The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  Finally, he looked back at Liam. “So let me guess,” he said quietly. “This young fellow made this. In your forge. Am I correct?”

  Liam nodded.

  “Well, it has merit—more so than most of the attempts I’ve seen from apprentice smiths in recent years. But it’s raw, Liam, so I don’t understand. You know my standards, and my requirements, so why would you even think to bring me this?”

  “It’s his first,” Liam replied, looking steadily at the armourer.

  Ajax sat silent for the space of five heartbeats before he asked, “What does that mean, his first?”

  “What I said,” Liam said. “It’s his first sword. His first attempt. Made it in six days, unsupervised and with no help. From an iron bar welded in my smithy. And no template other than another sword.”

  The big Roman sat without moving for some time, staring at the sword in his hands, but then he set it on the table in front of him, straightened his back against the chair, and pushed his hips forward, slouching in his seat and lowering his chin towards his breastplate. “His first,” he said. “This was his first attempt at forging metal and he made a sword, is that what you are saying?”

  “No,” Liam said. “I said this was his first attempt at making a sword. He has been around smithies since he was a boy and so he knows the basics of smithing, taught by a former legionary smith. And he’s been working for the last half year on completing those mail tunics we made for your junior officers.” He shrugged. “I simply thought you should meet him, so you will know who he is in future, once he has perfected his craft.”

  “Hmm.” The armourer drained his cup and looked at Varrus. “Your blade has a central spine, with blood channels on both sides. Where did you learn to do that?”

  “My old master made all his sword blades that way: central spine, twin channels, straight, hardened edges, wide V point.”

  “All his swords. How many did he make?”

  Varrus shrugged. “Scores,” he said. “Perhaps hundreds.” Only as the words left his lips did he realize how revealing they were, and Ajax pounced before he could recover.

  “Hundreds? Of swords? In Eire? Was he equipping an army?”

  Varrus recovered quickly, his mind racing. “We were not in Eire,” he said, not daring to look at Liam. “I grew up in Dalmatia, across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, near the town of Salona.”

  “But you’re from Hibernia.”

  “My family’s from there—all smiths—but my father, a distant cousin to Liam, was attached to the Seventh Claudia Legion.” He had a sudden mental flash of his father’s villa, and the lie came to him easily, surprising him. “He was a wheelwright, based in Viminacium, in Moesia. I was born there, but we moved to Dalmatia when my father’s employer, a successful military supplier, retired to his estates there. A year after that, my parents both fell sick and died, and I was raised by a friend of my father’s, a smith called Rhys Twohands, who took pity on me. It was his wife, Anna, who took me in, really. They had no children of their own, and so they raised me as their son. Anna taught me to read, and to write and count and keep records—”

  “Wait,” Ajax interjected. “A village woman, the wife of a wheelwright, taught you all that?”

  Varrus flapped a hand at him, frowning as though impatient at being doubted. “Anna was more than that,” he snapped. “And she was not a village woman. She had been with the family for years when Rhys met her, a trusted, privileged member of the household staff, tutor to all the merchant’s children. When she adopted me, I attended lessons with the other children in the household. And at the same time, Rhys started teaching me his craft. He taught me all I know, and then he died, with Anna, in a fire…I came back to Britain last year and found some of my father’s family still living in Londinium.”

  Ajax went back to scrutinizing the sword in his hands before holding it up where Varrus could see it. “Do you believe you can do better than this?”

  “I know I can. All I need is time to work at it.”

  Ajax sniffed loudly and rose to his feet. “I can give you that.” He cocked his head to Liam. “Providing you have no objections, Liam?”

  “To having him taught by you and Demetrius? You think me mad? How much time can you give him?”

  “Half days, every day.”

  Ajax looked back to Varrus. “Mornings,” he said. “You’ll have to come here on your own.” He stooped forward to pick up both horn cups. “What was your name again?”

  “Fingael. Fingael Mcuil.”

