He and It Chapter 137: The Serpent of Pharisee (3)

Chapter 137: The Serpent of Pharisee (3)

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: GaeaTiamat

 

Xie Ning stood there awkwardly, then silently retracted his gesture of offering.

Still, he was impressed by the scene in front of him. The old man with the golden crown had fainted on the spot, and the sturdy heroes had surrounded him, some with eager eyes, some with panicked looks. Some dropped their spears, and some were yelling at their companions. The light was bright, the positions were staggered…it was a fine layout for an oil painting!

Palaemon cradled the king’s head and poured water onto his closed eyes. The old man woke up, then looked happily in the direction of the young man and said, “If the Gods have not sent an auspicious sign, and given Iolcus a cure for the pestilence, let me not live till the morning!” 

The king was all smiles. He rose to his feet in joy, pushed aside the crowd of heroes who cared for him and regarded him as more than a father, and went to the mysterious young man. However he discovered that the other only looked into his eyes without smiling, or uttering a sound.

“By the honorable name of the great God of the Mountains!” the king spoke respectfully. “When I was still a young man, I once went hunting in the mountains with my seven brothers, and unfortunately I was wounded in the stomach by a wild boar’s tusks, my brothers scattered, and no one came to save me from my misery. Later I realized that jealousy had already eaten up their hearts, and they had left me to die in the mountains and forests to prevent me from succeeding to the throne. Just then I heard the sound of a flute, and a solemn voice said to me, ‘Decendent of Telemachus! ¹ Even if thou shalt be a wise king of Iolcus in the future, thou shalt suffer more than thou canst imagine today! I will take pity on you, so stand up! With those words, the grass by the roadside came to life, and fed me one of its fruits, and immediately I was endowed with infinite strength, and my wounds were healed.” 

“For this favor, I built an altar to the great god Pan here. I swear by my father’s name, I will give you ten brocade robes, ten bulls, ten cooking pots, and an equal amount of gold in exchange for those miraculous fruits to cure the people of the city of their disease!” 

Xie Ning really wanted to tell him, it doesn’t matter what you say. Saying more is useless. It’s like a chicken and duck trying to have a conversation.

However, when he observed the situation, he realized what the man wanted wasn’t the jacket, but the fruits…

After he thought about it for a while, Xie Ning boldly put the jacket under his left arm, stretched out the index finger of his right hand, tapped his lips, swung it, then tapped his ear, and swung it.

Body language was understood by all mankind, wasn’t it? I don’t know how to speak, I don’t understand, so please forgive me, please forgive me.

Aeson looked at the boy in amazement. His fingers were white as cream. Only a maiden could have hands and arms like that. His daughter, Antheia, who was as good a horsewoman and archer as her brother, and was known in the neighboring countries as a beautiful girl, was much stronger than this boy.

Was it possible that he was deaf and mute? 

Stubbornly, the boy pushed the fruit-filled cloth towards him. It was a color he had rarely seen, blue as the deepest sea, soft as the lightest wool, but without the mesh of weaving. The red berries inside were reflected on the cloth, as if they would burn his eyes if he looked at them for more than a moment.

The other heroes suggested that the boy should be taken back, but the king was far-sighted and had greater ideas. He gestured for the boy to ride with him in the carriage, determined to make him a priest of the city’s temple in order to demonstrate the Gods’ favor.

Xie Ning was too nervous to show it outwardly. After all, he was a college student who hadn’t yet graduated. Now that he couldn’t find his way home, he could only follow the current and drift wherever it took him.

As the carriage moved forward, Xie Ning observed the scenery on both sides of the road. The carriage he rode in was very different from the ancient Chinese carriages, with only two wheels, pulled by two golden-blanketed steeds, just like an open-topped chariot. ²

He was even more amazed. No, not so much surprised as horrified, but what scared him even more were the heroes who guarded the vehicle on both sides. There were only eight of them, and all of them were on foot, yet the speed of their stride alone could keep up with two horses trotting at a brisk pace!

What a wealth of martial virtue! Were they still human beings? Were the ancients really so fierce? 

Xie Ning watched them in a cold sweat, and wondered if those men were able to crush their own little dog’s head with only their arm muscles.

