The Singing Sword cc-2

by Jack Whyte

  "Your pardon, Tribune!" The centurion, whose gaze had drifted to the naked corpse, was frowning and now moved quickly to kneel by the body. Narrow-eyed, he slipped his fingers underneath the chin, pressing gently with finger and thumb beneath the points of the jaw where, against all reasonable expectation, he discovered a very faint but quite regular pulse. The man was alive. The wide-eyed centurion informed the tribune, who frowned as he heard the words.

  "Alive? He can't be! Are you sure?" He swung towards his troops and pointed at two of them. "You two, use your spears and tents to make a litter, quickly!"

  As the soldiers scrambled to their work, he turned back to the centurion.

  "I shall answer your impertinent question this time, simply to discourage any others. It is not for such as you to be curious about diplomatic matters, Centurion, but I suppose, under the circumstances, it is understandable enough. The answer is no. We were called out to search for the Procurator of South Britain, but these abductors were apparently as stupid as they were careless. This man is not the missing Procurator. He is not Claudius Seneca — doesn't even resemble him, apart from the broken nose. I look more like Claudius Seneca than this man does, which is only natural, I suppose, since Claudius Seneca is my father's brother. Mistaken identity. Stupid, as I said. They took the wrong man."

  He turned back to where the two soldiers were constructing a serviceable stretcher. "I don't know who he is, but I want you to take the utmost care of this man. Carry him gently, one man to each arm of the litter, and I'll flog any man who bumps him. He deserves to live, if only because of the fight he put up." He looked at the rest of his men, silently gauging their response to his words. Apart from the sullenness caused by his threat, their expressions were disinterested. They had accepted his assertion completely and without curiosity.

  "All right, then," he snapped. "Let's get this man to a military sick bay as quickly as we can. But I want these other two bodies brought in, too, for identification. Let's move!"

  By the time the litter was ready for the injured man and the procession had set out on its journey back to the barracks at Aquae Sulis, the spa town the local Celts called Bath, no one in the party even remembered that the Tribune had been reading a parchment when they'd reached the clearing.

  BOOK ONE – Colonists

  I

  A broken shutter banged somewhere. I could hear it clearly over the howling wind and the hissing roar of the driven rain. It was almost dark. I could barely make out the shapes of the two men flattened against the wall on either side of the door of the one-room stone hut across the narrow street from me. To my left, two more men flanked the door of the hut I was leaning against, and there were twelve more men similarly placed at the other six buildings that lined the narrow street. My reserve of thirty-four men was split into two groups, one at either end of the village.

  At forty-eight, I was far too old for this kind of nonsense.

  I stood with my shoulders pressed against the wall, my sodden tunic clammy cold against my back. I raised my hand in a useless attempt to clear streaming rain-water from my eyes, and my waterlogged cape was a dead weight dragging at my arm. I cursed quietly.

  A dim yellow glow appeared as somebody lit a lamp in the hut across the way, and then a quavering, moaning scream rose above the wind. I gave the signal — one blast on my horn — and my men went in, bursting through the doors, their swords and daggers drawn. House-cleaning can be brutal, dirty work.

  I looked down at the dead man at my feet. The rain had washed most of the blood away, but he still looked bad. I guessed an axe had killed him. His open eyes were glazed in the fading light.

  One of my men reappeared, silhouetted against the light in the doorway opposite me, wiping his sword on a rag. He leaned out into the street, and though I heard nothing, I saw him tense and open his mouth in a shout. Then he was running up the narrow street. I cursed my age and my bad leg and thrust myself away from the wall, forcing myself into a lumbering run, only now aware of the fight going on in the street about thirty paces from me. The weight of my cloak was awful. I fumbled at the clasp and felt the burden fall away, and then I was in the middle of the fight.

