The Burning Stone Read online

  * * *

  —

  The following morning, having listened to everything Varrus had said to him since bursting into his workplace almost a full hour earlier, Ajax sat back, wiping the corners of his mouth absently with a thumb and index finger.

  “So,” he said, cautiously, “what do you expect me to say, after that? Because, if I’m being honest, Quintus, it sounds mad.”

  “Believe me, Natius, I know how mad it sounds, because I’ve gone over it in my mind a hundred times since yesterday. But having been through it that hundred times, I now believe, absolutely, that my grandfather and all his people saw a giant thunderbolt fall to earth. None of them knew what it was, though. Their only explanation was that the gods had gone mad. But it was enormous beyond credence or description, and it fell from the sky. I believe that.”

  “I can see you do. But what comes next, then?”

  “I need to see the stone that farmer brought you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it fell, too.”

  “Out of the sky, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s mad, Quintus. From where in the sky? Everything that falls has to fall from somewhere. Do you think there are shelves up there above the clouds, laden with stones and thunderbolts waiting to fall off?”

  Varrus faced his friend squarely. “I know it sounds insane, Natius, but it can’t be. This was my grandfather’s testimony—Titanius Varrus’s own words. Would he fabricate such a tale? And if so, why? And besides, I think Ler’s Skull is another of these things—except that it fell into the sea. I know I can’t prove any of this. All I’m asking is that we ignore the madness of it all and simply try to smelt them in the new oven. Will you work with me to do that?”

  Instead of answering directly, Ajax rose and went to the door, where he leaned out and shouted for an apprentice, then sent the lad scuttling off to fetch Demetrius Hanno. “Hanno’s the man you have to talk to,” he said, turning back and closing the door. “He’s the one you’ll have to work with. So you’re going to have to go through the whole thing again, risk his ridicule, too.”

  Demetrius Hanno listened as attentively as Ajax had, but to Varrus’s surprise he appeared completely unfazed by what the younger man described, and merely shrugged when he heard Varrus request permission to proceed.

  “This skull you describe. Where is it?”

  “It’s here, in my knapsack.”

  Varrus dug it out and passed it over for the giant’s inspection, and Hanno hefted it and shrugged again. “We’ll need the full power of the bellows…and even that might not be enough. This metal looks hard. It might not want to melt—not with the kind of heat we can generate, anyway. But we won’t know until we try.” He set the skull aside and turned back to Varrus. “How is your wife this morning?”

  Varrus grinned. “Enjoying married life. I left her preening herself in front of her new mirror. She might still be there when I get home. I know I would be, were I as beautiful as she is.”

  Hanno glanced over at Ajax sardonically. “Newlyweds,” he growled. “Is love not wonderful?”

  THIRTY-THREE

  The young woman who brought Cato’s ale thought he was smiling at her as she approached his table, and she smiled back at him and winked in a tacit commitment to come to know him a little better if he wished. Her face fell, though, when he ignored her and shifted his body to look beyond her, and she swished away with an indignant toss of her head that, like her smiling wink, went completely unnoticed. Marcus Licinius Cato was oblivious to anything other than what was happening at the only other occupied table, across the floor from where he sat alone. He was close to invisible against a dark, windowless wall, almost entirely obscured by the dimness that enveloped him despite the feeble, guttering light of the single smoky lamp on his small table.

  Four men sat around a much wider table against the wall farthest from him, lit from above and behind by the daylight streaming in through a long, low window from the street outside. Cato had arrived mere moments ahead of them, going directly and instinctively to the dark side of the tavern, where he dropped his pack against the wall and slouched into a chair just in time to appear motionless when they came in. The serving girl had come to take his order—a simple mug of ale that he would test and perhaps consume later—but the other men had sent the girl away brusquely when she approached them. Now it was obvious, from the way they sat fidgeting, that the four were waiting for someone else to join them.

