The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  TEN

  It did not take long for the smith to satisfy himself that his guest, despite all appearances, was familiar with working smithies, for he watched him closely from the moment they stepped through the doors, noting how Varrus stopped on the threshold to take a sweeping inventory of the interior. The young man took particular interest in the enormous bellows against the farthest wall and the way the jointed wooden arms that powered the device were driven in turn by the massive, revolving waterwheel just on the other side of that wall. He also saw the precise moment the Roman’s eyes took note of the system of perfectly inclined stone sluices that brought a steady, gentle stream of water gliding almost silently from the top of the wall down to the quenching pits beside the forge that dominated the room.

  Mcuil was immensely proud of his forge, the working centre of his universe, for there was not another to match it in all of Londuin. It was built entirely of a substance Varrus did not recognize, though logic told him it must be clay of some description. It was startlingly white under its much-stained coating of smoky yellows and sooty black, the white underneath standing out in unexpected brilliance where it had been worn away or chipped by one workplace vagary or another. It was easily three, perhaps even four times larger than would be found in any normal smithy, and the young Roman nodded in admiration at the clean, spacious extent of it, easily large enough for several men to work at it together, as was evidenced by the three separate fire baskets on the bed of the huge hearth.

  “A beautiful forge,” Varrus said. “Did you build it yourself?”

  “Every bit of it,” the big man said. “This used to be a cooperage, so it had a forge of sorts when I bought it, used for making and shaping the iron hoops for the barrels they made, but it was a lightweight thing, nothing like the kind of forge I needed, so I ripped it out and started again from nothing, designing what I wanted. It turned out as close to perfect for me as it could have been, and I’m more than simply proud of my water system. There’s nothing to compare to it in all Londuin.” He smiled. “Besides, I happen to believe that if a smith can’t build his own workplace, he has no right to call himself a smith.”

  Still smiling, he stepped over to a workspace fronting the forge. It contained a heavy, flat-topped anvil and was lined on one side with a solid oaken bench from which hung hammers, mauls, tongs, and pincers of all shapes and sizes. “Hand me that bit of iron, would you?”

  It was obvious which piece of iron he was referring to—it was the only piece on the top of the anvil—and Varrus smiled, too. Then, without saying a word, he stepped to the rack of tools and chose a pair of tongs about the length of his forearm. Manipulating the tool easily with one hand, he picked up the metal scrap Mcuil had indicated, hefted it effortlessly, and flipped it in the air, end over end, catching it smoothly and flipping it again before setting it down gently within easy reach of Mcuil’s hand.

  The big smith smiled ruefully. “Well, I had to try.”

  “I would have been disappointed if you hadn’t,” Varrus said, grinning back at him. “It’s the oldest lesson in the trade, but no apprentice ever learns it until he picks up a piece of metal with his bare fingers and learns that it had been red hot moments earlier. He’ll never make the same mistake again. Beware black iron.”

  He nodded then towards the complex apparatus against the wall by the forge. “Those bellows are magnificent. We had a set at home in Dalmatia, but not that big. And your forge is spectacular. What did you use to build it? It looks like white clay.”

  “And it is. Pure, white clay. I brought it here from Eire, from near where my mother’s people lived, in the heart of the mainland. There are great pits of it there, and the local people are all potters. They make their pots and decorate them wondrously, and then Roman merchants buy them up and ship them off to Gaul and other places. The clay is superb, smooth and easy to work, and the pots made from it are iron-hard, baked for days in kilns that are old beyond counting. So when I came to build this place I sent my brother Liam home to bring me back enough clay to build this forge and the ovens attached to it, and the chimney to vent all the smoke well away from where we work.”

  “You sent him all the way to Hibernia for clay? That must have been cripplingly expensive.”

  “And why not? It was the only kind of clay I had ever found that would allow me to do what I needed to do with it. I’d worked in other people’s forges until then, forges made from brick and other kinds of stone, and even concrete, but none of them suited the demands of the work I was doing. Sometimes you have to spend gold to make silver, but if you do it right, the silver you haul in can soon outshine the gold you laid out. Once I built the forge, I earned more for my work than I ever had before.”

