The Eagle of the Ninth Read online

  ‘A clean wound. It is healing.’

  Marcus nodded. ‘You will be seeing him, I suppose? Salute him for me, Centurion. Tell him I shall come and compare scars with him if I am on my feet before he is. And tell the troops I always have said the Fourth Gaulish was the finest cohort with the Eagles.’

  ‘I will, sir,’ said Drusillus. ‘Very anxiously inquiring, the troops have been.’ He got up, raised an arm heavy with silver good-conduct bracelets in salute, and tramped off back to duty.

  Marcus lay for a long time with his forearm across his eyes, seeing against the blackness of his closed lids picture after picture that Drusillus had left behind him. He saw the relief force coming up the road, tramp-tramp-tramp, and the dust rising behind them. He saw the last stand of the tribesmen crumble and the moon-crested fanatic go down. The British town a smoking ruin and the little fields salted by order of the relief force Commander. (Wattle-and-daub huts were easily rebuilt, and salted fields would bear again in three years, but not all the years in eternity would bring back the young men of the tribe, he thought, and was surprised to find that he cared.) He saw dead men, Lutorius among them; he hoped that there would be horses for Lutorius in the Elysian Fields. Most clearly of all, again and again, he saw Cradoc, lying broken among the trampled bracken of the hillside. He had felt very bitter towards Cradoc; he had liked the hunter and thought that his liking was returned; and yet Cradoc had betrayed him. But that was all over. It was not that Cradoc had broken faith; simply that there had been another and stronger faith that he must keep. Marcus understood that now.

  Later, the Commander of the relief force came to see him, but the interview was not a happy one. Centurion Clodius Maximus was a fine soldier, but a chilly mannered, bleak-faced man. He stood aloofly in the doorway, and announced that since everything was under control, he intended to continue his interrupted northward march tomorrow. He had been taking troops up to Isca when the Frontier fort’s distress signal had reached Durinum and he had been deflected to answer it. He would leave two Centuries to bring the garrison temporarily up to strength, and Centurion Herpinius, who would take command of the fort until Marcus’s relief could be sent from Isca, when no doubt fresh drafts of auxiliaries would be sent with him.

  Marcus realized that it was all perfectly reasonable. The Relief Force were Legionaries, line-of-battle troops, and in the nature of things a Legionary Centurion ranked above an auxiliary one; and if he, Marcus, was going to be laid by for a while, a relief would of course have to be sent down to take his place until he was once more fit for duty. But all the same, he was annoyed by the man’s high-handed manner, annoyed on Drusillus’s account, and on his own. Also, quite suddenly, he began to be afraid. So he became very stiff, and very proud, and for the rest of the short and formal interview treated the stranger with an icy politeness that was almost insulting.

  Day followed day, each marked off in its passing by lamplight and daylight, food that he did not want, and the changing shadows that moved across the courtyard outside his window. These, and the visits of Aulus and a medical orderly to dress the spear-gash in his shoulder (he had never felt the blade bite, as he sprang in under the spearman’s thrust), and the ugly mass of wounds that seared his right thigh.

  There was some delay about the arrival of his relief from Isca, for several cohort centurions were down with marsh fever; and the moon, which had been new when the tribe rose, waxed and waned into the dark, and the pale feather of another new moon hung in the evening sky; and all save the deepest and most ragged of Marcus’s wounds were healed. That was when they told him that his service with the Eagles was over.

  Let him only be patient, and the leg would carry him well enough, one day, Aulus assured him, but not for a long time; no, he could not say how long. Marcus must understand, he pointed out with plaintive reasonableness, that one could not smash a thigh-bone and tear the muscles to shreds and then expect all to be as it had been before.

  It was the thing that Marcus had been afraid of ever since his interview with Centurion Maximus. No need to be afraid now, not any more. He took it very quietly; but it meant the loss of almost everything he cared about. Life with the Eagles was the only kind of life he had ever thought of, the only kind that he had any training for; and now it was over. He would never be Prefect of an Egyptian Legion, he would never be able to buy back the farm in the Etruscan hills, or gather to himself another like it. The Legion was lost to him and, with the Legion, it seemed that his own land was lost to him too; and the future, with a lame leg and no money and no prospects, seemed at first sight rather bleak and terrifying.

