The Skystone cc-1

by Jack Whyte

  He interrupted me, prompted, I would find out later, by the probity that was so much a part of his character. "I'm not sure I want to hear any more. It sounds to me as though the reward for you was a reward for himself, too. Safe back in Britain, you will be grateful, and unlikely to say anything that he could find embarrassing."

  I caught his meaning and shook my head. "Not so, Tribune, with respect. There was nothing improper involved. My commander, the Legate Seneca, had a son who might have been a burden to him. I took the lad under. my wing and saw him properly fledged. That's all there was to it." He frowned. "Seneca? You are a friend of the Seneca’s?" I shook my head, bewildered at the sudden hostility in his voice. "No, Tribune, I'm just a simple centurion. The Legate asked me to keep an eye on his son and straighten him around; make a soldier out of him."

  "And did you?"

  "Yes, " I answered. "I did. He wasn't as difficult as he'd been made out to be. I just brought out the decency in him. The Legate was grateful, and here I am on my way home to Britain."

  "Humph! You must be a man of great subtlety, to bring out the decency in a Seneca." His voice was heavy with irony and dislike. I felt a surge of anger.

  "Well, Tribune," I snapped, "I grieve if I've offended you." He flipped his hand at me in an unmistakable order to be silent, and we continued for a while without speaking. When he spoke next, his voice was contrite.

  "Forgive me, Centurion. I have no right to berate you, and no reason. You cannot be expected to choose your commanders. There has been a long and bitter enmity between my family and the House of Seneca. Blood has been spilled for it over the years, and there is no love at all between us, from one generation to the next."

  There was nothing I could say to that. It was none of my affair, and I had no wish to be inquisitive. I accepted his words and passed no comment. After a time he spoke again.

  "Home to Britain!" His voice sounded nostalgic. "All that greenery after all this sand. How much do you know about the Twentieth?" I shook my head. "Nothing, except that they're famous. They've been called the Valeria Victrix since the days of Julius Caesar, and their legionary fortress has been at Deva, in Cambria, since Agricola's campaign, about three hundred years ago. Apart from that, I only know I'm posted to the Second Millarian Cohort as replacement for its pilus prior. Apparently the man they had was killed and there's no one really qualified to replace him from the existing crew. They have an acting cohort commander in place until I get there." I grimaced to myself in the darkness. "Frankly, I'm not sure what that means, so I'm expecting the worst, in the hope that anything less than that will be bearable. The only other thing is that I've heard they're not currently stationed in Deva — the Second Cohort, I mean. They're in the north-east, at Eboracum."

  "The Second of the Twentieth, eh?" Even in the dark, I could see the smile on his face as he shook his head.

  "What's so funny? What are you smiling at?"

  He was grinning strangely to himself. "I was just thinking about our circumstances here," he said. "You are here because of my enemy, even though indirectly, and you have saved my life. Yet your mode of address to me is decidedly lacking in military respect, and I'm not sure what I ought to do about it."

  I stiffened at the censure in his voice. He was right, of course. I was only a centurion and he was a Military Tribune, and my deportment had not been militarily correct. But somehow, because of our circumstances, it had not seemed necessary to defer to him here in the middle of a desert when there were only the two of us around. Now it appeared that I had been wrong in my reading of the man. He was more of a martinet than I had thought. He must have read my mind, for he swung his camel right around close to mine, a broad smile on his face.

  "Relax, Varrus. We're going to get along, you and I. This meeting was obviously fated. My name is Caius Britannicus. I, too, was on my way to Britain when I was taken. To the Second Cohort of the Twentieth Legion. I'm your new commanding officer. Haven't I got a right to wonder what I'm going to do about you?"

  II

  For a period of weeks after the trap in the mountain pass, my whole world existed only in terms of the pain of my wound. Even now it is hard to describe. As a veteran, and the bearer of many scars picked up over years of duty in some savage places, I had thought myself familiar with pain. I was wrong. This experience of muscle and tendons and sinew shattered by the ripping spike of a hard-swung axe taught me just how little I had known. The pain I lived with had a wide range of intensity and textures, and I experienced it as a spectrum of pulsating colours, ranging from blazing white to a dull, harsh, throbbing red.

