[A Dream of Eagles 01] - The Skystone

by Jack Whyte (ebook by Undead)

  She laughed that lovely laugh again. "And now you sit there wondering if I like what I see, but too unsure of yourself to ask me. Am I correct?" She raised one eyebrow exactly the way her brother would have done, and I had to smile and nod my head. "Well, sir, you may wonder and wonder. There are some things a Roman lady does not do, and one of them is to flatter strange men."

  I had to chew on that one for a few seconds before I was able to see that it was a compliment.

  "There now!" she said. "Having dealt with you, I think we should talk about me next. Don't you think that would be a delightful topic?"

  I had to laugh, feeling better and more relaxed by the minute with this marvellous woman. "Completely," I said. "What do you think I should know about you, since I have not had the benefit of your brother's constant descriptions to prepare me for you?"

  Her eyebrows went up. "You mean Caius failed to warn you of my beauty? My wit? My brilliance?"

  "I was aware of nothing more than your name." I grinned, now feeling almost miraculously at ease. She pretended to be upset, pouting her full lower lip slightly and frowning. "But I'm grateful to him," I went on.

  "Had I known the truth, I would never have been able to endure waiting to meet you. He did, however, tell me that you are his favourite sister."

  "Well, at least that's something, I suppose. Never mind that I am his only sister."

  "Seriously," I said, smiling in sheer pleasure. "What should I know about you?"

  "I wonder," she said, and paused, frowning in mock concentration. "What should you know about me?" She pursed her lips, giving me lots of time to admire the contours and the softness of them. "First of all, you should know that I am really delighted that you are here. I really have wanted to meet you for years. I think, too, you should know that I am regarded as something of an oddity because I refuse to behave like a woman, in that I am unwilling to do nothing except have babies. I have a mind, and I enjoy learning. I can hardly wait to have you tell me about your skystone." She paused, thinking her next words over, and then went on. "You should also know that I am extremely unlucky when it comes to husbands. I have lost two so far, which explains why I am here, a twenty-five-year-old widow in the home of my brother, when I should be happy in a home of my own rearing large numbers of small Britannici."

  Startled by this information, I stood up, then moved to sit on the bench by her side. "Two?"

  She nodded. "Two."

  "But how?"

  "I don't know. Carelessness? No, forgive me. That was flippant. Perhaps I was guilty of hubris, punishable pride. I do not know."

  "Two! I knew of one."

  "How? Did Quintus tell you? Silly question, of course he did. Veronica is Julius's sister." She was quiet for a few seconds, staring into the fire. Her stola had started to slip from her shoulders and I reached out and pulled it closer around her, marvelling at my sudden bravery. She was very close. I wanted to draw her closer. A tiny smile touched her face in acknowledgement of my attempt to preserve her from the cold.

  "I hardly knew my first husband. He was a boy of seventeen when he was killed by a wild boar during a hunting party. I was fifteen at the time. It seems like centuries ago, and I remember him as I would a beloved brother. His family and mine had been close for generations, although we lived here in Britain and they had moved to Constantinople with the imperial court. We were married less than three months." I said nothing, knowing she was not finished. "And then there was Julius, Veronica's brother. A very fine, upstanding man. Again, my father arranged the match. We lived quite happily together for one year, discovering ourselves, and then unhappily for three years, having discovered each other too well. He died four years ago and I mourned him only slightly, although he was far from being a wicked man. But I love his sister more than I ever loved Julius." She glanced up at me, a look of inquiry on her face. "Do you find it shocking that I should say these things to you?"

  I shook my head in a negative and she went on.

  "I feel very strongly about things like that, and I suppose that is unfitting for a Roman woman. But I have done my duty as a faithful daughter. My father is dead now, and from now on, I arrange my own life. I am no longer a little girl. I am a woman, and a wealthy one. A wealthy young woman! Twenty-five is not so old, and I flatter myself that I could still attract a husband of my own choice, if the idea appealed to me." She paused. "I really have shocked you, haven't I?" She had, but I shook my head again in a lie.

  She chose to believe me. "Good," she said, approvingly. "I had an aunt, Aunt Liga. A remarkable woman. She was firmly convinced that men rule in this world simply by default, because women are content not to challenge their supremacy. She went into commerce. She bought real estate and amassed a fortune. She was quite scandalous in her youth, even in Rome, which was a scandal in itself, but by the time she died she had achieved a kind of respectability through sheer notoriety and ridiculous wealth. She left all of it, her money and her lands and buildings, to me." She stopped, looking me straight in the eye again over the two feet or so that separated us.

  "I am a very wealthy woman, Publius. I own a very large amount of the city of Rome itself, and a fair-sized portion of Constantinople, in the form of land and buildings." She paused again and looked at me seriously before going on. "I love my brother dearly, but now that I have my own wealth, I find I also have the courage to indulge myself in my own ideas. I suppose what I really mean is I have come to agree with my Aunt Liga's ideas about life and the way one lives it. When I marry again, I shall choose my husband, much as it may distress Caius. I will not be treated like disposable property simply because I happen to have been born in a female body. I have a good mind. I read, I write, I think, and I conduct my own enterprises through my own lawyers."