  Maybe Centurion Drusillus guessed something of all this, though Marcus never told him. At all events he seemed to find the Commander’s quarters a good place to spend every off-duty moment, just then; and though Marcus, longing to be alone like a sick animal, often wished him at the other side of the Empire, afterwards he remembered and was grateful for his centurion’s fellowship in a bad time.

  •    •    •    •    •

  A few days later, Marcus lay listening to the distant sounds of the new Commander’s arrival. He was still in his old quarters, for when he had suggested that he should go across to the sick-block, and leave the two rooms in the Praetorium free for their rightful owner, he was told that other quarters had been made ready for the new Commander, and he was to stay where he was until he was fit to travel—until he could go to Uncle Aquila. He was lucky, he supposed rather drearily, to have Uncle Aquila to go to. At all events he would know quite soon now whether the unknown uncle was like his father.

  Now that he could sit up, he could look out into the courtyard, and see the rose-bush in its wine-jar, just outside his window. There was still one crimson rose among the dark leaves, but even as he watched, a petal fell from it like a great slow drop of blood. Soon the rest would follow. He had held his first and only command for just as long as the rose-bush had been in flower… It was certainly pot-bound, he thought; maybe his successor would do something about it.

  His successor: whoever that might be. He could not see the entrance to the courtyard, but quick footsteps sounded along the colonnade and then in the outer room, and a moment later the new Commander stood in the doorway; an elegant and very dusty young man with his crested helmet under one arm. It was the owner of the chariot team which Marcus had driven in the Saturnalia Games.

  ‘Cassius!’ Marcus greeted him. ‘I wondered if it would be anyone I knew.’

  Cassius crossed to his side. ‘My dear Marcus; how does the leg?’

  ‘It mends, in its fashion.’

  ‘So. I am glad of that, at all events.’

  ‘What have you done with your bays?’ Marcus asked quickly. ‘You are not having them brought down here, are you?’

  Cassius collapsed on to the clothes-chest and wilted elegantly. ‘Jupiter! No! I have lent them to Dexion, with my groom to keep an eye on them, and him.’

  ‘They will do well enough with Dexion. What troops have you brought down with you?’

  ‘Two Centuries of the Third: Gauls, like the rest. They are good lads, seasoned troops; been up on the wall laying stone courses and exchanging the odd arrow now and then with the Painted People.’ He cocked a languid eyebrow. ‘But if they can give as good an account of themselves in action as your raw Fourth have done, they will have no need to feel themselves disgraced.’

  ‘I think there will be no more trouble in these parts,’ Marcus said. ‘Centurion Maximus took good care of that.’

  ‘Ah, you mean the burned villages and salted fields? A punitive expedition is never pretty. But I gather from your embittered tone that you did not take warmly to Centurion Maximus?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘A most efficient officer,’ pronounced Cassius, with the air of a grey-headed Legate.

  ‘To say nothing of officious,’ snapped Marcus.

  ‘Maybe if you saw the report he sent in when he got back to Headquarters, you
might find yourself feeling more friendlily disposed towards him.’

  ‘It was good?’ asked Marcus, surprised. Centurion Maximus had not struck him as the type who sent in enthusiastic reports.

  Cassius nodded. ‘Rather more than good. Indeed, before I marched south there was beginning to be talk of some trifle—say a gilded laurel wreath—to make the standard of the Gaulish Fourth look pretty when it goes on parade.’

  There was a short silence, and then Marcus said, ‘It is no more than we—than they deserve! Look, Cassius, if anything more than talking comes of it, send me word. I will give you the direction to write to. I should like to know that the cohort won its first honours under my command.’

  ‘Possibly the cohort would like to know it too,’ said Cassius gruffly, and lounged to his feet. ‘I am for the bathhouse. I am gritty from head to foot!’ He paused a moment, looking down at Marcus, with his air of weary elegance quite forgotten. ‘Do not worry. I shall not let your cohort go to ruin.’

  Marcus laughed, with a sudden aching in his throat. ‘See that you do not, or I swear I shall find means to poison your wine! They are a fine cohort, the best with the Legion: and—good luck to you with them.’

