The Burning Stone Page 49

  He glanced at the other three men, who were gaping at him, and then he folded the ends of his cloak back over his shoulders, exposing the matched pair of weapons, dagger and military short sword, that hung from the thick, well-used legionary belt at his waist. He looked back at Endor.

  “So? Shall we get on with it, me against you and your three louts here, or will you suffer me to go back to my table and leave me to drink my ale in peace?”

  One side of Endor’s mouth twitched slightly upwards. “Things are different now,” he said quietly. “You are no longer nameless, or faceless. With that in mind, I see no difficulty in your staying here…Other than the obvious.”

  “The obvious…” Cato thought about that for a moment and then decided he was being foolish and that he might as well ask outright. “And what is it that’s so obvious?”

  “Your table is too close, for one thing. If you would consider moving to another—say to that one over in the farthest corner there—then this whole quarrel would be unnecessary.”

  Cato looked at the table Endor had indicated. It was as far from where he stood as anything in the large room could be, and in the darkest corner.

  “That’s easy,” he said, turning back. “I’ll move, so be it they give me a brighter flame against the darkness. I’ve no interest in your guests or your business and I’ll be able to conduct my own affairs without overhearing or being overheard by you and your people.”

  He turned then to look at the remaining trio at the table. “You fellows might think about offering a bit more help to poor old Spero here. Clean him up a bit, see to that nose of his. One day it might be you on your arse in the rushes somewhere, needing all the help you can get, and Spero won’t offer you his hand if he has no memory of yours reaching out to him.”

  He nodded curtly at Endor, then made his way to the counter, where the landlord and the serving maid had been watching tensely, no doubt worried about what might happen next. He was aware of a soreness in his hands, the result of having held them clenched into fists for too long, and so, with his back to the Basilisk’s table, he unclenched them very deliberately, flexing his fingers and stretching them wide as he tried, uselessly, to make himself relax. He could feel his shoulders juddering with tension and repressed anger, but he knew that, so far, nothing was visible to anyone else. He also knew, from hard experience, that his tight control was temporary, and that he would soon start to shake in earnest unless he found some solitude. He asked the innkeeper for a new mug of ale and a freshly filled oil lamp, and as the pair at the counter moved to fill his requests, he returned to where he had been sitting earlier, collected his kit bag, and carried it to the distant corner table to await their arrival.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  By the time he reached his new table and set down his pack in the darkened corner, the trembling Cato had anticipated had begun, and he sat down quickly with his back to the room, tucking his hands beneath his crossed arms and clamping them tightly as he lowered his chin, afraid to relax in case the men at the distant table might see him shaking, even in the gloom that surrounded him. He willed himself to breathe steadily and evenly and regain his composure, and after a short while he felt himself beginning to uncoil. He continued the deep, exaggerated breathing for a while longer, though, allowing his heartbeat to settle down naturally, and uncrossed his arms just as the serving woman set down a tray holding a freshly lit lamp and a new mug of ale.

  He smiled at her this time, and thanked her, but she offered no return acknowledgment, and as soon as she turned away his mind returned to his confrontation with Endor, still reeling at how suddenly life can switch from pleasantness to utter terror and the threat of imminent death. He picked up the mug of ale and drank almost a third of it before he set it down again. A lifetime of soldiering had taught him that the difference between life and death often depends on the length of time that passes between recognizing danger and reacting. He knew he should not have come out of that encounter as cleanly as he had. His reaction had been far too slow and he had been saved solely by the fact that the Basilisk had never seen his face.

  He knew that his terror had been justifiable, nonetheless.

  Until the moment of coming face to face with Endor less than half an hour earlier, Cato had believed that the man was dead, stabbed through the neck and burned in a fire that had partially consumed him, then eaten by worms in the unmarked, salt-filled grave into which he, Marcus Licinius Cato, had personally rolled him. Dead men did not come back to life, and any man who could effectively contrive to falsify his own death under the close scrutiny of judgmental officialdom was someone around whom a wise man should tread carefully.

  Now Cato wondered about the true identity of the man he had buried that day—for he had buried a charred, disfigured corpse. Somewhere, he thought, someone else, some innocent, would long since have lost hope of ever finding a man, perhaps a well-loved man, who had simply vanished from existence that day.

  He had sat down with his back to the room because he had been afraid that someone at Endor’s table might see him shaking. Now, though, he wished he had not done that. He needed to watch the group at the other table. He stood up and moved to the chair across from where he had been sitting, noting as he turned that the man called Spero appeared to have recovered and was now seated with the others. None of them seemed to be paying attention to Cato, and he thought his change of seats might have gone unnoticed. He took another long pull at his mug of ale and then slid down in his seat, his eyes narrowing as he focused on the bright table beneath the window on the street wall and wondered what would happen next.

  He was not waiting for anyone to join him. He had lied about that, realizing that without a guest to wait for he would have had no reason to remain here, and by that time he had no slightest desire to leave. The Basilisk, miraculously returned to life, had filled Cato’s life with hard-edged purpose again after long months of boredom, and this dark, dingy room, stinking of stale beer and cheap wine, and traces of old sweat and urine, was its sole focus.

