The Skystone

by Jack Whyte

  “I did think you were dead, you know,” he muttered, and then he hawked and spat and spun around to face the staring sentries, his arm across my shoulders.

  “Look at this man, you two. Mark him well! He is responsible for all your grievances. This is Gaius Publius Varrus, the kind of whoreson soldier puling little turds like you will never be. This man has hauled my arse out of more tight spots and saved my worthless life more times than I can count. Next time you find yourselves cursing me, curse him instead, for without him I wouldn’t be here to plague your worthless souls. And if you stay in this army long enough, you might, some day, find a friend as good as him. You might, I say, but I doubt it.” That day stretched into a long, drunken night.

  The following afternoon found me seated in the office of Antonius Cicero, a direct descendant of the golden orator, and legate commanding the military district of which Colchester was the hub. I knew him of old, for I had served under him in Africa and with him, after my promotion, in North Britain. He was a close friend of Britannicus’ and newly appointed to this command by Theodosius. With us in the room were Trifax, the garrison armourer, and Lucius Lucullus, the paymaster, both of whom I had known and liked in pre-invasion days. Plautus was there, too, standing stiff against the wall, uncomfortable in the informal company of staff officers. It was gratifying to be so well remembered and so obviously welcome in their company, and I was relaxed as I spoke to them, telling them what I was doing now.

  Cicero waited until I had finished and then spoke. “So you are here in Colchester, operating as a smith?” I heard the edge of incredulity in his voice, in spite of his well-bred attempt to disguise it.

  “Aye, Legate, that is correct.”

  “Amazing. What do you do, exactly?”

  I looked at each of them and then stood up. “Let me show you.” I unbuckled the belt from my waist and laid it, with the short-sword and dagger it held, on his table. “A sample of my work.” They all leaned forward as Cicero drew the sword and examined it closely.

  “You made this?”

  “Aye, and the dagger and scabbards. It’s a matched set.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” His voice tailed away, then, “These are very fine, very fine.” He was at a loss for words, unsure of my purpose, and he feared he might offend me. I waited as he passed the sword to Trifax, the armourer, and the dagger to Lucullus. “Let me understand this, Varrus. Are you offering these for sale?”

  I grinned at him. “I am. These, and as many others as I can get orders for. That is my business.”

  Poor Cicero was out of his aristocratic depth. He looked at Trifax. “What do you think, Trifax?”

  Trifax was as blunt as a rusty dagger. “Don’t have to think, General. This sword is flawless. If I could get my own people to turn these out, I’d be a happy man. But I can’t. I’ll buy as many of these as I can requisition. Lucullus?”

  The paymaster shrugged his patrician shoulders. “I only pay the money. I’ll take your word on the quality, although for once I can see it for myself.” He looked at me. “Quality taken for granted, Publius, what about quantity? Can you produce enough of these to justify the paperwork?”

  “If you want a hundred a day, starting tomorrow, no, I can’t. If, on the other hand, your expectations are reasonable and your settlement of accounts prompt, I’ll keep you supplied with weapons of that quality.”

  “Be specific. As you are set up now, how many of these could you turn out in a week?”

  “Right now, two a day. Within a month, eight a day. I can expand to meet your needs with no loss in quality if, as I say, you pay me promptly. Expansion costs money.”

  He nodded. “We pay promptly. What about the smiths’ guild? You have their approval?”

  “For what? I belong to no guild.”

  “Oh! I see. That could be awkward.”

  I frowned. “How? I don’t see what you mean.”

  He cleared his throat. “The law, Publius. We are required by law to deal only with civil suppliers who are in good standing with their guilds.”

  “Horse turds for that!” I stood up, sudden anger welling in my throat. “You must excuse me, gentlemen. I seem to have been wasting your time. I belong to no guild, as I have said. Nor did my grandfather. I didn’t need the approval of the smiths’ guild to lay my balls on the line for the Empire and I’ll be damned if I’ll ask their approval to earn my bread.”

