The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  But then, less than six weeks later, the work was suddenly over, the last of the armoured shirts completed, its lustrously polished bronze perfection draped over a wooden life-sized figure with the five others, subtly reflecting the light from the glimmering sconces on the smithy walls. Varrus lifted a cup of wine in salute to it. I hope you save lives, he thought, because I know the people who wear you, these next fifty years and more, will have no idea of what a monstrous bastard you were to make, ring by ring by gods-cursed ring.

  * * *

  —

  The smithy had been cleared out for almost two weeks, with not a single small bronze ring in sight, when Varrus walked in one morning from the street and turned to face the wall, then stopped short in the act of unwrapping the thick muffler from around his neck. It was the month of January, and the first fierce storm of the winter was raging outside. The snow on the shoulders of his cloak was already melting quickly in the warmth of the smithy, but Varrus stood as though frozen in place, staring down at an object on a narrow table against the wall by the door, next to the rack of wooden pegs from which he was about to hang his wet clothes.

  “Is this new?” he asked, speaking to no one in particular as he reached down to pick up the object. To his surprise, though, he failed to lift it, his clenching fingers slipping off its smooth surface, unprepared for its solid weight. He gripped it again, more firmly this time. It was metal, he knew that much, but he didn’t know what kind. He held it up carefully, cradling it in both hands, and turned towards Liam, who was busy near the forge. “What is this? I’ve never seen it before.”

  “It’s Ler’s Skull.” The smith’s mouth quirked into what might have been either a wry grin or a distasteful grimace. “And it’s been sitting there for years. The reason you’ve never seen it before is that until now you’ve never come in wearing a wet cloak and gone to hang it up on the pegs there. Some fisherman gave it to Rann, Shanna’s first husband, to pay a debt, years ago. I kept it after he died, as a curio, for it’s worth nothing.”

  Varrus lowered the object gently back onto the narrow table, and then removed his snow-wet cloak, but he continued to look at it all the while and as soon as he could he picked it up again, holding it up to his eyes in the light from the partially open door. “I can see why you call it a skull,” he said. “It looks like one. But what’s it made of, and who is Ler?”

  “Ler is one of the old gods,” Liam answered from just behind him, having crossed the smithy floor unnoticed. “The god of the sea, where I come from. As for what the thing is made of, your guess would be as good as mine. Not any metal I’ve ever seen. Not iron, I’ll swear to that…Far too hard, for iron.”

  “You’ve tried melting it, then…Of course you have.”

  “Melting it, and smelting it. Rann put it in the blast furnace for days, forcing more air into the chamber than he ever had before, but without even the beginnings of a melt. Absolutely nothing. That thing came out of there as pristine pure as when it went in.”

  Varrus heaved the object gently into the air and caught it again. “It’s hugely heavy,” he said. “Like lead, or even gold. Do you know where it came from?”

  “From the sea. That’s why I called it Ler’s Skull. Fisherman dredged it up in his net somewhere. Brought it to Rann, thinking it might be worth something because of its weight. Even he could see it was metal, from the way the light caught the dome of it. But we’ve never found out anything more about it. Don’t know what it is or where it was made, or even if it was made at all. A curio, as I said. No more than that.”

  “Aye. So why d’you keep it here?”

  The smith grinned. “Because it makes a grand doorstop, to hold the door open in fine weather. Besides, I don’t want to throw it away. I’ve grown attached to it.”

  Varrus smiled. “You are not the only person in your family who keeps things like that. Dominic does the same.”

  “Ah, no, not so. Not quite.” Liam wagged his finger from side to side. “Dominic’s curios have purpose—or had purpose, at one time. He collects old weapons, and I do, too. It’s a thing we learned from our father, who collected war clubs all his life. Some of those were elaborate and beautiful, and as boys we were taught repeatedly that some men have the gift of being able to infuse great beauty into what they make by hand. So as we grew to become smiths and craftsmen, we learned to respect the craftsmanship of smiths who went before us in the distant past. Would you like to see my own pieces?”

