The Skystone

IX

It was a blazing hot day in midsummer and I was unhappy, cooped up in the darkness of the smithy doing last-minute work on a neglected order of pike-heads for the German mercenaries of the local garrison. It was a consignment that had given place to other priorities and now required emergency attention. The inside of the smithy seemed as black as the pit, although the truth was that I was simply feeling lazy, having no stomach for work that day. I finished hammering a cooling pike-head and plunged it into the quenching trough, looking through the cloud of steam towards the doorway as I did so, and there sat Britannicus, high on a magnificent white horse, his full-dress uniform a glory of scarlet, white and gold. I dropped tongs and hammer and ran as fast as my bad leg would allow me to the doorway, where I stopped, suddenly overcome with shyness. He looked at me sardonically, his eyes taking in my beard, my sooty face and arms, and my leather apron.

"By the divine Augustus! Vulcan in person! Tell me, fellow. I'm looking for a friend of mine, probably your owner. Varrus the Roman. Where will I find him?"

"Vulcan was lame from birth, " I said. "I got my limp just recently, wasting my time in trying to help out an ungrateful colleague."

His face broke into a great grin. Then he swung his leg over his horse's back and slid to the ground, his arms open, with the apparent intent of throwing them around me. I jumped away in horror. One touch of me and my soot would ruin that dress tunic forever. I held up my hand to keep him off.

"For the love of God, General, don't touch me! You'll never get clean!" He stopped just in time and stood, looking me up and down, still smiling widely. "You may be right, old friend, you may be right. You do look rather... sooty. But at least I can take your hand!" We shook, as Romans do. arm to arm, looking each other over in delight. It had been almost two years since we had parted company. He looked in top fighting condition, even though he must now have been forty-one years old. He was lean and bronzed and strong-looking. His scarlet cape and plume and his gold helmet and armour made the rich white wool of his military tunic look like damask.

"What brings you to Colchester, General? And why so formally dressed?

You are a sight for sore eyes. You look marvellous!"

"Thank you, Varrus, so do you. But Colchester? I thought I was in Camulodunum."

I grinned at him, having forgotten the archaic compunction that made him insist on calling every place in Britain by its original Roman name, rather than by the Celticized names used by the people.

"How are you, Varrus? Is life dealing well with you? Are you happy?"

"What's happiness, General? I have a good life and a place to live and a place to work. I'm content. What more could a man want?"

"How's the leg?"

"It's fine." I glanced down at it. "It'll never be straight again, and it aches in the winter, but I can walk on it, as you can see."

"Excellent!" He glanced around the yard. "Do you have a jug of wine to offer a thirsty man?"

"No, but I have something better." I looked back into the darkness of the smithy. "Equus! Come out here. I want you to meet someone."

Equus came out into the sunlight, wiping his hands against his tunic. I introduced him to Britannicus as my partner and asked him to pour us some of his homebrewed ale. There was a bench in the yard; as we made ourselves comfortable on it, Equus went to get us a drink.

"You didn't answer my question, Commander. What's the occasion for the finery?" I nodded at his uniform and he shrugged disparagingly.

"It seems that all of Britain is fully at peace. I am on my way to Verulamium with Theodosius. Tonight we dine with Antonius Cicero and the garrison here. We arrived this morning and held a full-dress review of the troops at noon. I came directly here after the ceremonies."

"Ah, so that's what all the commotion was about! I heard the trumpets, but I was busy and didn't pay much attention. I knew if it was important Plautus would tell me about it soon enough. Will you be staying in town tonight?"

"Yes. And leaving tomorrow at first light. I came to invite you to dine with me tonight at the fort. Will you come? You know several of the officers."

I blinked in surprise. It would be a formal officers' dinner. I reviewed my entire wardrobe in half a second. I had nothing suitable for a banquet.

"Can't, Commander, " I said. "Sorry, but I've got nothing even remotely suitable to wear to an affair like that. I've bought no new clothes — no stylish ones, at any rate — since I came here. I have no need of them, normally."

He shook his head. "Not good enough. Too easily remedied and too weak as an excuse. Not acceptable at all. I'll have my man supply you with some of my clothes. They will fit, and I have far too many for my own needs. We'll bathe together in the evening and see if the army masseurs can get the soot out of your pores with steam, water, perfumed oils and muscle. You must stink like a goat!"

