The Skystone

by Jack Whyte

  Conscious of the impossibility of responding intelligently to that, yet wanting to clarify what he was driving at, I said, “I don’t know, Caius. Perhaps I do, from time to time, but I’m not sure if we’re both talking about the same thing. What is it you’re missing? Have you any idea?”

  He threw me a sidelong glance and then returned his eyes to the path at his feet. “Yes, I’m missing my son, for one thing. I’m not happy with his decision to follow Magnus.”

  I answered him firmly on that point. “That’s because you would never have decided to do that, Caius. You wouldn’t have to. You’re Caius Britannicus, Legate, Senator and Proconsul of Rome. But we’re discussing Picus’ decision. He’s only a lad, and a grunt, at that, not even a centurion yet. He has to do what he’s told, like any other soldier. More than likely he had no choice at all. It’s pointless to fret over it, anyway, because there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  He kicked at a clump of grass. “Damnation, Publius, I know that. But I still don’t like it. I should have kept the lad here on the Colony.”

  “How? You mean you should have forbidden him the privilege of serving with the legions? Of following in the steps of his ancestors? How long has it been since the last Britannicus stayed at home and didn’t serve the Empire?”

  “It’s never happened, you know that.”

  “Then why start it now? You know the experience will be the making of the lad.”

  “I know it will, of course! But what if…?”

  “What if what? Do you mean what happens if he’s killed?”

  He answered, his voice a whisper, “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  I reached out and grasped him by the shoulder. “Then your name will die with you, my friend. But it won’t happen. Picus won’t die. He’ll come home because he knows he’ll be needed. There is a position waiting for him in our Colony, and his experience and skills will be important. The lads who stay here with us will learn their trade with us. They’ll be good soldiers, but they’ll be home grown. Our Picus will bring back the training and experience to round them out and make real fighters of them, real Romans.”

  “I suppose so.” He heaved a great, deep sigh. “I know you’re right, my friend,” he said. “My intellect knows you’re right, but my heart —”

  I cut in on his words. “What’s really bothering you. General?”

  He stopped short, in mid stride, and looked at me. “That is, Publius. What you just said.”

  I blinked at him. “What did I say?”

  “You called me General, and that’s what I’m missing. Soldiering, Publius! The excitement, the challenge, the movement, the constant stimulation and requirement to be prepared for anything. The constant need to think on one’s feet and keep abreast and ahead of developments.”

  I had stopped walking, too, and now I was staring at him in amazement. He took my stunned silence for recognition of the problem.

  “Don’t you agree?”

  “Agree?” I said, hearing the wonder in my own voice. “I can’t even believe what I heard! General, can you recognize horse turds when you see them?”

  His gaze went blank. “What d’you mean? Of course I can.”

  “So can I.” I nodded. “Aye, and I can hear them when they hit the ground, too, fresh dropped. But I seldom hear them dropping from the horse’s mouth.”

  The old Britannicus surfaced quickly. “Varrus, what in Hades are you talking about?”

  “What you were talking about. Horse shit. I’ve never heard the like. You were the one who loved to talk for hours about the pettiness and uselessness of the military life — the inactivity, the boredom, the frustration, the bureaucratic meddling, the ineptitude and the general folly bred by the army’s ‘hurry up and wait’ mentality.” I stopped to draw breath, and he did not interrupt me as I continued. “You know, if I didn’t know who I was listening to, I’d be tempted to think you were sorry for yourself. But I know that’s not the case. You’ve a huge job to do here in this Colony, and you’re doing it well. What you’re feeling right now will pass. It’s nostalgia for a way of life that’s over. You’ve done it all. Trying to repeat any part of it would drive you insane. The job you have to do today means more, and demands more, than anything you’ve ever tried before.”

  Now it was he who stared open-mouthed at me. “By the living Christ, Varrus,” he breathed, his eyes wide in wonder, “you’ve never dared speak to me like that before. I’ve never heard you talk to anyone like that! You’re really eloquent in fury… I must have pissed on your cooking fire to make you that angry!”

