The Skystone

by Jack Whyte

  “That’s better! Now it feels like the end of a long, miserable day in garrison.” He crossed to a wall cupboard and brought out two cups and a stoppered jug of wine. “Sit, man, sit, sit, sit in the name of Mithras and relax. You are now officially off duty, by my personal dispensation. I need your advice. Here.” I took the cup of wine he offered and he sat across from me and raised his cup to eye level. “Let us drink to the health, although we may deplore the wisdom, of Aaron Flavius, pilus prior of the First.”

  I raised my own cup. “Gladly,” I said, “but why? What’s Aaron up to?”

  “What’s he up to? An excellent question. Would you trust him?”

  The question confused me. “Trust him? I don’t know, Tribune. It would depend on what was involved. Trust him with what? With my life, in battle? Certainly, of course I would. With my sister, if I had one? Probably not. I don’t think I would be that big a fool. Trust is a relatively changeable commodity, Tribune.”

  “Hmmm, I agree, and a strange one, too.” He slouched further down into his chair, his long, muscular, aristocratic legs stretched out towards the empty brazier in the corner of the room, and took a deep swig of his wine.

  “He came to me in trust, and with a bizarre request, one that required tact, subtlety and diplomacy to a degree I’m not used to finding in centurions, apart from yourself.” I held my peace and he continued. “He asked me to arrange a contest between our cohort and his own. He says he likes what he sees happening with our people, and he doesn’t think much of his own Tribune or the performance he gets from his troops. That was where he had to be tactful, telling that to me. Anyway, as pilus prior, he believes the only way he’ll ever be able to get his own people-excited enough to smarten up is by having us challenge them, unit to unit. He thinks they’re likely to see a challenge like that as insulting to their sense of priority. They are, after all, the First Cohort and therefore, by definition, the best soldiers.”

  “Ah, but by whose definition, Tribune? They’re the senior soldiers, the most experienced, certainly, but the best?” I emptied my cup and he immediately filled it again. It occurred to me as he turned away that I could not think of any other officer who would ever be gracious enough, or sure enough of his own power, to serve a subordinate unselfconsciously.

  “So who are the best?” He spoke over his shoulder. “Ours? What do you think of the challenge idea? Be truthful — this is just between you and me, man to man, out of uniform. Will it work? Can we challenge them? I mean, is it feasible that our men would back the challenge if we made it?”

  I drank again and thought about the question before answering him. The wine was excellent; a far cry from the thin, sour vinum we drank normally. The question was a complex one. Finally, I shrugged my shoulders and admitted my ignorance.

  “Truthfully, Tribune? I don’t know. Had you asked me that a couple of months ago, I would have said no, it’s not possible. Today, I honestly don’t know. It may be possible, and our men might do it, if…” I stopped there.

  “If what? What, Varrus?”

  “If we — and I suppose that means you — approach it properly. Are we still man to man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Aaron Flavius is right. His Tribune, Cirrius, is a complete pig, hated by everyone, including our men. He treats his people like filth, and, as you probably know, he’s had several of his rankers flogged to death for petty offences. Well, you may or may not be aware of this, but one of those men was Castor Liger, twin brother to Pollux Liger, our Eight Squad leader.”

  Britannicus nodded. “I knew that. Nothing I could do about it. What’s your point?”

  “Simply this. Although it’s only a gut feeling, and I may be completely wrong, I believe that if you issue the challenge to Cirrius, personally and in public, one cohort commander to another, our people might just be bloody-minded enough to support you.” I grinned at him. “After all, they’ve been cursing you and reviling you for two years, so they’re due for a change, and this might be as good a chance as they’re going to get. Cirrius is such a complete bastard that he makes you look good.”

  His grin matched my own, his whole face lighting up with the incandescence of his smile. “I’ll have your arse for that remark, one of these days, my friend. You think we can beat them?”

  “Repeatedly, Tribune, and ad nauseam.”

