The Skystone

by Jack Whyte

  My mind could not encompass the appalling implications of this new thought. No man can visualize the end of the world in personal terms, and Rome was the world. The barbarian states outside the Empire’s frontiers were Ultima Thule — so far away as to be beyond imagining, I tried to ignore the terrifying thought of it, without much success, and without making any progress towards gaining a rational perspective on how our lives here in Britain would be affected by the end of Rome. I finally duped myself into accepting the impossibility of the premise and into accepting the thesis that this was simply an eccentricity of Caius Britannicus. Every man, I reasoned, is entitled to one personal folly.

  After a week, I found myself buying silver ore and familiarizing myself with the properties of the metal.

  After Alaric’s return — within the month, as he had promised — I found myself spending endless hours in the study of proportion and of Celtic art.

  After that time, I was never free of a compulsion to fashion silver crosses of all shapes and sizes.

  About a month after Alaric’s return from Londinium, on an evening when I was working on the design of the first pectoral cross I was to make for him, my servant came to tell me that there was a soldier at my door wishing to talk with me, and I bade him bring the man in.

  I saw immediately from his trappings that my visitor was an aide to the Military Commander, Antonius Cicero. He drew himself to attention as he entered my room.

  “Centurion Publius Varrus?” I nodded acquiescence. His salute was crisp and perfect. “The Legate Cicero sends his compliments, sir. This scroll was delivered to him today by military courier with a request that he forward it to you.”

  I thanked him and took the scroll he proffered, immediately conscious of the weight of it. As the soldier left, I noticed that it was already dusk. I lit several lamps against the gathering darkness and then decided to forage in the kitchen while there was still enough light to see by. I loaded a platter with bread, cold meat and some pickled onions, poured myself a flagon of Equus’ brew and went back to examine the weighty scroll. It was sealed with the signet of Britannicus. Surprised, for I had never had any such communication from him before, I prised the seal open gently with my thumb-nail, being careful not to break the wax, and unrolled the missive. I was even more surprised then to discover that the thick parchment was only the wrapper for four sheets of fine papyrus covered with Britannicus’ neat, characteristic script. Forgetting food and drink for the moment, I pulled a lamp closer to me and began to read.

  Caius Britannicus

  to:

  Publius Varrus

  Greetings — This for your reading only:

  I have been remembering the story of the sword your grandfather fashioned for your father, who died abroad without ever seeing it. I hope the fact that you are now making one for me is not ominous.

  It always surprises me to learn again that the affairs of Empire proceed irrespective of our petty affairs here in Britain, and that the Powers who command the destinies of men and peoples remain aware of the minor functionaries in the provinces. I am commanded by the Senate and the People of Rome to proceed immediately to Rome, and thence to Constantinople, where I will be granted the Consulship of Numidia by the Emperor Valentinian himself, and be provided with the means and the authority to execute all of the appropriate consular functions within the Province of Numidia in the proper style and fashion.

  The appointment, which is generally regarded as the supreme military achievement, is of course a great honour, and I suspect that Theodosius had a deal to do with the bestowal of it. Had it occurred

  even five years ago, I would have been delighted. Now, however, I perceive it as something of a mixed benison, a blend of inconvenient duty and dutiful inconvenience. You, however, and my wife are the only two souls to whom I could ever confide such a viewpoint.

  Five more years under the sun of Africa! The prospect does not appeal to me. Five more years of dealing with the fractious and contentious nomads native to the land appeals to me even less, particularly since mine will be the head on which will fall the odium and opprobrium if all does not go well under my care during my term of office. When have things ever gone well in Africa for five consecutive years? Only Scipio ever emerged from there with true glory, and the Consular Army that won him his title “Africanus” was made up of four real legions! My soldiers will be conscripts and mercenaries.

  That, however, is the pessimistic view. The other side of the medallion presents a different face. At the conclusion of my term of office, I will be free to retire with full military and civil honours to the province of my choice — to return home, in other words — with all the pecuniary stipends concomitant with senatorial and consular rank. That means, dear friend, that at the age of fifty I will be a retired landowner, and wealthy enough to indulge my whims and realize my dreams. Remember my request of you!

  Another advantage, I am told, of proconsular status is that I may transport my family and keep them with me in comfort and luxury. I am still

  unconvinced of the wisdom of such a course, but Heraclita is adamant. She is tired of staying behind, an uncomplaining victim of the military life, and she believes it will be good for my son Picus to see Rome, Africa and the Emperor’s Court at Byzantium. (Constantinople is too new a name for such an old city!) I find myself inclined to bow to her wishes in this, in spite of what a small voice tells me is my better judgment.

  Should you have reason to travel to the west while we are gone, you will be welcome in my villa, close to Aquae Sulis. It will be tended in our absence by my brother-in-law, Quintus Varo. You will find him amiable and a useful friend, should you have need of one. He owns the villa next to mine and our lands are contiguous. I have told him of you. He will make you welcome, as will my own sister, Luceiia, who was married to his wife’s brother.

