Debase the Currency - Whether Coin or Clout - Show Who Rules Them - And Set Yourself Free - Go East Old Man - To Learn Something New - Make Peace With Darkness - And Shine Your Light - Witness Inaction In Action - Before the Great Game - Of Two Competing Conceits - Leaving a Strange Legacy
3
375 B.C.
They spent the first half of the day separating heads from shoulders. Pirates played rough in Shaolin, apparently. Wherever that was. It didn't seem to matter, really. Dio was doomed right here on the Black Sea and a sane man kept it local.
“Hey, where's Shaolin?” Dio asked cheerfully, if cracked.
A man methodically decapitating strangers stopped to answer in a gibberish Dio didn't understand. When Dio stared rather than respond, he sighed and spoke clearly in Greek, “Swap language track to Doric Greek, kykenos.”
Dio sighed, too. This was entirely too meta. The fourth wall in stories exists for a reason, to protect the reader from pirates and such. If stories weren't going to respect traditional bounds, readers could get hurt. It could get real weird. Real dissociative.
But maybe this one time, breaking through it could save Dio, too. Fumbling with the remote control he didn't know he had, he pressed a button and looked to his executioner.
“Schützen sie ihren nacken!” The executioner lopped off another head and asked, “Wie est das, hund?”
In horror, Dio hit the button again. Whatever language that was, it seemed the oral equivalent of a gorgon with a stomachache. Or a house painter with political power.
“How's that, dog?” Doric Greek filled the air, translated as English for the reader, of course. Whatever that is.
“Imperfect. I can understand you, but your lips aren't synced with the sound,” Dio whined.
The executioner chuckled, “Perfect. Beats dying confused, don't it? Protect your neck!” Another head removed.
“Definitely,” Dio replied, not entirely convinced. “What's this remote control?”
“A liberal education. Or a metaphor identifying as an anachronism. Who knows? Wasn't sure you were holding one or not. Might be able to sell you, after all.”
“Oh, goody. So, where's Shaolin?” Dio tried his question again, masking his disappointment at being sold rather than murdered.
“No place you heard of. No one knows it here and China don't even exist yet.” Dio thought he detected impatience in the pirate, punctuated with another decapitation.
“I sure don't,” Dio admitted, warily watching blood spray from yet another body tumbling over the side into the sea. “Thought I caught a New York accent in there, though.”
“Forgotten borough, nahmean? Shaolin, Staten. You dig?”
“Word,” Dio nodded, mildly confused before pivoting back to indiscriminate murder. “Hey, any reason you're killing everyone?”
“No skills,” he said, removing another paying passenger’s head and kicking the body into the sea. “You gotta make yourself useful. Mr. Fondue here was a banker, right? No one likes bankers. Thievin’ is a skill, for sure. But the wrong one.”
Dio watched himself swallow hard. “Wouldn’t a banker know math and such? That seems valuable.”
“Nah,” the executioner replied. “He didn’t know anything about subtraction until this moment and I don’t think he’s in a position to teach anyone anything about it. Didn't know nothing about Supreme Mathematics.”
“Golly,” Dio said. “That sounds supremacist. Do you guys have a leader? Can I talk to him?”
“Nah, just because Voltron comes together and someone's gotta be the head. It don't mean nothing.” The executioner demurred, managing to look embarrassed somehow.
“Positively Heraclean, whatever Voltron is. Can you treat it with mercury?”
“For sure, dog,” The man patiently ignored his attempt at medical humor. “So, you got any skills?” He hefted his bloodied jian, gore dripping down its point to pool on the deck below. “I’d hate to cut that beautiful, manly beard of yours.”
Prior to the last thirty seconds Dio would have said banking, mathematics, geometry, language, or any other number of subjects bored, rich people demand. But, for once, he determined to tell the truth, if just this one time.
And something inside Dio, an increasing nag at the back of his mind growing since Delphi, finally snapped.
“I know how to rule men,” Dio declared with the confidence of an idiot, eyes wide. “Sell me to a slave in need of a master.”
The executioner laughed hard. “Yeh, that's a skill for sure. What's your name, dog?”
“Diogenes of Sinope. Er, well, just Diogenes, I suppose. I think Sinope is over me by now. I think I am, too. So, Diogenes of Nowhere.”
“We had to leave Staten to get recognized, too. Spread that Five-Percent message like strangers in a strange land.”
“The five what now?”
“The truth, dog. The first man was black and Asiatic and most everyone else is an imitator sent to tempt the best humans from the path of excellence and equality. We unite by asserting 95% of humans are useless idiots.”
Dio exclaimed, “Oh snap! The first man?! Was that you? You don’t look a day over sixty.”
“Nah, dog. An ancestor.”
“Not you then. Why do you care?”
“Pride, dog. Pride. You gotta have a heritage.”
“No, you don’t. You didn’t do anything to get a heritage,” Dio unwisely accused. “Your mother got a bit tipsy, your father a bit handsy, and then you evacuated yourself from a vagina sometime later, just like everyone else. Be thankful, not proud.”
