The Burning Stone

by Jack Whyte

  “Right. I’m gone.”

  Equus returned as soon as Ajax had left, and without another word the two smiths went back to work, hammering and filing and tapping, shaping nails and counting them painstakingly into small wooden boxes, allocating one, two, or three score each to differently sized boxes.

  Some time after Ajax’s departure—it might have been an hour, possibly even two—Varrus looked up again, distracted by a movement at the edge of his vision. He half-expected it to be Ajax, and so he was surprised to see not one but two men in the doorway of the smithy, silhouetted against the afternoon brightness at their backs. He was even more surprised to see the tall, ornately crested helmet worn by the taller of the two men, and at first he thought it must be the adjutant, Damian Marcellus. As soon as he began to move towards the newcomers, though, he saw that the taller man was the legate Gaius Cornelius Britannicus, the garrison commander.

  Setting down his hammer and signalling to Equus to make himself scarce, he moved quickly to greet the elegant, black-clad cavalryman, wiping his hands on a rag as he went.

  “Legate Britannicus,” he said cordially. “Be welcome, and forgive the way you find me. I was not expecting company.”

  Britannicus smiled gently and turned to his companion with a wave of his hand, at which the fellow snapped to attention, spun on his heel, and marched smartly away, presumably to mount guard at the smithy door. Varrus watched him go, then glanced at his visitor. “Impressive,” he murmured, not quite smiling. “Smart, crisp, efficient. I hope he doesn’t try to keep my wife out if she comes home while he’s there.”

  Britannicus laughed and reached up to unfasten the clasp beneath his chin. “May I?” He removed the elaborate headpiece and scrubbed at his bared scalp like every other man who had ever worn a helmet. “These things are brutally heavy.”

  “Of course they are,” Varrus said. “They have to be. Set it on the bench there, if you like. As I was saying, it’s gritty, but I was not expecting company.”

  “Nor should you be apologizing. You are a working man practising his occupation. It’s only in the army that we seek to make a virtue out of cleanliness while working, and it is seldom effective. Forgive my unexpected arrival, but I was passing by and remembered the first time we met—or was it the second time? It was your wedding day, anyway. Four years ago, is that correct?”

  “It is.” He hesitated, then asked, “Could I offer you a cup of watered wine?”

  The legate smiled. “Benigne,” he said. “I would enjoy that.”

  “Excellent, then come into the house, if you will, and I’ll pour us some.”

  As Varrus busied himself preparing drinks, Britannicus said, “We returned yesterday from Londinium, as you probably already know. It’s difficult to disguise such comings and goings in a military town, and I know Ignatius Ajax is a friend of yours, as was his former colleague Marcus Licinius Cato.”

  He said no more, but he watched the deliberate manner in which the smith picked up the cups of wine and carried them to the table where he sat. He took the cup that Varrus proffered and nodded graciously, then sipped the wine appreciatively and set it down. “Delicious,” he said. “Rhenish? Definitely Germanic? I thought so.” He sat silent for a space of heartbeats, before saying, “I acquired some information in Londinium that I think might be of interest to you, Magister Varrus.”

  He spoke quietly, articulating his words slowly and precisely. “It was…unusual information, and it came to me through channels best described as unofficial, and I must underline the fanciful, even conjectural nature of what was nevertheless relayed to me as unassailable truth. And those muddy waters are roiled even further by the fact that, when my informant attempted to verify the information, he—they—met with no success. None at all. They found no evidence to attest to the accuracy of the information, or even to its authenticity.”

  He sipped at his wine again, somehow managing to convey an air of assertive, competent fastidiousness in the mere act of drinking. Varrus, meanwhile, sat watching him narrow-lidded. He had no slightest idea of what to expect from this man.

  “Are you by chance familiar with what is said to be happening on the Hellespont?”

  The question snapped Varrus into full, wary attentiveness. “Byzantium, you mean?” He waited for confirmation, then nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard about the Emperor’s plans for it. He has decided that it would be far better and more appropriate as the seat of the imperial government than Rome. It dominates the central hub of the world’s trading routes. The town is to be rebuilt as a city and renamed Constantinopolis, and they have been working on the rebuilding and refurbishing for several years already, with a view to declaring it a new and open city in a few years’ time.”

  Britannicus grunted appreciatively. “Well done, Magister Varrus. Forgive me, but I must admit I had not expected you to know so much about the topic. Knowing you are that well informed, I can continue with my tale unobstructed.

  “Some time ago, according to my sources, in an isolated region of southeastern Gaul, in the province of Narbonensis and within three days’ ride of the port of Massilia, the word began to spread, no more than a few years ago, of an unnamed but evil and malignant presence that appeared to have sprung up and was flourishing in one specific but uncharted area. Large numbers of people were disappearing, never to be seen or heard from again, and dreadful rites and rituals were allegedly being conducted on heavily guarded private lands in vast, wealthy estates amid great secrecy. Of course, nothing about any of those rumours could be proved, rumours being what they are, and no living person came forward with complaints or concerns specific enough to trigger an official investigation, and so the matter never came, officially, to anyone’s attention. Eventually it lapsed into oblivion and was discussed no further, officially, though the rumours persisted. Eventually, too, after several years of nothing having happened, what little fuss there had been earlier died away completely. Until a new uproar broke out.”

