The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  When they returned to the house, there was music being played—two fiddlers and a piper playing lively, melodic Eirish tunes, and for a long, pleasant time, the newly wed couple circulated among their guests, laughing and talking with all of them until dinner was announced and everyone sat down to marvel over the delights that had been prepared in the kitchen. They dined on fresh vegetables—turnips, parsnips, and fresh asparagus—lentils served in several ways, both sweet and spicy, yearling venison, a roasted suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, and broiled salmon caught the previous day in the local river, and fresh-baked bread aplenty. At the latter part of the meal, the truly festive part, the women served honey-sweetened oatcakes and chewy sweetmeats made from pounded nuts and thickened with finely diced precious dates from Africa and chopped dried plums, accompanied by a hot, delicious sauce of whipped eggs and milk flavoured with nutmeg from Asia.

  It was a sumptuous and protracted meal, and when it was over, leaving little to be cleared away, Dominic, as father of the bride, began the process of presenting the newly wed couple with the surprising profusion of gifts their guests had managed to provide despite the lack of time they had all had to prepare.

  The gift provided by Ajax and Demetrius Hanno was easily the one that captured everyone’s admiration. The mirror was unlike any seen before in Camulodunum. It was oval, measuring perhaps three feet in height and slightly less than half of that in width, and it was mounted in an ornate, free-standing frame with swivels mounted on either side, permitting it to be angled up or down. The mirror surface was of purest, unblemished, liquid-seeming silver, burnished and polished to a brightness that was almost supernatural. Few of the guests had ever seen their own reflections, as any mirror surface was precious, and the most common were of polished bronze or brass, or even copper. The liquid purity of silver brought gasps of amazement from everyone who looked into it.

  The celebration that followed was enjoyable in the way that most such celebrations are, in that few of the participants would be able to remember much about the evening that was clear-edged, yet each would have his or her own memories of specific moments or events that stayed with them long afterwards. Shanna’s ale was in great demand the entire evening, and fortunately there was no shortage of it, though it would take a long time for her stock to recover from the depredations of the thirsty guests that night. And as their enjoyment of the brew grew greater and sweeter, the innate love that the Celtic people have for song and story sprang free and flourished, with even the shyest, most self-effacing among the non-Roman guests stepping forward willingly to offer his or her own contributions to the spirit of the festivities.

  * * *

  —

  The bride and groom stood together in their doorway and watched until the last of the guests vanished through the gate into the street outside, and then Varrus stooped and kissed the crown of his wife’s head, enjoying the tightness of her arms around his waist as she nestled into the hollow beneath his shoulder. “Well, wife,” he murmured. “I think that went well.” He tightened his arm, squeezing her against him. “How does it make you feel, now that you are no longer simply Lydia Mcuil?”

  She pivoted gently, turning him away from the door and back towards the interior of the house, which had now fallen completely silent. “I think it makes me feel exactly as I’ve wanted to feel for a long time now—happy and looking forward to a life of fulfillment and self-satisfied smugness.”

  He closed the outer door before facing her again, when he bent and scooped her up effortlessly, his right arm behind her knees. “And you’ll have that, milady,” he growled, his throat suddenly swollen with tenderness. “As long as I’m alive, I’ll work to keep you smug and satisfied. And as soon as I can get you free of that yellow robe, I’ll show you how I intend to do it…”

  THIRTY-TWO

  When he first became aware of it, in the days and weeks that followed his wedding day, Varrus was not particularly surprised that his grandfather should be in his thoughts much of the time, no matter what he found himself doing. He had been shown that his grandsire had in fact been the very antithesis of all he had believed him to be.

