In the small hours of a summer morning, the sappers were awakened by a roar and a rumble, and for the next week the lake poured itself down the hillside, emptying like the broken bowl it resembled.
There can be few things or places less attractive than the newly exposed bottom of a suddenly drained lake — mud and stench and noxious vapour steaming under a hot sun. There was nothing to do but leave it and hope that the sun would dry it quickly.
August came and went, and the sun blazed into September. Strong autumn winds sprang up to help, and I watched, waiting and fretting in a fever of frustration and impatience. October remained dry and clear, and finally, driven to distraction by the waiting, I decided that the time had come.
I had made careful drawings before the lake was breached and had calculated to within ten paces where my treasure had to lie. All summer long, as soon as the mud had become firm enough to bear a man, I had men digging ditches, channelling residual water away from the centre, so that by late autumn the lake bed was a maze of drainage ditches, some of them wide and deep.
I had also kept a team of men and horses busy building mountains of fuel on the lakeside — bushes, dried grass and thistle, dead wood, even whole trees. Now I began to burn it in a monstrous pyre above the spot where I hoped and believed the skystone lay. We burned for two days and then left the ashes to cool, and when we scraped them away, the clay beneath them was baked. We tackled the baked clay then with mattock, pickaxe and spade until we found moisture again. Then we repeated the whole process. It was tiring, hard and dirty work, but the day came, towards the year's end, when a workman's pickaxe struck rock, and a shout of triumph told me we had found what we were looking for. The skystone was there. My guess had been correct. The size of it, however, left me breathless. Caius, I thought, would never believe this.
XXVIII
With the perspective of time, I am tempted to say that I chose the wrong day to bring my skystone home in triumph, but that would be neither true nor accurate.
My homecoming with the skystone was a triumph for me and, in a strange way, for Gaius. By vindicating myself in the finding of the stone, I had also vindicated his faith in my strange obsession. He had wanted me to find a skystone for years; it meant a lot to him. Only occasionally did his fine mind balk at the impossibility of everything involved in the quest. The day I found the stone and brought it back to the villa should have been a day for rejoicing all day long. But it was not to be. The arrival of the skystone at the villa was an event whose light was soon eclipsed by other happenings. That particular day was a day of days for all of us, although our human frailties precluded us from identifying the directions in which we were being steered.
We had had a fruitful and excellent year on the villa, which we had already started to call the Colony. Our crops had prospered, and we had more land under the plough than ever before. Quintus Varo, our neighbour to the north, had worked his fields with ours, as had Terra and Firma, who had bought two villas to the east and south of us. In all, we now held a block of nine contiguous villa farms, forming a solid rhomboid tract of arable land some twelve miles long by five miles deep at its widest, and we were confident of adding to those holdings in the coming year.
There were at least three villas that Caius knew of to the south and west, and several more in the north and east, whose owners lived outside of Britain: one on the Emperor's island of Capri, one outside Rome itself and one in southern Gaul. These we knew we could have — by default, if things progressed too quickly. They were maintained and farmed by trusted staff of the finest quality — people of the type our plans called for.
Throughout the summer and the autumn months, we had also had a steady trickle of newcomers to the villas — craftsmen and artisans, all with families, selected by various members of our newly formed Council.
The first of these to arrive was a family from Verulamium. The father and his two adult sons were tanners; the mother, daughter and the wives of the two sons were highly skilled workers in leather. Caius welcomed them with open arms. They were followed within the month by a family of coopers, sent by Tonius Cicero from Londinium. Domus, the father of the clan, was also a skilled carpenter, and his son Andronicus shared all his father's talents.
In August came a family of brewers from the hop country far to the east, and the next month brought the arrival of another family of carpenters and wagon-builders, and a man from the north who, with his wife and daughters, had taken the art of basket-weaving to new virtuosity. Within a week of their arrival, they were making baskets that would hold water! A potter arrived shortly after them, bringing his wheel with him—a huge device on which he threw amphorae and other large storage jars and pots.
Caius had begun to list all the resources we had at our disposal, and the people in our group who were best able to make use of them, and it was from this task that he was summoned by the commotion of my arrival. He was waiting with Luceiia at the gates as I turned my heavily laden wagon around the last bend in the road, and I could see his teeth gleaming in a grin from a hundred paces. The excitement being generated by my coming might have seemed, to a stranger's eyes, more suited to the arrival of an important visitor than a lump of rock, but everyone in the Colony had been aware for months of the importance I placed on the stone I had been searching for so painstakingly.
I stood upright on the wagon tongue, holding the reins, feeling my grin threatening to split my face in two. And then I was in front of them, and I stopped and leaped down to kiss Luceiia and embrace Caius.
"So! You found it!" he said. Luceiia said nothing, smilingly enjoying my obvious pleasure.
"Aye. I found it. Right where I knew it was." Elated beyond words, I squeezed him tightly to me, hooking my right elbow round his neck in an unusual display of my affection, unaware that I was endangering his dignity. He eased himself gently free from this uncharacteristic embrace and eyed the canvas-covered heap on the bed of the wagon.
