The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  Culver and Galban rose to stand with him as he carefully taught the supplicants how to extend the proper grip and how to respond to it when they encountered it from someone else.

  Cato and Valerius watched critically, and when they were satisfied that the ritual had been properly learned, Cato proposed a toast to the two new members of their brotherhood. Afterwards, he looked again to Strabo, who said, “So be it. We have much yet to do tonight and I think that, for convenience and ease of conversation, we should move back to the table.” He set his cup down on the dining table and pulled his own chair back to where he had sat at dinner.

  * * *

  —

  When everyone was seated again around the table, Alexander Strabo held up his drinking cup. “My friends, we should give thanks, yet again, to Gaius Valerius for this excellent wine, but we have formal matters to attend to now, so I suggest we drink no more of it until we are done—other than what is already in our cups, I mean. Regulus, Thaddeus, we can talk openly now. Ask us anything you wish.”

  There was a pause before Galban raised a hand slightly and said, “I have a question.” He turned to Cato, who was sitting next to him. “Us, you said when you first spoke of belonging. I think I know what you meant now, but I’m not entirely sure. I suspect there is more than you were admitting. Am I correct?”

  Cato grinned at Strabo, who was sitting at the head of the table. “You’re right,” he said. “This lad cuts right to the centre of things. And yes, Thaddeus, you are correct. There is more, more than you can begin to imagine, and you’re going to have to absorb most of it quickly—abnormally quickly, I regret to say, because of circumstances. I’ll leave it to your legate to explain.”

  “From now on,” Strabo said, “you are going to be asked to accept many things on trust, with no more to rely on for backup than our assurances as your new brothers. We’re going to ask you to change your minds, sometimes even to change your thinking, radically, even to deny much that you have been taught to believe until now. It might shock you deeply at first. As Cato said, we would normally take the time to introduce you gradually to new ways of thinking and of perceiving things, but in this case we have no time. You have both known me and worked with me for years now, and you know Gaius Valerius as well as you do me. With him as my witness, then, I can do no more than ask you, as brothers in the Unconquered Sun, to trust me. Can you accept that?”

  Regulus Culver grinned. “Of course we accept it. Don’t we, Thaddeus? After all, what option do we have? If we don’t, you’ll kill us.” No one else smiled, and his face sobered instantly. “Pardon me,” he said. “Ill-timed humour. On my oath to Mithras, I swear loyalty.”

  “And I do, too,” Galban added.

  “So be it, then. Let’s get to work. Think about this, both of you: what would you identify as the single most important thing that Diocletian did during his reign? I need each of you to decide on one event, or one decision, that set him apart as an emperor.”

  Galban ventured, “His persecution of the Christians?” The very tone of his voice, though, tentative and timid, betrayed his lack of confidence, and no one chose to comment on his suggestion.

  Regulus Culver was much more positive. “Diocletian saved the godforsaken empire,” he said. “Couldn’t do anything more impressive than that.”

  “How so?” Strabo’s question was unemphatic.

  “How so?” Culver looked astonished, but then he frowned and looked about him, scowling. “Are you asking me that as a brother or as an imperial legate?”

  “A brother. Pretend I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. How did Diocletian save the empire? Convince me.”

  The primus pilus looked down at his own knees, his brow creased deeply. He sat motionless, and no one made any sound that might distract him. Eventually, he cleared his throat and sat up straight.

  “Well, he saved the armies, for one thing. When Diocletian came to power, the legions were on their last legs, because for years they hadn’t been supplied as they should have been. Whether that was through incompetent government or stupidity within the administration doesn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was what wasn’t happening, and what was happening was destroying the legions. Some units—hundreds of them, truth be told—had been left in the field, unsupported for years, abandoned to live or die on their own initiative. So they had taken to living off the land around them, plundering local farms and businesses to maintain some semblance of readiness. They had lived for too long with no regular supplies—no weapons, no food, and no pay—and many of them had disintegrated completely. Those still intact, and there were too few of those, couldn’t have lasted much longer without help.” He paused.

  “But it wasn’t that alone,” he continued. “It wasn’t just the military situation, though all the gods know there would be no Rome without the legions. When Diocletian seized the reins, the whole empire was tottering like a chariot on the edge of one wheel. It was a shit-clogged mess from end to end, a brimming latrine set to swallow up the whole world. And it had been that way, growing worse all the time, ever since Severus Alexander was murdered. That was seventy years ago. After that, everything went downhill like a runaway wagon. The power blocs in Rome, who really ran the empire, panicked after the murder and started raising taxes, pretending that there still was an emperor. But there wasn’t. The Praetorian Guard had made sure of that when they killed Alexander. He was the last of the Severans. Anyone with a brain in his head knew there was no heir.”

  Strabo was frowning, and he held up a hand. “I think I might have misunderstood you there. I thought I heard you speak of power blocs in Rome, who really ran the empire. Was that correct?”