  “I would,” said Varrus, and he followed the smith back through the rear part of the smithy and into the house, where he used a large key from the bunch at his waist to open a door that the younger man had never known to be unlocked in the six months since his arrival. The small room beyond it was very obviously the smith’s own private territory, because it was filled with a kind of organized chaos of old and exotic weapons, many of them arranged in displays while others were mounted in boxes and cases that had clearly been made specifically to house them. Liam crossed to the wall beneath a shuttered window, where he used a thin rope tethered to a cleat there to manipulate the slatted shutters, letting in more light.

  Varrus stood in the small space in the middle of the floor and looked all around him in amazement. There were weapons everywhere: swords and daggers, axes and clubs of every conceivable shape and size. Some of them were ancient, showing clear signs of ages of neglect, many of the iron-bladed weapons among them almost entirely destroyed by rust. But there were other blades, and spearheads, some made of bronze and others of softer metals unknown to him, that showed no signs of aging at all. And there were heavy, primitive war clubs, many with heads made from smoothed stones or metal balls that had been bound with rawhide thongs to handles fashioned from long bones, some of which he thought appeared to be human. The rawhide bindings on those had dried into bonds that were as hard as iron, but he suspected that they must be brittle with age and that if anyone struck anything hard with one of them, the bindings would shatter like splintered bone. Every piece, he saw, had been carefully cleaned and treated with some kind of preservative, like a clear varnish. He saw what he estimated to be fifty or more exhibits before he lost track of what he had already seen and what he had not, and he turned to his host in wide-eyed astonishment.

  “This is—” He stopped, shaking his head with a smile of disbelief. “I don’t know what it is, Liam, to tell you the truth. I have never seen anything like it. Where did it all come from?”

  The smith flapped a hand as though in dismissal of it all. “From everywhere and anywhere,” he said, “over the course of years. I never set out to collect anything. Never even thought of such a thing. It simply happened. Some of these were my father’s—the war clubs. That’s how it started, I suppose. I always enjoyed looking at them, and sometimes I played with them when I was a tadpole, though the old man would have flayed me if he’d caught me. And when he died, I didn’t want to part with them. And over the years I simply found the others, or bought them, or traded for them if I saw something that caught my fancy.”

  “And why do you keep them here, in this room?”

  “To protect them.” The smith spun slowly on his heel, an outflung hand indicating the profusion of his collection. “No one else cares about them, and the result of not caring is carelessness. Most people would think me mad for thinking so, and you might be one of them, but I believe these pieces deserve respect, if for no other reason than that they survived for so long when so little else from their times did. More than that, though, I think they deserve it for the craftsmanship that made each one stand out for me when I first found it. And so I keep them locked up because I don’t want them mishandled or abused by people who have no interest in them.” He looked around at the cases with fondness. “I enjoy the old clubs, but I love the blades even more…the way they were made.”

  Quintus Varrus bowed his head admiringly. “You are a philosopher, then,” he said quietly. “And far from thinking you mad, I agree with you. These instruments deserve
respect for what they are, and I admire you for providing it for them. Have you a favourite among them?”

  “I do,” Liam said, “but you’ll be surprised to see what it is.” He pointed over Varrus’s shoulder. “Hand me down that box there. The small one. Lift it onto the table.”

  There were two tall wooden cases propped upright on a shelf against the wall at his back, and Varrus lifted down the smaller one, surprised by how light it was, for it looked strongly made and substantial. He placed it on the table that occupied most of the floor space, and the smith undid the simple hasp and threw open the lid.

  “Do you know what that is?”

