The Eagle of the Ninth [book I]

by Rosemary Sutcliff

Marcus had been expecting the question. ‘Save that it would not do for the parade ground, very near as serviceable as ever it was,’ he said. ‘If we should have to run for it, it would load the dice against us, I grant you, but in strange country we should not stand a dog’s chance on the run, anyway.’

  Again the silence settled. And he sat with his head up, gazing from the Legate to his uncle and back again. They were summing up his chances, and he knew it: his chances of coming through, his chances of doing the thing that he went out to do. Moment by lengthening moment it became more desperately urgent to him that he should win his marching orders. The very life or death of his father’s Legion was at stake; the Legion that his father had loved. And because he had loved his father with all the strength of his heart, the matter was a personal quest to him and shone as a quest shines. But beneath that shining lay the hard fact of a Roman Eagle in hands that might one day use it as a weapon against Rome; and Marcus had been bred a soldier. So it was in no mood of high adventure alone, but in a soberer and more purposeful spirit that he awaited the verdict.

  ‘Claudius Hieronimianus, you said just now that had you had the right man among your young men, you would have sent him,’ he said at last, able to keep silent no longer. ‘Do I get my marching orders?’

  It was his uncle who answered first, speaking to the Legate as much as to Marcus. ‘The gods of my fathers forbid that I should hold back any kinsman of mine from breaking his neck in a clean cause, if he has a mind to.’ His tone was distinctly caustic; but Marcus, meeting the disconcertingly shrewd eyes under his fierce jut of brow, realized that Uncle Aquila knew and understood very much more of what all this was meaning to him than he would somehow have expected.

  The Legate said, ‘You understand the position? The Province of Valentia, whatever it once was, whatever it may be again, is not worth an outworn sandal-strap today. You will be going out alone into enemy territory, and if you run into trouble, there will be nothing that Rome can or will do to help you.’

  ‘I understand that,’ Marcus said. ‘But I shall not be alone. Esca goes with me.’

  Claudius Hieronimianus bent his head. ‘Go then. I am not your Legate, but I give you your marching orders.’

  Later, after certain details had been thrashed out round the brazier in the atrium, Placidus said an unexpected thing. ‘I almost wish that there was room for a third in this insane expeditionary force! If there were, Bacchus! I would leave Rome to fend for itself awhile, and come with you!’

  For the moment his face had lost its weary insolence, and as the two young men looked at each other in the lamplight Marcus was nearer to liking him than he had been since they first met.

  But the faint fellowship was short-lived, and Placidus killed it with a question. ‘Are you sure that you can trust that barbarian of yours in a venture of this kind?’

  ‘Esca?’ Marcus said in surprise. ‘Yes, quite sure.’

  The other shrugged. ‘Doubtless you know best. Personally I should not care to let my life hang by so slender a thread as the loyalty of a slave.’

  ‘Esca and I—’ Marcus began, and broke off. He was not going to make a circus show of his innermost feelings and Esca’s for the amusement of such as Tribune Servius Placidus. ‘Esca has been with me a long time. He nursed me when I was sick; he did everything for me, all the while that I was laid by with this leg.’

  ‘Why not? He is your slave,’ said Placidus carelessly.

  Sheer surprise held Marcus silent for a moment. It was a long time since he had thought of Esca as a slave. ‘That was not his reason,’ he said. ‘It is not the reason that he comes with me now.’

  ‘Is it not? Oh, my Marcus, what an innocent you are; slaves are all—slaves. Give him his freedom and see what happens.’

  ‘I will,’ said Marcus. ‘Thanks, Placidus, I will!’

  •    •    •    •    •

  When Marcus, with Cub at his heels, entered his sleeping-quarters that night, Esca, who was waiting for him as usual, laid down the belt whose clasps he had been burnishing, and asked: ‘When do we start?’

  Marcus closed the door and stood with his back against it. ‘Probably the morn’s morning—that is, for myself, at least. The details can wait awhile; but first you had best take this,’ and he held out a slim papyrus roll he had been carrying.

  Esca took it with a puzzled glance at his face, and unrolling it, he held it to the lamplight. And watching him, Marcus remembered suddenly and piercingly the moment that afternoon when he had taken off Cub’s collar. Cub had come back to him; but Esca?

  Esca looked up from the papyrus, and shook his head. ‘Capitals are one thing,’ he said, ‘but I can make nothing of this script. What is it?’

