The Skystone

Book 1: Camulod Chronicles

by Jack Whyte

Genres: Arthurian; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

This first novel in Jack Whyte's riveting Arthurian series tells how the story of Camelot may have actually come to be.

We all know the story—how Arthur pulled the sword from the stone and how Camelot came to be.

But how did it really happen?

The Roman citizens of Britain faced a deadly choice: leave to live in a corrupt Roman world, or stay amidst the violence of the warring factions of Picts, Celts, and invading Saxons.

For Publius Varrus and Caius Britannicus, there is only one answer. They will stay, try to preserve the best of Roman life, and create a new culture from the wreckage.

In doing so, they will plant the seeds of a legend. For these two men are Arthur's great-grandfathers and their actions will shape a nation...and forge the sword known as Excalibur.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: August 1, 2004

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 360

Sample

THE SKYSTONE

BOOK ONE
INVASION




I
TODAY IS MY SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, a hot day in the summer of 410 in the year of our Lord, according to the new Christian system of dating the passage of time. I am old, I know, in years. My bones are old, after sixty-seven summers. But my mind has not aged with my body.
My name is Gaius Publius Varrus, and I am probably the last man alive in Britain who can claim to have marched beneath the Eagles of the Roman army of occupation in this country. The others who marched with me are not merely dead; they are long dead. Yet I can still recall my days with the legions clearly.
I have known men who refused to admit ever having marched with the armies. Whatever their reasons, I regard their refusal as their loss. I remember my legion days frequently, with affection and gratitude, because most of my lifetime friends came to me from the legions and so, indirectly, did my wife, the mother of my children and sharer of my dreams.
There are times, too, when I think of my army days with an echo of incredulous laughter in my heart. I remember the foul-ups and the chaos and all the petty, human frailties and fallibilities that surface in army life, and my options are clear: laugh at them, or weep.
I remember, for instance, how I spent the afternoon of another summer day, more than forty years ago, back in '69. That day was my last as a Roman soldier, and I spent it leading my men, and my commanding general, up a mountain and into an ambush.
Traps are never pleasant spots to be in, God knows, but the one we sprung that day was the worst I ever encountered in all my years of soldiering. The heathens who caught us seemed to materialize out of the living rock. Savage, terrifying creatures, half-man, half-mountain goat, they took us completely by surprise in a high, rocky defile in the very center of the rugged spine of mountains that runs the length of Britain.
We had been climbing for two days, picking our way carefully and, we thought, in secrecy through valleys and passes away from the major crossing routes. We wanted to arrive unannounced on the western side. The few officers with horses, myself included, had been on foot most of that time, leading the animals. We had just entered this defile and mounted up, thankful for the reasonably level floor it offered, when we were crushed by a torrent of massive rocks from above.
The three men I had been talking to were smashed to a bloody pulp before my eyes by a boulder that fell on top of them out of nowhere. They never even saw it. I doubt if any of the men killed in that first apocalyptic minute saw death approach them I know I was stunned by the suddenness of it. Itdid not even occur to me at first that we were being attacked, for we had sighted no hostiles in more than a week and expected to find none there, so high in the mountains.
Those first plummeting boulders caused carnage among our men, who had just bunched together on the narrow, rocky floor, exhausted after a long, hard climb. The mountains, which had until then heard only panting, grunting breath and muttered curses, were suddenly echoing with the roar of falling rock and the panicked, agonized screams of maimed and dying men. And then the enemy appeared, dropping, as I have said, like mountain goats from the defile walls above us.
Britannicus, my general, had fallen back from the head of the column only moments earlier to chivvy the men behind us, and as I swung my mount around, I saw his helmet's crimson plume about thirty paces distant, swaying as he fought to control his rearing horse. The cliffs directly above him were swarming with leaping men, clad in animal skins, and I began flogging my horse, willing the frightened beast to fly me over the men packed around me to a spot where I could organize some effective resistance.
It was hopeless. There was no room to do anything. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, the entire length of the defile was a mass of snarling, angry men locked in hand-to-hand fighting. This was a fight that, whichever way it went, would be won by brawn and guts, not by tactics.
