The Skystone

by Jack Whyte

  “Relax. Our friend has gone off into the desert. He won’t be back. You are only badly winded and will recover. He’s badly wounded and will not.”

  I looked up at him. He was massaging his right wrist and wiggling his fingers.

  “You’re right. This hurts like nothing else on earth.”

  I saw then that he was talking through clenched teeth, as he nodded backwards over his shoulder and continued.

  “I can’t hold your sword yet, otherwise I’d go over there and put that poor swine out of his misery.”

  Only then did I identify the horrible sound that had been assailing my ears. It was the sustained screaming that had to be coming from the man I had gut shot beneath the camel’s legs. I lay there for a few more minutes, collecting my breath, and then I got to my feet and crossed to where the screaming man squirmed on the ground. I could see, without looking too closely, that I had shot him clean through the centre of his pubic bone.

  This was the part I dreaded. All my ghosts came to haunt me as I dispatched him quickly, trying vainly not to get any of his warm, unthreatening, painfully personal blood on my hands. I straightened up slowly, my eyes full of the look on his face and my hands covered in his blood. Scooping up a double handful of sand, I used it to try to clean the sticky gore away, but the blood was congealing between my fingers already and I fell to my hands and knees, retching up my guilt in painful spasms.

  After a while, I was able to get up and go back to Eagle Face, who was still rubbing his wrists and watching me with a strange expression on his face.

  “Who are you?” he asked me. “How did you come to be here? And why in the name of all the ancient gods would you be foolhardy enough to risk your life against such odds for a total stranger?”

  I grinned at him, shakily. “Not such a total stranger as you think,” I said. “My name is Varrus. Publius Varrus. A ghost from your past, returned to pay a debt.”

  A tiny flicker of apprehension appeared on his face as he thought for an instant that I might be telling the literal truth, and then his face broke into a great smile and he held out his hand to me. I was aware of the strength in his fingers as they gripped my forearm. His right eyebrow climbed high on his brow in an expression I was to become very familiar with.

  “Well, Publius Varrus,” he said. “We are well met this night, although I know I have never laid eyes on you before. You mistake me for someone else, I’m sure, but I am glad of your mistake.”

  “No mistake, Tribune. You have laid eyes on me before tonight. And hands.”

  “When? What do you mean?”

  “Just what I say. It was a long time ago, and there’s no reason why you should remember it. It’s enough that I do.”

  “If it caused you to save my life, then I thank God for your memory. Tell me about it.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the shadows surrounding us. “I’ll be glad to, but I think this is not the place. We had better move away from here. The water attracts too many visitors.”

  He looked around him. “You may be right, my friend, but I would dearly love to sleep for an hour before we move. I haven’t had much rest in the past few days, and none at all since our friends took me, yesterday.”

  “Could you stay awake for another hour? I left my horse among some rocks on a hill about half a league from here. It’s safer than this place. You can sleep all you want when we get back there.”

  “Haifa league?”

  “No more than that.”

  “Can you ride a camel?”

  I grimaced. It was as close as I could come to smiling. “Can anyone? I’ve been up on one. Can’t say I enjoyed the experience too much.”

  “It’s better than walking.”

  “Tribune, in this country, anything’s better than walking!”

  During the ride back to my hill of rocks my stomach settled down again, finally, and along the way I told him about where we had first met. It pleased me when he remembered the occasion and proved it by recalling that he had noticed my tears first, and the fact that I had been a beardless boy.

  “Beardless is right. And that’s not all I was lacking,” I told him. “That was my first campaign and my first battle. If you hadn’t noticed me there, it would have been my last one, too.” I told him of my search for him and my failure to trace him. “Where did you go? Why couldn’t I find you?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I moved on. I wasn’t with your lot in the first place —just passing by on my way to join my own legion. Your skirmish was over when we happened along. My men handed you over to your own medics. But you were completely paralyzed,, I thought. We didn’t expect you to live.”

  “Nobody did, but the paralysis wore off after a while.”

  He shivered, and I noticed how cold the night had become. “Here,” I said, “take my cloak. I have some extra gear and blankets with my horse, back there.”

  “Do you have any food? Real food, I mean?”

  “Legion food. Dried meal and corn, nuts, raisins and dates. Some dried meat, lots of water I got earlier, and two skins of wine I was taking back with me.”

  “Thank the gods! You have a guest for supper.”

  Staying astride a camel was more easily said than done. It seemed to take years to reach the bottom of the hill where I had left my horse. We talked in quiet voices all the way back, for sound travels far on the desert at night, and I told him that I was on my way back to Britain to join the Twentieth Legion, the famed Valeria Victrix, my first posting in my homeland since joining the Eagle Standards some seven years earlier. He was interested in how I had managed to secure the transfer, and I pointed out that I had not had a major furlough in six years of frontier duty. That was all very well, he said, and I had certainly earned a long leave, but it hardly qualified me for intercontinental and inter-legion transfer. He was right, of course, and I felt no reluctance in telling him how I had managed to finagle it.

  “I’m a centurion, Tribune. You know the breed. There’s not much a centurion with seniority can’t get, if he puts his mind to it. In my case, I was in a situation to perform a number of services for my commander. The kind of services he thought were worth rewarding.”

