Jack Whyte - The Skystone

"No, I am the wife of Publius Varrus. " I hugged her to me with one arm and looked above to the silent birds wheeling overhead.

The eagles were still there when I returned exactly one month later and sat in the same spot with a small group of serving officers, a special team assembled from Glevum, Venta Belgarum and the great gold mines of Dolocauthi in the mountains of Cambria. Each of these men was a professional in the manipulation of water, and Verecundius Secundus, the senior among them, was directly responsible for drainage and water flow at Dolocauthi itself, where two great open-channel aqueducts, one of them seven miles long, delivered three million gallons of water a day to wash the crushed, gold-bearing ore. Secundus had the responsibility of maintaining the great wooden water wheels that drained all of the overflow of this water from the open-cast workings and the underground galleries of the mine, some of which went down more than a hundred feet.

The group sat silent for a spell, each man gazing around him, noting the fall of the land below, the steepness of the gradients and the angle of the retaining wall of the dam-like structure on which we sat. "Well, Secundus?

How does it look to you?" "Cicero was right. " He did not look at me, his eyes still busy gauging and estimating. "An interesting exercise. Straightforward enough, but a degree of difficulty that'll keep our trainees on their toes. " He glanced at me, and then at Rufus Seculus, his colleague from Venta. "I like it. I think we should do it. Rufus?" Rufus Seculus grunted. "Aye. As you say, though, there are problems. It's not going to be an overnight job. This is going to take a lot of planning. Hit that hillside the wrong way and you could wash a lot of men away when that juice squirts out. Especially since we'll be using trainees and not experienced sappers. What's your opinion, Rasmus?"

Erasmus Lecio was the third member of the group, a grey-haired veteran of many wars. He had been listening to their exchange with his lips pursed and a frown of concentration on his face. Now he spat a glob of phlegm and spoke.

"I think if we tackle this without at least a major contingent of veterans we should all face a court martial. It's a good training project — I've got no objections on that ground — but it could be nastier than a sharp-toothed whore. I'd hate to have to rely on green sappers all the way in this one. You're right, Seculus. This dam is new, from the looks of it, and it wasn't built by Romans. No telling what kind of mess is underneath us, or how unstable it is. Every shovelful that comes out of the sap down there could be the critical one that's holding the whole whoreson lake in check. I wouldn't want to be the one responsible for it if some green trainee who doesn't know his rectum from his throat makes a mistake and empties the whole sewer at the wrong time. Let's do it, by all means, but let's be sure we know what we're doing, every step of the way. "

Seculus turned back to me. "What did you say you wanted this drained for?"

I grinned. "There's a stone buried in the mud at the bottom of it. I want it. "

"I thought that's what you said. A stone. In the mud. Did you throw it in yourself?"

"No. " I grinned. "It fell in. "

"I see. And now you want to get it out. Is it a big stone?"

"I think so. "

"You think so. "

I could see by his face he thought I had lost my wits, but he was not going to insult me openly to my face by saying so.

"Have you any notion of how much mud there is at the bottom of a lake, Master Varrus?"

I nodded, still smiling. "Quite a lot, I should imagine. "

"It doesn't dismay you?" I shook my head, and his eyes narrowed as he asked, "What are you really after?"

"I told you. A stone. A big stone in the mud at the bottom. Look, Seculus, I know you don't believe me, but it's the truth, and if I told you any more you would really think me sick in the head. I think the stone is really there, and it is valuable to me, and only to me. At least, I think it is valuable. It may not be. But I have to find it first, before I'll know. " Their expressions were wondrous to behold and I laughed aloud. "I swear I'm speaking truth. Come, let's go back down to the villa. By the time we get there it'll be almost dark. Over dinner tonight, I promise you, Caius Britannicus will tell you the whole story. In the meantime, even if you do not believe it, and even if the stone is not there, your trainee engineers will have gained the experience of draining a lake and no harm, will have been done, except to my dreams. "

They accepted this, and later they accepted Britannicus's story of my quest for the stones from heaven, and because they were who they were, they asked intelligent questions that I tried to answer as well as I could. Thereafter, they went about their tasks of planning and organization as if it were the most natural and the most urgent thing in the world that the millions of gallons of water and mud between me and my skystone should be removed with the utmost possible haste.

The three military men returned with an army of engineers and sappers before the end of the following month, and within days of their arrival a military camp was well established in the valley and the work was under way. It proceeded with all necessary caution for, as Erasmus Lecio had pointed out on that first inspection, there was no way of determining how thick the dam was on the lakeward side, or how far the waters had penetrated the rubble of the dam itself. It was dangerous work every foot of the way, but it was not until mid July that the first seepage occurred. From then on, it was merely a matter of time — a little more cautious digging, and then the wait for the water of the lake to find its own way out.

In the small hours of a summer morning, the sappers were awakened by a roar and a rumble, and for the next week the lake poured itself down the hillside, emptying like the broken bowl it resembled.

There can be few things or places less attractive than the newly exposed bottom of a suddenly drained lake — mud and stench and noxious vapour steaming under a hot sun. There was nothing to do but leave it and hope that the sun would dry it quickly.

August came and went, and the sun blazed into September. Strong autumn winds sprang up to help, and I watched, waiting and fretting in a fever of frustration and impatience. October remained dry and clear, and finally, driven to distraction by the waiting, I decided that the time had come.

I had made careful drawings before the lake was breached and had calculated to within ten paces where my treasure had to lie. All summer long, as soon as the mud had become firm enough to bear a man, I had men digging ditches, channelling residual water away from the centre, so that by late autumn the lake bed was a maze of drainage ditches, some of them wide and deep.

I had also kept a team of men and horses busy building mountains of fuel on the lakeside — bushes, dried grass and thistle, dead wood, even whole trees. Now I began to burn it in a monstrous pyre above the spot where I hoped and believed the skystone lay. We burned for two days and then left the ashes to cool, and when we scraped them away, the clay beneath them was baked. We tackled the baked clay then with mattock, pickaxe and spade until we found moisture again. Then we repeated the whole process. It was tiring, hard and dirty work, but the day came, towards the year's end, when a workman's pickaxe struck rock, and a shout of triumph told me we had found what we were looking for. The skystone was there. My guess had been correct. The size of it, however, left me breathless. Caius, I thought, would never believe this.

XXVIII

With the perspective of time, I am tempted to say that I chose the wrong day to bring my skystone home in triumph, but that would be neither true nor accurate.