The Burning Stone Read online

  He swept the spilled handful of iron bits into his other palm, dropped them into the crucible, and added the same amount again.

  “So. There is our main ingredient. To that we add the enhancers, the additives that will impart the magic and add allure to the final product, thus.”

  He bent beneath the tabletop, reaching for the box of charcoal. He gathered up a large handful, then began to break the individual lengths of brittle, black, powdery fuel into pieces smaller than a thumb pad, placing them in the crucible. When he was done, he mixed them with his fingers, grinding them against the iron beads. That done to his satisfaction, he dusted his hands off over the bowl and reached for another wide-mouthed jar, this one capped with a disk of dried cork. He removed the cap and pulled out a few dull but still green leaves, then placed them, one at a time, over the mixture he had prepared.

  “For succulence,” he said, but offered no other words to explain either what they were or what purpose they served. Finally, after a glance around the tabletop, he reached into a large, pot-bellied clay vessel against the wall, more like an urn than a jar, and scooped out first one handful, then another, of a dull greyish-white powder, which he shaped into a conical pile on the table’s surface.

  “What’s that?” Varrus asked him.

  “Crushed seashells. Limpets and oysters. We add them thus.” He scooped up a handful and poured it gently over the mixture in the crucible, directing the falling powder towards the most obvious holes between pieces, and continuing, adding more of the powder from the urn, until there was nothing visible in the crucible beneath the even surface of the powdered shells. When he was satisfied, he smoothed the surface gently, leaving a space of about half a thumbnail’s length between it and the upper rim of the crucible.

  “Is that it?” Varrus was not even sure what his question meant, but he felt disappointed, cheated almost, though he could not have explained why, and from the way the giant looked at him, he could see that Hanno had noticed.

  “No,” Hanno said. “That is the mixture of ingredients. It remains now to place the crust on the pie.” He reached out his giant, questing hand yet again.

  Varrus had seen the disk of damp clay leaning against the wall at the back of the table. Now, Hanno picked it up gently by its edges, then flipped it over and held it on the extended fingers of his huge left hand, exposing an inset flange around the rim of the disk. Without removing his eyes from the lid, he groped with his right hand for another jar, this one with its sides slick and coated with wet clay, and Varrus slid it closer to him. The smith grunted in thanks, then reached in and scooped up a handful of wet clay, transferring it to the outer edge of the flange and spreading it liberally, one-handed, smearing it thickly until the entire flange was covered. He then scooped up more of the clay mixture, squeezed it between his fingers over the neck of the jar to make its consistency thinner and more pliable, and applied a generous coating of it to the top of the crucible itself. Then he used both hands to settle the sealing lid atop the crucible, pressing it firmly into place.

  “There,” he said, giving the lid a last downwards push. “That is it, for the time being, at least. Now it simply has to be cooked.”

  “Why must it be sealed so tightly?”

  “Another mystery. But all of us who use this method know that if it is not sealed perfectly, the process will fail. The same applies to the powdered seashells. No one knows their purpose, but none of us doubts that they have one. Prepare the crucible perfectly in every way, take fullest care with every aspect, then omit the seashells, or substitute some other compound in their place, and your process will fail. The metal obtained from it will be inferior. No one knows why, but that has been proved, time and again, ad nauseam.”

  Ignatius Ajax watched Varrus keenly as he asked his next question. “What about the cooking? Which oven do you use? The big one outside?”

  “Why would you think that?” Hanno replied.

  Varrus sucked on something in his teeth, then looked from one to the other of the two men. “Because it is big, because it is right outside, and because it’s the only one out there. There are fifteen smelting furnaces and ovens in this armoury—I’ve gone around and counted them—but none of them comes close to the one outside this room, either in volume or capacity.”

  Hanno looked over at Ajax, who looked straight back at him in silence, and then his mouth twisted into a lopsided smile. “And what do you construe from that?”