  Cato already knew that, though, just as he knew the man for whom they were waiting. He had seen them in the street outside, a short time earlier, when he had stopped to adjust his heavy regimental backpack. He had removed the thing—it was damnably heavy and one of its buckles had been digging into his shoulder and causing him grief—and was in the process of heaving it back up onto his shoulders when he noticed the group ahead of him, huddled beneath an overhanging eave in the hamlet’s single, narrow street, all four of them listening intently to a fifth man, the one they were now waiting for. Cato’s reaction to seeing them might have seemed amusing, had anyone else been watching to see it, for in the act of swinging the heavy leather pack up over his shoulder, he had stopped short, almost allowing the weight of the thing to throw him off balance, so that he ended up snatching at it and clutching it to his chest with both hands as he stared, wide-eyed.

  What stopped him in his tracks was his instant recognition of the man to whom the other four were listening avidly. The mere sight of him, and the certainty of who he was, filled Cato with leaping anxiety and made him look around in panic for some place to hide, to give himself time to think. Until that moment, Cato had believed the man in front of him to be dead, having seen with his own eyes, a year earlier, what he had believed to be the fellow’s charred remains. And in that instant of recognition, laying eyes on the dead man, he accepted the sickening truth: he had been duped. Appius Endor was very much alive.

  Cato had hesitated there in the open for a space of heartbeats, clutching his leather knapsack to his chest with both arms like a witless, gape-mouthed yokel and utterly incapable of moving, caught flatfooted between the urges to flee and to fight as he waited for the other man to turn and recognize him.

  When Endor did glance in his direction, though, from a distance of five or six paces, Cato saw no flare of recognition in his eyes, and only then, on the very edge of starting away guiltily, did it occur to him that he had never met the man. Cato had known him and detested him and pursued him for years, had come to know aspects of the man’s personality more intimately and in more ways than he cared to think about, but their paths had never actually crossed. Cato had known his quarry solely from the reports and observations of others who had been set to watch him closely, day and night. That realization almost overwhelmed Cato with a vast relief as he realized that he was nowhere near as vulnerable as he had first feared.

  Appius Endor. The Basilisk. Now, watching the four hard-looking men across the room, Cato wondered idly who had first applied the nickname, for it was both accurate and appropriate. The basilisk was a mythical monster, an impossible creature born of a paradox: a reptile hatched from a cockerel’s egg by a nursing snake, its mere gaze lethal, as was its poisonous breath. The man these four were now waiting for dealt in lethality as his daily commerce, with a cold-blooded lack of humanity that Cato knew to be genuinely reptilian.

  The door from the street swung wide and Endor himself stepped into the tavern, his eyes sweeping the room as he entered, registering Cato’s presence by the wall even as he dismissed him and moved to join his waiting hirelings. Cato had to resist an urge to pull his hood forward to shield his face. He did raise his hand to his face, but instead of tugging at the hood’s cowl he brushed the tips of his fingers along his upper lip, feeling the alien smoothness there.

  His beard had been gone for weeks already, but he had yet to grow accustomed to its absence and he doubted that he ever would. The single view he had had of his own face dur
ing those weeks, in the reflective surface of a smoothly polished platter on a silversmith’s market stall in a town far north of where he was now, had shocked him deeply. He had barely recognized himself, but the startled, pale green eyes glaring back at him from that shockingly bare, pallid face had been his own, and the admission had depressed him for days afterwards. He had worn a full beard, trimmed to legionary specifications, for twenty years by then, almost from the day he joined the army as its newest recruit, and he had had the garrison barber shave him clean on the day he left the fort at Eboracum for the last time.

  No longer a soldier, and profoundly unsure of what he might become, he had decided to embrace civilian life as quickly and wholeheartedly as he could, and shaving off the military beard had been an important part of that transition, a deliberate step into the unknown, relinquishing the reddish-brown beard that had won him the nickname of Rufus among his friends and messmates.