  “Sit down, Publius.” Cicero’s voice was bland. He spoke directly to his paymaster. “Are you serious? You mean we cannot buy Varrus’ swords because he does not belong to some ridiculous civilian tradesmen’s organization?”

  Lucullus cleared his throat again. “That is the law, General.”

  “How do we get around it?”

  “We cannot, General.”

  “And horse turds for that, too!” The profanity sounded strange, uttered in Cicero’s cultured tones. “I want Varrus’ swords for my men. Are you telling me I cannot have them?”

  Poor Lucullus was looking very uncomfortable. “No, General, not I. All such contracts have to be arranged through the office of the Procurator.”

  “Ahh! The office of the Procurator. I begin to see. No doubt the Procurator’s ‘department’ gains a commission on the services involved?”

  A short pause, then, “Yes, General.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten to fifteen percent, depending on the size of the contract.”

  “Blatant theft.” Cicero turned to me. “Publius, if our excellent Lucullus here can find a way around this nonsense, legally of course, would you be prepared to surrender the required per centum ‘tax’ to the Procurator?”

  I was smiling now. “Of course, General. I’d be happy to.” Particularly since we had not yet negotiated my price, which I had just raised by 20 percent.

  “Excellent! Lucullus, can that be arranged?”

  Lucullus was no fool; he looked at me and smiled a tiny smile. “I’m sure it can, General.”

  “Wonderful. By the way, Lucullus, that reminds me. When must we submit our budget to the Procurator?”

  “Next month, General.” His expression tacitly added, “As you well know.”

  “Well, Publius Varrus, it’s good to know we will be well armed and well supplied in future. A jug of wine would be appropriate now, I believe.”

  My feet hardly touched the ground on the way home that night, and within the month we had an iron-bound contract to supply arms to the local garrison.

  VII

  It was on Midsummer’s Day that I finally allowed myself to open my grandfather’s treasures and gloat over them. I had waited, month after impatient month, until I felt that I had earned myself the reward of spending time to examine these wonders that were now legally and rightfully mine.

  From the way I have been speaking of treasures, anyone reading this will probably have imagined a hoard of coins and jewels. That is not quite correct. My grandfather had been an armourer — a master sword-maker and also an earnest historian and student of weapons and weaponry. During his early years with the legions, he had picked up several assorted examples of the armourer’s craft and the metalsmith’s art that had caused him excitement and given him great pleasure. In later years, while he served as armourer to the various legions stationed in Britain, he had encouraged legionaries to pick up other examples for him. The end result of forty years of this was a collection of antique and esoteric weapons the like of which existed nowhere else that I knew of. These were my grandfather’s treasures, each individually wrapped in protective cloth and many stored in cases that he had made specifically to house them. Every piece was accompanied by a scroll outlining the history of the item as far as it was known by the old man. Where the history of the piece was obscure, he consulted all available sources and made some very shrewd guesses.

  Some of the shapes I remembered from boyhood, and I felt like a boy again as I opened them one by one. There was one particular piece that chilled me to my bones with awe. It wa
s a face-protector of dull, black iron, shaped to fit the forehead and muzzle of a horse, with flared eye-protectors. It had been crudely decorated with a drawing of a mounted man charging with a long, heavy spear balanced over his shoulder, and beneath the drawing, the Greek word meaning “companions.” The lover of history in me had to swallow hard as I looked at this piece of armour, because I knew it had protected one of the horses of the Companions, the hand-picked friends of the King, who had ridden into battle at the side of Philip of Macedon and later with his son the great Alexander, fully seven hundred years before I had been born. The Companions! How often had I dreamed of them as a boy, imagining myself winning glory under the greatest military commander of ancient times.

