The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (13 page)

Then he found Esca beside him, holding a cup. ‘Cottia—and Cub—’ he stammered.

‘I will see to them soon, but first you must drink this.’

Esca dropped to one knee beside the cot, and Marcus found that he was lying with his head on his slave’s shoulder and the rim of the cup was cool against his mouth as he drank. He remembered the bitter taste from last year. Then, as the cup was withdrawn, he turned his head contentedly on Esca’s arm. There was a pinched greyness in the other’s face, he realized, an odd wryness about his mouth, like the look of a man who wishes to be sick but has nothing in his stomach to be sick with.

‘Was it as bad as that?’ he asked with a weak attempt at laughter.

Esca grinned. ‘Go to sleep.’

A
MILE
or two south of Calleva, where the forest opened suddenly to a steep drop of bracken-clad lhillside, two men were standing: a Roman and a Briton; and between them, head up and muzzle quivering into the wind, a young brindled wolf.

Abruptly, the Roman stooped to unbuckle the heavy bronze-studded collar from the wolf ’s neck. Cub was full grown now, though not yet come to his full strength, and the time had arrived when he must have his choice of returning to the wild. You could tame a wild thing, but never count it as truly won until, being free to return to its own kind, it chose to come back to you. Marcus had known that all along, and he and Esca had made their preparations with infinite care, bringing Cub to this spot again and again, that he might be sure of the way home if he wished to take it. If he wished to take it. With his fingers on the buckle, Marcus wondered whether he would ever feel the hairy living warmth of Cub’s neck again.

The collar was off now, and he thrust it into the breast of his tunic. For a lingering moment he fondled the pricked ears. Then he stood erect. ‘Go free, brother. Good hunting.’ Cub looked up into his face, puzzled; then, as a fresh burst of woodland smells reached his quivering nose, trotted off down the woodshore.

The other two watched him go in silence, a brindled shadow slipping away into the undergrowth. Then Marcus turned and made for the trunk of a fallen birch-tree a little way down the slope, moving quickly but awkwardly over the rough ground with a sideways lurch of the shoulders at every step. Rufrius Galarius had done his work well, and now, some eight months later, Marcus was to all intents and purposes as sound as ever, just as the surgeon had promised. He would carry the scars to his dying day, and a twisted leg that would bar him from the Legions, but that was all; indeed, after a winter spent with Esca’s help in training as though for the arena, he was now as hard as a gladiator. He reached the fallen tree-trunk and sat down on it, and an instant later Esca was squatting at his feet.

This was a favourite vantage point of theirs. The treetrunk made a convenient seat, and the steep drop of the hillside gave a clear view of wooded hills and the blue lift of the downs beyond. He had seen these rolling woods in their winter bareness, dappled like a partridge’s breast. He had seen the first outbreaking of the blackthorn foam; and now the full green flame of spring was running through the forest and the wild cherry-trees stood like lit candles along the woodland ways.

The two in their vantage point sat talking lazily, with long silences between, of many things under the sun, including the guest whom Uncle Aquila was expecting that evening; no less a person than the Legate of the Sixth Legion on his way down from Eburacum to Regnum, and thence to Rome.

‘He is a very old friend of your uncle’s?’ asked Esca idly.

‘Yes. I believe they served together in Judaea when my uncle was First Cohort of the Fretensis and this man was doing his year as a Tribune on the Staff. He must be a great deal younger than Uncle Aquila.’

‘And now he goes home, to his own place?’

‘Yes, but only on some business with the Senate, Uncle Aquila says; then back to the Eagles again.’