I laughed aloud. "Commander, the dirt's no more than a disguise. I do bathe, from time to time."

"Thank God for that!"

He had removed his helmet when he sat down, and now he unhooked the fastening of his military cloak, allowing it to fall unheeded behind him as Equus arrived, carrying two enormous flagons of the cold beer he brewed in his own home. We always kept a cask of it down in the coolness of the cellar and it slaked a thirst in a way no other beverage could. Britannicus accepted his with a smile of thanks and put it straight to his lips. Equus stood and watched him drink deeply for a few seconds and then turned and left us.

After what seemed like minutes, Britannicus stopped drinking and wiped his lips with his forearm, breathing deeply.

"This stuff is delicious, Varrus! Did Equus... Equus?

Is that his real name?"

"It's what he's called. I don't think even he knows his real name. He forgot it years ago."

"Did he make this?"

"Yes, Commander. He's very proud of his ale."

"He should be." He drank again, then, "How many slaves do you have working for you, Varrus?"

It was my turn to shake my head. "None, Commander, as you well know. Slavery is non-productive."

He smiled gently. "Ah, yes, I remember your personal heresy. Slavery built the Empire, Varrus."

"That's horse turds, Commander, and you know it. The free fanners and the citizens of Rome itself built the Republic, and the Republic became the Empire, and slavery finished both of them."

Now he was grinning hugely. "That's treason, Varrus. Valentinian would have your tongue cut out for voicing such thoughts. How can you deny the benefits of slavery?"

"Same way I did the last time you brought it up. It's plain common sense. What I find surprising is that any man with a brain in his head can defend it."

Britannicus stood up and walked away to look at the riot of hollyhocks growing wild in the corner of the yard. He stood there for several moments, deep in thought. I spoke to his back.

"I know you agree with what I'm saying, in principle. I've heard you say so. I'm not stupid enough to think that all slaves should be freed, or could be. But I really believe that depriving a man of his humanity is a certain way to deny anyone, including him, the benefit of his living. A slave has no incentive to improve. That's why there were never any slaves in the legions. Go back to the days of the Republic, when Rome was the strongest it has ever been. All the best ideas, the finest decisions, the greatest steps forward in knowledge, in strategy, in deployment, in whatever you want, were developed and put into place by free men. None of them came from slaves. Not one. That's all I'm saying. I don't care if other people have slaves. My point is that any man who works for me or with me will better his own life and the conditions of his life by doing so. I'll make it worth his while to do the best he's capable of."

He had turned around and was looking at me. "What about the Greek city states?"

"What about them, Commander? We've been through this before. They prove my point."

"Not so, Varrus. In Athens, a slave state, the human mind was lifted to its greatest achievements ever."

"Aye, and they still died out! They had to! Commander, how can you be a Christian and believe that God made man in his own image, and still maintain that any man has the right to own any other man?"

"Religious philosophy? From you, Varrus?" He was smiling again.

"That's not philosophy!" I felt the blood rising to my face. "That stuff's too deep for me. The democracy of Athens was built on a basic fault: only citizens were allowed to think, and only slaves were allowed to work. The slaves had no life at all to speak of, but they were expected to produce everything the parasitic thinkers needed to live on. It was bound to fail. It bred hatred on the one hand and laziness on the other." Britannicus crossed back to the bench and picked up his flagon, and I saw another illustration of my point.

"That ale you're drinking — where do you think it came from?" His eyebrow went up again. "You told me. Equus brewed it."

"He did, but out of what?" I read the amusement in his eyes. "We know a farmer, General, who supplies us with the materials from which Equus makes his beer. Equus supplies me with his beer because I supply him with the workshop to make the nails and the tools with which he pays the farmer for his crop. If the farmer stops growing his crops, or if I deprive Equus of his workplace, or if he stops making his nails and tools, that chain will break down. The farmer will go somewhere else for his goods, or Equus will seek another farmer to supply him with hops. In the meantime, I'll have no ale. Somebody loses."

He smiled and half nodded, his eyebrow arched in what I took to be derision, but I carried on.

