The Skystone Read online

  The scope, the timing and the co-ordinated swiftness of the operation are difficult to visualize, let alone describe. I only arrived at a perspective of my own — a very personal and probably flawed measure of the events — long afterwards, by comparing the eyewitness reports of the few survivors I met from time to time in the years that followed. Without exception, these men were still amazed, bewildered and confused, years afterward, by what they had encountered that night. Each was still surprised to have lived through it, and each could only recall reacting to the events and the immediate circumstances that affected him personally. Of all these men, the most articulate was Marcus Gallifax, a garrison centurion who escaped and managed somehow to join up with us later, as did a couple of others.

  I spoke with Gallifax many times over the months that followed, and his recollections of that night were memorable and precise. They never varied either in detail or in delivery, so that, lying supine in my hospital cot, searching for ways to relieve the tedium of inactivity, I had no difficulty recalling either his face or his words…

  Hadrian’s Wall, 367

  It was his third tour of duty on the Wall, and he. hated it more than he had on his first assignment. Marcus Gallifax held his cloak firmly across his lower face and leaned out between the battlements, his eyes screwed almost shut against the outrage of the wind as he scanned the darkness below and in front of him. He saw and heard nothing but blackness and the howling gale. The noise in his ears as the wind roared through the earflaps of his helmet made it impossible to hear anything else, but he couldn’t even see the movement that he knew was out there: the writhing, whipping torment of the clumps of rank grass, bracken and gorse that carpeted the ground. His eyes teared rapidly and he grunted a curse and pulled back into the protection of the battlement on his left, wiping his streaming eyes as the frustrated wind howled by his shelter. The wind that seemed to blow endlessly from the north at this time of year had a malevolence, a concentrated hostility, that made it different from any other wind in the world. It came buffeting and blistering south out of the hills, its force twisted and compressed by their contours, and slapped hard against the fifteen-foot-high surface of the Wall, to be sucked down like cataract water into the ten-foot ditch below and then spewed back up and over and between the battlements with an erratic violence that could panic a man by snatching the air out of his mouth as he tried to breathe.

  Gallifax made a virtue of his hatred, using its virulence to keep him on his toes so that his men were always, always vigilant. They thought he hated them and that he was always trying to catch them out in dereliction of duty. They were wrong. He didn’t hate them. He hated that godless, savage frontier where nothing ever seemed to move except the demented wind that made progress along the Wall possible only in a series of leaps from one battlement to the next, the traveller having to brave each open gap and then huddle in the tiny protection of the next battlement before moving on. He leaped again, throwing his shoulders flat against the stonework, and made out the shape of a sentry huddled against the Wall less than four feet from him. The man had been expecting him, and Gallifax guessed at, rather than saw, the salute of greeting. A particularly fierce shock wave broke between them, and Gallifax waited for the gust to die down and then crossed to stand beside the sentry.

  “How goes the night?” He had to yell into the man’s ear to make himself heard, knowing that his words were being ripped away by the howling wind. “Anything to report?”

  “No, Centurion. All quiet. But this is…” Gallifax thought he heard “a waste of time,” but he could not be sure, for the man’s words were further muffled by a heavy woollen scarf that was wrapped around the lower half of his face, against all regulations. The contravention did not disturb the centurion. He himself was wearing two pairs of long drawers beneath his leather breeches and long knitted socks on his legs and feet beneath his sandals.

