The Burning Stone Read online

  Also by Jack Whyte

  A DREAM OF EAGLES

  The Skystone

  The Singing Sword

  The Eagles’ Brood

  The Saxon Shore

  The Sorcerer, Volume I: The Fort at River’s Bend

  The Sorcerer, Volume II: Metamorphosis

  ~

  Uther

  ~

  The Golden Eagle, Volume I: Clothar the Frank

  The Golden Eagle, Volume II: The Eagle

  ~

  THE TEMPLAR TRILOGY

  Knights of the Black and White

  Standard of Honor

  Order in Chaos

  ~

  THE GUARDIANS SERIES

  The Forest Laird

  The Renegade

  The Guardian

  VIKING

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Jack Whyte

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Whyte, Jack, 1940-, author

  The burning stone / Jack Whyte.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780670070008 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780143196969 (electronic)

  I. Title.

  PS8595.H947B87 2018   C813′.54    C2018-900626-9

                       C2018-900627-7

  Cover and interior design by Jennifer Lum

  Cover images: (illustration) Gillian Newland;

  (pattern) Yulia Buchatskaya/​Shutterstock.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  To my beloved and greatly appreciated wife Beverley,

  who seems no less mildly bewildered by this novel’s publication

  than she appeared to be at the unveiling of The Skystone in 1992.

  And to two relative newcomers: my great-granddaughters

  Reilly Burke, aged eight, and Melia (Millie) Strashuk, aged almost two…

  the forerunners of an entirely new generation of descendants.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jack Whyte

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Place Names in the Book

  Map

  Prologue Dalmatia, A.D. 310

  Book One Cornwall, A.D. 312

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Book Two Londuin, A.D. 317

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Book Three Colcaster, A.D. 317-318

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Book Four Eboracum to Colcaster, A.D. 318

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Epilogue A.D. 322

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  I’m starting to imagine how the late, great Yankee baseball player Yogi Berra must have felt when he was asked to describe what was going through his mind during his change of career from catcher to manager. He ended up, famously, saying that it was like déjà vu all over again.

  I remember being involved in an almost identical struggle back in 1991/92, when we were preparing to publish my first novel, The Skystone.

  My primary concern in my Author’s Note back then was to give my readers some idea of the makeup and complexity of the Roman armies operating in the Province of Britain in the last few decades of the third century—their composition, their armour and weaponry, their strategies and techniques—and I was able to make a fair stab, I believed at the time, at describing the realities of third-century Roman military life to modern, North American readers.

  This time around, though, my expectations have been different, yet oddly similar, grounded firmly in the needs of my twenty-first-century readers to be able to understand things that the common grunt soldier of Roman times understood instinctively, through example and experience. Soldiers used precisely the same kinds of everyday expressions that we still use two thousand years later; we just need to know where to look for them. Simple words such as the throwaway “thanks,” (“benigne,” pronounced with a hard “g” as in “ignore”) or the names of the ingredients in a recipe for garum, a spicy fish sauce that was to the Roman legionary what tea was to the British Army’s Tommy at the peak of the British Empire, seventeen centuries later.

  As for pocket money, the largest coins that most legionaries would ever see would have been varieties of the almost pure copper coins known as asses, and when they saw those in anything resembling large numbers, they probably said “benigne” to the gods of wealth and property. Braccae were the leather trousers worn by the legions in winter, and they became the trousers of later years, the original “breeches.”

  The legionaries used almost the same system of weights and measures used in Britain today (known as the Imperial System), but a Roman pound weighed approximately twelve ounces, about three quarters of a modern, sixteen-ounce British pound, so three Roman pounds weighed close to a modern kilogram.