  “So be it, Fingael Mcuil. We’ll see you in the morning. The guard changes at dawn, so be here before the changeover and come directly to me. I’ll be waiting for you.” He held up the new sword and looked at Liam. “Would you object if I kept this tonight? I want to show it to someone.” Liam shrugged and spread his open palms, and Ajax turned back to Varrus. “Be sure to get a good night’s sleep, because tomorrow you’ll be busy. And now I have to go and take off all this fancy clutter before I melt. Vale!” Neither man spoke as they walked back through the complex that housed the garrison, and no one paid them the slightest attention. Only when they were outside the gates on the public street again did Varrus turn to Liam.

  “Tell me what happened in there,” he said, and the smith grinned and slapped him hard on the upper arm.

  “What happened? You landed on your feet, my lad. You are now apprenticed to the foremost expert on sword blades in all of Britain.”

  SIXTEEN

  And so Quintus Varrus entered the netherworld of the garrison armouries, to become quickly lost in a metal-smithing world the like of which he had never imagined. He had known three smithies in his life: his father’s, run by Rhys Twohands, in Dalmatia, and the two Mcuil smithies in Britain. All three had been spacious, clean, and well maintained, brightly lit and airy even on the busiest of days when, at full capacity, they might have employed five or six men apiece. Nothing in any of them had prepared him for the noise-filled chaos of smoke and darkness, the clamour of ever-conflicting sounds, or the sooty, grit-filled, breath-catching air and seething activity he found in Ignatius Ajax’s domain.

  Of course, all his first impressions were wrong that first day, bred of his own apprehensions, the insecurities of any stranger in a strange realm, for as he stood hesitating on the threshold, peering into the murk ahead and wondering where he should go, a huge, burly man came striding out of the billowing smoke, much of which, Varrus realized later, must have been steam generated by hot water and the icy air.

  “Mcuil?” The big man saw Varrus nod and turned away, beckoning him to follow, then led him through a bewildering series of twists and turns, between haphazard heaps and disciplined piles of metal, until he stopped in front of a high, narrow pair of doors with a small, shuttered opening on the wall on one side. He grasped a handle, pulled open one of the doors, and pointed inside with his thumb. “There y’ go. Ask for Decius.” And before Varrus could thank him, he had vanished back into the maelstrom of noise that was the armoury.

  Blinking his eyes against the irritation of the smoke-filled air, Varrus stepped through the door and found himself in a narrow, quiet passageway facing a battered wooden counter. It was a much-used place, he could see, with a scarred and scuffed wooden bench running almost the entire length of the wall on his left, presumably for people to sit on while waiting for whatever it was that people waited for in here, but it was vacant for the moment, and he pulled the door closed at his back and walked forward to the counter. A harassed-looking clerk saw him there and demanded to know his business. But as soon as he heard the name Decius, he opened a flap in the countertop.

  “Through here,” he said, not uncivilly, and led the way to a cubicle in which sat a very elderly and distinguished-looking man, who stood up to greet Fingael Mcuil by name and turned out, unsurprisingly, to be Decius. His full name, he explained, was Decius Decius, and he had been clerk of the armouries of the Sixth Legion in Camulodunum for close to thirty years, and senior clerk, with the honorar
y title and pay grade of advanced supernumerary, or presiding finance specialist, for seventeen of those years, the last fifteen spent serving under Ignatius Ajax.

  He informed Varrus that he would take him to meet his initial supervisor shortly, but before he could do anything more, he had to register him as a bona fide serving member of the legionary auxiliary, and that on completion of the paperwork, Varrus would become a full apprentice, serving in the armouries and entitled to the wages of a serving recruit. That would change after six months of basic training, Decius said, whereupon Varrus would be paid as a qualified legionary, and a year after that, providing that he performed acceptably and lived up to his employer’s expectations, he could expect to be paid a regular salaria, or stipend, the amount to be negotiated by his employer, in this instance, Ignatius Ajax.

