Eagle's Honour (7 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said awkwardly.

He turned a cube of blue shale over in his fingers, and bent to settle it in place. ‘You have no need to be,’ he said, very carefully.

‘No,’ I stumbled, ‘not about that. – I’m sorry I got it wrong about tent-makers and poets.’ I felt the whole conversation getting away from me, and certainly getting further every moment from what I had come to talk to him about. I took a deep breath, and swallowed, ‘Vedrix,’ I said, ‘I want to talk to you seriously about something, and you’re making it all more and more difficult.’

‘So? I am listening. Speak then, as seriously as you please.’

Somehow, almost without knowing it, I slipped into the British tongue, the Celtic tongue. I had grown used to speaking it, after a fashion, with Cordaella, for the Celtic is better than the Latin, for making love-talk to a British girl, and easier for explaining to her brother in, too.

I said, ‘The love is upon me, for Cordaella.’

He abandoned the pavement and looked up
at me, and answered in his own tongue also. ‘And is the love upon Cordaella for you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You sound very sure, my fine young Roman Standard-bearer.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘She told me.’

‘And did she tell you that I have already found for her a man of her own people before we left Lindum?’

‘Yes, with thirty head of cattle.’

‘You, I am thinking, do not have thirty head of cattle. And yet you would be marrying with the girl in his stead.’

‘I would!’ I said. ‘But I cannot – not yet anyway.’

‘And why would that be?’ said he, with his red brows quirking up towards the roots of his hair.

‘In the Legions, no one below the rank of Centurion—’

‘Is allowed to take a wife, ah yes. And so you will be needing promotion before she grows weary of waiting. Well – good luck to you, noble Standard-bearer.’

Suddenly I began to feel a flicker of hope.

‘You mean – you’ll not force her to go to this other man?’

‘Force Cordaella?’ he said. ‘In all the years
since our father died, I have never found the way to make Cordaella do anything she was set against. If ever you do marry her, it may be that you will find the way, but I very much doubt it. Far more likely it will be the other way round!’

‘I’ll risk it,’ I said; and all at once it was as though the sun came out.

And then the trumpet sounded from the fort, and I knew that I must be getting back.

CHAPTER THREE

Campaign in the North

Later the same day I was standing before the piled writing-table in the Headquarters Office, where Dexius Valens the Senior Centurion had sent for me, waiting for him to notice that I was there. After a while he looked up from the scatter of tablets and papyrus rolls before him, and said, ‘Ah, Standard-bearer. – Yes, the General Agricola is at Corstopitum overseeing the arrangements for this summer’s Caledonian Campaign. The order has just come through. – We march to join him in three days.’

So that was that. All town leave was stopped, of course, and I never even got to see Cordaella to say farewell to her. Couldn’t write her a note, either, because of course she couldn’t read anyway. The best I could do was to scratch a few lines to Vedrix and ask him to read them to her – I thought I could trust him – and get one of the mule-drivers to take the letter down into the town the next day.

And three days later, leaving the usual holding-garrison behind us, we marched out for Corstopitum.

A Legion on the march – that’s something worth the seeing; the long winding column, cohort after cohort, the cavalry wings spread on either side and the baggage train following after. A great serpent of mailed men, red-hackled with the crests of the officers’ helmets, and whisding whatever tune best pleases them at the moment – ‘Payday’ perhaps, or ‘The Emperor’s Wineskins’, or ‘The Girl I kissed at Clusium’, to keep the marching time. Four miles to the hour, never slower, never faster, uphill and down, twenty miles a day. … And me, marching up at the head, right behind the Legate on his white horse, carrying the great Eagle of the Legion, with the sunlight splintering on its spread wings; and its talons clutched on the lighting-jags of Jupiter, and the gilded laurel wreaths of its victories….

