The Burning Stone Read online

  She looked at him blankly. “The what?”

  “Aquae et ig—”

  He was interrupted by a raucous shout from the door of the smithy, for Dominic had looked out and seen them together. “Quintus,” the smith roared. “Come inside! We’ve been wondering where you were.”

  “Give me a moment,” Varrus said to Lydia. “I’ll come right back.”

  He walked briskly over to the smithy and embraced the big man, and as they hugged each other tightly, he spoke into Dominic’s ear.

  “You told me a long time ago that if your daughter would have me you would raise no objection. Well, she has just told me she will, and the last thing I need here and now is to be interrupted before we can finish what needs to be said. Can you keep the others away from us until we’re done?”

  Dominic Mcuil thrust him away violently, holding him out at arm’s length and grinning at him ferociously before he tugged him back into his huge arms and tried to crush his ribs in a giant hug. “Go then, lad,” he said, in what for him was a whisper. “I’ll see to it you’re not disturbed.”

  Varrus went directly back to Lydia, and stood again at the wagon’s tailgate. “What I was speaking about is a Roman marriage rite,” he said. “They call it aquae et ignis, which means ‘water and fire,’ and it’s the ritual presentation, husband to wife, of those two necessities of life. It is based on the knowledge that a man can survive for a long time without food, but will die quickly without water, and without fire he will freeze to death in darkness. It’s symbolic of the husband’s contract to care for his wife throughout their lives together.”

  Lydia shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything like that. But did you tell my da?”

  Varrus nodded, grinning.

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much. I asked him to leave us alone to talk and he said he would make sure we are not disturbed.”

  “Dia! Did he, by God?” She cocked her head again in the endearing manner that he loved. “You have never had a moment’s doubt that he would accept you, have you?”

  “No. He told me so when first we met, and I believed him. He couldn’t wait to get you off his hands, and I took him at his word.” He laughed and cringed away as she swung her fist at his head. “Besides, I had enough to worry about, wondering if you would accept me. I didn’t have time to fret over what your da would think.” He moved towards her, placing a hand on either side of her on the wagon’s edge and leaning in until their faces were inches apart. “But you did accept me,” he murmured, and she leaned towards him and kissed his mouth, a long, delicious kiss with no other contact between them.

  When they eventually pulled apart, looking into each other’s eyes, he murmured, “So then, no priest. The next question, then, is when to do it. Have you any wishes on that matter?”

  “I might wish to change my mind about the priest, once I have thought about it. Would that displease you?”

  “No. I told you that already.”

  She smiled, wrinkling her nose. “As for when, I would happily do it now, but that would be inconsiderate of us.” She saw his eyebrows go up. “No, really it would, Quintus. We have to think about where we will live, where our home will be. Normally we would live at home with Da and the boys until we can afford to build a house. Have you considered that?”

  “No, not really. Not at all, in fact.” He paused, then blurted, “Haven’t even thought of it. That’s the real truth.” He stopped again, looking bewildered. “I suppose…I suppose that, inside my head, I’ve been building a life for you and me here in Colcaster, and now I’m suddenly hoping that won’t horrify you. I like this town. And I love my work at the armouries. But I hadn’t even thought about what would happen were you to decide you can’t live outside your Londuin.”

  She leaned forward and laid her hand on his arm. “Be at peace, Quintus. Be at peace. I like this town, too. I always have. It’s the closest thing to home I can imagine. And you are safer here than you would be in Londuin, so that decision is easily made. We will live here, in Camulodunum.”

  “It’s Colcaster.”

  “No, my dear, it is Camulodunum.”

  “I could argue, if I didn’t love you,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Camulodunum is no less Colcaster than Londinium is your Londuin.”

  “Perhaps, in your mind,” she murmured back. “But Camulodunum is where we two will live,” and she quieted him by laying her fingers on his lips.

