The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  Quintus struggled to imagine the sheer, awe-inspiring scope of what his grandfather was describing. He could see part of it, each straw a tree, an entire forest levelled by the fury of whatever had happened, but his mind was incapable of envisioning the scale of such destruction, let alone the force that would be required to generate such havoc. When he looked out again into the dining room, he was astonished to see that the adults were no less incredulous than he was. They stared at the old man, uncomprehending.

  It was Marius who asked the obvious question. “What was the black abyss, Father?”

  Titanius Varrus looked again into the distance. “It was an enormous hole, obviously—incredibly long and wide and seemingly bottomless, and it had swallowed Provo’s cohorts.”

  “All of them, a thousand fighting men? Surely not.”

  Quintus waited for his grandfather to respond angrily, as he invariably did upon having his words questioned, but the paterfamilias merely shook his head. “None survived that I ever saw. They were swallowed up and lost. We thought to go and look for them, but it was impossible even to approach the area.”

  “So you merely left them there, abandoned them?” Quintus’s father asked, and the boy saw confusion stamped clearly on his face.

  Once again the old man showed no sign of resentment at being questioned. He merely straightened up slightly and turned to look directly at his eldest son. “Have you ever seen a forest of evergreens?” he asked.

  “Yes, in Germania, along the Rhine. They stretch for hundreds of miles.”

  “Good. And have you ever seen the snow cascades that fall from the mountainsides in northern countries during the winter months?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen those, too, also in Germania.”

  “And have you ever stopped at the base of one of those cascades the following spring or summer, to take note of what is left behind after the snow has melted?”

  Marcus shook his head.

  “Not surprising. But I have. We lost an entire maniple of infantry one year, a hundred and twenty men plus their officers, during a storm in an Alpine pass in Cisalpine Gaul, and we went looking for their corpses when the snow melted that summer. We found some of their remains, including their broken unit standard, under a steep, overhanging slope. They had been wiped out by one of those cascades.” He looked around at the others. “People think snow is harmless—they think of it as lethally cold, but not lethally heavy. When one of those snow slides comes down a mountainside, though, it brings everything with it. It strips the mountain face of trees and soil and loose boulders, mixing them all together so that anything in front of the falling mass is instantly destroyed. And when the snow melts away, what remains behind is a solid mass of shattered, tangled trees—hundreds, sometimes thousands, of trees, every tree that had been in the path of that cascade.”

  He turned again to his son Marcus. “I have one more question about forests. Have you ever seen an entire forest of evergreens—an entire forest, miles in extent in all directions—picked up bodily, torn out of the ground that had nurtured it, and then mixed—earth and trees and water and bedrock all churned together like the makings of a dried fruit cake—and thrown back down into the hole that had been scooped beneath it by the force that tore it apart?”

  “Of course not.” This time Marcus’s words were barely audible as he began to grasp what his father was describing.

  “No, of course not,” Titanius said. “Well, again, I have. I’m sure you’ve watched our brick makers at work, mixing straw with mud and pebbles? Try, then, if you will, to imagine the same mixture made with mud and fully grown trees and boulders. Then try further to imagine how you would approach the edges of such a morass when the entire area for miles around the hole is ringed with flattened trees, all pointing away from the central hole with their tops towards you, but flat on the ground. Fallen in rows and layered waves like wheat stalks severed by a reaper’s scythe, so that they form a solid, endless, impenetrable wall of compressed branches. You cannot walk between them or among them but must fight your way for every foot of headway you achieve.”

  “I—” But Marcus Varrus could say no more. His father’s graphic description had brought home the enormity of the cataclysm that had engulfed the men in Dacia.

  Marius spoke into the silence. “The thunderbolt, Father. Was it a fireball?”

  Every head in the room swivelled from him to his father.

  “A ball of fire. That’s what I saw. A ball of fire big enough to destroy the world. It set the earth on fire when it landed—that’s what the stink was. It was the stench of burning trees and mud and molten rock.”

  “I think I might have heard of such a thing.” Marius sat up a little straighter. “I remember hearing rumours soon after I joined up, about a sighting that had happened years earlier, in the Pontus Euxinus—the Black Sea, as the people up there call it.”