  He sipped again at his wine. “Now here is where this grows most interesting, because it is at this point that the conjectural element comes into prominence. The commander of the garrison in Massilia, whose name was Talus, received a written communication, hand-delivered to his quarters by a military courier whom no one could identify afterwards.” He paused. “Think about that, Magister Varrus. A military courier who had no military identity. No recognizable distinctions on his uniform, no recognizable or memorable insignia, no unit badges or identifiable regalia. Nothing. He was a soldier, yet a cypher—armoured, equipped, mounted, and invisible. He vanished as soon as he had delivered his dispatch, which of course no one noticed, until the legate sent for him afterwards to question him.

  “The letter this man delivered caused quite a stir. It was addressed to Legate Talus in Massilia, by name, and it alleged that a notorious enemy of the state was about to be slain on his private estate, a three-day ride from Massilia. It listed detailed instructions on how to find the place. It also warned that the estate lands housed a private, disciplined army of six hundred mercenaries—a full, legionary cohort—superbly equipped and trained, and sworn to destroy anyone who sought to trespass on the estate. It also spoke of mass graves on the estate grounds, and extensive prison buildings with elaborate torture chambers attached. All in all, a document designed effectively to penetrate the shell of lethargy that had previously prevented much reaction to the earlier reports of strange goings-on in those parts.

  “Talus, as was his duty, summoned reinforcements from all his auxiliary camps and outposts in the Massilia region, and marched with a full thousand-strong cohort to investigate.”

  Varrus was sitting wide-eyed, scarcely believing what he was hearing. “Did they find the place?”

  “They did. And they engaged the mercenaries and defeated them. That is the only part of the report that is verifiable, but even that has been obscured, altered somehow to a report of an armed excursion against a strong party of seaborne raiders who had landed nearby. Be
that as it may, the lines delineating what took place are blurred beyond recognition after that encounter with the mercenaries. Officially, no one knows what happened at the villa, other than that a prominent citizen—a very successful merchant banker—seems to have been hauled from his bed by raiding bandits who penetrated his estate’s defences and dragged him down into a cellar, where they tortured him and killed him.

  “The unofficial, speculative reports cite something radically different. Apparently the searchers found a man awaiting them when they arrived at the villa in question. He was standing in full view, unarmed and dressed completely in white, and when the lead party arrived he raised his hand, in which he held a scroll of some kind, and asked permission to approach the commanding legate. Given the appropriate permission, he handed the scroll to Talus, who examined it with great care, several times, and then nodded, formally accepting it. The waiting man then led the searchers down into the bowels of the villa, where they found the naked body of a grotesquely fat man. He had been castrated and his throat was cut so deeply that his head was almost completely severed.

  “Then Talus, for reasons unknown at the time, instructed a squad of men to escort the unknown man, whoever he might have been, off the premises and deliver him safely to the nearest seaport.”

  The legate finished his wine and set down the cup, then stared into it for several moments. “That’s my little tale,” he said. “Short and mystifying as it is. And now I have to go. I hope I have not bored you, and I trust I have given you some food for thought, if only about the speculative aspects of rumour-mongering and the dissemination of truth.”

  “You have, and I thank you,” Varrus said. “But may I ask you, why did you decide to tell this tale to me?”

  Britannicus smiled. “Because it intrigued me when I heard it and, after thinking about it for several days, there is really no one else to whom I could tell it. It’s hardly the kind of thing an imperial legate could discuss with his subordinates, is it? I find myself intrigued most of all, though, that the man whom they found waiting in the villa, so important to the exposure of all that followed, simply vanished—as had the courier. Were they one and the same?” He shrugged. “Perhaps no one will ever know the truth of that.

  “As for the document he was holding, it was supposedly signed by the Emperor Constantine himself, if you can bring yourself to believe that. And it, too, has disappeared, lost somehow, with no blame assigned to anyone.

  “Unofficially, though, and speculatively again, Talus’s closest subordinate supposedly asked him afterwards what had transpired between him and the stranger, and was told that the fellow was leaving Gaul to make his way across the world, to Byzantium.”

  He smiled and stood up.

  “And now I really must go, so let me thank you for your hospitality and for giving me the opportunity to spend a short time talking like a normal human being. Give my best wishes to your friend Marcus Licinius Cato, by the way, if ever you run into him again. I greatly enjoyed his company in the short time I spent with him. Farewell, Magister Varrus.”

  Acknowledgments

  They say it is always unwise to deal in generalities, but I know that what I want to say here, general though it might be, is sound and true, because I’ve lived through it.

  I’ve been lucky for years in having been able to dance lightly when this section of my novels came around, because I’ve largely been dealing—particularly in the post-Roman British books—with pretty obscure, sixteen-hundred-year-old material that generally lacks specific attribution and is forever open to interpretation, permitting me to put my own personal slant on whatever I’ve wanted to.