  Outside in the courtyard, the last crimson petals fell in a little bright flurry from the rose-bush in the old wine-jar.

  V

  SATURNALIA GAMES

  UNCLE AQUILA lived on the extreme edge of Calleva. One reached his house down a narrow side street that turned off not far from the East Gate, leaving behind the forum and the temples, and coming to a quiet angle of the old British earthworks—for Calleva had been a British Dun before it was a Roman city—where hawthorn and hazel still grew and the shyer woodland birds sometimes came. It was much like the other houses of Calleva, timbered and red-roofed and comfortable, built round three sides of a tiny courtyard that was smoothly turfed and set about with imported roses and gum-cistus growing in tall stone jars. But it had one peculiarity: a squat, square, flat-roofed tower rising from one corner; for Uncle Aquila, having lived most of his life in the shadow of watch-towers from Memphis to Segedunum, could not be comfortable without one.

  Here, in the shadow of his own watch-tower, which he used as a study, he was very comfortable indeed, with his elderly wolf-hound Procyon, and the History of Siege Warfare which he had been writing for ten years, for company.

  By the dark end of October, Marcus had been added to the household. He was given a sleeping-cell opening on to the courtyard colonnade; a lime-washed cell with a narrow cot piled with striped native blankets, a polished citron-wood chest, a lamp on a bracket high against the wall. Save that the door was differently placed, it might have been his old quarters in the Frontier fort, seven days’ march away. But most of his days were spent in the long atrium, the central room of the house, occasionally with Uncle Aquila, but for the most part alone, save when Stephanos or Sassticca looked in on him. He did not mind Stephanos, his uncle’s old Greek body-slave, who now looked after him as well as his master, but Sassticca the cook was another matter. She was a tall and gaunt old woman who could hit like a man, and frequently did when either of her fellow slaves annoyed her; but she treated Marcus as though he were a small sick child. She brought him little hot cakes when she had been baking, and warm milk because she said he was too thin, and fussed and tyrannized over him, until—for he was very afraid of kindness just then—he came near to hating her.

  That autumn was a bad time for Marcus, feeling wretchedly ill for the first time in his life, almost always in pain, and face to face with the wreckage of everything he knew and cared about. He would wake in the dark mornings to hear the distant notes of Cockcrow sounding from the transit camp just outside the city walls, and that did not make it any easier. He was homesick for the Legions; he was desperately homesick for his own land; for now that they seemed lost to him, his own hills grew achingly dear, every detail of sight and scent and sound jewel-vivid on his memory. The shivering silver of the olive-woods when the mistral blew, the summer scent of thyme and rosemary and little white cyclamen among the sun-warmed grass, the songs that the girls sang at vintage.

  And here in Britain the wind moaned through the desolate woods, the skies wept, and wet gale-blown leaves pattered against the windows and stuck there, making little pathetic shadows against the steamy glass. There had been wild weather often enough in his own country, but that had been the wild weather of home: here was the wind and rain and wet leaves of exile.

  It would have gone less hardly with him if he had had a companion of his own age; but he was the only young thing in the house, for even Procyon had grey hairs in his muzzle, and so he was shut in on himself, and though he did not know it, he was bitterly lonely.

  There was just one gleam of light for him in the darkness of that autumn. Not long after he came to Calleva, he had word from Cassius that henceforth the Standard of the Gaulish Fourth would have its gilded laurel wreath to carry on parade; and a little later there came to Marcus himself the award of a military bracelet, which was a thing that he had never for an instant expected. This was not, as the various crowns were, purely a gallantry award; rather it was given for the same qualities which had earned for the Second Legion its titles ‘Pia Fidelis’; those titles which were cut deep upon the heavy gold bracelet under the Capricorn badge of the Legion. From the day that it came to him, it was never off Marcus’s wrist; and yet it meant rather less to him than the knowledge that his old cohort had won its first laurels.