  Varrus again studied the bellows apparatus and the way its outlet pipe tapered into the forge at the very base of the fire bed, and now he noticed a junction point, from which another pipe led off and vanished through a vent in the smithy’s wall, a brick wall that he now saw curved inwards in a quarter circle. He squinted, trying to see better in the gloom of that corner, and saw the outline of a door.

  “What’s out there, beyond the wall there?” he asked, pointing.

  Dominic glanced idly towards the door. “Oven,” he said. “For smelting ore.”

  Varrus stared at him. “You smelt your own ore?”

  “Sometimes, but it’s not exactly mine. Good ore’s not easy to find around here.”

  “So you bring it in?”

  Mcuil flashed a grin. “You might say that. You know about smelting?”

  “A little. I’ve worked with it. Where do you get your ore from?”

  “Rome.”

  “Where?” Varrus heard the shock in his own voice and stopped short, thinking he was being teased, but Dominic Mcuil was no longer smiling.

  “Rome,” he said, straight-faced. “But really from Camulodunum. The armourers up there like my iron ingots, so we have an arrangement. They send me ore, and I smelt it into ingots for them. They pay us for our work and everyone is happy.”

  Varrus was frowning slightly. “But that makes no sense. Why would they send ore all the way here? Have they no furnaces in the garrison fort at Camulodunum?”

  “They have, but it seems our kilns make better iron. Come and look.”

  He led the way through the door in the brick wall, and there, surrounded by high stone walls on every side, stood two brick-built, cylindrical furnace ovens, each one fed by a narrow pipe from the smithy’s enormous bellows.

  “They’re huge!” Varrus said. “Higher than I’ve ever seen before, I think. Why is that?”

  “It seems to be the reason for our smelted iron being so”—Mcuil hesitated—“desirable, I suppose.” He paused again. “You know how a smelting oven works, in principle, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. Are you telling me your ovens are this tall because you want to pile more fuel under them, so the ore benefits from the full force of the fire beneath?”

  The smith twisted his mouth, considering that, then nodded. “I am, I suppose, but I should say both yes and no. My brother and I were taught by the same master smith, in Gaul.” He saw Varrus’s eyebrows twitch in surprise. “Aye, Gaul. Our father was a smith when we were all small, but after he lost an arm at the forge he became a trader in metal goods, including weapons, and he moved us all to Gaul, where we lived very well in a town near the city of Lugdunum. He apprenticed us both to a wonderful smith called Oskar of Lugdunum, a ferocious taskmaster and an unforgiving teacher whom we both came to love outside of the smithy.

  “Now, every blade maker worth his salt understands the importance of charcoal in hardening iron. They may not know precisely how the process works—no one really does—but they know that ordinary, malleable iron, cooked in charcoal, takes on, to widely varying degrees, an extra amount of hardness, and that can result in extraordinary blades. It’s an uncertain process, and it can never be successfully predicted, but when it works well, the results can be astonishing.
r />   “Well, Oskar had a theory of his own, and though it sounded mad, his process worked remarkably well most of the time. He was very secretive about it, though. He was convinced that if his theory were proved true, everyone would start using it and he would lose the competitive advantage that kept his family fed and made his blades famous. I don’t mind talking to you about it, though, since you are not likely to be keeping company with any soldiers in the days ahead. In essence Oskar believed that the difference was achieved, not in the cooking of the metal—in creating the bloom, as he called it—but in the direct aftermath of the melting of the ore, when the molten iron fell through the charcoal ashes to the collection pan at the bottom of the oven. He came to believe that something, some magical, unknown component in those coating ashes, penetrated and hardened the iron as the molten metal fell through them.”

  “That does sound mad,” Varrus murmured.

