The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (33 page)

‘The parade ground!’ Cottia said indignantly. ‘I have seen them on the parade ground through the gates of the transit camp. They march about in straight lines with all their legs working together, and make silly patterns of themselves while a man with a voice like a bull shouts at them. What has
that
to do with the fighting of wars?’

Marcus hastily gathered his wits together to make Cottia understand what it had to do with the fighting of wars, but he did not have to struggle with the explanations, for she hurried on without waiting for an answer. ‘Then if you cannot go back to the Legions, what
will
you do?’

‘I am not—quite sure.’

‘Perhaps you will go home,’ she said; and then seemed suddenly to realize her own words, and her eyes grew frightened. ‘You will go back to Rome, and take Cub and Esca with you!’

‘I do not know, Cottia, truly I do not know. But I do not suppose for a moment that I shall ever go home.’

But Cottia did not seem to hear him. ‘Take me too.’ Suddenly her voice broke almost into a wail. ‘They will build the city wall round here soon, and you could not leave me in a cage! You could not! Oh, Marcus, take me too!’

‘Even if it were to Rome?’ Marcus said, remembering her old wild hatred of all things Roman.

Cottia slipped from the bench, and turned to him as he got up also. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Anywhere at all, if only it was with you.’

Two distinct waves of feeling swept over Marcus, so close upon each other that they were almost one. The first was the joyful surprise of finding, and the second the desolation of losing again … How was he to explain to Cottia that possessing nothing in the world, without even a trade to his hands, he could not take her with him?

‘Cottia,’ he began wretchedly. ‘Cottia, my heart—it is no use—’

But before he could get any farther, he heard Esca calling, with a note of excitement in his voice. ‘Marcus! Where are you, Marcus?’

‘Down here. I am coming,’ he shouted back, and caught Cottia’s hand. ‘Come with me now, anyway.’

Rain had begun to spatter round them, but the sun was out again and the rain shone as it fell. Cub met them at the courtyard steps, circling about them and barking joyously, his straight bush of a tail streaming out behind. And hard behind Cub, was Esca. ‘This has just come for you,’ he said, holding out a slim, sealed papyrus roll.

Marcus took the roll from him, raising his brows at sight of the Sixth Legion’s signum on the seal; while Cottia and Esca and Cub all greeted each other after their fashion. In the act of breaking the thread he glanced up to see Uncle Aquila stalking towards them.

‘Curiosity is one of the privileges of extreme old age,’ said Uncle Aquila, towering over the group in the entrance to the colonnade.

Marcus unrolled the crackling papyrus sheet. He was half blind with the dazzle of the day outside and the written words seemed to float in the midst of red and green clouds. ‘To Centurion Marcus Flavius Aquila, from Claudius Hieronimianus, Legate of the Sixth Victrix, Greeting,’ the letter began. He skimmed the few close lines to the end, then glanced up and met Cottia’s wide golden eyes fixed on him. ‘Are you a witch out of Thessaly, to draw down the moon in a net of your hair? Or is it only the Other Sight that you have?’ he said; and returned to the letter in his hand.

He began to read it a second time, more carefully, taking it in, as he had scarcely been able to do at first, and giving them the gist of it as he went along. ‘The Legate has laid that matter before the Senate, and their ruling is as we knew it must be. But he says that “in just recognition of service to the State, which is none the less real that it must remain unpublished …”’ He looked up quickly. ‘Esca, you are a Roman citizen.’

Esca was puzzled, almost a little wary. ‘I am not sure that I understand. What does it mean?’

It meant so much; rights, and duties. It could even, in a way, mean the cancelling of a clipped ear, for if a man were a Roman citizen, that fact was stronger than the fact that he had been a slave. Esca would find that out, later. Also, in Esca’s case, it was his honourable quittance, the wooden foil of a gladiator who had won freedom with honour in the arena; the settlement of all debts. ‘It is as though they gave you your wooden foil,’ he said; and saw Esca, who had been a gladiator, begin to understand, before he returned again to his letter.