  I could see laughter dancing in his eyes, and I tried to keep my own face stern.

  “You did,” I snarled, “and no wonder!” I tried to mimic his earlier words, but the harder I tried, the louder he giggled, and the more foolish this whole conversation seemed. “The activity of soldiering! Judge him not, ye gods! The excitement! The requirement to be prepared for anything… The horse turds and the dung in the mutton stew… Gods! I may puke!”

  I couldn’t even talk after that. Caius was giggling openly and helplessly, like a boy, and my own laughter broke out in guffaws, so that our hilarity fed upon itself and we staggered around, clutching at each other for support until our knees gave way as completely as our dignity, both weakened by our hysteria, and we collapsed to the grass. From that day forward, there was no more talk between us of discontent, or of nostalgia for the days that were gone. Our friendship grew richer by another layer of shared experience and we dedicated all our time and our collective energies to the development of our Colony.

  Luceiia and I came to know each other better, too, during those quiet days, and our first-born arrived with summer. A girl, Victoria. An angel child who grew lovelier with each passing day, as had her mother in carrying her. Today, decades later, I can clearly recall the amazement with which I watched Luceiia grow more beautiful from day to day as her pregnancy advanced, so that by the time she came to term, she was radiant, shining with health and wholesome ripeness, flaunting her femininity and carrying her belly proudly before her as a symbol of her feminine ascendancy. The birth itself was astonishingly easy, involving little time and — according to my wife — little pain, so that motherhood in all its aspects came easily to her, and such was her pleasure in the entire process that she was with child again in less than a year. Throughout the period of both pregnancies, I struggled with my skystones, which remained obdurate in the face of all Equus and I tried to do, refusing to melt and yield their secrets.

  Caius had his hands full that summer, and the one that followed, too, learning to administer our Colony. The death of Tonius Cicero, and the consequent loss of his counsel, influence and power to find and recruit new colonists, had been a blow to our plans, but we continued as before, goaded to new urgency by the suddenness of the previous year’s developments.

  Caius and I together began training the Colonists formally in the art of soldiering. We drilled our conscripts brutally, especially the young men, training them in the ancient way — toughening them to run and march and walk laden with heavy packs and spears and the true legionary’s heavy fighting shield, the scutum. And the men responded magnificently, for they shared our dream and knew that our survival might depend at any time upon their fitness to repel attack.

  In the long summer evenings, Caius set everyone to work refurbishing the ancient hill fort at our back. It had no name, because until Caius Britannicus told everyone what it was, no one had ever known it was a fort. It was just a hill, and it had always been there, completely disregarded, until a bright summer afternoon in that year between the birth of my first child and the conception of my second. That day, Caius loaded more than twenty of the most influential Colonists into a brace of wagons and led them out into the fields and over to the base of the hill, about a mile from the Villa Britannicus. There they disembarked from the wagons to be told that the kitchen staff from Caius’ villa had arrived earlier in the day and had prepared a meal for them on the sum
mit. By this time, of course, there were far more people at the scene than those who had set out with Caius. The sight of two wagons loaded with people heading out and away, obviously bound for somewhere specific, had attracted many followers, and there must have been close to a hundred people climbing the hillside that day.

  At the top, Caius’ people were waiting with bread and ale, nuts and roasted grain, crushed, sweet berry paste and a whole sheep roasting to perfection on a spit. When their meal was over, Caius demonstrated the reason for his efforts to get everyone up there. He had prepared a model of the hilltop and used it to aid his demonstration of the defensive genius of the early Celts, the people who had built the place, thousands of years earlier.

