by Jack Whyte
"Why not, indeed? They've already started to, it seems. "
"What d'you mean?"
Now she was grinning widely, enjoying the effect of her next words in advance of their delivery. "They've started to come back. To the hills. The dragons. They have been seen. Witnessed. "
"When? By whom? Your Druids?"
Instead of answering directly, she took another tack. "Last night you told me that your grandfather found and smelted his skystone thirty-some years ago?" I nodded, and she went on. "Well, according to my Druid friends, there was a visitation of dragons to the local hills one night about thirty-six years ago. It terrified the local people, genuinely. There is absolutely no doubt of that. The dragons came at night, in fire and thunder and smoke, flying through the darkness at great speed and landing with a huge commotion and concussion among the hills to the east. The Mendip Hills. The Dragon Hills. "
She paused to let that sink in for a few moments before continuing.
"I had no knowledge of the event. It happened eleven years before I was born, and my family were still living in Rome or in Constantinople. In any case, your grandfather's story makes me think there might be some connection between the two events. Perhaps the 'dragons' were a rain of your skystones? The times seem to fit, if your recollection of the date is accurate. Wouldn't you agree? Or does that sound insane? The speculations of a foolish woman?"
By this time, without being aware of it, I was on my feet, almost hopping with excitement. It was more than sane — it was remotely probable. It might well be that that was exactly what had terrified the people. A rain of skystones! I visualized them falling, red-hot and roaring from the skies!
"Good God, Luceiia. " I said, through a throat that had suddenly gone tight. "Of course they're connected! It's obvious! You're exactly right, I know it! A rain of skystones. "
Now that she had won my conversion, however, she seemed immediately to lose her own certainty. "Publius, " she said, almost in a whisper, "you really believe that theory?" She sounded dazed. "You think it might be what happened?"
"Might be! Of course it might be! I'm convinced of it, absolutely convinced. "
"Oh dear. I was convinced of it, too. at one time, right when the idea occurred to me. But Caius made me feel silly, and I gave in to his logic. " I fixed her with a glare, her mention of Caius's logic chilling me like a dash of cold water. "What logic?"
She flushed and looked down at the ground. "Oh, Publius. I feel quite guilty about this. Here you are now, all excited, and Caius has me confused so that I cannot really bring myself to believe, with the best will in the world, that stones can fall from the sky. Not, at least, unless someone has thrown them up there with a catapult. "
I threw myself down to the ground beside her, not quite daring to reach out and lay my hand on her. "Luceiia, that's not important. Your brother is a Roman general, his objective officer's mind simply will not allow him to believe what his senses tell him to be impossible. I know you're right in your deductions. I don't know how I know, but I do. My guts are telling me that you are right. They were skystones. "
"So what do you intend to do about it?"
"That depends on you and your Druids. Do you or they know exactly where these things landed?"
"They do. Apparently there was a small herd of cattle grazing right at the spot. The cattle were all dead the next day. Some of them had been burned, others apparently devoured. "
I was seething with excitement. "Luceiia, can you find out exactly where this place is? And can you find someone to take me to the exact spot? By all the gods in the universe, Luceiia, do you know how excited I am?" Her face was radiant. "I think so. I can see you. "
"Just think, Luceiia! To find another skystone!" I slapped my hands together in excitement. "I'll bring the dragons back to those damn hills, all right, if there are skystones there!"
"You see, Publius? Didn't I tell you you would adopt them?" I looked at her and knew that, even had I not loved her already, I would have fallen afresh in love with her then.
XVIII
The Villa Britannicus humbled me. I found myself facing a statement of wealth so sublime that I felt like a pauper again in spite of my hoard of gold and my successful weapons manufactory in Colchester. I had always known that the Britannicus family was a rich one, but the evidence that now confronted me in the size and the condition of the villa and its surroundings shouted of a wealth beyond human comprehension. On my first day there, after I had been shown to my quarters and had unpacked my few belongings, Luceiia took me in to the room she called her cubiculum, although she admitted it really belonged to her brother, and showed me a plan of the place, pointing out the various sections to me and explaining their several purposes, In plan, the house itself was an enormous "H" built on an east-west axis. The main family living quarters closed off the westernmost end of the "H" to form a quadrangle. All of the four buildings facing the enclosed courtyard of the quadrangle were domestic buildings, housing the villa's servants and domestic facilities such as baths, laundry, bakery, kitchens and the like. The main crossbar of the "H" was built with a portico that gave on to a second, outer courtyard at the east end. This was sheltered on three sides — by the "crossbar" itself, and by the north and south wings. These buildings housed stables, granaries, livestock barns, a spacious smithy with several forges, a carpentry shop with a barrelmaker's shop attached, a pottery and a tannery.
Luceiia took me on a tour of inspection. The entire villa was two-storeyed, and the walls surrounding the inner courtyard were of solid stone — huge granite pebbles, all smooth and rounded, bonded together by strong concrete. The extended wings flanking the outer courtyard were of timber framing and plaster mixed with broken flint.