  As soon as the Basilisk sat down, his four satellites closed ranks around him, leaning inwards as they listened to whatever he was telling them, and Cato knew he would hear or see nothing else until Endor’s information had been delivered. He leaned back in his chair then and allowed himself to relax slightly, content to wait until the huddlers moved apart and began to speak normally again.

  His ale was untouched on the table in front of him and now he picked it up and sipped at it tentatively, looking around the huge common room until his gaze arrived naturally at the counter against the end wall, where the landlord and the serving girl stood talking quietly to each other.

  The place was a typical roadside mansio, one of many thousands built over the years throughout the empire, established in the distant past as collection and distribution points for the imperial post, and furnished and appointed for the comfort and convenience of imperial couriers, commercial messengers, and wealthy travellers. Rome’s great network of roads had been built as individual units, each the shortest marching route between two points. Their sole purpose had been to facilitate the movement of Rome’s conquering armies from one place to the next in the shortest possible time. Centuries later, those same roads facilitated the flow of commerce that was the life’s blood of the sprawling empire. Mansios, some great, some smaller, lined each route, set at a distance of about twenty miles apart, a normal day’s journey.

  Cato had noticed that the adjoining stables, once extensive and spacious, were largely boarded up and derelict. Rundown and evil-smelling, they now housed no more than a few ill-fed, sway-backed nags, with the notable exception of a pair of fine, strong-looking horses that were stabled apart and obviously owned by some wealthy traveller. The once fine, spacious common room where he now sat was dingy, a slatternly tavern, carelessly swept and visibly in need of a thorough cleansing. The rushes on the floor had been left there for too long and smelled more than a little stale, and the tabletops that he could see looked as though they had not been wiped, let alone washed, since they had last been used.

  His train of thought was interrupted by a movement at the edge of his vision, and he moved his head slightly to see one of Endor’s men coming directly towards him, swaying truculently from side to side as he plodded heavily across the floor, his nail-studded boot soles dragging through the rushes that lay thick in some low-lying spots.

  Cato sighed quietly. He had been expecting this. He set his ale down and raised his right foot to the cross-member of the chair opposite where he sat, and then he waited. When the fellow was within two steps of him, Cato straightened his leg and kicked the other chair out and away, not knocking it over but propelling it with exactly the right amount of velocity to reach the newcomer and stop in front of him. It was a precise move, interpretable in either of two ways: it might have been an invitation to stop and sit down; equally, it might have been a deliberate provocation for the fellow to stand still and state whatever he had to say. Either way, it stopped him in his tracks, and Cato took the initiative.

  “I’m guessing you’ve come to tell me something, friend. What can I do for you?”

  The civilly phrased comment, followed by the friendly question, left the newcomer nonplussed, and he stood frowning, but then his surliness asserted itself.

  “Out,” he said. “We need this table.”

  “Out,” Cato repeated flatly. He looked all around the large room, slowly, then sniffed. “There’s tables everywhere, Plodder,” he said. “Why d’you need this one?”

  “’Cause we want it. ’S all you need to know.”

  “No, that’s not good enough.”

  Cato stood up smoothly, the move fluid and effortless, bringing him completely erect with no hint of imbalance, his straightening right leg knocking his chair backwards and over as he rose. His expression was calm and confident, challenging the other man to try and interfere with him. For the smallest fraction of a moment the fellow looked as though he might make an attempt, but by then Cato was already up and the opportunity, if it had ever been there, had passed. The Plodder merely stood glowering, fists clenched, and Cato grinned at him.

  “Let’s go ask your magister why you need it.” He stepped around the table, brushing past the Plodder, and crossed the room directly to where Endor and the other three sat watching him.

  “Do you know me,” he asked, “or should I know you? Have we met somewhere before? I’m asking because your half-tame halfwit here told me I have to move on out of here, but I’m here for a purpose that has nothing to do with you and I’m not moving on before I’m ready. So let me ask you again. Do we know each other?”