"It may seem like a contrived example, but it's not. It's not. It's simple and real, like life. There has to be something produced before anyone can consume it, and I believe no man has a right to live if he does not produce something. Parasites are destructive. Yet our society, our Roman state, has never seen any need to encourage its people to produce sensibly or to govern their own production! That's all I'm going to say. Otherwise I'll get angry."

He smiled at my vehemence. "Enough! Sorry. Show me your workshop."

"I'll be glad to. But tell me why you got me onto that topic as soon as you arrived? That's almost exactly where we left off talking two years ago."

He grinned. "That is correct. It was exactly where we left off. I was simply curious as to whether or not you would remember your own eloquent argument, although I never seriously doubted for a moment you would."

I led him inside, and we spent the next half hour going over work in progress. Britannicus asked a lot of intelligent questions and I tried to provide him with intelligent answers. He seemed impressed with the way we were set up, and I felt pleased. Then, after standing for a while watching Equus, who was finishing the last of the pike-head order, he pulled the sword from the scabbard by his side and extended it to me, hilt forward.

"What do you think of this?"

I took it and examined it. It was not a good weapon, in spite of the jewellery and inlay work on the hilt. The blade was plain and ill balanced. I hefted it and weighed it in my hand.

"Well?" He clearly wanted me to evaluate it and I did not want to hurt his feelings.

"Where did you get this, Commander?"

"Never mind, for the moment. Would you buy it?" I looked him straight in the eye. "No, Commander, I would not. The blade is ill weighted, the metal won't hold an edge for any length of time, and the tang is starting to work loose inside the hilt."

"Hmmm! There was no looseness inside the hilt when I bought it last year. What would cause that?"

"It was probably made by a slave." I couldn't resist the jibe. "No self-respecting armourer would allow such a shoddy piece of work to leave his hands. I would venture to guess that it was bought cheap by a jeweller, who made it look fancy and sold it for its decorative value rather than its usefulness."

He shook his head ruefully at my candour and took the offending weapon back, slipping it into its ornate scabbard. "Do you have any swords for sale?"

I shook my head. "No. Not that I would have such a ceremonial piece for sale at any time. These things are made to order. I do have one sword, but it's an experimental type that I've been working on for some months. It's not been proven yet."

"May I see it?"

I went and fetched the sword for him. He ran his eyes over the lines of it and hefted it for balance, transferring his gaze immediately to the hilt.

"How have you done this? It's bronze, isn't it?" I nodded. "But it's solid!

No seams. How?"

"A new technique, or rather, an adaptation of a very old technique. I think it's going to work very well. The entire hilt is poured in one piece and bonded to the iron of the tang."

He swung it in a series of sharp, jabbing cuts. "Will you make me one like this?"

"Happily. I'd give you that one, but I'm still not satisfied with the weight and balance of it. I'll make you one that will be perfect. Not fancy, Commander, but as close to a perfect weight for you as I can achieve."

He placed the sword flat on the bench. "Do so, my friend, and name your price."

As we walked back out into the sunlight, I was half smiling at the thought of charging Gaius Britannicus for using one of my swords. His horse was cropping the grass growing between the flagstones of the yard, and he stopped With his hand on its neck. "Varrus, have you ever heard of the Bagaudae?"

I thought for a moment. "Weren't they the rebels in Gaul who turned bandit about a hundred years ago? Stirred up a hornet's nest of trouble for the administration over there for a long time, if I remember correctly. What about them?"

He was stroking his horse's muzzle gently. The big white animal whickered softly and pushed its muzzle against his shoulder.

"You have a good memory, my friend. That's exactly who they are. I'd hardly call them bandits, but they are nominally rebels. They are still active, and the legions over there do nothing about them. Fascinating people, Varrus. They've held virtual rule over a major part of southern Gaul for almost a hundred years."

I stared at him. "What do you mean, rule?" He simply shrugged his shoulders. "You mean they govern the province? And the legions let them?

I find that hard to believe. Why haven't we heard more about them? Why haven't they been stamped out?"

He shrugged slightly again. "Cowardice, Varrus. Sheer cowardice."

"On whose part? The legions'?"

"No. The Empire's."

I could feel myself frowning. "Commander, you're not making sense."

"Oh yes I am, Varrus. I'm making absolute sense."

"Not to me, you're not."