  Uncle Marius was a naval officer, the first of the Varrus name to serve in such a capacity, and Quintus was proud of him for having achieved the rank of navarch, commander of a ten-ship squadron. The Varrus clan, though, was a military one, with a distinguished record of service that stretched unbroken all the way back to the days of Octavian, the first Caesar Augustus. No Varrus before Marius had ever served at sea, and the other men in the family looked down on him, considering the navy a poor choice. This made Quintus love him even more, perhaps in part because he himself had an infirmity in his leg which, although it did not much trouble him, would forever rule out a glorious military career.

  “According to the tale, one of our squadrons had been on patrol in the waters off Moesia—not far from Dacia, now I think on it—and witnessed a thing similar to what you describe: a massive ball of fire that roared across the sky with a great, soul-shaking noise and fell into the sea, below the horizon, west of where they were.”

  Titanius was wide-eyed. “And did they report it to the authorities in the region?”

  Marius shrugged, smiling. “What authorities, Father? From what I heard, this must have been at the time you yourself were in Dacia, around 270. The ships there were the only authority in the region.”

  Grandfather Titanius’s face filled with wonder. “That must…it must have been the same thunderbolt. It must have been. Such things are unheard of. And they made no report of it at all?” He frowned. “I find that difficult to credit.”

  “Why so? There was nothing to report, other than the fact that the event occurred, and even then, few people who had not seen it would have believed it, as you have said yourself. The fireball supposedly landed in the sea, where it exploded, sending up vast clouds of smoke and steam, and vanished. The only sign remaining of the impact after that was a succession of enormous, swift-moving waves that almost capsized our ships. And so the story died away to live on as mere rumour—another old sailors’ tale of strange doings upon the face of the deep. But all those witnesses were aboard a ship, and not anywhere near being close to where it landed. The impact occurred beyond the horizon, so they would naturally have assumed it landed in the sea.” He paused. “Hearing what you are saying now, though, it occurs to me that if this thing, this fireball, was as huge as you say it was, it could have landed countless miles away inland, far beyond the sea. What they believed to be steam might well have been smoke. And so I believe you are correct. That event and your friend Provo’s disaster must have been one and the same…But what about your incident? Did you report it?”

  Titanius shook his head. “No. I did not. Or, not really. A thunderbolt fell from the heavens and landed on a military camp, destroying a thousand men? No one would believe that. And we would probably have been charged with dereliction of duty for losing a full thousand men in an unrecorded battle. I did submit a report that we experienced a volcanic eruption among the Carpathian mountains, with heavy loss of men. As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. We finished our campaign, inauspiciously with such heavy losses, and were eventually withdrawn when the Empire abandoned Dacia.”

 
; “But what about your blind and deafened men?” Marcus asked him. “Did no one in authority ever wonder about the sheer number of those unusual casualties?”

  His father nodded. “Few of those survivors ever made it out of Dacia. The place was treacherous enough for normal, healthy legionaries. For maimed and disabled men the difficulties were far greater, and the mortality rate among the blind and deaf men was staggering. More than two years passed before we won home to civilization, and by that time those who survived believed they had been caught up in a violent volcanic eruption. To us all, it was the only credible reason for what had happened.”

  Titanius Varrus looked down at his hands, then up at his son. “I have talked more about it here at this table than I have in all the years since it occurred.”

  Marcus nodded. “Well, it makes a fascinating story, Father, but what does it have to do with Maris, or with the Christian god? I don’t want to belabour this, but this would all have happened years before she was even born.”

  Titanius smiled at his son, a genuine smile that astonished his grandson watching from across the room. “You missed what I was trying to tell you, then,” the old man said. “The tale has nothing to do with Maris. Yet it has everything to do with what people think and believe, and with how they behave because of that. And it has much to do with what makes me so angry about these Christians and their ways.”

