Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

The only tragic element in her departure lay in the timing of it; dead of peaceful and natural causes, she must now await burial with all the others killed by the storm. The knowledge of that haunted me, robbing me of sleep with visions of her high-cheeked, lovely face and fragile form stacked among others, stiff and frozen in an open-sided storage house, exposed to the icy wind. Our minds do strange things to us. I knew well she was not stacked like a piece of wood but lay alone and apart, where I myself had carried her, wrapped in a heavy shroud made from her own best bedspread and then swaddled in the dense-furred skins of bears, but the image persisted.

And then, sitting there before my tiny fire and staring into it, my mind took me among the flames, showing me things I had not known, and things I had forgotten lay therein: I saw once more the blue and white, lambent ferocity at the heart of the pyre that had consumed my father, searing my eyes and melting his flesh to ashes in the confines of his iron coffin; I saw the glowing, ill-shaped white-hot blade that would become Excalibur, as Publius Varrus pulled it from the red- and blue- and yellow-blazing charcoal of his forge; and I saw the blazing piles of fuel—bushes, trees and grass—that he had used years earlier to dry the muddy bed of a fresh-drained mountain lake, baking its viscous wetness into clay that he could break with pick and mattock until he reached mud again and then repeating the entire process until he found and could exhume his Skystone. And my heart began to pound as I discerned the meaning of such memories: Heat! Strong enough to melt flesh and bone; to smelt raw iron out of stone; to dry the liquid mud that lay beneath a lake. Heat, therefore, strong enough to melt the ice beneath it.

The following morning, I outlined my thoughts to Ambrose, who agreed that what I proposed might well be feasible. Our soldiers had already cleared broad pathways to the trees by then, felling and cutting to supply our fuel needs, then sledding the logs back to the base of the hill, where they were raised to the summit by an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys. This refuelling was a massive operation, involving the creation of common stockpiles on the plain beneath for the use of our other Colonists—we had learned that lesson quickly.

Now, with the adoption of the burial scheme, this drive took on a new intensity. A great, rectangular space was selected on the plain below, beside the military camp, and designated as the burial ground. It lay beside the older common grave of the Camulodian soldiers killed in repulsing Lot's first, treacherous attack long years before. Once designated, the space then had to be cleared of snow, a task that took two days and involved every soldier not assigned to other duty. An advance party had to dig its way forward from the camp's north gate to the closest point on the margin of the selected area, gauging their progress by signals from the engineers by the gates at the top of the fortress hill. As that party made the initial penetration, others advanced behind it, widening the access, shovelling the displaced snow into skid-mounted wagons, which shipped it back to where it could be piled out of the way in dirty mountains that could be left to melt in their own time.

Once arrived at the perimeter of the burial area, the advance party doubled in strength and then branched right and left, beginning the arduous process of clearing the borders of the rectangle, directed all the while by signals from the hilltop. Eventually, that task complete, they turned inward towards the centre, and as the working clearance grew, the number of workers increased in proportion, so that by the morning of the second day the work was running smoothly on all four sides and the project progressed with ever- increasing speed. The snow was uniformly almost shoulder high across the space selected, and dense-packed by the cold, incessant winds, so that it broke beneath the shovels like dry clay and, although heavy, was simple to handle.

As soon as the perimeter was wide enough to permit easy access, the skidded wagons served a double purpose, hauling snow outward to the dispersal points and bringing back fuel for the burning, spreading it thickly on the now-bare, hard soil of the northern end of the burial ground.

It had not escaped Ambrose that all this wood we gathered would be green and difficult to burn, and he proposed a solution that I thought again betrayed his brilliance. We had as many animal carcasses as human. Ambrose proposed stripping them of all fat and rendering that to liquid, which would then be poured upon the wood and itself used as fuel. The remaining meat, inedible because the animals had died and lain intact, was kept aside to be burned or buried later, after the main tasks were completed. The stench it would create were we to attempt, as one man had suggested, to burn it in the melting of the ground, would be unbearable to those on the hill above. In consequence, another large operation was simultaneously under way at the southern end of the site, where massive iron cauldrons, commandeered from the quartermasters, were suspended over fires to render down the fat of oxen and sheep, swine, goats and even horses. As each cauldron was filled, it was lowered with great care from the tripod that supported it and carried on a yoke between two men to where another team directed the disposal of the fat, taking care that none should be wasted and no part of the fuel should be untreated.

The fires at the north end of the area were lit the second night, long after nightfall, and by dawn, our men were out there, digging down through the warm ashes into the softened ground until the earth grew hard again beneath their picks.

The work was killing, but the task was completed as expected, and our dead were eventually interred with dignity and much solemnity, in the presence of the assembled populace of Camulod. It had taken ten long days to complete the task, and by the end of them everyone, and every animal in Camulod, stank from the omnipresent, cloying smoke. The bath houses on the hill and in the Villa Britannicus to the north of the burial ground operated throughout each night and day, and the furnaces and hypocausts never grew cool. And while all of this had been going on, a minor version of the same events occurred within the fort itself, where Luceiia Britannicus Varrus was laid to rest beside her husband and her brother, in new-turned earth that had been warmed to welcome her.

The cold abated finally, the temperature rising from the depths it had sustained for so long to the point at which it now seemed relatively warm, yet the cold was bitter still. The snow endured, too, although we had a period of three entire weeks without a fresh snowfall. And then the temperature soared, and the sound of running water was heard everywhere, and people wept for joy. For six sweet days it lasted, before the running water turned again to ice overnight and another storm swept in and held for four more days. This time there was to be no respite. And so it went on, with intermittent storms but always bitter cold, through January and into February.

By the time spring did arrive that year, early in March, people had begun to fear it might never appear at all. But come it did, and the snow and ice vanished gradually, and the grass grew beneath and new life appeared with shoots and buds and promise of green brightness. We were to discover, later, that a new phenomenon had touched our lands: large groves of trees, healthy the previous year, had died during that winter, killed, it would seem, by the appalling cold. Julia, the wife of Hector, our farmer Council member, had a pretty way of growing flowers outside her home, planting them each year in earthen pots, an oddity she had learned in her girlhood from an old nurse who had been raised in Greece. Hector and she had noticed that these flowers would die some years, if they were blighted early in their pots by a late frost, and he later attributed the same fate to the dead groves of trees, speculating that they might have suffered from the brief thaw that had come partway through the winter; that their roots might have stirred to life too soon and then been killed by the returning cold. It seemed reasonable to me at the time. I would never forget the ferocity of that searing cold.