  Culver gazed back at him and nodded slowly. “That’s what I said. Factions, organized clusters of self-fattening maggots, all serving the imperial court in one way or another, all advising the imperial deity, and all looking after their own interests, manipulating everything from behind the scenes. Court eunuchs, members of the imperial council, members of the imperial family, relatives of the imperial family, friends of relatives of the imperial family, army generals—too damn many of those—and entire legions of arrogant priests, smug, smirking clerks, and self-important underlings. They call themselves assemblies and councils and caucuses and guilds and colleges and they’re everywhere, and they all have their own agendas. And yet nothing in any of those agendas has much to do with anything beyond their own self-interest. Certainly it has nothing to do with the welfare of the empire or any of the common people in it.”

  “You astound me, Regulus.” Strabo was wide-eyed with admiration. “I had no idea you cared so deeply, or at all, about such matters.”

  “Don’t know as I care that deeply,” Culver said with a shrug. “It interests me, that’s all—the corruption of it all. I know about it mainly because my brother Faro loves to write about things like that. He’s a scholar and a scribe who has lived in Rome all his life, attached to the imperial staff, and he has always been intrigued by ambitious and ruthless people, ever since he was a lad and saw the mayor of our local town commit a murder and walk away unscathed simply because he was the mayor. From then on Faro was fascinated by the things people are willing to do in order to gain power, the things they’ll do to feed it and maintain it and hang on to it once they have achieved it. Most of all, though, he watches how they use their power. And every now and then he writes to me, telling me of his findings.” He shrugged again. “Over the years I’ve come to enjoy his musings, and even to think for myself, trying to see beyond the obvious things surrounding me. And when I do, I tend to get angry.”

  “Fascinating,” Strabo murmured. “Tell us more, if you will, about what Diocletian inherited.”

  Regulus Culver sniffed deeply, now at his ease. “Well, for one thing, the armies—those that remained operational, I mean—had gone mad. There was no line of succession after Severus. The dynasty was done, and there was no legitimate claimant to the throne. And the Praetorians had finally de
stroyed themselves in killing Severus. They had been loathed and distrusted for decades, but that crime wiped out the last vestiges of belief anyone might have had in their integrity.

  “In the old days, when a situation like that arose, a victorious army would propose one of its own as emperor, an imperator triumphant on the battlefield. But before Diocletian, with no successor in sight, every unit in the empire seemed to elect one of its own. Faro told me—and believe me, he knows—we had near fifty emperors proclaimed in different places throughout the empire in forty years, and fewer than ten of those survived for more than two years. It was insane.”

  “They weren’t all bad, those men,” Cato demurred.

  “No, they weren’t. A couple of decent men rose up during that time. Claudius the Second was the best of them. He might have made a real difference if he had lived, but the plague got him before he was two years in power, so we’ll never know. The truth, though, is that no one, anywhere, trusted anything anymore. People had lost faith. The government had devalued the coinage, almost completely cutting down the amounts of gold and silver in coins, so traders stopped trading because they couldn’t rely on being paid full value for their goods. When a merchant can’t trust that there’s gold in a gold coin, he can’t trust anything. That was an absolute catastrophe, and one we still haven’t heard the last of, you mark my words.”

  He turned to Thaddeus Galban, clearly believing that the secretary was too young to understand the gravity of what he was being told. “Before all that trouble started,” he explained, “a single gold aureus weighed one fiftieth of a gold pound—a solid, measurable truth against which all the lesser coins, from a silver denarius to a copper as, were valued. And there were supposedly a hundred denarii to the aureus. Supposedly, I say, because five hundred to one wasn’t uncommon in areas where the market demanded that. As for sesterces, at supposedly one hundred to the denarius, the response to that would have been a loud laugh, because they were really trading at something like three hundred to the denarius, so the real value was close to nil. Before Diocletian came along, there was barely any silver at all in a denarius, and people refused to use them, so some dimwit in Rome came up with the idea of a double denarius, and they made it out of some new amalgam of rubbish that was supposed to be a new and precious metal, half silver and half gold. What was it called?” He looked at Cato but provided his own answer. “Antoninianus, that was it. A very fine-sounding name for shit. Cities all over the empire were setting up their own mints and stamping out their own coins and they were all rubbish, so thoroughly debased and devalued that no one knew what anything was worth in real terms, so no one would touch money. People started bartering again, staying close to home and trading locally with people they knew. They stopped travelling because it wasn’t worth the time and effort when all they were likely to find on their journeys was grief.”

  “Diocletian did stop the damage, though.” This was Valerius. “He issued the new gold coin, the solidus, to regain that lost confidence.”

  “Regain, my arse,” Culver said scathingly. “There was nothing left to regain by then, even at one thousand denarii to the new solidus, and it wasn’t Diocletian’s fault. Introducing the solidus was a fine effort, but it was much too little, far too late. There are folk out there today who have never heard of a gold solidus, let alone seen one, and the things have been in existence for more than ten years by now. But they were minted in Rome. And for the most part, they’re still in Rome. Do you believe there is a single farmer in Gaul who is going to feel better about feeding his family because he knows gold coins are being used in Rome?” He shook his head. “That is never going to affect anything in his life, and your Gaulish farmer was well aware of that long before Diocletian ever thought about being emperor.”