  I went to great pains, in my Author’s Note to The Skystone, to explain the workings of the various military formations that comprised the Roman Legion: ten cohorts to each legion originally, that number had later been revised to eight cohorts in most instances. I described the eight military centuries contained by each cohort, and the Centurions who commanded them. A full cohort numbered eight hundred men by then, rather than the thousand men of earlier times, so each legion, at full strength, contained a minimum of six thousand, four hundred soldiers, plus all the ancillary forces required—from medical personnel to kitchen staff, armourers, and an entire range of artisans—to keep them functioning. At no time, though, did I take the trouble to explain that, from the ordinary legionary’s viewpoint, the most important building in a Roman camp—no matter the size, be it temporary marching camp
or permanent legionary fortress—was his personal billet; the tent or barracks house that accommodated him personally, along with the intimately close, eight-man squad with whom he lived and fought. There were eight eight-man squads in each century, and they were quartered in the same position every night they were in camp, sharing everything the army could throw at them. Both squad and billet shared a common name; each was a contubernium, its members were called contuberniales, and the contubernium was the basic unit of a century of six hundred and forty men.

  The daily military affairs of the cohorts were supervised by the legion’s Centurions, but the legion itself was ruled by the nominal Legatus Legionis—the legionary Commander—with the assistance of a crew of staff officers comprising six Tribunes and the legion’s senior Centurions. There were two distinct types of Tribune, each immediately identifiable to even the newest recruits. While most of the military Tribunes were ordinary, hard-working professional officers making their way steadily up through the ranks, that was far from being true of all Tribunes. The exception to the norm was the kind known as a Tribunus Laticlavius, a direct reference to the wide, highly visible stripe (the laticlavus) on his tunic. The Tribunus Laticlavius was an open and undisguised man to watch in the political arena, usually the younger son of a powerful senatorial family and almost always the second-in-command of his legion, there to be seen and admired as doing his public duty, no matter how mediocre a soldier he might actually be.

  Most modern readers don’t know that for several hundreds of years following the time of the first-century invasions under Claudius and the early emperors, there had been only three legions serving in Britain; these were widely and commonly known as the British Legions. I have opted to use the modern equivalent of the official titles of the British Legions in this book, since there were only three of them: Legio XX Valeria, the Twentieth Valeria, was based in Deva, which is now the city of Chester; Legio VI Victoria, the Sixth “Victorious,” was based in Eboracum, modern York, though its major fame had been won in Iberia—modern Spain and Portugal—where it distinguished itself under the leadership of the Emperor Flavius; and Legio II Augusta, the legion known as the Second Augusta, which seems to have been headquartered in Isca on the Cornish Peninsula, in the modern town of Exeter in Devon, which was then called Isca Dumnoniorum. For more than a hundred and fifty years prior to that, though, the Second Augusta was reputedly headquartered in another, more northerly Isca known as Isca Silurum, this one the modern town of Caerleon in south Wales.

  And then, of course, there’s the whole confusing question of why there were suddenly four emperors at the same time. That situation has perplexed more than a few people over the years, but the answer is really very simple. The period known as the “decline and fall” had its beginnings during the reign of the emperor Commodus, who was villainously played by the actor Joaquin Phoenix in the film Gladiator. For the next hundred and more years after his reign, the Empire began collapsing upon itself, and for the last seventy-odd of those years, a hodge-podge of ruinous so-called emperors, all bent upon enriching themselves, neglected the armies more and more outrageously at a time when the imperial borders themselves had never been more vulnerable. Soldiers went unpaid and unfed, and their weaponry and equipment were never renewed or upgraded, so that entire military units eventually began to disappear, drifting off to look after themselves in odd corners of the Imperial countryside, where they could maintain the remnants of their security and survive by their own skills.

  That dissolution was stopped, for a hundred years or so, with the arrival of a new emperor called Diocletian, who had been a soldier all his life and knew precisely what was needed to reverse the damage.

  He began by acknowledging that the Empire had grown too large for any one man to handle, and so he split it up into East and West, with an emperor and a deputy emperor for each region. The senior administrator was called the Augustus and held full Imperial power. His deputy, in both cases, was called the Caesar and was, ipso facto, the heir apparent to the Augustus’s powers. It was a sensible system that should have worked perfectly, and it did at the outset until, of course, human nature began to assert itself and idealism once again became politics.

  Hand in glove with those changes, Diocletian also moved to breathe new life and morale into the armies, by acknowledging what had gone wrong during the prior seven decades, and by putting an entirely new system of logistical supply and resupply into place, accompanied by a new recruitment campaign to guarantee that the needs of Rome’s legions would be properly catered to thereafter.

