[A Dream of Eagles 01] - The Skystone Read online

  The Skystone

  A Dream of Eagles - 01

  Jack Whyte

  The Legend of the Skystone

  Out of the night sky there will fall a stone

  That hides a maiden born of murky deeps,

  A maid whose fire-fed, female mysteries

  Shall give life to a lambent, gleaming blade,

  A blazing, shining sword whose potency

  Breeds warriors. More than that,

  This weapon will contain a woman's wiles

  And draw dire deeds of men; shall name an age;

  Shall crown a king, called of a mountain clan

  Who dream of being spawned from dragon's seed;

  Fell, forceful men, heroic, proud and strong,

  With greatness in their souls.

  This king, this monarch, mighty beyond ken,

  Fashioned of glory, singing a song of swords,

  Misting with magic madness mortal men,

  Shall sire a legend, yet leave none to lead

  His host to triumph after he be lost.

  But death shall ne'er demean his destiny who,

  Dying not, shall ever live and wait to be recalled.

  BOOK ONE

  Invasion

  I

  Today is my sixty-seventh birthday, a hot day in the summer of 410 in the year of our Lord, according to the new Christian system of dating the passage of time. I am old, I know, in years. My bones are old, after sixty-seven summers. But my mind has not aged with my body.

  My name is Gaius Publius Varrus, and I am probably the last man alive in Britain who can claim to have marched beneath the Eagles of the Roman army of occupation in this country. The others who marched with me are not merely dead; they are long dead. Yet I can still recall my days with the legions clearly.

  I have known men who refused to admit ever having marched with the armies. Whatever their reasons, I regard their refusal as their loss. I remember my legion days frequently, with affection and gratitude, because most of my lifetime friends came to me from the legions and so, indirectly, did my wife, the mother of my children and sharer of my dreams.

  There are times, too, when I think of my army days with an echo of incredulous laughter in my heart. I remember the foul-ups and the chaos and all the petty, human frailties and fallibilities that surface in army life, and my options are clear: laugh at them, or weep.

  I remember, for instance, how I spent the afternoon of another summer day, more than forty years ago, back in '69. That day was my last as a Roman soldier, and I spent it leading my men, and my commanding general, up a mountain and into an ambush.

  Traps are never pleasant spots to be in, God knows, but the one we sprung that day was the worst I ever encountered in all my years of soldiering. The heathens who caught us seemed to materialize out of the living rock. Savage, terrifying creatures, half-man, half-mountain goat, they took us completely by surprise in a high, rocky defile in the very centre of the rugged spine of mountains that runs the length of Britain.

  We had been climbing for two days, picking our way carefully and, we thought, in secrecy through valleys and passes away from the major crossing routes. We wanted to arrive unannounced on the western side. The few officers with horses, myself included, had been on foot most of that time, leading the animals. We had just entered this defile and mounted up, thankful for the reasonably level floor it offered, when we were crushed by a torrent of massive rocks from above.

  The three men I had been talking to were smashed to a bloody pulp before my eyes by a boulder that fell on top of them out of nowhere. They never even saw it. I doubt if any of the men killed in that first apocalyptic minute saw death approach them. I know I was stunned by the suddenness of it. It did not even occur to me at first that we were being attacked, for we had sighted no hostiles in more than a week and expected to find none there, so high in the mountains.

  Those first plummeting boulders caused carnage among our men, who had just bunched together on the narrow, rocky floor, exhausted after a long, hard climb. The mountains, which had until then heard only panting, grunting breath and muttered curses, were suddenly echoing with the roar of falling rock and the panicked, agonized screams of maimed and dying men. And then the enemy appeared, dropping, as I have said, like mountain goats from the defile walls above us.

  Britannicus, my general, had fallen back from the head of the column only moments earlier to chivvy the men behind us, and as I swung my mount around, I saw his helmet's crimson plume about thirty paces distant, swaying as he fought to control his rearing horse. The cliffs directly above him were swarming with leaping men, clad in animal skins, and I began flogging my horse, willing the frightened beast to fly me over the men packed around me to a spot where I could organize some effective resistance.