While he was peeping, one of them, whose peripheral vision was really sharp, turned his head and caught Xie Ning’s furtive line of sight.

Under his serious and sharp gaze, Xie Ning could neither laugh nor cry. He just put his head down and slowly averted his eyes.

Antisamos looked at the youth for a moment, and saw that his face was snow-white and his eyes dark, and that his hair was soft and dark at the temples, as if it had been a delicate hair of the womb, and that he was very sorrowful. He then turned his head, and marveled to his companion, “Behold the beauty of this young man, and what a veil of gloom he wears. If he were the youngest son of Nyx, the goddess of night, I would not doubt it!” ³

“He will not be the servant of any of us,” said Palaemon, who, having listened to him from the front of the group, couldn’t help but raise his voice in admonition. “The Gods have ordained that he shall neither speak nor hear, and this great sorrow will not be kind to any man! The King has decided to make him a priest of the temple, we should respect the opinion of our elders.” 

Xie Ning didn’t know what they were privately discussing. He was so hungry that his stomach wouldn’t growl anymore. He could only hold his coat, keep his back straight, and stay on the vehicle while he kept a firm eye on the life-saving berries.

After about an hour, a magnificent capital city gradually appeared in front of them. The tall white city walls sat on the mountains, and vaguely visible inside the city, Xie Ning was surprised to see real ancient Greek buildings. His heart filled with excitement.

He was too young. He had no experience and hadn’t suffered much, so he couldn’t draw such real, weighty and sensitive things. In literature, they said that people should write scenes with emotion, and the same applied to making paintings. Just as one couldn’t understand the flavor of mustard without tasting it, Xie Ning’s talent was not enough to support him by working behind closed doors. For most creators, if they didn’t have first-hand experience, what they wrote, drew and thought would inevitably become castles in the air.

Therefore, when he saw a real ancient city, saw the pedestrians and peddlers, the long alleys, the sunlight through the clouds and how it lit the top of the pale stacked buildings, Xie Ning’s was immediately excited, and his eyes glittered.

Material! What good material! If he could choose a high viewpoint, he could really draw until the end of time.

However, even as he thought that, he started to miss his parents and relatives in his hometown infinitely more.

Once upon a time, when he had just graduated from high school, he felt nagged by his grandparents, while his mom and dad were always going on about the job prospects of art students. At that time, he was really looking forward to going to college, where he could fly to a foreign country alone, and start a colorful and unknown college life. Now, he had traveled thousands of miles away from home, to a world where he didn’t understand the language or know what dynasty it was, only to realize that the time spent with his family was something that could not be exchanged for a thousand or even ten thousand pieces of gold.

As the king watched the young man, he glimpsed how he was at times buoyant as a hero about to kill his enemies, and at times as sad as a bride about to be married. Aeson wondered inwardly if he was the son of the god Pan and the goddess Nyx, or if he was an adopted son from a woman who had given birth to a child in a mountain stream, and then picked up by a dryad ⁴ and nurtured by her breast milk. Now he was grown up, and his foster-mother couldn’t care for him all his life, so she placed him at the altar of the god Pan, and saved him for the king.

“My son, please do not frown with worry!” Even though he knew that the boy didn’t understand his words, the king spoke to him soothingly. “I have resolved to watch over you, and care for you for the rest of your life. I shall call you ‘Dorus,’ for you are a gift from the Gods to my people to solve the scourge of the epidemic.” 

Xie Ning didn’t know what kind of name the old king had given him, but since his tone was soft and his expression was kind, he could roughly guess that the other party was saying soft words of comfort to him, and after hesitating for a while, he nodded his head lightly.

A low trumpet blew on top of the walls of the city, and the gates slowly opened to welcome the king’s chariot, escorted by the heroes. Xie Ning watched as a bunch of people popped out of the buildings like rolling beans and spilled towards the gateway. Men and women, young and old, and all of them withered in color. Their eyes looked like those of someone who had been in the college entrance exam training room for three months, red and swollen from overwork. They all looked sick.

Although they were sick, the people’s happy energy wasn’t diluted. They surrounded the chariot and the heroes as they shouted, arms raised and restless.