After a time they fell silent altogether, each busy with his own thoughts. Marcus’s were mainly concerned, as they had been for some time past, with the question of what he was going to do with himself and his life, now that he was well again. The Legions were closed to him, and that left just one other way of life that he would have turned to as a bird flies home. Farming was in the blood of most of his race, from the Senator with his estate in the Alban Hills to the time-expired Legionary with his pumpkin patch; and to Marcus, born and bred as he had been, farming and soldiering were yoke-mates, the two natural ways of life. But to start anything of that sort, one needed money. It was all right for the time-expired Legionary with his government grant of land. It would have been all right for Marcus if he had served his twenty years—even though he never became Prefect of an Egyptian Legion—and had savings from his pay and a centurion’s gratuity behind him. But as it was, he had nothing. He might have turned to Uncle Aquila for help, he knew, but he would not do that. His uncle, although he had sufficient for his needs, was not a rich man, and had done enough for him already. He should have set about finding some way to earn his living before now, he supposed, but there were so few ways open to a free man, and the frightful conviction was growing on him that he would end up as somebody’s secretary. There were people who preferred a free secretary to a slave, here—or even at home in Etruria. But even as that thought touched his mind, he knew that for him to drift home, rootless, and without any stake in the country that had bred him, nor any hope of such, would be only the shadow and none of the substance of homecoming. He would have carried his exile with him into his own hills and spoiled them; and that was all. No, he must look for his secretary-ship here in Britain.

Only this morning he had made up his mind to lay the secretary idea before Uncle Aquila tonight, but the Legate’s message had arrived, and now of course it would have to wait until the sudden guest had gone on his way. And part of him—a part of which he was rather ashamed—caught at the delay as a breathing-space; one day’s grace in which something might happen, though what was likely to happen he would have been hard put to it to say.

In their silence, the wild had drawn close in to the two in the vantage point. Presently a red glint slipping through the uncurling bracken and young foxgloves at the lower end of the clearing told them where a vixen passed. She paused an instant in full view, her pointed muzzle raised, the sun shining with almost metallic lustre on her coat; then she turned in among the trees. And watching the russet glint of her flicker out of sight, Marcus found himself thinking of Cottia.

The closer friendliness between her house and his had continued. He knew Kaeso quite well now, and even Valaria a little; Valaria, plumpish and prettyish and foolish, floating with pale-coloured mist-linen, clanking with bracelets, her hair closely curled as a ram’s fleece. He was for ever meeting her in her litter, as he came and went about Calleva, to the baths or the gymnasium or the Golden Vine, from whose stables he and Esca had lately hired ponies once or twice for a trip into the outback; and always he had to stop and talk. But of Cottia herself, he suddenly realized, he had seen less and less as the months went by.

With life opening to him again, he had had less need of her, and she had drawn back little by little, without a shadow of reproach. Yet he did not feel in the least guilty, and all at once, realizing how very easily Cottia could have made him feel guilty if she had chosen to, he felt a quick rush of warmth towards her. The odd thing was that now he came to think of it he did need Cottia as much as ever; he often forgot her altogether with the surface of his mind, but he knew that if he were never to see her again he would be very unhappy, perhaps as unhappy as he would if Cub never came back…

And would Cub ever come back? Would the call of his own kind prove stronger than the tie that bound him to his master? Either way, Marcus hoped that it would be quick and easy and final; no tearing of the heart in two, for Cub. He stirred, and looked down at Esca. ‘We have been roosting here long enough.’

The other tipped back his head, and for a moment their eyes met. Then Esca got up, and reached a helping hand to Marcus. ‘Let the Centurion whistle once, in case he is near; then we will go home.’

Marcus gave the shrill, broken whistle he had always used to summon Cub, and stood listening. A magpie, startled by the sound, scolded sharply from the woods behind them, and nothing more. After a few moments he whistled again. Still no answering bark, no brindled shape trotting out of the woodshore.

‘He is out of hearing,’ said Esca. ‘Well, he knows the way home, and there’ll be no harm come to him.’

No, there would be no harm come to Cub. He was well known in and around Calleva, and since he had long since lost his wolf-smell, the dog-pack accepted him for one of themselves, and one to be respected. No harm would come to him from his own kind, either, for save when man took a hand, there was little war between wolf-pack and dogpack, who indeed mated together often enough to make it sometimes hard to tell which was which. Only, if he went back to his own kind, the day might come when men would hunt Cub as they had hunted his mother.

Marcus longed to look back once, as they turned in among the hazel scrub of the forest verge, in case, even now, Cub might be coming uphill at a canter. But looking back was not in the bargain, and with his slave beside him he turned resolutely homeward.

