The Burning Stone Read online

  Varrus held up his hand to stem the flow of words that he anticipated would grow stronger. “Permit me, Master Liam, if you please. I am familiar with all the tools in your smithy. I can use all of them. Your brother satisfied himself on that matter, and I would not be here if I were unsure of my own abilities.”

  “Then why has my brother never seen you work?”

  Varrus had known that he would have to tell his story sooner or later, if he were to stay in Camulodunum and work in the smithy, but he had assumed that he would have time to settle in and come to know his employer a little before being required to reveal the details of his personal affairs.

  He glanced again at Shamus, who was standing like a witless lump, then turned back to Liam. “There is a sound reason, but it’s a long tale.” He pointed with his thumb towards the open street at his back. “Have you another place where we can talk, some place that’s not as public?” Liam Mcuil was peering at him doubtfully, almost squinting with the effort of trying to read him. “Aye,” he said, jabbing a finger towards a low, ill-fitting door in the wall. “In there.” He moved towards the door immediately and Shamus started to follow him, but Varrus stretched out his arm and stopped the younger man in his tracks.

  “Not you, Shamus,” he said. “I need to talk to Liam privately…Alone, that means.”

  Shamus looked surprised, and then indignant, and for a moment it looked as though he might argue, but then he threw up his hands and walked away towards the rear of the smithy, saying he was going to see his aunt.

  Varrus followed Liam into a tiny room that, from the piles and rolls of parchment and paper on every flat surface, he guessed served the smith as a records office. He asked Liam’s permission to shut the door, then closed it as securely as it could be closed, aware of the smith’s quizzical eyes on him, and leaned back against it as though to hold it in place. And for the next half-hour he told Liam Mcuil the story of his life, leaving out nothing that he thought might be necessary to the smith’s understanding of why Quintus Publius Varrus, a Roman aristocrat, had come to Camulodunum to seek employment in his smithy.

  The other man sat silent, listening closely and making no attempt to interrupt, and when Quintus eventually lapsed into silence, he sat there for moments longer. Finally, he straightened in his chair and nodded.

  “That makes sense out of what you said before,” he said mildly. “It took longer to tell than I thought it might, and I heard more in there than I ever heard before, or ever expected to hear, about things that folk the likes of me never get to hear about in the normal way of life.” He gazed at Varrus with his head tilted to one side as though reassessing him carefully. “You’re far less than half my age, I would say, and yet you’ve probably travelled ten times farther than I ever did and seen more things than I could ever dream about. I won’t question anything of what you’ve told me, because was any word of it untrue my brother would never have sent you. But I still don’t know if you’ve the skill or the strength to swing a heavy maul or shape a piece of iron.” Again he scrutinized Varrus from head to toe. “Where did you get that sword you’re wearing? I’m guessing it’s the one you used to save Lydia.”

  Varrus dropped his hand automatically to the hilt. “It is,” he said. “I found it in a town called Florentia, in Italy.”

  “Did you buy it? Personally, I mean?”

  “I did.”

  “Who from?”

  “From the man who made it. His name was Ichthus. I remember that because he was eating fish when we arrived.”

  “It’s the Hispanic sword.” Liam had no interest in the maker’s name. “That’s what they call it, a gladius hispaniensis. The heavy infantry legions brought it back with them from Iberia a hundred years ago, preferring it to their own. It’s longer, heavier, and sharper than the old legionary short swords used to be.”

  “I know.” Varrus was careful to show no hint of surprise that the Eirishman should know the weapon’s Latin name. The man was a smith and therefore, he presumed, an armourer to some extent.

  “Well then, you’re not completely ignorant. Can I look at it?”

  Varrus drew the sword from its sheath and passed it to him, hilt first, and the smith eyed it appraisingly, hefting it for balance.

  “Hmm. How did you know it was worth buying?”

  “I didn’t know,” Varrus said. “Rhys Twohands said so, and I trusted him, so I bought it.”

  “Twohands…That’s the fellow who died in Londinium, the one who taught you smithing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why was he looking in that particular place, do you know? You were a long way from home and he could have found a sword anywhere else, in the hundred miles between where you were and where you lived.”

  “He could have. I had a serviceable sword and we were not looking to buy a new one. But we heard about this famous Florentine sword maker, Ichthus, who had been legion trained, and Rhys wanted to go and look at the fellow’s wares. He picked out this sword, and I bought it.”

  “Well, he had a good eye.” Liam Mcuil flipped the heavy sword vertically and caught it easily by the end of the blade, and returned it to him, hilt first. “It’s a fine weapon. Let’s hope you don’t have any need to use it here in Colcaster.”

  Varrus raised his head, frowning slightly. “Colcaster?”

  Mcuil grinned. “Aye, Colcaster. It’s what the folk who live here call the place now, and of all the names it’s had, it’s the easiest one to say. Claudius named it Colonia Claudia Victricensis. Can you believe the stupidity of that, for the name of a town? I’ve heard tell he named it in honour of the Twentieth Legion, the Valeria Victrix—as well as himself, of course—but who knows? That was two hundred years ago and by that time the Victrix legion was long gone from here. Anyway, the folks around here paid no more attention to it then than they do now. They were content with Camulodunum, the name it’s had since before the time of Boudicca, and even that’s a jawbreaker. But the old ways are changing. There’s new folk coming here all the time, and there’s more retired veterans living here.” He shrugged. “So now it’s Colcaster—the walled fort on the River Colne, or something like that.”