  I have written these lines mindful of my promise to visit you soon. Alas, it will be longer than we could have anticipated. Keep my new sword safe for me, and find me a skystone while I am gone.

  Your friend ever,

  Britannicus

  Proconsul of Numidia! I was elated for him, and at the same time worried by his accurate diagnosis of the problems that would face him there. However, I was confident, overall, that he would do well. I reread his letter several times then, thinking that five years without seeing him would be a long and lonely time. He and I had been comrades now for longer than that, and these past two years were the only time we had been parted. Five years! My natural pride and pleasure at the honour done my friend gave way to despondency, and I found myself staring sightlessly at Bishop Alaric’s Celtic scrolls. I started to eat the food I had prepared for myself but it tasted like sawdust, and even Equus’ ale was flavourless. Thoroughly depressed, I threw on my cloak and set out to find Plautus, to drown my sorrow with him in a tavern.

  XII

  There was a spirit of resurgence, of renewed optimism in Britain in the years that followed Theodosius’ campaign against the invaders, and Equus and I profited handsomely by it. Our business grew rapidly; we had to more than double the size of our premises, and hire new workers regularly. By the end of our fifth year of operations, we had four apprentices, one of whom was Equus’ own oldest son, Lannius, and six smiths in addition to ourselves. Equus had shown a natural aptitude for running our affairs, maintaining a tight but flexible production schedule and handling the day-to-day administration. My major function was how finding new contracts for our services and, maintaining cordial relationships with our existing customers, the major one being the army of occupation. Life had been good to us.

  My friendship with Alaric, Bishop of Verulamium, had deepened so much over the years that I had come to regard him as I did Equus and Plautus, almost as a brother. I seldom thought of him as a man of God, except when the work I did for him reminded me of his calling. The first cross I made for him had been exactly what he wanted, and in the making of it I had fallen in love with silver, taking great pleasure in
the working of it — its ductility, its purity, its texture and its lustrous richness. It was a love that did not detract from my love of iron, but rather reflected it, for only in the polished newness of silver could I find a resemblance to the brilliance of my skystone dagger.

  Plautus, showing the real mind that lay beneath his abrasive, rude-tongued public persona, took great pleasure in my silverwork and believed the tale of the skystone without reservation. He, too, asked me whether there might be other such stones lying around, and received the same response that I had given Britannicus. Undeterred, Plautus took a pragmatic approach. Without giving any reasons for his demand, he ordered his patrols to ask questions everywhere they went about strange noises, explosions, falling stones and the like, whether they occurred day or night. In response, we heard some outlandish reports, two of which took Plautus and me off together in the hopes of finding another skystone. In one spot we found a massive oak tree, long dead, sundered by some cataclysmic force in the distant past, and in the other no more than an enormous pile of jagged rocks that had split from a high cliff and obliterated a valley at the foot of it. Plautus’ orders stood, however, and the inquiries continued, for which I was grateful.

  On a warm evening, in the spring of my sixth year in Colchester, I sat alone in the small garden at the rear of my house, examining the latest in a series of silver crosses I had made for Alaric and waiting for Equus and Plautus to arrive for dinner. My crosses were growing more and more artistic, and this one was certainly unique. I was not quite sure whether I liked it at all, now that it was finished.

  I had taken a fancy the previous year to combine the cross upon which Christ had died with the other symbol of his degradation, the crown of thorns thrust on his head by his Roman tormentors. The end result had been a beautiful but quite impractical piece, for the tines of the realistic silver thorns caught so often and so badly on the clothing of the wearer that the thing could not be worn at all. It was decorative, but useless, so I had melted it again to reuse the silver. Now, months later, I was looking at its successor. I had represented the crown this time as a plain, wide circle of silver, cut into quadrants by the arms and uprights of the cross, and into the circle I had engraved a graphic representation of the interwoven thorns, using an adaptation of the stylized bramble work so common in Celtic art. To balance the centrality of the circle, I had then widened the extensions of the cross into wedge shapes. The effect was different from anything I had seen before, but, as its creator, I could only hope that Alaric would like it. I was prepared to let my own judgment wait upon his.

  As I sat there musing, the sky, which had clouded over unnoticed by me, opened suddenly in a torrential downpour. I scrambled to the door and stopped under the eaves to watch the effect of the heavy rain on the growing things in the garden. The weight of it was so great that the young, new flowers reeled beneath it, flattened to the ground. I stayed there until its force abated, and then I remained there, staring at something I had seen before. It was something anomalous that had nagged at me in an undefined way for all the time that I had lived in the house since my return, yet something I had never really paid proper attention to. It was one of a pair of military pikes that my grandfather had nailed diagonally to opposite walls of the garden for decoration. Looking at them now, their rusted heads streaming with rainwater, I had a flash of recognition. They were very old and rusted; at least, the heads were very old. The shafts looked comparatively new. By rights, these pike-heads should have been with all the other old weapons in my grandfather’s collection, protected from further deterioration. Why, then, were they here, out in the open, exposed to the weather, mounted as useless, almost frivolous decorations on a wall?

