The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  The two men retraced their steps until they reached the entrance, where the Roman stopped and stepped back, tilting his head up towards the tiled roof of the gate tower. As he did so a gust of wind tugged at his hair and brought a familiar and welcome odour to his nostrils. “Charcoal smoke,” he said. “The hot-iron smell of a working smithy. Not another smell like it in the world.”

  Shamus had turned to look at him. “You know it?”

  “I ought to—I’ve lived with it for long enough. How old are you?”

  “Almost seventeen.”

  “And I’m almost eighteen, so I probably know it better than you do.”

  Shamus sniffed. “Nah,” he said. “I was born smelling it.”

  Varrus grinned and dipped his head. “I can’t argue with that,” he said.

  He looked up again at the roofed tower in front of him, then glanced the length of it from side to side. “Courtyard house,” he said. “Roman built, by the looks of it. But it’s different. The house is on one side instead of in the middle.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that,” Shamus said. “Before my time. But there is a courtyard, though it’s more storage and work space now.”

  Varrus realized that the hostility and suspicion had vanished from the young smith’s voice, and in consequence his speech sounded more fluid, more musical. Varrus assumed that the lilting cadence he heard now must be the natural rhythm and sound of Shamus’s Eirish parentage.

  Shamus glanced sideways at Varrus. “You still sure you want to go in?”

  “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  Shamus shrugged. “It’s what Lydia wanted, aye. I just wondered about you. But come, if you want.”

  * * *

  —

  Shamus stepped forward and leaned against the heavy gate, and stepped through as the massive thing swung open easily. “Don’t often see these gates shut during the day,” he said, waving Varrus through, then putting his shoulder to the back of the door to close it again. “Matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen ’em shut when it wasn’t a festival day of some kind.”

  Varrus stopped a few paces inside the gates, his eyes scanning the cluttered-looking yard only briefly before he recognized a well-organized absence of clutter. He took in the house—huge but elegant, occupying an entire corner of the enclosure—some kind of storage room, and a stable with open double doors and stalls for four horses. Along the bottom of the high perimeter wall adjacent to the smithy was a row of ten rust-dusted pyramids of iron loaf ingots, aptly named, he knew, for the way they resembled loaves of bread, and his eyes narrowed in appreciation of the care with which they had been laid out on a raised wooden platform that was slatted for ventilation. The ground under the platform was a gravel bed, he noted with approval, and the area surrounding it was clean and dry, with no weeds to be seen.

  “Not even on Sundays?” He drawled the question casually, to deflect Shamus’s attention from what he felt must be his all-too-obvious curiosity. “You don’t observe Sundays as a day of rest?”

  “Nah.” The younger man shook his head. “We work on Sundays, us. Always ’ave, ’cause we’ve no other choice. Most of the folk we work for need work done on Sundays, seems to me. We’d go hungry if we didn’t work Sundays. That’s Christian, that day-of-rest rubbish—as if ordinary folk can even think to do that. Lydia’s Christian. You knew that, didn’t you? Mam was, too, and so’s the other women. Da sometimes goes to services wi’ Lydia, but no more’n once or twice a year, mostly at Easter. But the rest of us, my brothers an’ me, we don’t bother much wi’ stuff like that.” His voice suddenly dropped to a near whisper. “Ho, boyo, watch you, now.”

  Ahead of them, a man had emerged from the house and now stood watching them from the darkness beneath the overhanging, pillared roof of the colonnade that fronted it. His shoulders and head were hidden in deep shadow, but it was plain that he was a big man, tall and broad.

  “Your father?” Varrus asked, barely moving his lips.

  “Himself, it is.” Shamus’s voice was equally quiet.

  Varrus felt the other’s fingertips between his shoulder blades, pushing him forward, and he stepped towards the watching figure, halting just short of the first step up to the portico, where he stood looking up at the man above him. For long moments neither man moved, but then the senior Mcuil stepped fully into the light of the afternoon sun and squinted appraisingly at the white-clad Roman facing him. His gaze swept down the length of the toga-like robe Varrus was wearing and then snapped back to engage the eyes that looked steadfastly back at him.

