by Whyte, Jack
The towns of Britain had stone walls, backed by earthen ramps and fronted by deep, V-shaped ditches. Theodosius ordered these ditches filled, and then added exterior towers to the walls, towers constructed expressly to hold heavy artillery—catapults of varying sizes that could hurl projectiles ranging from deadly ballista bolts and javelins, to massive rocks and stones, and blazing containers of oil. That done, he dug new, deeper, U-shaped ditches, this time sited far enough away to stop an attacking force short of the town's walls, but within range of the artillery on the new towers.
His most important and immediate contribution to the welfare of the province, however, was an extensive refurbishment of Hadrian's Wall itself, including the regarrisoning of the forts and mile castles along its length.
These were sweeping changes, and they involved an intricate and convoluted redistribution of the military forces under his command. The remnants of our old cohort were split up and scattered among the new and reformed legions, and Caius Cornelius Britannicus was promoted to Legate, commanding one of these new units. He took me with him as his primus pilus, his chief centurion and second-in-command in all matters relating to the daily operations of the legion, as was his prerogative. Things were never the same after the Invasion, however. Britannicus had the reputation, but his new men didn't have the balls to be anything great, and we did not have the time to train them before going into action. And then, in the closing months of Theodosius's campaign, when we had the enemy well and truly on the run, heading north to the Wall again, we walked into that mountain trap and won ourselves a lengthy, if unwelcome, respite from war.
Mitros, personal physician to Britannicus and now, by association, to Varrus, began his daily arrangements to lengthen my life by deepening my misery. Britannicus was still asleep, and after the briefest glance at him Mitros ignored him, and me, as he went about his work. I watched him with a thin worm of fear churning in my gut. I was already accustomed to the procedure he was preparing for, but I knew I would never become inured to the pain involved, in spite of the wondrous extent of his healing powers.
Mitros poured white, crystalline powder from a phial into the pot already bubbling on his small brazier, and then removed the vessel from the coals almost immediately, pouring its contents into a shallow bowl to cool until I could drink it. The larger vessel on the big brazier contained a grey, viscous liquid that bubbled heavily, almost like the mud it resembled. Both mixtures, I knew, contained opiates that would dull my senses against the pain Mitros would shortly begin to inflict upon me. I would drink the mixture in the shallow bowl first, when it was cool enough. Even heavily flavoured as it was with fresh crushed mint, it tasted foul, but it was magical. Mitros had told me it was made from a substance rendered from the gum of poppies grown far to the east, beyond Byzantium. It conquered pain in proportion to its own potency. Each day Mitros made the mixture stronger, and each day my awareness of the pain diminished.
When the opiate had numbed me sufficiently, Mitros would undo my bandages and wash and clean the wounds that swept up into the centre of me, using hot water and astringent cleansers that I could not have tolerated without the assistance of the potion. Then, when he had finished, he would dress the wounds again, packing the inner bandages with an almost unbearably hot poultice of the foul-smelling, clay-like mixture from the big brazier. The poultice itself also held a painkiller, more powerful in its own way than the other, so that by the time the effects of the draught had worn off, the magic of the poultice had numbed my leg completely, leaving me able to sleep again until the following day.
Mitros tested the draught in the bowl with the knuckle of his little finger. It was evidently still too hot for me to drink. I swallowed a mouthful of saliva nervously, sniffed, and glanced towards Britannicus. He slept on, flat on his back, his great, hooked beak of a nose pointed to the roof of the tent. I remembered again his words to me on that first night we met, about having to decide what to do with me, and I grinned at the recollection. In the years that had elapsed since that night, Caius Britannicus had had more to concern himself with than what he would do with me. My grin grew wider, and I wondered what he might have done without me.
"Here, now we drink, and we grow well." Mitros was standing beside me, the bowl in his left hand as he reached with his right to support my head.
"Do we, by God? Well, Mitros, since we're doing it together, I've got an idea. Why don't you drink it today and I'll watch, the way you usually do?
That way, we share the pain and the pleasure."
"Not amusing. Come."
I obeyed him, quietly and meekly, in the absence of alternatives. The concoction tasted awful. I can still remember the acidic bitterness of it, decades later.
When the bowl was empty, Mitros returned my head to the pillow and wiped my brow with a damp cloth. "There, now. Soon you will be asleep."
And soon I would, but not immediately. Sleep drifted in very slowly after that draught, and sometimes it did not come at all; consciousness remained in a kind of dream state, where awareness still functioned but earthly problems like pain and discomfort disappeared completely. Mitros had returned to his braziers, and now he lifted the other pot away from the heat, using a stout, wooden handling device to distribute the weight of the heavy vessel. He carried it to the sturdy table at the foot of my bed and left it there before crossing to the door of the tent, where he signalled for two soldiers to come and remove the braziers. I watched all of this in a kind of daze, eventually realizing that everyone had left the room and that I was alone, except for Britannicus.