  It was hopeless. There was no room to do anything. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, the entire length of the defile was a mass of snarling, angry men locked in hand-to-hand fighting. This was a fight that, whichever way it went, would be won by brawn and guts, not by tactics.

  I was using my horse as a battering ram, forcing my way through the struggling mass of bodies, stabbing right and left with a spear I had snatched from a falling man, but it was like one of those dreadful dreams when nothing works properly and everything slows down except the forces threatening you.

  The narrow floor of the cleft we were in was bisected for a third of its length by a ridge of rock that was sharp as a blade on top, and I reached one end of this ridge just as my horse sagged under me, fatally wounded but unable to fall immediately because of the press of bodies. I managed somehow to throw myself from its back before it did go down and found myself standing on the ridge above the struggle, unchallenged by anyone. I looked to my right and saw Britannicus, his teeth bared in a rictus of pain, less than a spear's length from me, an arrow in his thigh above the knee. It was a red-flighted arrow, very pretty, and it had pierced him cleanly, pinning him to his screaming horse, which, like mine, did not have room to fall. As I watched, a hand came up out of the press below and grasped the protruding shaft, pulling it downward. He screamed, and his horse lurched and went down on that side, crushing his pinned leg beneath it.

  I have no recollection of crossing the space between us. The next thing I remember is standing on the hindquarters of his horse, directly above Britannicus, looking for a clear space to jump down into. The masses parted and I leaped, only to take a spear thrust in the chest in mid flight so that I fell backwards on top of him. My breastplate had deflected the spear's point, but I saw its owner set to try for me again. I tried clumsily to roll to my right as he stabbed and this time felt the point of the spear lodge between the plates of my armour, beneath my shoulder. I rolled back again frantically, throwing my weight against the shaft, and managed to wrench it from the man's grasp as one of my own men plunged a sword beneath his arm. He went to his knees and died there, his eyes wide and amazed. As he began to topple towards me, I was already on my feet again, ignoring the spear, which had fallen beside me, and drawing my dagger. My sword was gone. A hand grasped my left shoulder, tugging me violently around before I could find my balance. I swung blindly, finding a naked neck with my blade and falling again, hearing a voice inside my head cursing me clearly for not being able to stand up.

  There was blood everywhere. I caught a glimpse of Britannicus beside me, staring, face pale as death, and then someone else fell on me, gurgling his own death into my ear. I lost all reason, panicking with the need to stand on my own feet. I reached and grasped and hauled myself up, throwing someone aside — whether friend or foe I'll never know — and managed to stand erect only to realize that I wa
s weaponless and being pulled down yet again. I went to one knee and this time could not rise. A voice yelled "Varrus!" and a hand appeared from my left side, fingers extended to me. I clasped it and pulled myself up again, and as I did so, I clearly saw a bronze axe-head with a long, polished spike sever the helping hand cleanly from its wrist. Time froze. I saw the axe-wielder turn towards me, his weapon swinging to its height, and I knew the sharpness of that blade.

  The details of that instant stand out clearly. The man was big, red-bearded, grinning in rage, showing black stumps of teeth. He wore a wolf skin across his naked chest and another around his loins, held by a leather belt into which was stuck a long dagger. He saw a dead man staring at him from my eyes. A voice in my mind agreed with him, and I was preparing for my death when that same handless arm, spurting its life, pointed itself at him, jetting its bright-red blood into his eyes and blinding him for the time it took me to throw myself forward, jerk the dagger from his belt as he reeled back from my weight and sink it to the hilt beneath his unarmoured ribs.

  As he fell dying, however, he somehow found the strength to whirl his axe backward and down and around, and I felt the raking tear of its spike from knee to groin as it slammed jarringly up into the join of me. I dropped my head, cringing from the violence of it, to see the thick shaft, like a gross, wooden, impossible phallus, sticking from beneath my tunic. Pain exploded in me, wracking me with unimaginable fury as I fell into a whirlpool of screaming blackness, still clutching the severed hand of my saviour.