  Varrus could see that Lydia’s father was enormous in every respect, dwarfing any other man he had ever known. And yet there was none of the gross bulk about him that was usually associated with the term “big man.” With four adult sons and a grown daughter, he must have been close to fifty years old, yet he had the physique of a man decades younger, with no swelling to his belly and no pendulous flesh visible on his bare, heavily muscled arms.

  He wore a heavy leather apron over a plain, knee-length tunic of coarse-woven, undyed wool, and the thick leather hide of the apron was softened and glazed to supple blackness from years of use. It had leather shoulder coverings attached to it, made in overlapping layers like the armoured epaulets Rome’s legionaries wore and clearly designed to protect its wearer’s shoulders from fiery flying embers. It was for the same reason that the smith was close shaven. His hair was so tightly cropped that it, too, appeared shaven, his scalp bright beneath a thin but dense cap of iron-grey hair. To protect his feet and legs, he wore thick, knitted woollen stockings, their tops folded down over thick-soled, hobnailed boots that were scarred and even deeply pitted in spots with the residue of burning embers from Mcuil’s forge.

  “Callum’s in the smithy,” the smith said. “He’ll have need of you.”

  Shamus moved away immediately, and Varrus knew that he and Lydia’s father were now the only two in the yard—not Mcuil the smith, but Lydia Mcuil’s father. Her enormously large father, he thought ruefully, resisting the urge to grimace. Far too large a man to have disliking you. He would be a formidable opponent in a fight, an enemy to be reckoned with under any circumstances.

  The big man grunted, looking directly at him. “My daughter tells me you’re a Roman,” he said, and Varrus merely looked back at him, unsure of how he should respond. “She also tells me that you killed men to save her life.”

  Still Varrus made no response, held motionless by something in the older man’s expression.

  “Four men, she says.” He paused. “Four dead men.”

  Varrus decided he was being goaded and had already had enough. “Correct, Master Mcuil,” he said. “Four men who are now dead. You might think I murdered them, but I believe they earned their deaths. They were four unwholesome creatures who could be relied upon to debase everyone with whom they came in contact. Would you rather I had spared them? That way your daughter would be dead, and I would, too, but neither of us would have murdered anyone. Would that have pleased you more?”

  The big man’s eyes did not waver. “No,” he said, “it would not. And yourself must surely know that. I was but wondering where you found the courage to kill four men, for I know you must have needed courage.”

  The words, and the tone in which they were spoken, were so different from what Varrus had expected in reaction to his anger that he stood open-mouthed, his resentment forgotten.

  Mcuil continued philosophically, “Men don’t die easily—or so I’m told. Of course I’ve no experience—I’ve never killed a man. Truth be told, I’ve seldom fought one, even without weapons, because I’ve never needed to, being the size I am. But I’ve been told that killing a living man is never easy, and no blade is ever sharp enough to guarantee a quick, clean ending to any such act. Even when taken unsuspecting, an ordinary man will fight like a demon to stay alive, and those four you faced today must have been both aware and desperate. They must have fought hard to live, and you…If I may
say so, you lack the look of a desperate fighter. Yet you took all four of them. I doubt I could have done that, provoked beyond bearing though I would have been.”

  Quintus Varrus shrugged, but kept silent.

  “Have you killed men before?” Mcuil must have thought the question intrusive even as he asked it, because he raised a hand quickly. “That’s no affair of mine, I know, but you…you look too young to have done such things, and yet Lydia says you didn’t get sick and you didn’t seem disturbed by what you had done. And she told me you have never been a soldier.”

  “I’m nearly eighteen, Master Mcuil. At eighteen, Alexander of Macedon—the one they call Alexander the Great—had conquered the whole world. And he had the falling sickness. Julius Caesar had it, too. I’m no Alexander, nor even a Caesar, but I am who and what I am. I was born with a slightly twisted leg, sufficient to keep me out of the legions, but it did not prevent me from learning how to use weapons.

