The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  The heavy rain that started soon after the wagons left the hostelry, and the happenstance of the two wagons being joined during the storm by a third, also driven by two men, were merely unexpected bonuses. No one knew what the new wagon contained and no one cared. Whatever its cargo, it would have new owners before it came close to Isca.

  Isca was the most southwesterly garrisoned town in Britain, at the end of what was notoriously the worst stretch of road in the province, on the peninsula known as Cornua, the Horn, which the locals mispronounced as Cornwall. The terrain there had defied the finest of Rome’s road-building engineers at the very start of the conquest of the island hundreds of years earlier, before Rome, in its imperial wisdom, decided that the peninsula was too isolated and too savage to be worth the effort and expense of a pacification campaign. Cornua, they had decided, held nothing that Rome needed, and so the road had remained unfinished, and Cornwall itself had lain virtually undisturbed for two hundred years, since the time of the emperor Claudius.

  Legend said that the five-mile stretch of road to Isca had been near impossible to build because of the terrain. The land through which it ran was ludicrously fractured—so broken and riven and shattered that it was close to impassable in places, criss-crossed with fast-flowing streams and rivers, bizarrely interspersed with bogs and lakes. The very bedrock in the region, it was said, had been impossible to build on, brittle and untrustworthy, incapable of underpinning viaducts or permanent structures of any kind. The road the Roman engineers had built there had been forced to follow the dictates of the land’s contours rather than adopt the arrow-straight, tightly engineered thrusts of the typical Roman iter.

  About three-quarters of a mile from the end of the rough section, at the bottom of a steeply winding descent through a tunnel of ancient trees that had overarched the roadway for more than a hundred years, there was a clearing containing a cavern that had been used for centuries as a sheltering point by travellers and as a rallying point by thieves and brigands. For more than a decade now the clearing had been policed by patrols from the garrison at Isca. There had been no robberies there for three years, though, and the patrols had recently been withdrawn.

  That was where the watcher from the ditch was headed.

  Far above him, on a tightly curving downhill bend of the looping road, a man called Marcus Licinius Cato sat on the passenger’s side of the driver’s bench on the third wagon and watched through narrowed eyes the edge of the cobblestoned roadway on his left as it seemed to disappear beneath the rim of the wheel below him. The cart’s rear wheels lurched sideways across the wet stones, threatening to slide off the other side of the narrow road. The sideways movement forced the horses to brace themselves awkwardly against the yawing, dragging weight at their backs.

  The downslope here was more severe than any Cato could remember seeing anywhere, even among the mountains in the north, and he was thankful that the road was as serpentine as it was. With fewer twists and turns and with longer, straighter descents, it might have been impossible to control the wagon. In the current deluge, the road was lethally difficult.

  Watching the edge of the roadbed as it vanished beneath him, Cato could see this passage would be dangerous even in dry weather. He glanced up, searching the sky for lightness, but even as he looked he knew he was being foolish. The rain had been lashing down for more than an hour already, and each time he thought it could not sustain itself in such volume for much longer, it seemed to grow heavier. And on this particular stretch of road, the noise was deafening. The broad-leaved trees on either side, plane and elm and chestnut and oak, were enormous, their tops arching above the roadway to form a tunnel, and the falling rain hammered relentlessly against the canopy, from where it poured down onto the arched, tightly stretched leather covering of the wagon, creating a noise like the thunder of a thousand demented drummers.

  From the corner of his eye he saw his companion Ludo turn slightly towards him, craning his neck in preparation to shout, and he leaned quickly sideways, cupping a hand over his ear to listen.

  “This is…shit!”

  It was impossible to hear everything, even with the words shouted right into his ear. “What is?” he yelled back at the top of his lungs, afraid for a moment that he might have missed seeing something, but the other man merely flapped a hand upwards at the storm before grasping the reins again.

  “This whole…I’m starting to…gods are pissed…The old gods, not the new one.”

  “You need help? The brake?”

  “Brake’s useless…tits on a bull! Watch out!”

  Cato flinched sideways, away from the sudden splintering noise as a heavy branch ripped away from a treetop and came sweeping towards him. Just before it struck him, it stopped short and whipped down and back, lashing the wooden side of the wagon beneath the driver’s bench, and he saw that it had not completely broken free of the tree but was still anchored to the bole by a strip of bark that had undoubtedly saved his life. And at that instant, as though some god had clapped his hands, the rain stopped and the wind died. It was a stupefying moment because of its completeness. The rain and the wind simply stopped, instantly, so that even the sound of the still-falling cascades from the trees overhead seemed part of the enormous silence that ensued.

  The horses stopped moving, the wagon stopped moving, and the men on the driver’s bench stopped breathing. So profound and sudden was the stillness that Cato realized he could hear the rain receding through the forest on his left.

  “By the Christ,” Ludo said quietly. “I’ve never seen anything the like of that before.”

  “Nor have I,” Cato said, paying no heed to the Christian reference. Ludo said whatever came into his head and held no reverence for any god, ancient or new. “That’s the kind of suddenness that makes grown men afraid.”