  He stopped, scowling angrily, then shook his head for emphasis. “No, by the time Diocletian came along the empire was a mess from one end to the other, and barbarian invaders were howling on all sides—prancing, godless creatures from the farthest depths of the world outside the empire’s borders, cursed Persians in the east, slant-eyed Huns on the northern banks of the Danube, and whole federations of bare-arsed barbarian tribes in the northwest, along the Rhine.” He shook his head again. “I’m amazed that he took on the job at all. I wouldn’t have, I know that. Not for five imperial crowns. But he could see what the problem was, and he moved to solve it instantly.” He stopped abruptly. “Do any of you know what that problem really was?”

  “Of course,” Strabo said. “The empire was too big for any man to rule alone.”

  “Absolutely correct. Too big and too deeply damned by uncaring gods. And why? Because for ages the emperors hadn’t really been emperors at all. They’d abdicated their power soon after the rule of the original Caesars, ages earlier, handing the running of the entire thing over to councils and caucuses and bureaucrats in return for the privilege of being left alone to live a quiet life in privacy. And that’s what I was talking about when I spoke of power blocs. It’s hard to accept, but until Diocletian started kicking arses, there hadn’t been a real emperor since before Septimius Severus founded his dynasty more than a hundred years earlier. In all that time the empire had been run by functionaries, all of them hiding behind the image of whatever ‘divine’ emperor was in power.” He stopped suddenly, as if aware that he had been speaking treason. “Well, you asked me what I thought, and I told you.”

  Strabo was looking from one to the other of the men sitting with him, his eyebrow quirked high. He looked at Thaddeus Galban last. “Interesting viewpoint, don’t you think? Do you agree with it?”

  “I do.” There was no hesitation. “I agree with the primus completely. I had not thought about it until he spoke of it, but as soon as he did, I knew he was right. And the more he said, the more I agreed with him.” He sipped at his wine, then asked Strabo, “What answer were you hoping for?”

  “Oh, the first part, about saving the armies. But Regulus kicked that aside as being unimportant in the greater scheme of things.”

  Galban’s eyes narrowed. “No, sir,” he said slowly. “The primus said nothing about its being unimportant. He merely defined it as one of a mixture of ills. But I suspect that until he did so, you thought that saving the armies was the most important part of all. Why?”

  “Why?” Strabo rested his chin on the ends of his steepled fingers. “I suppose because I saw it as the reason we five are here together.” He hesitated. “The ‘us’ you asked about earlier.”

  “Forgive me, sir,” Galban said, frowning, “but I don’t follow you.”

  “Nor should you, because I’m making no sense—at least not yet. Diocletian did save the legions, because from the moment he assumed power he made it his priority to see that they were all supplied. He tolerated no sloth. He insisted that records be kept to ensure that materials were delivered on time and as ordered, and he would accept no excuses for poor performance. Diocletian had absolutely no patience for half measures. As emperor, he was commander-in-chief, and as commander-in-chief he made sure that every man under his command had appropriate clothing, armour, weapons, food, and everything else required to do what was demanded of him—which was to protect the empire.

  “That was an enormous undertaking, and it was not achieved overnight, but it was achieved. From among the legions under his own direct command he conscripted a corps of loyal, trusted young officers—young and loyal being the important words there—and charged them with the duty of making his vision a reality. He gave them the power and authority to ensure that whatever needed to be done was done properly, and that people at every level of responsibility were held accountable for the performance of their duties.”

  Regulus spoke up then. “I remember that. It was just before I joined the ranks myself. I’ve been in for twenty-five years now, and he’d been emperor for about three years before I joined up.” He grunted a sound that might have been a stifled laugh. “I remember how excited everyone was in my first camp, because they had just
been paid—really paid, I mean, with hard money in their hands—for the first time in ages. And a new train of wagons had come in with weaponry only the month before—new spears and swords and factory-made shields blazoned with the legion’s crests and colours. You’re right, Legate. It gave all the legions a new grasp on life and gave us back our pride. In those days we thought him a miracle worker.”

  “He was,” Strabo said. “Diocletian had a miraculous ability to pick men for their talents, to set them challenging tasks, and then to leave them to get on with what he asked of them. Very few men have that kind of ability, that kind of confidence. But it inspires insane levels of loyalty and encourages ordinary men to perform extraordinary feats that they wouldn’t normally think of tackling. Those young officers he charged with supplying the legions—and my own father was one of them—performed prodigiously, and the most amazing aspect of their achievements was that few of them had any experience doing the kinds of things he asked of them. But they learned how to do them better, and how to speed things up, and they perfected a system of logistics, a method of connecting all the armies throughout the whole empire, that hadn’t existed ten or twenty years earlier.

  “And then they learned something else. About something that, perhaps foolishly, they hadn’t expected to find. Human nature at work.”

  Galban absently picked up his glass cup and had raised it to his lips before he saw that it was empty. He set it down distractedly and said, “Forgive me for being dense, sir, but I still don’t know what you are talking about.”