The Eagle of the Ninth Read online

  ‘Oh.’ Placidus was slightly put out. ‘A wound, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I do not think that I have ever met you in the Tribune’s Club, at home?’

  ‘It would be strange if you had. I was a mere cohort centurion.’ Marcus smiled, but all the contempt that the professional soldier could feel for the aristocrat playing at soldiers for a year was politely but thinly veiled behind his quiet words.

  Placidus flushed a little. ‘Really? Do you know, I should scarce have guessed it.’ He returned the thrust, with the silken suggestion in his tone that really Marcus seemed almost civilized. ‘Do I salute a brother of the Victrix? Or was it Capricorn or the charging boar with you?’

  Before Marcus could answer, a low chuckle came from the Legate, whose back was towards them. ‘For one who considers himself—I believe not without the right—a somewhat skilled hunter, you can be singularly unobservant of small things, my Placidus.’ He said over his shoulder, ‘I have mentioned the fact to you before. You will find the Signum of his Legion on his left wrist,’ and he returned to his conversation with Uncle Aquila.

  At his words, something had clicked in Marcus’s mind, and as the Tribune’s glance jerked down to the heavy gold bracelet that he always wore, he remembered. ‘Smooth as a girl, but a skilled hunter,’ Esca had said; and the name had been Placidus. His mouth felt dry with disgust, and the flicker of discomfiture—yes, and something very like envy—that showed for an instant in the other’s face, gave him a quick satisfaction that was on Esca’s account rather than his own.

  Placidus recovered himself at once, and looked up with his faintly supercilious air. ‘See what it is to serve under a Legate renowned for his appreciation of his junior officers,’ he murmured. ‘My dear Marcus, I do congratulate—’ His eyes widened suddenly, and the soft, drawling voice sharpened into life. ‘Roma Dea! A wolf !’

  Before the words were out, Marcus had swung round. There in the colonnade doorway stood a brindled shape, savage head alertly raised, and eyes wary of the strangers within, whose unfamiliar scent had halted him on the threshold.

  ‘Cub!’ Marcus called, ‘Cub!’ and crouched down as, with a joyful bark, the brindled shape hurled itself upon him, fawning against his breast and singing as a crock sings on the boil. Cub’s flanks were heaving with the speed that he had made to find his master, and he was frantically apologetic for having somehow lost him. And Marcus caught the great head in his hands, rubbing his thumbs into the hollows behind the pricked ears. ‘So you have come back, brother,’ he said. ‘You have come back, Cub.’

  ‘It is a wolf! It really is a wolf—and the brute behaving like a puppy!’ said Placidus, in tones of disgusted unbelief above him.

  ‘It seems that we are witnesses to a reunion. Surely we have come in a happy hour,’ said the Legate.

  Marcus freed himself from Cub’s embraces and got to his feet. ‘A reunion—yes, you could call it so,’ he said.

  Then Cub did a thing that he had never done before. He thrust his lowered head between Marcus’s knees, as a dog will sometimes do with someone he perfectly trusts; and stood there contentedly, in the one position in which he was utterly defenceless and at his master’s mercy.

  And while he stood like that with slowly swinging tail, Marcus brought out the bronze-studded collar from the breast of his tunic, and bent to put it round his neck again.

  ‘How long have you had him?’ Placidus asked, watching with a gleam of interest as, his collar safely buckled on again, the young wolf shook himself violently, and sat down with lolling tongue and eyes half closed, propped against his master’s leg.

  ‘Since he was a very small cub, more than a year ago,’ Marcus said, fondling a twitching ear.

  ‘Then, if I am not mistaken, I saw him taken from the lair after his dam was killed! The painted barbarian who fetched him out claimed to be slave to a Marcus Aquila. I remember now.’

  ‘You are not mistaken,’ Marcus said quietly. ‘The painted barbarian told me that story.’

  Rather fortunately Stephanos appeared at that moment hovering in the doorway; and Uncle Aquila took the Legate’s empty wine-cup from him. ‘You will be wishing to soak off the dust of the road,’ he said. ‘We may live at the world’s end, but the bath-water could not be hotter in Rome itself. Your own slaves will be awaiting you in your quarters, no doubt. That is so, Stephanos? Good. I look forward to our next meeting at dinner.’