The Britannicus family were justifiably proud of their villa. It had two completely separate sets of baths, one for the family itself and the other, a larger facility, for the servants and the tenants who farmed the surrounding land. Luceiia pointed out to me that all of the buildings flanking the inner courtyard were entered from the courtyard. This did not surprise me, and indeed seemed not worth mentioning, until she also pointed out that all the buildings flanking the outer yard opened into the fields surrounding the villa. Only four small doors permitted pedestrian access from these buildings to the outer courtyard. That did surprise me. She saw my surprise and smiled and told me to blame the anomaly of the outer courtyard on herself. When Caius had left for Africa, she had decided to beautify the place. She had transformed the courtyard, blocking up the entrances to all the buildings around it and opening new ones on the other side. Now the threshing floor, the entries to the cattle sheds, sheep pens and swine sties were hidden from the casual visitor. Having masked the front of the building, she had then proceeded with the construction of a great, sweeping arc of an entrance road leading to the main portico. She had seeded the entire yard with new grass and lavished attention on it, and when it had grown rich, she had planted formal gardens of flowers — roses, violets, pansies and poppies. The only remnants of the days before her changes were the twelve mighty trees that had always stood there: four oaks, three elms and five great copper beeches.
"Come, Publius, " she said after I had admired the scene. "You have some idea now of the layout of the place. Now we can look more closely. " That was when the humbling process began. I may have thought, as I listened to her talk about the plan of the villa, that I was getting some idea of what it was like, but I was wrong. The reality beggared description. The ground floor of the family quarters, for example, was palatial, and every room was differently floored. The floors in the main rooms were mosaic, in a multitude of colours, showing scenes of Greek myth and legend: I saw depictions of Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan, and Theseus and the Minotaur. The lesser rooms on that floor were merely tessellated, laid out in geometric shapes and patterns that dazzled the eyes with their brightness and colours.
The triclinium, the great dining room, held an open-sided arrangement of matched oaken dinin
g tables that would seat upwards of sixty guests in comfort, and the walls were panelled in sheets of lustrous green and yellow marble so highly polished that I could see myself reflected in them. Against the walls, ranked side by side, were deep-shelved cabinets — some open-fronted, some with doors — that held the family's wealth of plate and dinnerware: platters and bowls and serving dishes and knives and utensils of gold and silver and copper and tin and bronze; exquisite Samian pottery, richly glazed and decorated; cups and beakers and vases of polished glass; and two enormous drinking cups of aurochs horn, polished and worn, glossy with age and ornamented with mounts of finely crafted gold.
The family slept on the upper floor, which was reached by a double flight of spacious, marble steps. Up there, I found real cause for astonishment. The floors were all of wood, for one thing, but such wood as I had never seen before. I asked Luceiia about them and she told me they were of pine, imported to Britain by her great-grandfather years before, and planed and then polished to a deep, reflective glaze by more than a hundred years of care and cleaning.
The most amazing thing of all, however, was that each of the ten sleeping-chambers on that upper floor had a window, and was therefore filled with light. The windows were small, and covered with wooden shutters fitted with louvered slats that could be closed completely, or angled to permit light and air to enter. I had heard of such things, and had even seen a few, but I had never seen them used so lavishly before. Normal Roman sleeping chambers were precisely that: tiny, lightless cubicles containing a bed, and perhaps a table. Because of the profusion of light, however, each of the ten chambers was decorated in a different colour, the walls and draped windows and the carpets on the floors blending their hues to give each room a character quite different from any other. My own room, which was separated from Caius's by a short, lateral corridor with a window at the eastern end and a chamber door on each side, was decorated in pale gold, while his was a spacious chamber of cool greens. Luceiia's own chamber was white and silver, with pale blue carpets and window drapes, and a bed covering of blue and silver silk the value of which must have been incalculable, made as it was in the distant lands far beyond Constantinople to the east.
The temperature throughout the entire house was uniform, thanks to the heated air carried to the various rooms by the hypocausts, hot-air ducts fed by the furnace that burned constantly beneath the bath house and was refuelled twice each day by the household servants. Luceiia led me from the upper floor to the family bath house by means of a stairway that descended to the inner courtyard from the passageway that ran along the outside of the upper floor.
Once again I was impressed beyond my expectations. The family bath house lacked none of the facilities one would expect to find in a major public bathing house. There was a spacious undressing room, divided by rod-hung curtains for privacy, and lined with niches for holding clothing. Directly outside this room were three pool rooms laid out in sequence —
cold, tepid, and hot — and beyond those, closed off by heavy, waterproofed curtains, was the sudarium, or steam room, which held a number of stone plinths and was looked after by an attendant skilled in massage and depilation.
We did not linger in the bath house, but I asked her about the glazed tiles that lined the walls and the pools, and she told me that they, too, had been imported from beyond the seas.
It was a relief to emerge again into the scented coolness of the inner courtyard where, even this late in the year, the air was redolent of green and growing things. This inner courtyard was split into four quarters by intersecting pathways. The two plots closest to the living quarters were ornamental, lined with privet hedge and planted with a profusion of red poppies, some of which still bloomed. The far plots were given completely to vegetables and fruits. I could tell from the pride with which she described the plants that this garden was Luceiia's special concern. She pointed out two plum trees, a cherry tree and two apple trees, all pruned severely and healthy-looking.