  I remember little of the tussle itself, but with me, that is a far from unusual state of affairs. Images are all that remain in my memory: a bare neck with a prominent Adam's apple, and then blood spouting as I jerk my sword point out of it — no memory of the stab; the feeling of a living body under my feet and then my braced arm, up to the wrist in mud because my crippled leg has let me down again and I've fallen; the crotch of a man whose sheepskin-wrapped legs are criss-crossed with cloth bindings, and my blade again, taking away his manhood; and a face, wide-mouthed and staring-eyed, and hands with no strength clutching at my sword, trying to pull it out of their owner's breast. All this I recall in silence. There is no noise, no screaming — no sound of any kind.

  When it was over, I was badly winded, puffing for breath like an old man. I leaned over, hands on my knees, and hung my head, sobbing to clear my chest.

  "Commander Varrus? Are you all right?"

  I knew the voice; it belonged to young Kyril, one of my lieutenants. I nodded my head as clearly as I could in that position and he left me, moving on to check the others. Gradually I became aware of my hands, gripping my knees. Neither held a weapon. I had no sword, and no memory of dropping it. I blinked my eyes clear of rainwater and saw, by the darkness of blood on my right wrist and hand, that I was wounded. I straightened up, feeling no pain, and touched my right hand with my left. My hand responded, but strangely. My whole arm felt numb. I moved my left hand up along my arm, and I felt the cut — just above the elbow, and bleeding fast. My stomach lurched and I puked — my normal reaction after a battle, and one that usually left me feeling better. But this time, as I straightened up from retching, it seemed to me I saw a light, somewhere ahead of me, spinning in the strangest fashion and coming towards me at a roaring speed. And that was all I saw.

  They picked me up out of the mud in the roadway and carried me to one of the huts, and I was out of my mind for more than a week.

  My wound, on its own, was not too serious, although there is no such thing as a dismissible battle wound. Some whoreson had swiped me with an axe that had no edge. The weight alone had dug what little edge the thing had into the flesh and had broken my upper arm in what the medics call a twig-fracture. At my age, it's a wonder the whole bone didn't shatter. At least, that's what I thought then. Now I know that I was just mellowing into my prime in those days. But I bled a lot, they told me later: a sullen, angry bleeding that worried them because it would not stop. And on top of that, I'd caught pneumonia from the soaking. For a while my men thought they were going to lose me.

  I still remember the corpse that lay at my feet that night. If the axe that hit me had been as sharp as the one that hit him, I would not be telling this story today. Of course, much of the story would not have happened.

  My name is Gaius Publius Varrus, and I am an ironsmith and a weapons-maker. I was born and raised in Colchester, in East Britain close to Londinium, the imperial administrative centre of the Province of Britain, and it was to Colchester I returned to reopen my grandfather's smithy after I was crippled in an ambush during the Invasion of 367 and invalided out of the legions.

  During my years as a soldier, I met Caius Britannicus, a wealthy nobleman, a patrician Roman of ancient lineage. He first came into my life as a young tribune who saved my skin, then later as a Commanding Officer whose life I saved, and he finally ended up as a Roman senator, a proconsul of Rome and my brother-in-law and dearest friend. My friendship with Britannicus, however, made his enemies my enemies, particularly one family, the wealthy and powerful imperial bankers, the Senecas, who had feuded bloodily and bitterly with the Britannicus family for generations.

  That adopted enmity brought me to violent, personal confrontation with Claudius, the youngest of the six Seneca brothers. We fought, and I scarred him for life. After that, I had to
remove myself and my affairs permanently — and hurriedly — out of the way of Claudius Seneca's wrath. I travelled west to the rich farmlands below the spa town of Aquae Sulis to live at Caius's villa.

  On my arrival there, my whole life changed. I met and married Luceiia Britannicus, and she showed me where to find something I had been dreaming about for most of my life: a stone made of extraordinary metal, which I called the skystone. I smelted the stone and sculpted a crude statue of Coventina, the Celtic goddess of water, to commemorate the struggle I had had to salvage the stone from the bottom of a lake. I called it my Lady of the Lake. My main intent was to preserve the metal in dignity, rather than leave it to rust as a plain, raw ingot until I should find a purpose for it. Someday, I knew, I would make a sword from that same metal, but I wasn't ready yet.

