs and waves it away, then goes totally still, his face and body appearing so pallid and frozen that I wonder if he will faint.

  “Are you all right?” I ask, sheathing my dagger and stepping slowly toward him.

  Titus takes a step backwards off the path and crouches there, holding a hand to his heart as rays of setting sun pour color back into his face. Then, with his other hand he reaches into his belt and pulls something out of it, but promptly forms a tight fist to conceal whatever it holds.

  A knife? Hemlock?

  “What? Am I to die here? Right now? … Tell me!” I implore.

  “No, Iris. Listen to me…” he says calmly, standing back up again. “This is all very new to me; I haven’t been quite sure how to handle it. And now, it’s affecting my health!”

  “Handle what?” I ask.

  “Let’s keep moving. Idleness will only draw attention.”

  I follow as Titus continues leading us down the mountain, lifting his chin and nodding curtly to a pair of soldiers, each riding a stolen Alpha stallion up to its new home.

  “I had a dream a few days ago after my prayers in the temple. Actually, I don’t remember ever falling asleep…all of it seemed so real…Have you ever had a dream like that?” he asks me.

  “A dream, no. A nightmare, yes,” I reply, anxious to reach the end of his revelation.

  “I was by myself in the cella when it happened. I saw a bright flash of light, and then a girl appeared in the midst of it. I thought at first it was Alexa, but when the light faded away, I saw it couldn’t be. This girl had auburn hair, and splendid robes that were –”

  “Deep blue, like the sea,” I say, not the slightest bit surprised. I look around the barren slope to see if the elusive messenger is here now, waiting for me with another riddle to sing or a stone to give. But all I see are Diokles’s men below, scurrying about his makeshift palace like rats around a nest.

  “Yes. So you do know her! You do know Carya! I haven’t lost my mind!” he exclaims, almost bounding forward in his relief. But he swiftly contains himself and lowers his voice to whisper, “I thought it was a dream, but she gave me something.” He looks down at his fist. “I still have it.”

  I reach into the pouch around my waist and pull out my own gift from Carya.

  “I presume she has a message for me,” I say, rubbing the jasper stone between my fingers, waiting for the right moment to bring it into the light and corroborate his encounter.

  Titus scratches his head. “Yes…but, like I said, this is – this is extraordinary!” He says, tilting his head toward me and talking from one side of his mouth. “Everything she told me would happen has happened.” He pauses as an actor would to ensure he’s got the audience’s attention. “First she told me Tycho had been captured by Soukinoi in Limén. Then she said that during his final mission as a Soukinos, he had saved the life of the girl I found in the desert – you, of course – and that I should give you a message if you intervened for him the day he was returned here to Ēlektōr. And you did.”

  Titus stops on the path and turns to me, anticipating a question, or a gasp of disbelief, but I keep walking, kicking pebbles as I go along, and contentedly breathing in lungs-full of cool evening air.

  “She must be a goddess, this Carya,” Titus starts again, thirsty for discussion. “But there is no such thing. That much I know.”

  I smile a little at the mystified general. Never would anyone suspect that he, a stalwart, flinty, and unflappable soldier, was at this moment seeking religious insight from a mildly educated orphan recruit.

  “Is something funny, Soukina?” he asks. I shake my head and press my lips together, erasing my smile.

  “No, sir. It’s just – well, never mind. Carya is a nymph,” I say, getting back to the subject at hand.

  “A nymph!” he repeats, as though he misheard me. “Like the berserk ones in the Alphas’ stories, draped in fawn skins and running around the woods with pine-cone staffs? The ones who raised Dionysus in a cave before he grew up and became a god of wine and abject debauchery?” He chuckles, “Carya is one of those?”

  I realize I’d never thought it through. All this time, I’ve been blinded to the stark contradictions surrounding my ideas of Carya’s identity. Since the day I met her in the moonlight near my mother’s death bed, I have called her “nymph.” But according to Eusebian prophecy, such creatures are, at best, nothing more than imaginary froth, and at worst, harmful distractions, inconspicuous diversions from the one true, unequaled god...