  Varrus hesitated, aware that he was on the point of saying something he might later regret. Now he thrust his thumbs down into his belt, beneath his apron, his eyes going to Ignatius Ajax first, then to Demetrius Hanno. “May I speak my mind, without fear of being punished?”

  The giant shrugged. “So be you say nothing punishable, yes.”

  Varrus caught his breath, then plunged. “I think there is more here than people know.”

  The other two men looked at each other blankly, and then Ajax asked, “Which people are you talking about?”

  “The people with the power to stop whatever is happening here. The legate, I presume. The high command.”

  Hanno made to speak, but Ajax stopped him with an upraised hand. “Go on. What else do you think?”

  “Well, I know you are the garrison armourer, a commissary centurion, as you say. But I don’t think you are a smith. Demetrius Hanno is certainly a smith, but you seem not to be. And yet you two are friends and you spend more time daily in the smithy here, talking to Demetrius Hanno, than you do anywhere else. It’s almost as if you two were conspirators or secret collaborators. But in what? I have been asking myself for some time now, what could you two be sharing that the authorities might want to terminate?”

  Ignatius Ajax smiled with half his face, the right side of his mouth curving upwards to expose a gleam of teeth. “And have you found an answer to give yourself?” The smile widened, barely perceptibly. “I warn you, you should think before you say more, because I’m remembering stories I was told as a child, about Julius Caesar at the Rubicon River.”

  Varrus shook his head. He was committed to his course now. “The legate here, Lucius Placidus Pompey, is not respected. He has authority, but despite his august name, he lacks credibility, and his behaviour is scandalous by any measure. Even the merchants and street vendors in the town know that. The man is venal and grasping, vain and petty. But as legate he is protected by the full, majestic force of imperial law against anything that might resemble mutiny. The single man in all of Britain who could demote or remove him is the colonial governor, and he is overseas with the Emperor.” He stopped, slightly out of breath, looking again from one to the other of his listeners. “Have I yet crossed the Rubicon?”

  Ajax made a face. “Well, you have certainly earned a charge of mutiny and sedition. But you have said nothing of this alleged conspiracy between myself and Demetrius Hanno. What is it that we are, allegedly, conspiring to protect or conceal?”

  The silence now was deafening. Varrus glanced quickly sideways at Ajax, but the armourer was bending forward with his arms crossed, his backside against the edge of a workbench and his helmeted head down, concealing his face. He looked back at Hanno defiantly.

  “Testing new metals. Forging new kinds of weapons. You, Magister Hanno, are a smith. A very fine one. That is evident. But all you want to do is what you do. You want to make better swords and you have little patience for anything that interferes with that—including officious busybodies and incompetent superiors.”

  He turned to Ajax, who kept his head lowered, refusing to look up as Varrus spoke to the crest of his helmet. “You, Magister Ajax, are an armourer and a collector of fine blades. Far more important than all that, though, you are a leader and an organizer. You understand what the management of a complex manufactory entails, and even more, you understand the ways and means of avoiding official interference and circumventing unnecessary procedures. Most important of all, you understand the methods by which a legion and a garrison function effectivel
y—this garrison, most particularly. You appreciate that once a garrison is deemed ineffectual or moribund, its days are numbered. So you work very hard to keep this one functioning smoothly and efficiently by presenting flawless, unfailing results from your armouries. By processing a seemingly inexhaustible supply of weapons and iron bars. And thanks to that, Legate Pompey smiles on everything you do. He depends upon you to keep his career presentable, and you work hard to do that—not because you want to, but because you know that by doing it, you can keep him blind to what is happening beneath his nose, in his armouries.

  “What do I think you two are conspiring over? I believe you are conducting experiments that no one in authority has authorized—building furnaces and ovens unlike any others, and working on new ways of hardening metal. For that, you have built the high ovens by the smithy, but even so, you cannot produce all the high-quality metal you need, and so you have an arrangement with my uncle in Londinium, Dominic Mcuil, whereby he sends you the output from his special oven to augment your own production. And in return, you send him illicit supplies of iron ore from all over the empire, materials intended for the military, not a civilian contractor like himself. So there is the partnership. Demetrius Hanno handles the unseen experiments and in turn you keep him safe from the attentions of the praetorium and the legate.”

