The Skystone

by Jack Whyte

  Two of the hostiles were still alive, but one of the newcomers soon set that right. I started to say something to the decurion in charge of the hunting party, but everything went red and I threw up. That was the one consistent result of my grandmother’s efforts to keep me spiritually whole.

  When I had finished, I returned my attention to the decurion. Thinking back on it later, I had to give all of them full marks for the discipline of their faces. Not one man among them gave any indication that he might have been surprised to discover that a centurion of their cohort could be human enough to be sick.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Two squads, Centurion. Twenty, plus myself.”

  “Cavalry?”

  “None, Centurion.”

  “Well, I’m glad you got here. Now we have to get back. How far are we from camp?”

  “About two miles, Centurion.”

  “Good. The Tribune is in bad shape. Bring me that chariot with the four horses. I’ll drive. Make the Tribune as comfortable as possible, and have one of your men collect our horses and walk them. Is the Tribune’s horse all right?”

  “It seems to be, Centurion. Nothing broken. Both of them are pretty well blown, though.”

  “They have every right to be. All right, let’s get out of here as quickly and as quietly as possible.”

  The young decurion was frowning. “What’s going on, Centurion? Who are these people? Where did they come from?”

  I looked at him in surprise. He wasn’t very old. “Where in Hades d’you think they came from, lad? They came over the bastard Wall, that’s where they came from!” He looked stunned. “What’s your name?”

  “Strato, Centurion. Decius Strato.”

  “Well, Decurion Strato, the barbarian, the enemy that you’ve spent the last few years training to fight against, has come over the Wall in strength. In great strength. We’re in the middle of a full-scale surprise offensive. An invasion. And we’ve been caught squatting. Do you understand?” He nodded as I went on. “The best thing we can do right now is get back to camp and hold it, if we can, until our Tribune here comes back to the land of the living.” Many things I have been unable to remember about that day, but I remember seeing then in that decurion’s eyes the realization of what I was talking about.

  We placed Britannicus on the bed of the four-horse chariot and I drove. I aimed the four horses at the top of that hill and they climbed it at a walk, so that our infantry rescuers had no trouble in keeping up with us. We made it back to the camp without any further contact with the enemy.

  Britannicus started to show signs of awakening shortly after we set out, but he was hurting badly and was in no hurry to regain consciousness. There was no great amount of room on the floor of the chariot, so I straddled him as he half lay, half sat in the body of the vehicle. When he began to come to, he started to thrash about a bit, and I think I kicked him once to settle him down. Anyway, he came out of it gradually and began to make efforts to stand up, and by the time we came in sight of the camp he was in command of himself again. When we rode through the gates, he was holding the reins.

  Word of the attack had preceded us. The sentries spotted us while we were still a long way from the gates, and I could see from the activity that they knew what was happening. Flavinius, the second in command, had his wits about him, as always, and the entire garrison was standing to. Fully half the cohort, five hundred men, were hard at work strengthening the camp’s defences, digging the surrounding ditch deeper and throwing the earthworks higher.

  Britannicus was as white as death and must have had the earth mother of all headaches, but he called an immediate meeting of all centurions and officers, and informed everyone of the day’s developments as far as he could. One of the first things he asked about, after informing them of the breakthrough, was the number of fleeing soldiers who had made their way into camp from the Wall. He was told there were none. He winced, dropped his eyes in thought for a minute and then shrugged, dismissing the thought, whatever it might have been, and got down to business. And Britannicus knew his business.

  Because we were on the march, there was a detailed inventory of supplies on hand: the quantities and types of rations, weapons, wagons and all of the thousand details that keep an army unit functioning, no matter what its size may be. He reeled off allocations of supplies and detailed his orders for emergency procedures, including an intensified guard schedule that involved a four hours on, four off cycle for every man in the camp. He made every one of his listeners aware that the demands of the present emergency would mean that everyone must stand prepared to adapt at any time to new orders. He was dealing with defensive manoeuvres when the alarm sounded; a party of hostiles had been sighted by our sentries. He dismissed the meeting, calling on me as pilus prior, senior centurion of the cohort, to stay behind with his four senior officers.

