The Skystone

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Publisher's note: The Skystone is based in part on actual events, but all the principal characters are fictional.

To my wife Beverley,

who always believed,

but now can't, quite.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The term "historical fiction" indicates that there is at least a framework of factual material involved in the story being told in a novel. It seems to follow, therefore, that everyone who reads historical fiction should have a right to know — or should be accorded the privilege of knowing — how much of what he or she is reading is historically correct and accurate.

The characters Caius Britannicus and Publius Varrus are fictitious, as are all their families, friends and relatives. They were all born of the author’s need to answer the question, "How could this, or that, have happened or come into being?"

The events against which their fictional story unfolds, however, were very real, and the major imperial characters — Valens, Valentinian, Theodosius and Stilicho — lived and behaved as described herein. The time in which they lived, the latter part of the fourth and the early part of the fifth Christian centuries, was a period when world-shaking events took place; things that still affect our lives today,. sixteen hundred years afterward, owe their beginnings to the ideas and events that were developing at that time.

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