The Eagle of the Ninth Read online

  Through the doorless opening Marcus could see almost the whole of the sleeping-cell, the narrow cot piled with gay native rugs, the polished oaken chest, the lamp-bracket high on the bare wall, and nothing more. The outer room held the battered writing-table on which Marcus was sitting, a cross-legged camp-stool, the cushioned bench to represent comfort, another chest for the record rolls, and a bronze pedestal lamp of peculiarly hideous design.

  In the little silence that had fallen between them, Marcus looked round him at the austere room in the yellow flood of lamplight, and to him it seemed beautiful. But though it would be his tomorrow, for this one night he was a guest here, and he looked back to his host with a quick smile of apology for having looked too soon at his surroundings with the eye of mastery.

  Hilarion grinned. ‘You will not be feeling like that this day next year.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Marcus, swinging one sandalled foot and idly watching the swing of it. ‘What does one do here, beside growing toadstools? Is there good hunting?’

  ‘Good enough; it is the one thing to be said for this particular corner of the Empire. Boar and wolf in the winter, and the forest swarms with deer. There are several hunters below in the town, who will take you out for the price of the day’s work. Unwise to go alone, of course.’

  Marcus nodded. ‘Have you any advice for me? I am new to this country.’

  The other considered. ‘No, I think not.’ Then he sat up with a jerk. ‘Yes, I have, if no one has warned you already. But it has nothing to do with the hunting. It is the priest-kind—the wandering Druids. If one of them appears in the district, or you get the least idea that there is one about, look to your weapons. Good advice, that is.’

  ‘The Druids?’ Marcus was surprised and puzzled. ‘But surely Suetonius Paulinus dealt with them once and for all, sixty years ago?’

  ‘As an organized priesthood, maybe; but as easily hold off these heathen mists with a palm-leaf umbrella as end the Druids by destroying their stronghold. They spring up still, from time to time, and wherever they do spring up, there is likely to be trouble for the Eagles. They were the heart and soul of British resistance in the early days, and even now, when there is any sign of unrest among the tribes, you can wager your sandals there is a holy man at the bottom of it.’

  ‘Go on,’ Marcus prodded, as the other seemed to have finished. ‘This becomes interesting.’

  ‘Well, the thing is this. They can preach holy war, and that is ever the most deadly kind, for it recks nothing of consequences.’ Hilarion spoke slowly, as though he was thinking the thing out as he went along. ‘The frontier tribes are not like those of the south coast, who were half Romanized before ever we landed; they are a wild lot, and superbly brave; but even they have mostly come to think that we are not fiends of darkness, and they have enough sense to see that destroying the local garrison will only mean a punitive expedition and their homes and standing crops burned, and a stronger garrison with a heavier hand thereafter. But let one of their holy men lay hold of them, and all that goes whistling down the wind. They cease to think whether there can be any good come of their rising, cease to think at all. They are keeping faith with their gods by smoking out a nest of the unbelievers, and what happens after is no concern of theirs, for they are going West of the Sunset by the warriors’ road. And when you get men into that state there is apt to be trouble coming.’

  Outside in the quiet darkness the trumpets sounded for the second watch of the night. Hilarion uncurled himself and stood up. ‘We had best do Late Rounds together tonight,’ he said, and reached for his sword, slipping the baldrick over his head. ‘I am native born,’ he added as though in explanation. ‘That is how I come to have some understanding of these matters.’

  ‘I imagined that you must be.’ Marcus tested a buckle of his own equipment. ‘You have had no holy man round here, I suppose?’

  ‘No, but my predecessor had a certain amount of trouble just before I took over, and the trouble-maker slipped through his fingers and disappeared. We lived a month or two on Vesuvius—all the more so as the harvest was bad for the second year running—but it never erupted.’

  Footsteps sounded outside, and a red light glimmered at the window; and they went out together to the Duty Centurion, who stood outside with a flaring torch. The clashing Roman salute was exchanged, and they set out on their tour of the darkened fort, from sentry-post to sentry-post along the rampart walk, from guard-point to guard-point, with the low exchange of the password; lastly to the small lighted room in the Praetorium where the pay-chest was kept and the Standard stood against the wall, and between rounds the Duty Centurion sat with his drawn sword on the table before him, through the night.