  He glanced up at the sky, looking for stars among the roiling cloud masses, but there was only blackness. The sentry was shouting something about snow. Well, it was cold enough for it. Gallifax nodded his head as though in agreement and then looked over to his right, where he could see a distant yellow glimmer of lamplight from the window of the watch-turret. “Thank you, Mithras, you soldier’s god,” he thought. “A man’s needs are few and easily cared for on a night like this. Still air and warmth will make him feel blessed.” The yellow light marked the end of the first half of his inspection tour. It signalled a cup of hot broth and perhaps a throw or two of the dice before he had to make the return trip to the mile castle. He clapped the sentry roughly on the shoulder and yelled in his ear again. “Watch is halfway gone, lad! Relief coming up at dawn!” He hitched his cloak up again across his left shoulder, tightened his grip on his vine-wood cudgel, the centurion’s badge of rank, and moved on towards the tower. On a night like this, he could well see why a man might think guard duty was a waste of time. Each of the four poor whoresons he had inspected in the past hour might as well have been blind and deaf as well as cold and miserable. Every step of the last hundred paces towards that yellow lamplight was a fight for balance in the teeth of a wind that had now risen to maniacal fury, but at last he reached it, flung open the door and dived inside to the warmth and brightness.

  What he found instead was horror and confusion. Trebatius, his friend of many years, was sprawled back-wards across the table top, his face split in two by an axe. ! Herod, the young Judean mercenary, was squirming in a corner, pinned against the wall by a man almost twice his size who jabbed viciously and fatally with a dagger even as Gallifax’s mind absorbed what he was seeing. Another stranger, equally big, had been in the act of lifting a steaming bowl to his lips with both hands when Gallifax burst in on them. He froze with shock, as did Gallifax, and for a petrified moment the two stared at each other in wild-eyed surprise. The centurion was powerless to do anything. Only his left hand was free. The other, muffled by his tight-wrapped cloak, was holding only the useless cudgel.

  Gallifax was the first to recover his wits. He threw himself backwards out of the room again, pulling the door shut with his free hand. There was only one thought in his head: to raise the alarm. He was shouting at the top of his lungs as he ran back towards the sentry, but the man was gone. The wind was feral, a howling animal. In confusion, Gallifax stepped to the southern edge of the parapet, thinking the sentry might have been blown over. Then he crossed to the battlements and leaned out again. He had a momentary vision of someone standing close to him, on the outside of the Wall, fifteen feet in the air, and then fingers hooked into the back of his helmet and he felt himself jerked forward and over the edge as he thought, “Ladders! How did they bring up ladders?” He was still thinking that as he smashed to the ground at the bottom of the ditch, twenty-five feet below.

  Thirty miles to the east of Gallifax, at precisely the same time, Lollius Malpax was in agony. There was no wind in his sector, but Malpax would have been oblivious to it anyway. Malpax had the runs, and he had had them for two days. His bowels were a water-filled labyrinth of twisting cramps and his total attention was given to timing the onslaught of his next bout of diarrhoea, so that he could get permission to leave his post in time to make it to the clump of bushes that he had been using as his personal latrine behind the Wall. Malpax was a Pannonian, from Hungary, and his squad commander was an Iberian who hated Pannonians. Malpax, after two days of suffering, had reached the point where he would have changed his name, his place of birth and his personal loyalties if he could have pleased the whoreson squad commander and been assured of some sick bay time, but it was not to be.

  The commander kept him longer and longer each time Malpax asked permission to relieve himself, and he knew that one of these times he was not going to reach the latrine in time. He was correct, but for the wrong reasons. The squad commander released him and he ran, picking his way through the darkness in dim moonlight towards his clump of bushes, tugging at his clothes as he went. And then there was someone looming a
t him from the bushes, and a massive blow to his right shoulder that spun him sideways and threw him to the ground as he lost control and felt the warm foulness flood him. Years later he remembered thinking, just before he lost consciousness, that his squad commander had run ahead to lie in wait for him, just to get even with him for being a Pannonian.

  Tetrino, a Sarmatian mercenary at one of the mile castles quite close to Gallifax, but to the west, remembers only regaining consciousness to see a crowd of bodies on the wrong side of the gate in the Wall, heaving and straining at the big bar that held the gate shut. He saw the bar give way suddenly, causing some of the men to fall, and then the gates were flung wide and Pictish chariots came through, the first of them crushing the bone in his leg with its iron-rimmed right wheel and hurling him back into blackness from the pain.