  Varrus had been listening with a tiny, bemused smile on his face. “Forgive me,” he said, “but it seems you have more than a passing knowledge of Britain.”

  “It’s my business,” the other said, sounding surprised that he should be asked such a question. “I need to know that kind of thing. I’m a smith, a master blade maker, and I rely on the Roman armies for my livelihood. So I pay attention to them. I know their history. The three legions in Britain, their cohorts and the territories they police and govern, along with names and ranks of commanding officers and armourers and quartermasters and junior officers and senior centurions, all provide me with my stock-in-trade and my family with its daily bread.”

  He stood up. “And speaking of bread, come and meet my wife, Shanna. She’ll have drained Shamus dry of information by now and she’ll know all she needs to know about you. If our Lydia’s taken a liking to you, that’ll be enough for her and she’ll try to fatten you up like a prize pig. You probably think I’m gulling you, but wait you, now, and you’ll see for yourself.”

  “I thank you for the warning,” Varrus said. “But let me ask you one more question before we go.”

  The smith remained where he was, standing behind the table that served him as a desk. “What can I tell you?”

  Varrus lifted one hand slightly, in a silent request for patience. “I know you asked your brother for help. I also know you have work that you’re concerned about finishing on time, and I know, too, that you had an accident recently that has impaired you somehow. So if it pleases you, and if I am to work with you, tell me about those things. You don’t appear to be seriously impaired in any way, though I noticed a slight hesitation in the way you move when you turn your body.”

  “You have keen eyes. Aye, I stumbled and fell at the forge, about four months ago, and set myself afire. Sh
anna seized the bucket and doused the flames before they reached me too badly. But the trouble was that I was forging a sword at the time and the blade, yellow hot, fell with me. There was nothing a single bucket of water could do against that. I burnt my belly and my left side, under the ribs—badly. Not an enjoyable thing, believe me. It’s almost healed now, but it still pulls when I turn the wrong way, so I’m careful about how I move. What else?”

  “The workload. What’s involved, and why are you so concerned about meeting your commitment?”

  “Armour. Ring-mail tunics—what they call lorica hamata. That’s what has me concerned. I make them for the garrison officers, have done for years. It’s slow, painstaking work, but it’s profitable. I was managing well up to the time I fell, but I couldn’t work for months after that and now I have three of them left to make, out of an order of six, and they have to be ready within six months, by the Ides of December, in time for the garrison festivities at the closing of Saturnalia.”

  “Three of them, in six months? That should not be too difficult, should it?”

  Liam snorted. “No, not at all. Unless, that is, you want them to be well made. Have you ever seen how those things are made?”

  “No, but I know they’re heavy and worth their weight in gold to a legionary.”

  “They would be worth that to me, too, if I could get the whoresons finished. It’s time that concerns me first and foremost, not the work itself. They are not that hard to make. Much of it is straightforward donkey work that any reasonably clever boy can do, once he’s shown how, but it’s mind-numbingly tedious.”

  “How so?”

  “Because it never seems to end. There’s no escaping it. Each full hamata tunic, complete with shoulder reinforcements, takes up to thirty thousand metal rings. Thirty thousand, all the same size and thickness, less than the width of the pad of your thumb. And they all have to be made by hand and then attached to one another, half of them solid rings, the others, alternating with them, made to be riveted shut once they’re in place and threaded through the solid rings next to them on four sides, holding the entire fabric together.”

  He turned away cautiously and rummaged through a pile of papers behind him, withdrawing a hand-sized sample and tossing it to Varrus, who almost dropped it when the solid weight of it took him by surprise.

  The smith nodded, clearly having expected that. “There are state-run manufactories that do nothing else but produce stuff like that, and that piece you’re holding is made of plain iron rings. Even with trained people working full-time on them, year in and year out, each one of those iron shirts takes about two and a half months to assemble.”

  Varrus was peering at the individual rings around the edges of the sample because they were easier to see than those in the mass of the thing. “You have to make these? These rings?”

  The smith made a huffing sound. “Not me, I promise. Slaves make them, one at a time, by hand, in the manufactories I mentioned. That’s where the wire is made.” He saw the lack of comprehension in Varrus’s eyes. “Each ring is made from a piece of wire.”

  “I see. And where are these manufactories?”

  “They’re everywhere, throughout the empire, such a common sight that most people don’t notice them. You’ve seen them yourself. There are some close to the edge of town here, outside the city walls, enormous enclosures, each of them containing a number of separate buildings where hundreds of slaves, perhaps even thousands of them, do nothing else but make wire, all day long, every day of every year.”

  “Thousands? I find that hard to credit.”