  Cato had been making his way slowly south from Eboracum for months, honourably discharged from military duty after twenty-five years of compulsory service, according to the official diploma of dismissal given him by a grateful empire. That was not quite true, though. He had served for only twenty years, and the additional five years were awarded, with pension, in tacit recognition of the extraordinary nature of his services, which had been known only to a limited number of highly placed superiors. And so at thirty-five years old he had changed everything, leaving behind the great stone fortress of Eboracum that had, at least according to official documents, been his home for almost two whole decades.

  To his surprise, once out and free he had been reluctant to move away too quickly, and so his southward progress had been slow, and sometimes he went nowhere for days on end. It had taken him more than a month to travel the first eighty-odd miles between Eboracum and Danum, simply because he was enjoying the novelty of moving at his own pace, without urgency. And so he simply drifted, following the great south road but moving parallel to it, through forested countryside, making a solitary camp each night and sometimes staying in a spot with good fishing or other attractions for as long as a week at a time.

  He could easily have ridden, for the accumulated back pay in his heavy moneybelt meant he was far from penniless, but he had never really liked horses and preferred to go afoot like the infantryman he was. And so he walked, taking his time and considering what he might do in the months and years ahead. He had no training for anything other than soldiering, but he was not concerned about that. He had sufficient money to set himself up in an alehouse or even a roadhouse, if he wanted that kind of life, and he knew that there were always billets available for well-qualified veterans who needed private work as bodyguards and household retainers on the larger villas.

  He also had a wife out there somewhere, and an eleven-year-old son about whom he had found himself thinking a lot recently, ever since his dec
ision to quit the army.

  Rhea had been a decent woman, but ill suited to being a soldier’s wife, and certainly not capable of coping with the demands of Cato’s life, which was unusually active and complex for a senior centurion, even in garrison. She had tried doggedly for six years, but when Cato had been almost killed, inexplicably far from home, by one of his own men, a chronic malcontent with an uncontrollable temper and a grudge against all officers, she had had enough. She had forced Cato to choose between her and the army. It was no choice at all, and she had been gone within the month.

  That had been six years earlier, and the last he had heard, from someone who had seen her there, was that she was living in Londinium. He didn’t know whether she was still there, but the thought of heading down in that direction had been in his mind for several months now, and he found himself anticipating seeing his son, Nicodemo, after such a long time.

  In the meantime, he’d reached the town of Danum and continued southward towards Lindum without stopping, following the great road that would lead him eventually to Londinium, two hundred miles farther south. He had picked up his pace after leaving Danum, making better time, and was three days south of Lindum when he was caught in a torrential downpour that gave him no time to erect a tent or find any kind of shelter. It had been a short-lived but brutally violent storm, and the steep-sided little gully in which he had sought shelter, barely more than a deep, shrub-choked ditch, had suddenly become a fast-flowing water chute that swept him off his feet and downstream for several hundred paces. When the spate passed, leaving him chilled and soaked through, he discovered that the water had penetrated his waxed leather kit bag and his rations were ruined, which meant he would have to stop at the next inhabited place he found, be it village or army post, in hopes of replenishing his supplies.

  He had walked for another eight or nine miles after that, and had found this place. A mere posting station, between forty and fifty miles south of Lindum, it contained two principal features: a minor marching camp with a small, fifty-man garrison commanded by a junior centurion with the rank of optio, or deputy commander, and the former imperial posting inn in which he now sat. Since the mansio had seemed, from his first casual inspection, to be badly neglected, Cato had passed it by without a thought, going directly to the garrison quartermaster’s store, where he had shown his discharge papers and received immediate attention to his needs. A welcome addition was a cup of wine that he drank with the decanus in charge of the commissary, in recognition of the demands of professional courtesy that made Rome’s legions function as efficiently as they did at the centuriate level throughout the empire.

  It was only after leaving the post, making his way slowly along the hamlet’s single short street, that he had blundered into the knot of men blocking the sidewalk.

  Everything was now unexpectedly at hazard, thrown open to chance in the crosswind of the instant, and his sole objective now was to stay close to Endor and wait for an opportunity to kill the man. Appius Endor had been tried and condemned in absentia by an imperial tribunal, sentenced to death for crimes against the empire and the military administration of Britain. Among those crimes had been one that was very personal to Cato: the murder of his friend Alexander Strabo and Strabo’s wife Maria, Cato’s own sister. And Endor had never been punished.

  Nothing protects a human predator as well as wealth and power do.

  And now the deception stood revealed, and Marcus Licinius Cato had no idea what to do next.

  He had been too long on the road to be able to react effectively, too far from anywhere familiar to know where to look for resources. His former team disbanded, he had lost touch already with those who would have run to help him. Instead he was alone here, unprepared, unready, off balance. Had he had a day of warning, he thought, or even a few hours, he might have come up with something, some plan of attack, some strategy, no matter how wild and unrealistic it might have been.