“A black vagina.”
“What?” Dio hesitated.
“I crawled out of a black vagina, dog.”
“I don’t know that makes it any harder to get out of, does it? Was it harder for you to get in there?”
“You always try to die? Gotta big mouth on you for a dude who still don't know what ‘protect your neck’ means.” He glanced at the now waist-high pile of heads stacked on deck.
“I can’t think of a more appropriate time to be mouthy. That liberal education, again. Don’t worry, though. Once this Athenian ass I know invents sociology, people will invest in the idea an idea trumps reality. It'll be wrong, but it'll sound wicked smart.”
“Hah,” the executioner laughed. “For real? You’re all right, Diogenes of Everywhere.”
“I like the sound of that,” Dio scratched his beautiful, manly beard. “Everywhere. It's the same as nowhere. Positively cosmopolitan, that. Oh, I think I just coined a new term. Cosmopolitan. I am a citizen of nowhere and everywhere. They saw to that in Sinope. I am of no race or tribe, both are fictions, and neither serve any longer.”
“Pffft,” the executioner sniffed. “You gotta have roots, dog. You can’t be of nowhere.”
“Of course, I can,” Dio countered. “Particularly if the alternative is pushing some racialist nonsense on the open sea to the captive condemned.”
“Racialist? Is that some Greek word?”
“History's worst-best joke!” Dio roared. “After astrology maybe. Straight out of the Academy at Athens.”
“You mean racist?” The executioner furrowed his brow. He didn’t seem to like that word. “I’ve seen racist ice cream, but not racialist ice cream.”
“No racism without racialism. A racialist thinks races exist instead of melanin, whatever that is. It means you pulled the best straw of the bunch, which just happens to be the very first one. What are the odds, you think? That it's true in reality, rather than just the mind.”
“A black dude hasn’t invented probability yet.” The executioner admitted, somewhat huffily. “That stuff is for nerds, though. We’re into Supreme Mathematics.”
“What is that? Arithmomancy? Bunch of crap just like racialism, but as long as you're entertaining you can say absolutely anything.” Diogenes was pushing it, but he was swiftly adapting to the world’s demand he be a dog.
“You’re talking yourself to death here, you know.” The executioner hefted his jian. “It sounds like you’re calling me a racist.”
“I'm not.” Dio continued. “We’re just having a conversation on the open sea, thick as thieves, friends to the end, death to all the white man, etc. Whatever that is. I’m on your side, mate. You're entertaining, can't help but like you.”
“Well you’re confusing as hell and super racist, baby. Don’t hate white people. They can’t help it.”
“Not as confusing as those racists from the last chapter who’d rather jump overboard than get decapitated by a dark skinned dude. Those guys sucked.” And Dio meant it. He had not enjoyed his time with them. HR these nuts.
The executioner chuckled. “I couldn’t kill you, dog. You’re entertaining, too. Could sell you as a clown. A clown who knows how to rule men.”
“Oh good,” Dio asserted. “You know, for human traffickers, you guys are all right.”
“We know it. We like to think of ourselves as fishers of men, though. A black man will invent that phrase, you know. Fishers of men. Filthy men, in your case, dog. Also, Cleopatra is going to be super cool and definitely black.”
“Yes, I'm a dog, as everyone keeps telling me,” Dio barked. “A Cosmopolitan Dog. I feel positively transformed, rootless, filthy, and invincible.” He was a new man. Or woman. He didn’t discriminate. Not like that.
What would Tiresias do? Probably stroke his beautiful, manly beard, while looking over his shoulder for another round of surprise gender reassignment surgery. That kind of thing tends to make a person nervous. Hera and her humor.
The executioner cut in. “You know how this whole slave-selling thing works? If not, I gotta pamphlet here called ‘Cash Rules Everything Around Me.’ It’s a banger. Think of it as being set free from your old life. Makes it easier.”
“Nope! I got it!” Dio exclaimed, stroking his beautiful, manly beard and looking over his shoulder before continuing. “You're doing me a favor selling me like a fish to some slaver.”
“For sure, dog. For sure,” the executioner turned and yelled at the rest of the crew to get moving west to auction, “Dollar, dollar bills, ya’ll!”
The crew picked up the chant as they embarked west towards the slave markets of the free polis of Corinth. “Wu-Tang sparks the wicks! Wu-Tang sparks the wicks!” Dio couldn't help barking along. It was a catchy tune.
Were the sun not straight overhead by now, and assuming anyone looked up, they would see Canis Minor following Orion overhead. But they wouldn’t call it that. For that is Latin, and only Italian barbarians talk that trash.
Unlike Doric Greek.
Debase the Currency - Whether Coin or Clout - Show Who Rules Them - And Set Yourself Free - Go East Old Man - To Learn Something New - Make Peace With Darkness - And Shine Your Light - Witness Inaction In Action - Before the Great Game - Of Two Competing Conceits - Leaving a Strange Legacy