The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  He looked at her through narrowed eyes, then continued soberly. “That’s when I learned to stop dressing like a rich, spoiled brat and make myself inconspicuous. That’s when I learned to keep my mouth shut and to stifle the arrogant, spoiled-rich-brat pronouncements I’d been spouting since I was born. And I didn’t learn any of those lessons easily. I didn’t want to believe that my family had all been murdered. I tried to convince myself it had all been an awful accident. But that was folly. Anyway, Marius brought in tutors—special tutors, highly knowledgeable in their particular areas—who taught me how to live like prey, with one eye diligently on the watch for predators at all times. He most certainly saved my life. And eventually, when he had to return to his command, he had me brought here to Britain, because he thought no one would think to look for me here, so far away from home.”

  Lydia sat frowning. There were so many questions she wanted to ask.

  “Where had you been when your family…died? It sounds as though you had been away from home for a long time.”

  “I had been. I was visiting Florentia, a town in the north of Italy. I had gone there with Rhys Twohands on an expedition—it was a long journey, two weeks each way—to examine a new kind of iron ploughshare he had heard about.”

  “Who is this Rhys Twohands?”

  “He’s…he was my father’s head smith and my closest friend. He taught me all I know about smithing.”

  “Where is he now, your closest friend? Oh, I forgot—”

  “We buried him last week, here in Londinium.” He saw that the information had left her wondering at her own clumsiness, so he held up one hand. “Be at peace,” he said quietly. “You asked a perfectly innocent question. He died of injuries that he received weeks earlier, when we first landed in Britain.”

  “What happened to him?” Her question was barely audible.

  “An accident, a silly, pointless accident that should never have happened. We had reached port early that morning, after eight days of bad weather at sea that had damaged our ship. We had been travelling from Brigantium—that’s a seaport in northern Iberia. While we were waiting for our goods to be offloaded, Rhys decided to go looking for a market where he could find out the going price for his sucinum.”

  “Sucinum?”

  That won her a grin. “You would call it amber, I believe. That’s what Grandmother Alexia called it, and she had large quantities—necklaces, bracelets, beads, and brooches made from the stuff. It is precious and greatly sought after as jewellery by those who can afford such things. If it contains preserved insects, it’s even more valuable. Rhys had taken a substantial hoard of it in payment for a job of work he’d done while we were in Florentia. He discovered that the best place to sell his amber was probably Londinium, which pleased him immensely because that’s where we were heading. I remember how round our ship’s captain’s eyes grew when he saw how much of it Rhys had.

  “Anyway, he found a market as soon as we got here—probably this very one, now that I think of it—and sold about half of his bag of amber for more gold than he’d ever dreamed about. He arrived back at the ship just as the crew were unloading the heaviest of the cargo from the hold—ingots of iron that they had used for ballast. A pulley block snagged and a rope snapped and the whole pole derrick collapsed over the side. A flailing rope caught Rhys going up the gangplank. Whipped him off and threw him into the side of the ship, where he fell between it and the wharf, one arm hanging by a flap of skin. We pulled him out and bound up his wound and sent for his brother Dylan, who we knew lived nearby. Dylan took us back to his house, and I’ve been there ever since, but Rhys never recovered…Never showed any signs of wanting to. He was a smith, and he had lost an arm. So he simply…faded, day after day until he died, early last week.”

  Lydia reached out and laid her hand on his. “Forgive me,” she said. “I had no wish to bring you painful memories. I had no idea…”

  “How could you have? You didn’t know me until this morning.” He stopped, his brow wrinkling. “What’s wrong? You look troubled.”

  “No, merely curious. Why did Rhys come with you all the way to Britain? I know he was your friend, but he was much older than you are and you said—or you implied—that he had lived most of his life in Damatia, did you not?”

  “Aye, but Britain was his birthplace and he still had contact with his brother here, so when he heard I was coming he decided to come with me. His father had served with the Twentieth Legion at Deva, in Cambria, and he wed one of the local Cambrian women. Rhys learned the art of smithing as a boy in the military fortress at Deva, and he was an accomplished smith by the age of sixteen, when he joined the legions himself and was transferred to Londinium. He ended up in my father’s command sometime after that, as a smith. Years later, when my father was transferred back to Rome, he took Rhys with him, and he’s been with our family ever since. It was he who taught me how to light a charcoal fire and swing a hammer.”

  “I’m sure my father would understand why that would make you grateful,” she said. “I—I’m sorry to keep returning to what is surely a painful subject, but…Why did anyone suspect that murder had been done in so many deaths? It was a fire—did it not seem like a tragic accident?”

  “It did, at first,” he said. “But something seemed amiss from the start. For example, neither Marius nor I could remember a single occasion, be it on feast days or other special occasions, when every single person on that estate—family, household servitors and tenants, freedmen and slaves—had been inside the villa at the same time. It was a thing that simply never happened. That was nowhere near our largest estate, but it was large enough that there was always work of some description—great or small, but always urgent and pressing—being done somewhere.”

  “Nowhere near your largest estate? Your family owned others?”