  “Aye, men like me,” the other growled. “I just about shit myself there. But it looks like I’m not the only one. Them other fellows have stopped, too.”

  At the end of the vicious downhill twist they had been negotiating, just before the roadbed swung into another turn, the wagon ahead of them had stopped in the middle of the road. The one ahead of it was already out of sight around the bend.

  All around them, the sound of dripping water faded as the last droplets fell from the surrounding trees, and the silence seemed to spread.

  “He’s getting out,” Ludo growled as the driver of the cart ahead climbed down to the ground and spread his arms, arching his back to relieve the kinks. Then he turned to look back and up to where they sat watching him.

  “Quiet, suddenly, isn’t it?”

  The other driver clearly understood the tone, if not the words, of Cato’s shouted question, for he answered it fluently and cheerfully in a language of which Cato understood no single word. Whereupon the man spun around and hoisted himself back up onto his bench, talking in the same outlandish tongue to his companion. Moments later, the wagon started moving again with a clatter of hooves and iron tires. Cato turned to look wide-eyed at Ludo, who was rubbing rain from his nose with the back of his hand.

  “Did you understand any of that?”

  Ludo sniffed. “No, not much more ’n you. But it was British.”

  “Didn’t sound like any British I ever heard.”

  “Yup.” There was no doubt in Ludo’s voice. “That was Cornish. That’s the way they talk down here in the Cornua. Like they’re chewing every word and sucking on the vowels. So what d’you want to do now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it looks like the rain might be finished, so do we drive on, or d’you want to dry off a bit? There’s towels in the big chest at your back there, and we could wait for Leon and the others to catch up.” He looked behind him and shook his head. “Wonder where they are, anyway.”

  Cato looked back at him, grinning and shaking his own head. “They won’t be far away, if they haven’t drowned already. You’d really stop right here and try to dry off, even though we’re being drip
ped on from a thousand trees and our wagon’s perched on a slope that would terrify most people we know?”

  Ludo shrugged. “Your choice. Make up your mind.”

  “Let’s get to the bottom of the hill and out of this damned tunnel before we do anything else. If the rain stays away, we can decide what we want to do next. Leon and the others aren’t going to overtake us on this slope. They’d have to be mad even to think of it. If they have any sense at all, they’ll have ridden around and be waiting for us wherever this damned chute levels off.”

  Ludo raised an open palm in what might have been a salute. “You’re the magister, Magister. That’s why I’m the driver.”

  “Then drive, and let’s get out of this nightmare and back onto a decent flat road.”

  With a nod, Ludo released the brake, then geed the horses gently forward down the hill again.

  When they rounded the next bend, they saw an open, almost level stretch of road several hundred paces long ahead of them, but the other wagons had already vanished. Neither man said anything, but Cato glanced sideways at Ludo a few times, waiting for him to push the horses to go faster. Ludo, though, was in no hurry. “The beasts are tired,” he growled. “No point in whipping them into a sweat after what they’ve been through. We’re not in any great hurry, are we?”

  “No,” Cato agreed. “We’re not. Let them amble while they can.” He swung himself around on the bench, grasped an iron stanchion at his back, rose to a crouch, then stepped back into the covered bed of the wagon.

  Six chests and cases there took up most of the floor space, forcing him to move cautiously, but he sat on the one nearest the tailgate and rummaged in the box of outer clothing until he found his sword. It was a spatha, the long-bladed broadsword that many of Rome’s fighting formations had adopted in recent years from their Germanic allies. He unsheathed it now and held it up in the dim light to inspect it briefly before setting it down and pulling his whetstone out of the scrip at his waist. Two hours a day he spent sharpening his blades, usually in four half-hour sessions. It was a discipline, and a healthy, necessary one, for the keenness of his sword blade, more often than not, was the edge between life and death for a fighting man, and Cato had been a fighting man his whole life.

  The leather covering the back of the wagon had been drawn tight against the rain, but now he loosened the rope bindings and pushed the edges apart, creating an opening that allowed him to look out at the road behind him as he settled into the routine of honing the spatha’s long blade.

  It was a fine weapon with magnificent and durable cutting edges, made almost a half century earlier by a gifted slave who had lived in the Cato family’s household, and as he began to sweep the palm-held whetstone along the blade’s edges in the susurrant rhythm that had long since become a part of his daily life, as natural to him as breathing, he enjoyed the familiar shape of the hilt in his fist and imagined, not for the first time, that his father and grandfather would both have taken pleasure in the same sensation.

  As he sat there stroking the blade, enjoying the hypnotic keenness of the sound, he quickly lost awareness of the passage of time, but he had been counting unconsciously, and when he came to the end of his pattern he knew, and he tested the edge of the blade with his thumb before replacing the sword in its sheath and reaching for his other weapon, the gladius he wore at his right side.