Cains Cornelius Britannicus was a true Cornelian, a direct descendant of the pure, patrician stock of the founding families of the Roman State. During those early days of confinement, practically strapped to his bed and unable to influence anyone to change anything, Britannicus talked, sometimes for hours and hours, about his life in Britain as a citizen, rather than as a soldier. I remember I found that surprising at first, primarily because I had known him until then only as the military Legate Britannicus, the taciturn, professional commander who normally kept his company and his opinions to himself. As time passed, however, I discovered that I barely knew him at all. Whatever intimacies he and I had shared as companions in arms had exposed only a few small facets of the man's fascinating character and personality to me. Now, as he talked and I listened, more and more of the man inside him began to emerge. A paternal ancestor — his great-great-grandfather, in fact — had won his cognomen, Britannicus, through his efforts on behalf of the province in the time of Hadrian, more than a hundred and fifty years earlier, and his whole family had come to think of Britain as home over the intervening generations, although their primary allegiance remained always to Rome. For my part, I had been born in Britain and had grown to manhood without ever being really aware of it. I never thought of it as being an important place; it was simply Britain, the place where I lived. It took a few years in Africa, followed by years of enthusiasm on the part of Britannicus, to show me what Britain really meant to me.
He talked at great length and with real affection about his family and about their home, a villa close to Aquae Sulis, the famous hot water spa in the south-west. I heard the pride in his voice when he spoke of his wife, Heraclita, whom he evidently worshipped and whose imperial Claudian blood was as ancient and noble as his own. He spoke proudly, too, of his first-born son, Picus, who, like Caius and all his forebears, would join the ranks of the legions when he reached sixteen. The boy was eight now, almost nine, so there was no rush to find a place for him in the imperial ranks. For the next five years at least, young Picus would remain at home with his younger siblings: a sister, Meleiia, who was seven years old and the favourite of her doting father, and four-year-old twin brothers Marcus and Paulus. He talked of a sister called Luceiia and a brother-in-law called Varo, who owned an estate beside the Britannicus lands in the west and who acted as caretaker cum estate manager to the family in Caius's absence. Someday, he swore, when his duties were ove
r and the Empire no longer required his services, he would return and assume stewardship of his own lands.
Early on in our association, Britannicus and I had discovered that we had both been born in Colchester, the oldest Roman settlement in Britain. His family had moved away early in his boyhood to live in the region south of Aquae Sulis, in the family villa, but he had always retained happy memories of Colchester. Traditionalist that he was, however, he always insisted on calling it by its original name of Camulodunum. Colchester, he maintained, was a bastard name, Celtic and Roman mixed, which stood only for 'the camp on the hill.' As a name, he said, it lacked character. In the course of one discussion it came out that his father had had a friend in Colchester who had been a smith, and owned his own forge. This man's name had been Varrus, too. Britannicus didn't connect the name with me, personally, because no Roman citizen of his connection would have willingly worked with his hands. When I told him that this Varrus had been my own grandfather, his eyes widened with surprise, and he had wanted to know how Varrus the Elder had come to pursue a life of manual labour.
The answer to that was short and simple, and I had no worries about telling him the story of my grandfather, who had in fact been Varrus the Younger, youngest son of a minor branch of the famed Varus family. Over the course of centuries, our branch of the family had acquired an extra "R" in the spelling of its name and had, in the same process, lost almost all of the wealth associated with the one ‘R’ Vari. My grandfather himself had been brought up by slaves, which was not unusual in Roman households, but had become fascinated as a young boy with the smithy attached to the house. Drawn to the atmosphere of smoke and heat and the clanging of the smith's hammer, he haunted the place. The smith, for his part, took a liking to the young nobleman and taught him as much as he could about the art of forging and working with metals. It was a love that was never to leave the boy, and eventually, when he left the army, he set up a smithy of his own.
At first it had been a hobby, but as the smithy began to take up more and more of the young man's time, his father had become increasingly displeased. Arguments developed into open rifts, and the younger Varrus finally left home to realize his dream of working with metal. He had a little money from the sale of his smithy, and he made his way to Britain, where he set up another and began making tools and weapons to supply the army of occupation. Because he was Roman and an aristocrat by birth, and because he was a veteran of the legions, and because he made the finest swords available, he was able to build up a thriving business. He married the daughter of a wealthy merchant, also of pure Roman birth, and produced one son who, in his turn, married yet another Roman and produced me. But my father was killed on campaign and my mother died of a fever the following year. From then on, my grandparents raised me, my grandfather completing the task alone after the death of his beloved wife. He died while I was stationed in Africa.
When I had finished my story, Britannicus lay looking at me for a few minutes before asking, "What are you going to do when you leave here, Varrus? Doesn't seem as though you'll be doing any more soldiering, thanks to that." He nodded towards my mauled leg.
I grinned at him. "Smithing, like my grandfather. I'm going back to Colchester to work the old forge. It's mine, now."
His patrician eyebrow arched in surprise. "Smithing? Isn't it a bit late in the day to be starting over? You're a soldier, Varrus. What in the name of all the ancient gods do you know about being a smith?" I smiled at him, anticipating the impression I was about to make. "I probably know more about it than a lot of so-called smiths who are doing well by supplying the armies today, Legate. The old man taught me all he knew. I was as keen, and as good a student, as he had been. By the time I was thirteen, I could run the whole smithy. By the time I was fourteen I was making swords for local officers."
