The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (9 page)

‘And if it had been another, after all?’

‘Then I should have escaped later, to the wilds where my clipped ear would not betray me. There are still free tribes beyond the Frontiers.’ As he spoke, he drew from the breast of his rough tunic, where it had lain against his skin, a slender knife, which he handled as tenderly as if it had been a thing living and beloved. ‘I had this, to my release.’

‘And now?’ Marcus said, not giving a glance to the narrow, deadly thing.

For a moment the sullenness lifted from Esca’s face. He leaned forward and let the dagger fall with a little clatter on to the inlaid table at Marcus’s side. ‘I am the Centurion’s hound, to lie at the Centurion’s feet,’ he said.

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So Esca joined the household and, carrying the spear that marked him for a personal slave and superior to mere household slaves, stood behind Marcus’s couch at meals to pour wine for him, fetched and carried and saw to his belongings, and slept on a mattress across his door at night. He made a very good body-slave, so good that Marcus guessed him to have been somebody’s armour-bearer in the days before his ear was clipped; a father’s, or an elder brother’s, perhaps, after the custom of the tribes. He never asked about those days, nor how Esca had come into the Calleva arena, because something about his slave, some inner reserve, warned him that to ask would be an intrusion, a walking in without leave. One day, perhaps, Esca would tell him freely, but not yet.

The weeks went by, and suddenly the rose-bushes in the courtyard were gemmed with swelling leaf-buds, and the air had a sense of quickening that was the first distant promise of spring. Slowly, very slowly, Marcus’s leg was mending. It no longer woke him with a stab of pain every time he turned in the night, and he could hobble round the house more and more easily.

As time passed, he got into the way of leaving his stick behind him and walking with a hand on Esca’s shoulder instead. It seemed natural to do that, for without quite realizing it, he was slipping more and more often from the master to the friend in his dealings with Esca; though, after that first night, Esca never for an instant forgot the slave in his dealings with Marcus.

That winter there was a lot of trouble with wolves in the district. Driven out from their fastnesses by hunger, they hunted under the very walls of Calleva; and often Marcus would hear their long-drawn cry in the night, setting every dog in the town baying in that frenzy that was half hate and half longing, half enemy hurling defiance at enemy, half kin calling to kin. In the outlying farms of the forest clearings, lambing pens were attacked, and anxious men kept the wolfguard every night. At a village a few miles away a pony was killed, at another a baby was taken.

Then one day, Esca, going into the town on an errand for Marcus, returned with news of a country-wide wolf hunt planned for next day. It had started simply among the outlying farms, desperate to save their lambing ewes, then gathered to itself professional hunters, and a couple of young officers from the transit camp out for a day’s sport; and now it seemed that half the countryside was out to end the menace. He poured it all out to Marcus. The hunters were to meet at such a place, two hours before sunrise; at such another place they were going to drive the thickets with dogs and torches; and Marcus laid aside the belt he was mending, and listened to him as eager to hear as his slave was to tell.

Listening, he longed to be off on that wolf hunt and run the spring fret out of his bones; and he knew that the same longing was hot in his slave. For him, it did not seem likely that there would be any more hunting, but that was no reason why there should be none for Esca. ‘Esca,’ he said abruptly, when the other had told all that there was to tell. ‘It would surely be a good thing if you joined this wolf hunt.’

Esca’s whole face lit with eagerness, but after a moment he said, ‘It would mean maybe a night and a day that the Centurion must do without his slave.’

‘I shall do well enough,’ Marcus told him. ‘I shall borrow half of Stephanos from my uncle. But what will you do for spears? I left my own for the man who came after me at Isca, else you could have had those.’

‘If my Master is sure, really sure, I know where I can borrow spears.’

‘Good. Do you go and borrow them now.’

So Esca borrowed the spears he needed, and in the pitch dark of that night, Marcus heard him get up and collect them from the corner where they had been stacked. He turned on his elbow and spoke into the darkness. ‘You are going now?’

A light footfall and a sense of movement told him that Esca was standing at his side. ‘Yes, if the Centurion is still sure—quite sure?’

‘Perfectly sure. Go and spear your wolf.’