  Small wonder, then, he thought, that he should now be shamed by the utter wrongness of his failure to see beyond the outward appearance to the inner truth of his grandfather’s behaviour. As the days passed by and the image of the old man remained in his mind, sharp-edged and unfading, Varrus found himself growing preoccupied with one single recollection. In it, Titanius stood, as he so often had in young Quintus’s boyhood, at the enormous table in the formal dining room of his villa in Salona. His right hand was raised in a sweeping, imperious gesture familiar to the boy, and he wore his favourite quilted, bright green dalmatic tunic, the one with the wide sleeves and shoulders and narrow but elaborately decorated vertical stripes of hand-worked gold wire, one of those much-loved garments that men regard as trusted, loyal friends but that wives frequently, and vainly, attempt to wrest from their husbands’ possession, seeing them as shabby reminders of things long past. Titanius was surrounded by his family. His son Marcus stood in front of him and three other people sat at the table, looking up at Titanius as he spoke: his wife, Alexia Seneca; Marcus’s wife, Maris, Quintus’s mother; and his younger son Marius, wearing the blue-and-white civilian tunic of a naval officer on furlough.

  Something about the look of his uncle Marius in that image bothered Varrus, but try as he would he could not grasp what it was, and each time he felt he was on the point of identifying what it was the recognition slipped from his grasp again, so that eventually he simply gritted his teeth when the vision came to him and resisted any temptation to waste more time fretting over it.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks later, early on a perfect afternoon, Varrus returned from the armoury to discover that Shamus had finished all that they were working on, leaving him some unexpected time, and so he took Lydia for a walk along the summer-clad banks of the River Colne on the outskirts of the town. They strolled aimlessly along the riverbank towards the sea a few miles ahead of them, enjoying the novelty of being out of the smithy and alone together on a lovely afternoon, and then they swung away inland, following the course of a meandering brook that had cut them off from walking any farther by spilling itself across their path and into the river. The brook itself was neither broad nor deep, but it presented a threat to Lydia’s daintily slippered feet, and so rather than risk damaging her footwear, the young couple merely angled their way back towards the town, following the brook’s path through an area of small farms.

  Varrus was surprised to discover that the area was far more pleasant and attractive than he had expected, and that in turn set him thinking about the task he and Lydia had undertaken to find a suitable small farm for Shanna. He had stopped to admire one tidy, prosperous-looking little farm on the other side of the brook, knowing from the mere appearance of the clean, attractive buildings that it was highly unlikely to be available for sale, when Lydia drew his attention to something ahead of them, on their side of the brook. It was a mature oak, he guessed, but as he and Lydia neared it he could see that it was one of a pair, the second of which was riven and splintered, its glaring wounds new and shockingly raw, while its shattered branches yet held green foliage.

  As soon as he saw it, Varrus knew he was looking at the tree Ajax had told him about, the one hit by the stone that had supposedly fallen from the sky, and suddenly he was breathing hard, squeezing Lydia’s hand tightly enough to make her wince as he pulled her forward with him. When he told her what had happened to the tree, though, she threw back her head and laughed at him, convinced he was teasing her, and that gave him pause, because his own initial reaction to the story had been precisely the same scornful dismissal. A stone, falling from the sky, without being thrown up there by someone nearby? The idea of that alone was ludicrous. But when you suggested that the stone had fallen on a massive oak tree and hit it hard enough to shatter the tree and destroy it, well, c
onsidered objectively, it sounded truly insane.

  “Something bothers me here,” Varrus admitted at length. “And it is bothering me deeply…but I don’t know how I can talk about it in any way that would make sense to you, my love, because it makes nonsense of all I’ve ever been taught about the natural world we live in.”

  “The natural world we live in…” She stared at him, no trace of teasing in her attitude now. “That sounds more than slightly ominous, husband. But I think I need to hear you tell me about it, nonetheless. What is it that bothers you?”

  He waved his hand towards the ruined tree and the upturned, shattered ground surrounding it. “The people whose land this is were wakened in the middle of the night, not long ago, by a terrifying noise and an earth-shaking explosion. When they grew brave enough to go and look at what had happened, they found this oak tree destroyed—just as you see it now—and all the earth around it torn up around that huge hole from which smoke was still rising.

