The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (16 page)

‘It is to keep faith with your father, then?’

‘Yes,’ Marcus said, ‘amongst other things. It is good to hear the trumpets sounding again, Cottia.’

‘I do not think that I quite understand,’ Cottia said. ‘But I see that you must go. When will you start?’

‘Tomorrow morning. I shall go down to Rufrius Galarius first, but Calleva will not come in my way again as I go north.’

‘And when will you come back?’

‘I do not know. Maybe, if all goes well, before winter.’

‘And Esca goes with you? And Cub?’

‘Esca,’ Marcus said. ‘Not Cub. I leave Cub in your charge, and you must come and see him every day and talk to him about me. In that way neither of you will forget about me before I come back.’

Cottia said, ‘We have good memories, Cub and I. But I will come every day.’

‘Good.’ Marcus smiled at her, trying to coax a smile in return. ‘Oh, and Cottia, do not mention the Eagle to anyone. I am supposed to be going on business for my uncle; only—I wanted you to know the truth.’

The smile came then, but it was gone again at once. ‘Yes, Marcus.’

‘That is better. Cottia, I cannot stay any longer, but before I go, there is one thing else that I want you to do for me.’ As he spoke he pulled off the heavy gold bracelet with its engraved signum. The skin showed almond white where it had been, on the brown of his wrist. ‘I cannot wear this where I am going; will you keep it safe for me until I come back to claim it?’

She took it from him without a word, and stood looking down at it in her hands. The light caught the Capricorn badge and the words beneath. ‘
Pia Fidelis
’. Very gently she wiped the rain-drops from the gold, and stowed it under her mantle. ‘Yes, Marcus,’ she said again. She was standing very straight and still, very forlorn, and with the darkness of her mantle covering her bright hair as it had done when he first saw her.

He tried to think of something to say; he wanted to thank her for the things that he was grateful for; but with everything that was in him reaching out to what lay ahead, somehow he could not find the right words, and he would not give Cottia words that meant nothing. At the last moment he would have liked to tell her that if he never came back, she was to keep his bracelet; but maybe it were better that he told Uncle Aquila. ‘You must go now,’ he said. ‘The Light of the Sun be with you, Cottia.’

‘And with you,’ said Cottia. ‘And with you, Marcus. I shall be listening for you to come back—for you to come down here to the garden foot and whistle for me again, when the leaves are falling.’

Next instant she had put aside a dripping blackthorn spray and turned from him; and he watched her walking away without a backward glance, through the sharp thin rain.

F
ROM
Luguvallium in the west to Segedunum in the east, the Wall ran, leaping along with the jagged contours of the land; a great gash of stone-work, still raw with newness. Eighty miles of fortresses, milecastles, watch-towers, strung on one great curtain wall, and backed by the vallum ditch and the coast-to-coast Legionary road; and huddled along its southern side, the low sprawl of wine shops, temples, married quarters, and markets that always gathered in the wake of the Legions. A great and never-ceasing smother of noise: voices, marching feet, turning wheels, the ring of hammer on armourer’s anvil, the clear calling of trumpets over all. This was the great Wall of Hadrian, shutting out the menace of the north.

On a morning in early summer, two travellers who had been lodging for some days in a dirty and dilapidated inn close under the walls of Chilurnium presented themselves at the Praetorian gate of the fortress, demanding to pass through to the north. There was not much coming and going across the frontier, save for the military patrols; but such as there was, hunters for the most part, or trappers with chained wild beasts for the arena, or a stray fortune-teller or quack-salver, had all to pass through the great fortresses of the Wall.

They were a faintly disreputable couple, mounted on small ex-cavalry mares of the Arab type which had certainly seen better days. The Legions could always find a steady market for their old mounts, cheap and well trained, and with several years of working life in them. They were to be seen everywhere along the Empire’s roads, and there was nothing about these two to suggest that they had been bought, not for money, but by a few words signed by the Legate of the Sixth Legion, on a sheet of papyrus.

