The Eagle of the Ninth [book I]

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Something forbade him to tax Guern with his old life, here at the heart of the new life that he had made. And so a little later, while preparing to take the trail once more, he reminded the hunter of his promise, to set them on their way to the next village. He had a mind to go westward, he said, and Guern replied willingly enough, that since westward there were no more villages for two days’ trail, if they were set on going that way, he would ride with them the first day and share their camp that night.

  So presently they set out. And in the long-shadowed evening, many miles to the west, the three of them ate their evening meal in the curved lee of a rocky outcrop, and afterwards sat together round their small fire. Their three mounts, each hobbled by a rein from the head to the left foreleg to prevent them straying, cropped contentedly at the short hill-turf that spread here and there like green runnels among the bell-heather. Below them the hills rolled away north-westward, falling gradually to a blue haze of low ground, maybe forty miles away, and Marcus followed the fall of them with his eyes, knowing that somewhere in that blueness the wreck of Agricola’s northern wall slashed across the land, severing Valentia from the country beyond that the Romans called Caledonia and the Celts Albu; knowing that somewhere beyond the blueness was the lost Eagle of his father’s Legion.

  In all the world there seemed no sound but the dry soughing of the wind through the heather, and the sharp yelp of a golden eagle circling the blue spirals of the upper air.

  Esca had drawn back a little into the heather, and sat polishing his spear, and Marcus and Guern were alone by the fire, save for the hunter’s favourite hound, who lay, nose on paws, with his flank against his master’s thigh. Presently Marcus turned to his companion. ‘Soon, very soon now, our ways part,’ he said, ‘but before you go your way and I go mine, there is a question that I have in my heart to ask you.’

  ‘Ask, then,’ said the other, playing with his dog’s ears.

  Marcus said slowly, ‘How did you come to be Guern the Hunter who once served with the Eagles?’

  There was a sudden flicker in the other’s eyes; and then for a long moment he became very still, with a sullen stillness, peering at Marcus under his brows, in the way of the Painted People. ‘Who told you such a thing?’ he asked at last.

  ‘No one. I go by a song, and the scar between your brows. But most of all by the gall-mark under your chin.’

  ‘If I were—what you say,’ Guern growled, ‘what need have I to tell you of it? I am a man of my tribe, and if I was not always so, there is none among my sword-brethen who would speak of that to a stranger. What need, then, have I to tell?’

  ‘None in the world,’ said Marcus, ‘save that I asked you in all courtesy.’

  There was another long silence, and then his companion said, with a queer mingling of sullen defiance and a long-forgotten pride, ‘I was once Sixth Centurion of the Senior Cohort of the Hispana. Now go and tell it to the nearest Commander on the Wall. I shall not stop you.’

  Marcus took his time, sitting quiet and searching the fierce face of the man before him. He was looking for any trace that might be left under the painted hunter of the Roman centurion of twelve years ago; and presently he thought he had found it. ‘No patrol could reach you, and you know it,’ he said. ‘But even if it were not so, still there is a reason that I should keep my mouth shut.’

  ‘And that reason?’

  Marcus said, ‘That I bear on my forehead a mark which is brother to the mark that you bear on yours,’ and with a quick movement he freed the crimson riband that bound the silver talisman in place, and jerked it off. ‘Look!’

  The other bent forward swiftly. ‘So,’ he said lingeringly. ‘Never before have I known one of your trade who made his evening prayer to Mithras.’ But even as he spoke, his gaze narrowed into a new intentness, became like a daggerthrust. ‘Who are you? What are you?’ he demanded; and suddenly his hands were on Marcus’s shoulders, wrenching him round to face the last windy gold of the sunset. For a long moment he held him so, kneeling over him and glaring into his face; while Marcus, with his lame leg twisted under him, stared back, his black brows frowning, his mouth at its most disdainful.

  The great hound crouched watchfully beside them, and Esca got quietly up, fingering his spear; both man and hound ready to kill at a word.

  ‘I have seen you before,’ said Guern in a rasping voice.

  ‘I remember your face. In the Name of Light, who are you?’