  The days grew shorter and the nights longer, and presently it was the night of the winter solstice. A fitting night for the dark turn of the year, Marcus thought. The inevitable wind was roaring up through the forest of Spinaii below the old British ramparts, driving with it squalls of sleet that spattered against the windows. In the atrium it was warm, for whatever the peculiarities of Uncle Aquila’s house, the hypercaust worked perfectly, and for the pleasant look of it rather than for need, a fire of wildcherry logs on charcoal burned in the brazier hearth, filling the long room with faint, aromatic scent. The light from the single bronze lamp, falling in a golden pool over the group before the hearth, scarcely touched the limewashed walls, and left the far end of the room in crowding shadows, save for the glim of light that always burned before the shrine of the household gods. Marcus lay propped on one elbow on his usual couch, Uncle Aquila sat opposite to him in his great cross-legged chair; and beside them, outstretched on the warm tessellated floor, Procyon the wolf-hound.

  Uncle Aquila was huge; that had been the first thing Marcus noticed about him, and he noticed it still. His joints appeared to be loosely strung together as if with wet leather; his head with its bald freckled top and his bony beautiful hands were big even in proportion to the rest of him, and Authority seemed to hang on him in easy and accustomed folds, like his toga. Even allowing for their twenty years of difference in age, he was not in the least like Marcus’s father; but Marcus had long ago ceased to think of him as like, or unlike, anyone. He was simply Uncle Aquila.

  The evening meal was over, and old Stephanos had set out a draughts-board on the table between Marcus and his uncle, and gone his way. In the lamplight the ivory and ebony squares shone vividly white and black; Uncle Aquila’s men were already in place, but Marcus had been slower, because he was thinking of something else. He set down his last ivory man with a little click, and said: ‘Ulpius was here this morning.’

  ‘Ah, our fat physician,’ said Uncle Aquila, his hand, which had been poised for an opening move, returning to the arm of his chair. ‘Had he anything to say worth the listening to?’

  ‘Only the usual things. That I must wait and wait.’ Suddenly Marcus exploded between misery and laughter. ‘He said I must have a little patience and called me his dear young man and wagged a scented fat finger under my nose. Fach! He is like the white pulpy things one finds under stones!’

  ‘So,’ agreed Uncle Aquila. ‘None the less, you must wait—there being no help for it.’

  Marcus loo
ked up from the board. ‘There’s the rub. How long can I wait?’

  ‘Hmph?’ said Uncle Aquila.

  ‘I have been here two months now, and we have never spoken of the future. I have put it off from one visit of that pot-bellied leech to the next because—I suppose because I have never thought of any life but following the Eagles, and I do not quite know how to begin.’ He smiled at his uncle apologetically. ‘But we must discuss it sometime.’

  ‘Sometime, yes: but not now. No need to trouble about the future until that leg will carry you.’

  ‘But Mithras knows how long that will be. Do you not see, sir, I cannot go on foisting myself on you indefinitely.’

  ‘Oh, my good lad, do try not to be such a fool!’ snapped Uncle Aquila; but his eyes under their jut of brow were unexpectedly kindly. ‘I am not a rich man, but neither am I so poor that I cannot afford to add a kinsman to my household. You do not get in my way; to be perfectly honest, I forget your existence rather more than half the time; you play a reasonably good game of draughts. Naturally you will stay here, unless of course’—he leaned forward abruptly—‘is it that you would rather go home?’

  ‘Home?’ Marcus echoed.

  ‘Yes. I suppose you still have a home with that peculiarly foolish sister of mine?’

  ‘And with Uncle-by-Marriage Tullus Lepidus?’ Marcus’s head went up, his black brows twitched almost to meeting point above a nose which looked suddenly as though there was a very bad smell under it. ‘I’d sooner sit on Tiber-side and beg my bread from the slum women when they come to fill their water-pots!’

  ‘So?’ Uncle Aquila nodded his huge head. ‘And now, that being settled, shall we play?’

  He made the opening move, and Marcus answered it. For a while they played in silence. The lamplit room was a shell of quiet amid the wild sea-roaring of the wind; the small saffron flames whispered in the brazier, and a burned cherry log collapsed with a tinselly rustle into the red hollow of the charcoal. Every few moments there would be a little clear click as Marcus or his uncle moved a piece on the board. But Marcus did not really hear the small peaceful sounds, nor see the man opposite, for he was thinking of things that he had been trying not to think of all day.