"Good God, I don't believe it!" But he did, I could hear it in his voice.
"You mean to tell me you really are a smith? A worker in iron?"
I nodded slowly. "Yes, Legate. Believe it. I really am." I dropped my voice. "I even know the secret of white iron."
He raised his head from the pillow, trying to sit upright, "White iron? You mean the magical kind, the one men have lost the secret of making?
You joke with me."
I shook my head. "No, Legate, may I die right now, I tell you the truth. To some of us, that secret was never lost — to the majority of men, however, it has yet to be discovered. You've seen Theodosius's sword."
"What about it?"
"Were you impressed by it?"
"Of course! Weren't you? It is magnificent. If I were superstitious, I'd be inclined to think it was made by Vulcan himself. I have never seen anything like it. It shines, almost, in the dark. And those patterns on the blade! I think they're Egyptian. At least, that's what Theodosius himself thinks they are."
I stretched a kink from my back and stifled a belch; then, when I was sure he thought I had no more to say, I added, "They're British, General, not Egyptian. The patterns are Celtic, from the mountains. And the blade wasn't made by Vulcan, it was made by Varrus. My grandfather made that sword for my father when he entered the legions. He had not quite finished it when my father had to leave, and so he kept it for when he would come home on leave. He never did. He died in Iberia.
"I played with that sword as a boy. Then one day some Roman officers saw it and wanted to buy it from my grandfather. It wasn't for sale. A week later, our smithy was broken open and the sword has never been seen again, until I saw it on display as the property of Theodosius himself."
"Good God, Varrus! " Are you suggesting that Theodosius... ?"
"No, General, of course I'm not. God only knows how it came into his hands. It's probably priceless. It may quite possibly be the finest sword ever made. A lot of men would give anything to own such a unique weapon."
We lay there in silence for a while, each of us thinking about the beautiful sword. Britannicus broke in on my thoughts.
"What makes it so different, Varrus? What makes it so much harder and sharper and cleaner than ordinary iron? And so bright?" I thought about that one carefully before I answered him. "I don't know, General. I honestly don't know. I know how it was made. The old man taught me how to duplicate the process, and we made some fine blades of a light grey colour, but we were never able to duplicate that blinding brightness. My grandfather swore it was the skystone that made the difference."
"The what?"
"The skystone — a stone that fell from the sky." I smiled at the look on his face. "No, it's true. A shepherd who worked for one of my grandfather's friends heard a terrible noise in the air one night, followed by a crash that shook the earth. It almost frightened him to death and kept him huddled awake beneath his bed skins for hours. When he peeked out in the morning, he saw a great hole in the ground, close by his hut. At the bottom of the hole was a rock, almost buried in the ground. The shepherd tried to dig it out, but it was so heavy for its size that he could hardly move it. He was frightened to discover it was warm, too, so he left it where it was and reported it to his master, who examined it but thought little more about it.
"That afternoon, in the course of a conversation, he mentioned it to my grandfather, who sent my father to bring the rock to him. It was as heavy as iron. For some reason, he kept it for years. And then one night, intrigued by the weight of the thing, he decided to try to melt it down, to smelt it. It turned out not to be easy and he almost gave up the attempt, but just as he was about to abandon it, he noticed that it had developed a glazed texture, almost as though it had been starting to liquefy. So he kept trying. He had to use a far higher temperature than ever before to melt it down, whatever it was. Eventually he succeeded, and from it he finally forged the sword that now belongs to Theodosius, mixing some of the skystone metal with an equal amount of normal iron. When the blade was finished, he polished it with an abrasive stone and it developed the finish you find so admirable. Whatever that skystone was made of is the material that made the s
word so bright."
When he responded, his voice was admiring. "Bright! The thing is unnatural! Have there been any more of these fabulous skystones found? I find it amazing that no one else has ever talked of them."
I indicated my own frustration on that score with a quick shake of my head. "Again, I don't know. If that one hadn't fallen where and when it did, it might never have been found. Who's to know how many others there are like it?"
"Hmmm. I see what you mean. But do you really believe it fell from the sky, Varrus? That's impossible. I mean, I believe that it fell, but it must have fallen from somewhere!"
"I know it seems impossible. My grandfather felt the same way. But it was still warm when the man found it, hours after it had fallen, and it did contain something that isn't known to smiths anywhere. He finished up believing that it truly did fall from the sky."
His eyebrow shot up and he shook his head. "Astonishing! Have you ever tried looking for any more of these phenomena? These skystones? I mean, how do you know there aren't thousands of them just lying around waiting to be found?"
"Lying around where, General?" I grinned at him, shaking my head at the foolishness of the thought that occurred to me. "A man could spend a whole useless lifetime just walking around, looking at stones."
He sucked air through his teeth. "Yes. I suppose you're right. But if ever one could find such a stone again, could you make another sword like that one?"
I considered that. "Yes, I could. I know how he made it. I'm sure I could make another."
Britannicus lay silent, thinking. He might have wanted to say more, but Mitros came in to change our dressings and he made us both take the sleeping potions that he believed were the secret behind letting the body heal itself. We slept.