‘It is in my heart that I wish the Centurion came too,’ Esca said in a rush.

‘Maybe I’ll come another year,’ Marcus said sleepily. ‘Good hunting, Esca.’

For an instant a dark shape showed in the lesser darkness of the doorway, and then it was gone, and he lay listening, not at all sleepily now, to the quick, light footfall dying away along the colonnade.

In the grey of the next dawn, he heard the footfall returning, a little heavier than at the setting out, and the dark shape loomed again into the cobweb pallor of the doorway.

‘Esca!—How went the hunting?’

‘The hunting was good,’ Esca said. He stacked the spears with a slight clatter against the wall, and came and bent over the cot; and Marcus saw that there was something curled in the crook of his arm, under the rough cloak. ‘I have brought back the fruits of my hunting for the Centurion,’ he said, and set the thing down on the blanket. It was alive, and being disturbed, it whimpered: and Marcus’s gently exploring hand discovered that it was warm and harshly furry.

‘Esca! A wolf cub?’ he said, feeling a scrabble of paws and a thrusting muzzle.

Esca had turned away to strike flint and steel and kindle the lamp. The tiny flame sank and then sprang up and steadied; and in the dazzle of yellow light he saw a very small grey cub, who staggered to uncertain paws, sneezing at the sudden light, and pushed in under his hand with the nuzzling thrust of all very young things. Esca came back to the cot and dropped on one knee beside it. And as he did so Marcus noticed that there was a hot look in his eyes, a brightness that he had not seen there before, and wondered with an odd sense of hurt if his return to bondage from a day and night of freedom was the cause.

‘In my tribe, when a she-wolf with whelps is killed, we sometimes take the young ones to run with the dog-pack,’ Esca said. ‘If they are like this one, little, little, so that they remember nothing before; so that their first meat comes from their master’s hand.’

‘Is he hungry now?’ Marcus asked, as the cub’s muzzle poked and snuggled into his palm.

‘No, he is full of milk—and scraps. Sassticca will not miss them. See, he is half asleep already; that is why he is so gentle.’

The two of them looked at each other, half laughing; but the queer hot look was still in Esca’s eyes; while the cub crawled whimpering into the warm hollow of Marcus’s shoulder, and settled there. His breath smelled of onions, like a puppy.

‘How did you get him?’

‘We killed a she-wolf in milk, so I and two others went to look for the whelps. They killed the rest of the litter, those fools of the South; but this one, I saved. His sire came. They are good fathers, the wolf kind, fierce to protect their young. It was a fight: aie! a good fight.’

‘It was taking a hideous risk,’ Marcus said. ‘You should not have done it, Esca!’ He was half angry, half humbled, that Esca should have taken such a deadly risk to bring him the cub, for he was enough of a hunter himself to know what the hazard was in robbing a wolf ’s lair while the sire still lived.

Esca seemed to draw back into himself on the instant. ‘I forgot it was my Master’s property that I risked,’ he said, his voice suddenly hard and heavy as stone.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Marcus said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean that, and you know it.’

There was a long silence. The two young men looked at each other, and there was no trace of laughter now in their faces.

‘Esca,’ Marcus said at last, ‘what has happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘That is a lie,’ Marcus said. ‘Someone has been working mischief.’

The other remained stubbornly silent.

‘Esca, I want an answer.’

The other moved a little, and some of the defiance went out of him. ‘It was my own fault,’ he began at last, speaking as though every word was dragged out of him. ‘There was a young Tribune; one of those from the transit camp, who I think is taking troops up to Eboracum—a very splendid young Tribune, smooth as a girl, but a skilled hunter. He was one of us who went into the lair; and after the old dog-wolf was dead, and we had come away, and I was cleaning my spear, he laughed and said to me, “So, that was a noble thrust!” And then he saw my clipped ear, and he said, “for a slave”. I was angry, and I let my tongue run away from me. I said: “I am body-slave to the Centurion Marcus Flavius Aquila; does the Tribune Placidus (that was his name) see any cause therein that I should be a worse hunter than himself ?”’ Esca broke off for a moment, drawing a harsh breath. ‘He said: “None in the world; but at least the Tribune Placidus’s life is his own to hazard as he wills. Your Master, having paid good money for his slave, will not thank you for leaving him with a carcass that he cannot even sell to the knacker’s yard. Remember that when next you thrust your head into a wolf ’s lair.” And then he smiled, and his smile is a sickness in my belly, still.’

