Power must be taken through violence, and only religious zealotry leads to the degree of necessary conflict within individuals, families, communities and populations such they visit this violence upon self and one another.
The Eternal War | Doctrine | Religion | Resentfuls’ Principle
It’s his first year at here Akadimía Ellinikís Neolaías. Early into this first semester at the boarding school he’d been moved to at the age of twelve, from the Catholic orphanage school he’d attended since the death of his family when he was only seven. By whom and for what purpose he’d been moved here, he’s still unable to determine.
Standing on the football pitch of the school nestled up on Mount Chortiatis, overlooking Thessalonica, he pauses to take in the stunning view of the city, of the Thermaic Gulf, and the Axios-Loudias National Park. All the many shades of browns and greens and tans of northern Greece, the deep blues of the Aigaío Pélagos. All deeply embedded and colored with the rich history of the place. This unique place in the world.
The pause is necessary. Not to face what is soon before him. But as one must always take a moment to appreciate the view. No less so given he’s yet again in his young life forced to stand and fight.
The school buildings and facilities are rather impressive, all the white marble, local stone and fired red brick, the manicured gardens and landscapes, very comfortable dormitories and living spaces. All of which, even now, he finds appreciation for. This is all a far cry from the orphanage in Torino. Except for the fights. The one thread linked both schools, both lives.
The lessons and education here at Neolaías are given in Greek, Latin, and English, some in German and French, are the very best. This very old center of learning sits here high up above the bay, on the mountainside. An academy which survived world wars and more than one revolution. To say nothing of centuries of time. The whole of it, its style luxury and class, as well as its survival, the result of location and well-healed patrons. There’s little time to ponder this though. Soon he must fight!
Not that it matters who wins or loses in the fight now before him. It’s not about such paltry concerns. It’s about showing them they can neither frighten nor dominate him through words and the threat of violence alone!
It isn’t even about the two Greek teens his age, crossing the pitch to fight him. These two don’t matter in the great scheme of life. They’re just practice. Two spoiled rich kids who aren’t a fraction the threat posed by the orphaned Italians boys he spent years fighting with before coming here. Poor boys with absolutely nothing to lose and absolutely everything to prove. No, there are the dáskalos and Foitités watching from the windows and in between spaces of the campus. This fight is for them. Before they might think of pushing, pressing or taking advantage of him. Let them see what happens to those who cross the line!
At least these two had the temerity to take a punch in the face. Those watching are little more than cowards. Peter, now Mikel, says to himself. Cowards believing they can hide their malevolence behind civil words and clever statements. These two are at least something more than that. How much more is yet to be seen.
Though he’s underweight for his height, at twelve, he’s already five foot nine, and still growing. The ache in his legs every night, telling him his body is still getting longer. He may not have the muscle mass to impress, which gives inexperienced bullies like these confidence might be better thought through. But he lacks nothing in experience, reach, speed, flexibility and accuracy. And a total and utter lack of fear. Not even the fear one should have to preserve self.
This is just life. It had been this way since that night forced him out into the world alone as only a small child. The night two explosions nearly took his life, like it had the others.
Four years ago, they’d come in the early morning, after Vespers, before classes began. A very old man who walked with a cane, but who obviously had been a man of war in his earlier days. And a man in his early thirties who was obviously still a man of war. He’d been called to the abbot’s office where he was told he was to go with these men. The abbot, a man who had been like a grandfather to him, kind and genuinely concerned with his wellbeing since he first arrived as the orphan with no name. Two mornings after the explosion and fire had taken his home and family and changed his life forever.
He had thought to not go with these two men. In the hallway, turning as if to go back to the abbot’s office, return to the safety and comfort of the life he’d built here at the Catholic Charities orphanage in Torino. A place where whomever had killed his family could not find him. But the old man, heavy on his cane, had taken his arm and whispered to him in the native language he’d kept hidden from absolutely everyone since the night of fire. “Vy ne v bezopasnosti zdes'.” Any thought to resist disappeared, not because he was afraid. No, the shock of hearing his native tongue was enough to quell any urge to pull his arm free and walk away.
He’d neither used nor heard Russian since that night. Not since his mother had said spokoynoy nochi for the last time, turning off the light to the TV room dug into the hillside as the ground floor of the old farmhouse. The TV room where he was falling asleep on the sofa watching his favorite movie for the thirtieth time. The last time he would ever see that movie, his mother, father, and his brother and sister.
