[A Dream of Eagles 01] - The Skystone

by Jack Whyte (ebook by Undead)

  By the end of dinner, I was again enmeshed in Luceiia's beauty and had lost all awareness of Cylla's charms. I thought no more about her until she came to my bed in the small hours, awakening me and throwing me into a panic.

  I had been dreaming of Luceiia, feeling her there beside me in the bed, warm and strong and silken, and then suddenly I was no longer dreaming. The breast I was fondling was warm and real, and the body pressed against my swollen penis was alive and urgent. I awoke very quickly, and must have called Luceiia by name, for a laughing, whispering voice said, close to my ear, "No, not Luceiia. Luceiia isn't here."

  And as I struggled to raise myself on one elbow, blustering in sleepy panic, I heard Luceiia's voice say, "Ah, but she is, my dear, and you, I think, are in the wrong bed."

  By the time I had sat up and shaken myself completely awake, Cylla was gone, and Luceiia spoke from the doorway of my room.

  "Go back to sleep, Publius, and sleep well."

  I saw her shape, outlined in the moonlight as she turned to leave.

  "Wait! Wait, Luceiia!" She turned back to me as I rubbed the last of the sleep out of my eyes. "What's happening?" I asked her, though I knew, finally. "What was that all about?"

  Her voice was low-pitched. "I sent Cylla away. She is a foolish woman and a dangerous one. Her husband is not as stupid as she thinks he is. Had he awakened and found her gone, he would have come right here. There are only two beds she could visit, apart from his, and Meric is too old and too holy to appeal to her."

  "Uh," I grunted, at a loss for words. Then I found my tongue. "Thank you for that. I was asleep and thought it was a dream."

  "I know." I could have sworn I heard a smile in her voice. "I heard you."

  "But... how did you come to be here? What hour of night is it?"

  "It is late, Publius, but I have known Cylla all my life. I knew she would come to you. So I waited for her. Would you rather I had not?"

  "No! No. I thank you for your thoughtfumess. You may have saved my life. You were right. That was both foolish and dangerous. And unsought."

  "Then your broken dream was not of Cylla?" Again there was that smiling sound in her tone.

  "I cannot remember," I lied. "No, no, I was not dreaming of Cylla."

  "Good. Then go to sleep again. She will not be back tonight, and we have to be afoot early tomorrow. Meric is not a patient guide. Good night, Publius."

  She closed the door gently as she left, and I had a hard time regaining my lost slumber.

  XIX

  I know that there are people who love hills and mountains. I hate them. They stink of blood and death and ambush. They hide enemies. I have lost too many good friends among hills ever to be impressed with their beauty. Hills are a hazard to the lives of travellers, and of soldiers. Place me on the top of a high hill with an unobstructed view of the countryside in every direction and I might be tempted to relax for a while, but I could never lie down and sleep on a hillside, nor can I ever be cheerful and talkative on a journey that wends through valleys. As I said, I hate hills.

  The Mendip Hills are no different to any of the other hill ranges in south Britain. They look exactly the same. But the Mendip Hills held the promise of skystones, and because all of my experiences since landing in this part of the country had been happy ones, I was prepared to treat the Mendips as friendly territory for the time being; for the first time in my life, I did not feel threatened or claustrophobic. I only realized that, however, when we pulled our horses to a halt at the crest of a high hill and looked down into the valley on the other side, a valley that had been visited by dragons.

  "Well, what do you think?"

  The voice belonged to Meric. I did not answer him immediately; I was too busy scanning the floor of the valley.

  Even from the top of the hill I could see that the grass was thick and rank, mottled already with the browns and yellows of wintertime. Everything I saw had that wet, chilled, unwelcoming look that meant December, and I felt no promise in the prospect in front of me, even though I could count about thirty large boulders scattered across the floor of the valley. The surface of the lake at the far end looked cold and hostile, opaque with wind ripples, and the excitement of the trip turned suddenly to disappointment and depression. I glanced sideways at my two companions. Both of them sat huddled on their horses, swathed in cloaks against the bitter, gusting wind.

  "I don't know what to think, Meric," I answered. "Are you sure this is the place?"

  He started to snap a response but restrained himself and turned his eyes away from me, down into the valley. It was obvious that he had decided not to lower himself to the level of my ill-mannered tone of voice.

  "Yes, Varrus, I am sure this is the place. I have been here several times and it has not changed." He nodded towards the valley floor. "Are those boulders the stones you think fell from the sky?"

  "They might be. I doubt it. I think they're too big. You realize I've never seen a skystone either? I have no idea what they look like." There was a roughness in my voice that I tried, too late, to conceal. It wasn't Meric's fault that this place was different from my expectations. To tell the truth, I hadn't known what to expect. "Tell me again what happened that night, Meric," I said more gently.

  He shivered and drew his cloak more closely around his shoulders, and when he spoke his voice held no indication that he might be irritated by my request.