  We won — how, I will never know. But that was the end of my career as a follower of the Eagles. By rights, it should have been the end of me completely. The spike had missed my testicles and had driven upwards into my left buttock, but it had damaged the hamstring behind my knee in passing and laid open my whole thigh to the bone. The medics wanted to take the leg right off, there and then, at the end of the fight, before taking me down out of the mountains, for they thought that I would never survive the journey. Thank God I recovered consciousness quickly! I squealed like an angry hawk, knowing the survival rate among amputees to be almost nil. But it would have done me no good had it not been for Caius Britannicus. He insisted that I be cauterized and sewn up to take my chances. I had saved his life more times than he could count, he swore, and if I were to die, then by all the gods in heaven, I had earned the right to die two-legged. I was his primus pilus, he declared, and a primus pilus was entitled to two legs, alive or dead.

  He was absolutely correct, of course. Primus pilus — literally the First Spear — was the single most exalted and exclusive rank an ordinary soldier could attain within his legion. Rome had only twenty-eight legions in commission at that time, and each had one primus pilus. As primus pilus of my legion, therefore, I was officially recognized as one of the twenty-eight best professional soldiers in the imperial legions of Rome.

  No man who ever inarched behind the Eagles would ever deny that claim. Each primus pilus, down through Rome's thousand years of power, earned every single step of his promotion by being the very best among his equals at every stage of his career. Each progressed, without deviation or blemish, and frequently from the lowest ranks, up the ladder of honour, through the entire centuriate of the legion, to the ultimate post of First Spear. Everyone, including the political and appointed officers — junior legates, staff and tribunes — answered to the primus pilus in matters of tactics, discipline, troop dispositions and the daily administration of his legion's affairs. For his part, the primus pilus answered directly and only to his legion's commanding general — in my case, the Legate Caius Cornelius Britannicus.

  I don't know how either of us survived the journey back down to the plains, but when we got there, Britannicus quartered me in his sick bay and I was tended by Mitros, his personal physician. We lay there on our cots, side by side, and waited to heal, and as we waited, each of us had ample time to explore his own thoughts — for me, I must admit, a novel experience at that time. I believe it may have been during those days that the idea of telling this story first entered my mind, but I cannot make that claim with absolute conviction.

  Where does a man find the arrogance to contemplate the telling of a tale like the one I have to tell? "Inside himself" may be the most convenient answer, but in this particular instance it is both inadequate and inaccurate. My present determination to tell this story — and it is one that has often seemed stubborn and foolish even to me, in spite of the fact that I have been writing it for many years — springs from the fact that, in Caius Britannicus, I had a lifelong friend and mentor whose prophetic vision and moral integrity still awe me. Thanks to his strength of character, his powers of perception and evaluation and his insistence upon needing me, I was permitted to survive the ending of an entire world, and then to begin a new life at an age when other men were lying down to die.

  Now that I am truly old, the fear of leaving that tale untold, and thereby consigning my friend to eternal anonymity, unsung and unrecognized, strengthens me to write. Having found that strength, I have struggled to find a beginning for my tale, the way a boy will search perversely for the centre of an onion, blinding himself with tears as he pursues his folly. There is, I now know, no real beginning. There is only memory, which flows where the terrain takes it.

  Caius Cornelius Britannicus was not a good invalid. He resented being confined to bed, but until the hole in his thigh mended there was not a thing he could do about it. Regrettably, as a direct result of that, those first few days were the worst I ever spent in his company. I was grateful to him, but he was hard to take on an empty stomach, and since I spent most of those first days puking up the medicines Mitros was feeding me, my stomach was certainly empty a good deal. I would have been happier sharing those quarters with an angry leopard. He did eventually begin to settle down, however, and to accept his enforced inactivity with more characteristic philosophy. From that point on, we talked — rather, he talked and I listened, throwing my occasional copper contribution onto his pile of silver and golden ones.

