Jack Whyte - The Skystone

"I don't know. " I was examining the valley more closely now. "That whole valley is shut in. How did the cattle get there?" He looked mystified. "I don't know. They must have crossed the hills. " I kept my voice free of impatience. "Why would they do that? There's no shortage of grazing on the other side of the hills. Why would the villagers go to all the trouble of bringing their cattle all the way up and over the hills to let them graze in a shut-in valley?"

"For protection, perhaps?"

"From whom? Did you have trouble with raiders back then?"

"Not that I know of. "

"And you're sure he said nothing about the lake?"

"Nothing. I am convinced of that. "

"Has the lake always been here?"

"What kind of a question is that? Of course it has. "

"Then where did all the mud come from?"

"I don't know, boyo. "

"What else did he tell you? Think hard, Meric. It's important. Was there anything else he said to you about this place that might have slipped from your memory? Something that you might not have thought important at the time? Anything at all?"

His face became thoughtful as he turned back to the valley below us. I watched him closely, not taking my eyes off his face for a second. His gaze swept across the valley from right to left, and then I saw it — a momentary tic between his brows. I held my breath as it became obvious that he was searching his memories of his first visit to this place and recalling something, something vague that had lain disregarded and forgotten, for years.

"There was something. Something he said about that hillside. " Then it was as though a light suddenly shone in his eyes. "I remember now. He said the Sum God's face was there in the mud of the hillside. " "What?

What in Hades does that mean?" He grinned a quick grin and looked at me. "I wondered the same thing and asked him to explain. He said that the mud on the hillside over there had a circular gap in it, where there was no mud at all. He said it was as if one of those dragons had scooped out a perfect picture of the Sun God from the mud all around. A perfect circle of silver-grey rock, he said, in the middle of a sea of mud. " I was silent for a while. There was something tugging at a loose end in my mind. I felt that irritating anticipation you feel when something is just about to pop into prominence in your mind and then will not. I blinked my eyes hard and shook my head to clear my thoughts. "Where?" I demanded. "Where was it?" He pointed. "Over there, on the flank of the hill. " I stared hard in the direction he was pointing. Nothing. I could see nothing.

"How big was this circle?"

"I don't know. Athyr did not say, and I did not think to ask him. " I mumbled a curse, scouring the hillside with my eyes, willing the Sun God's portrait to be there. But there was nothing. And then my stomach churned as I remembered what had caused the tugging at the loose end in my mind: a hot, dusty summer day in Germany, twenty-odd years earlier. We had been marching all day and had stopped for a ten-minute rest. I hadn't even had the energy to unload my gear; I sat hunched on a milestone by the side of the road, staring blindly at the dust that covered the cobbled road surface.

There had been thunder growling around for most of the afternoon, but the rain had held off. As I sat there, a scattering of big, fat, heavy raindrops fell sullenly around me. It was literally just a scatter of drops, each one of which left its own singular mark in the dust: a perfect circle, a blob of water in the middle of a perfect circle of dust thrown up around it like a wall. If I had not been so tired I would never have seen it. As it happened, the first one that I did see just happened to land right in the centre of the very cobblestone I was staring at. I was mildly surprised by the perfection of the shape it had caused, and I looked at the next one closest to it for the sake of idle comparison. And they were all the same!

All the same size and all the same perfect shape, not only on the stones in the road, but in the dust by the roadside. I was sitting in a field of tiny, perfect circles. And then the centurion started yelling and I forgot all about it in the renewed agony of the long march.

I had remembered it again a couple of days later, however, when we arrived at the end of our march and were installed in camp. The dust was thick everywhere, and our centurion had detailed a couple of men, of whom I was one, to wet down the area surrounding the tribune's tent. I tried then to reproduce the effect of those raindrops, scattering drops high into the air and watching how they fell. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. It seemed to depend on the size of the drops of water. Big drops just splattered everywhere. It wasn't important to me, just a matter of curiosity, and when the other fellows around noticed what I was doing and started to mock me, I felt foolish and quit.

For months after, however, I became very conscious of the effects of falling rain. I saw how it landed on water, creating circular ripples. Eventually I lost interest in the phenomenon and forgot all about it, until one day about five years later when we got caught on the extreme edge of a freak summer hailstorm, and I saw the same circle effect in the dust of the field we were crossing.

I hadn't thought about it in years, and yet it had been there at the bottom of my consciousness, waiting to be remembered. Now I had recalled it, and it excited me. I remembered that my father had found the skystone at the bottom of a hole — a hole punched by the fury of its descent from the sky. And old Athyr had seen a circle in the mud on the hillside, a circle big enough to attract his attention.

My reverie was interrupted by Luceiia, who had been silent for a long time. "Shouldn't we go down and take a look at the boulders, Publius?" I smiled at her delicacy in not pointing out that she was freezing to death sitting up there on an exposed hilltop.

"We can go down and look, of course, but I doubt if we'll find or see any skystones today. "

Her face fell. "How do you know that?"

"I don't. I don't know it at all. But I just have a feeling that those boulders are not skystones. Anyway, let's go and see. I could be wrong. " We started to move down the hill, and I could see from the expression on her face that she was having doubts about something.

"You look concerned, Luceiia. What's the matter?" She jerked her head in a negative. "Nothing, really. I was just wondering how you would know whether a stone, any stone, is a skystone or not?"

I grinned at the seriousness of her expression. "I seem to be saying this a lot today, but I don't know that either. I have no idea how I'll know, or even if I will know. Unless we find one that is pure metal. I won't know until I try to pick one up, I suppose. "

"Publius Varrus! Are you telling us you really don't know what a skystone looks like?"

I shook my head. "Haven't got an earthly idea. I've only heard about them. I've never seen one. "

"You said you won't know until you try to pick one up. Were you joking?

Those boulders in the valley are huge. Nobody could pick one of those up. "

"I'll grant you that, Luceiia, but a man with half a brain in his head should be able to break a piece off one of them, eh? Don't you think so?" She flushed, thinking I was teasing her.

"No, I'm serious, Luceiia. I'll have to break each stone to see what's inside it. Metallic ore is easy to see inside a newly broken stone. The outside's usually weathered and discoloured and the veins of ore are often hard to see at a glance. You'll see, I'll show you when we get down there. " I turned to Meric, who was making his way down directly behind me. "Seen any dragons yet, Meric?" He only grunted, not even lifting his eyes from the ground where the horse was placing its dainty feet. I relaxed and left my own horse to find its way down, remembering the day of the Invasion, many years before, when Britannicus and I had both trusted our lives to the sure-footedness of our horses.