The first explosion had rocked the first floor of the old stone house, showering dirt and debris down upon him where he slept, the thick wool blanket half on him and half on the floor, the TV blinking out as the power was cut to the building by the massive blast. The room becoming pitch black suddenly. He couldn’t see it, but the blast had taken out not only the first floor but half the second floor, collapsing what hadn’t been blasted up and outwards. It was a powerful blast, with a serious shockwave, his ears rang, vision blurred and he was disoriented for days after. All of which did not stop him early that morning from seeking to make his way to the stairs and the door to a first floor no longer existed.
What else was there to do but to start screaming for his mother, his father, his siblings. A scream which wouldn’t come out as a scream at first. No, more a dry throated gurgle that becomes a cough that blows out the ancient dirt had gotten into his sinuses and throat. A scream becoming a full on, full throated seven-year old’s earnest scream. But there was no voice coming back to him and he’d come to fear the worst. Then there was smoke and the sounds of the old stone farmhouse, what remained of it, settling. Even his young mind understood the sounds of stone and wood scraping and creaking, what remained of the building above ground engulfed in fire, wanted nothing but to collapse down into the ground floor where young Peter was.
Heat follows smoke, followed by tongues of flame licking through the gaps opened up in the stone and tiled floor above, seeking oxygen and any flammable material on the ground floor below to feed itself upon. A ravenous beast only just beginning to roar into being. His seven-year-old, blast addled brain knew he must escape the ground floor room, must get out using the door to the outside, or the part of the entry still intact. He had to get himself out and away from the fire as quickly as possible.
From the outside, having forced the fragments of the blocked ground floor door open, having climbed out through the crack he was able to make. Having climbed up the hillside, to the level where the first floor of the building once stood with a second floor above that. He saw the destruction. The area of the second floor where the three bedrooms had been, was nothing but sky and fire. Just as his mind grasped that everyone who had been asleep in those rooms was dead, what remains of the second floor collapses onto the first floor. Moments later a second smaller blast ensures both collapse into the ground floor where he’d been sleeping only minutes before.
Two days later, exhausted, cold and hungry, dirty, fed up and deep down angry. He’d approached a Carabinieri and asked to be taken somewhere where he could get food. Stating, sure to only use Italian, that he was alone in the world, with no family and no home. Other than that, he gave no information, afraid those who’d attempted to kill his entire family might be looking for him. The Carabinieri had taken Peter straight to the officer’s uncle, the abbot of the orphanage, where Peter would for years feign amnesia regarding his family and what happened. Having learned well the lessons of distrust from his Russian parents and the stories they'd told of the trials of Russian nobility through the early part of the twentieth century.
When the first boy is within striking distance, Peter front kicks him straight in the groin. The boy doubles over at the blow, putting his head in perfect position for Peter to fluidly, all in the same motion, transition from the first kick into a knee to the face that puts the first boy down hard. There are no such things as rules nor is there fairness in a fight, not in a real fight. The surprise on the second boy’s face doesn’t have time to convert to fear or anger before Peter strikes him with a left jab that rocks the second boy’s head back. Before the boy, stunned by the blow, can recover, Peter strikes him with another left jab before a right hook puts the boy on the ground unconscious.
Without looking long at either of the two boys he’d put down in mere seconds, Peter turns to look back at the main campus of the school, before walking off across the pitch towards the hillside. Best he took some time to himself, let the violence in him subside, before going back to his studies and to the responses of those who had watched or will have heard of what just transpired. Of course, they’re already preparing their lectures on fair play, integrity and other than violent means of remedy, which will ensue from one or more teacher and administrator.
He doesn’t care. Unlike the men who had founded this academy, centuries past, there isn’t a single teacher nor administrator today with any combat or fight background. Hell, he doubts any of them had ever even been in a real fight. Teachers and a few students rush to where the first boy is rising unsteadily trying to move to check on the second boy who’s only just regaining consciousness. While Mikel as he is called, his real name Peter being unknown, walks off towards the trails into the trees of Mount Chortiatis. Turning away from the balcony where he'd been watching, the academy’s headmaster asks Mikel’s counselor to join him in his office after he's checked on the two boys.
“Neither boy is seriously injured. Beyond their pride, that is.” Professor Mykonos says as he enters the headmaster’s office. Just under forty minutes after the event on the football pitch.
“And Mikel? Has anyone seen him yet?” Headmaster Karakotsius asks, motioning for Mykonos to be seated across the hardwood desk from him.
“Not yet.”
“He still first in his subjects?”