"Well, then? Let's see this prodigy! Let's have a look at it!"
I leaped back up onto the wagon bed and threw off the covering. It was huge. Or rather, they were. There were four of them. Four massive stones, the smallest of them as big as a strong man's torso, the largest like the hindquarters of a draft horse.
I had known what this sight would do to Caius. I saw all his doubts come crashing back to him at the sight of them. How could these mighty things have fallen from an empty sky? He bit his lip. Everyone had fallen silent.
The rocks seemed to gleam in the sunlight. They almost looked ordinary — four big stones. But they had that polished, glassy look in parts that marked the other seven, smaller stones.
Caius cleared his throat, since he could see that I, and everyone else, was obviously waiting for him to say something.
"They... They're very clean."
I laughed aloud. "And so they should be! We washed them."
"You... washed them?"
"Yes, of course we washed them. They had been buried under tons of muck for years. I had to wash them to be sure of what they were. Their weight told me they were skystones, but I couldn't be sure from looking at them, so we stopped at the first stream we came to and cleaned them. And there they are!"
There they were, indeed.
There was still a look of dreadful doubt on Caius's face. "Did you not expect to find only one, Varrus?"
I slapped my right hand onto one of the smooth surfaces. "They are only one, Caius. At least I think they are. My guess is that it shattered on striking the earth. If you look closely at them you'll see that each has smooth surfaces and jagged planes. I fancy that if a man had the time and the strength to juggle with them, he could piece them all together like a broken nut."
"I see." The tone of his voice told me he really did not see. "What will you do with them now?"
"Break them in smaller pieces and smelt them."
"Will that take long?"
"Who knows?" I said. "I hope not. It depends a lot upon the kiln we build, the
degree of heat we can generate and on the hardness of the stones themselves and the quality of iron they contain. It could take a month. Perhaps much longer. I only know I'll do it, no matter how long it takes."
I could see the doubt tugging at Caius's mind. "Varrus," he said, "Publius... what if the stones contain no metal?"
I leaped back down to the ground. "They do, Caius! They do." I suddenly became aware that everyone around was listening to us, and I turned to address them with raised arms, acutely conscious of their scrutiny, their curiosity and the scepticism that few of them were able to conceal as well as Caius.
"My friends," I told them, speaking into their polite, attentive silence, "these are the skystones you've all heard me talk about." I glanced from face to face, smiling at the studied non-expressions on most of them. "They're not much to look at, are they? But they're big, and that's what I was hoping for."
I jumped up onto the bed of the wagon and rubbed my hand against the smooth curvature of the biggest piece of stone.
"Don't let their plainness mislead you. They are real, and they were found where I expected to find them, and their true magic remains to be discovered in the months that lie ahead." I drew my skystone dagger and held it up so that they could all see its shining, liquid-silver blade. "They contain metal," I said, raising my voice to reach everyone there. "Metal like this, and as real as this is. I don't know what kind of metal it is, but it's more than simple iron. Whatever it is, I'll get it out of them."
I saw in their faces — and in a few kindly but sceptically shaken heads — that they were prepared to accept and make allowance for my strangeness. They had begun to go about their interrupted affairs even before I jumped down from the cart again. I turned to Equus, who had not left my side in weeks.
"Take the wagon to the smithy and get a few men to help you unload it. And make sure you warn them these things are heavier than they look. Don't let anyone get hurt handling them."
I turned next to Luceiia. "My love, I have to bathe, and I'm as hungry as three starving men. Would you organize a bath and some food for me while I talk with Caius?"
She smiled up at me and squeezed my arm, stretching on tiptoe to kiss my cheek, dirty as it was.
"Gladly, my lord and husband," she said, smiling. "Welcome home. I'll be waiting for you." And she was gone.
I watched her walk towards the house, then turned to Caius with a contented sigh, throwing my arm around his shoulder. We began to walk together.
"Caius, have I ever thanked you for your sister?"
"Only ten thousand times. No more, I beg!"
"So be it." I laughed again, throwing my head far back. "Caius, I feel so good that I could dance a jig!
There's iron in those stones! I know there is. Do you recall the time I told you of my grandfather's struggle to smelt his stone?" He nodded that he did, and I continued. "Don't you remember, then, my telling you that at his last attempt, just when he was about to give up in despair, he noticed that there had been a change in the surface texture of the stone?"
"Yes, I remember that. But what —?"
"What he had noticed, Caius," I interrupted him, "was a glazing effect, as though the stone had started to melt just as the fire died down. The same glazing effect that is already present in these stones!"
He shook his head, mystified.
"Don't you see, Caius? When these stones fell to earth in fire, the heat of that fire must have been enough to start that melting process."
But this was stretching Caius's imagination too far. He sought refuge in ridicule.
"So? Are you saying you don't need a kiln? That if you just throw these stones up in the air, they'll melt themselves?"
I stopped him short and turned him to face me, reading his disbelief straight from his eyes. We stood together thus for quite a space, and then we resumed our walk. When I spoke again my voice was more sober.