I was using my horse as a battering ram, forcing my way through the struggling mass of bodies, stabbing right and left with a spear I had snatched from a falling man, but it was like one of those dreadful dreams when nothing works properly and everything slows down except the forces threatening you.
The narrow floor of the cleft we were in was bisected for a third of its length by a ridge of rock that was sharp as a blade on top, and I reached one end of this ridge just as my horse sagged under me, fatally wounded but unable to fall immediately because of the press of bodies. I managed somehow to throw myself from its back before it did go down and found myself standing on the ridge above the struggle, unchallenged by anyone. I looked to my right and saw Britannicus, his teeth bared in a rictus of pain, less than a spear's length from me, an arrow in his thigh above the knee. It was a red-flighted arrow, very pretty, and it had pierced him cleanly, pinning him to his screaming horse, which, like mine, did not have room to fall. As I watched, a hand came up out of the press below and grasped the protruding shaft, pulling it downward. He screamed, and his horse lurched and went down on that side, crushing his pinned leg beneath it.
I have no recollection of crossing the space between us. The next thing I remember is standing on the hindquarters of his horse, directly above Britannicus, looking for a clear space to jump down into. The masses parted and I leaped, only to take a spear thrust in the chest in mid-flight so that I fell backwards on top of him. My breastplate had deflected the spear's point, but I saw its owner set to try for me again. I tried clumsily to roll to my right as he stabbed and this time felt the point of the spear lodge between the plates of my armor, beneath my shoulder. I rolled back again frantically, throwing my weight against the shaft, and managed to wrench it from the man's graspas one of my own men plunged a sword beneath his arm. He went to his knees and died there, his eyes wide and amazed. As he began to topple towards me, I was already on my feet again, ignoring the spear, which had fallen beside me, and drawing my dagger. My sword was gone. A hand grasped my left shoulder, tugging me violently around before I could find my balance. I swung blindly, finding a naked neck with my blade and falling again, hearing a voice inside my head cursing me clearly for not being able to stand up.
There was blood everywhere. I caught a glimpse of Britannicus beside me, staring, face pale as death, and then someone else fell on me, gurgling his own death into my ear. I lost all reason, panicking with the need to stand on my own feet. I reached and grasped and hauled myself up, throwing someone aside--whether friend or foe I'll never know--and managed to stand erect only to realize that I was weaponless and being pulled down yet again. I went to one knee and this time could not rise. A voice yelled "Varrus!" and a hand appeared from my left side, fingers extended to me. I clasped it and pulled myself up again, and as I did so, I clearly saw a bronze axe-head with a long, polished spike sever the helping hand cleanly from its wrist. I saw the axe-wielder turn towards me, his weapon swinging to its height, and I knew the sharpness of that blade.
The details of that instant stand out clearly. The man was big, red-bearded, grinning in rage, showing black stumps of teeth. He wore a wolf skin across his naked chest and another around his loins, held by a leather belt into which was stuck a long dagger. He saw a dead man staring at him from my eyes. A voice in my mind agreed with him, and I was preparing for my death when that same handless arm, spurting its life, pointed itself at him, jetting its bright-red blood into his eyes and blinding him for the time it took me to throw myself forward, jerk the dagger from his belt as he reeled back from my weight and sink it to the hilt beneath his unarmored ribs.
As he fell dying, however, he somehow found the strength to whirl his axe backward and down and around, and I felt the raking tear of its spike from knee to groin as it slammed jarringly up into the join of me. I dropped my head, cringing from the violence of it, to see the thick shaft, like a gross, wooden, impossible phallus, sticking from beneath my tunic. Pain exploded in me, wracking me with unimaginable fury as I fell into a whirlpool of screaming blackness, still clutching the severed hand of my saviour.
We won--how, I will never know. But that was the end of my career as a follower of the Eagles. By rights, it should have been the end of me completely. The spike had missed my testicles and had driven upwards into my left buttock, but it had damaged the hamstring behind my knee in passing and laid open my whole thigh to the bone. The medics wanted to take the leg right off, there and then, at the end of the fight, before taking me down out of the mountains, for they thought that I would never survive the journey. Thank God I recovered consciousness quickly! I squealed like an angry hawk, knowing the survival rate among amputees to be almost nil. But it would have done me no good had it not been for Caius Britannicus. He insisted that I be cauterized and sewn up to take my chances. I had saved his life more times than he could count, he swore, and if I were to die, then by all the gods in heaven, I had earned theright to die two-legged. I was his primus pilus, he declared, and a primus pilus was entitled to two legs, alive or dead.