The king stood up straight and began to make a speech in gibberish. As he spoke, he took the coat from Xie Ning’s hands and reverently held it high. Everyone cried tears of joy. As the king spoke, he grabbed Xie Ning’s hand and lifted it up, causing everyone to cheer, like all the smelly foreign tourists in the city asking for money to play on the public screen…

No, I’m kidding. The people’s reactions were still very surprising and enthusiastic.

However the language and cultural barriers were far from being eliminated with a few words. Being alone in a foreign land, Xie Ning really couldn’t tell in such a short time, whether this enthusiasm was the enthusiasm of “friends coming from afar” or “Haha, bad luck! The boy and girl sacrificed to the God don’t have to come from my house anymore!” The enthusiasm of native people wasn’t the same as the enthusiasm of the people who had come from afar.

However, there wasn’t time for him to think about it. The king’s chariot continued to move forward, all the way to the royal palace. Xie Ning was still starstruck as he looked around. Three maids came straight out of the palace and they took Xie Ning off the chariot, then put a big white linen cloth around his shoulders, and like driving oxen, hurried him away.

Xie Ning, “?” 

Xie Ning was really puzzled. Although the westerners already had large bones, this was still an ancient time when material resources weren’t abundant. Why was everyone taller and stronger than him? Not to mention the eight heroes, even the beautiful maids were like that. Xie Ning looked up at their bare, rounded shoulders, with muscle lines visible in those white arms, and figured they could punch him to death without any problem.

Without saying a word, the maids walked through the marble halls, past gold and silver pillars, a courtyard full of brightly colored statues, and brought Xie Ning to an inner room where a bathtub was placed and began to peel off his t-shirt.

Xie Ning, “?!”

The ancient Greeks were supposedly ahead of any of their contemporaries in the aesthetics of the human body, believing that the physical body should be as developed as the intellect in order to be truly beautiful, and they weren’t shy about displaying it. Even though Xie Ning came from a modern, open and civilized society, he remained a subtle orientalist who, due to his sexual orientation, had never even been to a public bathhouse, not to mention being stripped by a few female friends.

A bath is a bath, but let me do it myself!

He leapt away from them and dodged their hands in fear, as he frantically gestured until the maids finally understood what he meant.

The maids laughed as they filled the bath with warm water, set clothes on the low stools next to him, and put a lot of exquisite bottles and jars in the small straw frames near the bath.

Xie Ning was in a befuddled mood. However, he still started by taking off the book strap and putting the sketchbook on a high platform, since he was afraid that a splash of water would wet his sketchbook. Then he made sure that no one was watching before he took off his clothes and pants with a lot of concern, and stepped suspiciously into the tub.

Hiss! So cold!

As he was under someone else’s roof, the treatment was still considered acceptable, he consoled himself. They aren’t whipping you, or making you a slave. They are treating you politely. They even invited you to ride in the chariot, led you to a bath…By the way, why is the king treating me so favorably? 

The way he’s acting, it seems to be all about the berries. But I just picked those that were at hand. They should be plentiful in the woods. How much could they be worth? 

Xie Ning hastily scooped up the water and splashed it on his body twice over.

He had a sharp mind and was good at observing. After he saw the people’s looks and behavior earlier, he knew that a serious infectious disease must have spread through the city. Since he was a child, he had received a lot of vaccinations, which was really good. He didn’t want to cover his mouth and nose in front of hundreds of sick people, in case they felt offended. Then he would be in deep trouble.

However, how could the king, at his age, not be afraid of getting infected from all the germs he’d been walking around in? Wait a minute…Was the king praying for a cure for the contagious disease, when he fell from the altar with those berries in my hands, so he got the wrong idea? It couldn’t be that!

When he thought of that possibility, Xie Ning panicked. How could a few broken berries cure a disease? Don’t drag me out and chop me to death for the crime of deceiving the king!

Even though he’d just experienced a kind of mysterious and metaphysical type of ‘traveling,’ and then spent the night in a weird jungle, then was faced with ancient heroes with inhuman physiques…ultimately in his current situation, he still didn’t know what the real dangers were. It didn’t even occur to him that this was the age when men and gods mingled, and that those eight fierce and strong heroes carried the ancestral bloodlines of the gods, or that even one of their parents could be a god.