  Apis Elpis, commander of the guard in a section far to the west of all of these, opened the door and stepped out of the mile tower to make his inspection. He found himself face to face, almost chin to chin, with a black-bearded stranger. In describing the encounter to me later, Elpis remembered thinking, “Who in Hades are you?” before his testicles were driven up into his belly by a savage kick. His brain seemed to explode and he went blind, probably squeezing his eyes shut in protest and denial of the suddenness of the agony, and he felt hands grasping at the shoulder straps of his corselet and lifting him effortlessly sideways to throw him from the parapet to the stony ground far below.

  These were the lucky ones, the survivors, the only survivors of that night I have ever met. All of them recollect that it was the middle of the last watch before dawn. None of them had any warning or expectation of attack. None of them knew what was happening, or had time to organize himself, let alone others. All of them lost consciousness and so lay as though dead. And all of them were able to escape afterwards because the enemy made no attempt to stay and destroy the Wall, or even to hold it. They overwhelmed it simultaneously in an eighty-mile-long wave, butchered the defenders and swept on south into Britain. They were well organized, silent, efficient and totally devastating. Hadrian’s Wall, the vaunted bastion of Rome’s presence in Britain, was chewed up within the space of an hour. The unthinkable had happened. Rome’s most peaceful and prosperous colony had fallen to invasion.

  Britannicus and I, as luck would have it, were among the very first to find out about it. We were about ten miles south of the Wall just after dawn, headed north on a short leave of absence to pay a visit to one of Britannicus’ friends, Antoninus, who was stationed at one of the mile castles, and we crested a hill to be greeted by a spectacle the like of which neither of us had ever seen. The valley below us was choked with Celtic warriors, streaming south. We sat up there for about an hour and watched. There were thousands of them, and after the first shock of what we were seeing had passed, we realized that this was not just a big raiding party. It was an army.

  We had no idea who they were, other than that they were Celts, but we knew they could only have come down from the north, and that meant they’d come over the Wall. The fact that there were so many of them, and no sign of any opposition, meant that our garrisons on the Wall must have fared very badly. Even then, staring at them in their thousands, it did not occur to us that this could be anything more than a localized breakthrough. I looked at Britannicus to see what he thought of it all, and his face was like thunder.

  We had left our cohort safely quartered about five miles away, and it was a good thing we did, too. Otherwise, we would have been surprised in our camp like sitting ducks, or caught on the march in extended order, not knowing anything had gone wrong. They say more than a hundred thousand came over the Wall that day. We hadn’t even known there were that many people up there! Anyway, there were too many of them for us to deal with. Luckily, they were headed south through the valley down on our right, to the east of us. Our thousand-man cohort was dug in to the south-west of where we were sitting, so we got out of there and headed back to camp.

  We tried very hard to be inconspicuous, but we were spotted by a group of charioteers — two horses to each chariot, and one with four — coming down to the west of us around the other side of our hill, and we were suddenly racing for our lives. Naturally, they were down in the valley where the terrain was fairly level for their chariots. We would be safe, we realized, as long as we kept high up on the hillsides.

  We were shouting to each other as we ran: the fact of chariots on this side of the Wall meant that they had captured at least one mile castle and opened up the gates to wheeled traffic. That was not a pleasant prospect for the people living to the south, and the numbers we had already seen made it obvious that we would be unable to do much to help them.

  I was trying hard not to notice the boulders and loose stones under my horse’s hooves on the hillside; trying not to think what would happen if the horse fell; trusting that animal more than I’d ever trusted anyone or anything since my grandfather. We could hear them yelling below us, catching up and drawing level with us. As far as I could tell, there were three or four of them jammed into the four-horse chariot and two in each of the others.