  He gave a sheepish smile. “Several others. The grandest of them, on the Palatine Hill in Rome, was the ancestral family residence, but it was seldom used since my great-grandsire died. There was another on the island of Capri, and yet another in Egypt, on the banks of the Nile near the Pyramids. The villa where the deaths occurred was just a small place on the Adriatic shore, little more than a summer house, really. And yet we were expected to believe that on this single occasion, every single person on the estate had found reason to gather inside the villa at the same time. All their blackened bones were there, in the ashes of the fire…”

  “All of them? That seems unbeliev…” Her lips continued to move soundlessly.

  “It was unbelievable. And it still is. For another thing, there were too many ashes. Far too many for a villa built mostly from local stone. Stone doesn’t burn—or at least it doesn’t produce ashes. And yet the gutted walls were drifted with wood ashes. Marius decided—and I now agree with him—that everyone must have been killed wherever they were found on the estate, and their bodies taken to the villa afterwards and burned together in an enormous funereal pyre. It was an organized slaughter, we became convinced, carried out by a determined group sent to make sure no one escaped.”

  “I see…So how long have you been here?”

  “In Britain or in Londinium?” He tilted his head very slightly to one side. “Same answer, either way. We arrived by ship, four weeks ago this very day.”

  He smiled at her again, but there was a different glint in his eye this time, and he was shaking his head.

  “What are you smiling at?” she asked, curious to know how he could find a smile within him after what they had talked about.

  “At you,” he said.

  “And why? Do you find me amusing, Master Varrus?”

  “Not at all,” he protested. “I find you intriguing, and very enjoyably so.”

  “How, intriguing?”

  “Well, for one thing, no more than an hour ago you were fighting for your life, and mere moments later all the men who had hunted you were dead. You only met me today, and you are wearing a new garment to hide the fact that your own clothes were for
cibly torn from you, and yet here we are sitting together drinking ale and telling each other stories. You amaze me, Lydia. I only wonder what you will do now.”

  She blinked at him. “What do you mean, what will I do?”

  “Next, I meant. What will you do now you’re no longer in danger?” He cocked an eye at her. “Don’t you want to go home?”

  “I do,” she said, surprising herself with how oddly submissive she sounded. “I want to, but I’m afraid to face my father and brothers. They’ll be angry at me, and rightly so, for being stubborn and stupid and ignoring their warnings.”

  “About being alone in the marketplace.” It was not a question. “Many warnings?”

  His tone was sympathetic, and she nodded. “Incessant.”

  “But you’ll pay heed to them in future, will you not?”

  She nodded again.

  “Then they won’t stay angry for long,” he said gently. “They’ll be too grateful that you lived and learned a valuable lesson. I think I had better take you there. Is it far?”

  “No, it’s very close. It will take us less than a quarter of an hour.”

  “And how long has it been since you left?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “Did you go anywhere else between home and the marketplace after you left this morning?”

  “No. I came straight here.”

  “Then you probably haven’t been absent for overlong. Your family might not even have noticed that you’re missing yet. I watched you arrive and you weren’t here for long at all before—”

  She silenced him with an open hand as she sat up straighter and peered over his right shoulder, her eyes fixed on something behind him.

  “What is it?” He kept his eyes on her. “What are you looking at?”

  She gave a sharp, dismissive shake of her head, and he carefully turned around to scan the scene at his back. Lydia was vaguely aware that he was looking in the wrong place, searching for something much closer than the activity that had attracted her own eyes, but she was too caught up in the apprehension of what she was seeing to explain it to him.

  The watch patrol had come back into view, their circuit of the far side of the marketplace complete, and she had watched idly as their corporal, Nerva, flanked by his drummer and standard bearer, extended his arm in the signal to wheel right, then began to lead them up the gentle slope towards where she and Quintus Varrus were sitting, about sixty paces away.

  That much she had watched without interest. But then other movements had caught her eye, some distance along the intersecting road. In an instant she was on her feet, her heart racing as she rose on her toes, straining to see over the people in between, and knowing she was powerless to prevent what was about to happen.

  SEVEN

  Five men—four of them Lydia’s brothers, and she didn’t know the fifth—were running towards the marketplace junction, looking urgently around them in all directions as they approached. They were soot-grimed and wearing work clothes, and it was obvious that they had dropped everything they were doing and come running, and Lydia knew with a chill that they had come looking for her. Shamus, her youngest brother, was in the lead, closely followed by Callum, Declan, and Aidan. They were running directly towards the centre of the marketplace, threading their way impatiently between the stalls and around the growing knots of people ahead of them as they went, and already she could hear the sounds of consternation from the crowd at being jostled by the running men. She took a few steps forward and started to wave, opening her mouth to shout to them, but before she could, she saw Nerva throw up his arm in an abrupt signal to halt his men, and she knew he had recognized Shamus.

  “That man there, in front,” Nerva shouted. “Take him.”