  “I told you it did. So Oskar built his ovens taller than anyone else’s and kept them hidden. And his iron grew harder than ever, able to be worked and reworked as often as it needed to be and to hold an edge that came close to defying belief.” His face quirked into an off-centre smile. “Best of all, though, no one paid attention to his ovens because he built himself a magnificent new forge of shining white clay that he shipped in from Belgium. And years later, obviously, I built my own for exactly the same reason. And my white clay forge is the envy of every smith in Londuin.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Varrus said, stretching out his hand towards the nearest oven’s wall. It was cold.

  “And does Oskar’s process still work, here in Britain?”

  “It would work anywhere. I don’t know why, but it works every time, and the sole reason for it has to be that extra distance the molten iron falls through burning ashes. And so, twice a year, Liam sends down a train of wagons filled with prime ore that’s brought in to Camulodunum by water, and I send him back loaf ingots of fine iron. He then uses that metal to make superior weapons for garrison and legionary officers—blades far more than a simple cut above the kind of swords churned out in the state factories. Our customers are more than happy with our goods and they pass the word to others, so we do well.”

  “So the ingots in your yard—I noticed they’re all stamped with the same die. Are they yours, from these ovens?”

  “From these ovens, yes, but they are not all mine. Most of them—a hundred and thirty, to be exact—will be shipped to Liam when the next load of ore comes in. That will be some time next month or in the first half of the one after that.”

  “You said the ore is shipped in to Camulodunum. Do you know from where?”

  Dominic shook his head. “I have no idea. It could come from anywhere in the empire. I know it arrives on enormous freight carriers that sit at anchor offshore, before it’s unloaded into smaller craft to be shipped upriver to forts and garrisons with smelting capabilities.” He reached out a hand, looking down at it as raindrops began to fall around them. “I thought I felt rain a moment ago,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

  “My thanks, sir, for entrusting me with the knowledge of your ovens,” Varrus said, and followed the older man back through the smithy. But on the way he stopped, his attention caught by something propped up, as though on display, on a long, narrow shelf on the wall. Mcuil watched as the younger man moved towards the shelf and stopped to stare intently at the device before picking it up with both hands.

  “What is this?” He didn’t even look at Mcuil as he asked the question.

  “It’s an iron faceplate for a horse.”

  Varrus held the piece up higher, looking at it with slitted eyes. “Of course it is. With that length and shape and those flared eye protectors it couldn’t be anything else, could it? It’s not Roman, though. Where did you find it?”

  Mcuil’s mouth twitched into a half smile. “Why would you say it’s not Roman? What else could it be?”

  “I don’t know,” Varrus said quietly, still peering at the thing, turning it from side to side as he studied it, searching for some clue to its identity. “It might be any of several things. But none of them is Roman. It’s ancient—older than anything I’ve ever seen made for a horse. And this iron’s black, blacker than any made today.” He hefted the faceplate with both hands, feeling the weight of it. “It’s heavy and it’s thick, probably case-hardened when it was forged, and it’s deeply pitted, so it was badly rusted at some point, though it’s been well looked after since then. I’d guess this was made no sooner than a hundred years ago, and it’s probably far older.”

  He finally looked at his host. “And it’s not Roman because Romans have never used armoured horses. Legionary cavalry is light and nimble. It has to be. Its sole purpose is to provide a fast-moving shield to protect the legions while they’re regrouping into battle formation.” He hefted the piece again. “Armour like this would slow them down too much.”

  Mcuil was still smiling. “Now it’s my turn to be impressed,” he said. “No one else has ever been that definite about that piece before. And you’re right. It isn’t Roman.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s Macedonian.”

  Varrus stared at him. “The Macedonia that Alexander ruled?”

  “Aye, and his father Philip before him.” He pointed to the faceplate. “But that, I think, is from Alexander’s time.”

  Varrus tilted his head very slightly to one side, narrowing his eyes. “You mean this thing I’m holding has a connection to the man who conquered the world of his day? To Alexander?”

  The smith nodded. “To his cavalry. I do.”

  “How could you possibly know that? Alexander died six hundred years ago.”