  To keep company with the faceplate, there was the badly rusted remnant of a sarissa, the sixteen-foot-long spear carried by the Macedonian cavalry. It had a long cross-piece attached below the blade, presumably to stop the entire spear from going through the body of whoever was skewered, and to give the rider at least a chance of pulling it out again as he galloped past his victim. My grandfather had really studied this weapon in his youth. Like the one in the drawing on the horse’s faceplate, the sarissa was carried point down, the shaft over the rider’s shoulder, and was used with a downward thrust. It was originally left in the body of the first victim, and the rest of the fighting was done with swords. The victorious cavalry — Alexander’s cavalry were always victorious — would return later to collect their sarissas from the bodies of the men they had slain in their charge. The cross-piece, added later, meant they then had a chance of retaining the spear for a second victim.

  In a large, long case that I remembered well, there was a collection of original Roman pila, the fighting spears of the ancient legions. Seven feet long, the shaft of these original spears was of wood for half its length, the other half being a metal rod with a wicked head. Embedded in an enemy’s shield, the rod, of soft iron, would bend, and the cumbersome weight of the thing dragged at the shield until it became useless to the man trying to shelter behind it.

  Another carefully wrapped package contained the great African bow that I had marvelled over as a child. It was composed of alternating layers of wood, animal horn and sinew, and it was truly a mighty weapon the like of which had never been seen in this part of the world. I laid it aside for closer examination later.

  There were several items that I had never seen before, and a parchment wrapped in deerskin, addressed to me with the instruction that I should read it carefully at my leisure and study the contents and methods described in it. Intrigued, I laid this package, too, carefully aside. A second, new-looking package contained a magnificent shirt of soft leather, onto which had been stitched, with the most astonishing precision, thousands of tiny metal rings in overlapping rows, in the fashion of our own Roman plate armour, but in a form much lighter and far more supple. The accompanying note said that it had been brought back from the country north of the Danube and was the kind of armour being worn now by many of the Germanic and Saxon chiefs.

  The last package was a magnificent box of rich, oiled wood no more than a foot long by a hand’s breadth wide by about half of that in depth. At first I could not even find out how it opened, but eventually I discovered that the top and bottom had been carved to fit one over the other into matching grooves. I knew this package was special, from the way it had been hidden away at the back of the hoard. I was trembling slightly in anticipation as I opened it, but I almost dropped it when I saw what it contained. It was a knife. A dagger. But such a dagger! The blade shone like polished silver, and in fact I took it to be that at first; the hilt looked to be of polished gold. The entire weapon was covered with a slight sheen of oil.

  I picked it up reverently. It felt alive in my hand. I tested the blade with the ball of my thumb and drew blood! Gaping at the blood in amazement, for I had barely used any pressure, I carried the knife upstairs and out into the sunlight, where it blazed in my hand like a torch. I heard footsteps behind me and Equus stood by my side.

  “I see you found it. I’ve been dying of impatience! Thought you’d never go down there. Boudicca’s buttocks, man, sometimes I think you’re not human! How could you not go down there for all this time?”

  I didn’t even bother to answer him. I was too busy staring at the wonder in my hand.

  “He was sorry it couldn’t be a sword, but that was all of the skystone metal he had left, and he didn’t want to pollute it with ordinary iron the way he did with the sword he made for your father. He didn’t know what it was, but whatever it was, he thought it was fitting that it fell from heaven. It holds an edge like nothing in this world. It’ll shave the hairs off your arm. Try it.”

  I did, and the tiny hairs of the back of my wrist gathered in a small clump on the edge of the blade.

  “Have you ever seen the like?”

  I simply shook my head, hefting the knife in my hand. It had an unusual hilt, slightly cruciform, the arms of which protruded for about an inch above and below the blade.

  “Why the cross-piece?”

  “Extra weight. And balance. You can throw it. It flies as though it had wings, like magic.”

  “Is the handle solid gold?”

  Equus shook his head. “No. Gold-dipped, though. Underneath it’s brass. Gold was too heavy. And too soft.”

  “And too expensive. It looks like one piece — the hilt, I mean. How did he make it?”