  “My family was murdered when I was fifteen—all of them—and I have killed three men since then. Before the four I killed this morning, I mean. I had also killed a man—my first one—mere days before my family were all killed. I was travelling with my friend Rhys Twohands and we were attacked by bandits on our way home to Dalmatia. There were five of them, and I killed one of them, more by sheer good fortune than through any skill. I did vomit, that first time. I had never felt anything more loathsome than that man’s warm blood on my hands. But Rhys made it clear to me that, had I not killed that man, he would certainly have killed me.” He smiled, wryly. “When you believe, deep inside you, that there are people looking to kill you and complete the extermination of your family, you find yourself quick to assess threats and even quicker in eliminating them. Does that answer your concerns?”

  Mcuil gazed at his Roman guest through slitted eyes, then waved him forward. “Come inside. I owe you my daughter’s life and that is a debt indeed, so my house is yours for as long as you wish to stay.”

  NINE

  “So why were you following my daughter this morning in the first place?”

  The two men were seated in the dining room, where Dominic Mcuil had been questioning Varrus closely, all with a view, Varrus knew, to verifying what Lydia had told him about her earlier misadventures. The Eirish smith had shown no rancour or discourtesy. His manner had been brusque but forthright from the start, befitting a concerned father looking out for the welfare of his only daughter. Varrus quickly determined that Lydia had told her father about almost everything he and she had discussed, though it was plain from the older man’s lack of fatherly outrage that she had made no mention of his declared intent to wed her. Lydia herself had appeared only once, when she had served her father and him with jugs of ale drawn from a wooden keg that sat on a table against the end wall of the dining room. Her sole comment, accompanied by a tiny smile, had been, “Five men, all ale drinkers. No wine in this household.” And then she had vanished into the interior of the house.

  “I wasn’t following her,” Varrus answered. “At least not at first. I was merely looking at her, from a distance.”

  “So you simply chanced to see her.”

  “Not simply,” he said. “In truth, I was looking for her. I had seen your daughter twice before and I was hoping I might see her again on this occasion.”

  A frown flickered between the smith’s brows. “Twice before? Where?”

  “Right there in the marketplace, a few days apart. She was with another woman, an older woman with dark hair, streaked through with silver. A servant, I thought.”

  “Companion, not servant. That was Camilla, she was a close friend of my wife’s. She’s like a mother to my girl. How did you come to notice them two, out of all the people in a crowded market?”

  Quintus Varrus’s upper lip quirked as though he were about to break into a grin. “I didn’t notice them at all, Master Mcuil. I saw Lydia first, and after that I was blind to all else. It was impossible not to notice her because she shone like the morning sun, brightening the entire world around her. Your daughter is a marvel. You must surely be aware of that?”

  “Oh, I’m aware of it, Master Varrus.” The smith’s growl was sardonic. “Believe you me, I am aware of it. You are not the first wide-eyed young man to tell me that…So you weren’t following her?”

  “No, not until she started to run. She looked afraid, I thought, and then I saw those men going after her, and that’s when I followed.”

  “Thanks be to all the gods you did. What did they look like?”

  Varrus hitched his shoulders and shook his head. “I don’t know—dirty, and threatening, I suppose. Definitely out of place anywhere near your daughter. From first look, I knew nothing good could come from them.”

  “Was there anything similar about them? Anything they had in common? Think, Master Varrus. It could be important.”

  “No…”

  “What?” The smith leapt on the slight hesitation. “Something came to you. What?”

  The young Roman frowned. “I don’t think it means anything, not really, and I’m not really sure even now that I even saw it…but it seems to me that two of them might have had similar wristbands. Of braided leather—”

  “With blue stones in them.”

  “How—?” Varrus’s eyes went wide with surprise.

  “They were Blues,” Mcuil said, his face twisted in a grimace.

  “What does that mean?” Varrus asked.

  “The Blues are a clan of criminals—a kind of brotherhood—the worst in Londuin, which means they are the worst in all Britain.”

  “You mean the Roman Blues, the charioteers? That’s impossible. The Roman Blues don’t wear blue stones or bracelets.”