  The entire top of the hill was laid out in concentric ramparts, separated by deep ditches, and the extreme centre, a level, roughly circular area about a hundred paces across, had evidently been intended to serve as the final refuge of the defenders. The layout was simple, and for all practical purposes impregnable. Any attacking force first had to climb the steep hillsides and then begin an arduous and bloody struggle to the centre, forced to fight their way across each ditch and then to climb each rampart before sliding down into the ditch that lay behind it. And throughout all of this, the defending forces on the ramparts always had the upper hand, retreating from crest to crest only after they had wreaked maximum damage on the advancing attackers massed below them.

  When Caius had pointed all of this out to everyone, he also pointed out the inevitable corollary: any defenders prepared to commit themselves to the defence of the fort as it stood must also be prepared to die, should the attacking force be numerous enough or stubborn enough to accept the losses inflicted upon them. That, Caius suggested, needn’t be inevitable. This fort was defensible, he suggested, but it would be ten to a hundred times more secure were it surrounded by a wooden wall of pallisades.

  It would be a thousand times stronger were those walls of stone. Such was his eloquence that no one argued.

  We dug embrasures and soon began to erect strong wooden fortifications in strategic places. And eventually, as the work progressed, we began to build a stone-walled citadel. It became the norm that, in addition to his standard duties and to the normal stone-gathering activities of the work crews, each man was required to find one stone each day and take it to the hill, and our stonemasons were set to work to build a mighty wall.

  It was slow, tedious work in the first two years, and Caius worked hard to keep people’s enthusiasm for the project high. He reminded them constantly of the legend of Rome’s walls, finding a thousand different ways to remind them how strong those walls had been, down through the centuries, and pointing out frequently how easy it was to see how Remus had angered Romulus by jumping across the “walls” of Rome. He urged them, all the time, every day of every week of every month, to watch the progress of their own work and to watch the progress of the work as a whole. And sure enough, as day followed day and stone was laid on stone, year in, year out, the shape of our walls became more pronounced, more evident, so that now a man could see what would be there, in time.

  Apart from my struggles to smelt the skystone, and to drill new soldiers, my days were filled with ironwork. I had apprentices in plenty now, and I taught them how to smelt, and how to forge new tools and weapons. I had organized some of the local Celts to find the scarce iron ore of the local hills and bring it to our smelters. In return, I made them goods and taught them Roman skills in ironwork. Some of their ironsmiths became friends, attracted, I suppose, by that mutual respect that exists among professionals of any kind, and Caius remarked with a smile one evening that my smithy had become the liveliest place in the Colony.

  Cymric, the Celtic bowman whom I had met on my arrival here in the west, became a regular visitor, and because of that I still practiced regularly with my great African bow of horn and sinew. The fame of that bow soon spread, for the hill people were avid archers, and the Pendragon men in particular were awed by it. One day, one of them made me a gift of several dozen arrows, beautifully made, flighted with coloured feathers and tipped with iron barbs. They had been made especially for my bow, I knew, for those the Pendragon used were half the length. I was delighted with them and reciprocated with an axe of solid bronze, after which I became friends with the fletcher, who was Cymric’s brother, and allowed both of them the use of the bow. Cymric used to spend hours with the great bow on his knees, studying its design.

  By the end of the third year, 386, we were strongly established. We had a private army of six hundred well-trained soldiers who could march all day and dig a fortified camp at the end of it, break it down next morning and fill the ditch before marching all day again.

  And as the time went past, our numbers grew. Not a month passed without some new arrival landing in our midst: carpenters and cobblers; coopers and coppersmiths. All were made welcome and put to work at once. We soon had six shoemakers among us who spent all their time in making heavy sandals, which were shod with iron nails made in a smaller forge built beside the first one.

  A silversmith from Glevum joined us with three strong, young sons in their mid teens, one of whom was an artist like his father. The other two wanted nothing more in life than to be soldiers. They were our youngest recruits. Two more stonemasons came to us from the east and were quickly put to work on our fortifications.