  “I don’t know,” I confess. “I suppose I don’t know what else she could be.”

  “Call her a messenger,” Titus says, employing his authoritative tone. “We demean Duna’s servants by likening them to maniacal pagan shrews.”

  “Fair enough,” I say, respectful of the man’s convictions. “Now can you relay the…messenger’s message?” I remember to add, “Please, general?”

  “The hour I prayed for a clear sense of Duna’s vision for my life here, my purpose here, I’m given a visitation with a goddess – er, a messenger – that I cannot deny, and that you have confirmed! Forgive me, but my mind is rather muddled, Soukina. I never thought our Creator would insinuate himself into a soldier’s affairs, least of all mine.”

  “Please. Just try,” I urge him, ignoring his sentiment. “You don’t have to remember every word.”

  The general sighs loudly and slows his pace, thinking silently and then mumbling unintelligibly over Carya’s rhymes. And then confident, crisp, coherent words come forth:

  “Below amber lies the emerald arc among the Moonbow’s hues,

  A color of life, a stone of growth, a new beginning if you choose.

  Forgive and be forgiven, take the green gem held nearby,

  In the hand of the one who held the torch, and watched your brother die.”

  A few long moments pass as the message sinks into my skin, slips into my veins, and circulates through my body like a virus until it reaches my heart, gripping it, twisting it as I do the same to the hilt of my dagger. Maybe this time I will have the courage to use it.

  “You killed my brother?!” I scream, not caring who might hear. Titus doesn’t try to quiet me, but sadly hangs his head as though a heavy yoke were around his neck.

  “It seems you and I worked for the same man,” he says.

  “Acheron…” I spit the name from my mouth like a poison.

  “He offered me more wealth than I have ever known to be his bodyguard, promised me my family would always be safe as long as I kept him safe.” Titus begins walking again as his memories wash over him. “One night while he was away, his house was burned to the ground, by arsonists or accident, no one knows. The next night…” he stops and gazes out at the peach-colored clouds painted across the horizon. “My wife and two sons were killed, tied to their beds and burned alive. From then on, I was Acheron’s executioner, made to listen and watch as men, women, and countless innocents were consumed with fire...”

  Titus turns away from me, his shoulders heaving up and down as he cries to himself in silence.

  I wait for the swell of wrath to rise up in me at any second, for lava-hot anger to send me running toward the executioner and stabbing him a hundred times – no doma needed. How I have waited for this moment! How I have longed to seize revenge like a jewel-encrusted chalice and fill it until it overflows with the blood of all who destroyed my life and oppress my people. But now that the moment is here, I am overcome not with rage, but with empathy.

  “Perhaps I should have taken your dagger when I had the chance,” says Titus, mustering a laugh as he eyes the weapon in my hand.

  Titus goes to his knees, surrenders his sword on the ground in front of me, and lowers his head, ready to receive whatever blow I have in mind for it.

  “I won’t defend against it. I deserve justice,” he says. “My only request…Make it quick.”

  CHAPTER NINET
EEN

  EMERALD

  General,” I whisper, half baffled, half relieved that I cannot kill him. “When did you leave?”

  He looks up at me with surprise.

  “Pardon me?” he says.

  “When did you leave Acheron? And stand up, sir. I can’t do this,” I add, sheathing my knife and pushing his sword back toward him with my sandal. Somehow, the desire to kill, to avenge, has been summarily dissolved, replaced by unexpected feelings of pity, sorrow, and of kinship for the general.

  “Your mercy will not be forgotten,” he says, rising and taking his sword. “You are truly your brother’s sister.”

  “You didn’t know my brother!” I retort, my skin prickling instantly with indignation, but the temperature of my blood doesn’t shift.

  “I left Acheron the morning following your brother’s death. I’d heard him and the others of the Hodos who died that night speak in the streets on several occasions,” he says somberly. “They spoke of Phos, the Light of Petros, and the peace he gives to anyone who believes that he is who he said he was, and that he died for us. Diokles was looking for more recruits. And I was looking for a purpose. Much like yourself.”