They came to the South Gate of Calleva and passed through, Esca immediately falling the usual three paces to the rear. They made their way round by the short cut behind the temple of Sull-Minerva and entered the house by the nearest door, which gave on to the slaves’ quarters and the garden. Cub, if he came at all, would likely come over the old earthworks at the foot of the garden, for he was used to that road, but Marcus had had word with the City gatekeepers in case he came the other way.

They reached the courtyard without meeting anyone, and while Esca went to set out a fresh tunic for his master, Marcus turned off along the colonnade towards the atrium. As he neared the doorway, a strange voice sounded behind it. The guest had arrived already, then.

‘You are sure?’ said the voice, a harsh, clipped voice, but pleasant. ‘It would be a simple matter to send him up to the transit camp.’

And Uncle Aquila’s voice replied: ‘When I have not the space to lodge two guests at the same time, I will tell you. You are a fool, Claudius.’

There were two strangers in the long room with Uncle Aquila, both in uniform: one, resplendent under his coating of dust in the gilded bronze of a Legate; the other, standing a little behind him, evidently a Staff Officer. It seemed that they had only just arrived, for they had done no more than lay aside cloak and crested helmet. That much Marcus saw as he hesitated an instant on the threshold before his uncle looked round and saw him.

‘Ah, you are back, Marcus,’ said Uncle Aquila; and then, as he came forward to join the group, ‘Claudius, I present to you my nephew Marcus. Marcus, this is my very old friend Claudius Hieronimianus, Legate of the Sixth Legion.’

Marcus raised his hand in salute to his uncle’s friend, and found himself looking into a pair of long, jet-black eyes that seemed to have the sun behind them. The Legate was an Egyptian, and, he judged, of the old strain, for there was none of the Syrian softness in his face that he had seen so often in the faces of the men of the Nile. ‘I am very much honoured to meet the Legate of Victrix,’ he said.

The Legate’s face crinkled into a smile that sent a thousand fine lines deepening about his mouth and eyes. ‘And I am very glad to meet a kinsman of my ancient friend, all the more so because until today he might have been hatched out of a turtle’s egg in the sand, for all the kith and kin that he had to my knowledge.’ He indicated his companion. ‘I make known to you Tribune Servius Placidus, of my staff.’

Marcus turned to the young officer, and instantly became painfully conscious of his twisted leg. Once or twice before he had met people who made him feel like that, and he did not find that it endeared them to him. The two greeted each other as custom demanded, but without warmth. The Staff Officer was about Marcus’s own age, an extremely beautiful young man, with the graceful carriage, the oval face, and clustering hair that suggested Athenian ancestry. ‘Smooth as a girl,’ Marcus thought with quick dislike; and the phrase seemed vaguely familiar. So did the name, Placidus, for that matter; but it was a common enough name, and anyhow, this was no time to be trailing marsh-light memories. Marcus supposed that until the guests went to wash off the dust of the journey, it was for him to hold the Tribune in conversation, leaving Uncle Aquila free to talk to his old friend.

Marcipor had brought in wine for the travellers, and when it had been poured, the two young men turned from their elders and drifted over to a sunlit window. For a while they made casual small-talk to each other; but as the moments went by, Marcus found it harder and harder to think of anything to say, while the Tribune appeared to have been born bored. At last Marcus, at his wits’ end for another word, asked: ‘You return to Rome with the Legate, or only as far as Regnum?’

‘Oh, to Rome. Praise be to Bacchus, I am done with Britain once and for all when I board the galley in two days’ time.’

‘You have not, I take it, found Britain much to your taste?’

The other shrugged, and took a gulp of his wine. ‘The girls are well enough, and the hunting. For the rest—Roma Dea! I can bear to leave it behind me!’ A doubt seemed to strike him. ‘You are not native born to this benighted province?’

‘No,’ Marcus said. ‘I am not native born.’ And then, feeling that he had been over abrupt, he added: ‘Indeed, I have been out less than three years.’

‘What possessed you to come out at all? You must have found the long journey very trying.’

There was nothing so very much in the words, but the tone in which they were spoken made Marcus, who was rather on edge because of Cub, feel his hackles rising. ‘I came out to join my Legion,’ he said coldly.