  Marcus glanced from his father to his wife and back again. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The older man sighed. “I know you don’t. You never have. But then, you have never been required to understand, have you? Your duties and your loyalties all lie with Constantine, and on his behalf you are much involved with the Christian leadership. I’ve been where you are now, serving my own emperor in my own day, but I confess I am unaware of what, precisely, you do on Constantine’s behalf when you meet with these Christian leaders—which you seem to do far too often for my liking. So tell me, if you can, what do you do—what do you discuss—when you sit down with those people?”

  “We talk,” Marcus Varrus said. “That’s all we do. I explain the Emperor’s requirements to them, and then they discuss those among themselves and put forward suggestions of their own, which I, in turn, deliver back to Constantine.”

  “Does Constantine ever meet with them himself?”

  “Occasionally. He prefers to have them aware that as Emperor he has more emphatic priorities.” He paused, then added, “The Emperor has an agenda for dealing with the Christians, to which he adheres rigidly. He has no desire to be perceived either as being overeager to placate them or too easily accessible to them. As well, he must bear in mind at all times the jaundiced eyes of the College of Pontiffs constantly overlooking everything he does, and the jealous and zealous glares of the imperial ministers, who perceive their own first duty to be the preservation of the empire and the status quo. So he proceeds with great caution in all his dealings with Christians, never forgetting that their very existence threatens the empire.”

  “Aha! So he is aware of the danger they present. That, at least, is encouraging.”

  “Father Titanius, forgive me, but I really must protest.” Quintus’s mother sounded timid. “In what way could the Christian Church possibly threaten the empire?”

  The old man smiled indulgently. “By overthrowing it, child.” He paused for a beat, waiting for that to register. “I am not saying that your fellow Jesus-worshippers will physically pull the empire down in ruins. What I mean is that their creed itself undermines, and will eventually destroy, the very fabric of our imperial society. I can see you think the idea mad. Think about it, Maris. Christians believe there is but one all-powerful, all-knowing god and that all other gods are false, created by man for man’s own ends. They believe they have personal, inner access to their god, and that their god is the ultimate supreme being, outranking—and therefore invalidating—any earthly emperor. There is an insidious revolutionary aspect to the Christian way of life that is unconscionable to those of us who take pride in our history and in our civilized, Roman way of doing things. They believe that the sole reason for their existence here is to prepare to be resurrected into the next life in an idyllic place called Heaven. So if the state decides to kill them as a punishment, they will be eternally grateful. Christians are impossible to punish, and therefore ungovernable. If they ever become strong enough to enforce that belief, they will destroy Rome’s pantheon in the blink of an eye, and with it all the priests and priestesses who serve its gods. That, in itself, is cause for bloody, violent revolution, because the priests will not go quietly into oblivion.”

  He dipped his head to one side and spread his arms, shrugging his shoulders expressively. “No matter how you examine it, my dear Maris—if, that is, you look at it with any logic at all—the Roman state and the Christians’ church cannot long coexist.”

  He turned back to address his elder son again. “I have no doubt this is familiar to you. It probably guides your deliberations with these bishops, and that must give you a degree of familiarity with their beliefs. So you must know that all those beliefs are predicated upon their single god being a god of mercy and goodwill, of humility and simple fellowship, undying forgiveness and infinite tolerance. I find that impossible to stomach. To me, and to people like me, the mere notion of such syrupy, limitless, mind-numbing benevolence is inconceivable. It flies in the face of the nature of humanity. Constant cloying, incessant, unrelieved sweetness of the kind those people preach has to become toxic at some point.”

  He saw that his son and his daughter-in-law were both preparing to rebut what he had said and he forestalled them with a swift slash of his hand. “Wait! Allow me to finish, if you will.” He continued, speaking directly to Marcus. “Your duty to Constantine led to your dealings with these Christian priests. You had no choice in the matter, and that is important to bear in mind. But priests are priests, Marcus, whether they profess to serve the ancient Roman gods or those of Greece, or even Baal of Babylon. And they all live with their hands extended, expecting the world to keep them in food and comfort in return for little in the way of work and less in the matter of substance.

