The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  “That’s ridiculous. Did you try to find her?”

  “Of course I did, at first. But when it became clear that she had no wish to be found, that she had gone to great lengths to be unfindable, I…stopped.”

  “She hid from you? That is iniquitous.”

  “No, Alex, it’s not,” Cato said. “The fault was mine. Rhea might have been a good military wife, had she had a man who cherished her and stayed in one place, but she was ill suited to sharing the kind of life I live. She couldn’t handle the not-knowing that surrounds me and everything I do, all the secrecy and the clandestine shuffling and the constant mystery and absences and silences and lack of explanation. I had seen the warning signs and I should have heeded them, but I ignored them until it was too late.”

  “What warning signs?”

  “All of them. And though it seems the height of blind stupidity to me now, I ignored them because I didn’t know what they were. I was too deeply mired in the shit of my own life to be able to see the misery in hers. Rhea was deeply unhappy with our life, and afraid for mine all the time. Because of who we are and what we do, I was constantly away from home, always on duty, and always available to everyone for everything—except where those things applied to my family. And then I rode into a trap one day last August, chasing deserters up by the Northern Wall, and got myself skewered by a rusted spear. I should have died there, but Ludo and some others got me out and drove me to one of the mile castles on the Wall. Against all odds, they found a military surgeon there who knew what to do with me.”

  “He saved you, obviously.”

  “Aye, he did, but more by good fortune than good judgment, according to his own testimony. I lost consciousness for more than three weeks, stone dead to all appearances, and he fed me through tubes of sheep intestines—don’t ask me how. He told me afterwards how he did it, but I hardly understood a word he said. Anyway, by the time I got back to Eboracum to complete my recovery, I had lost about a quarter of my body weight and Rhea had been mourning me for nigh on two months.

  “When I arrived home she became hysterical, stunned that I was still alive in the first place and horrified at the condition I was in. She made me promise I would stay in garrison after that, and I half believed I would. But then I got fit again, and inevitably another crisis came up, and I went out to deal with it. And when I returned, she was gone, and had been gone for more than a week. I can’t blame her. Knowing what I did to her and the boy, for so long, I can’t find it in me to be angry with her. I truly hope they’re happier now, wherever they are.”

  “You’ve no idea at all?”

  “None.”

  “Your son, how old is he now?”

  “He was five in March.”

  “Nicodemo…An unusual name. One of your family names?”

  “No. It’s just pulled from the air. Rhea liked it. I don’t know where she heard it. It’s Nicodemus in Latin, but she preferred Nicodemo.”

  “And you haven’t tried to find them recently?”

  Cato shook his head. “Not really. I’ve put out word among some of the people I know that if anyone sees them they should let me know when and where, but I haven’t tried to hunt them down. And I’m at the stage now where it doesn’t hurt too badly if I don’t think about it too deeply.” He stood. “Can we go and join the others now?”

  Strabo nodded. “Of course. Forgive me if you think I pried too much.”

  “Nonsense. I thought no such thing. It’s simply—not easy to talk about. Let’s join the others and have that drink you earned with all the paperwork you finished.”

  FOUR

  “Well, gentlemen, if you are all agreed that we can do no more damage to this food, we can attack the business of the evening. What say you?”

  When no one objected, Strabo nodded to Yarro, and within moments an entire cadre of serving staff moved into the dining room and began to clear away the remains of the meal. The servants were all men, and no one there would have expected anything else, since this was a legionary headquarters. Some were permanently attached to headquarters staff as stewards in the quartermaster’s division; the others, all in light garrison uniform, were ordinary legionaries assigned to temporary kitchen duties. After they were gone, Yarro checked that the fire in the brazier was freshly fed, then bowed to the legate before leaving, closing the doors securely behind him.

  “What was that wine we drank with dinner?”