  “Should we set the date far enough in advance to allow them to prepare?”

  I sat up straight and finished my wine. “Makes no difference, Tribune,” I said. “They’ll never beat the Second, no matter how hard they try.”

  Britannicus reached for the jug again and refused to listen to my protestations that I had had enough. When he had refilled both our cups, the jug was empty. He replaced it in the cupboard and returned to sit across from me. For a period of time, neither of us spoke.

  “Well,” he said, at last, “I’m going to make the challenge, and we’ll see what happens. Win or lose, it should shake things up around here.” He stopped again and looked at me quizzically, one eyebrow arched high on his forehead. “What about you? How do you feel about your life here? Are you content? Satisfied? Thinking of transferring out?”

  “What? Why would…? No, thank you, Tribune. I am well here, and pleased with my lot. I’ve no complaints.” I was slightly embarrassed by this turn in the conversation, but he pursued it.

  “You could have… complaints, I mean. Some might say you should have. It hasn’t been easy for you, has it?”

  I was almost squirming now, feeling the blood flushing my cheeks, but still he went on.

  “I want you to know I appreciate your loyalty, all the support you’ve provided for me over the past two years. It’s a large debt, and I intend to repay it.”

  I cleared my throat and started to bluster something about having to leave, but he rode right over my protests, finally silencing me by standing up and holding out his right hand, palm towards me.

  “Varrus, trust me,” he continued, his face breaking into a grin. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking your Tribune is losing his grip, losing his feeling for the fitness of things, and you don’t want to be around him while he’s falling apart. Forget it. I’m not going to embarrass you. But I am going to say what I have to.”

  He sat down again as I tried to breathe more easily. “We’re very similar in many ways, you and I,” he said then. “We are soldiers first and foremost, and we have a rigid and very fine code by which we live. We feel safe operating within that code. When we drift away from it, we lose that feeling of safety. We become embarrassed. But there are some things that aren’t dealt with in the code, Varrus. I have some things to say to you that I cannot leave unsaid, and I feel this may be the best time to say them, so let’s get them out and deal with them and have done with it.

  “As I said a moment ago, I want to thank you, man to man, for the support you have given me over the past two years. It can’t have been easy for you, being perceived as my man while everyone else was loving hating me, but you bore it stoically. I watched and listened and appreciated your loyally. I have been tempted to say something to you long before this, but I guessed it might be better to simply leave you to your own devices. And it was, I think. The men accept you completely now, as one of them, and that is as it should be. And now there’s something in the air, something I can’t quite define, but I think we may be close to a breakthrough. Aaron Flavius focused my thinking, and I decided to speak my thoughts. There, I’ve finished, and I will never mention the matter again. But bear in mind, please, that I am in your debt. If ever you need a friend in the future, I will be glad to serve in that capacity.” He smiled again, a small quirking of his lips accompanied by a rising eyebrow. “Now you may finish your wine and flee.”

  The following night, in the course of a well-attended dinner in the Officers’ Mess, Britannicus publicly challenged Titus Cirrius, the Tribune of the First Cohort, to a match between his men and ours, man against man, squad against squad, for
mation against formation. The match would consist of athletic contests in the morning, and tests of military skill in the afternoon. The judging would be conducted by the Legate, assisted by officers from the auxiliary cohorts. Britannicus told me later that it was done in such a way that Cirrius could refuse neither the challenge nor the wager involved. Of course Cirrius, in common with everybody else, knew that his men had neither the training nor the discipline of ours, so Britannicus very nobly set the date for ten weeks in the future, around the Ides, the fifteenth, of October.

  We whipped their tails, but not as easily as we would have done ten weeks earlier. Those lads made up a lot of ground in ten weeks of training; the word was out that there was gold riding on the match, and a lot of it was theirs. They drilled and marched and trained almost as hard as we did normally. In our cohort, all the jokes and sneers about our training rosters were forgotten and forgiven, and without anything being said, we stepped training up to a level that would have produced mass desertions a month earlier.