  "Very well, but remember, please, I am only reporting what was told to me. The event took place during my boyhood, before I joined the Brotherhood. Apparently, the night it happened was a wild one — cloudy and windy, with great gaps in the clouds through which the stars were plainly visible. At about the second hour before midnight, many lights were seen in the sky. Each of these lights was separate from the others at first, but as they approached, at great speed, they became blindingly bright and were accompanied by a great roaring noise. They crashed to earth among the hills in fire and flames that lit up all the undersides of the clouds, turning them red as the fire itself, and the smoke of their coming blotted out the stars. This was all seen by hundreds of people who live in and around the hills here, and it was obvious to every one of them that the dragons of the legend had returned.

  "On the following day, some of the more adventurous among the people came into the hills to see what had to be seen. Among them was Athyr, the old man who became my teacher. He was the one who told me what he saw with his own eyes. He brought me here to this very spot and tried to describe for me the devastation that had been wrought."

  He paused, and for the space of many moments there was no sound on the hilltop except for the bluster of a gust of wind and the clump of hooves as Luceiia's horse sidled away from us slightly. Meric cleared his throat and took up his tale.

  "There had been a small herd of cattle grazing in the valley that night — the riches of the village. The whole herd was dead, and the villagers left with nothing. Some of the cattle had been torn to pieces and the pieces scattered far apart. Some had completely disappeared. Vanished without trace. Others had been roasted alive. The entire valley had been drowned in mud, feet deep in places. Athyr said the mud reached the tops of the surrounding hills." He pointed to a cliff face to the west. "The entire side of that hill over there was blasted to rubble. You can still see the rocks at the foot of the cliff, although they're almost overgrown now." I looked and, sure enough, the bottom of the cliff over by the distant lakeside which I had taken, from this distance, to be sloping hillside, was in fact a tumbled confusion of ruin overgrown by rank, tufted weeds and scraggly shrubs.

  "Everything was covered in mud, and yet Athyr said the cattle were roasted alive. I still don't understand how that could have happened, how it could have been true." He shrugged his shoulders. "I can do no more than accept it on faith. Athyr would never lie about anything. I have never known a more truthful man. He told me that is what he saw, therefore that is what he saw. He believed what he told me, and I believed him. By the time he brought me here,
more than ten years had gone by and the grass had begun to cover everything again, although not so thickly as it has now."

  I interrupted him. "What about the lake?" He looked at me in surprise. "What about it?"

  "I don't know what about it. That's why I'm asking. Did Athyr say anything about the lake?"

  He frowned, remembering that day. "No. No, Athyr said nothing about the lake. Why do you ask?"

  "I don't know." I was examining the valley more closely now. "That whole valley is shut in. How did the cattle get there?"

  He looked mystified. "I don't know. They must have crossed the hills."

  I kept my voice free of impatience. "Why would they do that? There's no shortage of grazing on the other side of the hills. Why would the villagers go to all the trouble of bringing their cattle all the way up and over the hills to let them graze in a shut-in valley?"

  "For protection, perhaps?"

  "From whom? Did you have trouble with raiders back then?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "And you're sure he said nothing about the lake?"

  "Nothing. I am convinced of that."

  "Has the lake always been here?"

  "What kind of a question is that? Of course it has."

  "Then where did all the mud come from?"

  "I don't know, boyo."

  "What else did he tell you? Think hard, Meric. It's important. Was there anything else he said to you about this place that might have slipped from your memory? Something that you might not have thought important at the time? Anything at all?"

  His face became thoughtful as he turned back to the valley below us. I watched him closely, not taking my eyes off his face for a second. His gaze swept across the valley from right to left, and then I saw it — a momentary tic between his brows. I held my breath as it became obvious that he was searching his memories of his first visit to this place and recalling something, something vague that had lain disregarded and forgotten, for years.

  "There was something. Something he said about that hillside." Then it was as though a light suddenly shone in his eyes. "I remember now. He said the Sun God's face was there in the mud of the hillside."

  "What? What in Hades does that mean?"

  He grinned a quick grin and looked at me. "I wondered the same thing and asked him to explain. He said that the mud on the hillside over there had a circular gap in it, where there was no mud at all. He said it was as if one of those dragons had scooped out a perfect picture of the Sun God from the mud all around. A perfect circle of silver-grey rock, he said, in the middle of a sea of mud."

  I was silent for a while. There was something rugging at a loose end in my mind. I felt that irritating anticipation you feel when something is just about to pop into prominence in your mind and then will not. I blinked my eyes hard and shook my head to clear my thoughts. "Where?" I demanded. "Where was it?" He pointed. "Over there, on the flank of the hill." I stared hard in the direction he was pointing. Nothing. I could see nothing.

  "How big was this circle?"

  "I don't know. Athyr did not say, and I did not think to ask him."

  I mumbled a curse, scouring the hillside with my eyes, willing the Sun God's portrait to be there. But there was nothing. And then my stomach churned as I remembered what had caused the tugging at the loose end in my mind: a hot, dusty summer day in Germany, twenty-odd years earlier. We had been marching all day and had stopped for a ten-minute rest. I hadn't even had the energy to unload my gear; I sat hunched on a milestone by the side of the road, staring blindly at the dust that covered the cobbled road surface.