  Of all the torments I had to endure, the worst by far was caused by the natural, waste-producing functions of my own body. They became my most bitter and treacherous enemy, scourging me with unimaginable agonies each time I had to accommodate them. Mitros was gentle in his ministrations at such times, but not always sympathetic. On one occasion — he was in a particularly impatient mood — he told me brusquely that women endured far worse in childbirth and I should be grateful I was alive to feel pain. But it was only his skills and his magical opiates that saved my mind from breaking during that first month.

  Pain, however, like everything else in life, is transient. I began to mend, gradually, day by day, heartbeat by heartbeat. A time came when I could lie still and feel — almost explore — my pain, without wanting to scream like a baby. And a day came, much later, when I could lie on my back and think about things other than how much I hurt. From that point on, I began to mend visibly, and to talk, and to think rationally again. I spent many silent hours reviewing and analyzing the affinity between Britannicus and me, and how it had developed and prospered after our meeting in Africa.

  We had travelled back to Britain together, and by the time we disembarked at Lemanis in South Britain, each of us had a sound measure of the other's capacities. I was comfortable with the relationship we had established — one of Staff officer and trusted subordinate — and I felt confident that Britannicus was, too.

  From Lemanis, we rented horses and made our way directly north to Londinium, the administrative centre of South Britain. There we reported to the Military Governor, to present our papers and gain official acknowledgement of our arrival. No one in Londinium had any time to waste with us. We were sent on our way — almost without rest — with a package of personal dispatches, a thirty-strong squadron of light cavalry under the command of a senior decurion, and an infantry detachment of one hundred and twelve replacements with six junior centurions. All of these the Tribune was instructed to deliver to the senior Legate in Deva, the fortress headquarters of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix for more than three centuries. We had expected to be sent directly to Eboracum where the Second Cohort of the Twentieth had been stationed on temporary duty for several years. The official military mind, however, continued to function in its own peculiar way.

  Deva lay in the hill country to the north-west, in Cambria. It had been built around 70 AD, during Julius Agricola's campaign to complete the conquest of Britain. Its site had been chosen because it dominated the territory where the lands of three warlike tribes — the Brigantes, the Deceangli and the Ordovices — came together. However, after three hundred years of the Pax Romana, Deva's original strategic importance had long been forgotten. Its location was now no more than damnably inconvenient. It took us five days of hard marching to make the journey there by road from Londinium.

  As a fortress, Deva was impressive and seemingly impregnable, exactly as one would expect after three hundred-odd years of continuous occupation by one of Rome's proudest and oldest legions. We had less than one day to absorb it, however, before our orders took us back to the road again.

  We learned immediately upon our arrival that our initial intelligence —

  acquired in Africa — had been accurate. The Second Cohort of the Twentieth lay at Eboracum, on temporary duty with the Second Legion, the Augusta, another three days' march to the north-east. The Legate who accepted our form
al reporting for duty was surly and ill-tempered. He excoriated both of us mercilessly for having taken so long to get there —

  apparently we had been expected the previous week — and sent us on our way with ringing ears. My admiration for Britannicus grew as I watched the uncomplaining manner in which he accepted the injustice and the inefficiency and inconvenience being heaped upon him by incompetent superiors.