  This time, though, I’ve decided it’s time to step forward and acknowledge those people who, over the past quarter-century and more, have consistently influenced both my writing and my storytelling skills and, coincidental though it might seem, there is nothing accidental about the preponderance of Penguin Canada personnel in the list—Viking Press/Penguin Books has been my sole Canadian publisher and my major publisher throughout my career, though its name and influence have changed radically from time to time in recent years. That truth is reflected in what follows here.

  The drafts of all my earliest efforts (I started writing my first novel, The Skystone, back around 1975 or ’76,) fell categorically into what is now the virtually extinct genre of “Men’s Books,” in that they were invariably written with a predominantly male readership in mind. It was taken for granted by almost everyone then that women had no interest in spending their valuable time reading sweeping works of nonacademic but exhaustively researched historical fiction that featured (mostly) male protagonists.

  And so I wrote Men’s Books, because that is the background that existed then: I had learned to do things in what I saw then as the “right,” traditional way, and that’s how I proceeded: I wrote for my own amusement and satisfaction, fully aware of the challenges and the competitive standards involved, and I did so to the best of my ability, struggling to put together a well-crafted story that was different to anything ever written before on my chosen topic.

  So I wrote alone and in private for close to fifteen years, and I guarded my work jealously, allowing less than a handful of close friends to see even glimpses of my scribblings during all that time.

  But even then, that long ago, I was beholden to several women for shaping my progress.

  Sword At Sunset was a novel published in the USA in 1963 by a writer called Rosemary Sutcliffe, and it was the first novel, ever, that physically shook me awake to the possibilities of the Arthurian tales I had always loved; it stimulated me to understand that there might be other, more subtle and therefore more effective ways of telling a story, eschewing the tried and true formulae of the “great” authors of historical fiction. Many of those, including such giants as Taylor Caldwell and George Eliot, had no other choice than to publish as “men” in order to see their work in print. But even then, a sprinkling of other women like Mary Stewart and Marion Zimmer Bradley had begun to make an impact on the market for Historical Fiction.

  I was greatly honoured, therefore, when, I was invited by the editorial staff at Chicago Review Press to write a Foreword to their reprint of Sword At Sunset, published in 2008 to mark the 45th Anniversary of the book’s original publication.

  As long ago as 1990, at the insistence of my long-time friend Alma Lee, who ran the Vancouver Writers Festival for years, I attended my first Master Class for Writers, taught by the inimitable and irreplaceable Ursula K. Le Guin, who insisted, logically it seemed to me, that attendance at a Master Class should entail some kind of mastery over one’s craft and its stock in trade, which was the manipulation and bewitchingly simple presentation of good old plain, highly-polished English. Ms Le Guin insisted, therefore, that her classes should be competitive, and attendance at them should essentially be something in the nature of a prize. I never forgot that, and my own work to this day is predicated upon what she taught me.

  Brad Martin and Doug Gibson, two of the brightest male luminaries of Canadian publishing at that time, stood shoulder to shoulder with me initially in finding a suitable and appropriate publisher (no simple thing, since I was a totally unknown and unproven entity with a complex, bulky series of novels that essentially rewrote the entire Arthurian legend, without magic) but soon after that, I found myself surrounded by a sea of enormously competent, delightfully self-confident women editors, the most current of whom is Lara Hinchberger.

  Cynthia Good was my original publisher at Penguin Books Canada, and under her leadership I soon came to know a legion of female editors who set out collectively to civilize me, change my deplorable attitudes, and reshape my entire mindset on the matter of writing to, about, and for women. They included Catherine Marjoribanks, the substantive editor with whom I have now worked for twenty-six years, and her US counterpart at Tor Books in New York, Claire Eddy.

  I remember Martin Gould, too, for being the artist—at that time he was Art Director of Penguin Can
ada—who first brought my personal graphic designs and ideas to life, showing me how important my input was and is. What a joy it is to discern an idea for a template or a piece of cover art, and then see afterwards the influence it can generate in the hands of a professional illustrator/designer. I have not had the pleasure of working with Martin in more than a decade now, but I understand that he is a thriving, independent designer of books in Ontario, and despite the highly-touted benefits of modern living, communications, and travel, I just don’t get around much any more…especially east of Winnipeg.

  I have enjoyed working with a number of top-flight agents through the years, too, starting with Perry Knowlton of Curtis Brown Limited of New York, who died almost two decades ago, and including my current representatives, Russ Galen of CGG Literary Agency and Danny Baror of Baror International Inc., who handles my off-shore publishers. It was Russ Galen who who made it clear to me, years ago, that my livelihood consisted in deconstructing legends, not in building them…

  And finally, my personal thanks to the friends and colleagues I have garnered over a quarter-century of involvement with the Surrey International Writers Conference: Diana Gabaldon; Anne Perry; Ian Rankin; Guy Gavriel Kay; Hallie Ephron; Roberst McCammon; Michael Slade, AKA Jay Clark; Robert Dugoni; and a host of others. I feel honoured and privileged to have worked with each and every one of you.