The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  In the profound silence that followed, Quintus, in his hiding place, watched his grandfather look around him slowly, eyeing each of his listeners in turn.

  “You need to pay heed to what I said,” Titanius continued. “I told you I arrived at the place four days after the event took place, and yet I saw it happen. And how could that be, was all you asked. Well, it could be, and it was, because this incident took place on a more massive scale than anyone could comprehend.

  “I saw it because I was looking up when it took place. In the space of an instant, and without warning of any kind, an enormous, indescribable noise filled our whole world, snatching the living breath from our chests and shaking the very air around us, and a gigantic ball of fire shut out the afternoon sky. It came from behind me, screaming across the firmament from east to west and turning the blue of the sky to smoke-roiled blackness in less than a blink. My horse spun around and instantly fell dead beneath me as the thing passed over us, and I ended up face down in the mud, grovelling like a terror-stricken slave and doubting my own sanity. Then all the world went white in one searing moment of…of what I can only think of as unnatural, even supernatural light, and there came a sound the like of which I have never heard again. Whatever it was that had passed above us, it deafened many of our men and blinded others, some of them for days, and others forever.”

  No one moved or breathed.

  “One moment the day was tranquil and all was as it should be, and in the next instant the world was filled with noise and chaos, our army reduced to a state of gibbering, mindless terror. The western sky turned red, pulsing like a living heart before it quickly died away into roiling brown and black, smoky darkness, shot through with fire that engulfed the mountains beyond our horizon. But that face-down mud bath might have saved my life, or at least my vision, for it put my back towards the flash when it happened. All the men who were blinded that day had been facing west, looking towards the mountains when that blast of light occurred.”

  He moved to where Quintus’s mother sat listening in open-mouthed horror and reached out to take her hand in both of his. “I swear to you, Daughter,” he said, “on the honour of my name and that of your children, that every word of what I have said is true.” He released her hand and she sat frowning, her hand upraised still, her wide eyes fixed upon his face.

  Marcus Varrus shook his head. “It was four days, you said, before you visited the spot where Provo and his men vanished, never to be found. Why did it take you so long?”

  “Because we were that far away, with a range of mountains between us and where Provo and his people were supposed to be. The entire catastrophe—be it an explosion or an eruption—happened late in the afternoon, but it was almost as disastrous for us as it was for those poor whoresons who took the brunt of it. I know that sounds bizarre, but it is no exaggeration. What happened that afternoon came close to destroying not merely my command but my career as a soldier, and to this day I have never told anyone about it in detail.”

  “Never?” Marcus asked.

  His father looked at him, and in his hiding place young Quintus was astonished to realize that there was no anger in the old man’s face, and there had been no goading challenge in his father’s question. He could not remember when he had last heard the two men speak to each other with genuine civility.

  “Never,” Titanius Varrus said. “Your mother has heard the tale before, many years ago, soon after the events took place, but I have never spoken of it to another living soul. What would there have been to discuss, with someone who had not been there? Judge from your own reaction to what you have just heard, and believe me when I tell you that no one who had not been there and witnessed the aftermath could ever begin to imagine the scope of it. And as for trying to describe it…” He grunted a sound that might have been a dismissive laugh. “There are no words powerful enough. Not in my mind, and not in all the books ever written. There are no words…”

  He walked to the head of the table and resumed his seat, waving Quintus’s father to his own chair as he did so. “Sit down,” he said. “I don’t know if I can talk much more about this, after so many years, but now I am willing to try, at least, and it will take time. We might as well be comfortable.”

  He turned then to his wife. “Alexia, you might not wish to hear this, so if you prefer to leave I will not be offended.”

  The old lady stirred slightly and turned to face her husband. Quintus wondered how she would respond, for she was notoriously sharp-tongued, but all she did was shrug.

  Her husband nodded. “As you wish,” he said, then drew a deep breath.

  “I always detested Dacia,” he said. “It’s a foul, unfriendly place, unfit for human habitation, and we were deep in the heart of it, in the region the locals call Carpathia. We had been there for more than two months, a half-strength legionary force of five cohorts. The high command didn’t think the opposition we were facing merited the attention of a full legion, and so we were detached as a special task force. Each of our cohorts had a full complement of six hundred fighting men—ten sixty-man maniples—with appropriate support staff and a full century of auxiliary forces, specially trained locals recruited from the surrounding region and thoroughly familiar with fighting in that kind of terrain. We numbered more than six thousand personnel, and I was the commanding legate.

  “It had been a brutal campaign, against a force made up of Visigoths and Vandals—that’s what we believed, at any rate, for we never came close enough to them to discover whether it was true or not. They were mountain fighters, though, and they were on their home ground, hitting us hard and withdrawing before we could react. They had started raiding south into our jurisdiction from the Danube territories towards the end of May, and they had been leading us on a chase ever since, using hit-and-run tactics that we were almost powerless to fight.

