The Skystone

VII

It was on Midsummer's Day that I finally allowed myself to open my grandfather's treasures and gloat over them. I had waited, month after impatient month, until I felt that I had earned myself the reward of spending time to examine these wonders that were now legally and rightfully mine.

From the way I have been speaking of treasures, anyone reading this will probably have imagined a hoard of coins and jewels. That is not quite correct. My grandfather had been an armourer — a master sword-maker and also an earnest historian and student of weapons and weaponry. During his early years with the legions, he had picked up several assorted examples of the armourer's craft and the metalsmith's art that had caused him excitement and given him great pleasure. In later years, while he served as armourer to the various legions stationed in Britain, he had encouraged legionaries to pick up other examples for him. The end result of forty years of this was a collection of antique and esoteric weapons the like of which existed nowhere else that I knew of. These were my grandfather's treasures, each individually wrapped in protective cloth and many stored in cases that he had made specifically to house them. Every piece was accompanied by a scroll outlining the history of the item as far as it was known by the old man. Where the history of the piece was obscure, he consulted all available sources and made some very shrewd guesses.

Some of the shapes I remembered from boyhood, and I felt like a boy again as I opened them one by one. There was one particular piece that chilled me to my bones with awe. It was a face-protector of dull, black iron, shaped to fit the forehead and muzzle of a horse, with flared eye-protectors. It had been crudely decorated with a drawing of a mounted man charging with a long, heavy spear balanced over his shoulder, and beneath the drawing, the Greek word meaning "companions." The lover of history in me had to swallow hard as I looked at this piece of armour, because I knew it had protected one of the horses of the Companions, the hand-picked friends of the King, who had ridden into battle at the side of Philip of Macedon and later with his son the great Alexander, fully seven hundred years before I had been born. The Companions! How often had I dreamed of them as a boy, imagining myself winning glory under the greatest military commander of ancient times.

To keep company with the faceplate, there was the badly rusted remnant of a sarissa, the sixteen-foot-long spear carried by the Macedonian cavalry. It had a long cross-piece attached below the blade, presumably to stop the entire spear from going through the body of whoever was skewered, and to give the rider at least a chance of pulling it out again as he galloped past his victim. My grandfather had really studied this weapon in his youth. Like the one in the drawing on the horse's faceplate, the sarissa was carried point down, the shaft over the rider's shoulder, and was used with a downward thrust. It was originally left in the body of the first victim, and the rest of the fighting was done with swords. The victorious cavalry — Alexander's cavalry were always victorious — would return later to collect their sarissas from the bodies of the men they had slain in their charge. The cross-piece, added later, meant they then had a chance of retaining the spear for a second victim. In a large, long case that I remembered well, there was a collection of original Roman pila, the fighting spears of the ancient legions. Seven feet long, the shaft of these original spears was of wood for half its length, the other half being a metal rod with a wicked head. Embedded in an enemy.

's shield, the rod, of soft iron, would bend, and the cumbersome weight of the thing dragged at the shield until it became useless to the man trying to shelter behind it.

Another carefully wrapped package contained the great African bow that I had marvelled over as a child. It was composed of alternating layers of wood, animal horn and sinew, and it was truly a mighty weapon the like of which had never been seen in this part of the world. I laid it aside for closer examination later.

There were several items that I had never seen before, and a parchment wrapped in deerskin, addressed to me with the instruction that I should read it carefully at my leisure and study the contents and methods described in it. Intrigued, I laid this package, too, carefully aside. A second, new-looking package contained a magnificent shirt of soft leather, onto which had been stitched, with the most astonishing precision, thousands of tiny metal rings in overlapping rows, in the fashion of our own Roman plate armour, but in a form much lighter and far more supple. The accompanying note said that it had been brought back from the country north of the Danube and was the kind of armour being worn now by many of the Germanic and Saxon chiefs.

The last package was a magnificent box of rich, oiled wood no more than a foot long by a hand's breadth wide by about half of that in depth. At first I could not even find out how it opened, but eventually I discovered that the top and bottom had been carved to fit one over the other into matching grooves. I knew this package was special, from the way it had been hidden away at the back of the hoard. I was trembling slightly in anticipation as I opened it, but I almost dropped it when I saw what it contained. It was a knife. A dagger. But such a dagger! The blade shone like polished silver, and in fact I took it to be that at first; the hilt looked to be of polished gold. The entire weapon was covered with a slight sheen of oil.

I picked it up reverently. It felt alive in my hand. I tested the blade with the ball of my thumb and drew blood! Gaping at the blood in amazement, for I had barely used any pressure, I carried the knife upstairs and out into the sunlight, where it blazed in my hand like a torch. I heard footsteps behind me and Equus stood by my side.

"I see you found it. I've been dying of impatience! Thought you'd never go down there. Boudicca's buttocks, man, sometimes I think you're not human! How could you not go down there for all this time?" I didn't even bother to answer him. I was too busy staring at the wonder in my hand.

"He was sorry it couldn't be a sword, but that was all of the skystone metal he had left, and he didn't want to pollute it with ordinary iron the way he did with the sword he made for your father. He didn't know what it was, but whatever it was, he thought it was fitting that it fell from heaven. It holds an edge like nothing in this world. It'll shave the hairs off your arm. Try it."

I did, and the tiny hairs of the back of my wrist gathered in a small clump on the edge of the blade.

"Have you ever seen the like?"

I simply shook my head, hefting the knife in my hand. It had an unusual hilt, slightly cruciform, the arms of which protruded for about an inch above and below the blade.

"Why the cross-piece?"

"Extra weight. And balance. You can throw it. It flies as though it had wings, like magic."

"Is the handle solid gold?"

Equus shook his head. "No. Gold-dipped, though. Underneath it's brass. Gold was too heavy. And too soft."

"And too expensive. It looks like one piece — the hilt, I mean. How did he make it?"

"He poured it." Equus grinned at my wide-eyed look, "Did you find the scroll he left for you? It's all in there. The old man thought it was an entirely new technique, revolutionary, he said, if it's properly used."

"How did he get this finish on the blade, Equus?" He shrugged his massive shoulders. "He didn't. It was there already. All we had to do was polish it... and polish it and polish it and polish it. But it was worth it. And the brighter it got, the easier it became to polish. We put the oil on it to protect it against rust, although we didn't know whether or not the skystone rusted. Better to be safe than angry. "

I held the beautiful thing up to my eyes. At the top of the blade, just below the cross hilt, my grandfather had inscribed a tiny "V" for his name and mine: Varrus. I felt a lump swell in my throat and swallowed hard.

"Equus, I'm going to take the scroll, and this, and go home. Will you see to shutting everything up?"

He grinned again. "Thought you might do that. Of course I will. Go home. Go!"