Chapter Chapter [2.10] The Going Rate
Sol,
The Raven From Rome
The haggling carried on long into the evening.
Beyond the bare basics that every mentor of a young patrician was owed, Selene was to be my master in cultivation. That demanded more. Her hallowed status of Oracle, anointed or not, demanded more still. She was a Heroic soul, standing head and shoulders above my own Sophic soul, and yet I was the older one of the two of us. Pride, if not convention, demanded compensation for that as well.
My father had spent half a day and a full night establishing terms with Aristotle after my mentor sought him out. It had been amiable enough at first, but by the time the moon had reached its zenith, there had been hollering fit to wake the dead.
Ours was a family that hadn’t known want for generations, not for anything material at least, and my father was far from a miser. Aristotle’s price had simply been that ridiculous. Had he been any other man, approaching the captain of the Fifth and demanding a consul's ransom for the privilege of teaching his son, my father would have fit him to his foot like a new boot and gone marching. Aristotle wasn’t any other man, though. He was the man who knew everything, and my father paid his price in the end.
Selene’s guidance was every bit as valuable to me now as Aristotle’s had been back then, and not just because she was the only Heroic cultivator I knew that didn’t want me dead. She was unique, even for a Heroine, just as Aristotle had been unique among scholars. She likely had insight that even Aristotle couldn’t have given me, were he with us on the Eos and at all inclined to teach. Selene had grown up immersed in aspects of mystery faith that Aristotle had always scorned. In all honesty, I wasn’t sure a material value could be matched to her at all. Yet even so, a price had to be paid.
It was a different sort of frustration than what my father had suffered. If Aristotle was the hunting hound, Selene was the hare. Beyond food and water and a very good horse, she suddenly became a woman with no earthly wants worth noting.
It took Griffon stepping in on her behalf to negotiate, masking it as a series of brotherly jabs, to finally get somewhere productive. By the time she realized what he was doing, it was too late.