  He interrupted me, prompted, I would find out later, by the probity that was so much a part of his character. “I’m not sure I want to hear any more. It sounds to me as though the reward for you was a reward for himself, too. Safe back in Britain, you will be grateful, and unlikely to say anything that he could find embarrassing.”

  I caught his meaning and shook my head. “Not so, Tribune, with respect. There was nothing improper involved. My commander, the Legate Seneca, had a son who might have been a burden to him. I took the lad under. my wing and saw him properly fledged. That’s all there was to it.”

  He frowned. “Seneca? You are a friend of the Senecas?”

  I shook my head, bewildered at the sudden hostility in his voice. “No, Tribune, I’m just a simple centurion. The Legate asked me to keep an eye on his son and straighten him around; make a soldier out of him.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “I did. He wasn’t as difficult as he’d been made out to be. I just brought out the decency in him. The Legate was grateful, and here I am on my way home to Britain.”

  “Humph! You must be a man of great subtlety, to bring out the decency in a Seneca.” His voice was heavy with irony and dislike. I felt a surge of anger.

  “Well, Tribune,” I snapped, “I grieve if I’ve offended you.” He flipped his hand at me in an unmistakable order to be silent, and we continued for a while without speaking. When he spoke next, his voice was contrite.

  “Forgive me, Centurion. I have no right to berate you, and no reason. You cannot be expected to choose your commanders. There has been a long and bitter enmity between my family and the House of Seneca. Blood has been spilled for it over the years, and there is no love at all between us, from one generation to the next.”

  There was nothing I could say t
o that. It was none of my affair, and I had no wish to be inquisitive. I accepted his words and passed no comment. After a time he spoke again.

  “Home to Britain!” His voice sounded nostalgic. “All that greenery after all this sand. How much do you know about the Twentieth?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing, except that they’re famous. They’ve been called the Valeria Victrix since the days of Julius Caesar, and their legionary fortress has been at Deva, in Cambria, since Agricola’s campaign, about three hundred years ago. Apart from that, I only know I’m posted to the Second Millarian Cohort as replacement for its pilus prior. Apparently the man they had was killed and there’s no one really qualified to replace him from the existing crew. They have an acting cohort commander in place until I get there.” I grimaced to myself in the darkness. “Frankly, I’m not sure what that means, so I’m expecting the worst, in the hope that anything less than that will be bearable. The only other thing is that I’ve heard they’re not currently stationed in Deva — the Second Cohort, I mean. They’re in the north-east, at Eboracum.”

  “The Second of the Twentieth, eh?” Even in the dark, I could see the smile on his face as he shook his head.

  “What’s so funny? What are you smiling at?”

  He was grinning strangely to himself. “I was just thinking about our circumstances here,” he said. “You are here because of my enemy, even though indirectly, and you have saved my life. Yet your mode of address to me is decidedly lacking in military respect, and I’m not sure what I ought to do about it.”

  I stiffened at the censure in his voice. He was right, of course. I was only a centurion and he was a Military Tribune, and my deportment had not been militarily correct. But somehow, because of our circumstances, it had not seemed necessary to defer to him here in the middle of a desert when there were only the two of us around. Now it appeared that I had been wrong in my reading of the man. He was more of a martinet than I had thought. He must have read my mind, for he swung his camel right around close to mine, a broad smile on his face.

  “Relax, Varrus. We’re going to get along, you and I. This meeting was obviously fated. My name is Caius Britannicus. I, too, was on my way to Britain when I was taken. To the Second Cohort of the Twentieth Legion. I’m your new commanding officer. Haven’t I got a right to wonder what I’m going to do about you?”

  II

  For a period of weeks after the trap in the mountain pass, my whole world existed only in terms of the pain of my wound. Even now it is hard to describe. As a veteran, and the bearer of many scars picked up over years of duty in some savage places, I had thought myself familiar with pain. I was wrong. This experience of muscle and tendons and sinew shattered by the ripping spike of a hard-swung axe taught me just how little I had known. The pain I lived with had a wide range of intensity and textures, and I experienced it as a spectrum of pulsating colours, ranging from blazing white to a dull, harsh, throbbing red.

  Of all the torments I had to endure, the worst by far was caused by the natural, waste-producing functions of my own body. They became my most bitter and treacherous enemy, scourging me with unimaginable agonies each time I had to accommodate them. Mitros was gentle in his ministrations at such times, but not always sympathetic. On one occasion — he was in a particularly impatient mood — he told me brusquely that women endured far worse in childbirth and I should be grateful I was alive to feel pain. But it was only his skills and his magical opiates that saved my mind from breaking during that first month.

  Pain, however, like everything else in life, is transient. I began to mend, gradually, day by day, heartbeat by heartbeat. A time came when I could lie still and feel — almost explore — my pain, without wanting to scream like a baby. And a day came, much later, when I could lie on my back and think about things other than how much I hurt. From that point on, I began to mend visibly, and to talk, and to think rationally again.