  Marcus thought: ‘After tonight it will be for me alone to follow the centurion’s torch from guard-post to guard-post, from barrack block to horse-lines, seeing that all is well with the frontier of the Empire.’

  Next morning, after the formal take-over ceremony in the forum, the old garrison marched out. Marcus watched them go, out across the ditch and downhill between the crowding hovels of the native town whose reed-thatched roofs were gold-dusted by the morning sun. Century after Century, marching away up the long road that led to Isca; and at their head the glint of gold and crimson that was the cohort Standard. He narrowed his eyes into the piercing light, and watched that coloured glint till it disappeared into the brightness of the morning. The last driver of the baggage-train dropped out of sight beyond the lift of the road, the rhythmic tramp-tramp-tramp of heavily sandalled feet ceased to pulse through the sunlit air, and Marcus was alone with his first command.

  II

  FEATHERS IN THE WIND

  BEFORE many days had passed, Marcus had slipped so completely into the life of the frontier fort that it seemed as though he had never known any other. The plan of all Roman forts was much the same, and the pattern of life lived in them, so that knowing one meant knowing them all, whether it was the stone-built camp of the Praetorian Guard itself, or a baked mud fort on the Upper Nile, or this one at Isca Dumnoniorum, where the ramparts were of rammed turf, and the cohort Standard and the officers were all housed together in one small square of wattle-and-daub buildings round a colonnaded courtyard. But after a few days Marcus began to know the individualities that made every camp different, after all, from every other; and it was these differences, rather than the samenesses, that made him feel at home in Isca. An artist of some long-departed garrison had scratched with his dagger a beautiful leaping wild cat on the bathhouse wall, and someone less gifted had scratched a very rude picture of a centurion he had not liked; you could tell that it was a centurion, by the vine staff and the centurion’s mark > scored beneath it. There was a martin’s nest under the eaves of the shrine where the Standard was housed, and an odd and untraceable smell behind Number Two storehouse. And in one corner of the officers’ courtyard, some past commander, homesick for the warmth and colour of the South, had planted a rose-bush in a great stone wine-jar, and already the buds were showing crimson among the dark leaves. That rose-bush gave Marcus a sense of continuance; it was a link between him and those who had been before him, here on the frontier, and the others who would come after. It must have been there a long time, and it was becoming pot-bound; he thought that in the autumn he would see about having a proper bed made for it.

  It took him a little while to settle down with his officers. The Surgeon, who appeared, like the Quartermaster, to be a fixture, was a gentle soul, content enough in his backwater so long as it contained sufficient of the fiery native spirit; but the Quartermaster himself was something of a trial, a little red angry man who had missed promotion and grown overfull of his own importance in consequence. Lutorius, who commanded the fort’s one squadron of Dacian Horse, spent all his friendliness on his horses and was reserved to the point of sullenness with all men, even his own. Marcus’s five ranker centurions were all so much older and more experienced than he was that at first he was uncertain how to deal with them.
It was not easy, with less than a year with the Eagles behind him, to tell Centurion Paulus that he was overfond of using his vinestaff on his men’s backs; or make Centurion Galba understand that, whatever might be the custom in other cohorts, the centurions of the Fourth Gaulish were not going to take bribes from their men for letting them off fatigues, while he was in command. But he managed it somehow, and the odd thing was that though both Galba and Paulus raged inwardly at the time, and even talked to each other about puppies, there was a better understanding between them and the Cohort Commander afterwards. And between Marcus and his second-in-command there was a good working understanding from the first, which grew to a warm liking as time went by. Centurion Drusillus, like most of his kind, was promoted from the ranks; he was a veteran of many campaigns, full of odd wisdom and hard counsel; and Marcus had need of such, that summer. Day started with the trumpets sounding Cockcrow from the ramparts, and ended with Late Rounds; and between came all the complicated pattern of parades and fatigues, patrols out and in, stables, arms drill. He had to be his own magistrate too; he had to deal with the situation when one of his men claimed that a tribesman had sold him a worthless dog; or a tribesman complained that someone from the fort had stolen his poultry; or when the Dacians and the Gauls fell out over some obscure question of a tribal god whom he had never heard of before.