  Once the new system had been tested and proven reliable, though, it quickly became a rich target for organized thievery, perpetrated by the very people who had themselves been exploited by the former system and who now set out to grow rich by milking the new one, thereby drawing attention to the need for some kind of policing force.

  It has always been the job of the military to police itself, of course. But how can Authority police itself when the police forces themselves prove unreliable? That matter was never explained or addressed directly during Diocletian’s reign or during that of his successor, Constantine the Great, and so the details surrounding the resupply and refurbishment of the Imperial legions seventeen hundred years ago must, of necessity, contain much speculation. But speculation is the food of people who write historical fiction, and that is why this volume is a novel and not an academic treatise.

  The Romans used the Julian calendar, whereas today we use the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582. There were ten months in the Julian year, and they varied in length from twenty-eight days (February) to thirty-one, with several being twenty-nine or thirty days long. January was the month of Janus, the two-headed god who saw both past and future simultaneously. March was the month of Mars and June the month of Juno, while the meanings of the two between are uncertain today. The next month, originally known as the fifth month, Quinctilis, was eventually renamed July, in honour of Julius Caesar, while Sextilis, the Sixth month, was renamed August, in honour of Caesar Augustus. The four remaining months, the seventh through the tenth, have remained unchanged ever since; September (from the Latin “septem”), October (“octo”), November (“novem”), and December (“decem”).

  Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays did not exist in Romano-British times. Those names were coined later, to honour the Norse deities Woden, Thor, and Freya, and were added to the Anglo-Saxon language in the early Middle Ages. The soldiers of this tale would have spoken of Sunday as the Sun’s Day, and Monday as the Moon’s Day. Tuesday, though, was called Mars’s Day and Wednesday was the day of Mercury—still called mercredi in modern French. Thursday was dedicated to Jupiter, Friday was the Day of Venus, and Saturday was the Day of Saturn. Saturn was also the god honoured at the celebration of Saturnalia, which ran from December 18th through December 23rd and was a season of gift-giving during which traditional familial roles were often reversed, with household slaves and retainers being served and catered to by their owners. It was the precursor of our modern Christmas traditions.

  And so the traditional question of the Author’s Note has been rephrased yet again: How much information is needed to make the modern reader feel at home in this fourth-century world? I hope this helps a little.

  Jack Whyte

  Kelowna, BC, Canada 2018

  Place Names in the Book

  Modern readers who try to identify the Roman towns of fourth-century Britain and France (which was known as Gaul at that time) can quickly become confused and disoriented because the tribal Frankish invasions that eventually changed the region’s name from Gaul to France would not begin for at least another century. The reason for all the upheavals, puzzling though it may seem, is very simple: over the intervening centuries, great migrations moved people in unprecedented numbers. They invaded and settled and invariably brought their own languages, customs, and religions to their new homes. Thus, most of the names of the places in existence in Roman times have since changed radically. />
  Many small, unimportant Roman towns in Britain fell into disuse and disrepair during that time, while other, previously undistinguished outposts sprang into unexpected prominence under the pressures of history. One of the most startling results of all that movement of people, and the changes they brought with them, was frequent name changes for the larger, more permanent, and readily defensible population centres.

  The Gallic port originally called Lutetia was home to the earliest Roman garrison fort established in northern Gaul to control the local Celtic tribes of the region. By the time the Romans withdrew their armies back to Italia in 401 A.D., though, its name had changed, and more than a hundred years after that, because of its strategic importance in controlling a key river crossing, the Frankish king Clovis, who founded the Merovingian dynasty, decided to make the former garrison town his new capital, calling it simply Paris.

  The modern Turkish city of Istanbul had been a small but strategic port known as Byzantium for centuries, but in 330 A.D. the emperor Constantine rebuilt it and renamed it in his own honour, calling it Constantinopolis, although he also referred to it at various times as New Rome or Second Rome. The Vikings of the ninth century called it Miklagard (“The Great City”) and even the Arab world spoke of it with awe, but its name was changed to the much less exotic Istanbul in the early 1950s.

  The list that follows here is not at all comprehensive. Most of these names will be alien to readers today, but the places are all still there, and they are, for the most part, still thriving, albeit under different names. Those modern equivalents are listed here, too.