Esca had made very little real difference to his appearance, for he had no need; he had returned to the dress of his own people, and that was all. But with Marcus it was quite otherwise. He also had taken to British dress, and wore long bracco of saffron wool, cross-gartered to the knee, under a tunic of faded and distinctly dirty violet cloth. Bracco were comfortable in a cold climate, and many of the wandering herbalists and suchlike wore them. But the dark cloak flung back over his shoulders hung in folds that were foreign and exotic, and he wore a greasy Phrygian cap of scarlet leather stuck rakishly on the back of his head. A small silver talisman shaped like an open hand covered the brand of Mithras on his forehead, and he had grown a beard. Being little over a month old, it was not a very good beard; but such as it was, he had drenched it in scented oils. He looked much like any other wandering quack-salver, though somewhat young, despite the beard; and there was certainly no trace about him of the Centurion of the Eagles he had once been. His box of salves, provided for him by Rufrius Galarius, was stowed in the pack behind Esca’s saddlepad, and with it his oculist’s stamp, a slab of slate on which the hardened salves were ground, which proclaimed in engraved letters round the edge, ‘The Invincible Anodyne of Demetrius of Alexandria, for all kinds of defective eyesight’.

The sentries passed them through without trouble into the fortress of Chilurnium, into the world of square-set barrack lines, and life ordered by trumpet calls that was familiar as a home-coming to Marcus. But at the Northern Gate, as they reached it, they met a squadron of the Tungrian Cavalry Cohort that formed the garrison coming up from exercise. They reined aside and sat watching while the squadron trotted by; and that was when the pull of long-familiar custom laid hold of Vipsania, Marcus’s mare, and as the tail of the squadron passed she flung round with a shrill whinny, and tried to follow. Because of the old wound, Marcus had little power in his right knee, and it was a few trampling and sweating moments before he could master her and swing her back to the gate, and when he finally managed it, it was to find the decurion of the gate guard leaning against the guard-house wall, holding his sides and yelping with laughter, while his merry men stood grinning in the background.

‘Never bring a stolen cavalry nag into a cavalry barracks,’ said the decurion amiably, when he had had his laugh out. ‘That’s good advice, that is.’

Marcus, still soothing his angry and disappointed mare, demanded with a cool hauteur that Aesculapius himself could scarcely have bettered, had he been accused of being a horse-thief, ‘Do you suggest that I, Demetrius of Alexandria,
the
Demetrius of Alexandria, am in the habit of stealing cavalry horses? Or that if I were, I should not have had the wisdom to steal a better one than this?’

The decurion was a cheerful soul, and the small grinning crowd that had begun to gather spurred him on to further efforts. He winked. ‘You can see the brand on her shoulder, as plain as a pilum shaft.’

‘If you cannot also see as plain as a pilum shaft that the brand has been cancelled,’ Marcus retorted, ‘then you must be in dire need of my Invincible Anodyne for all kinds of defective eyesight! I can let you have a small pot for three sesterces.’

There was a roar of laughter. ‘Better have two pots, Sextus,’ somebody called out. ‘Remember the time you didn’t see that Pict’s legs sticking out from under the furze bush?’

The decurion evidently did remember the Pict’s legs, and would rather not, for though he laughed with the rest, his laughter rang a trifle hollow, and he made haste to change the subject. ‘Are there not enough sore eyes for your salving in the Empire, that you must needs go jaunting beyond the Pale to look for more?’

‘Maybe I am like Alexander, in search of fresh worlds to conquer,’ said Marcus modestly.

The decurion shrugged. ‘Every man to his own taste. The old world is good enough for me—with a whole hide to enjoy it in!’

‘Lack of enterprise. That is the trouble with you.’ Marcus sniffed. ‘If I had been so lacking, should I now be
the
Demetrius of Alexandria, the inventor of the Invincible Anodyne, the most celebrated oculist between Caesarea and—’

‘
Cave!
Here’s the Commander,’ somebody said. Instantly such of the group who had no business there melted away, and the rest straightened themselves on their feet and became painfully efficient. And Marcus, still discoursing loudly on his own importance and the healing powers of the Invincible Anodyne, was hustled out through the dark crowded arch of the gatehouse, with Esca, solemn-faced, in his wake.

The Frontier was behind them, and they rode out into the one-time Province of Valentia.