  “I heard it took some days for the farmer to gather up the courage to look closer—and who could blame him for that? But when he did, he found a stone, a stone that was still hot, almost buried at the bottom of the hole. Once he grew convinced no more unnatural events would follow the first, he dug the thing out. I am not sure exactly how or why, but the farmer ended up bringing that stone to Natius, who thought he was mad, with his tale about stones falling out of the sky, but then Natius himself grew intrigued by the metallic sheen of the thing’s surface, and so he bought it off the fellow.

  “Now, here’s where matters get even stranger. Liam has something similar in his smithy, a metallic-looking stone he calls Ler’s Skull.” He hesitated. “You know who Ler is, don’t you?” Lydia nodded, and he continued. “Well, that stone was dredged up by some fisherman a long time earlier, and Liam kept it because he was curious about it—from the look of it, he thought it might have started to melt at some time. He never could heat it enough to smelt it further, though—his bellows were just not strong enough to blow sufficient air into the furnace fast enough, and simply ended up using it as a doorstop in the smithy…”

  His voice trailed away, and Lydia made no attempt to draw him out of his reveries. She was the daughter in a household of smiths and was more than familiar with the ways in which something as inanimate and inert as raw metal could dominate the thinking of grown men, and so she waited, knowing that Quintus would resume when he was ready to say more.

  Sure enough, he cleared his throat and started speaking again. “Anyway,” he said, though more quietly than before, “Natius told me the story of this falling stone, and what I found really odd was that, once the novelty of what he had told me wore off and I had adjusted to the strangeness of the suggestion that the thing had fallen from the sky, I really had no difficulty in accepting that it might be true—that this other stone might have fallen from the sky more recently and landed here…But that was before I saw this.” He nodded towards the hole in the ground. “Now I can see how impossible it was.”

  “Why impossible, Quintus? What’s impossible?”

  He pointed at the ruined tree. “That is, Lydia. That is impossible…This was a mature, healthy oak tree, and now look at it. Look at the thickness of that trunk. A month or two ago, it would have taken three grown men to encircle that bole with outstretched arms, and yet it’s smashed to kindling. And look at those main branches. Those grew horizontally, thirty feet in length and thicker around than my chest—and again, look at them, smashed into splinters—lengthwise! I haven’t seen the stone that supposedly caused all this, but I know Ajax has held it in his hands, so it can’t be too big…heavy, certainly, but not too heavy to lift. Yet look at what it’s supposed to have done to this tree, and to the ground beneath it…I can’t begin to imagine the speed and force it must have had when it came down, to do all that damage. One small stone?”

  He fell silent again, shaking his head in disbelief, then seemed to freeze for long moments, his eyes wide and once again unfocused, gazing outwards in astonishment at something Lydia instantly turned to look for. But there was nothing there to see other than the flat, empty expanse of the meadow and the winding brook.

  “Quintus?” Her voice was uncertain. “What are you looking at?”

  “My grandfather.”

  She felt a single, sudden thump of apprehension, and glanced towards the meadow, and then willed herself to do and say nothing, knowing he would explain when he was ready.

  He stood silent again for several moments, then turned his head to look at her. “That’s it,” he said—speaking to her but looking through her, she thought. “That’s the vision of my grandfather I’ve been seeing recently. I knew there was something strange about what Marius was wearing.”

  She waited again, still not moving, until she was sure he would say nothing more, and then she said, “Quintus?” He did not react, and she spoke again, more insistently this time. “Quintus? Look at me!” She waved her hand in front of his eyes, and she saw the change in his eyes as he rejoined her.

  “What?”

  “Where were you? I don’t know where your mind went there, but you left me behind for a little while. You said something about seeing your grandfather.”

  “Oh!” His brow cleared instantly and he smiled at her, and she could see excitement dancing in his eyes. “I did. See him. But I’ve been seeing him for days and I couldn’t understand why. This time, though, I saw it clearly.”

  “You said something about your uncle…about what he was wearing.”