  I spent many silent hours reviewing and analyzing the affinity between Britannicus and me, and how it had developed and prospered after our meeting in Africa.

  We had travelled back to Britain together, and by the time we disembarked at Lemanis in South Britain, each of us had a sound measure of the other’s capacities. I was comfortable with the relationship we had established — one of Staff officer and trusted subordinate — and I felt confident that Britannicus was, too.

  From Lemanis, we rented horses and made our way directly north to Londinium, the administrative centre of South Britain. There we reported to the Military Governor, to present our papers and gain official acknowledgement of our arrival. No one in Londinium had any time to waste with us. We were sent on our way — almost without rest — with a package of personal dispatches, a thirty-strong squadron of light cavalry under the command of a senior decurion, and an infantry detachment of one hundred and twelve replacements with six junior centurions. All of these the Tribune was instructed to deliver to the senior Legate in Deva, the fortress headquarters of the Twentieth Valeria Victrix for more than three centuries. We had expected to be sent directly to Eboracum where the Second Cohort of the Twentieth had been stationed on temporary duty for several years. The official military mind, however, continued to function in its own peculiar way.

  Deva lay in the hill country to the north-west, in Cambria. It had been built around 70 AD, during Julius Agri-cola’s campaign to complete the conquest of Britain. Its site had been chosen because it dominated the territory where the lands of three warlike tribes — the Brigantes, the Deceangli and the Ordovices — came together. However, after three hundred years of the Pax Romana, Deva’s original strategic importance had long been forgotten. Its location was now no more than damnably inconvenient. It took us five days of hard marching to make the journey there by road from Londinium.

  As a fortress, Deva was impressive and seemingly impregnable, exactly as one would expect after three hundred-odd years of continuous occupation by one of Rome’s proudest and oldest legions. We had less than one day to absorb it, however, before our orders took us back to the road again.

  We learned immediately upon our arrival that our initial intelligence — acquired in Africa — had been accurate. The Second Cohort of the Twentieth lay at Eboracum, on temporary duty with the Second Legion, the Augusta, another three days’ march to the north-east. The Legate who accepted our formal reporting for duty was surly and ill-tempered. He excoriated both of us mercilessly for having taken so long to get there — apparently we had been expected the previous week — and sent us on our way with ringing ears. My admiration for Britannicus grew as I watched the uncomplaining manner in which he accepted the injustice and the inefficiency and inconvenience being heaped upon him by incompetent superiors.

  From the outset of our relationship Britannicus invariably treated me with military correctness, slightly warmed by courtesy and consideration. I found him to be just, temperate, and dispassionate in his dealings with the men under his command. But he could be awesome in his wrath when provoked by incompetence or malfeasance. A rigid disciplinarian, he was implacable once he had decided that punishment was in order. And never, at any time, did he show any capacity for suffering fools gladly.

  In those days, Britain had been at peace for many years. Legionary duties consisted, in the main, of road-building and maintenance, policing the province, and maintaining civil order. The army was, as it always was, the enforcing power behind the law. Few circumstances called the troops in Britain out to spill blood: occasionally, raiding bands of Picts from Caledonia or Scots from Hibernia would make incursions into provincial territory and would have to be repulsed, or, much less common, uninvolved units would be called out to put down an army mutiny bred of anger, dissatisfaction, lack of discipline and the tedium of garrison life. The Second Cohort’s posting to Eboracum had come as the result of a mutiny. The rebellion had been a deep-rooted one. and the thousand-man Second of the Twentieth, the only uncontaminated cohort in Eboracum, had been detained there by an apprehensive praesid
ium for almost two years.

  Tribune Britannicus was ordered by the ill-mannered Legate in Deva to take command of the Second Cohort, get it out of Eboracum, and march it sixty miles south to Lindum, to relieve a unit of the Fourteenth Legion posted there. So he and I came together into the life of the Second Cohort, the new Tribune, Caius Britannicus, and his new pilus prior, Publius Varrus. And together we began to reshape it in the image of Caius Britannicus.

  It was fitting then, that almost two years later, we should be together when we first came face to face with the unthinkable — the opening action of a chain of events that was to alter all our lives, forever.

  According to the official report, it happened in the hour before dawn on the first night of August in the year of our Lord 367. The frontier bastion known as Hadrian’s Wall in the north of Britain was overrun by a federation of hostile tribes from Pictish Caledonia, aided in the east by a seaborne invasion of Saxons and in the west by a similar invasion of Hibernian Scots. That’s all it says. Roman historians do not write eloquently of Roman defeats.

  Be that as it may, the dimensions of the disaster were appalling. Hadrian’s Wall was eighty miles long. At no point in that length was it less than fifteen feet high, and it was fronted along its entire length by a V-shaped ditch ten feet deep and thirty wide. It had a mile castle at every mile of its length, with two small, fortified watch-turrets between each pair, plus a series of sixteen fully garrisoned forts, spaced approximately six miles apart. It was defended at all times by a force of not less than three thousand — regular auxiliary infantry from time to time, depending upon local conditions and the availability of manpower, but mainly local conscripts, citizen farmers and mercenaries. Always mercenaries. And the whole thing collapsed in one hour on that black August night.