The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (24 page)

How long he stood like that he never knew, until he saw the blue spark strengthen slowly, sink a little, and then lick up suddenly into a clear, small flame. It might have been only a fault in the wick… He realized that he was breathing in great shuddering gasps, and the sweat was running down his face and breast. He looked at Esca, and Esca returned his look; neither of them spoke. Then he started again on the fourth pin. It was the most stubborn of the lot, but it yielded at last, and Eagle and thunderbolts came loose in his hands. He lifted them off with a long, shaken breath, and sheathed his dagger. Now that it was done, he wanted to fling the staff aside and make a blind dash for the open air, but he schooled himself to take the staff from Esca and return it to its place in the recess, to lay the thunderbolts and the four bronze pegs on the floor beside it, before he turned at last to go, carrying the Eagle in the crook of his arm.

Esca had taken the branch of heather from his belt, and, still carrying the glim, followed him, moving backward to brush out any recognizable tracks they might have left in the dust. His own tracks, Marcus knew, were all too easily recognizable, because, however hard he tried not to, he dragged his right leg a little.

It seemed a long way round to the other side of the tomb chamber, and every few instants Esca glanced hastily aside to the ring and the axehead, as though they were a snake about to strike. But they gained the mouth of the entrance passage at last, and began to make their way down it; Esca still switching out their trail. Marcus moved sideways along the wall, guarding his own back and his friend’s. Esca’s crouching figure blotted out most of the light from the glim he carried, save where it fell on the dusty flag-stones and the flicking heather-switch, and his shadow swallowed up their way, so that every step Marcus took was into the edge of the darkness. The passage seemed much longer than it had done when they followed it inward; so long that a new nightmare grew on Marcus that either there were two passages and they had chosen the wrong one, or the only one had ceased, since their coming in, to have any end.

But the end was still there. Suddenly Esca’s giant shadow ran on to the sealskin curtain, and they had reached it.

‘Get ready to douse the light,’ Marcus said.

The other glanced round without a word. Marcus’s hand was on the curtain when they were plunged in darkness. He drew it back slowly, with infinite care, ears and eyes straining for any hint of danger, and the two of them ducked out under the lintel. He let the curtain ease back into place behind them, and stood with his hand on Esca’s shoulder, drawing in great gasps of the clean night air with its scent of bog myrtle and its salt tang of the sea, and gazing up at the veiled stars. It seemed to him that they had been many hours in the dark; but the stars had swung only a little way on their courses since he saw them last. The summer lightning was still flickering along the hills. He realized that Esca was shuddering from head to foot, like a horse that smells fire, and tightened his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

‘We are out,’ he said. ‘We are through. It is over. Steady, old wolf.’

Esca answered him with a shaken breath of laughter. ‘It is that I want to be sick.’

‘So do I,’ Marcus said. ‘But we have no time, just now. This is no place to wait in until we are discovered by the priest-kind. Come.’

Some while later, having recrossed the hills and fetched a wide half-circle round the dun and encampment, they emerged from the steeply falling woods on to the bleak shores of the loch, just where a spit of rough turf and boulders laced together with alder scrub ran out from the grey shingle beach. Just above the beach they halted, and Esca hurriedly stripped. ‘Now give me the Eagle.’ He took it, handling it reverently, though it had been no Eagle of his; and a moment later Marcus was alone. He stood with one hand on a low-hanging rowan branch, and watched the pale blur that was Esca’s body slip down through the alder scrub, and come out on the spit of land below. There was the tiniest splash as of a fish leaping, then silence; only the water lapping on the lonely shore, and then the faint mutter of thunder a long way off, and a night bird cried eerily in the heavy silence. For what seemed a long time, he waited, eyes straining into the darkness, and then suddenly a pale blur moved again on the spit, and a few moments later Esca was beside him once again, wringing the water out of his hair.

‘Well?’ Marcus murmured.

‘It fits into the place under the bank like a nut into a nut-shell,’ Esca told him. ‘They might search till the loch runs dry, and never find it; but I shall know the place when I come again.’