  ‘Maybe it is my father’s face that you remember. He was your Cohort Commander.’

  Slowly Guern’s hands relaxed and dropped to his side. ‘I should have known,’ he said. ‘It was the talisman—and the beard. But none the less, I should have known.’ He sat rocking himself a little, almost as if he were in pain, his eyes never leaving Marcus’s face. ‘What is it that you do, your father’s son, here in Valentia?’ he said at last. ‘You are no Greek of Alexandria, and I think that you are no eye doctor.’

  ‘No, I am no eye doctor. Nevertheless, the salves that I carry are good, and I was shown how to work with them by one skilled in their use. When I told you that I had followed my father’s trade, that at least was the truth. I followed it until I got me this leg and my discharge, two years ago. As to what I do, here in Valentia—’ he hesitated, but only for an instant. He knew that in this one matter, at least, he could trust Guern utterly.

  And so, very briefly, he told him what it was he did in Valentia, and why. ‘And when it seemed to me that you were not as the other hunters of the Painted People,’ he finished, ‘it seemed to me also that from you I might learn the answer to my questions.’

  ‘And could you not have asked me at the first? Because I was drawn to you, not knowing why, and because you spoke the Latin tongue that I had not heard these twelve years, I brought you to my own place, and you slept under my roof and ate of my salt; with this hidden in your heart concerning me. It would have been better that you asked me at the first!’

  ‘Much better,’ Marcus agreed. ‘But all that I had in my heart concerning you was a guess, and a wild guess enough! If I had spoken out to you without first being sure, and found too late that you were, after all, no other than you seemed, would there not have been Ahriman the Dark One to pay?’

  ‘What is it that you want to know?’ Guern said dully, after a moment.

  ‘What became of my father’s Legion. Where is the Eagle now?’

  Guern looked down at his own hand, on the head of the great dog who was once more lying quiet beside him; then up again. ‘I can answer the first of your questions, at least in part,’ he said, ‘but it is a long story, and first I will mend the fire.’

  He leaned forward as he spoke, and fed the sinking flames from the pile of thorn branches and heather snarls beside him. He did it slowly, deliberately, as though holding off the moment when he must begin his story. But even when the flames sprang up again, he still squatted silent on his haunches, staring into the smoke.

  Marcus’s heart had begun to race, and suddenly he felt a little sick.

  ‘You never knew your father’s Legion,’ Guern began at last. ‘No, and if you had, you would have been too young to read the signs. Too young by many years.’ He had changed his tongue to Latin, and with the change, all that was of the tribes in him seemed to have dropped away. ‘The seeds of death were in the Hispana before ever it marched north that last time. They were sown sixty years ago, when men of the Legion carried out the Procurator’s orders to dispossess the Queen of the Iceni. Boudicca her name was; maybe you have heard of her? She cursed them and their whole Legion, it is said, for the treatment that she had at their hands, which was hardly just, for they had their orders: if she was minded to curse anyone, it had better have been the Procurator himself. But a woman who thinks herself wronged is seldom over particular where her thrust lands, so that it draws blood. Me, I am not one to set much store by cursings, or I was not in the old days. But be that as it may, the Legion was cut to pieces in the rising that followed. When
at last the rising failed, the Queen took poison, and maybe her death gave potency to her cursing.

  ‘The Legion was re-formed and brought up to strength again, but it never prospered. Perhaps if it had been moved elsewhere it might have been saved, but for a Legion to serve year after year, generation after generation, among tribes who believe it to be accursed is not good for that Legion. Small misfortunes bloat into large ones, outbreaks of sickness are set down to the working of the curse, instead of the marsh mists; the Spaniards are a people quick to believe in such things. So it became harder to find recruits, and the standard of those taken grew lower, year by year. It was very slow at first—I have served with men no older than myself, who remembered the Ninth when it was only a little rough and run to seed. But at the last it was terribly swift, and when I joined the Legion as a centurion, two years before the end—I was promoted from the ranks of the Thirtieth, which was a proud Legion—the rind seemed sound enough, but the heart was rotten. Stinking rotten.’