  “Closer to seven hundred, if I remember what my old teacher hammered into me. But that, I am assured, belonged to one of his cavalrymen. Do you read Greek?”

  “I do.”

  “Then look at the markings there, between the eyeholes. The writing’s hard to see, but it’s visible.”

  Varrus stepped sideways and held the metal up in a beam of light from a high opening. He stood peering at it for long moments, then lowered it and turned back to Mcuil.

  “Hetairoi,” he said. “It’s hard to read, with all the rust pitting. I’ve heard the word before, but I can’t remember what it means. Do you know?”

  Mcuil ignored the question. “What about the drawing?”

  “What drawing? You mean these scratches above the word?”

  “Look closer. Someone took great pains to scratch metal on metal right there, in that particular spot. And you’re right, the rust pits don’t help. But look again, and try to make sense of it.”

  “Well…it could be a stick man, I suppose. And if it is, he’s carrying something over his shoulder. A long pole of some kind, with a…with a crossbar on the end of it.”

  “Pointing downwards.”

  “Aye.”

  “It’s a sarissa.”

  Varrus’s eyebrows twitched upwards. “Is it,” he said. “Well, you’ll get no argument from me. But what’s a sarissa?”

  “A spear with a really long shaft, perhaps four or even five paces long. It was carried over the shoulder, pointed downwards, by a mounted man. The men who carried them were called the hetairoi, the companions of the king, and they were supposedly the finest cavalry of ancient times.”

  “The Companions. Of course. I remember hearing about them when I was little. But I never believed they were real.”

  “Oh, they were real. There’s not the slightest doubt of that. They were all from the nobility, because they had to provide their own mounts and weaponry and only the wealthiest of men could do that, and they were all volunteers, riding as friends of the king rather than as soldiers or conscripts. Philip of Macedon started it, inviting his young nobles to ride with him, and they became known simply as the Companions. It was Alexander, though, who really made the rank a great honour. He inherited a following of about six hundred men when his father died, but over the next ten y
ears he built the Companions up to a strength of five or six thousand.”

  Varrus was staring at him in amazement. “How do you know all this?” He instantly realized his question could have been offensive and made to apologize, but the big man cut him off.

  “Nah, I learned it all from my old teacher. His name was Father Domnuil and he was my mother’s oldest brother. Before he came home to die with us in Lugdunum and ended up teaching me and my brothers for five years instead, he spent more than thirty years in Egypt, in a place called Alexandria. Do you know of it?”

  “Of course. It’s one of the world’s great cities.”

  “Aye. Well, Domnuil worked as a scribe in one of the libraries there. He spent a lot of time digging into everything he could find about the Ancients and their world, and he was fascinated by everything about Alexander the Great.” He hunched his shoulder briefly in a fatalistic shrug. “I suppose he passed that on to me, though I was no scholar.” Again he pointed at the faceplate Varrus was still holding. “He taught me enough, though, that I knew what I was seeing when I first came across that thing. And it was that crossbar you noticed that convinced me that what I was seeing was real and that it came from the time of Alexander.”

  “The crossbar? How so?”

  “Because Domnuil had taught me that in Philip’s day the sarissa was a long, plain spear. A rider used it against the first enemy soldier he met—skewered him with it like a spitted rabbit. But then he had to leave it behind because the spear shaft went right through and the dead man’s weight would rip it from the rider’s grasp. But Alexander’s armourers added the crossbar just below the spearhead. That stopped the shaft from going in too far and offered at least a chance that the rider could pull it free of the corpse as he rode past and then use it again. It may not sound like much, but it doubled the killing potential of a charging horseman.”

  Varrus was nodding. “Aye, it would have…So where did you find this?”

  “In the marketplace. The huckster selling it told me it was from Alexander’s cavalry, but even I could see he didn’t know what he was talking about. There was something about it, though, something that made me look more closely at it, and that’s when I saw the drawing and realized that he was right, even though he thought he was lying. So I bought it—though not for the price he was asking.”