  The ten men at his back changed formation quickly, the two spearmen moving immediately to either side to flank their eight club-carrying comrades, and their corporal drew his short sword, extending it towards the four Eirishmen. The dull, foot-and-a-half-long blade of his gladius glinted in the sunlight, and Lydia looked past it in horror at the deliberate way the soldiers were advancing to confront her brothers, how fluidly they moved forward, spreading apart and doubling their speed to attack gait as they went. Appalled by what she knew was about to happen, she bit down on her knuckle, too terrified even to try to scream a warning, though she knew she was too far away for her brothers to hear.

  She half-turned to look behind her, wildly hoping the man Varrus would assist, and she blinked in disbelief, for he was nowhere to be seen. In panic, she spun back towards her brothers.

  The soldiers were still trotting forward, their shields raised, and for a few agonized moments she was afraid that none of her brothers would even see the danger they were in, too caught up in their own activities. But then Aidan saw the patrolmen running to intercept them and he shouted a warning. She saw Shamus, still in the lead, recognize Nerva instantly.

  In one glance, it seemed to Lydia, Shamus understood what was happening. He stopped running immediately and spread his arms to stop his brothers, too, roaring at them in their native Eirish as he spun to face them.

  “Lads, for the love o’ God, wait! Wait!” Even from as far away as she was, his words came to her clearly. “This is the pig I told you about, the one I thrashed for hitting the lass in the tavern. It’s me he’s after, but they’ll kill us all if we try to fight them now, so leave me here, in God’s name, and go and find Lydia. I’ll be fine. I’ll give him no reason to harm me.”

  Declan snapped something in response, and though she could hear nothing of what he said, Lydia knew he was pointing out that Nerva had no need of any reason, for she would have argued the same.

  Shamus turned back towards the Romans, and all four brothers now stood silent and motionless, facing the men of the watch warily. They offered no provocation at all because they were fully aware that the soldiers were looking for any excuse to start swinging their clubs. Lydia perceived, on some level, that the fifth man who had been running with her brothers had vanished just as effectively as the Roman Varrus had, and the realization jarred her from her trance-like shock and sent her running towards the confrontation.

  “I told you to take him!” Nerva shouted. “The one in front. He’s the ringleader.”

  The two spearmen stepped forward, crouching low and extending the long, tapering points of their weapons to within inches of Shamus’s throat while two of their fellows slung their shields over their shoulders and advanced to seize his arms.

  She saw Aidan, beside Shamus, snarl and start to lunge forward, but he froze as the two spearmen instantly thrust the points of their long weapons at his brother’s neck. A bright splash of blood welled up under Shamus’s chin and spilled down his bare chest. It was little more than an emphatic threat, but she almost choked with fright as Shamus threw back his head and bent sharply backwards, freeing the point from his flesh but causing a much greater flow of blood.

  “No!”

  Her scream caught everyone’s attention, drawing not only her brothers’ eyes but Nerva’s, too. The corporal turned slowly to where she now stood less than twenty paces away. “I’m here. I’m safe,” she said in her own language, though none of the men could hear her choked whisper.

  “You! Woman! Come here. Who are you?” When Lydia ignored him, Nerva clicked his fingers and waved one of his men forward. “Bring her to me. Move!”

  He spoke to one of the others, half-turning his head. “And you, Tullus, get that red-headed whoreson on his knees, and if any of the others moves to stop you, kill them all.”

  The man called Tullus, standing behind and slightly to one side of the soldier holding Shamus’s left arm, stooped and swung his cudgel lengthwise, hard across the back of Shamus’s legs, expertly dropping him like a felled ox. Now Declan lunged forward, but he ran into a hard-swung club and was knocked sprawling, while the other two brothers, threatened by the ready spear points, were quickly pinioned and forced to their knees. As soon as all four were
immobilized, the soldiers bound their arms and hands tightly with leather thongs, then shackled their ankles with longer ties that would allow them to hobble but not to run. They were far from gentle with their prisoners, but none of them made any attempt to obey the order to kill them.

  “Now bring the woman here,” Nerva snarled, and when no one moved quickly enough his snarl turned into a bark. “Now, I said!”

  Lydia watched the soldier come to take her. She felt paralyzed and impotent, disabled by the plight that had so suddenly overtaken her brothers, for she could neither help them nor save herself. The man took hold of her by the arm, firmly but not unnecessarily so, then guided her to stand in front of Nerva. The look in his eyes as he scanned her from head to foot made her feel soiled and tawdry. She knew that the very richness of the magnificent green cloak that the young Roman had bought for her would normally have been sufficient to impress and abash the lout in front of her, but that effect had been nullified by her scream. Now she suspected the fellow thought she might have stolen the garment, or earned the price of it lying on her back. She straightened her spine and looked at him defiantly, expecting him to belittle her for the amusement of his men. All he did, though, was point with his thumb to the huddled prisoners.

  “These men are dead meat,” he said. “Thieves and troublemakers. But who are you?”

  She hesitated, though she could not have explained why.

  “You know them, don’t you? Who are they, and why do you care what happens to them?”

  Still she said nothing, and his eyes narrowed to slits.