“He’s first in all his subjects.”
“He’ll have to be censured. There’s no way around it. The other boy’s parents could make this all very difficult for us.” Karakotsius states, as he looks out the large glass windows up to the treed hillside where Mikel has taken himself.
“We can’t just expel him like any other boy who demonstrates violent behaviour?”
“You know we can’t! We may not know who he really is. But he’s most certainly the son of someone powerful in the world. Or he wouldn’t be here, and with such a generous grant to the academy.” The size of grant says to not ask questions. Mikel is not the first, nor even the only, son of someone powerful in the world. Someone remaining anonymous behind the impenetrable barrier of attorneys and bankers who discreetly handle such things. The surplus sons and daughters legitimate and illegitimate, stuffed into just such schools and institutions around the world. Provided for, educated, prepared, yet kept out. Held in reserve. Just in case.
“Well, we seem to have dodged a real threat this time. At least!” Mykonos says as the headmaster turns back to him.
“What do you mean?”
“Neither of the other two boys have expressed anything but that it was all their fault and that they respect Mikel for standing up for himself.”
“That is something! A man, even as a boy, must take full responsibility for his actions. Isn’t that what we teach? Seems at least something we say is getting through.” The headmaster looks approvingly at Mykonos, nodding his head in pleasure.
Mykonos can’t help but smile and nod back. Despite that, down inside he knows the response of the two teen boys is not from anything the school or any of its instructors or administrators have taught. No, their reaction is one of genuine awe and legitimate respect. Something can’t be taught at all in any school. Nor is it anything any of the teachers and administrators alive here have ever earned from just such young men. It’s something only men, real men, share between themselves. It’s something to envy.
“They will need to be separated for some time. Till tempers and egos can return to calm.” Karakotsius.
“That won’t be necessary.” Mykonos responds, regretting the fact the headmaster of such an exclusive all boys school such as this, should know so little about boys. But then again, he was headmaster here for other reasons, mostly to do with relationships out there with the wealthy of the world.
“I should think there’s great need.” Karakotsius responds, taken aback. How could this professor not understand young men and the threat they pose when angry?
“They’ll be friends by week end.” This was the way of it between men. Mikel could have hurt either or both of them, badly. But he had chosen not to. He could have spoken ill of them, insulted them. But he had chosen not to. One of the boys, having gone so far as to state Mikel had looked at them in such fashion, as they approached, as to ask do we have to do this. And the other boy was certain Mikel had, in a quick look and assessment, ensured they were both okay and would be able to take care of themselves, before he headed into the hills up behind the academy.
“He will still have to be formally reprimanded, and an appropriate punishment will need to be identified and administered to each of them. We’ll need a formal writeup for the representative attorney brought him here.” The headmaster says over his shoulder as he turns to look out the window again, up to the trees on the side of Mount Chortiatis, praising himself internally for his staff doing such a splendid job at passing on chivalrous and gentlemanly knowledge. Completely oblivious to the fact the school’s good fortune in what could have been a genuinely difficult business, is resultant from something far more ancient and powerful than not only the school, but all of human civilization. A representation of boys learning to be real man.
Mykonos understands. This something these boys have is something he had sought in himself from the time he was a boy, and well into his early teen years. By then, however, he had come to realize he lacked that something, that undefinable quality he had looked hard for. Had sought to develop. Like many others before him, going back to the beginning of the species and before. By the time he was in his late teens, he had already recognized there just is something more about boys like these, like Mikel. Something more that he was not and never would be. And so, he, like many other males at a certain age, had set himself a path through life where he never had to confront such men. Better to learn to be of service to great men than to set yourself on a path to be their enemy.
As Mykonos stands, turns and moves to the door to return to his classroom and the afternoon sessions. He sets himself the task of seeking out and speaking with Mikel tomorrow. He might not have what Mikel has, but he’d spent his life diligently studying it in myth and history and had become a teacher, found his way to this very academy. Specifically, so that he might help boys like Mikel, and the other two in the fight, to recognize, to understand and to better utilize that rare something they have, that so many others lack. If history was to be any example, these boys, all three of them, are something rare, this something they have that others lack, not something to be shunned nor denied. But rather, something to be revered in those few who have it and who develop it fully. In those who learn to master and use it properly.
Mykonos had long believed that if he could help in this at all, in even a small handful of boys across the entire span of his life, even in one boy, really. Then his own life would have been of value. Then his wife and three daughters could be proud of him. Even if they would never know and could never fully understand.
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