  “That decision brings problems in its train, though.” She smiled at him and moved closer. “We have to consider the nuptials themselves, the wedding feast—for with my family taking part it will be a feast, you may depend upon that. Where will that be held? It should be here, since this will be our home, but most of the people I would like to attend will have to travel the hundred miles between Londuin and then find lodgings. That in itself will be a costly and complicated undertaking. And where will we live, you and I, once we are wed? We can’t stay with Liam and Shanna for long, not with Shamus there already. Their house is half the size of Da’s—far too small for five adults to live in all at once. Besides, we will need a place of our own—I will need a place of my own.”

  “You will. And you will have one.”

  “How?” The look she gave him had no doubt in it, but neither did it lack surprise.

  “I’ll build you one.”

  Her smile lit up her face like an inner light. “You are a smith, Quintus Varrus, and I’m sure you are the best at what you do, but you are not a builder.”

  “That’s true, but I am a gifted and charming smith and I have friends who have many friends. The man who hired me, Ajax the armourer—”

  “I know Ajax.”

  “Ah! Of course you do, through your father. Well, Ajax knows everyone in this town and most of them are indebted to him one way or another. When I tell him I need to build a house for us to live in, he will have a crew of builders working on it within hours, I promise you. I told you I was rich when we first met, but you never asked how rich I was. Had you asked, the answer would have been, ‘Not very,’ but that leaves me rich enough, nevertheless, to build us a decent house.” He frowned a little. “I see what you meant about not rushing into this. It could grow complicated.”

  She tapped the end of his nose with her fingertip. “It will, I promise you. And at the very moment when you think you have it under control, it will sprout new complications like green shoots of grass. Believe me. I have been involved in planning five marriages among my friends, and no two are alike.”

  “Then I’ll be glad to leave all that to you,” he continued, in the quiet, intimate voice he had been using earlier. “Except for when you need me to contribute.”

  She was about to speak but broke off, hearing hooves clattering on the cobblestones at the gate, and she looked over Varrus’s shoulder in astonishment.

  “That’s Callum’s horse,” she said. “I’d know him anywhere.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  “It is Callum,” Lydia said. “Callum! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at home, running the smithy.”

  He reached up and pulled off his hood, then scratched his head, grinning widely. “Aidan and Declan can take care of that easy enough without me,” he said, then nodded a greeting to Varrus and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb, to the high-sided, two-wheeled cart at his back. “Quintus, come and see this.”

  He led them both to the rear of his cart, where he removed the pins holding the tailgate in place and lowered the heavy flap, exposing the sole item in the cargo compartment. “This thing here arrived for Da soon after he and Lydia left to come here, but we all knew it was meant for you. We knew, too, that nobody wouldn’t be coming back this way again much afore year’s end, so then and there, soon as it arrived, we flung it onto the cart and I set out to catch up with Da and the wagons. I couldn’t, though. The weather was ungodly wicked for a long time, slowing everything down an’ just not shown’ any signs of blowin’ over,
and then I ran into some trouble further up the road.”

  “On the main road? What kind of trouble?” Varrus was frowning, for he had heard tales of mayhem and confusion on the roads, a state of affairs that would have been unprecedented a mere ten years earlier. Rome’s imperial roads carried the life’s blood of the empire, so they had been regularly patrolled for as long as anyone could remember. But a decade or so earlier, some budget-conscious imperial functionary had noticed that road traffic had declined drastically, and in his money-grubbing wisdom—and under pressure from the imperial treasury to cut down on expenses everywhere—he had deemed the roads to be no longer worth the expense of guarding. The regular patrols had been discontinued, and lawlessness had moved onto the main roads and worsened rapidly until people’s fear of being robbed on the open road had effectively put an end to intercity travel throughout Britain.