Since the beginning, he had been trying to use scientific principles to explain the matter of his travels. People feared the unknown, and people were creatures that needed the ability to explain. Science and reason were the weapons of man in the face of the unknown, and the process of explaining, therefore, was the process of getting rid of the mysterious aura of the unknown.

Deep in his heart, Xie Ning shied away from the most impossible answer. If ghosts and gods really existed in the world, and it was their will that brought him to this era, what should he do in order to get out of the world, and reunite with his hometown and family? 

He was immersed in his worries as he sat in the smooth tub, unaware that a maid had slipped in, barefoot and silent as a bobcat. She saw the sketchbook Xie Ning had put down, reached out her hand, then quickly made off with it.

Meanwhile, the king’s palace was celebrating. They were celebrating that the epidemic had subsided, and that the Goddess Akeso was once again brushing the folds of her robe, adorned with healing herbs, over the land. ⁵ The priests threw the fruit of the god Pan into the streams and wells. The water immediately became as clear as crystal, and the people vied with each other to drink it. After drinking it, their yellowish complexions immediately blushed with health, and the elders walked as if they were young and strong.

Aeson sat on his throne, and glowed from the relief of a great calamity, while he talked cheerfully with his wife, Glauke, while by his side sat his only daughter Antheia.

“If only my sons were here!” Aeson said. “But the happiness of this world is never complete. Alas! Still, now that the plague can no longer send my people to death, I have nothing to complain of!” 

At that moment, the maid came hurrying back. She had been ordered by the princess to secretly take away the mysterious boy’s belongings. As a young girl, Antheia was devoted to the Sun God, Apollo, and Apollo cherished the clever and beautiful princess, granting her the power of foresight. ⁶ As soon as the king’s chariot entered the town, Antheia felt an unexplained dizziness, so she started to wonder where the boy really came from.

Once she held the book, she opened it eagerly. The paper was as white as a dove, as smooth as silver, and was both soft and hard, thin and dense. Her first reaction was shock. She was convinced that the book was not a product of the earth, and after she examined the drawings in the sketchbook, she was even more convinced. She murmured in surprise.

Painters could use color to faithfully reproduce light or dark and the texture of surfaces and it was convincing. One could see crimson paint on a sculpture and think of the splendor of a real robe of that same color. When delicate pastels were painted on the lips one could imagine the beauty of a goddess’s face. However, she had never seen images, made with only a combination of black and white and gray, that could so exquisitely and vividly express a fruit’s fragrance, and show that fruit as if it were in a shadow, and the thin shadow was drawn on the paper.

“Ah!” The princess couldn’t help but exclaim.

The sound attracted her father’s attention. The king turned his head, saw his cherished daughter with her back to him, and asked, “What are you doing, my child?” 

Antheia had no time to hide the sketchbook before she was discovered by her father.

Aeson took the book and exclaimed to the queen in amazement, “Perhaps his mother, or the goddess who brought him up, was not a nymph, but a Muse from Mount Olympus!” ⁷

Then, of one accord, they chastised the princess, and reproached her for her willfulness and boldness. “Daughter, how could you offend such a benefactor, who has no quarrel with you? Knowing that as much as the heavens takes away, so much is given again. Since he cannot speak, much less hear, the Gods gave him this great talent instead. Why did you steal his love?” 

Antheia admitted her mistake, but she was still angry and unconvinced, and inevitably felt resentment towards ‘Dorus.’ She knew in her heart that she had never made a mistake with her talent.

Meanwhile, Xie Ning studied the clothes prepared by the maid for a long time before donning them. He also wore a chiton, only his chiton didn’t hang down to his ankles, the length came just to the bottom of his thighs. ⁸

…Well, thighs are thighs. Just think of it as a skirt. It’s not like you can’t wear it.

It was then that he realized that his sketchbook was gone.

Xie Ning was so scared that he searched everywhere. However, the maid gestured to him for a long time, then finally led him to the hall, where the lost item was recovered, so he realized that it was taken away by the king’s men.