‘The Legate says that for the same service, I am to be awarded the gratuity of a time-expired cohort centurion—paid in the old style, part sesterces, part land.’ A long pause, and then he began to read word for word. ‘Following the established custom, the land-grant will be made over to you here in Britain, as the province of your last military service; but a good friend of mine on the Senate benches writes me that if you so wish, there should be no difficulty in working an exchange for land in Etruria, which I believe is your own country. The official documents will be reaching both of you in due course, but since the wheels of officialdom are notoriously slow, I hope that I may be the first to give you the news…’

He stopped reading. Slowly the hand which held the Legate’s letter dropped to his side. He looked round at the faces that crowded him in: Uncle Aquila’s wearing the look of someone watching with detached interest the result of an experiment; Esca’s face with an alert and waiting look in it; Cottia’s, grown all at once very pointed and white; Cub’s great head upraised and watchful. Faces. And suddenly he wanted to escape from them all; even from Cottia, even from Esca. They were part of all his plans and calculations, they belonged to him and he to them, but for this one moment, he wanted to be alone, to realize what had happened without anyone else entering in to complicate it. He turned away from them and stood leaning against the half wall beside the courtyard steps, staring away down the rain-wet garden where the little native daffodils were a myriad points of dancing flame under the wild fruit-trees.

He could go home.

Standing there with the last cold spattering of the shower blowing in his face, he thought ‘I can go home,’ and saw behind his eyes, the long road leading South, the Legion’s road, white in the Etruscan sunlight; the farm-steads among their terraced olive-trees, and the wine-darkness of the Apennines beyond. He seemed to catch the resiny, aromatic smell of the pine forests dropping to the shore, and the warm mingling of thyme and rosemary and wild cyclamen that was the summer scent of his own hills. He could go back to all that now, to the hills and the people among whom he had been bred, and for whom he had been so bitterly home-sick, here in the North. But if he did, would there not be another hunger on him all his life? For other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling?

Suddenly he knew why Uncle Aquila had come back to this country when his years of service were done. All his life he would remember his own hills, sometimes he would remember them with longing; but Britain was his home. That came to him, not as a new thing, but as something so familiar that he wondered why he had not known it before.

Cub thrust a cold muzzle under his hand, and he drew a long breath and turned once again to the others. Uncle Aquila stood still with arms folded and huge head a little bent, looking on with that air of detached interest.

‘My congratulations, Marcus,’ he said. ‘It is by no means everyone for whom my friend Claudius will sweat as he must have sweated to drag justice out of the Senate.’

‘I could lay my head on his feet,’ Marcus said softly. ‘It is a new beginning—a new beginning, Esca.’

‘Of course, it will take a little time to work the exchange,’ said Uncle Aquila, thoughtfully. ‘But I imagine that you should be back in Etruria by autumn.’

‘I shall not be going back to Etruria,’ Marcus said. ‘I shall take up my land here in Britain.’ He looked at Cottia. She was standing just as she had stood ever since he began to read the Legate’s letter, still and waiting as a winter-bound withy.

‘Not Rome, after all; but you did say, “Anywhere”, did you not, Cottia sweet,’ he said, holding out a hand to her.

She looked at him for an instant, questioningly. Then she smiled, and making a little gesture to gather her mantle as though she were quite prepared to come now, anywhere, anywhere at all, put her hand into his.

‘And now I suppose that I shall have to arrange matters with Kaeso,’ said Uncle Aquila. ‘Jupiter! Why did I never realize how peaceful life was before you came!’

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That evening, having written to the Legate for both of them, Marcus had wandered up to join his uncle in the watch-tower, while Esca went to arrange about getting the letter sent. He was leaning at the high window, his elbows propped on the sill, his chin in his hands, while behind him Uncle Aquila sat squarely at the writing-table, surrounded by his History of Siege Warfare. The high room held the fading daylight as in a cup, but below in the courtyard the shadows were gathering, and the rolling miles of forest had the softness of smoke, as Marcus looked out over them to the familiar wave-lift of the Downs.

