I
 
 
A broken shutter banged somewhere. I could hear it clearly over the howling wind and the hissing roar of the driven rain. It was almost dark. I could barely make out the shapes of the two men flattened against the wall on either side of the door of the one-room stone but across the narrow street from me. To my left, two more men flanked the door of the hut I was leaning against, and there were twelve more men similarly placed at the other six buildings that lined the narrow street. My reserve of thirty-four men was split into two groups, one at either end of the village.
At forty-eight, I was far too old for this kind of nonsense.
I stood with my shoulders pressed against the wall, my sodden tunic clammy cold against my back. I raised my hand in a useless attempt to clear streaming rainwater from my eyes, and my waterlogged cape was a dead weight dragging at my arm. I crushed quietly.
A dim yellow glow appeared as somebody lit a lamp in the hut across the way, and then a quavering, moaning scream rose above the wind. I gave the signal—one blast on my horn—and my men went in, building through the doors, their swords and daggers drawn. House-cleaning can be brutal, dirty work.
I looked down at the dead man at my feet. The rain had washed most of the blood away, but he still looked dreadful. I guessed an axe had killed him. His open eyes were glazed in the fading light.
One of my men reappeared, silhouetted against the light in the doorway opposite me, wiping his sword on a rag. He leaned out into the street, and though I heard nothing, I saw him tense and open his mouth in a shout. Then he was running up the narrow street. I cursed my age and my bad leg and thrust myself away from the wall, forcing myself into a lumbering run, only now aware of the fight going on his the street about thirty paces from me. The weight of my cloak was awful. I fumbled at the clasp and felt the burden fall away, and then I was in the middle of the fight.
I remember little of the tussle itself, but with me, that is a far from unusual state of affairs. Images are all that remain in my memory: a bare neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, and then blood spouting as I jerk my sword point out of it—no memory of the stab; the feeling of a living body under my feet and then my braced arm, up to the wrist in mud because my crippled leg has let me down again and I’ve fallen; the crotch of a man whose sheepskin-wrapped legs are criss-crossed with cloth bindings, and my blade again, taking away his manhood; and a face, wide-mouthed and staring-eyed, and hands with no strength clutching at my sword, trying to pull it out of their owner’s breast. All this I recall in silence. There is no noise, no screaming—no sound of any kind.
When it was over, I was badly winded, puffing for breath like an old man. I leaned over, hands on my knees, and hung my head, sobbing to clear my chest.
“Commander Varrus? Are you all right?”
I knew the voice; it belonged to young Kyril, once of my lieutenants. I nodded my head as clearly as I could in that position and he left me, moving on to check the others. Gradually I became aware of my hands, gripping my knees. Neither held a weapon. I had no sword, and no memory of dropping it. I blinked my eyes clear of rainwater and saw, by the darkness of blood on my right wrist and hand, that I was wounded. I straightened up, feeling no pain, and touched my right hand with my left. My hand responded, but strangely. My whole arm felt numb. I moved my left hand up along my arm, and I felt the cut—just above the elbow, and bleeding fast. My stomach lurched and I puked—my normal reaction after a battle, and one that usually left me feeling better. But this time, as I straightened up from retching, it seemed to me I saw a light, somewhere ahead of me, spinning in the strangest fashion and coming towards me at a roaring speed. And that was all I saw.
They picked me up out of the mud in the roadway and carried me to one of the huts, and I was out of my mind for more than a week.
My wound, on its own, was not too serious, although there is no such thing as a dismissible battle wound. Some whoreson had swiped me with an axe that had no edge. The weight alone had dug what little edge the thing had into the flesh and had broken my upper arm in what the medics call a twig-fracture. At my age, it’s a wonder the whole bone didn’t shatter. At least, that’s what I thought then. Now I know that I was only mellowing into my prime in those days. But I bled a lot, they told me later: a sullen, angry bleeding that worried them because it would not stop. And on top of that, I’d caught pneumonia from the soaking. For a while my men thought they were going to lose me.
I still remember the corpse that lay at my feet that night. If the axe that hit me had been as sharp as the one that hit him, I would not be telling this story today. Of course, much of the story would not have happened.
* * *
My name is Gaius Publius Varrus, and I am an ironsmith and a weapons-maker. I was born and raised in Colchester, in East Britain close to Londinium, the imperial administrative centre of the Province of Britain, and it was to Colchester I returned to reopen my grandfather’s smithy after I was crippled in an ambush during the Invasion of 367 and invalided out of the legions.
During my years as a soldier, I had met Caius Britannicus, a wealthy nobleman, a patrician Roman of ancient lineage. He first came into my life as a young tribune who saved my skin, then later as a Commanding Officer whose life I saved, and he finally ended up as a Roman senator, a proconsul of Rome and my brother-in-law and dearest friend. My friendship with Britannicus, however, had made his enemies my enemies, particularly one family, the wealthy and powerful imperial bankers, the Senecas, who had feuded bloodily and bitterly with the Britannicus family for generations.
That adopted enmity brought me to violent, personal confrontation with Claudius, the youngest of the six Seneca brothers. We fought, and I scarred him for life. After that, I had to remove myself and my affairs permanently—and hurriedly—out of the way of Claudius Seneca’s wrath. I travelled west to the rich farmlands below the spa town of Aquae Sulis to live at Caius’s villa.
On my arrival there, my whole life changed. I met and married Luceiia Britannicus, and she showed me where to find something I had been dreaming about for most of my life: a stone made of extraordinary metal, which I called the skystone. I smelted the stone and, from the metal it contained, sculpted a crude statue of Coventina, the Celtic goddess of water, to commemorate the struggle I had had to salvage the stone from the bottom of a lake. I called it my Lady of the Lake. My main intent was to preserve the metal in dignity, rather than leave it to rust as a plain, raw ingot until I should find a purpose for it. Someday, I knew, I would make a sword from that same metal, but I wasn’t ready yet.
Someday, too, we would have need of that sword—and hundreds like it, if Caius’s ideas about the disintegration of the Empire ever came to pass. He believed the Empire was dying rapidly. He was convinced that someday soon—in the foreseeable future—the legions would be withdrawn from Britain to defend the Motherland against invasion. When that...