  By this time I was truly confused about her motives in telling me all of this. "Have you said any of this to Caius?" In her company, strangely enough, I could no longer think of him as "the General."

  "No. I haven't had the opportunity." She laughed. "I'm practising on you. Caius can be formidable when his sensibilities are outraged. He's so traditional. I know he disapproved of Aunt Liga very strongly. He will have an apoplectic fit when he finds out she has left all of her ill-acquired fortune to me. She died just a year after he left for Africa, and it was about a year after that I found out she had named me as her heir. Since then, I have been learning to run my affairs with the help of my lawyers — two here and five in Rome. I have been to Rome and met all of them, and I have spent much time since then studying my circumstances. I know they are all robbing me outrageously, but one of these fine days I shall deal with that. They're all going to get a nasty surprise. In the meantime, I have not had a chance to tell Caius anything about it."

  She looked away again, back into the heart of the fire, and again a silence fell. This time, however, there was no discomfort, for we were both thinking about what she had told me. A pocket of resin in one of the logs snapped loudly and the entire body of the fire settled inward; a million fireflies seemed to swarm on the burning logs signalling that they were starting to change from fuel to embers. I was wondering idly whether to add some more fuel when she decided for me.

  "Put some more wood on and tell me about your skystone."

  This time it was easy to smile at her. "What would you like to know about it?"

  "Everything. It fascinates me. Before he left for Africa, Caius told me about the sword of Theodosius, about how it was made originally by your grandfather for your father from the metal of a stone he believed to have fallen from the heavens. Now I would like to hear the story from you. You believe the stone did fall from the sky, do you not?"

  I stood upright. "Yes, I do," I said, "but the sword of Theodosius is nothing. Look at this." I reached behind my back and unsheathed the dagger from where it nestled in its familiar place at the base of my spine. "Be careful," I said as I handed it to her. "It is far sharper than any other blade you have ever known."

  When I had finished add
ing more logs to the fire, I turned back to find her engrossed in looking at the blade.

  "What makes the blade so silvery?" She held up the knife so that its blade reflected the flames of the fire.

  I sat beside her and held out my hand and she reversed the dagger, slapping its heavy hilt into my open palm. Extending my arm towards the fire, I could plainly see the tiny print of her thumb on the shining blade. I moved the point from side to side, watching the reflection of the light as it ran up and down the blade.

  "I don't know, Luceiia, but I think there's another metal in there besides iron."

  "Mmm, Caius told me. But tell me about iron. He also told me you said it was a new study."

  "That's correct," I said, my surprise showing in my voice. "But I said it is comparatively new. Why would you want to know about iron?"

  "I told you, I have a mind. I want to know all I can about everything that interests me, and I know nothing about iron. Not a thing."

  "Very well," I said, "I accept that. Where would you like me to begin?"

  "At the beginning. But please talk to me as you would to Caius. Try not to think of me as a woman."

  I resisted the temptation to look at her breasts or at the way the material of her gown clung to the sweep of her thigh. I tried desperately not to see her hair or the arc of her cheekbone. I fought to ignore the fullness of her lips. I attempted, deliberately and positively, to ignore everything about her that was unignorable and to consider what I would have said to a man in response to the same request.

  "Well," I mumbled, "let me think about it for a minute. I've tried to explain this before — to Caius — and it isn't easy. I don't want to confuse you, and I don't want to bore you." I collected my thoughts into an approximation of logical sequence. "For a start, I don't know much more than you do about the subject... nobody does. You know the story of the skystone, but do you know that my grandfather almost gave up on trying to melt it down?"

  She nodded. "I do. It seemed strange to me at the time that anyone should try to melt a stone, but I didn't want to parade my total ignorance to Caius, so I let it pass. What about it?"

  "Well," I went on, "almost all metal comes originally from stone, but not all stone contains metal. The stones that do contain it are called ore-bearing stones, the ore being, if you like, the raw metal."

  "You mean raw, as in uncooked?"

  I nodded. "Exactly. Iron ore is red. Have you ever seen hillsides in your travels that looked as though they were rust-stained?" She dipped her head in acknowledgement.

  "Well, that's exactly what they were. The rock that produces that red-stained effect is iron ore. We take that stone and we crush it and wash it thoroughly, and then we dry it over heat. The washing gets rid of the ordinary soil and other soluble material. What's left we burn at great heat in a tall kiln, or oven furnace, for a long time. In the course of the burning, or smelting as we call it, the metal melts from the ore and drips down into a crucible in the bottom of the kiln. We finish up, when the kiln has cooled, with what is essentially a lump of pure iron mixed with slag, the residue from the furnace. Then we go to work with our hammers, and by simply beating this mass— which is like a big, dirty sponge — we hammer out as much of the slag as we possibly can. It just falls out. and we are left at the end of the process with a lump of iron. We call it wrought iron, because it has literally been wrought out of stone by the sweat of our bodies and the pounding of our hammers. You follow me so far?"

  She nodded again, wide-eyed and obviously interested.