  “Phos didn’t give my brother – or his friends – any peace!” I say, bitterness burning and closing around my throat. “He brought them to Enochos and stood back as they suffered. And you have no idea what I’m looking for!”

  I spot an Acacia tree to my right and walk briskly to it, eager to rest my feet and steal a moment of solitude. Titus kindly keeps his distance as I collect a handful of seeds and store them up for later. I remove the jasper stone from my girdle, kiss it and clasp it tight as I lean my head against the tree and gaze at the rising moon peering over the desert, a lustrous pupil within a silken socket of clouds.

  And then I think of Carya’s song to Titus: “The green gem that is near…”

  “General!” I call. He turns to me and I wait for him to come closer.

  “Soukina, we should go now. Diokles is expecting me,” he says.

  “Expecting us, you mean.”

  Titus doesn’t have an answer to give, no reassuring words or even a well-crafted lie to offer. He only stares at the ethereal eye as it shines the beneficent light of heaven over our darkness.

  “I know that you must deliver me to him,” I say as I stand, noticing the fresh, redolent smell of rain wafting down from a dense caravan of clouds hanging low above our heads. “And I still don’t want to kill you.” I grasp Titus’s shoulder, and as he looks in my eyes, I know that he believes I mean it.

  “You can trust me, Soukina.”

  “That’s what Tycho said,” I say as my mind dispatches another prayer for my friend. “He hasn’t betrayed me yet.”

  The clouds release a few sprinkles of rain, each tiny splash on my forehead admonishing me to continue walking before the imminent downpour…or perhaps before Diokles suspects that his general is now following the orders of a nymph-like servant of Duna.

  “Now I trust you to tell me more about the green gem you’ve got in your hand,” I smile.

  “That’s right,” remembers Titus. “So this means you have forgiven me, then?”

  “Excuse me?” I ask.

  “Carya said the gem becomes yours if you forgive me for what I did at Enochos.”

  I answer only with a deep breath and a silent curse. What does forgiveness have to do with anything?

  “I would pay any price to undo all the wrong I’ve done, Iris. I would give my own life. I am sorry,” he pleads, the words spilling hastily into the air as though they’d been trapped for lightless ages, left suffocating inside his soul.

  Forgiveness. The last person I forgave was my own mother just a few days before her spirit left this world, driven away by the fever that had taken my father from us.

  She had emerged from her delirium, her cough and chills had subsided, even the rosy rash on her chest appeared fainter. She asked Jasper to carry her up onto the roof to enjoy the sunshine one last time. No sooner had we gone up than her coughing returned. But she refused to be taken inside.

  “I’m not dead yet!” she said. “I feel like I’m lying halfway inside my tomb while in that room.”

  So Jasper and I reclined alongside her and welcomed the sound and sight of any bird or breeze or butterfly that could brighten the shroud of death that was draped over us.

  When a friendly moth with dusky white wings alighted on her shoulder, I said with the cheeriest tone I could muster, “Those are drawn to the light, mother. Maybe it’s a sign that you’re going to be well!”

  She reached over to me, took my hand, and after a brief coughing spell replied, “Or maybe it will help draw me to the light…” She smiled as the moth took flight once again toward the tops of the poplar trees, fading like a ghost as it climbed on toward the sun. “When the time is right,” she added, kissing my cheek.

  “I miss you!” I cried out, my hopeful countenance evaporating at the thought of her spirit following the path of the moth.

  “She’s right here with you, Iris,” Jasper said, watching as she pulled me onto her lap, her baby girl again.

  Then why does she seem so far away? I remember thinking, as I wrapped my arms around her neck and buried my face in her hair, hoping that if I wished hard enough I could send us back in time, back to when I was a baby and the world was just beginning…

  “I want to ask something of you both,” she said.

  “Anything, mother,” Jasper replied, walking over to sit at our feet.