Down country: yes, that was the country for farming. Thyme for bees, and good grazing; maybe even a southern slope that could be terraced for vines. He and Esca, and what little labour they could afford, little enough that would be at first; but they would manage. Farming with free or freed labour would be an experiment, but it had been done before, though not often. Esca had given him a distaste for owning human beings.

‘We have been talking it over, Esca and I; and if I have any choice in the matter, I am going to try for land in the Down Country,’ he said suddenly, still with his chin in his hands.

‘I imagine that you should not have much difficulty in arranging that with the powers that be,’ said Uncle Aquila, searching for a mislaid tablet among the orderly litter on his table.

‘Uncle Aquila, did you know about this—beforehand, I mean?’

‘I knew that Claudius intended bringing your names before the Senate, but whether any result would come of it was quite another matter.’ He snorted. ‘Trust the Senate to pay its debts in the old style! Land and sesterces; as much land and as few sesterces as may be; it comes cheaper that way.’

‘Also one Roman citizenship,’ said Marcus, quickly.

‘Which is a thing apart from price, though not costly in the giving,’ agreed Uncle Aquila. ‘I think they need not have economized on your gratuity.’

Marcus laughed. ‘We shall do well enough, Esca and I.’

‘I have no doubt of it—always supposing that you do not first starve. You will have to build and stock, remember.’

‘Most of the building we can do ourselves; wattle and daub will serve until we grow rich.’

‘And what will Cottia think of that?’

‘Cottia will be content,’ Marcus said.

‘Well, you know where to come when you need help.’

‘Yes, I know.’ Marcus turned from the window. ‘If we should need help—really need it, after three bad harvests—I will come.’

‘Not until then?’

‘Not until then. No.’

Uncle Aquila glared. ‘You are impossible! You grow more and more like your father every day!’

‘Do I?’ Marcus said with a glint of laughter and hesitated; there were some things that it was never easy to say to the older man. ‘Uncle Aquila, you have done so much for Esca and me already. If I had not had you to turn to—’

‘Bah!’ said Uncle Aquila, still searching for his missing tablet. ‘No one else to turn to me. No son of my own to plague me.’ He found the tablet at last, and began with delicate precision to smooth the used wax with his quill pen, evidently under the impression that it was the flat end of his stylus. Suddenly he looked up under his brows. ‘If you had applied for that exchange, I believe I should have been rather lonely.’

‘Did you think I would be away back to Clusium on the first tide?’

‘I did not think so, no,’ said Uncle Aquila slowly, looking with surprised disgust at the wreck of his quill, and laying it down. ‘You have now made me ruin a perfectly good pen and destroy several extremely important notes. I hope you are satisfied … No, I did not think so, but until the time came, and the choice was between your hands, I could not be sure.’

‘Nor could I,’ Marcus said. ‘But I am sure now.’

All at once, and seemingly for no particular reason, he was remembering his olive-wood bird. It had seemed to him as the little flames licked through the pyre of birch-bark and dead heather on which he had laid it, that with the childhood treasure, all his old life was burning away. But a new life, a new beginning, had warmed out of the grey ash, for himself, and Esca, and Cottia; perhaps for other people too; even for an unknown downland valley that would one day be a farm.

Somewhere a door slammed, and Esca’s step sounded below in the colonnade, accompanied by a clear and merry whistling.

‘Oh when I joined the Eagles,

(As it might be yesterday)

I kissed a girl at Clusium

Before I marched away.’

And it came to Marcus suddenly that slaves very seldom whistled. They might sing, if they felt like it or if the rhythm helped their work, but whistling was in some way different; it took a free man to make the sort of noise Esca was making.

Uncle Aquila looked up again from mending the broken pen. ‘Oh, by the way. I have a piece of news that may interest you, if you have not heard it already. They are rebuilding Isca Dumnoniorum.’

ROMAN BRITAIN