  X

  MARCHING ORDERS

  PRESENTLY, having bathed and changed, the four came together again in the small dining recess which opened from the atrium. This room was as austere as the rest of the house; the lime-washed walls bare of ornament save for the bronze-faced cavalry buckler with a pair of crossed javelins behind it, hanging opposite the entrance; the three couches about the table spread with beautifully dressed deerskins instead of the usual quiltings and embroideries. And, ordinarily, the meals which Marcus and his uncle ate there were as austere as the room. But tonight was an occasion, and Sassticca had bestirred herself to produce a dinner worthy of it.

  To Marcus, because Cub had come back, the whole room seemed to shimmer with a faint air of festival, as he glanced about him by the soft yellow light of the palmoil lamps on the table. The future and the question of finding a livelihood could wait for the moment; he was pleasantly tired after a long day in the open; he had had a cold plunge and changed his rough tunic for one of soft white wool; and he was prepared even to keep a truce with Placidus, since Esca had only laughed when told of his arrival.

  The main part of dinner was over. Uncle Aquila had just poured the second libation to the household gods, whose little bronze statues stood with the salt-cellars at the corners of the table; and Esca and the other slaves had gone their way. The soft, uncertain lamplight cast a delicate web of radiance over the table, making the red Samian bowls glow like coral, turning the withered yellow apples of last year’s harvest to the fruit of the Hesperides, casting here a bloom of light over the fluted curve of a glass cup, kindling there a pointed scarlet flame in the heart of a squat flask of Falernian wine, strangely intensifying the faces of the men who leaned each on a left elbow round the table.

  So far the two older men had had most of the conversation to themselves, talking over old days, old skirmishes, old frontier camps, old friends and enemies, while Marcus and Placidus put in a word from time to time, spoke to each other occasionally—the truce was holding quite well—but for the most part ate their dinner in silence.

  And then, splashing water into the Falernian in his cup, Uncle Aquila asked, ‘Claudius, how long since you left the Fretensis?’

  ‘Eighteen years in August.’

  ‘Jupiter!’ said Uncle Aquila, reflectively. Suddenly he glared at his old friend. ‘Eighteen years in August since you and I last sat at meat in the same mess; and yet you have been in Britain almost three, and made no attempt—not the faintest attempt—to come near me!’

  ‘Nor you to come near me,’ said Claudius Hieronimianus, helping himself to one of Sassticca’s honey cakes and topping it with a cluster of raisins. He looked up from his plate, his strange face breaking into a winged, eager smile. ‘Is it not most often so, when we follow the Eagles? We make a friend here and there, in Achaea, in Caesarea or Eburacum; and our ways part again, and we take remarkably few pains to keep in touch one with another. But if the gods who rule the destinies of men bend our paths to cross again—why then …’

  ‘Why then we take up the old threads very much where we laid them down,’ said Uncle Aquila. He raised his recharged cup. ‘I drink to the old threads. No, I don’t. It is only old men who look backward all the time. I drink to the renewing of old threads.’

  ‘Do you come and renew them at Eburacum, after I return,’ said the Legate, as he set down his own cup.

  ‘It may be that I will even do that—one day. It is all of five-and-twenty years since I was last at Eburacum, and I should be interested to see the place again.’ Suddenly, bethink
ing himself of his manners, Uncle Aquila turned to include the young Tribune. ‘I took a contingent of the Second up there in one of the Troubles; it was thus that I came to know the Station a little.’

  ‘So?’ Placidus contrived to sound bored and polite at the same time. ‘That would be in the Hispana’s time, of course. You would scarce recognize the Station now. It is really almost habitable.’

  ‘The new generally build in stone where the old cleared the forest and built in wood,’ said Uncle Aquila.

  The Legate was staring reflectively into the heart of his wine. ‘Sometimes at Eburacum it seems to me that the foundations of that old building lie uneasy beneath the new,’ he said.

  Marcus turned on him quickly. ‘You mean, sir?’