He was absolutely correct, of course. I don't know how either of us survived the journey back down to the plains, but when we got there, Britannicus quartered me in his own tent and I was tended by Mitros, his personal physician. We lay there on our cots, side by side, and waited to heal, and as we waited, each of us had ample time to explore his own thoughts--for me, I must admit, a novel experience at that time. I believe it may have been during those days that the idea of telling this story first entered my mind, but I cannot make that claim with absolute conviction.
Where does a man find the arrogance to contemplate the telling of a tale like the one I have to tell? "Inside himself" may be the most convenient answer, but in this particular instance it is both inadequate and inaccurate. My present determination to tell this story--and it is one that has often seemed stubborn and foolish even to me, in spite of the fact that I have been writing it for many years--springs from the fact that, in Caius Britannicus, I had a lifelong friend and mentor whose prophetic vision and moral integrity still awe me. Thanks to his strength of character, his powers of perception and evaluation and his insistence upon needing me, I was permitted to survive the ending of an entire world, and then to begin a new life at an age when other men were lying down to die.
Now that I am truly old, the fear of leaving that tale untold, and thereby consigning my friend to eternal anonymity, unsung and unrecognized, strengthens me to write. Having found that strength, have struggled to find a beginning for my tale, the way a boy will search perversely for the center of an onion, blinding himself with tears as he pursues his folly. There is, I now know, no real beginning. There is only memory, which flows where the terrain takes it.
Caius Cornelius Britannicus was not a good invalid. He resented being confined to bed, but until the hole in his thigh mended there was not a thing he could do about it. Regrettably, as a direct result of that, those first few days were the worst I ever spent in his company. I was grateful to him, but he was hard to take on an empty stomach, and since I spent most of those first days puking up the medicines Mitros was feeding me, my stomach was certainly empty a good deal. I would have been happier sharing those quarters with an angry leopard. He did eventually begin to settle down, however, and to accept his enforced inactivity with more characteristic philosophy. From that point on, we talked--rather, he talked and I listened, throwing my occasional copper contribution onto his pile of silver and golden ones.
Caius Cornelius Britannicus was a true Cornelian, a direct descendant of the pure, patrician stock of the founding families of the Roman State. During those early days of confinement, practically strapped to his bed and unable to influence anyone to change anything, Britannicus talked, sometimes for hours and hours, about his life in Britain as a citizen, rather than as a soldier. I remember I found that surprising at first, primarily because I had known him until then only as the military Legate Britannicus, the taciturn, professional commander who normally kept his company and his opinions to himself. As time passed, however, I discovered that I barely knew him at all. Whateverintimacies he and I had shared as companions in arms had exposed only a few small facets of the man's character and personality to me. Now, as he talked and I listened, more and more of the man inside him began to emerge. A paternal ancestor--his great-great-great-grandfather, in fact--had won his cognomen, Britannicus, through his efforts on behalf of the Province in the time of Antoninus, more than a hundred and fifty years earlier, and his whole family had come to think of Britain as home over the intervening generations, although their primary allegiance remained always to Rome. For my part, I had been born in Britain and had grown to manhood without ever being really aware of my native land. I never thought of it as being an important place; it was simply Britain, the place where I lived. It took a few years in Africa, followed by years of enthusiasm on the part of Britannicus, to show me what Britain really meant to me.