"Caius," I said, "I wish that I could prove the truth of this to you right now. But I can't. I can't even explain the way I feel — how I know I'm right. It's just something that's in me. You think I am being foolish, and I know you well enough to know that you would suffer long before you'd take the chance of hurting me by saying so. But I also know that, of all the men I know, you are the one who wants most to believe that I am right, and to understand.
"You've seen the dagger, and you've heard the tale, and you believe what your eyes tell you is true. Everything inside you wants to believe that I am right and that I will smelt iron from these stones. Is this not so?" He nodded, and I went on, "The only false note in this scale is that your mind, rational being that you are, will not allow you to accept the truth of rocks of any size at all falling from the skies in fire. Unless they were pre-heated and shot up from catapults."
We had arrived outside the bath house, and one of the servants already waited to assist me. I indicated that I would be there and looked back at Caius, smiling.
"Well, General, I can't give you an eyewitness assurance, but I promise you this. You leave me to indulge my folly in my own good time, and one of these days I'll give you metal from those heavenly stones. I swear it. In the meantime, if you would turn your mind to assuring everyone else in the world that I am not insane, I will be greatly in your debt."
He looked me straight in the eye and blinked rapidly, and for one incredible moment I thought I saw the beginnings of tears in his eyes. Then he swallowed hard, clapped me on the upper arm, nodded and said, "Done!" Then he left me to my bath.
By the time I had bathed and eaten, Caius was once more immersed in his lists, and I did not see him again until we sat down to dine that night. No sooner had we begun our meal, however, than we were interrupted by the arrival of our old friend Bishop Alaric, accompanied by two of his priests. Caius insisted that they join us immediately, dusty and travel-weary as they were, and after our greetings were exchanged, they set about the meal with the single-minded gluttony of men who have not eaten for days. All of us noticed it, but apart from exchanging glances among ourselves, no one passed comment.
Finally, Alaric set down his knife and washed the grease from his hands.
"Caius, on behalf of my brethren here, I thank you for the meal. We have not broken fast since the day before yesterday."
"In God's name, why not?" I responded, astonished.
"In God's name we could not afford the time, Publius, and I knew we could eat here before going on."
Caius was frowning. "Going on to where? You are upset, my friend. What's happening outside there, in the world?"
Alaric returned Caius's frown with one of his own. "You have not heard? No, obviously you have not. There is bad news on every hand, Caius. Invasions in the north, across the Wall. Nothing that's organized, but heavy raiding parties range far south, destroying whole towns and marauding widely. They have kept far apart from each other, moving fast, so that the northern legions have been split to combat them."
"Has no one sent them help from further south?"
"No. The garrison at Arboricum has mutinied, stirred up by discontent, they say, over the newly commenced crackdown of discipline. It could not have come at a worse time. The garrison is confined within the city and the field forces containing them were faced with a choice of marching to the north to stem the Picts or staying there to quell the mutineers. It is chaos. They had to stay, of course. So the depredations of the raiders in the north have been massive and more or less unchecked."
He fell silent, but I could see from his expression that he had not finished.
"There is more, Alaric, isn't there?"
His eyes switched from Caius to me. "Aye, there is more. A fleet of Saxon longboats has landed in the southeast, on the Saxon Shore, and ravaged the country there. They managed somehow to outwit and ambush the forces sent to deal with them — slaughtered them all."
"How many?"
"A full cohort of the Seventeenth."
I felt the hairs on my arm stand up. "Good God!" I whispered. "Five hundred men?"
"A thousand! It was the First Cohort. The Millarian."
I leaped to my feet. "That's impossible! A band of undisciplined Saxons? Never!" My reaction was involuntary, pure shock, for I knew Alaric was no liar.
He ignored the implied insult and looked me straight in the eye. "Not impossible, Publius. Improbable, perhaps, but it happened."
"How, in the name of all that's good in Rome?"
He shrugged, shaking his head. "No one knows. All that is known is that they were taken on the march. The Saxons set fire to the grass. It has been a dry summer and the winds were strong that day. From the way the corpses were found, it was clear that they had been driven by the flames into a defile in the hills. They were trapped there and butchered."
"It still seems impossible," said Caius, his voice betraying shock similar to mine. "They must have had scouts out! Light cavalry. No Roman army, cohort or legion, marches blind!"
Alaric shrugged and had no comment to make.
"So, Alaric, where are you going now?" I asked him.
"South. To the coast. They have need of us. It seems another fleet has landed there, where no raiders have ever come before. The people were unprepared for them, and there is much suffering."
It was Caius's rum to interrupt. "A fleet? South of here? But how? They couldn't sail along the Saxon Shore without being challenged by our naval forces. What's happening?"
"It seems, Caius, they came across the sea. From Gaul."
"No!" Caius shook his head in denial. "How could that be? The Narrows — that I could understand. But a war fleet across the widest part of the sea? At the start of winter? Who would dare try it at this time of year? The Gauls have neither the courage nor the ships."
[A Dream of Eagles 01] - The Skystone Page 42