This feeling was similar to having a distant relative take an unauthorized look at his browsing history. Xie Ning stood there for a long time with a low expression as he clutched his sketchbook tightly, and frantically thought back to whether he had drawn anything shameful or not.

I don’t think so…right? Art! It’s all art here!

In a state of confusion, he ended up staying in the capital city, Iolcus.

Xie Ning felt that he must have burned incense for several lifetimes to have saved up for this one-time good fortune. Later, he asked the maid about the situation using gestures, and after some guesses he came up with a positive answer. The berries were useful. They really saved the citizens’ lives, and that meant that the ten beautifully embroidered robes, ten bulls, ten bronze pots of unknown use, and the pieces of gold promised by the king actually became Xie Ning’s possessions.

In the modern world, he was still a junior at college who needed to worry about where he would be working after graduation, but here Xie Ning soared to great heights and would have no problem supporting ten slaves with his assets.

He also lived in the temple. Food, clothing, housing and transportation were not a problem. Of course, he wouldn’t buy and sell slaves. He had his own hands and feet, and didn’t need to be served by others.

Xie Ning studied writing with the temple priests, then wandered around drawing. The first thing he drew was the grand and elegant temple, although he didn’t know which god it was dedicated to. The priest stood behind him and watched as he made messy lines on the precious “silver paper” with a thin, black ink brush, and gave him a disapproving look.

However, as if he were performing a miracle, after he added a few thick strokes horizontally, diagonally, and vertically, the outline of the temple jumped off of the paper. After filling in a few more black blocks and a few more fine lines, the shrunken image of the temple had already appeared on the paper.

The priest’s eyes were about to glaze over. Even though he was not a believer in The Muses, he still murmured silently that he admired and worshiped that technique. It was as if he had given the pen and paper a soul.

Xie Ning, the person concerned, didn’t feel that proud of himself.

He was using painting techniques that were the accumulation of thousands of years of work. He didn’t know how many ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign masters, exhausted their life’s work to summarize a variety of schools of techniques, and then an excellent educator extracted the most refined, shallow, and suitable methods for teaching the culmination of their efforts into a presentation for their students, to be studied and assimilated.

When standing on the shoulders of giants, we must know our own weight. If you take the height of the transparent giant as your own because no one else could see it, how could you dare to bear the weight of praise and glorification? 

Xie Ning only thought of himself as a street artist. He drew pictures. He’d asked a carpenter to help make a simple easel, and whenever he went out and set up the easel and put the sketchbook on it, there would soon be a large number of people quietly surrounding him and blocking the roadside.

In ancient times, entertainment was limited, but Xie Ning drew on the streets for hours, and many people couldn’t bear to leave and watched him for long periods of time.

He couldn’t speak the language yet, so he really didn’t know how to repay that level of love. Therefore, Xie Ning just gave away his paintings on the street. He didn’t have much paper in his book, but the temple always had a lot of clay tablets and straw paper, so he used straw paper and charcoal pencils to draw a lot of sketches, then distributed them to people who were willing to model for him.

People took the complimentary drawings, often ecstatically, so happy that they didn’t know what to do. Many people, in broad daylight, pulled their hair, clutched their chests, then ran home with wild shouts. However, within a few days the priest came to his door and, begging for forgiveness, gesturing fiercely and tearfully, as he asked him not to give away any more paintings to others.

When he looked into Xie Ning’s confused eyes, the priest was terrified.

That kind of painting, which was so exquisite that it caused fear in his heart, was the same as the golden olive oil offered to Athena, the white lion’s skin offered to Artemis, and the first-born wine offered to Dionysus, all of which were things that only the gods could enjoy. ⁹ For earthly human beings to obtain those items would be like a baby grasping the golden cup of abundance, or a lame man riding a divine flying horse. [The golden cup of the Gods was an item only found on Olympus, their home. The divine winged horse is Pegasus who can fly to the Gods [/efn_note] With such mismatched gifts, he feared that the Gods would be furious. As everyone knew, the last ancient god to favor mankind was Prometheus, who was now imprisoned in the Caucasus Mountains. ¹⁰