  He did not speak until everyone else had left the tent, and even then he stood silent, chewing reflectively on his top lip for long moments and ignoring us all completely. Finally he snapped out of his reverie and drew himself erect, after which he looked closely and searchingly at each of us in turn. We waited, making no attempt to second-guess him. Apparently satisfied with what he had seen in our faces, he nodded to himself and sighed noisily, blowing his pent-up breath out explosively.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, as though informing us of something he wanted attended to on parade the following day, “I have a feeling that what we are witnessing is only the beginning of something bigger than any of us have visualized. Something is out of kilter here, badly out of balance. This is not for discussion outwith these walls, but mark my words, we are going to be hard at this for a long time. This incursion is too big, too strong, to evaporate overnight.” He turned his gaze fully on me. “For that reason, I intend to take some steps that might be described later as unique. I want a new maniple, Varrus, and I want it made up of the very best men in the Cohort. Your best, no less than a hundred of them — and more, a score more, if you can spare them. I want the fittest, strongest, ablest men you can muster, and I want them as quickly as you can get them together, you understand me?” I nodded, amazed, and he accepted my nod and turned his head to include the others in his conversation again. “These painted buffoons outside think they have beaten the Roman army. They don’t know the difference between mercenaries, conscripts and regulars. They are about to be reminded of the standards that built the Roman Empire.”

  He stepped forward to his folding table and reached into one of its drawers, taking out a small throwing-knife, which he tucked up into the right sleeve of his tunic. Then he moved towards the doorway of his tent, and we made to follow him. Before we could take the first step, however, he had stopped and was speaking again, to all of us.

  “This Cohort is the finest in Britain, gentlemen. I know, because I made it that way. Our discipline is two hundred years and more out of date. In the next few days we’ll put it into practice and show these people that the Wall wasn’t built to protect us from them, but to save them from us. Let’s go!”

  We walked out of his tent and into the two longest years of my life.

  III

  It galls me to admit it, but even today as I write this, the young men who make up our own forces here in the Colony are so involved with horses and cavalry tactics that they have little or no idea of the composition of the classic Roman legion. Consequently, I have to accept the fact that some explanation will be necessary if those who read these words in years to come are to understand what happened in those days to the Roman armies.

  Before the growth of cavalry forces and tactics, the Roman legion was an infantry force made up of ten cohorts. Two of these Cohorts held ten maniples each, and the other eight each held five. A maniple consisted often, eleven or twelve ten-man squads, so that a legion at full strength numbered not less than six thousand men. In addition, each of the eight smaller cohorts had a squadron of thirty cavalry attached to it. Cavalry at that time were no mo
re than mounted bowmen, skirmishing troops whose job was to provide a mobile defensive screen out in front while the legion was drawing up into battle formation.

  The First and Second Cohorts of every legion were the Millarians, double cohorts of one thousand to twelve hundred men with sixty cavalry attached. Theirs was the honour and responsibility of holding the right of the line of battle. Only battle-hardened veterans were assigned to these cohorts, and their officers and warrant officers were the finest, having won their posts by exemplary conduct and outstanding ability.

  Ours was a Millarian Cohort. Just before the start of the Invasion, as it came to be known, we had been on duty in the garrison town of Luguvallium, hard by Hadrian’s Wall. Units of the Twenty-fourth Legion stationed there had fomented a violent, short-lived mutiny. Our task had been to eradicate the mutineers, using the experience we had gained in Eboracum. The exercise had been drastic and unpleasant, but we had completed it and were on our way to join up with two of our own auxiliary cohorts in Mamucium when the enemy came over the Wall. To this day nobody knows how many Roman soldiers died that day, and how many simply deserted into the hills, or even joined the barbarians. The invaders overran all of the north country and most of the south-east. There were even barbarians in Londinium! Ours was one of the very few units that survived, and we had Britannicus and his old-fashioned ideas — leavened with more than a bit of sheer military genius — to thank for it.