  There had been thunder growling around for most of the afternoon, but the rain had held off. As I sat there, a scattering of big, fat, heavy raindrops fell sullenly around me. It was literally just a scatter of drops, each one of which left its own singular mark in the dust: a perfect circle, a blob of water in the middle of a perfect circle of dust thrown up around it like a wall. If I had not been so tired I would never have seen it. As it happened, the first one that I did see just happened to land right in the centre of the very cobblestone I was staring at. I was mildly surprised by the perfection of the shape it had caused, and I looked at the next one closest to it for the sake of idle comparison. And they were all the same! All the same size and all the same perfect shape, not only on the stones in the road, but in the dust by the roadside. I was sitting in a field of tiny, perfect circles. And then the centurion started yelling and I forgot all about it in the renewed agony of the long march.

  I had remembered it again a couple of days later, however, when we arrived at the end of our march and were installed in camp. The dust was thick everywhere, and our centurion had detailed a couple of men, of whom I was one, to wet down the area surrounding the tribune's tent. I tried then to reproduce the effect of those raindrops, scattering drops high into the air and watching how they fell. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. It seemed to depend on the size of the drops of water. Big drops just splattered everywhere. It wasn't important to me, just a matter of curiosity, and when the other fellows around noticed what I was doing and started to mock me, I felt foolish and quit.

  For months after, however, I became very conscious of the effects of falling rain. I saw how it landed on water, creating circular ripples. Eventually I lost interest in the phenomenon and forgot all about it, until one day about five years later when we got caught on the extreme edge of a freak summer hailstorm, and I saw the same circle effect in the dust of the field we were crossing.

  I hadn't thought about it in years, and yet it had been there at the bottom of my consciousness, waiting to be remembered. Now I had recalled it, and it excited me. I remembered that my father had found the skystone at the bottom of a hole — a hole punched by the fury of its descent from the sky. And old Athyr had seen a circle in the mud on the hillside, a circle big enough to attract his attention.

  My reverie was interrupted by Luceiia, who had been silent for a long time. "Shouldn't we go down and take a look at the boulders, Publius?"

  I smiled at her delicacy in not pointing out that she was freezing to death sitting up there on an exposed hilltop.

  "We can go down and look, of course, but I doubt if we'll find or see any skystones today."

  Her face fell. "How do you know that?"

  "I don't. I don't know it at all. But I just have a feeling that those boulders are not skystones. Anyway, let's go and see. I could be wrong."

  We started to move down the hill, and I could see from the expression on her face that she was having doubts about something.

  "You look concerned, Luceiia. What's the matter?"

  She jerked her head in a negative. "Nothing, really. I was just wondering how you would know whether a stone, any stone, is a skystone or not?"

  I grinned at the seriousness of her expression. "I seem to be saying this a lot today, but I don't know that either. I have no idea how I'll know, or even if I will know. Unless we find one that is pure metal. I won't know until I try to pick one up, I suppose."

  "Publius Varrus! Are you telling us you really don't know what a skystone looks like?"

  I shook my head. "Haven't got an earthly idea. I've only heard about them. I've never seen one."

  "You said you won't know until you try to pick one up. Were you joking? Those boulders in the valley are huge. Nobody could pick one of those up."

  "I'll grant you that, Luceiia, but a man with half a brain in his head should be able to break a piece off one of them, eh? Don't you think so?"

  She flushed, thinking I was teasing her.

  "No, I'm serious, Luceiia. I'll have to break each stone to see what's inside it. Metallic ore is easy to see inside a newly broken stone. The outside's usually weathered and discoloured and the veins of ore are often hard to see at a glance. You'll see, I'll show you when we get down there." I turned to Meric, who was making his way down directly behind me. "Seen any dragons yet, Meric?" He only grunted, not even lifting his eyes from the ground whe
re the horse was placing its dainty feet. I relaxed and left my own horse to find its way down, remembering the day of the Invasion, many years before, when Britannicus and I had both trusted our lives to the sure-footedness of our horses.

  As we descended, the clouds parted and allowed the pale December sun to shine through, with beams too weak to counteract the chill of the wind. The bottom of the valley was exactly the kind of spot that gave me the professional soldier's indigestion; it was completely surrounded by hills. The ground sloped down gradually, westward to our right, and the extreme western end of the valley was blocked by the waters of the lake. It was easy to imagine a whole legion getting trapped there with their backs to the lake and being slaughtered from the hills above.

  "Does the lake have a name, Meric?"

  "Not that I know of. It's just a lake. There's another in the valley below it, to the west. Much smaller. But no name, just another lake."

  We spent the next half hour examining the closest of the boulders we had seen from the hilltop. I chipped a piece off each of them and showed Luceiia the striations in the material, but there was nothing there that indicated metal to me. It was Luceiia herself who pointed out that the inside of the rock was not much different from the outside, and she was correct. These boulders were brand new, no more than thirty or forty years old. They were great lumps of rock that had been blasted away from the glowering cliff face to the north, on the night of the dragons.