  Someday, too, we would have need of that sword — and hundreds like it, if Caius's ideas about the disintegration of the Empire ever came to pass. He believed the Empire was dying rapidly. He was convinced that someday soon — in the foreseeable future — the legions would be withdrawn from Britain to defend the Motherland against invasion. When that happened, we, the people of Britain, would be left alone and defenceless, with nothing to rely on but our own strengths.

  I remember that when I first heard Caius voice this idea, it struck me as being too ludicrous for words. Rome was eternal! It could never fall. But as the years went by, the signs Caius had warned of, every one of them, began to come thick and fast, so that I finally came to believe that the Empire, like the fabric of most things ancient, was grown thin and rotten.

  Armed thereafter with the zeal of all new converts, I threw myself wholeheartedly into Caius's plans to fortify and defend the beautiful villa properties on which he and his friends lived. I worked as hard as any man, and harder than most, to hasten the building of a stone-walled fort on top of the ancient Celtic hill fort behind the villa, and to make weapons and armour for the young men, the trainee soldiers of our private little Colony.

  It was the search for iron for new weapons that had led us out of the Colony, and into the confrontation in which I was wounded.

  I opened my eyes eventually in a small, smelly hut and realized that for some time I had been hearing a skylark singing, although I had not been listening to it. I lay there on my back for a few seconds, feeling bleary-eyed and itchy; my whole body itched, including my face. I raised my hand to scratch my chin and passed out from the pain.

  I could not have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. The bird was still singing when I opened my eyes again, the room was unchanged. I still itched, and my arm was on fire. God, it hurt!

  I tried to remember what had happened on that dismal wintry day.

  We had been up and on the road in driving rain well before dawn. It had rained all night long and the dawn took a long time to arrive through the slate-grey skies. We had eaten a breakfast of dried meat, dried corn and dried peas on the move, hunched and miserable under the lashing downpour.

  I was riding my grey stallion, Germanicus, named after an ancestral cousin of Caius Britannicus. I had chosen the name deliberately, pointing out to Caius that if he could ride my back mercilessly and whip me into carrying out his every whim, then I would do the like to his cousin. Six of my men were mounted, too; their job was to herd the horses we had collected on our journey. The remainder marched like the infantry they were, slogging through puddles with long-suffering sighs and muttered curses. We had six four-wheeled wagons in our train, three loaded with iron ingots from the Weald, two filled with salt boiled from the sea and compressed into blocks, and one commissary wagon.

  We were far from home, and had been on the road for four weeks. We had left our Colony, close by the Mendip Hills, and headed east until we hit the road running north to Aquae Sulis. From that point on we had travelled all the way to our present location on the solid, paved roads built by Caesar's legions. Twelve miles south of Aquae Sulis, we had swung around to the south-east again and passed through Sorviodunum and Venta Belgarum, stopping outside both towns without entering. From Venta we swung directly south to Noviomagus, taking less than two days to make this last leg of our outward journey.

  Our passage attracted much attention. This was the first time that we had come this way, and most of the people we met on the road took us for regular troops. One night long ago, by a fire at Stonehenge, Caius Britannicus had said that he might change the colour of our uniforms. He had said it in jest, but the Celts who were his audience did not know that. They believed him, and their king, Ullic, in particular, became serious about it and gave us his regal permission, no less, to use the red dye that was reserved for his use alone among his people. It had become a matter of diplomacy to humour him, and now the soldiers of our colony wore a royal red that troubled me by its resemblance to the crimson of the Imperial Household Troops. A few of the people we encountered on that trip knew better, of course, and that caused me great concern. But we experienced no trouble along the way. Who would start trouble with a hundred well-armed, disciplined men?