  Quintus stared blankly at what lay revealed. He shook his head, then frowned and bent forward to look at the device more closely. It was an oddly shaped serpentine piece of wood, and the image that popped into his mind was one he had seen as a boy: a drawing of an African snake called a cobra, stretched out on the ground in a long, undulating series of sinuous curves. It was perhaps a hand’s length longer than his own arm, and he saw that it had been cunningly and painstakingly crafted. When Liam told him he could pick it up, he did, and knew at once it was some kind of bow, but he could not identify the how or why of it. It was far lighter than he would have believed it could be, almost feather light, and he brought it closer to his eyes and turned it one way and then another as he tried to make sense of the strange, vertical striations in the wood.

  “Is it a bow?”

  “It is. A Scythian bow.”

  Varrus held it farther away, extending his arm and looking up at the weapon. “That’s what I thought when I picked it up—that it was a bow, I mean. But it’s shaped wrongly. I see notches for a bowstring, but look, they’re on the wrong side of the shaft, and the curves in the stave make the thing useless—the string would touch those outer curves. How would you aim it, or even hold it?”

  “I thought exactly the same thing when I first saw it,” Liam said, smiling. “That it was backwards. But the man who gave it to me showed me how wrong I was. He was an armourer and had spent much of his life up on the empire’s northeastern border, beyond the Euxine Sea. According to what he said, the lands up there grow nothing but grass—endless oceans of grass—and the people are all savages. He said they’re all short and hairy, but they breed the fastest and hardiest horses in the world. And some of them are called Scythians—the people, I mean, not the horses. There are lots of others up there, too, all barbarians—Huns and Goths and others like them, and they all ride horses. Well, these Scythians were horse warriors—they probably still are, but they were famous because they used their bows from horseback, and this is one of those bows. That’s why it’s so short. They were made to be used by small men on horses, and the Scythians conquered their part of the world using them.”

  Varrus was unimpressed. “Doesn’t look like much to me,” he said. “Doesn’t look strong enough. Too flat, and too thin.”

  “You’re right,” Liam said. “It doesn’t. But that’s because you’re looking at it backwards. See those straight lines running up along the outside edge there? What d’you think those are?”

  “They look like layers of some kind.”

  “That’s what they are. Three flat layers, all bonded together. Woodworkers call that lamination, and each layer strengthens the others. The first layer, on the outside, is wood, though I don’t know what kind. But it’s backed on the inside by a layer of long, thin strips of bone, glued on for strength. And then behind that again, on the very inside of the bow, there’s a third layer, this one of animal sinew, boiled and stretched and then moulded into place and trimmed to act as a pliable bonding layer on the inner surface. It’s called a recurve bow, precisely because of the way it’s made and curved. We’re accustomed to seeing only arced bows here in Britain, but this kind has two curves, one of which looks awkward to us, but that awkward look makes the weapon ten times stronger than you think it could be. You string it exactly the opposite way from the way you would an ordinary bow. Look, I’ll show you.”

  He reached into the bow’s case and pulled out a rolled bowstring, quickly shaking it out and grasping the two ends to stretch it, twisting it and smoothing out the kinks. It resisted him strongly, and Varrus bent forward to look at it, finally deciding that it must be some kind of hard, twisted yarn, or perhaps even sinew, lightly oiled to keep it from drying out completely, and made with a loop at each end. Once he was satisfied that he had softened the string sufficiently to work with, Liam picked up the bow stave, slipped a loop over one end of it, then braced that end on the floor, against his foot. Then, holding the free end of the string in his right hand, and moving deftly and with the ease of long practice, he tucked the upright end against his shoulder with his left hand and leaned heavily on it, forcing it against what Varrus had assumed would be the natural direction of its flex. When he had forced the top end down to the level of his chest, he quickly fastened the loop he had been holding into the notch in the top of the stave and stood erect, holding the suddenly transformed weapon out at arm’s length, and Varrus realized that the notches had not been on the wrong side of the stave after all.

  “Try it,” the smith said. “I’ve no arrows, but you can test the pull.”