  “Bad trouble,” Callum said, shaking his head. “A band of outlaws robbed and burned a hamlet at a crossroads ’bout ’alfway between here and Londuin. They fair ruined the place. It seemed like every single person in that village ’ad been killed, and their ’ouses burnt down over their heads. It was really awful.” He stopped, remembering, then shook his head again. “I thought about turning ’round and goin’ ’ome, since I could see by then I wasn’t going to catch up to Da an’ the others. But I was ’alfway ’ere by that time, and so I decided to keep comin’. And ’ere I am. Da in the smithy?”

  Varrus nodded. “With Liam and Shamus and some others. They’ll be surprised to see you.”

  Lydia nodded towards the cart. “You say that’s for Quintus?”

  “Aye, but it’s got Da’s name on it. Some rich feller brought it by the smithy and asked after Da, and when I said ’e warn’t there, ’e asked if Da could read and write. ’Course ’e can, I says, so then ’e sits down and pulls a pen, paper, and a horn of ink out of a wooden case ’e’s carryin’, and writes a letter to Da saying ’ow important it is that ’e reads this and sends the box on.” He shrugged. “Aidan read it to us as soon as ’e ’ad gone, an’ we all knew where it ’ad to go.” He looked at Quintus. “It was to come to you, but under the name we gave you, Fingael Mcuil.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because that cloth feller, Dylan, told us what would happen—that there was a box comin’ to Da that should be sent on to you.”

  “What’s in it?” Lydia asked Callum. “Do you know?”

  “No idea.”

  “I know what it is,” Varrus said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s a large box,” he said, smiling at her. “Would you agree with that, Callum?”

  “Aye,” Callum said, “that’s right. It’s big, and solid, but most of all it’s awkward. An’ it’s heavy, right enough, but not as heavy as it might be. So what’s in it, Quint?”

  Varrus shook his head. “You tell me,” he said quietly. And then to Lydia: “It’s some sort of family inheritance, from my uncle Marius. It is every bit as much a mystery to me as it is to either one of you two. Marius sent a letter to tell me it would be coming, but not exactly what would be in it. It’s had a long journey—the truth is, I was sure it would be lost or stolen somewhere along the thousand or so miles between Italy and here.”

  Lydia had been peering at the thing and now she turned to look at him in mystification. “How will you open it? There’s no way at all that I can see.”

  “I’ll have to break it apart, Marius said. But I’m far from sure if I want to.”

  “Why not? If I were you, I wouldn’t be able to wait to open it.”

  Varrus stood staring at the thing. “I think I might be a little bit afraid of knowing what’s inside. Something is telling me nothing good can come of it.” He paused. “My family died violently, remember. They were slaughtered, and their house burned down around them, consuming everything. There was nothing left but charred bones.” He looked at her, and she saw the uncertainty in his eyes. “What, then, could be in here that I might want to have?”

  Lydia laid her hand on his arm while Callum stood frowning, staying resolutely out of this. “But your uncle surely would not send anything to cause you pain, would he?”

  “No, not deliberately. But who can tell what might or might not cause another person pain? I hurt you, in all innocence and ignorance, not an hour ago.”

  “That was different, Quintus. And it’s already forgotten…Did your uncle really offer you no clue about the contents?”

  “Not really. But I read enough to know that he really wants me to have whatever is in there, so all I can think of is that it’s something that has to do with the family.”

  “Perhaps…Could it then have something to do with your parents, something that might have belonged to them, but would mean more to you than it ever could to him?”

  “It might. It might be something of my mother’s, but what? The simple act of looking at it would remind me painfully that she was lost—murdered, like your own mother, but for reasons completely unknown. And as for my father, well, I meant nothing to him, so why should I feel privileged to own anything that was his?” He drew a deep breath. “And that said, I have decided that I have no wish to open it. Or not yet. And perhaps not for a very long time.” He looked at Lydia and smiled, relieved, she could see, to have made his decision. “You and I have far more important matters to concern us, and not enough time, I suspect, to attend to all of them sufficiently.”