  It was Valerius who asked, and Strabo looked at him with his eyebrows arched high. “It was the same one we always drink with venison, as you know perfectly well,” he said. “One of the new reds, from southwestern Gaul. And I know that what you really wanted to ask was why didn’t we drink the wine you brought. And the answer to that, as you know equally well, is that your Falernian is simply too precious to waste with venison. So we will enjoy it all the more now.” He stood up and addressed the others. “While we are preparing the drinks, gentlemen, you may group the chairs around the fire. A semicircle, if you will, and not too close to the brazier. Leave room in front of all of us.”

  As the other three rose from the table and began to pull their heavy, high-backed table chairs into place in front of the leaping fire, Strabo and Valerius crossed to a tall cupboard against the wall, where Strabo retrieved a serving tray that held five large stemmed drinking cups of clear, precious, and practically flawless glass, while Valerius pulled out a rectangular tub of polished silver filled with fragments of chipped ice in which sat a tall silver ewer whose sides ran with condensation. Valerius set the ice-filled chest on the low sideboard beside the fire, while Strabo distributed the cups.

  Cato, settling into his chair in front of the fireplace, cleared his throat in anticipation, for this was something new to him. He had tasted Falernian wine from time to time, but never the very best of them. Falernian wines came exclusively from the slopes of Mount Falernus, in the district known as the Campania, surrounding Napoli, midway up the Italian boot. He knew now, thanks to Strabo, that the wines produced by the house of Valerius ranked among the finest of the Faustians, those superb wines grown in the prime vineyards that had once belonged to Faustus, the son of the dictator Sulla, who had been a contemporary of Julius Caesar. He knew, too, that the best vintages of all came from late-harvested grapes gathered—still frozen—after early frosts. The succulent wines that resulted were then cellared in clay amphorae for as long as twenty years, and commanded prices that none but the wealthiest could afford.

  Now Gaius Valerius bent towards him, extending a brimming cup of liquid the colour of dark honey. “Your health, Magister Cato,” the adjutant drawled, smiling. “But be careful. It can be lethal, and this is a fresh amphora, so none of us knows how potent it might be.”

  There was silence then for quite some time as all five men sipped appreciatively at what they all agreed to be the most wonderful wine they had ever tasted.

  Strabo eventually broke the mood. “So, gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve matters to discuss, the first of them being Cato’s tidings and the delivery he made to us tonight.” He turned to Cato. “It must be close to three hundred miles from Eboracum to here. You came all that way with a wagon full of coinage and no more than five men. I find my eyebrows twitching when I think of the dangers of such a long haul, with a such a valuable cargo. Those five men of yours must be highly qualified.”

  “They are. The best at what they do and the best of what I might expect of anyone who ever joined the legions. You know one of them, in fact. Ludo. You met him in Deva, when you first met Maria.”

  “Aye, mayhap I did, but as you say, that was the first time I ever laid eyes upon my wife. After that, my mind is blank. Awareness of your sister eclipsed all possibility of my noticing anything else, let alone remembering another man. So I’ll greet your man Ludo as an utter stranger, I’m afraid. Who are the others?”

  “Four friends of long standing—to one another as well as to me. Their names are Didymus and Thomas, and Stratus and Leon—”

 
; “Didymus and Thomas? That’s the same name, in different languages.”

  “Yes, Greek and Aramaic.” Cato turned his head slightly, to include the other three men. “Both names mean ‘twin,’ so that’s what we call them—the Twins. It helps that they’re practically identical. Stratus and Leon, on the other hand, couldn’t be less alike. Stratus is enormous, strong as a bear, and Leon is our thinker, as clever and intelligent as Stratus is strong. All four are very close-knit, and they are all lethally effective in everything they do.”

  “And what do they do? Normally, I mean.”

  That question came from Thaddeus Galban, and Cato looked at him, smiling very slightly. “They work for me,” he said, and young Galban blinked once and said nothing more.

  “They belong, then,” Strabo said, in a tone that was not quite a question.

  “Yes, they belong.” Cato kept his eyes on Galban and saw the brief confusion in the younger man’s eyes as he tried to understand what had been said. And that confusion showed him that the youthful secretary had not yet learned all of his legate’s secrets. A glance at Regulus Culver and Gaius Valerius confirmed what he had suspected there, too: Valerius also belonged. Culver, judging by his frown, did not.