  “He poured it.” Equus grinned at my wide-eyed look, “Did you find the scroll he left for you? It’s all in there. The old man thought it was an entirely new technique, revolutionary, he said, if it’s properly used.”

  “How did he get this finish on the blade, Equus?”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “He didn’t. It was there already. All we had to do was polish it… and polish it and polish it and polish it. But it was worth it. And the brighter it got, the easier it became to polish. We put the oil on it to protect it against rust, although we didn’t know whether or not the skystone rusted. Better to be safe than angry.”

  I held the beautiful thing up to my eyes. At the top of the blade, just below the cross hilt, my grandfather had inscribed a tiny “V” for his name and mine: Varrus. I felt a lump swell in my throat and swallowed hard.

  “Equus, I’m going to take the scroll, and this, and go home. Will you see to shutting everything up?”

  He grinned again. “Thought you might do that. Of course I will. Go home. Go!”

  VIII

  “How bad was that wound of yours?”

  Plautus and I were sitting in one of the local taverns frequented by the garrison centurions, waiting for Equus to come and join us and watching the antics of some of the other customers in the place. His question was unexpected.

  “Bad enough. Why d’you ask?”

  “Just curious. I was watching the slut with the big tits across there, and something about her reminded me of the bitch who used to run that big old brothel, over in Alexandria. You know the one I mean. The big one.”

  “The big brothel, or the big bitch?”

  He laughed. “Both.”

  “You mean Fatia?”

  “That’s the one! Fatia. What a whore that one was. She could suck the pommel off a sword! Hello! What’s going on over there?”

  I turned to look at the commotion that had erupted in the back of the tavern. Somebody had been caught cheating at dice and there were naked blades being waved around. The quarrellers were civilians, however, so Plautus had no need to get involved. We were too far away from them to see any of the details, but a sudden scuffle and a scream told us that blood had been spilled before the tavern owner and his enforcers could reach the scene. They were there within seconds, however, restoring order with heavy hands and clubs.

  Plautus sat back in his seat. “God-cursed civilians, they make me sick. Not a one of them fit for military service, but they cause more trouble in one night in this place than all the old sweats who come in here. If the place was m
ine I’d declare it off-limits to all civilians.”

  “That’s nice. Then I wouldn’t be able to come here.”

  Our beer was gone, and I signalled to the serving girl to bring us more. We both watched her in silence as she swung her fleshy body towards us, slopping ale from the jugs she held in one big hand. As she leaned over the table I could smell her — warm and sweaty and slightly sour. She leered at Plautus and he reached to tweak one of her prominent nipples as she laughed and swung away.

  “She stinks like a goat,” I said. “What is it about her that reminded you of Fatia? At least Fatia was clean.”

  “Aye, clean, but voracious. What a mouth!” He shook his head in nostalgic wonder. “What a mouth that bitch had.”

  “Plautus, are you drunk?”

  He blinked at me. “No more than usual at this time of night. Why? Are you?”

  “I don’t think so, but you’re not making sense. You asked me about my leg and then started prattling about Fatia. I don’t see the connection.”

  He hitched himself around in his seat and looked me straight in the eye. “You used to be a bigger whore-chaser than I was. You introduced me to Fatia’s place, remember? Now we’ve been back together again for, what? Two months? I haven’t seen you as much as look at a woman in all that time. It just occurred to me that you might…” His voice faded. “You know…” I stared at him in amused surprise. He was embarrassed! “Your wound — I thought perhaps… damnation, I think I am drunk.”

  I smiled gently. “I’ve still got all my equipment, if that’s what you’re getting at. It was a close thing, though. Missed by an inch.”

  “An axe, you said?” He looked fascinated.

  “Aye, with a spike on the back. It was the spike that got me. The whoreson swung it underhand, up into my crotch.”

  “Aiee!” His face puckered up in sympathy and horror at the image. “It hurts just to think about it.”