  “They would hide from our sight for several weeks—an easy thing to do in those endless, forested hills—and then they would hit us from all sides at once, striking hard and inflicting heavy casualties, then disappearing like smoke before we could form our battle lines. We were practically helpless among those trees, as you can imagine. Our auxiliaries were a godsend, but there were only a hundred of them to begin with, and we had no replacements for them as they fell.

  “Eventually we grew familiar with the terrain, and we worked out a plan to bring the bastards to bay. We would split our force in two, to catch them between a hammer and an anvil at the southern end of a chain of mountains high enough to stop them running away. I took three cohorts along the main road on the eastern flank of the mountains—though ‘main road’ is too generous for what was little more than a goat track—while Provo took his force down along the western flank, on the other side of the range. Theirs was the more difficult route, for they had no road at all and had to traverse cliffs and slopes that were sometimes close to vertical, but they were able to make better progress because we had their baggage with us.

  “But less than a week after we had set out, some kind of pestilence broke out among Provo’s legionaries, and it decimated them in a matter of days, according to his scouts, who had finally caught up to us after days of searching.

  “My force was close to the south end of the mountain range by that time, about five miles from our goal and about fifteen miles south of where Provo had been forced to make camp and allow his men to rest. He sent word with the scouts that he would come to me in person to report his situation, because he was afraid his men were unfit to fight and he wanted to talk to me. He said that after his scouts got back and told him where to find us, he’d come directly across the mountain separating us.”

  “And did he?”

  Titanius shrugged. “I never heard from him again. He must have died with his men.”

  A brief silence settled over the group, until Marcus Varrus said, musingly, “No one ever speaks of Dacia nowadays. I don’t even know where it is.”

  “And that is as it should be,” his father said.
“It’s an abominable place, mostly untracked forests and unclimbable mountains. The Black Sea is its eastern border, and its southern one is the north bank of the Danube. And in the north and west, it’s shut in by the mountains. The entire country is covered in impenetrable forests, with scarcely a usable road in the whole godforsaken place. Those of us who were tasked with holding and maintaining it were glad when we abandoned it to the Goths, back in the thousand and twenty-fifth year of Rome—what the Christians now call the year 272.”

  “That was three years before I was born,” Marcus said.

  His father quirked one eyebrow upwards. “Aye,” he growled. “I suppose it was…Anyway, we were there two years before that—were there for five years, in fact, before they called us home—but it would have been late in 270 when the thunderbolt fell.”

  Another pause ensued, and Quintus tried vainly to hitch himself closer to the partition between himself and the speakers, but his face was already pressed against the fretted carving of the screen that concealed him. He heard his father say, “The thunderbolt. Is that what you call it?”

  Titanius nodded, his expression sober.

  “A thunderbolt the likes of which the gods would hurl in ancient times? Is that what you mean?”

  Another nod and no change in the older man’s expression. “Precisely the same. Had you seen what I saw that afternoon, you would have no thought of questioning the name.”

  “It…fell, you said. Did you see it fall?”

  “No. I saw it pass above my head, but I didn’t see it strike with my own eyes.”

  Everyone at the table sat silent after that, and to Quintus it seemed as though they had all been stricken mute, incapable of asking what he himself was on the point of crying out to know: what was a thunderbolt, and where had this one come from?

  “So what did you do then?” his father asked eventually. “After the thing had fallen, I mean.”

  Titanius shook his head. “I have no idea. I can’t remember…” He looked around at his family. “I know that must sound like dereliction of my duty, but I swear it was no such thing. I’ve tried ever since that day to recall what happened afterwards, but I have no memories at all. I suspect, though, that the truest answer would be nothing. For it had seemed to all of us when the thunderbolt came down on us that the world was ending. We did nothing for the longest time, and I have no idea how much time went by before we began to gather ourselves together and regain our wits. We had been plunged into chaos in a single heartbeat, our formations destroyed and our military readiness wiped out as though it had never been. Our pack animals all ran amok, screaming and bawling in terror, and most of the wagons they had been pulling were overturned and shattered beyond repair.”

  He paused. “It was the screams of the men that frightened me most, though. I must have been deafened at first, for I remember my hearing came back to me very gradually. When first I looked up from the mud, the whole world was silent. There were empty-faced men walking and staggering everywhere I looked, most of them in armour and none of them in control of themselves or anything else. They all looked demented. And though I could hear nothing, I could see they were all screaming, as mindlessly terrified as the beasts, and I was no exception. Seeing my own soldiers all around me, lost and witless, appalled me to the depths of my being. Officers and men alike, uncomprehending and bereft of hope…

  “And then my hearing started to return and all the horror of the screaming settled over me—the screams of maimed and mutilated men and animals and the unhinged, mindless screams of men demented by fright they were ill equipped to handle.” He stopped again, staring into nothingness, then added, “And yet, terrified and demoralized as we were in the chaos that now surrounded us, we were days away from where the thunderbolt landed.”