  ‘Eburacum is still—how shall I put it?—still more than a little ghost-ridden by the Ninth Legion. Oh, I do not mean that their spirits have wandered back from the fields of Ra, but the place is haunted, none the less. By the altars to Spanish gods that they set up and worshipped at; by their names and numbers idly scratched on walls; by British women whom they loved and children with Spanish faces whom they fathered. All this lying, as it were, like a sediment under the new wine of another Legion. Also they linger strongly, almost terrifyingly, in the minds of the people.’ He made a small gesture with his open hand. ‘It sounds little enough, put into words, and yet it can create an atmosphere which is unpleasantly strong. I am not an imaginative man, but I tell you that there have been times, when the mist comes down from the high moors, when I have more than half expected to see the lost Legion come marching home.’

  There was a long silence, and a little shiver ran through the room like a little wind through long grass. Uncle Aquila’s face was unreadable. Placidus’s showed clearly his opinion of such vapourings. Then Marcus said: ‘Have you any idea—any theory—as to what became of the Hispana, sir?’

  The Legate looked at him shrewdly. ‘Their fate has some importance for you?’

  ‘Yes. My father was their First Cohort—Uncle Aquila’s brother.’

  The Legate turned his head. ‘Aquila, I never knew that.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Uncle Aquila. ‘Did I never mention him to you? He never came much in my way; we were at opposite ends of the family, with twenty years between us.’

  The Legate nodded, and after seeming to consider a moment, gave his attention back to Marcus. ‘There is, of course, the possibility that somewhere they were cut off and annihilated so completely that no survivors were left to carry back word of the disaster.’

  ‘Oh, but surely, sir,’ put in Placidus with a great show of deference, ‘in a Province the size of Valentia, even in the whole of Caledonia, upward of four thousand men could not be destroyed without trace? Is it not far more likely that having had their fill of the Eagles, they merely butchered such of their officers as would not join with them, and deserted to the Tribes?’

  Marcus said nothing; the Tribune was his uncle’s guest; but his mouth shut into a hard, hot line.

  ‘No, I do not think it particularly likely,’ said the Legate.

  But Placidus had not yet finished planting his sting. ‘I stand corrected,’ he said silkily. ‘I was led to think it was the only possible explanation to the mystery, by the extremely unsavoury reputation the Hispana left behind them. But I am happy to find that I was at fault.’

  ‘I am sure you are,’ said the Legate, with a glint of humour.

  ‘But you do not find the ambush theory a very likely one, either, I think, sir?’ Marcus helped himself carefully to a cluster of raisins which he did not want.

  ‘I do not greatly care to believe that any Legion of the Empire could have fallen so low, could have become such rotten fruit, as the other explanation would prove them.’ The Legate hesitated, and his face seemed to grow keener; no longer the face of a man enjoying a pleasant meal, Marcus thought, but that of a soldier. He began to speak again, abruptly. ‘There has been a rumour quite lately, along the Wall—incidentally giving me cause to wish profoundly that the Senate had not chosen this moment to recall me, though I leave behind a Camp Commandant and a First Cohort both knowing more of the game than I shall ever do—a rumour which, if it were true, would suggest that the Hispana did indeed go down fighting. Only market talk, but in such there is often a core of truth. The story runs that the Eagle has been seen; that it is receiving divine honours in some tribal temple in the far north.’

  Uncle Aquila, who had been playing with his wine-cup, set it down so sharply that a drop splashed over on to his hand. ‘Go on,’ he said, as the other halted.

  ‘That is all; there is no more to add, no more to work on, which is the cursed part of it. But you take my point?’

  ‘Oh yes, I take your point.’

  ‘But I am afraid that I do not, not with any clearness,’ Marcus said.

  ‘A Legion which went rogue would probably hide its Eagle or hack it to pieces, or simply topple it into the nearest river. It would be most unlikely to have either the wish or the chance to set it up in the temple of some local godling. But an Eagle taken in war is in a very different case. To the Outland Tribes it must seem that they have captured the god of the Legion: and so they carry it home in triumph, with many torches and perhaps the sacrifice of a black ram, and house it in the temple of their own god to make the young men strong in war and help the grain to ripen. You see now?’

  Marcus saw. ‘What do you intend doing about it, sir?’ he asked, after a moment.