  “Three shipments stolen, you said, from Londinium and Eboracum.” There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Alexander Strabo had absorbed everything Cato had said when he arrived, and had no need to hear it all again. “I presume the missing shipment destined for Lindum was the one from Eboracum. The two for Camulodunum and Aquae would have originated in Londinium. Do we have any idea who was behind the thefts?”

  “We know exactly who it was.” The statement was blunt. “It was the same crew of thieves we stopped last year, when they were raiding the grain trains south of Lindum. They’re still out there, but they’ve upgraded their operations—and their depredations. Last year the harvest was bad, so they stole grain. We intercepted them, killed some of them in skirmishes, hanged half a score of others, and thought we had put them out of operation. But we hadn’t. They simply refilled their ranks and changed direction. Now they’re stealing the coinage we use to pay our troops—gold, silver, and copper. One successful raid on a paymaster’s train might have been random chance. Two of them, though? And three stretches belief. We checked the chain of command in all three jurisdictions affected by the raids, and we’re confident we know who two of the three informants were—or are. Those two are from Camulodunum and Lindum, and in the time I’ve been on the road, we’ve probably identified the third source, in Londinium. All are senior officers, highly placed and privy to confidential information, including delivery schedules and routing plans for the paymasters’ shipments. And all of them, believe me, are destined for courts martial as soon as we have gathered sufficient proof to nail them to the crosses they deserve to hang on. We also recognized the style of the raids. These attacks were planned in detail.”

  “Planned by whom?” Regulus Culver was leaning forward, tensed like a hound on a leash.

  “We know the name of the principal operative, the man who organized and led the raids. His name is Appius Endor, but behind his back people call him the Basilisk. Have you heard of him?”

  “No,” Culver said.

  “I’ve never heard of him, either,” Galban said, “but I know what a basilisk is, I think. Isn’t it mythical? Some kind of reptile so hideous that its gaze can kill?”

  Cato nodded. “Something of that kind. Its stare is supposed to be lethal, even its breath. Not a pleasant creature to encounter in a dark place. But an appropriate name for a man like Endor. We are familiar with how he operates, and from that, and what we learned from the three raids, we were able to infer that he still works for the same people who employed him last year and the year before. We still don’t know who those people are, though, and that’s the sticking point. We could take him into custody at any time, depriving them of their main field commander, but that would only give us a short breathing space before they replaced him with someone new, someone unknown to us. We chose to retain the basilisk we know over the chimera we wouldn’t. So rather than arrest him, we watch him closely and constantly. The hope is that sooner or later he will lead us to his employers, or at least into some situation from which we’ll be able to learn, or to deduce, who is behind the whole thing.”

  “Pardon me,” Thaddeus Galban interjected, “but who are we? Do you mean the authorities? And when you say your men belong, what do they belong to? The imperial army?” His earnest young face was wrinkled from the intensity of his focus.

  Cato grinned at him and confused him further. “No,” he said. “And yes.” He then looked directly to Strabo. “I am presuming you’ve decided to raise these two. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. So now would be an appropriate time to do it, to put the pilus’s mind at ease and save young Galban from an apoplexy.” He saw his brother-in-law smile and nod, and he turned back to Galban, who had subsided into his chair, open-mouthed and wide-eyed. “Prepare for the next step in your progress, then,” he said. “You, too, Magister Culver. You should both refill your cups before anything else is said. And if Gaius Valerius has no objection, I will, too.”

  “Permit me,” the lanky adjutant said, rising lithely and bringing the ice-filled chest from the sideboard to place it on the floor between them and the fire. He then refilled their cups from the chilled ewer while the two outsiders sat looking from one to the other of their three companions in bewilderment.