  It was hard work, especially in the earliest days, and he was thankful for Centurion Drusillus; but the work was in his blood, just as farming was, and it was work that he loved. And it was not all work: there was the occasional day’s hunting too—good hunting, even as Hilarion had said.

  His usual guide and companion on the trail was a Briton not many years older than himself, a hunter and horsedealer, Cradoc by name. And on a morning of late summer he went down from the fort, carrying his hunting-spears, to pick up Cradoc according to custom. It was very early, the sun not yet up, and the mist lying like a white sea between the hills. Scent would lie low and heavy on such a morning, and he sniffed the dawn chill like a hound. And yet he could not find his usual pleasure in the fine hunting morning, for he was worried. Not very worried, but enough to take the keen edge off the blade of his enjoyment; turning over in his mind the rumour that had been drifting through the fort for the past day or two— the rumour of a wandering Druid having been seen in the district. Oh, no one had actually seen him themselves; it was much more vague than that. None the less, remembering Hilarion’s warning, he had checked up as best he could, without of course the least result. But even if there were something in the wind, there would be no result—nothing to be got even from the few men who held official positions from Rome; if their first loyalty was to Rome they would know nothing; if it was to their Tribe they would tell nothing. Probably there was not a scrap of truth in the story; it was just one of those floating rumours that blew up from time to time, like a wind out of nowhere. But he would keep his eyes and ears open, all the same, especially as once again, for the third year running, the harvest was going to be a poor one. You could tell that from the faces of the men and women, as well as you could from their little fields, where the corn stood thin and shrivelled in the ear. A bad harvest was always the time to look for trouble.

  As he threaded his way among the crowding huts beyond the forum, it struck Marcus again how untouched this place was by Rome. The tribe found the forum and basilica useful to hold their markets in. One or two men had laid aside their hunting-spears to become Roman officials, occasionally one even saw a Roman tunic. There were wine-shops everywhere, the craftsmen of the town made things to please the garrison, and everybody else sold them dogs, skins, vegetables, and fighting-cocks, while the children scrambled after the auxiliaries for denarii. But all the same, here in Isca Dumnoniorum, Rome was a new slip grafted on to an old stock—and the graft had not yet taken.

  He reached the cluster of huts that were Cradoc’s, and turned aside at the house-place door, whistling a few bars of the latest tune running in the Legions, with which he was used to announce his arrival. The leather apron over the doorway was drawn aside at once, but instead of the hunter, there appeared a girl with a solemn sunburned baby on her hip. She was tall, as were most British women, and carried herself like a queen; but the thing that Marcus noticed about her was the look on her face: a queer, guarded look, as though she had drawn a veil behind her eyes so that he should not see in.

  ‘My man is out behind with his chariot team. If the Commander goes to look, he will find him,’ she said, and stepped back, letting the leather apron fall between them.

  Marcus went to look. The sound of the hunter’s voice and a horse’s soft whinny gave him his direction, and making his way between the wood-pile and a tethered cock whose feathers shone with metallic colours among the duller hens, he reached the doorway of a stable hut, and looked in. Cradoc turned to the doorway as he appeared, and gave him a courteous greeting.

  Marcus returned it—by this time he spoke the Celtic tongue fluently, though with an appalling accent—but he was staring into the shadows behind the other man. ‘I did not know you drove the Royal Fours in these parts,’ he said.

  ‘We are not above learning some lessons from Rome. Have you never chanced to see my team before?’

  Marcus shook his head. ‘I did not even know you for a charioteer, though I suppose I might have guessed. The British are all charioteers.’

  ‘The Commander is mistaken,’ Cradoc said, drawing his hand down a glossy neck. ‘The British can all drive after a fashion; not everyone is a charioteer.’