  ‘Nothing. For all the evidence that I can gather, there may be no shred of truth in the story.’

  ‘But if there is?’

  ‘There is still nothing that I can do about it.’

  ‘But, sir, it is the Eagle; the Hispana’s lost Eagle!’ Marcus said, as though trying to drive an idea into the head of one half-witted.

  ‘Eagle lost—honour lost; honour lost—all lost,’ the Legate quoted. ‘Oh yes, I know.’ The regret in his voice sounded very final.

  ‘More than that, sir.’ Marcus was leaning forward, almost stammering in his sudden desperate eagerness. ‘If the Eagle could be found and brought back, it—it might even mean the re-forming of the Legion.’

  ‘That also I know,’ said the Legate. ‘And I know a thing which interests me even more. If trouble were to break out again in the north, a Roman Eagle in the hands of the Painted People might well become a weapon against us, owing to the power it would undoubtedly have to fire the minds and hearts of the Tribes. The fact remains that on a mere wind-blown rumour, I can take no action. To send an expeditionary force would mean open war. A whole Legion would scarcely win through, and there are but three in Britain.’

  ‘But where a Legion could not get through, one man might; at least to find out the truth.’

  ‘I agree, if the right man came forward. It would have to be one who knew the Northern Tribes and would be accepted by them and allowed to pass; and it would have, I think, to be one who cared very deeply for the fate of the Hispana’s Eagle, else he would not be madman enough to thrust his head into such a hornet’s nest.’ He set down the cup that he had been turning between his fingers while he spoke. ‘If I had had such a one among my young men, I would have given him his marching orders. The matter seems to me serious enough for that.’

  ‘Send me,’ Marcus said deliberately. His glance moved from one to another of the men round the table; then he turned to the curtained entrance and called, ‘Esca! Hi! Esca!’

  ‘Now by the—’ began Uncle Aquila, and broke off, for once at a loss for words.

  No one else spoke.

  Quick footsteps came through the atrium, the curtain was drawn aside, and Esca appeared on the threshold. ‘The Centurion called?’

  In as few words as might be, Marcus told him what was toward. ‘You will come with me, Esca?’

  Esca moved forward to his master’s side. His eyes were very bright in the lamplight. ‘I will come,’ he said.

  Marcus turned back to the Legate. ‘Esca was born and bred
where the Wall runs now: and the Eagle was my father’s. Between us we fulfil your conditions finely. Send us.’

  The queer silence that had held the other men was shattered abruptly as Uncle Aquila banged an open hand on the table. ‘This is lunacy! Sheer, unmitigated lunacy!’

  ‘No, but it is not!’ Marcus protested urgently. ‘I have a perfectly sane and workable plan. In the name of Light, listen to me.’

  Uncle Aquila drew breath for a blistering reply, but the Legate put in quietly, ‘Let the boy speak, Aquila,’ and he subsided with a snort.

  For a long moment Marcus stared down at the raisins on his plate, trying to get the rough plan in his head into some sort of order. Trying also to remember exactly what Rufrius Galarius had told him that would help him now. Then he looked up and began to speak, eagerly, but with great care and long pauses, rather as though he were feeling his way, as indeed he was.

  ‘Claudius Hieronimianus, you say that it would have to be one whom the Tribes would accept and allow to pass. A travelling oculist would be such a one. There are many sore eyes here in the north, and half the travellers on the roads are quack-salvers. Rufrius Galarius, who used to be a field surgeon with the Second’ (he glanced at his uncle with a half smile), ‘once told me of a man well known to him, who even crossed the Western Waters and plied his trade through the length and breadth of Hibernia, and came back with a whole hide to tell the tale. And if an oculist’s stamp will carry a man safely through Hibernia, of a surety it will carry Esca and me through what was once, after all, a Roman Province!’ He sat up on the couch, almost glaring at the two older men. Placidus he had forgotten. ‘It may be that we shall not be able to bring back the Eagle; but the gods willing, we will at least find out the truth or untruth of your rumour for you.’

  There was a long pause. The Legate was looking at Marcus searchingly. Uncle Aquila broke the silence. ‘An enterprising plan, but with one trifling objection to it, which you would appear to have overlooked.’