  We had arranged to meet a merchant called Statius in Noviomagus. This fellow had made a name for himself by living up to his own boast that he could supply anything to anyone at any time in any place, if the price was right. We had contacted him through Bishop Alaric and agreed to pay him in gold for all the iron ingots he could supply by mid-November — one gold aurus for every hundred pounds of ingot iron he could supply, if he delivered it to Noviomagus. This was more than twenty times the going rate. In his eyes, it was the deal of lifetime. From our viewpoint, we were stealing his iron. We had no use for gold in our Colony and iron was becoming harder and harder to find anywhere, since the Hibernians, too ignorant to know that there is no gold in iron ore pits, had shut down the Cambrian mines with their raiding. To the Hibernian Scots, it seemed logical that since gold was dug from the Cambrian mines in Dolocauthi, then every other hole in the ground of Cambria should have gold in it, too.

  I was disappointed that Statius had only had five cartloads of iron with him. We loaded that onto three of my big wagons. On the way to the meeting I had dreamed of loading all five wagons and buying a few more of his to carry the rest of the haul. When we met, over a mug of ale in a tavern in Noviomagus, he told me that he had scraped the foundries of the entire eastern part of the country to accumulate the three thousand pounds of iron he had brought with him. When he saw the bag of gold I paid him from, however, his eyes almost fell out of his head and he suddenly became convinced that he could probably find as much again, and perhaps even more, given time.

  "How much more time?" I asked him. He did some fast calculation and we agreed to meet again in June. Feeding his greed, I told him my wagons could easily carry a thousand pounds each. For every hundred pounds, therefore, over five thousand pounds, I would pay double if he would throw in the carts and horses. We shook on the deal, and when we parted the following day, Statius was a happy merchant, firmly convinced that he had found the biggest fools in the Empire.

  On the way home, we kept to the south coast road in order to avoid the towns we had passed earlier. It almost doubled our journey, but I had sound reasons for the circuitous route, the main one being that I wished to attract no attention to the richness of the train we were escorting. On the way, we picked up our two wagonloads of salt and passed by Durnovaria in the dark hours before dawn, trying to make no noise and attract no attention. Just beyond that town, the road runs along the seashore for several miles. There are no other towns out that way except Isca in the far west, and the road was seldom travelled, even that long ago — a truth attested to by the amount of grass and weeds growing between the cobblestones.

  We travelled slowly. The wagons were fully loaded and we had managed to acquire a fair-sized herd of horses of all descriptions. Most of them we had bought along the way; gold is a powerful persuader. Others we had found, and many of these were wild.

  At one point, where the road ran very close to the sea, the horses took i
t into their heads to stop and graze. In trying to get them moving again, one of my men panicked them and they scattered. With difficulty we rounded them up, and then one of them, a big black gelding, the finest horse in the bunch, decided to show us his heels and headed off at full gallop for the west. Three of us chased him. The going was dangerous because of the wetness of the grass, and we were a long way from the road, which had swung north, by the time we finally ran him down.

  I tied a halter around his head and handed the rope to Bassus, the young soldier who had ended up with me. We were just turning back to the road when I heard a shout, seemingly cut off in mid-breath. We froze, both of us listening for more. There was only silence, broken by the sound of waves on the pebbled beach a hundred paces away and the whisper of the rain, which had lessened, in the leaves around us. We were in a grassy hollow, surrounded by hawthorn bushes. I turned to look at young Bassus.

  "Where did that come from?"

  He shook his head uncertainly. "It sounded as though it came from over there." He pointed towards the beach.

  "Where's the young fellow who came with us?" I had just noticed that he was nowhere in sight. "What's his name? Anicius. What happened to him?"

  Bassus shrugged. "He was behind me to my left last time I saw him."

  I tried to tell myself that he had only fallen from his horse, but even to me it sounded like a lie. "Tie up the horses and follow me," I whispered, suddenly aware of a need for silence. "And don't make any noise!"

  I climbed out of the hollow and began to head cautiously towards the beach. The ground was rough and stony beneath the turf, and I cursed my limp for forcing me to move more slowly and more awkwardly than I wanted to. My palms were sweating, which is my mind's way of letting me know that it does not feel good about something. I glanced backwards and saw young Bassus following me, coming fast. I signalled to him to slow down.