  He stopped, having finally run out of words, and for long moments no one moved and his heart sank as he recognized, too late, the enormity of what he had said. He kept his eyes focused straight ahead, staring at the large jar of powdered seashells on the workbench and hearing his own inner voice raging at him for being such an idiot, for condemning himself so damningly that nothing he could do or say thereafter could ever change anything he had said.

  And then Ignatius Ajax, who was still slouching against the bench with his head down and his arms crossed, sniffed loudly and lifted his head, turning to Demetrius Hanno.

  “Moribund, he said. And ineffectual. Have you ever heard an Eirish barbarian speak like that before? That fluently and with so much conviction? I told you he was one to watch, did I not?” He turned back to Varrus. “I came here today to talk to you about something that came to me almost by accident, in that I was there when it arrived and someone recognized your name and knew you worked for me.”

  Varrus was left open-mouthed by the change of topic, and several moments passed before he was able to ask, “What about it?”

  “Your name? It’s Mcuil. You should know that better than I do.”

  “No, I mean, what about everything I’ve been saying here?”

  “What about it? You had most of it right. All of it, in fact. So are you in or out?” He saw the look of utter confusion on Varrus’s face and added, “The alleged conspiracy, I mean. Are you in or not?”

  “I don’t believe I have any option, do I?”

  “Of course you have options. You simply have to pick one. If you choose to join us, we’ll tell you a little of what’s happening—enough to keep you curious but happily ignorant—and life will continue as before. If you opt not to join us, we’ll kill you and throw your corpse into the river. It’s not a difficult choice—you simply say yes or no. So choose.”

  It finally sank home to Varrus that the armourer was teasing him, straight-faced and solemn, and he began to relax. “So if I come in, you’ll tell me what’s going on?”

  “No. I said we’ll tell you a little bit. No more than that.”

  “So be it, then. I’m in.”

  “Good, then we’re almost done here, so you can stop looking so unhappy. The most important thing Hanno had left to tell you, before you turned into the Golden Orator there, was that your parallel was sound—cooks and smiths are much alike, and the cooking is the most important step in either process. That’s why we had to build a higher, bigger, better furnace with a giant bellows—to control the cooking. Dominic Mcuil built the first one, several years ago. We improved upon his creation here, enlarging and refining it, with his cooperation. He and I have known each other for years. What we do here is, we fire the furnace at ferociously high heat for days—higher heat than any I’ve ever heard of, or Hanno either—and then we let it cool at its own speed until the oven is cold to the touch. That long cool-down is the wondrous part—the mystery. Again, no one knows why, but once that’s done—fierce, air-blown heat for days and then a long cooling down—then everything afterwards can be done at normal smithy temperatures, so be it that you handle it gently at the very outset. That’s the dangerous time, right after the metal leaves the crucible, for when it’s new, fresh from the oven, the metal can be brittle if you overheat it again and you can shatter it and ruin it.

  “So we heat it slowly at first, and hammer-work it gently until the impurities all fall out, and as we reheat it and rework it, time after time, that brittleness fades and the iron grows more malleable and easier to handle all the time. And then we hammer it flat and stretch it, and fold it and flatten it and stretch it again, and we keep doing that until we can form it into strong, thick bars. And eventually, from each of those bars, we make a weapon. The finest weapons ever made by Roman smiths. And sometimes we mix our metal with the metal from Dominic’s oven, which is damn near as good as ours. And beginning tomorrow, Demetrius will show you how to do it.”

  He looked sideways towards Hanno. “Right now, though, I need him. He and I have matters to discuss. May I take him away?”

  “Aye, there’s nothing to be done now, anyway. His time is up.”