  Britannicus was one of those rare officers who was like a god to his men. He was the toughest, most bloody-minded disciplinarian I’d ever served under, and the men would have marched into Hades for him. Once again, any future reader of these words may not understand that to be able to say that about any commander of Roman forces in those days was phenomenal in itself. The old days of the Republic and of Empire triumphant were centuries gone. By the beginning of the fourth Christian century, the eleventh century of Rome, senior rank was held, in the main, by horses’ arses rich enough to buy it. And ninety out of every hundred of those leaders were afraid to antagonize the men they ostensibly commanded.

  The average soldier in the armies of the Empire was a joke. Every one was a Roman citizen, by imperial decree. Black, white, yellow, brown or painted with blue woad, they were all Roman citizens. There were Germans, Numidians, Egyptians, Armoricans, Phoenicians, Greeks, Vandals, Huns, Thracians, Dacians, Franks, Saxons, Scots, Levantines and Jews. We taught them how to fight, instructed them in battle techniques and strategy, and equipped them, and then they deserted in their thousands to their home territories to organize resistance against the Roman succubus!

  Everyone knew what was happening. We knew we were training our own adders to bite us. It was a fact of life, and it was aggravated by the fact that, while they were in the army, they all had their “rights.” It had become normal for garrison troops to be excused from wearing breastplates and carrying shields at all times. They were too heavy for the men! The results were preordained. The debacle at Hadrian’s Wall was a micro-cosmic example of the state of the whole Empire.

  Britannicus, following in the steps of his own father, would have none of this. He had a stony row to hoe at first, because his methods were as out of date as those of the Republic he admired, but he had the courage of his convictions and he was willing to lay his own balls on the line. He expected his men to make a twenty-five-mile march every week in full gear. That meant seventy pounds of helmet, armour, two spears, five javelins, scutum (the infantryman’s heavy shield), leg greaves, cooking pots, rations, canteen and two palisades (long, pointed poles to be used in setting up the camp’s defences each night).

  Every night on the march, or on manoeuvres, the men built a fortified camp, surrounded by a ditch and palisaded walls and gates. Only then were they allowed to relax and eat their evening meal sitting down. Breakfast was always consumed standing or on the move.

  Britannicus did everything he expected his men to do. He marched at the head of the column, on foot and carrying full gear. He could outmarch, outrun, outjump and outfight any man in his cohort at any time of the day or night.

  When he first took command of the cohort, the men were appalled. By their own lights, they were already crack troops, second only to the First Cohort. By his lights, they were rabble whom he was determined to make into soldiers second to none. They hated his guts, and he fed them back their own vomit. He used the full authority of his rank and the Empire to punish them, harshly, every time they asked for it. Every time he so much as imagined defiance he ground their faces down into the dirt. And the more they hated him and resented him, the rougher he was. Eventually they discovered that if they were going to beat him, it would have to be on his own ground and by his own rules, so they tried that. And they failed. And then, somewhere along the line, they began to develop a pride in themselves, in their toughness, and in their rotten, whoreson, bloody-minded, miserable commander. And only then, and only very slowly, did they begin to realize that for every fault they could find in him, someone else, somewhere in the cohort, could point out something that was not too bad, or something that you had to respect, or something that you even had to admire.

  They began to realize that they had no bad officers. At least, they said, not bad compared to what the other cohorts had to put up with. Britannicus had cleaned out his officer corps within weeks of his arrival, and now it seemed that any new officer in the Second Cohort was quickly made to shape up, or move out. No officer ever took advantage of an enlisted man in the Second Cohort; punishment was swift, severe and certain, but victimization was unknown.