He talked at great length and with real affection about his family and about their home, a villa close to Aquae Sulis, the famous hot water spa in the south-west. I heard the pride in his voice when he spoke of his wife, Heraclita, whom he evidently worshipped and whose imperial Claudian blood was as ancient and noble as his own. He spoke proudly, too, of his first-born son, Picus, who, like Caius and all his forebears, would join the ranks of the legions when he reached sixteen. The boy was eight now, almost nine, he told me, so there was no rush to find a place for him in the imperial ranks. For the next five years, at least, young Picus would remain at home with his younger siblings: a sister, Meleiia, who was seven years old and the favorite of her doting father, and four-year-old twin brothers, Marcus and Paulus. He talked of a sister called Luceiia and a brother-in-law called Varo, who owned an estate beside the Britannicus lands in the west and who acted as caretaker cum estate manager to the family in Caius's absence. Someday, the Legate swore, when his duties were over and the Empire no longer required his services, he would return and assume stewardship of his own lands.
On one particular morning, I awoke to the sounds of grunting and movement, to find Britannicus being hoisted into a sitting position by two soldiers whom Mitros had drafted for the duty. They made him reasonably comfortable, eventually, in spite of his cursing, which died away when the physician pointed out that this was part of the curing process. When they had all gone and left us alone again, I asked him if he was in much pain. He looked at me without responding for a few moments, then eased his leg slightly sideways with both hands and shook his head.
"No," he said, "doesn't hurt nearly as much as it used to. How about you?"
I smiled at him. "I feel no pain at all, as long as I don't try to move. Course, when I fall asleep, my body seems to want to move on its own Then there's pain. I tend to wake up suddenly, very often."
He was watching me closely, frowning slightly. "Well," he growled, "at least you're beginning to look a little better. Those purple bags have gone from beneath your eyes and your face has started to fill out again." He cleared his throat, his frown deepening, then added, "Mitros tells me you should soon be functional again."
It was my turn to frown. "Functional? What, you mean I'll be able to walk again?"
"No, of course not. We know you'll be able to do that. You might have a limp, but you'll walk perfectly well. No, I meant ... functional--physically, sexually." He seemed embarrassed.
"Oh, that," I said, as a vision flared in my mind of the discomfort an erection would cause. "God, I prefer not even to think of that at this point."
He was looking at me strangely, and I felt myself flush under his gaze.
"What is it, General? What's the matter?"
He shook his head dismissively. "Nothing, nothing at all." He paused, and then continued. "You're an abstemious kind of character, aren't you?"
"General?"
"Abstemious, fastidious. You're not much of a man for the womanizing life, are you?"
"I suppose not," I said, surprised and caught off guard by this unexpected departure from our normal style of talking. I added as an afterthought, "No less normal than any other normal man, though, if no more so."
"No, I don't think so." He shook his head again, an unusual, almost musing expression on his face. "I've watched you, you know, over the past few years, and I've been pleased by your temperance. It's one of the primary elements that make up exceptional soldiers."
He saw by the expression on my face that I was uncomfortable with his line of reasoning, and added reassuringly, "Oh, you are normal enough, God knows. It's simply that there is nothing excessive about you, in the vicious sense. You do everything in moderation, it seems to me, nothing to excess. You don't drink too much, you don't whore too much, you don't fight or even argue without reason. You are a fine example to your men."
"Gods, General," I said, "you make me sound too sweet to be wholesome."
"Ha! Far from it, but I apologize nevertheless." He was quiet for several moments, and I had closed my eyes again, wondering when the orderly would arrive with hot water for my morning ablutions, when he spoke again. "Varrus, have you ever been in love?"
My whole body stiffened in the bed as I wondered what had come over him to provoke such uncustomary intimacy. Britannicus never indulged in this kind of idle curiosity about anyone or anything. "Never, sir," I replied, hearing the awkwardness in my own voice.
"Never, Varrus? You have never been in love? Not once in your entire life?"
I thought about that, keeping my eyes closed, and as several errant memories chased each other through my mind, I felt a smile pulling at my mouth in spite of my earlier discomfort.
"Well, sir," I said eventually, "I have known a few young women, girls would really be more accurate, who set my heart a-pattering and my senses reeling from time to time in various places."
"Aha!" His voice sounded pleased. "And is there anyone in particular who still has this power over you?"
My smile was easier now as I grew more at ease with our topic. "No," Ianswered. "Not today, not really. No one holds that power over me, and I could be sad about that, if I thought for long about it."
"Ah, Varrus my friend, then you are unfortunate. There is nothing greater than the love of a good woman. It can sustain a man throughout any troubles, for any length of time."
The silence grew and stretched until I broke it. "Aye ... I've heard that said before, by several people."
