Jack Whyte - The Skystone

"I had no thought of sleeping beside you tonight. It happened by accident because I was so tired. God knows I never hoped to possess your body. But now I have, and it is the most wondrous thing that I have ever known. I feel like a virgin boy again. No other woman has ever known what I have given you of myself this night. You have had my soul, and you possess it still, and that possession will never cease to be. I am yours, body and soul, from this time forward, no matter what may befall us.

"Now, if this is love — and I think it might be — then I have discovered it at last. I can look at you here, in this darkness, and see every feature of your face and every nuance of your smile, and I can say I love you and know that it is true. And if, as you have said, you would be glad to be my wife, to share my life and bear my children and make a home for me to call my own and yours, then no man could be happier and still be alive. For it seems to me that such happiness is only found in the Heaven that the priests speak of. "

I stopped and drew a deep breath, weighing my next words carefully before committing them to speech.

"There is but one thing I fear. Your brother, Caius. He has meant more to me than any other man since the death of my grandfather. I would never have dared to hope that he would bless a marriage between me and his sister. Tonight you tell me that he hoped for it, and I believe you in spite of myself, and I am glad. But, my love, I tell you truly after tonight I will forfeit his friendship willingly— not happily, but willingly — should he refuse to allow us to wed. I will forsake my friend to keep you. I love you. I can say no more than that. "

I was feeling more than a little surprised and pleased by my own eloquence, and the warmth of her treatment of me during the next few long and glorious minutes convinced me that I had managed to say exactly the right things.

Sometime later, I opened my eyes to see the brightness of dawn at the window. Luceiia was already astir, and I was alone in the small room we had shared. I leaped from the bed and pulled on my clothes, my thoughts racing as I tried to separate dreams from reality. I was lacing up my sandals when she came back into the room. I immediately stopped what I was doing and stood up, my eyes straining to read the expression on her face in the dim half-light.

She came straight to where I stood and placed herself in front of me, her hands on her hips. She was tall enough to look me straight in the eye, and I was relieved to see that she had a smile on her face.

"Well, Publius Varrus, now that the day is here, do I still have the right to think of you as husband?"

I reached and pulled her to me. "Aye, my love, my beloved, " I said. "As long as I have the breath and the life to call you wife. " Our kiss was brief, however. She disengaged herself and smoothed her gown over her hips.

"So be it. You will not regret this, my love. But there are things to arrange. We must return to the villa, and I shall begin to prepare for our wedding. You, in the meantime, will serve us both best if you spend your time digging for your skystone. That way, neither of us will distract the other from what has to be done. I will write to Caius today and send the missive by military courier tomorrow. " She stopped abruptly, as though in mid thought, and then came back to me, taking my hands in hers and raising her mouth to mine.

"I almost forget to tell you, " she whispered. "Last night was heaven on earth, and I love you. And there are no fleas in my bed at home, you'll see.

"

BOOK FOUR - The Dragon's Nest

XXI

In the month that followed, Luceiia busied herself with preparations for our nuptials. For my part, I kept my word and stayed out of her way by digging for skystones. Greatly to my disappointment, I unearthed seven stones — I presumed them to be skystones — the largest of which was little bigger than the skull of a new-born babe. My knowledge of smelting, scant though it was, nevertheless made me certain that, even were I to succeed in smelting these, I would get little metal for my trouble. The truly disheartening aspect of all of this was that I had been at pains to excavate the largest "nests" first. If these finds were the biggest skystones in the valley, then all my dreams and effort had been for nought. And yet, I thought, there was something I was missing. My grandfather's skystone had made enough noise in falling to awaken only one man. I had never seen the stone itself, but I knew that it had been big enough to yield several pounds, at least, of raw metal. None of the stones I had unearthed would run to as much as one pound of metal. The mystifying thing was that their descent had been witnessed — both seen and heard — by hundreds of people, over a range of many miles. Something, therefore, was missing from my calculations. There had to be more and bigger skystones buried here somewhere; I must be looking in the wrong place, perhaps even in the wrong valley.

Discouraged and frustrated, I decided to leave my digging for a while and make a try at smelting the stones I had found. I would have to build a smelting furnace — a kiln — somewhere on the grounds of the villa, so I broke camp and headed for what I now thought of as my home. Luceiia would be expecting me today, anyway. I had been away for five days and was beginning to run low on provisions. In spite of my pleasurable anticipation of seeing her, however, my frame of mind was not a happy one as I set out on my return journey.

It was now the middle of January, and although the winter had been reasonably mild, there was now a real threat of snow in the wind. I reined my horse in at the very crest of the hill and turned around for one last look back into my valley of dragons. It was barren and hostile, cold and inhospitable. The signs of my puny excavations were invisible from this height, and the surface of the lake at the far end of the valley looked like a bed of rough slate beneath the angry sky. I pulled my cloak tighter about me and determined not to return for at least three months. By that time, I hoped, spring might have made the place look more welcoming. By the time I reached the villa I was in a foul frame of mind. The threatened snow was falling as sleet and it had caught me on the road, eight miles from home. I was chilled and I was hungry, but I had enough sense to go directly to the bath house before seeking out Luceiia. Hot water and hotter steam would improve my disposition.

I had not finished bathing when I was interrupted by Luceiia's personal retainer, a Greek called Diomede, carrying fresh clothing for me. He welcomed me home and informed me that the Lady Luceiia was entertaining guests, and that dinner would be served in half an hour. In the meantime, would I please go, as soon as I was ready, to the anteroom, where the guests were having a cup of wine? I thanked him and, cutting short my wallowing in the pool, dressed quickly in what I saw to be some of the best of the fine clothes that Luceiia's tailors had been making for me over the past month. In a short time, scrubbed and cool and quite resplendent in my new and stylish clothes, I hurried through the colonnades from the bath house to the main building, curious about who these guests might be. There were three of them, all young, all handsome and all soldiers. They were dressed in what had become fashionable as "undress uniform, " decorative tunics cunningly fashioned to resemble armour. I felt an irrational wave of jealous resentment that they should be here, with Luceiia, when I might be still away in the hills but for a bout of frustration. I swallowed the feeling, however, recognizing it as petty, and schooled my features into a smile as I went first to greet and kiss Luceiia, favouring them only with a pleasant, impersonal nod in passing. Luceiia was radiant in the light of what seemed to be a thousand of the household's finest beeswax tapers. I had never seen her so lovely, and I told her so, but her eyes were sparkling with a joy that I could see was not due solely to my presence. She squeezed my arm strongly with an inexplicable excitement as she introduced me to her guests, all of whom were from the garrison to the south at Portus Adurni, now called Portchester. I greeted each of them personally, welcoming them to the Villa Britannicus, and then accepted a cup of wine from Diomede before turning back to face them, Luceiia still close by my side.