  “I ask that you would forgive me.”

  “Mother, what on earth for?” Jasper asked, his face blanched with bewilderment.

  “For not being here to watch you both grow up. For not being here to see you as a beautiful bride, Iris, a mother, a great explorer like you’ve always wanted to be. For not being here to see you become the leader and teacher Duna has called you to be, Jasper. I pray that he lets me see pieces from above. Who knows, maybe there’s a cloud with my name on it, where I can lie and look down on you both any hour of the day!” she said as I crawled off her lap and cried as silently as I could.

  “Oh Iris, don’t be sad,” she said. “I’m going to see your father soon, and I know you’ll have lots of hugs and kisses for me to deliver to him, isn’t that right?” Reluctantly, I nod my head and find solace in the daydream of my mother and father united again in a utopia free of fevers and tears and lives cut short.

  “That means you have forgiven me, then?” she asked, just as Titus has today.

  Jasper and I shouted an enthusiastic “Yes!” in unison, and together we sat on the roof until dark, forgoing sleep and supper to stretch out the day, to freeze time, if it were possible. And at her insistent request, we described for our mother every detail of the dreams we had for ourselves, dreams none of us could have imagined would be snuffed out by death, slavery, and a desert of rebellion.

  A blue bolt of lightning flashing over the mountain brings my attention back to the man asking for my forgiveness.

  “I could lie you know,” I say with a smirk. “I could tell you that I forgive you just so I can have the stone.” But I am fooling no one. The relief I observed on my mother’s face when Jasper and I released her of the burden of guilt she bore impressed me greater than I ever realized. I learned that forgiveness is a finespun sort of phenomenon, possessing a quality I can only describe as magical. I felt that as I gave it to my mother, I was receiving for myself something equally precious.

  “You could,” concedes Titus. “And you would have no one but Duna to judge you for it.” He gives me a wink, but I know there is a warning in his words.

  “I should – I should be angry,” I stammer, my feelings of frustration hindering my tongue just as it has my logic throughout this tedious trek down the mountain.

  Forgive the man who killed your brother? How foolish can you be!

  “The only reason I am in this forsaken place is because I know that Diokles will lead me to Acheron and s
et our people free,” I say, speaking the words like a dispassionate orator reading from a scroll. “And here you are, the man who set fire to Jasper’s pyre; I should be ecstatic!” The words come out effortlessly now. “Why can’t I kill you? What don’t I feel one iota of anger when I look at you?! I forgive you, general.”

  And I feel it. Forgiveness enchanting me, calming me, cleansing me. I force one foot in front of the other as the wind blows, carrying in the storm from the distant sea.

  “Soukina,” he says, following after me. “You love your brother, don’t you.”

  “More than anything.”

  “When my wife and sons were alive, I lived to love them, protect them, and make them proud. There were many times I walked away from battles and laid aside offenses simply because I knew it pleased them, because it is what they wanted. Do you understand?”

  I nod, knowing undoubtedly that Jasper would be proud that I have let forgiveness win. My brother gave the clothes off his back, the meat from his table to anyone in need of it. After he devoted himself to the Hodos, he was routinely mocked, ostracized, and imprisoned for his beliefs, but never once did he speak of vengeance or utter a single syllable of complaint; rather, he rejoiced in his sufferings. “I give thanks that I have been found worthy to suffer disgrace for the name of Phos,” he’d say.

  It was when I heard him speak words so incomprehensible, so absurd-sounding as those that I questioned whether he or I was adopted. On the nights I was whipped by Acheron, or given only crumbs off his plate for supper, my mind alternated between dreaming of life with my family on the limestone cliffs, and longing to be sucked into the Styx and released from my misery. I had nothing to smile or sing about, and giving thanks was done only out of fear and compulsion when Acheron pointed to emaciated beggars on the street and demanded of Niobe and me, “Are you not grateful that I have saved you from such a fate?”

  “I can see Jasper smiling now,” I say to Titus. “But I think there is more to my tolerance of you than you realize,” I say.