  From time to time, the monotony of our confinement would be broken when one or the other of us would have a visitor, but the men who came to visit me were awkward and uncomfortable in the presence of my august host and companion. To me, he was my Legate, my companion-in-arms for years, and a trusted friend. To my visitors, he was "Old Eagle Face," their commanding general, and therefore their nemesis and their god. They shuffled and whispered and fidgeted and couldn't wait to get out of there.

  On one of those occasions, after a very brief visit by two of my subordinate cohort centurions, I turned to Britannicus and found him asleep, flat on his back, his high-ridged nose outlined against the light. The image brought back a surge of memories.

  Africa, 365

  You don't spend two years on active service in Africa without learning to get out of the sun during the hottest part of the day. I had been sheltered and reasonably comfortable, dozing quietly, when something startled me awake. I lay there motionless, holding my breath, my ears straining, and waited for whatever had made the noise to make it again. Then, somewhere behind me, just on the edge of my hearing range, a camel coughed, and this time the sound brought me to my knees, head down below the tops of the rocks that shaded me, as I tried to isolate the direction it had come from. A Roman soldier meets few friendly strangers in the desert; none of them ever rides a camel.

  There were five men, four of them mounted on camels and wearing the long, black, stifling clothes of the nomadic barbarians who infested these desert lands. The fifth man walked between two of the riders, and something in his posture, even at that distance, told me he walked with his hands bound behind him; the fact that he was walking at all made it obvious he was a prisoner. They were about a mile from me when I first saw them shimmering through the heat haze, and they approached steadily and slowly until the walker fell to his knees, forcing the little procession to stop and wait for him to get back to his feet. Even from almost a mile away I could see that he was one of
my own kind, for he wore a short, military-style tunic. I could see, too, that he was just about finished. I flattened myself to my rock, my eyes barely clearing the top of the small hill I was on, and watched the poor swine weaving and staggering as the group drew closer to my hiding place. They had him strung by the neck with two ropes, each one stretching to one of the riders who flanked him.

  I had no worries about their finding me. They would pass close by to my left, heading directly to the water hole, the only water around for miles. I had been there at dawn. I had drunk my fill and replenished my water bags, and then I had looked around and chosen this boulder-strewn hill to hide on during the long day. Here, I was sheltered from the sun and from visitors by high rocks and a strategically hung cloak, and my horse was comfortable and well hidden. I had left no visible tracks for any casual or inquisitive eye to see. I was waiting for nightfall, when I would cross the five leagues of desert between me and the sea coast, and pick up a galley to take me out of Africa, home to Britain along the coasts of Iberia and Gaul.

  I detest Africa. I loathe it from the bottom of my legionary's soul, and for the best of reasons, which I share with every other grunt who ever humped a military pack across its God-forsaken sands: I went there as a soldier. To me, it is a country with only two faces, one of which is false. The false face is a harlot's mask, painted to disguise corruption and decay. It is the face of urban Africa, gaudy with gross and exotic luxuries. It is the face most often seen by Rome's diplomats and wealthy, travelling merchants. Away from the flesh-pots and the palaces of its major cities, however, Africa shows its other face, its real face, to Rome's soldiers. That sneering face is twisted with hatred, toxic with hostility.

  The soldiers who police Africa's lethal wastelands on foot have no illusions about its vastness or its mysteries; to them, Africa is Hades, a miserable, sweltering place of unpleasant duty, unbearable temperatures and unrelieved harshness. They know it to be peopled with alien, violent creatures whose feral natures reflect their environment. Its people are nomads — grim desert tribesmen whose lives seem wholly dedicated to strife in the form of never-ending local wars and vicious blood feuds. They call themselves Berbers, and the only common cause they ever seem to make is to war against Rome's soldiers. In consequence, the soldiers of Rome, down through the centuries, have regarded them with a mixture of awe and hatred and sullen respect, treating them as the most implacably savage warriors in the world, and convinced that the word "barbarian" was coined far back in antiquity to describe the Berbers of Africa.