  “Yes. He was wearing a tunic he shouldn’t have been wearing—in my vision, I mean. That’s one of the things I couldn’t understand.”

  She reached out and pressed one hand flat against his sternum. “Stop,” she said, “because I didn’t understand a word you said there. Now kiss me, please, before you say anything else, then start again and tell me all about it, leaving nothing out.”

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “But you still might not understand what I’m saying. There’s nothing wrong, though, nothing for you to be concerned about.”

  “It has something to do with this place, this tree and this hole in the ground. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.” She looked all around again, then pointed to where someone had dragged an ancient log to provide seating near where the bed of the brook widened to form a wide, deep hole. It had obviously been sitting there for decades, because the surface had been polished smooth by generations of use. “Let’s rest over there and you can tell me what you are talking about.”

  A short time later, when she was snuggled against his side on the log with his arm around her shoulders, she looked up at him again. “Start by telling me about your uncle’s tunic. What was so strange about it?”

  He grinned again. “Nothing, really…other than the timing. He was wearing a distinctive blue-and-white tunic, the tunic of a trierarch. I had forgotten all about that.”

  She looked at him, unimpressed. “A trierarch. And what is a trierarch?”

  “A ship’s captain, the commander of a trireme. But at the time I’m talking of—the time of this memory of my grandfather—my uncle Marius was already a navarch, commanding a squadron of ships, and I remember him wearing that white uniform with the blue border in honour of one of his captains who had died in a battle during his last campaign, just before he came home on furlough…And that was the night when Grandfather Titanius told us all about the fireball that wiped out more than half his force in Dacia.”

  He hesitated, and Lydia shifted away from him slightly, peering up at him, and asked, “Where is Dacia? And whose force was wiped out? Your uncle’s?”

  Varrus smiled at her. “No, my love. My grandfather’s. Or more accurately a group under my grandfather’s command, led by a man called Provo. And I was not supposed to hear any of it. I was ten years old at the time, too young to be at table with the grown-ups, so I was hiding in a sideboard, listening to them in secret. I did that often when I was bo
red and had nothing else to do.” He pulled her back close to him and kissed her, then held her in his arms while he related the story, which he now remembered vividly, that his grandfather had told the family that evening, about the falling of the great fireball in Dacia, decades before Quintus had been born. When he had finished, Lydia continued to cling closely to him for a long time, making no attempt to speak. When she let go and looked up into his eyes, her face was stamped by incomprehension.

  “Quintus, that is an awful story,” she said. “No wonder he refused to talk about it for so long. But I don’t understand what it has to do with this, this oak tree, here and now.”

  “Degree, and perception. It’s all a matter of how we perceive things, and how deeply we trust in what’s before our eyes. Just minutes ago I was shaking my head at the power it would take for one falling stone to do as much damage as this one did here. And then I remembered my grandfather’s story of what he saw with his own eyes—a ball of fire so large, and moving so quickly, that it streaked over the heads of his entire army, plunging the world into darkness and blinding and deafening hundreds of his men merely in passing. And when it hit the ground it destroyed a thousand fighting men and levelled miles and miles of standing forest as easily as a strong wind can flatten a field of grain. A ball of fire, Lydia. Think about that…

  “And then remember what the farmer said. When he approached the hole days later, and found the stone at the bottom, it was still smoking, as though it had been cooling ever since it fell from the sky. That makes me wonder, Lydia. What if my grandfather’s fireball was but a stone—a burning stone? The Greeks spoke of their gods throwing thunderbolts from Mount Olympus—great, flaming balls of fire that destroyed everything they struck. Is that what we had here, in Camulodunum? A thunderbolt? A small, barely significant thunderbolt? Could such a thing even be conceivable?”

  “Of course it could,” Lydia said, her voice barely audible. “You are talking about it, Quintus. That means you already consider it possible. And now I believe you need to talk about it with someone else, someone more able to talk sensibly about such things than I am.”