  Varrus said nothing, surprised that anyone—and most astonishingly, the Roman state—would consider paying him for learning what he wanted to know. He had talked to Liam at length the night before, and he had been surprised to discover that Ajax’s brusque offer to train him had astounded the smith, too. The possibility had never entered Liam’s mind. He had taken Varrus there, he said, simply to meet Ajax and to let the armourer know the Mcuil smithy now had a promising and amiable new associate, another Mcuil. The true reason for his visit, though, was that he knew and liked the armourer, who was one of his best customers, and knew, from past visits, that Ajax would offer him a warm chair and a welcome drink, perhaps a cup of hot, honeyed vinum, at the end of a long, hard, cold day spent trudging door to door, criss-crossing the city. Liam had expected nothing more.

  Now, Varrus stood waiting, watching the clerk’s bald head as the man finished writing down the information Varrus had given him, duly registering the new recruit, and sprinkled sand across the surface of his ledger to dry the ink.

  “There. All done,” Decius said, rubbing his hands together as though drying them. “Now come with me and we’ll find Turco.”

  “Who is Turco?”

  “Turco will be your temporary…guardian, I suppose, until we find the work to which you are best suited. Everyone is different, with differing abilities, and your next few days will be spent undergoing tests to—” At the sound of iron-studded boot soles he looked over Varrus’s shoulder. “Ah! Magister Ajax! Good morning to you.”

  “Ave, and hail to you, my friend,” Ajax answered. “I see you found Mcuil. Have you signed him up?”

  “Yes, Magister, I have. I was just telling him how Turco will be test—”

  “Testing him to see where he fits in. No, Decius, not this time. Tell Turco, if you will, that I already know where this one will fit best.” He shrugged, to take any sting out of his comments, and beckoned with his fingers for Varrus to follow him as he swung away and strode off again, talking loudly over his shoulder as he went, against the noise of metal being moved and worked. Today Ajax was without the imposing trappings of the military, bare-headed and unarmoured, dressed in a plain, belted woollen tunic, thick-soled, sandalled boots over bare feet, and a short, shoulder-protecting kind of half cloak. The sole weapon he wore was a gladius, the Hispanic type, hanging at his right hip, and Varrus could not imagine him ever having to unsheathe it here, although part of him knew that, should such a need ever arise, Ajax would not hesitate to draw it.

  “I’ve already spoken with one of my men about you,” he shouted, forcing Varrus to concentrate on listening to his words and to shut out the distractions coming at him from every direction. “My best man, in fact. He knows why you are here, what I saw in the blade you made. He also knows what else I need to know about you, and what I want him to discover about you.” He vanished into a billowing cloud of vaporizing steam, and Varrus followed him steadfastly, only to find him waiting three paces ahead, his arm thrust backwards to hold him in place. “Careful.” He stepped to the side, sucking in his belly.

  A man emerged from the gloom ahead and eased past him, moving backwards and pulling an unsteady, squeaky-wheeled cart filled with round bars of rusted iron. Varrus drew aside, too, letting the fellow pass him as Ajax relaxed and flicked some imaginary rust stains off his tunic. Then, continuing to shout against the noise as though there had been no interruption, he moved on.

  “His name is Demetrius Hanno. Sounds like a Roman name, Hanno, but it’s not. He’s from Macedonia—Northern Greece, he calls it.” He stopped again, this time in a short, narrow passageway between tall racks holding long, cylindrical bars of rusted metal twice as tall as he himself was, and laid a restraining hand on Varrus’s arm to hold him there as another large group of his people squeezed by them, manhandling a number of open containers on tiny, squeaky wheels. He nodded to a few of them as they passed by. “Do you know any Greeks?” he asked, and seeing Varrus’s headshake, he went on. “Well, Demetrius doesn’t look like a Greek. And he certainly doesn’t sound like one. To hear him speak, you would think he was tutored in the finest schools in Rome. Never at a loss for words and never a word out of place. Doesn’t slur, doesn’t mutter.” He stepped right inside one of the racks holding the metal bars, and Varrus stepped in beside him, to let pass a container that was larger than the others.

  “So where was he educated?”