  The magic had been performed. The Second Cohort had been transformed into a solid unit, pulling together for the honour and the gold they could win as a group, as a tight, disciplined, highly trained entity. A fighting force was born, and over the next few years it grew into one of the elite units of the garrison of Britain. The First Cohort kept on trying to beat us, but they didn’t have a chance. We were too finely honed.

  And, four years later, there we were — an elite fighting unit stranded in the field, in a fortified overnight camp, surrounded by God only knew how many thousand howling savages drunk on victory and spilling southward around us like wine from a broken barrel.

  By nightfall that first day following the Invasion, we were no longer able to estimate the numbers of men drawn up around the camp, just out of range of our arrows. The first party who had spotted our camp and had been sighted by our sentries, causing the first alarm we heard from the Tribune’s tent, had sent back runners to summon help. From that point on, they had gathered like vultures.

  We watched the hordes that first evening from the safety of our parapets, wondering when they would attack us. We had no illusions about their fear of us. After Hadrian’s Wall, our little camp must have looked like a pimple on an elephant’s arse to them. The Picts, we knew, were dawn fighters. They would sleep during the night and come at us in massed charges with the rising of the sun. The Scots, we believed and prayed, were similar, so the odds looked good for a quiet night before Hades came to earth with the morning.

  Britannicus, however, had other ideas, and they involved me. On leaving his conference, I had called a meeting of all the centurions in the cohort. There were twenty of them, not including myself. I asked each of them to pick the five best all-round soldiers in his unit of fifty men (the days when a centurion commanded a hundred men had been gone four hundred years). It wasn’t quite that tidy, because some of them came up with six or seven, but within half an hour I had the names of one hundred and twenty of our very best.

  I set the clerks to the job of drawing up a roster for this new maniple and chose two centurions to command it, sixty men apiece. I promoted ten of those men to decurion rank, retaining two who were already decurions, and then detailed ten centurions to assemble all of these bodies in full gear against the wall of the camp closest to my tent within half an hour. Having done that, I went to tell Britannicus that his “special unit” was being prepared.

  He astonished me by having one of the smiths from the regimental armourer’s quarters set up an anvil and a hammer at the assembly point. I stayed in his tent with him, sharing the briefing he was giving to young Cato, one of the subalterns, whom he had promoted to command the new maniple. When a decurion stuck his head into the tent to tell us that the men were all assembled, Britannicus himself came with us to address them.

  The new 120-man detail stiffened to attention as we approached. The two centurions had them drawn up into their two divisions of 60 men each; ten ranks by six files. Apart from the far-off whoops and yells of the enemy outside the camp, there was utter silence. Britannicus eyed them and, cool as a spring breeze, inspected each of them. When he had finished his inspection he returned to the front and faced them, picking up the hammer from the anvil and swinging it over his head to bring it smashing down onto the flat surface. He knew then that he had everyone’s attention.

  “Watch the hammer!” He swung it again. “It bounces back from the surface. Watch it!” Again he swung, hard.

  “The harder the blow, the more complete the rebound. And anything between the surfaces gets smashed. Now. Watch this.” He took off his cloak and held it up in front of him, in his left hand.

  “I could swing a hammer at this all day and it would be a total waste of time and effort.” He did so, and the cloth slipped easily over the hammer head. But then Britannicus put down the hammer and began to fold the cloak again and again upon itself, until it was reduced to a compact wad of wool that he held high in his left hand, taking the hammer again in his right. He let the wad drop, swung the hammer and knocked the cloak a good fifteen feet.

  “When it is folded, as you just saw, it becomes solid enough for me to hit it and move it.” He paused, waiting for the message to sink in, and then continued, his voice never rising beyond an intimate but very powerful pitch, audible to all of the soldiers of the new maniple.