  ‘You, I take it, are a charioteer?’

  ‘I am accounted among the best of my tribe,’ Cradoc said with quiet dignity.

  Marcus had moved in from the doorway. ‘May I see your team?’ he asked, and the other stood aside for him without a word.

  The four were loose in their stable, and they came to him almost like dogs to sniff inquiringly at his breast and outstretched hands; four superbly matched black chariot ponies. He thought of the Arab team he had sometimes driven in Rome. These were smaller—under fourteen hands, he judged—thicker coated, and for their size a little more heavily built, but in their way they seemed to him without match; the heads that turned to him gentle and intelligent, the ears pricked and delicate as flower petals, the quivering nostrils lined with vivid red, the breasts and haunches deep and powerful. He turned from one to another, moving among them, fondling them, running a practised hand over their lithe bodies from proud crest to sweeping tail.

  Before he left Rome, Marcus had been in a fair way to becoming a charioteer, in Cradoc’s sense of the word, and now desire woke in him, not to possess this team, for he was not one of those who must be able to say ‘Mine’ before they can truly enjoy a thing, but to have them out and harnessed; to feel the vibrating chariot floor under him, and the spread reins quick with life in his hands, and these lovely, fiery little creatures in the traces, his will and theirs at one.

  Turning, with a soft muzzle against his shoulder, he said, ‘Will you let me try your team?’

  ‘They are not for sale.’

  ‘If they were, I could not afford to buy them. I asked that I might try them.’

  ‘The Commander also is a charioteer?’ Cradoc said.

  At the Saturnalia Games last year, Marcus had been put up to race a borrowed team against a staff officer, reputed to be the finest driver in the Legion; and he had won. ‘I am accounted the best in my Legion,’ he said.

  Cradoc did not seem to think his question answered. ‘I doubt if you could handle these black jewels of mine.’

  ‘Will you take a wager on it?’ Marcus asked, his eyes suddenly cool and bright, and his mouth smiling.

  ‘A wager?’

  ‘That I will handle your team to your satisfaction, over ground of your own choosing.’ Marcus slipped a brooch from the shoulder of his rough cloak, and held it out, the red cornelian with which it was set gleaming faintly in the shadows. ‘This fibula against—against one of your hunting-spears. Or if t
hat does not suit you, name your own stakes.’

  Cradoc did not look at the fibula. He was looking at Marcus, rather as though the young Roman was a horse whose mettle he wished to gauge, and Marcus, facing the cool stocktaking, felt himself flushing. The hunter noticed the angry colour, and the arrogantly raised head, and a queer little twisted smile lifted one side of his mouth. Then, as though satisfied by his scrutiny, he said: ‘I will take the wager.’

  ‘When do we put the matter to the test?’ asked Marcus, returning the brooch to the shoulder of his cloak.

  ‘I am taking a draft of horses up to Durinum tomorrow; but in eight days I shall be back. We will hold the trial on my return. And now, it is time that we were away.’

  ‘So be it,’ said Marcus; and with a final pat to a glossy neck, he turned and followed Cradoc from the stable. They whistled the waiting hounds to heel, collected hunting- spears from the house-place wall where they had been propped, and disappeared into the wilderness.

  •    •    •    •    •

  Cradoc was away longer than he expected, and the harvest, such as it was (there would be many hungry in Isca Dumnoniorum that winter), was gathered in by the time the trial took place. Marcus was turning over in his mind the question of getting in extra grain supplies when he arrived at the appointed meeting ground, a wide stretch of level land in the curve of the river, to find the other waiting for him. Cradoc flung up an arm in greeting as he appeared from the woodshore, and springing into the chariot, turned the team and came thundering towards him through the swaying fern at a gallop. The sun flashed back in spars of light from the bronze ornaments on the breasts and foreheads of the team, and the long hair of the charioteer was flying like his ponies’ manes. Marcus stood his ground, though with an uncomfortable tightening of his stomach, until at the last moment the ponies were brought to a rearing halt almost on top of him and the charioteer ran out along the yoke-pole and stood poised against the sky.