  Guern the Hunter spat into the fire.

  ‘I strove to fight the rot in my own Century at first, and then—the fighting grew to be too much trouble. The last Legate was a hard and upright man without understanding—the worst man to handle such a Legion—and soon after his coming the Emperor Trajan withdrew too many troops from Britain for his everlasting campaigns; and we who were left to hold the Frontier began to feel the tribes seethe under us like an over-ripe cheese. Then Trajan died, and the tribes rose. The whole North went up in flames, and barely had we settled with the Brigantes and the Iceni when we were ordered up into Valentia to hammer the Caledonians. Two of our cohorts were serving in Germany; we had suffered heavy casualties already, and leaving a cohort to garrison Eburacum and be cut to shreds by the Brigantes if they happened to feel like it, that left well under four thousand of us to march north. And when the Legate took the omens in the usual way, the sacred chickens had gone off their feed and would not touch the pulse he threw to them. After that we gave ourselves up for doomed, which is a bad state of mind for a Legion to march in.

  ‘It was autumn, and almost from the start the mountain country was blanketed in mist, and out of the mist the tribesmen harried us. Oh, it never came to a fight; they hung about our flanks like wolves; they made sudden raids on our rearguard and loosed their arrows into us from behind every tuft of sodden heather, and disappeared into the mist before we could come to grips with them; and the parties sent out after them never came back.

  ‘A Legate who was also a soldier might have saved us; ours had seen no more of soldiering than a sham fight on Mars Field, and was too proud to listen to his officers who had, and by the time we reached Agricola’s old headquarters on the Northern Wall, which was to be our base, upward of another thousand of us had gone, by death or desertion. The old fortifications were crumbling, the water supply had long since given out, and the whole North had gathered in strength by then. They sat round the walls and yelled, like wolves howling to the moon. We stood one attack in that place. We rolled the dead down the scarp into the river; and when the tribes drew off to lick their wounds, we chose a spokesman and went to the Legate and said: “Now we will make what terms we can with the Painted People, that they may let us march back the way we came, leaving Valentia in their hands, for it is no more than a name, and a name that tastes sour on the tongue at that.” And the Legate sat in his camp chair, which we had had to carry for him all the way from Eburacum, and called us evil names. Doubtless we deserved the names, but they did not help. Then more than half of us mutinied, many of my own Century among them.’

  Guern turned from the fire to face Marcus. ‘I was not one of them. Before the Lord of the Legions I swear it. My full shame was not yet come upon me and I held the few men left to me in leash yet awhile. Then the Legate saw where his mistake had lain, and he spoke more gently to his Legion in revolt than ever he had done before, and that was not from fear. He bade the mutineers lay down the arms that they had taken up against their Eagle, and swore that there should be no summary punishment, even of the ringleaders; swore that if we did our duty from thenceforth, he would make fair report of it, the good with the bad, on our return. As though we should ever return! But even had the way back been clear, it was too late for such promises. From the moment that the cohorts mutinied it was too late. There could be no turning back for them, knowing all too well what the word of the Senate would be.’

  ‘Decimation,’ Marcus said quietly, as the other halted.

  ‘Aye, decimation. It comes hard, to draw lots out of a helmet, knowing that one in every ten means death by stoning to the man who draws it.

  ‘So the thing ended in fighting. That was when the Legate was killed. He was a brave man, though a fool. He stood out before the mob, with his hands empty, and his Eagle-bearer and his beardless Tribunes behind him, and called on them to remember their oath, and called them curs of Tiber-side. Then one struck him down with a pilum, and after that there was no more talking…

  ‘The tribesmen came swarming in over the barricades to help the red work, and by dawn there were barely two full cohorts left alive in the fort. The rest were not all dead, oh no; many of them went back over the ramparts with the tribesmen. They may be scattered about Caledonia now, for all I know, living even as myself, with a British wife, and sons to come after them.