  “There are thousands of bare-arsed hostiles just outside this camp dreaming of slitting our throats. They are a rabble, an undisciplined mob. But they love to fight, and they think they know how it’s done. They don’t! We are going to teach them how it’s done. You are going to teach them how it is done. I have already taught you. You men are going to hammer these people until the concussion blinds them. You are going to hit them hard, compressing them and folding them back on themselves until the power of your blows is multiplied a hundred times by their density. Jam them together tightly enough, and you’ll take away their power to strike back at you. Once you have them jammed together, compacted just like my old cloak here, you will hit them and rebound, just like that hammer head, ready to hit them again.”

  There was total silence in the ranks as he continued. “Before Julius Caesar reorganized his legions into cohorts, the maniple was the main striking force of the Legion. The maniple. A hundred and twenty men, just like you, fighting in twelve squads often men each. Each ten-man squad performed and manoeuvred just like a modern maniple, except that it was one-twelfth of the size.” He paused and waited for his message to infiltrate the minds of the men listening to him. “Tonight, we are going to resurrect those tactics. Don’t worry about it. You have been training for this for the past three years. You just didn’t know it. Those heathen helots outside won’t know what’s hit them.”

  Another measured pause before he continued. “You will fight in three lines of four squads each, one behind the other, with gaps between the front line squads wide enough to accommodate the squads of the second line when it moves forward and the first falls back. As the front line falls back, the third line will advance at the charge to fill in the front line gaps. The first line, now in the rear, will then swing right and left to form the sides of a box, and you will then make a fighting retreat, protected by the mounted archers who will come out of the camp gates to cover your withdrawal. Nothing new — you’ve done it all before, in training. Just remember: Your purpose is to hammer. To deliver hard, unexpected attacks of short duration from any and all of the four camp entrances. Your intent will be to terrorize and demoralize the enemy.

  “Remember, too, that your discipline makes you both unmatchable and unbeatable. The enemy fights in single combat. Every one of them is alone. You men, on the other hand, fight like a machine. There is little human about you. I expect you to get into their ranks quickly, hit them hard and then get back to the safety of these walls. Intact.” His eyes moved from face to face.

  “Upon re-entering the camp, you will rest for an hour and then hit them again from the other side.” Again
he paused before going on. “This is not an easy assignment, but each of you has been chosen as the best man in ten. You’ll be tired by dawn, but you will be relieved of daytime duties. Remember, your prime purpose in this exercise will be to confuse and panic the enemy, to undermine his confidence.” He stopped and looked them over carefully. “Is there any man here who does not want this duty?”

  Silence.

  “This is your last chance.”

  Nothing.

  “Very well, then. Hammer them!” He spun on his heel and stalked off.

  The new commander cleared his throat. Britannicus had not introduced him. The men were watching him. He coughed again.

  “My name is Cato. I am now in command of this maniple. We will reassemble here in full armour half an hour before midnight. Centurion, dismiss the men.”

  I did, and they broke up gradually, talking among themselves. In five minutes I was alone, looking at the hammer and the anvil.

  Well, Britannicus’ plan for the hammering worked. It worked so well that first night that in four raids we lost only three men, all three wounded and none seriously. The men were exhausted and slept all morning, the company clerks having rearranged the duty rosters to free them for “special services.” When the enemy attacked at dawn, the “Hammers” were already under blankets, and there they remained. The rest of the cohort had little trouble holding off the attacks; our walls and ditches were high enough and deep enough to discourage all but the most foolhardy attackers, and they were easy pickings for the bowmen on our walls.

  The second night, about an hour before midnight, Britannicus split our cavalry into two groups of thirty and sent them off in opposite directions from the east and west gates of the camp, with orders to gallop at full speed through the enemy, keeping the camp walls within easy reach. The effect was magnificent. Each group charged out of the darkness, trampling bodies and creating chaos that hardly had time to settle before the second squadron arrived from the same direction. Each squadron made one and a quarter revolutions of the camp, re-entering by the gate beyond the one from which they had left. They lost four men.