  “When I was your age, my duty and my loyalty were owned by Diocletian and I served him willingly—as loyally and faithfully as you do Constantine. He was a fine man, my friend Diocles—one of the finest men I ever knew, though I fear history will not be kind to him. The Christian priests condemn him now as a persecutor and blame him for the deaths of thousands of their followers during the purges that led to his abdication. But that abdication was voluntary, and the worst excesses of the anti-Christian campaign continued for seven years after Diocletian stepped down from the imperial throne. Galerius and Maximinus, lesser emperors in every sense, were the perpetrators there, and it was Galerius, damn his black heart, who first talked Diocletian into launching a campaign to protect the ancient gods of Rome and the civil order they represented. Diocletian allowed himself to be persuaded to take a stand in defence of the state religions, and from that point on Galerius took over, because Diocletian, as always, was too busy tending to the empire and its affairs to have time to be distracted by the self-serving squabblings of a petty religious sect. It was Galerius who pressed the persecutions, but since Diocletian was emperor of Rome, they laid the blame for everything squarely on his head.” Quintus could hear the disgust in his voice. “That is all I want to say,” he said. “On that topic, at least.”

  “I still don’t see what you are driving at,” Marcus Varrus said.

  “Fundamentals,” Titanius replied, rising from his chair. “I’m talking about fundamentals. The fundamental teachings of the Christians are based upon the belief that their god—the sole and only god—is a being of infinite goodwill, incapable of pettiness or violence, intolerance or injustice. If that is incontrovertibly so, as they insist, then which god hurled down the thunderbolt that destroyed Provo’s cohorts and ravaged an entire countryside for miles around? Answer me that!”

 
ONE

  The third and last wagon lumbered by slowly, the noise of its iron-clad wheels lost in the fury of the downpour, swallowed by the hissing roar of rushing, falling, wind-blown water. As it passed him, the man crouching in the brush-filled roadside ditch straightened up slowly, bracing himself with one bent leg against the force of the torrent that battered at his legs. He watched until the wagon passed out of sight downhill and around the bend to his right, following the cobbled road that hugged the steep hillside, and then he pulled the sodden hood of his cloak more firmly over his head and moved quickly, making his way down the treacherous slope to his left, to where five other men waited for him.

  The three wagons, confined by near-vertical slopes on either side, would follow a long, downwards loop to reach the same point, and when they reached it, every one of the six men aboard them would die, killed before they were even aware that they were being attacked.

  The heavy rain would help in that, the watcher thought as he swung himself down the breakneck hillside, lurching from tree to tree and grabbing at low-hanging branches to stop himself from falling. He could not remember ever having seen a storm as savagely violent as the one raging now, and though it was damnably inconvenient, it also gave him and his men an advantage over the poor fools stuck in the wagons. They, because of the darkness of the tree-shrouded road, the late-afternoon storm, and the overwhelming roar of the pounding rain, could neither see nor hear what was happening beyond the ends of their noses. When they reached the end of the steep downslope they would find a fallen tree blocking the road, and when they climbed down to move it aside they would die, probably without ever seeing the men who would cut them down with javelins from among the trees. It would be quick, and he and his people would be miles away long before anyone found the bodies.

  There had only been two wagons when he and his men had stopped to water their horses around noon, at the mansio roadhouse near the junction of the roads leading from Lindinis in the north and Durnovaria in the east. He had noticed them when he arrived and sent one of his men to walk by casually and try to see what was in them. The only thing visible had been a heavy, iron-bound chest, carelessly concealed beneath a heavy, pitch-covered cloth, but that had been enough. The wagoners, oblivious to any danger, had been sitting at a table in front of the main entrance to the mansio, feeding on whatever the place offered for sale. There were four of them, dressed in plain, homespun cloth tunics and hooded cloaks; ordinary, unimpressive men who looked as though they would not know one end of a sword from the other. The watchers took note and smiled knowingly at one another. They waited until they saw the wagons take the south road, and once they were sure of their prey’s destination there was no question about where they would lie in wait for them. The town of Isca, the sole place where the wagoners and their cargo could be headed, lay slightly more than thirty miles to the southwest, and the watchers knew the exact spot on that road most suited for robberies and assaults on unsuspecting passersby.