  “No, they wear blue headcloths and blue belts. But that’s in Rome. Here in Britain they wear bright blue pebbles entwined in leather thongs, and it’s far from impossible that you might have killed four of them. They don’t race anymore, ’cause there’s no hippodromes in Britain today—none since they shut down the last big one up there in the north decades ago—and so the gangs have turned to other means of sport. The Blues are professional thieves, with ways of distributing their wares that would leave most people gape-mouthed with wonder. They’re almost as well organized as lawyers are, and they are merciless. They’ll be looking for the killer now, I expect. Did you see anyone else there? Or did anyone else see you?”

  “I—I don’t know. I chased those men for a mile, and almost everyone else was coming towards me. A hundred might have seen me. But none of them followed me, I am confident of that, and I saw no one afterwards. The place where I killed them was narrow, and hidden among high buildings. It was shut in, enclosed on all sides except for the access lane. There were no vantage points at all. And I dragged the bodies out of sight to give us time to get away before anyone discovered what had happened.”

  He paused, frowning as though reviewing what he had just said. “Your daughter’s clothes were torn, so I gave her my cloak to cover herself with until we were safe in the market again. Someone might have noticed her before that…I don’t know…She was distraught, as you would expect, but she coped well with it. I was able to arrange for a decent wrap large enough to conceal the damage to her clothing. That’s when I told her who I am, and that I knew her name.”

  “And how did you know her name?”

  “Because I had asked about her, the first time I saw her. Everyone knew her, it seemed to me, and I was impressed by the high regard folk had for her, and the way she seemed unaware of it.”

  “And what about this Nerva fellow? Where did you go with Shamus, once that drama was over and the others came back here?”

  “Up to the garrison fort. Nerva’s a bully—but that makes him easy to deal with, once he sees you know him for what he is. I wanted him to think we were going to report him to his commanding legate, so we made sure he saw us passing by in that direction while he was yet on patrol.”

  “And did you report him?”

  “No.
I never intended to. But I wanted him to think I would. That should convince him to keep his head down and safely out of sight at least until he realizes that nothing more has come of what happened.”

  “Hmm. And what did happen?”

  Varrus blinked. “What d’you mean?”

  Mcuil leaned forward and placed his elbow on the table, holding his jug of ale up at eye level and peering past it to where Varrus watched him. “The Emperor’s licence,” he said in a lower tone. “The labarum that you carry. That’s what I mean.”

  “You know its name. That surprises me. What do you want to know about it?”

  “Lydia told me you showed it to this Nerva fellow—though the fool didn’t know what it was. But she knew what it was, my Lydia. She recognized it because she’d seen one like it, or a drawing of one, right here in her own home.”

  “That sounds…interesting.” Varrus cocked his head. “Can I ask how that happened?”

  “You can. It’s no secret. An old friend I hadn’t seen for thirty years came by to visit us one day, a year and more ago. He’s a Christian bishop now, and he knew somehow that we was living in Londuin, so when his work brought him here he came to call, to see if my wife had yet succeeded in converting me to their faith. He didn’t know she was dead, you see—my wife. But while he was here he told us the story of how in a dream the Emperor Constantine saw that symbol in the sky, the cross with the Greek letters chi and rho, for the christos. He drew a picture of it for me, right then and there on the table in my smithy, and Lydia was there. He said Constantine saw a message in his dream—a sign saying, ‘In hoc signo vinces,’ meaning ‘In this sign, conquer.’

  “The very next day after that dream, he told us, Constantine won a great battle, the battle of the Milvian Bridge, and he became Emperor, and soon after that he became a Christian and took God’s sign as his personal standard. His personal standard, his vexillum. The labarum…” He tilted his head to one side, staring quizzically at Varrus. “Now there might be a handful of good reasons for you to be carrying the Emperor’s personal insignia with you, but if any of them is valid, then I’m left with one more concern. My daughter told me about what happened to your family, and about your fears for your own safety now. She told me you’re in hiding, but you don’t know who you’re hiding from, and that’s why you came to Britain. You think there’s little chance of your being recognized here, she said, by any who might wish you ill. Is that right?”