  ‘Just after dawn, your father called together the few that were left in the open space before the Praetorium, and there, every man with his sword ready in his hand, we took hurried counsel, and determined to win out of the old fort, which was become a death-trap, and carry the Eagle back to Eburacum as best we might. It was no use by then to think of making terms with the tribesmen, for they had no longer any cause to fear us. And besides, I think there was the thought in all of us that if we won through, the Senate could scarcely count us as disgraced. That night the fools feasted—so low had we sunk in their contempt—and while they drank, baying to the moon, we got out, all that were left of us, by the southern scarp, and passed them by in the darkness and the mist—the first time ever the mist had seemed our friend—and began the forced march back, heading for Trinomontium.

  ‘The tribes picked up our trail at dawn and hunted us as though it had been for sport. Have you ever been hunted? All that day we struggled on, and the sorest wounded, who dropped out, died. Sometimes we heard them die, in the mist. Then I dropped out too.’ Guern rubbed his left flank. ‘I had a wound that I could put three fingers in, and I was sick. But I could have gone on. It was being hunted—the being—hunted. I took my chance at dusk, when the hunters drew off a space; I slipped into some long furze-cover, and hid. One of the Painted People nearly trod on me presently, but they did not find me, and after dark, when the hunt had passed far away, I stripped off my harness and left it. I look like a Pict, do I not? That is because I am from Northern Gaul. Then I suppose I wandered all night. I do not know, but in the dawn I came to a village and fell across the door-sill of the first hut.

  ‘They took me in and tended me. Murna tended me. And when they found that I was a Roman soldier, they did not greatly care. I was not the first of my kind to desert to the tribes; and Murna spoke for me, like a lioness whose cub is threatened.’ For an instant, a glint of laughter sounded in his voice, and then it grew harsh and heavy again. ‘A few nights later I saw the Eagle carried by on its way north again, with a great triumph of torches following behind.’

  There was a long, strained silence. Then Marcus said in a quiet, hard voice, ‘Where did they make an end?’

  ‘I do not know. But they never reached Trinomontium. I have looked there again and again, and found no sign of fighting.’

  ‘And my father?’

  ‘He was with the Eagle when I dropped out. There were no captives with it when they carried it north again.’

  ‘Where is the Eagle now?’

  Guern reached out and touched the dagger in the other’s belt, looking at him steadily. ‘If you are minded to die, here is the means to your h
and. Save yourself the further journey.’

  ‘Where is the Eagle now?’ Marcus repeated his question, as though the other had not spoken.

  For a moment he held the hunter’s eyes with his own; then Guern said, ‘I do not know. But tomorrow, when there is light to see by, I will give you what direction I can.’

  And Marcus realized suddenly that he was seeing the other’s face by firelight, and all beyond him was blurred into the blue dusk.

  He did not sleep much that night, but lay rigid with his head in his arms. All these months he had followed a dream; in a way, he realized now, he had followed it since he was eight years old. It had been bright and warm, and now it was broken, and without it he felt very cold, and suddenly older than he had been a few hours ago. What a fool he had been! What a blind fool! Clinging to the stubborn faith that because it had been his father’s, there had been nothing much wrong with the Ninth Legion, after all. He knew better now. His father’s Legion had been putrid, a rotten apple that fell to pieces when it was struck by a heel. And God of the Legions! what his father must have suffered!

  Out of the ruin, one thing stood up unchanged: that the Eagle was still to be found and brought back, lest one day it became a menace to the Frontier. There was something comforting about that. A faith still to be kept.

  Next morning when the early meal had been eaten, and the fire quenched and scattered, Marcus stood beside his mare, looking away north-west, along the line of Guern’s pointing finger. The light wind whipped his face, and his morning shadow ran away downhill as though eager to be off before him, and he heard the wild, sweet calling of the green plover that seemed to be the voice of the great loneliness.

  ‘Yonder where the vale opens,’ Guern was saying. ‘You will know the ford by the leaning pine that grows beside it. You must cross there, and follow the right bank, or you will find yourself at the last with the whole broad Firth of Cluta between you and Caledonia. Two days’ march, three at the most, will bring you to the old northern line.’