"It's true." Britannicus's voice grew warmer and more enthusiastic as he honored me with his confidence.
"Do you know, I can still remember the day I first met Heraclita? I was about thirteen ..." He broke off, then amended what he had said. "Well, I actually only saw her that first time, I didn't meet her. We didn't really meet for about another two years, but I had never forgotten her since that first time. You'll meet her some day, Varrus, and you'll see what I mean. She was--she still is--the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. I knew, even at that age, that my life would be built around her. We lived in different cities, so it was fortunate that our families were close friends. After that first meeting, however, our parents decided we would wed when we had grown, and we both approved. We became friends, I marched off to the legions, and years later we became lovers. But I had been in love with her since that first day I saw her, playing with a pet rabbit among the frosted sedge at the edge of a frozen pond, with her breath steaming in the cold air and her pink cheeks making her blue eyes seem even brighter than they were. And now we have been married for what?" He did a mental addition against the back of his closed eyelids and answered his own question. "Fifteen years. We were wed on my twenty-third birthday. She was twenty." His voice died away for a spell, his thoughts led inward by his words.
"My only regret about being what I am," he resumed eventually, "is that I have so little time to spend with my wife. I do my soldiering alone, and she stays at home and keeps my private world in order for me. She could come with me, but camp life is no kind of existence for a soldier's wife, and the family of a senior officer can have much grief, particularly if the husband and father is strict with his command. But love, Varrus, the love of a good woman is of matchless value." He turned his face towards me and shook his head in mild perplexity. "I really find it difficult to believe what you say, that you have never been in love."
"Believe it, General," I told him, smiling as I said the words. "I'm sure if I had been, I would remember."
The images in my mind right then were distracting and, for some reason I never really resolved, were causing me to feel some kind of guilt--perhaps because I felt I was, somehow, deceiving him. I was thinking of saying so, after which the conversation might have gone anywhere, but the medical orderly came in at that moment with the hot water for our morning ablutions, and the entire process of changing dressings resulted in a change of mood, which led in turn to our losing the desire to pursue what we had been discussing. Nevertheless, throughout the entire washing, cleansing, draining and changing of my dressings, I entertained and distracted myself by recalling the girl whosepresence had been brought back into my mind by the way Britannicus spoke, the girl who had bewitched me the summer before I joined the legions, when I was only fifteen. She was my spectral love, my special inspiration. I carried the memory of her with me, the physical, magical excitement of her, wherever I went in the service of the Empire, and the remembered sight of her face, the supple slimness of her waist, the deep, flashing blueness of her eyes and the redness of her warm, sweet mouth, had nursed me to sleep many a cold night on campaign.
It was a wondrous time, that last summer of my boyhood, a time that would remain with me forever. I know now, or I strongly suspect, that my grandfather took special pains on my behalf that year, knowing I would soon be gone into manhood and soldiery. He had a friend, a wealthy customer and patron, who lived in a superb villa close to Verulamium, and this friend invited my grandfather and me to spend the summer with him. We accepted, and I went to paradise for eight long, golden weeks. The villa itself was magnificent, but it was nothing compared to the lands! The summer fields were heavy, lush with ripening greenness, and the air was filled with the scent of the grasses, mixed with the dryness of sun-hot dust, the smells of dung and flowers. My ears were teased by the buzzing of flies and insects, the song of birds and the rustling of long grasses as they brushed against my legs. I made new friends there, a Roman boy my own age called Mario whose father was an overseer on the farm, and a younger boy called Noris, the son of the Celtic thatcher who roofed all the houses and buildings for miles around. Among the three of us, we hadn't a care in the world.
And then one day, less than a week before my grandfather and I were to return to Colchester, we heard about a festival to be held at the next villa to the east. The son of the villa's owner had recently been married to a girl who lived far to the south-west. The wedding had been in the bride's home, and now the son was bringing his new wife home. Everyone was invited to the celebration. There would be musicians, players, a dancing bear, games, and food and drink for everyone.