  Titanius looked over at his son, his head tilted slightly to one side. “And so, perhaps you can understand why I chose never to speak of it with anyone. What could I have said? How could I explain it? There had never been anything like it. Our chief surgeon was a Greek. He came up with a Greek word for it. Called it cataclusmos, a kind of unimaginable disaster.”

  “So you made no move to look for Provo at that time?”

  “Look for him?” It seemed for a moment that Titanius might smile. “Nobody even thought of him. We had enough troubles of our own to keep us all hard at work that night. It was only after our recovery efforts started that we began to discover we had more than a hundred men who had been maimed—blinded and deafened. How were we to deal with that? Our surgeons were trained to deal with battle wounds. They were ignorant of what to do to help those men. And that is just one minor example of what we confronted.

  “No, we didn’t think about Provo and his men until the afternoon of the following day, once we were satisfied we had returned everything in our camp to some kind of order. It never occurred to any of us that any harm might have come to them. We knew they were more than fifteen miles away, and on the other side of the mountain range, so it would not have seemed possible that Provo’s people might have experienced anything similar to our own upheaval, let alone worse. But then two of our scouts came in from the west side, bringing stories that would have been unbelievable the day before. The news they brought back of the things they’d seen, distant scenes of raging fires and roiling chaos, was dire enough to start us moving quickly.

  “I decided to go looking for Provo myself and ordered a full century, a hundred men, to march with me, each man with rations for a week. We left at dawn the next day, in pouring rain that lasted the entire day and made every step a misery.”

  “And it took you two more days to find Provo?”

  “No, it took us two days to find the place where he might once have been.” Titanius cocked his head again the way he had earlier, as though trying to hear something just beyond the range of his ears. “We never did find Provo, or any of his men,” he said. “We never even discovered where they had been when the thunderbolt fell. We never went to look for them. It would have been pointless.

  “We had been fighting against rain and mud and slippery slopes all day long, clambering hand over fist every step of the way up ever-increasing inclines as we fought to reach the crest of that damned mountain. The sky ahead of us was dark—black dark, the air filled with foul smoke. It stank abominably. There was no sign of flames or living fires, just that wretched, all-consuming stench of burning filth.

  “The first of our men reached the top of the ridge eventually, a cause for celebration at any other time. I was in the second wave of climbers, and I remember thinking it strange that the men above us were as quiet as they were. Strange and ominous. When I made it to the crest they were all standing with their backs to me, staring into the distance ahead, and something inside me died when I saw what they were looking at.”

  He fell silent and everyone waited for him to resume, but it became clear that he had become lost again in his own memories.

  Marius cleared his throat. “What did you see, Father?”

  “A wasteland,” Titanius said quietly, his eyes focused on some inner vista that no one there could share with him. “A wasted land unlike anything I have ever witnessed.”

  “Well, you’ve already said the place was unfit for human habitation.” Quintus noted that his father’s tone was decidedly less contentious than before.

  “That was how it was in the normal run of things—a pigsty of a place. What I saw from that mountaintop, though…that was completely different, something stunning to contemplate.” He frowned. “Have you ever seen grass bend?” The old man did not wait for an answer. “What I saw reminded me of a thing I had seen with the Emperor as a boy, but had forgotten for thirty years. That was near the town of Salona, in Dalmatia, where Diocles and I grew up. We couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old, and it was near harvest time. We had been playing wolves with old Ankora’s sheep, chasing them and frightening them half to death, when the old man himself caught us in the act. We knew we were in for a floggin
g if he came close enough to recognize us, but we knew, too, that he was more than half-blind, so we ran to hide among his standing crop. It had been a perfect year for growing grain and the crop was perfectly ripe, golden and heavy and thick, and we dived into it. Diocles landed beside me, giggling with that kind of insane glee that boys sometimes use to mask the terror of being caught and punished.

  “He had been bending sideways as he ran, and as he fell flat, sliding along the ground, I was astonished to see what happened to the stalks of grain around him. They flattened and radiated outwards ahead of him in a wave, a wall of straws flattened, creating a circular pattern like those you sometimes see when a gust of wind strikes a field of grain. I saw exactly the same pattern on the day I stood on that mountaintop in Dacia and looked down on the devastation in the valley below.”

  “Waves of grain?”

  Quintus could hear that mixture of not quite sneering contempt and patronizing condescension his father used when questioning Quintus about his sins. But if his grandfather noticed it, he ignored it.

  “No, not exactly,” Titanius Varrus murmured. “I was looking down on what had been a thick evergreen forest, undisturbed since time began. Yet each full-grown, straight-boled tree, four or five times the height of a mounted man, had been flattened like a stalk of straw. The valley below us was vast, wide enough for the far side to be invisible through the smoke in the distance and long enough, following the swell of the mountain chain, to suggest it might be ten miles or more in extent, north to south. At the centre of it all, perhaps a mile and a half from where I stood, was a black abyss, and from it the destruction stretched outwards as far as I could see on every side.”