Esca had been speaking in a dull, hopeless monotone, as though he had the bitter lesson by heart; and as he listened, Marcus was filled with a cold anger against the unknown Tribune; and the light of his rage suddenly made clear to him certain things that he had never thought of before.

Abruptly he reached out his free hand and grasped the other’s wrist. ‘Esca, have I ever, by word or deed, given you to believe that I think of you as that six-month soldier evidently thinks of his slaves?’

Esca shook his head. His defiance was all gone from him, and his face in the paling lamplight was no longer set and sullen, but only wretched. ‘The Centurion is not such a one as the Tribune Placidus, to show the whip-lash without need to his hound,’ he said drearily.

Marcus, baffled, hurt, and angry, suddenly lost his temper. ‘Oh, curse Tribune Placidus!’ he burst out, his grasp tightening fiercely on the other’s wrist. ‘Does his word strike so much deeper with you than mine, that because of it you must needs talk to me of hounds and whip-lashes? Name of Light! Do I have to tell you in so many words that I really do not imagine a clipped ear to be the dividing-line between men and beasts? Have I not shown you clearly enough all this while? I have not thought of equal or unequal, slave or free in my dealings with you, though you were too proud to do the same for me! Too
proud
! Do you hear me? And now’—forgetful for the moment of the sleeping cub, he made a sudden movement to get on to his elbow, and collapsed again, exasperated but half laughing, his fury gone like a pricked bubble, holding up a bleeding thumb. ‘And now your gift has bitten me! Mithras! His mouth is full of daggers!’

‘Then you had best pay me a sesterce for the lot of them,’ said Esca, and suddenly they were both laughing, the quick light laughter of breaking strain that has very little to do with whether or not there is anything to laugh at, while between them on the striped native blanket the small grey wolf-cub crouched, savage, bewildered, but very sleepy.

The household varied a good deal in their reactions to the sudden appearance of a wolf-cub in their midst. Procyon was doubtful at their first meeting; the new-comer had the wolf smell, the outland smell, and the great hound walked round him on stiff legs, the hair on his neck rising a little, while the cub squatted like a hairy malignant toad on the atrium floor, ears laid back and muzzle wrinkled in his first attempt at a snarl. Uncle Aquila scarcely noticed his arrival, being at the moment too deeply absorbed in the siege of Jerusalem; and Marcipor, the house slave, and Stephanos looked on him rather askance—a wolf-cub that would one day be a wolf, roaming at large about the house. But Sassticca was unexpectedly an ally. Sassticca, her hands on her hips, told them roundly that they should be ashamed of themselves. Who were they, she demanded shrilly, with two sound legs apiece, to begrudge the young Master a pack of wolf-cubs if he wanted them? And she finished her baking in a state of high indignation, and presently brought Marcus three brown honey-cakes in a napkin, and a chipped bowl of castor ware with a hunting scene on it, which she said he might have for the little cub’s feeding-bowl.

Marcus, who had overheard her championship—she had a loud voice—accepted both gifts with becoming gratitude, and when she had gone, he and Esca shared the cakes between them. He no longer minded Sassticca quite so desperately as he had done at first.

A few days later, Esca told Marcus about the days before his ear was clipped.

They were in the bath-house when it happened, drying themselves after a cold plunge. The time that he spent in the plunge-bath each day was one of Marcus’s greatest pleasures, for it was big enough to splash about in and swim a few strokes; and while he was in the water, unless he was very careless, he could forget about his lame leg. It was a little like his old sense of being born from one kind of life into another, that he had been used to know in his charioteering days. But the likeness was the kind that a shadow bears to the real thing, and this morning as he sat up on the bronze couch, drying himself, he was suddenly sick with longing for the old splendour. Once more, just once more, to know that burst of speed as the team sprang forward, the swoop and the strength of it, and wind of his going singing by.