  Cato was watching Endor’s eyes as the Basilisk evaluated his words, but simultaneously he was waiting for the Plodder’s delayed reaction behind him, visualizing the thought process involved in the man’s belated realization that he had been defamed and insulted. Then, knowing the Plodder’s type as well as he did, he timed the man’s move with exact precision. Without breaking his gaze from Endor’s, he swayed slightly left as he cupped his fist into his other palm, braced his weight on one foot, and twisted his upper body hard and fast, driving his elbow up and back into the bridge of the charging Plodder’s nose, shattering bone and cartilage and dropping the man to his knees like a head-spiked bull.

  Endor’s eyes never wavered, never acknowledged the Plodder’s presence, let alone his fall. His three companions all started to rise, but he quelled them with one wordless gesture and they sank back like well-trained dogs.

  “Why would you think we might know each other?” the man asked as though nothing at all had happened since Cato spoke, the question casual, almost disinterested.

  “I don’t,” Cato said. “Not for a moment. I know I don’t know you. Never set eyes on you before and I don’t care who you are. But you might know me from somewhere, and I don’t like that, don’t like not knowing people who might think they might know me, and so I came to ask. And plainly you are the man to ask.” He jerked his head, indicating the others at the table. “These three—four—were nothing more than lumps until you walked in. But you got them moving. That makes you the magister, the boss. So, one more time. Do you know me?”

  There was a lengthy, thoughtful silence before Endor responded, but when he did his voice was placid. “No,” he said. “I don’t know who you are. But I know what you are…and where you came from.”

  “Oh, really? And where would that have been?”

  Endor smiled a lazy, half-amused smile to match the one Cato had used in asking the question. “It might have been any one of a half score of places, but they all have ‘legion’ etched into them. You and I are of a kind and we both know it. Legion bred and legion trained. Long-service and hard-core, though I suspect you’re out now. Are you?”

  “Aye, three months ago.”

  “Which legion?”

  “Twentieth Valeria. Legionary headquarters, Deva.”

  “Hmm. Rank?”

  Cato narrowed his eyes, clearly deliberating whether he should answer, but then he shrugged, apologizing silently to the dead man whose
face was in his mind at that moment.

  “Pilus prior,” he said. “Second Cohort. Ten years. Name’s Blixus.”

  Gaius Blixus, his boyhood friend of more than twenty years, had been senior centurion of the Second of the Twentieth for the last ten years of his military career and had retired a half year earlier after twenty-five years of distinguished service. He had died at his family home near Londinium two months later, of what the medics called an apoplexy—a sudden, inexplicable convulsion. Cato had been one of the four old comrades, friends of long standing, in attendance at his funeral service. Blixus’s service record was impeccable, but his death had been private, unpublicized and largely unnoticed. Cato knew Blixus would be glad to have his name used to confound Appius Endor, who had been as well known and loathed by him as he was by Cato.

  Endor was already nodding as the name left Cato’s mouth, accepting it completely for the moment, because of how easy it would be to verify. The man facing him would be a fool to lie about such a thing. He waved a finger towards the oaf Cato had felled, who had regained his senses and was now attempting to sit up with the help of one of his companions who was pressing a blood-soaked rag to his ruined nose and mouth.

  “I sent Spero to tell you to leave because I have matters to conduct here that are not for strangers’ ears.” He paused. “Obviously, though, you chose not to go. Why would you refuse, faced with five of us?”

  Cato faced him evenly, allowing nothing of what he was really feeling to show on his face. “Because I learned long ago never to back down if I see a chance of beating the odds, and your bully boys didn’t look like much. If I let these clowns of yours get away with anything, even for a moment, then I might as well just lie down and die. So I’d rather go down fighting. Besides, I made arrangements to meet my contact here, and I have no intention of clucking around outside like a broody hen cut off from her clutch. I won’t carry out my business in the street like a huckster to prevent offending you.”