  “He was a slave. And a gladiator. And he taught himself everything he knows. The man is a prodigy. He’d make a damned fine emperor, and he’d do the job alone.” The cart passed them and the two men moved on. “Don’t expect him to welcome you, though. Not at first. He might not speak to you at all for a day or two. Demetrius is…different. He’s intimidating—in his looks, I mean. You’ll like him eventually. But don’t let his appearance put you off. At what he really does, he’s the very best. No one can come close to his abilities, and he will be the best teacher you will have ever known. I promise you that even if he dislikes you. If he does like you, though, you’ll never find a better teacher or a more loyal friend.”

  Once again he whipped up an arm, interrupting their passage and peering at something ahead of them that Varrus couldn’t see. “Saros!” he shouted. “If that’s what I think it is, it shouldn’t be on this side of the building. And if someone told you to bring it over here, I want to know who that someone is, and when he was appointed to overrule me. Have your people turn it around right now and take it back to where it was, and ask Centurion Pella to come and talk to me when he has time, would you?”

  He turned his attention quickly back to Varrus and smiled, the first smile Varrus had seen from him. “We have close to four hundred men working here every day,” he said. “Sometimes even the best of them get things wrong. And one more word on Hanno.” He actually winked. “Don’t work hard to make him like you. He’ll see through that and resent it. Just be yourself, and he will either like you or he won’t. Nothing you can do—nothing either one of us can do—will alter that. Mind your feet here now. It’s treacherous.”

  Ahead of them, the floor appeared to be of concrete, covered in standing water that glistened dully, reflecting light from what Varrus could only surmise must be oven furnaces and open fires. Thick wooden planks had been laid down end to end to serve as pathways between the work areas with heaviest foot traffic, and Varrus stepped firmly onto the wooden path selected by Ignatius Ajax.

  When they came to the end of the wooden pathway, they stopped at a place that resembled Liam’s smithy, save that it was more than ten times larger and housed upwards of twenty men, all of them hammering iron bars in all hues of heatedness.

  “Demetrius!”

  At the sound of Ajax’s voice, one of the labouring men straightened and turned around, and Varrus felt his jaw drop. He snapped it shut immediately, fairly sure no one had noticed.

  Demetrius Hanno was not merely huge. He was a giant, head and shoulders taller than the next-tallest man there, and with the slab-like facial features common to all giants. Varrus had first seen one—a real giant—when he was ten years old, but that had been a shambling, piteous, almost witless creature whose life had been shamelessly twisted
to provide a source of endless, mindless awe and laughter to others, whether he performed feats of superhuman strength or capered pathetically in shackles, chained to an equally malformed dwarf.

  This giant, Varrus could see, was no halfwit. He had the massive, distinctive face, the heavy, hanging brows and jutting jaws, and the flattened cheekbones and pendulous lips of the other giants Varrus had seen, but the deep-set eyes that peered out from under the shaggy, undivided brow were bright with light and intellect. Varrus saw the way they scanned him, head to toe, cataloguing everything about him, from the way he stood to the angle of his head as he gazed back directly into them.

  “This is Mcuil,” Ajax said. “I’ll leave him with you. I have to go and talk to Pella. That idiot Saros was over here, moving the stock into precisely the wrong place after I told him specifically where it ought to go.” He turned to Varrus. “Fingael Mcuil, this is Demetrius Hanno. He’ll see to you from here. I’ll speak with both of you again later.” He combined a clenched-fist military salute with a good-natured nod, then turned and walked away.

  “Come,” Demetrius Hanno said, and Varrus followed him into an interior room at the back of the smithy. It was obviously Hanno’s personal domain, for the furnishings were made to fit his enormous size. “No one disturbs me here,” the giant said. “I call it my sanctum, and no one ever enters it other than by my leave. Sit.” He indicated a pair of normally sized chairs that looked like children’s seats beside the other furniture in the room, and lowered himself into the cushioned wooden armchair behind the huge work table. He reached down to the floor and brought up Varrus’s blade. He looked at it expressionlessly, then laid it flat on the table and pushed it across towards Varrus with one finger, spinning it slightly as it went.