  Callum had been watching and listening closely, his head moving from one to the other of them as they spoke, and now he deemed it safe to become involved again. “What’s you two up to, then?”

  “We’re to be married, Callum,” Varrus said. “And you’re among the first to know.”

  Callum’s face was transfigured by a shining grin that spread from ear to ear. “By Gor!” he exclaimed. “That’s grand. Our da will be right glad. C’n I go tell ’im?”

  “He already knows, but you can come with us and we’ll all make it official.”

  “What about the box, then?”

  “If you’ll help me unload it, we’ll stow it in the stables until I decide what to do with it.”

  Between them they manhandled the bulky case until they could lift it down from the cart, and then they carried it over and laid it against a wall in the stables, close by the storage area where they kept the stooks of straw for spreading on the floor. The crate was much lighter than it appeared to be, and in spite of himself Varrus began to wonder again what it could possibly contain, but he threw an old horse blanket over it and left it there, then went to join the others.

  * * *

  —

  There was a festive atmosphere around the dining table that night, and the celebration lasted long after the dinner was finished, fuelled by the dark ale Shanna brewed herself according to an ancient formula that her people had used forever. Candles and lamps were relit when they burned out, and the large fire in the iron basket in the hearth was regularly replenished with fresh logs. The matter of inviting a Christian priest to the wedding festivities came up and was eventually rejected as being irrelevant, since no one there knew a local priest well enough to consider one worth inviting. Varrus watched Lydia carefully during that discussion, and she appeared to accept everything that was said, so he accepted that she had no objections to her pagan loved ones dismissing her religious wishes on grounds of practicality.

  Varrus was nursing his fourth jug of ale and feeling at peace with the world when he heard Callum say something about heading back home the following day, and it shook him out of his lethargy.

  “Why would you even think of going home tomorrow?” he asked, leaning forward between Callum and Liam to join the conversation. “That’s insane. You’ve only just arrived, so stay and rest for a while, where it’s safe. The roads are too damned dangerous these days for you to go traipsing off on your own. You would be asking to be robbed, being all by yourself, a single traveller.”

  Callum laughed. “Robbed of
what? I’ve nothing worth stealing. The cart’ll be empty.”

  Varrus looked at him in disbelief. “Think of that hamlet you told us about earlier.” He did not attempt to be dramatic in any way, merely keeping his voice natural and therefore more emphatic purely through the contrast between his gentle tone and the words he was speaking. “The people slaughtered and their houses burnt on top of them. Do you believe those people were killed for their wealth? Butchered for the luxuries they owned? Look at yourself, Callum. You’re wearing sturdy leather boots and a good, hard-wearing tunic. And when you’re on the road you’ll be wearing a warm cloak. And riding in a fine, strong cart, empty though it be. A valuable cart drawn by a heavy, strong, well-fed, and obviously healthy horse. Don’t you think those would be worth killing you for? There are people on those roads today, desperate men, whose livelihood is based upon robbing, despoiling, and murdering whoever they encounter. They rob and kill them for the few things they possess. And there are more and more of those predators out there every day, because they know there’s no one to stop them. In the old days, they didn’t dare. They’d have had the army out looking for them before they even had the chance to plan another robbery.”

  “You sound very sure of your facts there, Quintus,” Dominic Mcuil said. “Have you been talking about this recently with someone else?”

  “I have. And often. Bear in mind my friends in the garrison armouries are mostly centurions of varying ranks. They talk about things like that all the time—about how unsafe the roads have become and about how the empire is falling apart because of the tight-fistedness of the imperial auditors and accounts keepers who are always cutting budgets. They never seem to have much difficulty finding funds for games and holidays and senatorial necessities, but when it comes to the armies, and I mean the domestic legions not involved in the frontier wars along the borders, they do nothing but whine and complain and plead poverty and cut funding. So we have no patrols now policing the roads, and soon we will have no roads because people will stop using them altogether and the money-grubbers will stop maintaining them.”