  Varrus did, and found it far more difficult to pull the bowstring back to his shoulder than he would ever have imagined. He handed it back, shaking his head ruefully. “I would never have believed that if I hadn’t watched you do it. That’s the strongest bow I have ever pulled. Mind you, I doubt I have held a bow more than six or seven times in my life, and that was when I was a boy. But none of them were anywhere near as powerful as that one…No wonder it’s your favourite.”

  “It’s not,” Liam said. He pointed again. “That one is, but I can’t string it.”

  Varrus lifted down the other tall case. It was twice the height of the first one, though not much wider, and it was heavier, though not by much. He gasped when the lid was swung open to reveal another bow stave, for this one was easily twice the length and thickness of the first, and it had been fitted perfectly into a fabric-lined, lovingly shaped niche that had been carved to hold it.

  He stood stunned for long moments. “No,” he said eventually. “I don’t believe it. I could barely pull the small one you showed me. And I don’t think I have ever met a man who could pull a bow as big as this. It would take a giant. You said the Scythians were little people.”

  “And so they were. But this bow came from Africa, not from Scythia. It’s the same kind of bow, recurved, but it’s not Scythian. Someone copied the design, and whoever he was, he was a master craftsman. Look at the inlay work.”

  Varrus did look, and the workmanship was truly wonderful, with sinuous strips of variously coloured woods inlaid in fanciful, interwoven patterns in the glossy, lacquered frontal panels of the triply layered stave above and below the thickness of the smoothly sculpted leather-covered grip.

  “The leather’s dried out,” he said.

  “So would you be after a few hundred years. It can be replaced if anyone ever needs to use it again.”

  “You said you can’t string it. Why not?”

  “Because I have nothing strong enough to string it with. Where would I start to look for such a thing?”

  Varrus was surprised to hear that. “I would start by going to the man who made the bowstring for you for the smaller bow. There can’t be much difference between making one for that and one for this, other than length and thickness.”

  “So you might think,” came the reply. “But apparently that’s not the case. I went to that man first. He told me it couldn’t be done. He wouldn’t even try. Said the idea was ridiculous.”

  “Did you show him the bow?”

  “No, I told him about it. He didn’t believe me.”

  “That’s hardly surprising. I doubt if I would, either, without seeing it. It sounds like the kind of story fishermen tell—about those fish that no one ever sees but them. How did you obtain the thing, anyway?”

/>   “From an old friend who knew I admired it—a man for whom I did a great amount of work. He spent the last years of his army career as a legate with the Second Trajan Legion in Egypt, in Alexandria, and picked it up there. When he died, he left the bow to me, naming the gift in his will.” He smiled. “He never used it, of course. He was far too old to pull it, even when he first bought it. I’ll never pull it, either, but we kept it safe, between us, and if there’s life after this one, as the Christians say there is, then its maker and its owner will both be happy that it still exists, for it must be unique—”

  He frowned suddenly and grimaced, sucking air sharply between his teeth, and he hunched forward, pressing the heel of his hand against his ribs above where he had burned himself.

  “Liam, is it bad? I’ll go and fetch Shanna.” In the previous few weeks Varrus had noticed his employer doing the same thing more and more frequently, and he knew that their physician had left Shanna some kind of opiate for when the pain grew intense. But Liam shook his head and waved his free hand in a negative, then held it up, bidding Varrus be silent and wait.

  Finally, he drew a deeper breath and began to straighten up slowly, and the colour returned to his face. “Right, then,” he said. “We’ll say nothing of that little incident to Shanna, right? It’s over now, so not a word. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Varrus said.

  “Good.” He inhaled again, deeply, then released the air slowly through his pursed lips, testing himself for lingering pain, and then he straightened perceptibly and flexed his shoulders. “So,” he said, “where was I? Yes, I remember. I was about to say that we have now established that you can make and assemble bronze rings. So it’s about time now to find out if you can make a blade. Are you ready?”

  Varrus nodded, resigned to accepting Liam’s minor tyranny. “I am, whenever you are.”

  “Good, then let’s find out. We can’t afford to stand around here all day doing nothing.”