  Liam looked at him as if he were mad. “What is hard to credit is that it takes several people two and a half months, working together, to make a single shirt. That is hard to believe. And how many of those shirts do you think are being made? How many legionaries are there in all the empire’s armies? There are probably close to thirty-five legions today. And there’s at least five thousand men in each legion and sometimes twice that many in the frontier units, and probably half of all of them wear ring-mail tunics. So that’s approaching a hundred thousand tunics, each of the whoresons taking two and a half months to make…” He seemed to have stunned even himself.

  “The first thing you have to do, though, before you can start making the shirt, is to make the wire for the rings, and it has to be either iron or bronze because everything else is too soft to turn away a hard-swung blade. The ones I use are bronze.”

  “And why do you use bronze?”

  “Because it was worth my while, until I fell. It’s picky, fussy work, but highly profitable and it produces a much finer, luxurious-looking tunic. The three remaining shirts I have to make are for staff officers up at the fort on the hill, so they have to be of superior quality in every way—polished bronze with gilded buckles and brass embellishments. Nothing resembling the coarseness of the iron things the ordinary grunts wear. And so we have to make bronze rings—we being me and now you and young Shamus and any other willing bodies we can recruit. It’s donkey work, as I said, and anyone can do it, and I have another building where we make rings and nothing else. Thousands of wire rings—tens of thousands of the things—and every one of them practically identical to all the others…Are you perhaps beginning to see why I might be concerned?”

  “I think so. But you think it can be done in time?”

  The smith shrugged. “Of course it can, provided nobody wants to sleep for the next six months.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that, at least. It can be done, so we’ll do it.”

  THIRTEEN

  By the time his first six months in Colcaster ended, Quintus Varrus’s life was altogether different from anything he had ever imagined it might be, and he had no wish to change a single thing about it. He discovered very quickly that Liam had not been exaggerating when he predicted that his wife, Shanna, would take him to her heart and would thereafter try to fatten him up like a pig. She did, but all the men were working so hard for the duration of that six-month period that both he and Shamus ate everything she placed in front of them and neither one gained a smidgen of extra weight.

  Lydia Mcuil had come up from Londinium during that period, too, accompanied by Dominic, and they had spent a week with the family. Among other things, Varrus had been glad to see that Shamus’s hostility to his father appeared to have lessened, blunted, no doubt, by the time and distance of their separation, but assisted greatly by the visible emergence of self-confidence in the younger man, who had proved beyond dispute, in the gruelling, day-to-day grind of the previous months, assembling the endless tapestry of ring mail, that he was more than capable of applying himself to a monotonous and thankless task.

  It also transpired at that visit, though Quintus himself would never have believed it earlier, that he was too busy and preoccupied, and too bone-tired, to do anything other than react with simple, genuine pleasure to Lydia’s presence, spending hours talking quietly with her each evening before falling headlong into his bed and passing out immediately. More than three months had gone by since he had last seen her, on the morning he and Shamus left for Colcaster—he no longer thought of it as Camulodunum, unless he was talking to someone from the garrison—and for the first few moments after her arrival he had worried that they might no longer be able to talk with each other as openly and easily as they had that first day they met. After exchanging shy, tentative smiles, though, they quickly fell into the easy, bantering companionship they had enjoyed at the outset. Then she mortified him by taking mischievous delight in pointing out, one night at dinner, that Varrus’s hair was growing yellow again at the roots, and as soon as dinner was over she produced the hair potion she had brought with her and made a great fuss about cutting it considerably and darkening it again in the middle of Shanna’s kitchen, to great hilarity from the others. Varrus took it in good spirit, and everyone enjoyed watching him undergo his transformation. And from that point on, though he knew the entire family was watching and paying eager heed to their be
haviour, Varrus allowed himself to relax and enjoy the simple delight of being near her.

  He could not have been more aware of her sexually had they been alone together constantly and free to explore each other as man and woman, but they never were alone, and that made the tingling tension between them even more pronounced and jealously guarded than it might otherwise have been. He could feel his insides vibrating with excitement each time she came into a room and each time she passed close to him, or smiled at him, or touched him even by accident. But the number of those brushing touches increased as time passed, and the accidental element vanished quickly, and he learned to interpret her expressions and to read what was in her eyes when she looked at him. On three short-lived occasions, seizing precious moments when they were unobserved, she had kissed him, tenderly and wistfully the first time, but then with fast-mounting passion that left them both breathless and shuddering, and from the look in her eyes after the third time, he knew that the same feelings that were threatening to rip him apart were affecting her equally.

  The single great solace of that short visit, though, lay in the evident fact that the Mcuil family accepted their relationship and the mutual affection and attraction that was so obvious between them. It was clear to everyone that Lydia was looking on him with more than casual favour, and that he was besotted with her, and the warmth and atmosphere of an extended family gathering to celebrate grew more pronounced from day to day, so that on the day she and her father left to return home, no one seemed to think anything of the fact that the young couple’s fourth kiss, chaste and slow, yet tender and clinging, took place in front of them all.

  The following morning he was back at work, the drudgery of the meticulous, boring routine depriving him of everything but the need to concentrate on achieving absolute sameness in everything he did, and he swore an oath that he would never, ever again work with bronze wire or metal ring armour.