  Most men, if they fought at all, used a sword and a dagger in tandem. Cato, like a few of his long-serving military friends, had come to prefer the sword-sword combination, spatha and gladius, the old and the new combined. For hundreds of years the gladius had been the sword of the Roman legionary, a short-bladed, heavy weapon designed for stabbing and chopping in close-formation, hand-to-hand combat. In the hands of Rome’s heavily trained legions, it had been the most feared and fearsome weapon in the world. In recent years, though, partly the result of changes in legionary tactics and partly through necessity, the longer-bladed spatha favoured by certain barbarians outside the imperial borders had been adopted by some Roman military units, and because of its increased length and stabbing power, it had become the preferred sword of the heavy infantry units of some legions. Cato, who had trained in the use of both, now used both, the long spatha in his right hand and the gladius in his left.

  Just as he began to sharpen the gladius blade, he heard a sharp, hissing intake of breath from Ludo. The two men had spent years living closely together, and he recognized it as an alarm. He was already twisting around as the wagon lurched to a stop.

  “What?”

  “Shit. We’ve got shit.”

  “Where?” He was straining forward, peering to see what Ludo had seen, but there was nothing visible except trees and clumps of undergrowth.

  “Ahead and to the right. Up there by the big tree. Two men with javelins. See them?”

  Cato had been scanning the bushes surrounding them for a threat, but now he looked in the direction of Ludo’s pointing finger. About a hundred and fifty paces beyond, the tail end of the wagon that had been ahead of them was now visible. It, too, had stopped, and almost without surprise he watched one of the men Ludo had seen by the tree straighten up and throw his javelin towards the distant wagon. His eye followed the flight of the missile and he saw it hit a man who had leapt down from the tailgate and turned to run. The spear struck him in the middle of his back and punched him forward and off his feet to sprawl on the road, and then four, no, five men were converging on the wagons ahead.

  “Shit,” Ludo said again. “What now? We can’t go anywhere, can’t outrun them. Can’t turn back—the road’s too narrow. Where in the name of Nero’s nipples are Leon and Stratus and the Twins? Lazy bastards are probably—Uh-oh. They’ve seen us.”

  The group in the distance huddled together briefly, then they turned as one to look back at the solitary wagon remaining to be taken. They stood looking for a space of heartbeats during which they might have been talking, and then, though Cato saw no signal, they began moving in unison towards the wagon. They showed no evidence of haste or of excitement; they merely walked forward stolidly, spreading slightly apart until they formed a front that filled the lower breadth of the road.

  “You have your sword?” Seeing Ludo’s affirmative nod, Cato clipped his own sheathed gladius into the ring at his right side and watched the strangers coming until they had covered about a third of the distance separating them from him and Ludo, and then he inhaled deeply and blew the breath out forcibly. “So be it,” he said quietly. “Out of the wagon. Pull your cloak up over your shoulders and cover your blade. Don’t let them suspect we’re armed until they’re close enough for us to reach them. I need to get my other sword so I’ll get out through the back, as though I’m running. I’ll keep the wagon between me and them. As soon as I move, stand up and raise your arms and try to look scared, and then climb down and move away from the wagon. Move slowly and try to look afraid…or bewildered. That shouldn’t be too difficult for a man of your skills.”

  “It won’t be,” Ludo growled. “But I can’t handle more than four of the whoresons. What’re you going to do with the fifth one, all on your own?”

  Cato grinned. “I’ll manage it somehow. Once you’re down and clear of the wagon, break to the rear and join me. We’ll run up the road as far as the first bend and hope they’ll come after us. And when they do, we’ll hit them as they come around the bend.” He sucked air thoughtfully through his teeth before adding, “But for now there’s no need to hurry. We have a little time and they’re expecting an easy kill. So let them come on, and wait for me to make the first move.”

  “What if they try to take us down with the javelins, from a distance?”

  “Then you had better grow nimbler and faster than you’ve ever been in your life, and do it quickly. If they start throwing, I can’t help you or myself. So let’s hope they’ll want to take us alive.”

  “Who d’you think they are?”

  Cato was watching the men up ahead, cataloguing their appearanc
e, and he shook his head. “I’ve no idea. Could be deserters. Two of them look military, and those two with the javelins look legion trained. Could be plain bandits, though, local clansmen out looking for plunder.”

  Ludo grunted. “Well,” he said, “if they open those two chests we’re carrying, they’ll see plunder they could never have imagined. They’ll be able to buy villas on the Palatine Mount with it.”

  “Right, they’re close enough.”

  Cato stood up suddenly, turning as he moved, and flung himself into the covered back of the wagon, where he snatched up his spatha and hooked the metal clip on its sheath into its carrying ring on the belt beneath his cloak. He used his shorter gladius to slash the ropes securing the leather opening at the rear and leapt out. He landed easily, shook out his cloak to conceal his weapons, then swung around and to one side to look back at the approaching thieves, who were now running towards them. When he was sure they had seen him again, he spun back and sprinted for the tree-lined tunnel at his back, as if he were escaping back up the hill. It was less than fifty paces before the road started to curve, and he kept going until he rounded the sharp bend. As soon as he was sure he couldn’t be seen from below, he dived to the left and hid behind the first good-sized tree among the bushes lining the roadside to wait for Ludo.