"That's because you were born and bred here, Varrus, sheltered by the army and by the seas around this island. The real bureaucracy of the Empire never really established its stranglehold here in Britain the way it has everywhere else. Take yourself, for example. Do you know that neither you nor your grandfather would have been allowed to live and work the way you've always done if you'd lived in any other part of the Empire? The regulations and restrictions would have killed you, "

"You mean the guild rules? Yes, I've encountered those."

His eyebrow went up again. "You have, have you? And what was the result?"

"I'm still here, and I will not join the guild."

"Good for you. I should have known. It's not just smiths they affect, you know, the guild rules. They're everywhere. They're killing trade throughout the Empire. Britain is about the only place where there have always been ways of getting around their regulations — of staying free, in the sense of a merchant being free to conduct his own affairs without interference. But you know all this, don't you?"

"Some of it. Most of it. What are you getting at, Commander?" I was utterly confused.

"This, Varrus: the Bagaudae in Gaul rebelled, a hundred years ago, but they are not bandits. They are ordinary but courageous people who decided they could not continue to live under the Empire's rules, even then."

I frowned. "For example?"

"Examples? Try crippling taxes, unjust and self-serving laws, constant inflation, corrupt officials, restrictive regulations governing the way they lived their lives and constant government interference." I had nothing to say to this, so he continued. "They walked away — out of the Empire. Away from their homes, from their businesses, from their employment. Away from the taxes and the duties and the burdens. They walked away to the hills and the forests and they refused to go back. They built huts and they lived on whatever they could grow and hunt for themselves." His voice was almost a monotone. "It started as a trickle at the end of the third century and it grew into a flood. We're now at the end of the fourth century and it's still going on. For over a hundred years now these Bagaudae have paid no taxes, obeyed no Roman laws and spared the lives of no Roman soldiers who came after them. Most of them live communally on huge villa farms and settlements. Each man contributes to the life of the commune with his own skills and abilities. They have no use for money; they barter. And among their numbers are physicians, magistrates, architects, lawyers, administrators and a large number of professional soldiers."

"That's incredible, " I said. "And the Empire does nothing?" He spread his hands wide in a gesture that was purely Gallic. "What can the Empire do? The bureaucrats are afraid that the story will spread. The official policy is to do nothing that will attract attention to the problem. To ignore it, in the hope that it will go away. Rome leaves the Bagaudae in peace, because the alternative might stir up a furore that could breed an Empire full of Bagaudae."

"How do you know all this?"

He smiled at me. "I read, and I talk, and I ask lots of questions of lots of people. How would you like to come and be the smith in my Bagaudae community?"

The unexpectedness of the question made me laugh aloud, but he cut me off before I could make any reply.

"There's not a slave in the place, Varrus."

He was serious, I could see, but I had no idea of what he was getting at. I know my incomprehension was showing on my face.

He continued, in a low voice, "Think on it, Varrus. I am very serious. You would be a great asset to my plans for the years ahead. I want you with me."

I shook my head. "What plans, Commander? I have no idea what you're talking about. Your farm is where? By Aquae Sulis? That's over a hundred miles from here. Why would I want to close down my business and move out there, other than just to be closer to you? What purpose would it serve? I'm known here. My work is here, and it's going well. I may never be wealthy, but as long as I have my health I'll never lack for anything."

"Is your mind closed on the matter?"

"No, of course not! But I wish I knew what you are driving at!" The wide smile I knew so well flashed again. "Some day, Varrus, I'll explain myself completely. In the meantime, I should be getting back to the fort. Will you come now?"

I glanced behind me to where Equus was still working away on his own.

"No, Commander, I still have a few things to attend to here, and after that I shall go home and change into something that will get me past the guards at the gate. I'll meet you at the bath house in about two hours."

"So be it. I'll have my man ready with some finery for you. As a hero of the legions, you should look as good as we can make you, although with that face of yours..." He punched me on the arm. "So be it, my friend, till later. It's good to see you again."

I stood and watched him as he vaulted onto his horse and cantered out of the yard, a vision of military splendour in scarlet and gold. A hero of the legions, he had called me. I wondered what I had done to deserve that?

Mind you, I'd had my leg carved up and had survived, which was unusual in itself. Perhaps that did qualify me for junior hero status. I laughed at my folly and went about my business.