  An armourer, who had worked in the south, was sent to us by Plautus and told us that Plautus himself was still with the holding garrison in Britain, apparently having switched allegiance to Magnus. I found that hard to believe, but I was able to come up with no other explanation for either Plautus’ continued existence, or for his ongoing presence in Britain. Had he spoken up at the time of Magnus’ rising, he would no doubt have shared the fate of Tonius Cicero. I was grateful that he had done neither. But I wondered how he had managed to avoid having to cross to Gaul with Magnus. By rights, a soldier of his experience should never have been allowed to remain at home in a safe billet while there was fighting to be done, but Plautus, old soldier that he was, had found a way. In the meantime, having worked his ruse, whatever it was, Plautus had found the new armourer on one of his patrols and had dispatched him to find us. I had work for him before the poor fellow had had time to eat.

  In a short space of time we had to start building new homes to lodge all the newcomers, and a small town grew up outside the main gates of the villa. The houses were of stone, quarried in the hills and brought in by wagon. A family of thatchers had been early arrivals, so all of the new houses were strongly roofed with woven reeds, straw or grasses, depending on the season of the year when they were finished.

  From time to time we heard rumours of increasing raids along the Saxon Shore. Magnus’ departure with so many troops had not gone unnoticed, it appeared. The forces left to garrison the island were spread too thin to do a proper job, and on one of his visits, Alaric told us their morale was very low, since they were constantly faced with the problem of doing too little too late.

  Like the Franks with their horses, these Saxon raiders were a new form of warrior. They came by night, landed in darkness and attacked at daybreak. They operated most of the time in single boatloads of thirty to fifty men. They could attack a hamlet, burn it, steal all that they could carry, sate their lusts for flesh and blood and be back at sea again before the word of their attack had reached the garrison troops who were supposed to stop them. The only danger they faced was the prospect of meeting a naval patrol, but the seas were big, and the patrols were few.

  In the autumn of 387, a boatload of Saxons infiltrated the river estuary to the north-west of us. There they left their ship and struck far inland, being careful to avoid the towns in the area and somehow managing to escape discovery.

  They struck the most northerly of our villas. Fortunately, most of our people were out in the fields at the time. A squadron of our soldiers was in the area and smelled the smoke of burning thatch carried on the wind. I was in the area myself, passin
g by with a small escort of men and wagons on my way to Aquae Sulis for supplies. It was Lorca, one of my wagon-drivers, who made me aware that something was wrong. His nostrils were sharp, and had he not been with us we might have ridden by without noticing anything amiss. He smelled the familiar stink of burning thatch and told me what it was. Although I doubted him at first, I sent two of our strongest runners to check on it and find out where the faint smell was coming from.

  Less than two hours later, I was in hiding on a shrub-covered knoll overlooking a narrow pathway that was ditched on both sides, and hoping that my cursory reading of the land and routes available had been accurate. They had, and the enemy played right into our hands. We had surprise on our side, and the fight was brief and bitter. I had split my force and found myself fighting with the larger of my groups against the enemy’s vanguard, a fearsome band of brutal fighters. The majority of the raiders fell back from our first attack and found themselves cut off by our second party. I was dismounted, fighting on foot, and one of the fleeing raiders found my horse and took it. He was the sole survivor of his party, and I hope he had thews of iron for he must have had to row their long boat homeward alone.

  Murder was done much further back from where I fought, where the fleeing enemy met our second fighting force. Although the men of their vanguard fought to the death and went down fighting, each and every man, the ones who fled our first attack were made of softer stuff. When I went back to check my own rear guard; I found the path littered with enemy corpses piled one on the other like firewood. Along the path of flight, all of the enemy were very soundly dead.

  What to do? This was a dilemma I had faced before. The enemy was vanquished, but justice had not been done. We should have had prisoners — wounded, at least. Some should have survived. I found myself looking at the heaped dead and recalling the words of condemnation uttered centuries earlier by a chieftain of the Picts: “They make a desert and they call it peace.” He had been describing the atrocities of Julius Agricola’s army when it attempted to conquer the highlands of Caledonia, and my grandmother had adopted his words as her favourite expression for the inhumanity of the military mind.