  From the outset of our relationship Britannicus invariably treated me with military correctness, slightly warmed by courtesy and consideration. I found him to be just, temperate, and dispassionate in his dealings with the men under his command. But he could be awesome in his wrath when provoked by incompetence or malfeasance. A rigid disciplinarian, he was implacable once he had decided that punishment was in order. And never, at any time, did he show any capacity for suffering fools gladly. In those days, Britain had been at peace for many years. Legionary duties consisted, in the main, of road-building and maintenance, policing the province, and maintaining civil order. The army was, as it always was, the enforcing power behind the law. Few circumstances called the troops in Britain out to spill blood: occasionally, raiding bands of Picts from Caledonia or Scots from Hibernia would make incursions into provincial territory and would have to be repulsed, or, much less common, uninvolved units would be called out to put down an army mutiny bred of anger, dissatisfaction, lack of discipline and the tedium of garrison life. The Second Cohort's posting to Eboracum had come as the result of a mutiny. The rebellion had been a deep-rooted one. and the thousand-man Second of the Twentieth, the only uncontaminated cohort in Eboracum, had been detained there by an apprehensive praesidium for almost two years.

  Tribune Britannicus was ordered by the ill-mannered Legate in Deva to take command of the Second Cohort, get it out of Eboracum, and march it sixty miles south to Lindum, to relieve a unit of the Fourteenth Legion posted there. So he and I came together into the life of the Second Cohort, the new Tribune, Caius Britannicus, and his new pilus prior, Publius Varrus. And together we began to reshape it in the image of Caius Britannicus. It was fitting then, that almost two years later, we should be together when we first came face to face with the unthinkable — the opening action of a chain of events that was to alter all our lives, forever. According to the official report, it happened in the hour before dawn on the first night of August in the year of our Lord 367. The frontier bastion known as Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain was overrun by a federation of hostile tribes from Pictish Caledonia, aided in the east by a seaborne invasion of Saxons and in the west by a similar invasion of Hibernian Scots. That's all it says. Roman historians do not write eloquently of Roman defeats.

  Be that as it may, the dimensions of the disaster were appalling. Hadrian's Wall was eighty miles long. At no point in that length was it less than fifteen feet high, and it was fronted along its entire length by a V-shaped ditch ten feet deep and thirty wide. It had a mile castle at every mile of its length, with two small, fortified watch-turrets between each pair, plus a series of sixteen fully garrisoned forts, spaced approximately six miles apart. It was defended at all times by a force of not less than three thousand — regular auxiliary infantry from time to time, depending upon local conditions and the availability of manpower, but mainly local conscripts, citizen farmers and mercenaries. Always mercenaries. And the whole thing collapsed in one hour on that black August night. The scope, the timing and the co-ordinated swiftness of the operation are difficult to visualize, let alone describe. I only arrived at a perspective of my own — a very personal and probably flawed measure of the events —

  long afterwards, by comparing the eyewitness reports of the few survivors I met from time to time in the years that followed. Without exception, these men were still amazed, bewildered and confused, years afterward, by what they had encountered that night. Each was still surprised to have lived through it, and each could only recall reacting to the events and the immediate circumstances that affected him personally. Of all these men, the most articulate was Marcus Gallifax, a garrison centurion who escaped and managed somehow to join up with us later, as did a couple of others.

  I spoke with Gallifax many times over the months that followed, and his recollections of that night were memorable and precise. They never varied either in detail or in delivery, so that, lying supine in my hospital cot, searching for ways to relieve the tedium of inactivity, I had no difficulty recalling either his face or his words. ...

  Hadrian's Wall, 367

  It was his third tour of duty on the Wall, and he. hated it more than he had on his first assignment. Marcus Gallifax held his cloak firmly across his lower face and leaned out between the battlements, his eyes screwed almost shut against the outrage of the wind as he scanned the darkness below and in front of him. He saw and heard nothing but blackness and the howling gale. The noise in his ears as the wind roared through the earflaps of his helmet made it impossible to hear anything else, but he couldn't even see the movement that he knew was out there: the writhing, whipping torment of the clumps of rank grass, bracken and gorse that carpeted the ground. His eyes teared rapidly and he grunted a curse and pulled back into the protection of the battlement on his left, wiping his streaming eyes as the frustrated wind howled by his shelter. The wind that seemed to blow endlessly from the north at this time of year had a malevolence, a concentrated hostility, that made it different from any other wind in the world. It came buffeting and blistering south out of the hills, its force twisted and compressed by their contours, and slapped hard against the fifteen-foot-high surface of the Wall, to be sucked down like cataract water into the ten-foot ditch below and then spewed back up and over and between the battlements with an erratic violence that could panic a man by snatching the air out of his mouth as he tried to breathe. Gallifax made a virtue of his hatred, using its virulence to keep him on his toes so that his men were always, always vigilant. They thought he hated them and that he was always trying to catch them out in dereliction of duty. They were wrong. He didn't hate them. He hated that godless, savage frontier where nothing ever seemed to move except the demented wind that made progress along the Wall possible only in a series of leaps from one battlement to the next, the traveller having to brave each open gap and then huddle in the tiny protection of the next battlement before moving on. He leaped again, throwing his shoulders flat against the stonework, and made out the shape of a sentry huddled against the Wall less than four feet from him. The man had been expecting him, and Gallifax guessed at, rather than saw, the salute of greeting. A particularly fierce shock wave broke between them, and Gallifax waited for the gust to die down and then crossed to stand beside the sentry.