  “Excellent.” Ajax stood straight and adjusted his clothing. “Follow me, Recruit Mcuil. For you, this day is not yet done, and all we can do is hope that it will continue to unfold as smoothly as it has until now.”

  “No, wait! A moment more. A single question on a matter that disturbs me…”

  He waited as the two senior men exchanged glances, and then Ajax nodded. “One question, then. Ask it.”

  “Will anyone ever do anything about this legate? I realize that might not be good for you and what you do here—your conspiracy, as you call it. His removal could potentially expose your activities, but the man is thoroughly corrupt.”

  “He is. And his corruption has not gone unnoticed, believe me. But Lucius Placidus Pompey is no concern of ours. What befalls him in the future will create its own upheavals, but they should not affect us here. Is that what you wanted to ask?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we are finished here. But I promise you, Pompey will fall.”

  NINETEEN

  Ajax struck out for the main door of the praesidium building across from them without speaking, walking quickly and holding his head high so that the protective guard of his helmet deflected the rain down onto his back rather than into the neck opening of his body armour. The guards saw them coming and stood at attention, prepared to greet the centurion, but apart from a casual nod and an informal salute to both of them, Ajax strode on through the doors and into the main hallway. There he stopped instantly and stretched his arm backwards to stop Varrus, too. The place was alive with movement, with people bustling in every direction everywhere Varrus looked. Ajax stood with a perplexed look on his face, staring across the open floor, with all its quickly moving bodies, to where his own official cubiculum sat empty, its open front looking out onto all the activity. Three men sat facing it, their backs towards Ajax and Varrus as they stared straight ahead, obviously waiting.

  “What’s wrong?” Varrus asked quietly. “Are those men waiting for you?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. They’re not important and I have no time for them. But I had forgotten about this.” His terse nod indicated the chaos all around them. “It was madness to come here. Let’s go back to the armouries. We can talk there.” He moved back the way they had come, and Varrus kept pace with him all the way, without another word.

  Ajax’s work office in the armouries bore no resemblance to the official one he used in the headquarters building, with its collection of swords: it was a tiny place, dowdy and utili
tarian, with stools instead of high-backed chairs, and a scarred old trestle table for a work surface, but it was warm, and it was dry, and it was well lit and quiet—insofar as its occupants had long since been inured to the incessant noises of the workplace and were now unaware of them. The armourer took off his helmet and set it on the floor inside the door, then swung his sodden cape over his head, leaned out into the workplace, and shouted for an assistant, beckoning for Varrus to hand over his cloak, too. When an eager young apprentice came running to the door, Ajax handed him both cloaks and told the boy to spread them near the forge to dry and then to run to Demetrius Hanno’s forge, apologize for disturbing him, and ask the smith if he would consider blessing his centurion with a hot jug of his spiced apple drink.

  “I had some of his drink earlier,” Varrus said. “It’s really good.”

  “Aye. He loves it. Keeps a pot of it simmering by the forge all day long in weather like this.” He waved a hand towards one of the three stools against the wall. “Sit.” He then moved to the trestle table and picked up a tube that lay there. It was a typical military dispatch case: a cylinder of hardened leather, capped with sealable covers at both ends and equipped with a leather strap that allowed it to be slung over a shoulder. He set it upright on one end, then turned back to Varrus, perching himself on another of the stools.

  “So,” he said. “Here is where you and I will begin all over again.” He narrowed his eyes to mere slits and pursed his lips, then stared at Varrus for a long, discomforting space of ten heartbeats before he continued. “I knew from the outset, when our paths first crossed, that you were different. I didn’t know why, but I sensed something unusual about you. I thought at first it might have been a talent for working metal, and in recent weeks I had begun to believe that’s what it was. But I never would have suspected you of sorcery, or of having supernatural powers. Until these past few days.”

  “What…?” Varrus stared blankly. “I don’t…I don’t understand,” he managed to say.