The next danger was that their absence would have been noticed; but when they came to the dun again, and passed unseen through the gateway, all was quiet. They were none too soon. The sky was still black—blacker than at their setting out, for the cloud had thickened, blotting out the stars. But the smell of the day-spring was in the air, unmistakable as that other smell of thunder. They slipped in through the hut-place doorway. In the darkness only the embers of the fire glowed like red jewels, and nothing moved. Then a dog growled, half sleepily, green-eyed in the gloom, and there was a sudden stirring and an equally sleepy murmur of inquiry from Liathan, who lay nearest to the door.

‘It is only I,’ Marcus said. ‘Vipsania was restless; it’s the thunder in the air. Always it makes her restless.’

He lay down. Esca also lay down, curled close to the fire, that he might not have damp hair to explain in the morning. Silence settled again over the sleeping-hut.

A
FEW
hours later Marcus and Esca took their leave of the dun, and started out, riding through a world that was clear-washed and as deeply coloured as a purple grape, after the thunderstorm which had finally broken over them at dawn. Southwards they went at first, following the shores of the loch to its foot, then north-east by a herding path through the mountains that brought them down towards evening to the shores of another loch, a long sea-loch this time, loud with the crying of shore-birds. That night they slept in a village that was no more than a cluster of turf bothies clinging to the narrow shore between the mountains and the grey water, and next morning set out again for the head of the loch, where there was a village through which they had passed before.

All that day they rode easily, breathing the horses often. Marcus was eager to be out of this land of sea-lochs, through which one had to zigzag like a snipe, in which one could so easily become trapped and entangled, but it was no good getting too far from the Place of Life before the next move in the game could be played. The loss of the Eagle would have been discovered at midnight, when the priest went to renew the offering, and suspicion, though it would be widespread over all outside the tribe who had gathered to the Feast of New Spears, would certainly fall most heavily on himself and Esca. So the tribe would be up and after them long before now. Knowing the way that they had taken, Marcus reckoned that their pursuers could be up with them not long after noon if they crossed the loch by coracle and comman-deered ponies on the near shore, as they undoubtedly would do. But he had forgotten to allow for the difficulties of the few mountain passes, and it was much later than he had expected when at last his ear caught the soft drumming of unshod hooves a long way off; and looking back, he saw a ragged skein of six or seven horsemen coming at break-neck speed down a steep side-glen towards them. He drew a quick breath that was almost of relief, for it had been a nerve-racking business waiting for them. ‘Here they come at last,’ he said to Esca; and then as a distant yell echoed down the mountainside, ‘hear how the hounds give tongue.’

Esca laughed quietly, his eyes bright with the excitement of danger. ‘Sweff! Sweff!’ he encouraged them softly. ‘Do we ride on, or rein in and wait for them?’

‘Rein in and wait,’ Marcus decided. ‘They will know that we have seen them.’

They wheeled the mares, and sat waiting while the skein of wild riders swept towards them, the ponies sure-footed as goats among the rocks of the steep glen. ‘Mithra! What cavalry they would make!’ Marcus said, watching them. Vipsania was uneasy; she fidgeted and side-stepped, blowing down her nose, her ears pricked forward, and he patted her neck re-assuringly. The tribesmen had reached the low ground now, and swung into the long curve of the lochside; and a few moments later they were up with the two who waited for them, and reining back their ponies in full gallop, dropped to the ground.

Marcus looked them over as they crowded in on him, seven warriors of the tribe, Dergdian and his brother among them. He took in their ugly looks, and the war-spears they carried, and his face was puzzled and inquiring. ‘Dergdian? Liathan? What is it that you want with me, in so much haste?’

‘You know well enough what it is that we want with you,’ Dergdian said. His face was set like a stone, and his hand tightened on the shaft of his spear.

‘But I fear that I do not,’ Marcus said in a tone of rising annoyance, pretending not to notice that two of the tribesmen, leaving their own mounts standing, had gone to Vipsania’s and Minna’s heads. ‘You will have to tell me.’

‘Yes, we will tell you,’ an older hunter cut in. ‘We come to take back the winged god; also for blood to wash out the insult that you have put upon us and upon the gods of our tribe.’

The others broke into a threatening outcry, pressing in on the two, who had by now dismounted also. Marcus faced them with a pucker of bewilderment between his black brows. ‘The winged god?’ he repeated. ‘The Eagle-god that we saw carried at the Feast of New Spears? Why, you—’ Light seemed to dawn on him. ‘You mean that you have lost it?’