The dancing bear was the biggest I had ever seen, but when I managed to approach close to it I was very disappointed. The poor thing was half-starved and sickly, its skin broken and ulcerous from rubbing constantly against the bars of its tiny cage, and its coat dirty, matted and awful-smelling. I felt outrage for the helpless, obviously brutalized creature, and fury at the hulking, half-witted giant who was apparently its owner. I immediately went looking for my two friends, determined to enlist their help in freeing the animal that night after everyone had gone to sleep. I had seen them just a short time before, heading towards the stall where the pie-maker was finding it hard to keep up with the demand for his goods, and I set off towards them, cutting directly across the middle of the tree-dotted meadow where the festivities had been set up. And there, in the middle of the field on that hot, dusty afternoon, I came face to face with my future dreams.
I had just swung smartly around the bole of a good-sized tree, taking the shortest route to the pie stall, when my eye was attracted by a bright blueness that I saw to be a dress, worn by a tall girl of about my own age. She had long,straight black hair, an achingly beautiful smoothness of sun-browned face and skin, high cheekbones, a bright-red mouth and wide blue eyes that seemed to leap from her countenance. I saw her, all of her, in one flashing glance and stopped dead in my tracks, as completely stunned as though I had been hit with a heavy club. She was breathtaking. I had never seen anything so beautiful, anywhere. She was with three other girls, all shorter than herself, and they were all laughing at something one of them had said. I knew the others were there--I could see them moving and hear their laughter--but I was aware of them only as shapes. The girl in blue held my eyes and my attention completely.
All four girls became aware of my attention at exactly the same moment, it seemed. They broke off their conversation abruptly and four pairs of eyes devoured every detail of my awkward, mid-step fascination, from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. Then, in that singular way that is unique to adolescent girls, they instinctively swung inward, towards a common center, giggling and chattering, convinced that somehow, by turning their backs on me and huddling together, they had disappeared.
The tall girl, however, distanced herself from her friends by simply raising her head and gazing directly at me. There was no smile on her face, no discernible expression in her eyes. She simply looked at me, and I at her, and somehow, across the ten paces that lay between us, I felt the warmth of her active, excited interest. My heartbeat sped up and my breath swelled and grew tight in my chest. I knew that I had somehow magically filled her universe as she had overwhelmed my own. Her eyes seemed to grow bigger and bigger as I gazed at her; they devoured me, filling my consciousness to the point where everything else faded away, and all I wanted to do was reach out and stroke the smoothness of her cheek. And then her friends were shouting and moving, pulling at her, urging her away. I had ceased to interest them, and, miraculously, they had been unaware of what had happened between me and their beautiful friend. She went with them--unwillingly, it was clear to me--turning her head as she walked to keep me in her sight. Bereft of all memory of what I had been doing before, my own friends and the bear completely forgotten, I moved to follow her. She smiled and turned back to her companions, confident that I would not go far away.
I followed her until the moment came--and I have no idea how it came or what led up to it--when we stood together, all others gone, the two of us alone, stranded in wonderful isolation among a throng of people who had no impact on us or our lives. I looked at her, speechless, and she at me. She smiled a perfect, pearl-toothed smile that made my chest constrict. I know we spoke, though I can recall no words, and then we walked together away from the festivities, away from the crowd, away from the eyes of all people.
She was tall. She was lovely. She was mine. Neither of us doubted that, and there was no need to talk of it. There was no strain between us, no shyness, no false awkwardness. We touched each other gently, faces, ears and hair, with the awestruck, quivering fingers of reverent discovery. I touched a questing knuckle softly to the swelling, smiling fullness of her lips, and they parted, kissing my finger chastely. I felt the pliant slimness of her waist beneath my hand and almost caught my breath in panic as her face came close, close upto mine, and our mouths kissed. She was in my arms, filling my arms, enclosing me in her own, and I was overwhelmed by the closeness and the fullness and the softness and the clean, sweet-smelling scent of her, and we devoured each other with kisses, avidly, wildly, in the innocent need and fury and wonder of first love.
She told me her name was Cassie, short for Cassiopeiia, the constellation that rose in the evening sky shortly before we realized how late it had grown. She knew my name was Publius. I never learned her f