At the intersection of the two pathways, she turned right and led me to the kitchens and the bakery, pointing out that most of the household servants lived above these places. Both facilities were enormous, spotlessly clean and well enough equipped to serve two hundred people on the shortest notice.
At the far end of this side of the courtyard, furthest from the furnaces that heated the house, Caius had placed the room in which he kept his wines. I felt my eyes grow large as Luceiia began to show me the treasures this room contained. It was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves, separated by walkways just wide enough to permit the installation and removal of the very largest of the amphorae, barrels, casks and jars of all shapes and sizes that lined the shelves. Each separate container was clearly labelled and numbered, and their contents ranged from the thick, rich, sweetened wines of Greece to the dark, red, tangy wine made from the grapes grown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. There were amphorae of the succulent wine of Aminea and a wide selection of the various wines of Gaul, including the light, sweet wine of the south that is neither red nor white but a mixture of both.
There was one whole section of shelves that held different wines, all in small jugs that a man could hoist easily to his mouth on a bent elbow, and one of these Luceiia broke open and passed to me. It was ambrosia! Cool and nectar-sweet, imported, she told me, from the lands of the Germanic tribes I had fought against myself, years before. Had I known they could produce wines as superb as this, I would have stayed there longer, non-combatant.
We crossed the courtyard again to the northern wall, me still carrying my open jug, and she showed me the laundries and the dry storage rooms that occupied that wing, as well as the cool room, again furthest from the furnaces. This was the only other room in the whole building that, like the wine room, had no hypocausts. It was separated from the rooms on either side of it by thick stone walls, plastered on the inside with thickly strawed mud and painted white. The floor, I noticed, was of concrete and was channelled for drainage. During the summer months, this room was packed with ice and salt and straw to keep it cool, and carcasses of oxen, sheep, pigs, deer and other game hung on iron hooks suspended from beams in the ceiling. There were no cobwebs in the corners, and no speck of dirt on the walls or on the floor.
By the time we had completed our tour of the entire villa, the day was almost gone, and I was speechless. We ended our tour in a large and spacious smithy, having been over every square foot of the Villa Britannicus, and I was looking around me at the empty forges and braziers and at the tools that hung ranged in neat rows everywhere I looked.
"Well?" Luceiia asked. It was the first word either of us had spoken in a long time. "What do you think?"
I scuffed my foot on the concrete floor. No grit. No ashes. I looked again at the brazier closest to me, and at the tongs and hammers that flanked it.
"Everything looks new. "
Luceiia's eyebrow went up and she laughed. "Everything in here is new, Publius. This is your personal place, Publius Varrus's smithy, planned by Caius and furnished and equipped by both of us in what seemed the vain hope that you might someday come here. We both agreed that we would hate you to be bored or purposeless under our roof. " I had already guessed as much. I turned towards her, positioning myself so that I could see her face clearly in the late-afternoon light.
"You really expected me to come? Why?"
She gave me the full benefit of her dazzling, dizzying smile. "Why not?
You are the closest friend my brother has. And he has hoped for a long time, ever since you left the army, that you would come to the west to share his dream with him some day. We both did, even though I did not know you. We hoped at least that if you did come, even to visit, this smithy would encourage you either to stay or to return often. " She held up her hand as I made to speak and I waited for her to finish what she had to say. Her expression became serious. "Publius, " she said, "I know you have made a life for yourself and built an enterprise in Camulodunum. "
"Colchester. "
I grinned.
She returned my grin. "If you must. Colchester. But Caius will be home soon and he will no longer be a soldier. His whole life will be different, and he has been planning it for years. It would make him very happy if he were to find you waiting here to greet him. God knows there's room enough here for all of us, but Caius has a special place for you in his plans, which you already know something of. Before too many days have passed, you will know more of them. "
I perched myself, smiling, on the edge of the brazier nearest me; she saw the look in my eyes and hurried on.
"In any event, whether you choose to stay or no, you will be going up into the hills to look for skystones. Am I not correct?" I nodded. "Well, then, " she continued, with an eagerness in her voice that surprised and touched me, "if you find any such stones, you will probably want to start smelting them immediately. And now you can. Here. " She looked around her, and suddenly she resembled a very young girl far more than a beautiful, ripe woman. "You may find that not everything you need is here. If we've overlooked anything important, we can acquire it easily in Aquae Sulis. "
I sighed and smiled again, shaking my head, and then moved to where a pile of rust-covered ingots had been stacked in a corner. Beside the stack was a large, lidded bin. I raised the lid and looked inside. The bin was full of charcoal. I tested a piece between my finger and thumb. It was high-quality charcoal. I looked at her again.
"Where did you and Caius find all this?"
She looked perplexed. "I had the smith from Quintus Varo's villa buy everything he could think of that you might need. Why? Has he done badly?"
I laughed in disbelief. "No, Luceiia, he has done superlatively well. This place is better designed and better equipped than my own smithy at home. I am just amazed, that's all. Amazed and grateful. This is a gesture worthy of an emperor — and an empress. "