  "Good. Now, here's where it gets complicated. This wrought iron is solid iron, and good for all kinds of purposes. It's easy to shape and it's easy to work with. But it's too soft to hold an edge. A mediocre hammered bronze edge is much keener and longer lasting than a wrought-iron edge. Of course, iron is almost impossible to work with when it is cold. You have to heat it to a red-hot state to be able to shape it." She nodded, acknowledging this well-known fact.

  "Right," I continued. "Next step. Somebody, somehow, long ago. nobody knows when, made a momentous discovery. Everyone who worked with iron had known for centuries that to keep an edge on an iron blade you had to hammer the edge and then allow it to cool slowly. If you cooled it too quickly, the edge wouldn't hold. But somebody, one day, must have decided to re-edge a blade, and by accident must have left the blade in a charcoal fire for longer than was necessary at the time. He might even have hammered the edge into the blade and then reheated it. When he realized what he had done, he may have thought he had wasted his work, and then plunged the blade into water to cool it quickly, so that he could start all over again. Nobody knows how the discovery occurred. It was an accident. But the fact remains that iron, reheated in a charcoal fire and then plunged into water to cool quickly, takes on an edge that is unbelievably hard, whereas the same iron, heated without the charcoal and then plunged into the same water, will not hold its edge."

  "That sounds impossible."

  "I know it does. But it's true."

  "Is there some kind of magic in the charcoal?"

  "There must be." I shook my head, as I had done so many times over the same puzzle. "It must be magic, of some kind. But I don't believe in magic. And I refuse to believe that, with all the things in the world that are supposed to be magic but are not, there is only one thing, charred wood, that is not supposed to be magic and is. No, Luceiia, it isn't magic. It's just something that we don't understand yet."

  She smiled at me, a marvel-laden smile of warmth and admiration, and I almost stretched in the joy of it like a cat.

  "No wonder, Publius Varrus, that you spend all your time over a furnace! That is absolutely fascinating. It can't be the water that softens the edge, so it has to be the charcoal."

  "No, quite the opposite. It's the lack of charcoal that makes iron soft."

  "Yes, the lack of it... that's what I meant. So the charcoal holds the secret of the hard edge. And nobody knows why. That is fascinating."

  "Isn't it?" I hurried on, revelling in her approval. "Of course, you understand that nobody caught on to this quickly. The hardening was a hit-or-miss process for ages. But gradually, a method for making hardened iron came into general use, and as smiths learned how to increase the heat of their fires, the quality of the iron increased from black to the pale grey colour of our iron of today."

  "Wait a minute. What do you mean, they increased the heat of their fires? What can be hotter than fire?"

  "Hotter fire." I laughed at the expression on her face. "That's why we force air into our coals with bellows. The air blast increases the heat of the coals. No one knows how or why. And some fuels bum hotter than others. Some burn more slowly. That's why we use charcoal. It burns hotter and more slowly than ordinary wood. It can build up to fierce temperatures. My grandfather almost gave up on smelting the skystone, as I have said. He had tried a number of fuels, different kinds of charcoal, and increased the flow of air to his furnace to an extent that he'd never tried before, but none of it had worked. And then, finally, when the furnace cooled after what he'd sworn to himself would be his last attempt to smelt the stone, he noticed that, although he had achieved no melt, the surface of the stone did look different somehow, almost as though it had started to change. So he resolved to try one more time, and to find some way of really increasing the heat in his furnace. By this time he had spent seven months fooling around with the thing, but it was his hobby, and he considered the time well spent."

  Again I noted the rapt expression on her face. She was far from being bored, I felt, but then I thought that perhaps she was merely pretending interest. I allowed my voice to lapse into silence, giving her the chance to change the subject if she so wished.

  "Well? Then what? I know he was successful, but how did he do it?" The eagerness in her voice was genuine. I smiled and continued.

  "He mentions in his notes that an associate of his — a merchant of fuel and oils — had found a deposit of coal that he couldn't use. Apparently, this coal he had fou
nd was too brittle. It broke up into tiny little pieces and it wouldn't flame. My grandfather remembered this. The man had not said that it would not burn, you understand? Merely that it would not flame. My grandfather knew that charcoal wouldn't flame, either, and yet it burned hotter than the wood it was made from. He became curious. He asked his friend to sell him some of the coal. The fellow snorted in disgust and told Grandfather where he could find it for himself, and wished him luck.

  "Grandfather Varrus collected some of the coal and mixed it with some of his highest-grade charcoal to see if it would burn hotter. It did. It burned hard and clean, and by the time he had experimented with the proportion of coal to charcoal, he had evolved a furnace fire hot enough to smelt the skystone. The rest you know. He had enough metal to make the sword for my father, and this dagger for me."

  "But he mixed the sword blade with ordinary iron?"

  "No," I said. "It wasn't ordinary. It was his best. But Theodosius's sword is nowhere near as brilliant as the skystone dagger."

  Luceiia had a strange and thoughtful expression on her face. I waited to hear what she would say. When she did speak, however, she asked a question that surprised me.

  "How long ago was this, Publius?"

  "No idea. It must have been just after I was born. My father left for the last time shortly after that. Thirty-three years ago? Thirty-four? Something like that. I suppose I could pinpoint it exactly from the old man's notes."