  "How goes the night?" He had to yell into the man's ear to make himself heard, knowing that his words were being ripped away by the howling wind. "Anything to report?"

  "No, Centurion. All quiet. But this is ..." Gallifax thought he heard "a waste of time," but he could not be sure, for the man's words were further muffled by a heavy woollen scarf that was wrapped around the lower half of his face, against all regulations. The contravention did not disturb the centurion. He himself was wearing two pairs of long drawers beneath his leather breeches and long knitted socks on his legs and feet beneath his sandals.

  He glanced up at the sky, looking for stars among the roiling cloud masses, but there was only blackness. The sentry was shouting something about snow. Well, it was cold enough for it. Gallifax nodded his head as though in agreement and then looked over to his right, where he could see a distant yellow glimmer of lamplight from the window of the watch-turret. "Thank you, Mithras, you soldier's god," he thought. "A man's needs are few and easily cared for on a night like this. Still air and warmth will make him feel blessed." The yellow light marked the end of the first half of his inspection tour. It signalled a cup of hot broth and perhaps a throw or two of the dice before he had to make the return trip to the mile castle. He clapped the sentry roughly on the shoulder and yelled in his ear again. "Watch is half
way gone, lad! Relief coming up at dawn!" He hitched his cloak up again across his left shoulder, tightened his grip on his vine-wood cudgel, the centurion's badge of rank, and moved : on towards the tower. On a night like this, he could well see why a man might think guard duty was a waste of time. Each of the four poor whoresons he had inspected in the past hour might as well have been blind and deaf as well as cold and miserable. Every step of the last hundred paces towards that yellow lamplight was a fight for balance in the teeth of a wind that had now risen to maniacal fury, but at last he reached it, flung open the door and dived inside to the warmth and brightness. What he found instead was horror and confusion. Trebatius, his friend of many years, was sprawled back-wards across the table top, his face split in two by an axe. ! Herod, the young Judean mercenary, was squirming in a corner, pinned against the wall by a man almost twice his size who jabbed viciously and fatally with a dagger even as Gallifax's mind absorbed what he was seeing. Another stranger, equally big, had been in the act of lifting a steaming bowl to his lips with both hands when Gallifax burst in on them. He froze with shock, as did Gallifax, and for a petrified moment the two stared at each other in wild-eyed surprise. The centurion was powerless to do anything. Only his left hand was free. The other, muffled by his tight-wrapped cloak, was holding only the useless cudgel. Gallifax was the first to recover his wits. He threw himself backwards out of the room again, pulling the door shut with his free hand. There was only one thought in his head: to raise the alarm. He was shouting at the top of his lungs as he ran back towards the sentry, but the man was gone. The wind was feral, a howling animal. In confusion, Gallifax stepped to the southern edge of the parapet, thinking the sentry might have been blown over. Then he crossed to the battlements and leaned out again. He had a momentary vision of someone standing close to him, on the outside of the Wall, fifteen feet in the air, and then fingers hooked into the back of his helmet and he felt himself jerked forward and over the edge as he thought,