  We must have covered about two miles before I realized that we were on the wrong side of the valley. In order to get to our camp, we were going to have to go down, cross the valley floor and climb up the other side. Somehow, the sight of those hostiles on the wrong side of the Wall did nothing for my confidence in our Roman invincibility.

  Britannicus must have realized the same thing at the same time. The hillside was starting to curve round to the east, away from our camp, and the valley bottom beneath us was narrowing dramatically, forcing the chariots into single file. They were now drawing slightly ahead of us, looking for some means of cutting us off.

  “Come on, Varrus,” he yelled, and he yanked his horse hard downhill to the right. My own horse stumbled as I followed him and nearly sent me flying, but he regained his stride and down we went, diagonally back the way we’d come and to the rear of the chariots. Rather than look where the horse was taking me, I preferred to watch the reaction of the chariots.

  Our move caught them completely by surprise, and I could hear their curses as they tried to turn at full gallop without realizing how confined they were by the encroaching hillsides. One of the small ones spilled, throwing its riders flying. I heard the unmistakable scream of a horse.

  The other two finally slowed right down and manoeuvred tight turns, whipping their horses hard and fast as they pulled around. We had surprised them and gained a lead, but we were headed down diagonally on a converging course with them, losing ground all the way, so that we were no more than thirty paces ahead of them when we reached the narrow valley bottom and swung left, hard, hammering up the other hillside and passing them again going in the other direction.

  And then Britannicus’ horse went down. I saw the Tribune literally somersault in the air and land on his feet, but his momentum kept him going and he rolled twice before I lost sight of him. Cursing like a demented Saxon, I reined in and turned. He was on his feet and running up the hill towards me, with the two chariots about twenty-five paces behind him. From the way my horse was blowing, I knew he would never take both of us up that hill, so I jumped off and drew my sword. There was a clump of big rocks to my right, less than ten paces from me, and I ran for it, dodging among the boulders as the Tribune joined me.

  “Good man,” he grunted, not even breathing hard. There was nothing effete about Britannicus.

  By good luck, we had made the hillside work against them. They couldn’t get near us with the chariots while we were among the rocks. One of them started shooting arrows at us, but his friends could smell blood — they wanted to finish this by hand. There were six of them, and they came leaping from their chariots and up the hill towards us as if they were on their way to the Colosseum to watch a slaughter. I had my ceremonial cavalry shield strapped to my back, and as I whipped it around in front of me I was wishing it was an old infantry scutum of wood and leather and solid metal
. A man felt he had some protection behind one of those.

  I don’t remember much of the fight although I remember that each of us killed two men. At one point, Britannicus took a heavy blow on the head which put a big dent in his helmet, and down he went. I remember stepping astride him and ducking a slash from behind me, while the big Celt in front of me took a mouthful of the point of my sword. He fell sideways and I couldn’t get my sword free. I heard a zipping noise close by my ear and I thought, “Well, this is how we end it.” Then my sword was free and I swung around to see the heathen behind me falling, an arrow buried in his neck, and the only two of his friends still standing were staring up the hill, their mouths open.

  I was blood mad. I went over the rock in front of me and tried to decapitate the man closest to me, swinging with every ounce of strength I possessed. It was a solid try, and I almost succeeded. My sword came free easily this time, but before I could reach the last of them, he was dead, too, his hands clawing uselessly at the javelin that had skewered him. I turned, and the hillside seemed to be alive with Roman soldiers. I dropped my sword and ran to see to Britannicus.

  Titus Lautus, our adjutant, had sent out a hunting party to look for fresh meat. If they had arrived two minutes later, that’s just what we’d have been. As it was, they’d seen us on the hillside on the other side of the valley, and although they didn’t know why we were running so hard, they’d come down at the double.

  Britannicus was unconscious, but he wasn’t bleeding, except from the nose, and as far as we could tell he had only been knocked out by the force of the blow on his helmet. God knows the whoreson who swung it had been big enough! He was the one who had eaten my sword.