HYACINTHUS

Chapter Eight

TO MY SURPRISE, my father accepted.

He didn't even try to deter me. He must have been scared that I might react violently if he didn't grant me my request.

It was quite obvious to everyone that I had changed. I wasn't the meek mother's favorite. Yes, I was scrawny and malnourished at the time, but my rage was unmeasurable, overflowing the borders of my physical body.

I didn't stay scrawny for long.

My father first introduced me to calisthenics. Going straight to fighting with my brothers would only cause me to break bones (mine, not theirs).

Training by my own was easier said than done. It was a game of repetition and endurance. I would have to stay in painful positions, my arms the only part of my body in contact with the earth.

And the sandy terrain of the training ground was slippery beneath my hands, causing me to fall many a time. My instructor, a lean yet muscled man with piercing eyes and an even more piercing voice, taught me how to fall, too.

You have to protect your head at all costs, he said. Most ideally, fall on your behind; if you aren't able to, your elbows are an alternative.

So I fell, but at least I fell correctly. And then, I would rise again, and dust the sand off my scratched knees, which have already roughed up.

Soon, my instructor began bringing disks and javelins, so I would also learn how to throw. I found these games much more interesting, yet nothing rivaled my love for archery, which was still forbidden in the palace.

I was beginning to notice changes in my body. Long hours of training would leave me hungry and strengthen my appetite; I found myself eating much larger potions than before, and craving meat, meat I previously disliked eating.

My forearms thickened with muscle, and veins began drawing themselves in them, carving out in a net of blue and purple lines. My shoulders widened, my calves got stronger. I even grew in height during those few years; I didn't have to look up when talking to my father and brothers - now we were eye to eye.

I was still quite lean, not at all bulky like Argalos and Cynortas, but I was beginning to gain strength similar to theirs. Of course, they were immensely discontent about that. With cruel tricks, they tried to destabilize me.

Many rumors were going round about me, and I knew who the instigators were.

That I was promiscuous, and slept with lowly servant girls (to the fact that my father actually truly did that, not as a rumor, but as reality, nobody seemed to bat an eye).

That I was mentally fragile due to the years of imprisonment and was prone to anger outbursts and breaking things in my supposed fits of rage.

That I conspired to overtake the throne and kill my brothers, following some wicked ploy constructed by my late mother.

But the one that actually got to me, the only rumor that actually made me feel insecure in my identity, and questioning things, was their latest invention.

That I was attracted to men.

Now, listen. Many older men were known for using their young male servants for their perverse fantasies. But that wasn't done out of attraction. They did it just because they could.

Nobody could stop them. They could torture, mutilate, even kill those poor boys if they wanted, and it would go unnoticed; the boys were from peasant families, and their chastity, innocence, and life meant very little.

After a few strong drinks, or a few smokes of drugs from the Orient, those older masters wouldn't differentiate a cow from a woman, not to speak of a man from a woman. To many rich merchants and noblemen, male courtesans were even easier to get.

But I... I had no desire to torture and be a brute. My mind wasn't dimmed by opiates, nor my heart broken by a cruel woman.

After all, no woman even got close to possessing my heart.

Perhaps Daphne. Yet that was brotherly and sisterly love. She was my confidante, she was my friend. I held her near and dear to my soul. But it was not a love that involved passion and lust, a romance over which wars could be declared, battles fought, lives lost.

There have been bloodsheds caused by the folly of love, and there will be many more in the future. I am sure that, even here, on Spartan grounds, there will be a woman with which men will be so enamored that they will fight till their last breath.

I won't be one of those men. I think I knew that then, and I know that now, for absolute certainty.

I will never feel for women what I felt for men.

And no girl would ever incite in me those powerful butterflies in my insides, that searing pain in my chest, those insane, yet delightful fantasies that I discovered that one fateful day, in the beginning of my seventeenth summer, when I met the first man I ever loved.