  My skin broke into goose-flesh as I realized that they must be there for a purpose, for I suddenly knew beyond a doubt that it was totally out of character for my grandfather to treat old weapons this way. But for what purpose? I knew only that it concerned me — that it had to concern me. There was no other explanation possible.

  Excited without knowing why, I stepped out into the falling rain and crossed to the nearest pike to examine it more closely. It was as I had thought: the head was almost rusted through in places, but the wooden shaft looked strong, brand new, in fact. I tried to prise it off the wall, but it had been nailed securely by three big, double-pointed, U-shaped nails. Sure now that I had a mystery on my hands, I went and found a crowbar and levered the nails carefully from the wall. The pike fell heavily to the ground as I sprung the last one. It was at least ten times heavier than it had any right to be; I could hardly lift it from the ground. Astonished, I knelt down on the wet grass and drew my dagger and with its point I soon solved the mystery.

  The shaft was made of strips of wood bound together over a central tube of tin. As soon as I realized this, I made short work of the outside cladding and bared the whole tube, which ran the entire length of the shaft. Impatient now, I hacked at the soft tin with my dagger blade — and exposed the gleam of gold. I rose to my feet, placing the ball of one foot against the middle of the hollow shaft, and wrenched the end upwards. The soft tin split at the point where I had punctured it and a shower of golden coins cascaded to the wet grass. I stared at them in disbelief and then ran to the other wall and tore off the second pike to pour out a similar rain of golden pieces. I was rich! I stood there in the rain, blinking vacuously at the golden pile at my feet. Then I turned and slowly went inside.

  Equus was coming towards me from the front door as I entered. He frowned as soon as he saw the expression on my face and asked me what was wrong. I shook my head, unable to speak, and pointed a thumb over my shoulder to the garden. Still frowning, he stalked purposefully to the door and out of sight. The expression on his face as he passed me struck me suddenly as being very funny, and I began to laugh. My laughter grew to painful proportions when he came back in from the garden, his face as blank and shocked as my own must have been. I was hugging my middle, choking on my mirth by this time, and the incredulity on his face drew away the remainder of my strength, so that my legs gave out under me and I fell to the floor. His expression changed from incredulity to incomprehension, then to bewilderment, and finally to weak, uncertain laughter. By the time Plautus arrived several minutes later, we were both rolling helpless on the floor, and his face unmanned us even further.

  Eventually, inevitably, sanity returned, and we took Plautus outside to see what lay there glistening among the long, wet grasses. In all, there were more than four thousand gold auri, each of which, pure and unpared, was worth a cartload of silver denarii at current values. Most of the coins dated from the days of the early Caesars. Some bore the head of Claudius and some of Nero, although most of them were Tiberian, but there were others that bore the head of Augustus himself. There were also more than two hundred newer coins, dating from very recent Emperors.

  All three of us were stunned at the richness of the hoard, but it was Plautus, pragmatic as ever, who began asking questions.

  “Why would he hide them there, like that?” he asked me, and I had an answer for him.

  “That was my grandfather. What better place could he have chosen?” I said. “He left the pikes there knowing that sooner or later I’d be bound to notice something wrong. He knew that I knew him well enough to understand that he would never profane an old weapon like that without a reason. All I had to do was look at it and think about it.”

  “But you might never have noticed it!”

  I was not to be gainsaid, however. “Plautus,” I said, “I would have, sooner or later. Believe me. Today is the first time I have been in this garden when it rained, and I saw it.”

  It was Equus’ turn to ask a question. “What would have happened if you had not come back from the wars?”

  “What do you think? My uncle would still have lived here, or one of my cousins. It would not matter who lived here, in fact. The tin base of the tubes would have rusted out in another two or three years, and the coins would have fallen out onto the grou
nd of their own weight. That’s why they were mounted diagonally. If I hadn’t come home, someone would eventually have benefited. I believe that’s what my grandfather intended. That’s the kind of man he was.”

  “But where did all this money come from in the first place?” This was Plautus. “Wouldn’t he have left you some explanation, somewhere?”

  “He probably did. I haven’t even looked.” I picked up one of the broken tin tubes and there, tucked into the top of it, was a tightly rolled parchment. I unrolled it and read it aloud.

  “‘Reader, I hope you are Publius Varrus. If you are, then you have solved my riddle, justified my faith in you and earned the reward you must now be contemplating. The coins are yours by right. A few of them I earned throughout my years here, working in my smithy. The others, the older coins, I came by honestly, unearthing them by accident when I started to excavate the cellar under the forge.’”

  I looked at Equus inquiringly, but he shrugged his shoulders and made a face indicating that he had known nothing of this discovery. I continued reading.

  “‘The most recent of the hoard were minted during the reign of Claudius, so I assume they have been hidden in the earth here in Colchester since the days of his reign, when Colchester was built upon the ruins of Camulodunum. If that is so, they have lain hidden for almost three hundred years. Use them as you will. I have no use for them. If you are reading this, then you are safe and my prayers have been answered. Live long and happily.’”

  I felt my eyes mist over as I read these last words, and none of us spoke for several minutes. Then Plautus spoke again.

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “What? The coins?”