  ‘Your manumission—your freedom,’ Marcus said. ‘I made it out this evening, and Uncle Aquila and the Legate witnessed it. Esca, I ought to have given it to you long ago; I have been a completely unthinking fool, and I am sorry.’

  Esca looked down to the thing in his hands once more, and again back to Marcus, as though he was not sure that he understood. Then he let the roll spring back on itself, and said very slowly: ‘I am free? Free to go?’

  ‘Yes,’ Marcus said. ‘Free to go, Esca.’

  There was a long dragging silence. An owl cried somewhere afar off, with a note that seemed at once desolate and mocking. Cub looked from one to the other, and whined softly in his throat.

  Then Esca said, ‘Is it that you are sending me away?’

  ‘No! It is for you to go, or stay, as you wish.’

  Esca smiled, the slow grave smile that always seemed to come a little unwillingly to his face. ‘Then I stay,’ he said, and hesitated. ‘It is perhaps not only I who think foolish thoughts because of the Tribune Placidus.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Marcus reached out and set both hands lightly on the other’s shoulders. ‘Esca, I should never have asked you to come with me into this hazard when you were not free to refuse. It is like to prove a wild hunt, and whether or no we shall come back from it lies on the knees of the gods. No one should ask a slave to go with him on such a hunting trail; but—he might ask a friend.’ He looked questioningly into Esca’s face.

  Esca tossed the slender papyrus roll on to the cot, and set his own hands over Marcus’s. ‘I have not served the Centurion because I was his slave,’ he said, dropping unconsciously into the speech of his own people. ‘I have served Marcus, and it was not slave-service … My stomach will be glad when we start on this hunting trail.’

  •    •    •    •    •

  Next morning, promising to pay his old friend another visit on his way north again in the autumn, the Legate departed with Placidus, escorted by half a squadron of Cavalry. And Marcus watched them ride away down the long road to Regnum and the waiting galleys, without quite the heart-ache that the sight would once have given him, before he set about his own preparations.

  Esca’s freedom caused less interest, and certainly less ill-feeling in the household than might have been expected. Sassticca, Stephanos, and Marcipor had all been born slaves, the children of slaves; and Esca, the freeborn son of a free chieftain, had never been one with them, even while he ate at their table. They were old and well content with things as they were; they had a good master, and slavery sat easy on them, like an old and familiar garment. Therefore they did not greatly begrudge freedom to Esca, accepting it as something that was likely to have happened one day or another—he and the young master having been, as Sassticca said, the two halves of an almond these many moons past, and only grumbled a little among themselves, for the pleasure of grumbling.

  And anyhow, with Marcus going off—as the household had been told—about some sudden business for his uncle next day, and Esca going with him, no one, including Esca, had much time for raising difficulties or even for feeling them.

  That evening, having made the few preparations that were needful, Marcus went down to the foot of the garden and whistl
ed for Cottia. Lately she had always waited to be whistled for; and she came out to him among the wild fruit-trees under the old ramparts, with one end of her damson-coloured mantle drawn over her head against the heavy spring shower that had come with her.

  He told her the whole story as briefly as might be, and she heard him out in silence. But her face seemed to grow sharper and more pointed in the way that he knew of old, and when he had finished, she said, ‘If they want this Eagle back; if they fear that it may harm them, where it is, let them send someone else for it! Why need you go?’

  ‘It was my father’s Eagle,’ Marcus told her, feeling instinctively that that would make sense to her as the other reasons behind his going would never do. A personal loyalty needed no explaining, but he knew that it was quite beyond him to make Cottia understand the queer, complicated, wider loyalties of the soldier, which were as different from those of the warrior as the wave-break curve of the shield-boss was from the ordered pattern of his dagger sheath. ‘You see, with us, the Eagle is the very life of a Legion; while it is in Roman hands, even if not six men of the Legion are left alive, the Legion itself is still in being. Only if the Eagle is lost, the Legion dies. That is why the Ninth has never been re-formed. And yet there must be more than a quarter of the Ninth who never marched north that last time at all, men who were serving on other frontiers, or sick, or left on garrison duty. They will have been drafted to other Legions, but they could be brought together again to make the core of a new Ninth. The Hispana was my father’s first Legion, and his last, and the one he cared for most of all the Legions he served in. So you see …’

  ‘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.

  XI

  ACROSS THE FRONTIER

  FROM 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!’