‘We mean that it is stolen, and we are come to take it back from those who robbed us,’ Dergdian said very softly; and the softness was as though a cold finger gently stroked Marcus’s spine.

He looked into the other’s face with slowly widening eyes. ‘And it must needs be I who stole it?’ he said, and then flared out at them. ‘Why in the name of the Thunderer should I want a wingless Roman Eagle?’

‘You might have had your reasons,’ said the Chieftain in the same soft voice.

‘I cannot think of any.’

The tribesmen were growing impatient; there were shouts of ‘Kill! kill!’ And they crowded closer; fierce, rage-darkened faces were thrust into Marcus’s and a spear was shaken before his eyes. ‘Kill the thieves! There has been enough of talking!’

Startled by the angry turmoil, Vipsania was flinging this way and that, showing the whites of her eyes, and Minna squealed, going up in a rearing turn as she tried to break from the man who held her, and was forced down again by a blow between the ears.

Marcus raised his voice above the tumult. ‘Is it the custom of the Seal People to hunt down and slay those who have been their guests? Well do the Romans call the men of the North barbarians.’

The shouting sank to a sullen, menacing mutter, and he went on more quietly.

‘If you are so sure that we have stolen the Red Crests’ god, you have but to search our gear, and you will surely find it. Search, then.’

The muttering grew fiercer, and Liathan had already turned to Esca’s mare, stretching out his hand to the fastening of the pack. Marcus moved distastefully aside, and stood watching. Esca’s hand tightened for an instant on the shaft of his spear, as though he longed to use it; then he shrugged, and swung away to join Marcus. Together they watched their few possessions tumbled on the grass; a couple of cloaks, a cooking-pot, some strips of smoked deer-meat flung out with rough haste. The lid of the bronze medicine box was wrenched back, and one of the hunters began to rummage inside like a little dog after a rat. Marcus said quietly to the Chieftain, who stood beside him with folded arms, also looking on, ‘Will you bid your hounds be less rough with the tools of my trade. It may be that there are still sore eyes in Albu, though your small son’s eyes are well.’

Dergdian flushed at the reminder, and glanced aside at him for an instant, with a kind of sullen half-shame; then he spoke sharply to the man who was delving among the salves. ‘Softly, you fool; there is no need that you should break the medicine sticks.’

The man growled, but handled the things more carefully thereafter. Meanwhile the others had unfolded and shaken out the sheepskin saddle-pads, and all but torn the bronze ring-brooch out of a violet-coloured cloak by their rough handling.

‘Are you satisfied now?’ Marcus asked, when everything had been turned inside out, and the tribesmen stood about, baffled and empty-handed, staring down at the chaos they had made. ‘Or is it that you would search us to the skin?’ He held out his arms, and their eyes ran over him, over Esca. It was perfectly obvious that they could have nothing a tenth the size and weight of the Eagle hidden on them.

The Chieftain shook his head. ‘We must cast our net wider, it seems.’

The tribesmen were all known to Marcus, at least by sight; they looked bewildered, sullen, a little shamed, and they found it hard to meet his eyes. At a gesture from the Chieftain they began to gather up the scattered objects and bundle them, with the torn cloak with its dangling ring-brooch, into the pack-cloth. Liathan stooped to the disembowelled medicine box, glancing up at Marcus, and then away again.

They had offended against their own laws of hospitality. They had hunted down two who had been their guests, and not found the winged god, after all. ‘Come back with us,’ said the Chieftain. ‘Come back with us, lest our hearths are shamed.’

Marcus shook his head. ‘We are for the South, before the year closes in. Go and cast your net wider for this wingless winged god of yours. We shall remember that we have been your guests, Esca and I.’ He smiled. ‘The rest we have already forgotten. Good hunting to you on the game trails this winter.’

When the tribesmen had whistled up their own ponies, who had stood quietly by all this while with their reins over their heads, and, remounting, set off back the way they had come, Marcus did not move at once. He stood gazing after the dwindling specks up the glen, with a queer regret, while his hand mechanically soothed and fondled his upset and angry mare.