Aye, I was the proud one, that day! For I’d seen Cordaella among the crowd that gathered to see us off, and she had seen me and waved to me. And I was through with garrison duty and
going to join the fighting, and win my promotion and maybe make a name for myself and come back with the honours shining on my breast; and all for my girl Cordaella. And my breast swelled as though the honours were already there. – What a bairn I was, what a boy with my head chock-full of dreams of glory, for all the great lion-skin that I wore over my armour, and the size of my hands on the Eagle shaft, and my long legs eating up the Northward miles!

But it was three years and more before we came marching back; and there were times when I came near to forgetting Cordaella for a while, though never quite.

CHAPTER FOUR

Eagle’s Egg

We joined Agricola with the Twentieth Legion at Corstopitum, and marched on North across the great Lowland hills until we were joined by the main part of the Second and the Fourteenth that had come up through the western country of last summer’s campaigning. Then we headed on for the broad Firth that all but cuts Caledonia in half. The Fleet met us there, and we spent the rest of the summer making a naval base. You need something of that sort for supplies, and support, when you can’t be sure of your land lines of communication behind you. We saw a bit of fighting from time to time, but seemingly the Lowland chiefs were still too busy fighting with each other, to make a strong show against us, so mostly it was just building; first the supply base, and then with the winter scarce past, a string of turf and timber forts right across the low-lying narrows of the land.

Sick and tired we got of it, too, and there began to be a good deal of grumbling. I mind Lucius, a mate of mine growling into his supper bannock that he might as well have stayed at home and been a builder’s labourer – and me trying to give him the wink that the Cohort Commander was standing right behind him. It’s odd, the small daft things not worth remembering, that one remembers across half a lifetime….

But in the next spring, when we started the big push on into the Highlands, we found a difference.

Somehow, sometime in that second winter, the Caledonians had found the leader they needed to hammer them into one people. Calgacus, his name was, I never saw him, not until the last battle; but I got so that the bare mention of his name would have me looking over my shoulder and reaching for my sword. It was the same with all of us, especially when the mists came down from the high tops or rain blotted out the bleak country as far as a man could see. Oh yes, we saw plenty enough fighting that summer, to make up for any breathing space we’d had in the two before.

Agricola was too cunning a fox to go thrusting his muzzle up into the mountains, with every turf
of bog-cotton seemingly a war-painted warrior in disguise, waiting to close the glens like a trap on his tail. Instead, he closed them himself, with great forts in the mouths of each one where it came down to the eastern plain. That way, there was no risk of the tribes swarming down unchecked to take us in the rear or cut our supply lines after we had passed by.

We got sullen-sick of fort building, all over again, yes; especially with our shoulder-blades always on the twitch for an arrow between them. The Ninth wintered at Inchtuthil, the biggest of the forts. The place was not finished, but we sat in the middle and went on building it round us, which is never a very comfortable state of things, in enemy country. We lost a lot of men in one way and another; and the old ugly talk of the Ninth being an unlucky Legion woke up and began to drift round again. It might have been better if the Legate had not had a convenient bout of stomach trouble and gone south to winter in Corstopitum. I didn’t envy Senior Centurion Dexius left in command. It was our third winter in the wilds, and we were sick of snow and hill mists, and the painted devils sniping at us from behind every gorse-bush; and we wanted to be able to drink with our friends in a wine
shop, and walk twenty paces without wondering what was coming up behind us. And we cursed the Legate for being comfortable in Corstopitum, and grew to hate the sight of each other’s faces.

I began to smell trouble coming, sure as acorns grow on oak trees.

And then one day when we had almost won through to spring, some of the men broke into the wine store and were found drunk on watch. They were put under guard, ready to be brought up before the Senior Centurion next day. And everyone knew what that meant – He’d have been within his rights to order the death penalty; but being Daddy Dexius, who could be relied on to be soft in such matters, they would probably get off with a flogging. Even so, it would be the kind of flogging that spreads a man flat on his face in the sick block for three days afterwards.

All the rest of that day you could feel the trouble like nearing thunder prickling the back of your neck. And in the middle of supper, it came. Being the Eagle Bearer, I ate in the Centurions’ mess-hall, though in the lowest place there, next to the door; and I hadn’t long sat down when the noise began.