Chilurnium must be a pleasant place for the garrison, Marcus thought, as his quick glance took in the shallow wooded vale, the quiet river. There would be fishing and bathing here—when no trouble was brewing—and good hunting in the forest; a very different life from that of the upland fortresses farther west, where the Wall crossed bare moorland, leaping from crest to crest of the black hills. But his own mood just now was for the high hills, the tearing wind, and the curlews crying, and as soon as Chilurnium was well behind, he was glad to swing westward following the directions given them by a hunter before they set out, leaving the quiet vale for the distant lift of damson-dark uplands that showed through a break in the oakwoods.

Esca had ranged up alongside him, and they rode together in companionable silence, their horses’ unshod hooves almost soundless on the rough turf. No roads in the wilderness and no shoe-smiths, either. The country south of the Wall had been wild and solitary enough, but the land through which they rode that day seemed to hold no living thing save the roe-deer and the mountain fox; and though only the man-made wall shut it off from the south, the hills here seemed more desolate and the distances darker.

It was almost like seeing a friendly face in a crowd of strangers when, long after noon, they came dipping down over a shoulder of the high moors into a narrow green glen through which a thread of white water purled down over shelving stones, where the rowan-trees were in flower, filling the warm air with the scent of honey. A good place to make a halt, it seemed to them, and they off-saddled accordingly, and having watered the horses, and seen them begin to graze, they drank from their cupped hands and sprawled at their ease on the bank. There was wheaten biscuit and dried fish in the saddle-pack, but they left it there, having long since learned—Marcus on the march and Esca on the hunting trail—that morning and evening were the times for food.

Esca had stretched himself full length, with a sigh of content, under the leaning rowan-trees; but Marcus lay propped on one elbow to watch the little torrent out of sight round the shoulder of the glen. The silence of the high hills was all about them, made up of many small sounds: the purling of the water, the murmur of wild bees among the rowan blossom overhead, the contented cropping of the two mares. It was good to be up here, Marcus thought, after the long contriving of ways and means, the days of hanging along the Wall, kicking one’s heels and listening for the faintest breath of a rumour that had evidently died as a stray wind dies, since it came to the Legate’s ears. Up here in the silence of the hills, the strivings and impatiences of the past few weeks that had seemed to web him round all fell away, leaving him face to face with his task.

They had worked out a rough plan of campaign weeks ago, in Uncle Aquila’s study, which now seemed a whole world away. It was very simple: merely to work their way north in a series of casts that would take them from coast to coast each time, in the manner of a hound cutting across a scent. In that way they must cut the trail of the Eagle—and the Legion, too, for that matter—at every cast; and surely somewhere, if they kept their eyes and ears open, they must pick it up. It had all seemed fairly simple in Uncle Aquila’s study, but out here in the great emptiness beyond the Frontier it seemed a gigantic task.

And yet its seeming hopelessness was a challenge that he took up joyously. For the moment he forgot the sober facts of his search, and remembered only the personal quest. And sitting there in the little sun-warmed glen, his heart lifted suddenly and almost painfully to the crowning moment when he would carry the lost Eagle back into Eburacum, knowing that his father’s Legion would live again, its name clean before the world; and surely, surely, no god worth the serving would be so unjust as not to see that his father knew that he had kept faith.

Esca broke the silence presently. ‘So the contriving is done with,’ he said, speaking apparently into the bee-loud rowan branches above his head, ‘and the hunting is begun at last.’

‘The hunting-ground is a wide one,’ Marcus said, and turned to look down at his companion. ‘And who knows into what strange covers the hunt may lead us? Esca, you know this sort of country better than I can do, and if the people are not of your tribe, at least they are nearer to you than to me. They are people of the shield-boss, and not of the pattern on my dagger sheath. Therefore, if you tell me to do a thing, I will do it, without clamouring to know why.’

‘There may be wisdom in that,’ Esca said.

Presently Marcus shifted, looking up at the sun. ‘Soon we must be moving on, I suppose, lest we sleep in the woods tonight, seeing that we have not yet found this village that the man at the inn spoke of ’; for even south of the Wall one did not go to a strange village after dark, unless one was tired of life.