  When they were settled again, Strabo rose to his feet. “A libation, my friends, to the Unconquered Sun.” He waited while the others rose to join him, their cup-bearing arms extended, and then they all bent forward slightly in unison and tipped their cups to allow a little of their wine to spill into the melting ice, in tribute to their military god, Mithras Sol Invictus, Mithras the Unconquered Sun. The salutary ritual completed, they resumed their seats, and Strabo took a token sip before starting to speak.

  “When we say we belong,” he began, “it means that we have advanced to the fourth level of initiation into the sacred mysteries of Mithras, an estate about which you two know nothing. You are both initiates of the third level, and until this moment you have supposed that there was no further to advance. Am I correct, or have you heard whispers to the contrary?”

  He scanned their faces as they gaped at him, and then he nodded in satisfaction. “Good. But there is life beyond the third level, and your oath of silence extends to embrace that knowledge henceforth. It is now time for you to advance to the fourth and join the fraternity we call the syndexioi—the brethren united by the handshake.”

  Strabo pointed his index finger at the space above the heads of the two initiates. “From the moment you enter that status,” he continued, “your lives will be forever altered, for the simple act of shaking hands with any man will enable you to know, merely from the grip exchanged, who belongs to our fraternity, who does not, and which level of initiation each man has attained. The lowest level will be the fourth, the highest the seventh, and each of those men will be bound under sacred oath to stand as your brother in time of greatest need.”

  He looked from one to the other of the two initiates. “Before I continue I must formally ask, as you are all aware from your previous initiations: is either one of you unable or unwilling to commit to proceeding from this point onward?”

  Culver moved his head briefly in a tight little shaking motion, frowning ferociously. Galban sat rapt and motionless.

  “So be it,” Strabo said. “I will decree the killing of a white bull within the week, and we will proceed with the ritual ceremonial meal one month from tonight.” He glanced sideways at Cato. “Unfortunately, Brother, you may not be here to attend our celebrations, but we have sufficient brethren in Isca to complete the consecration with ease.”

  Cato nodded in acknowledgment, and Strabo, once more the imperial legate rather than the friend, again addressed the two supplicants.

  “You have both eaten meals of the bull four times
, beginning with the least attractive part, the tail, which some initiates consider the tastiest and most delicious part of all—when properly prepared.” One corner of his mouth flickered. “And of course it is always most properly prepared for our first-level initiation, as spicy, thickened soup and succulent meat stew.

  “When you rose to the second level, you ate bull ribs, roasted over air-blown coals with thickened garum, onions, garlic, and salt. The third level, your finest thus far, brought you to a meal of the tenderest loin, to mark your graduation from the ranks of novices and signify your status as an entitled soldier and servant of the Unconquered Sun.” He sniffed. “For most men, that is enough. A man may live a long and honourable life of service, with distinction, as a third-level brother.”

  He sipped at his cup of Falernian and savoured it before he resumed. “For others, though,” he said, “and by that I mean for those qualified and prepared to work and sacrifice to earn the privilege, the third level is merely a beginning, and the sole way forward thereafter is by invitation.”

  He regarded the two initiates, whose eyes were locked on his, and sipped again from his cup, managing to appear both relaxed and magisterial at the same time. “That invitation, when it comes, is not extended lightly, nor is it tendered, ever, at the whim of one particular person. Each prospective candidate, without exception, is proposed and sponsored by a trio of current brethren, men who have observed him closely for a long time and who must concur upon nine out of ten points of referral. And then, after that proposal has been accepted, each candidate is watched even more carefully, in absolute secrecy, by other brethren for a probationary period of two years. The objective of that surveillance is, of course, to ensure that the nine points of assurance agreed upon by the nominating trio, which included fundamental attributes like honesty, loyalty, sincerity, probity, and truthfulness, were accurate and dependable. You two have now been under scrutiny for the requisite two years, and I am privileged to tell you that your elevation to the fourth level has been approved. I had intended to tell you so tonight anyway, but Brother Cato’s fortuitous arrival has made the occasion even more appropriate. You will have to undergo initiation, of course, but at this stage that is a formality. For all intents and purposes, you are now syndexioi, brethren of the handshake. And the fourth-level version of that handshake I will now teach to you.”