  The thought of leaving to find help and then coming back was ludicrous: he had no idea where Endor had come from, why he was here, or where the man might go to next. Once out of sight of the hamlet, he and his men might strike off in any direction and become untraceable once again. And Cato had already demonstrated to the decanus at the garrison stores that he was inactive, his legionary career legally finished. He cursed himself for blind carelessness there. Had he not gushed so loudly about being out after so long, he might now have gone to the officer in charge of the garrison and bluffed his way into winning some kind of assistance, but that cup of wine shared so talkatively with the friendly decanus had killed that chance. Knowing who and what he was, or who he had been, the authorities would almost certainly have taken his information and used it to go after Endor, but they would have locked Cato up rather than allow him to participate in an official military operation. Besides, the lessons he had learned in dealing with the authorities by the book were still too raw. Cato would never again trust anyone he did not know personally with information about Appius Endor, and that certainty was emphasized by his determination to be the man wielding the sword that took vengeance for the slaughtered Strabo family and all the multitude of others who had died to satisfy Endor’s appetites.

  Now, hearing a burst of laughter from the other table, Cato slumped even lower, flexing his shoulders and pressing his fingers into fists again, seething. He had to keep Endor within sight and within reach. But he could see no way to do that. Exposed as he now was, they would be rightfully suspicious if they saw him close to them again. Questions would be asked.

  The only weapons he had were his short sword—the Hispanic gladius with its waisted twenty-three-inch blade—and its matching dagger. Both were formidable tools, designed solely for killing, and he had spent a lifetime mastering their use, but they were weapons designed to be used by men fighting in formations. They had severe limitations when used by a man alone. Endor and his four men were all heavily armed, and three of them presented a real threat in the kind of fight Cato would be facing: two carried long-handled war hammers of the kind used by the Germanic tribes along the Rhine, and a third was armed with an enormous twin-bladed axe of a kind Cato had never seen before. Any of those three could finish him from a distance before he ever came close enough to use his short sword. And then, of course, there was the Basilisk himself, who had allegedly killed more people with his own hands than any other single person. There was not the slightest doubt in Cato’s mind that Endor, by himself, was at least as dangerous in a fight as all four of his men combined.

  Almost audibly, the thought came to Cato that he would die there, in a rundown mansio in a nameless hamlet somewhere south of Lindum in the forests of Britannia. After an apparently successful career spent fighting military corruption, his life would be ended and all his work undone by the reappearance of Appius Endor, the single most notorious, treasonous criminal he had ever had to deal with. He had been seen to bring Endor down and had been lauded and rewarded for doing it, only to have the man spring back to life again and trap him here where no one knew him or would ever search for him. The Basilisk would win on all fronts now and might live to grow old and die naturally, his real identity a secret.

  As that final irony registered in Cato’s mind, Endor rose up from his seat and stood staring at him from across the room.

  He recognizes me now. He knows who I am. The words rang in Cato’s mind instantly and he accepted them without demur, but they were followed by another, more incongruous thought. I never really realized how big he is.

  Even across the distance separating them, the Basilisk was massive, his shoulders immensely strong and broad, their width and the depth of his chest emphasized by the way his cloak was rucked back to hang down behind him. Cato saw his face clearly for a few moments but was not sure what he had seen in it, because Endor had moved sideways as he stood up, changing the angle of the light streaming through the window at his back, so that it brightened his outline but threw his face into shadow. The look on his face when he first stood
up might have been an angry one, Cato thought, but it might equally have been puzzlement. Either way, he knew he was about to find out because Endor was now coming towards him, waving his own people down when two of them moved to rise.

  Cato forced himself to sit still, shifting his right hand slowly and unobtrusively to the hilt of the sword at his waist, where he hooked his thumb comfortably behind it in a gesture of lifelong familiarity.

  “Your friend appears to be late,” Endor said when he arrived, standing above him.

  “Who’s to say what late means in a place like this and at this time of the year? He might have been caught in a storm.” Cato pushed a chair towards him with one foot. “Sit down. Drink with me. The ale’s remarkably good.” He raised a hand and crooked a finger towards the serving girl, who had been watching from behind the counter, then spread two upraised fingers before turning back to face the other man.

  “I saw you look at me before you came over. An odd look, I thought. Is there something you want from me?”

  Endor picked up the heavy chair in one hand as though it were weightless and, in a silent, emotionless display of enormous strength and muscular control, spun it slowly, one-handed, in a complete revolution before replacing it precisely where it had been. “No,” he said slowly, lowering himself into the chair. “I have something to offer you. If you are interested.”

  Cato did not react at all for several moments, but then he quirked an eyebrow. “Can’t know if I will be or not until you tell me what it is.”

  He saw the tavern girl coming with their two fresh mugs and raised a warning finger to the man across from him, keeping an eye on the approaching girl. She arrived, set down their mugs, and left again without a word, and both men picked up and drank, paying close attention to the ale, its flavour and texture.