  The men discovered that they were always well fed — far better fed than the other units around them, where officers had other things to consider ahead of the diets of their men. Britannicus, it was observed, put the welfare of his men — their food, their equipment and their billets — above everything else.

  The cohort had been under his command for two years when Aaron Flavius, pilus prior and thus my opposite number in the First Cohort, came to me late one afternoon and asked me to arrange an interview for him with Britannicus on what he termed “a personal and confidential matter.” Too surprised to demur, I took Aaron’s request directly to Britannicus. He had been in a foul mood all day long and was clearly uncomfortable with such an unusual request. His frown darkened to a forbidding scowl immediately, and he growled, “What does he want to see me about, Centurion?”

  I spoke to a point in the air above his left shoulder. “I don’t know, Tribune.” We were being very formal that day.

  “Are there no officers in his own cohort? And what about the primus pilus?” These were obviously rhetorical questions, so I said nothing. “Very well, send him in,” he snapped. So in went Aaron Flavius, red-faced and ill at ease, but clearly determined about something. I was more than simply curious. This kind of thing was unheard of in the Roman army. I hung around outside, hoping to find out what was going on.

  Flavius was in there for about a quarter of an hour, and when he came out, saluting at the door and whirling like a doll on his heel, I was waiting for him.

  “What was all that about?”

  He looked at me very strangely. “You’ll find out,” he growled, and then he marched out of there like one of my own men on defaulters’ parade. I watched him go, scratching my chin as I wondered what was going on. The two men on guard duty, I realized, were watching me curiously. I rounded on them.

  “What in blazes are you two gawking at? Hoping I’ll take you into my confidence, are you? Get your minds on your work or I’ll have you on latrine duty for a month.”

  I heard the door open behind me.

  “Centurion Varrus.”

  “Tribune!”

  “Join me, please.”

  “Yes, sir!” I withered the two guards with one last baleful glare and made my way into Britannicus’ office, where I closed the door at my back, snapped to attention and saluted.

  “Sit.” The word came as a peremptory bark, more a command than an invitation. Hi
s face was turned downward in the act of reading something he had just written, so I could not see his expression, nor could I gauge his frame of mind from the tone of his voice in that one word. Reserving judgment on his mood, therefore, I sat on one of the two chairs facing his table and waited for him to get around to whatever it was he wanted to tell me.

  He was in no hurry. He read the papyrus in his hand again, from top to bottom, his lips moving as he whispered the words for his own ears. Then he picked up a pen from an ink pot and signed his name to whatever it was he had written. That done, he turned his gaze on me, a wide-eyed stare I had come to know well. That particular expression meant he was looking but not seeing. His eyes seemed fixed on me, but his thoughts were elsewhere. I waited. Finally his gaze sharpened again and focused on me, and I knew he had arrived at a decision.

  “Well,” he asked me, “what do you think?”

  I kept my face blank. “About what, Tribune?”

  “About that nonsense,” he said, waving his hand towards the door. “Your friend, Aaron Flavius.”

  Still I allowed nothing to show on my face. “What about him, Tribune? What nonsense?”

  He was staring at me now with an expression of mild incredulity, and his next words came in a softer tone. “You really don’t know, do you?” I said nothing, and he rose from his chair and began to pace around, undoing the buckles on his breastplate as he moved and spoke.

  “I found it hard to believe that he hadn’t told the primus pilus,” he said, talking almost to himself. “I mean, Catullus is going to cut him a new anus for coming to me without going through him, bypassing the chain of command. But I didn’t believe he wouldn’t have talked it through with you at least, since he had to go through you to get to me. Here, help me with this, will you?”

  I moved to help him with the last set of buckles beneath his right shoulder, the same ones I could never undo by myself. He shrugged out of the heavy leather cuirass and placed it on the floor by his feet, then stretched mightily and tugged at his tunic until it hung comfortably again.