‘Felix!’
Among the sacks and bales, something stirred again, and the pale blur of a face swam in the gloom. ‘All’s over,’ he whispered, ‘and all’s well. Out now – they’ll be missing you at any moment.’
‘Aracos! Oh, thank the God’s you’re back! I was – so afraid you would go down.’
‘For your sake, or mine?’ Aracos said grimly, and then, ‘Na, forget I said it. Get these on and out with you and take over your empty place. They’ve killed the Captain. Remember you led First Wing up to clear the Painted People from a hill spur where they were heaving rocks down on the Legion. They fired the heather, but you got through. There’s a singed place on the flank of the wolfskin, you’d best rub your face in it.’
He was dragging off the leather breeks as he spoke, and tossed them into the cart after tunic and wolfskin. He heard an inarticulate sound that was almost a sob. The boy had lain there all day, alone with himself, and the Mother of Foals alone knew what kind of shape he was in now, to carry the thing through; but he could not wait to see. The beast in his chest was getting ready to spring, and he must get clear of the baggage park while he could.
There was a high sweet ringing in his ears, and black webs spun between his eyes and the camp fires, as he turned away towards the wattle shelters beyond a knot of hawthorn scrub where the Medics would be busy with the wounded. He must have been missed, of course; he must think of some reason to give, some story to tell that would not turn anyone’s thoughts towards the Dacians’ pennant-bearer…. He was quite close to one of the fires when the beast in his chest leapt. He took one more step, choking for air against the rending teeth and claws, and had just sense and time left to turn towards the fire as he stumbled to his knees. The black webs spun into solid darkness as he sank forward on to his face among the hot ash. His last thought was that at least the marks of fire on him would be accounted for.
When the darkness ebbed again, he was lying on his back with men standing round him, and one kneeling over him with an ear pressed to his chest, just as the man had done who turned him down for the Thracian Horse.
‘He just loomed up out of the darkness and went head first into the fire,’ someone said. ‘Has he been at the barley spirit?’
‘No,’ said the man with an ear to his chest, and the voice was that of Diomedes, the surgeon. Then, straightening up, ‘Poor brute, he must have felt it coming on him and hidden away like a sick animal.’
Another voice pointed out, ‘You heard what these men said; he hasn’t just been lying around here all day, sir.’
‘I said hidden away, not lying around. I imagine he thought the worst was over, and was on his way back to duty when it took him again.’
In the end, they had decided that he had some sort of rift in his heart that the strain of the campaign had worsened, and he was invalided out with a small sickness gratuity, just about the time the news came through that Felix had won the Corona Civica for clearing the Picts from the hill spur after the Wing Captain was killed, and thereby most likely saving the Legion.
They had been back at Trimontum leaving the north quiet behind them, a good while by then, and Aracos was going south next day with a returning supply train; south, and out from the service of the Eagles.
Felix had hunted him out, where he had gone down the river glen to make a last small sacrifice at the Altar to Fortune which one of the garrison had put up long ago. The boy looked old and haggard, as though he were the one who had been ill. ‘I cannot go through with this!’ he said desperately.
‘Yes, you can.’
‘I can’t! I’m going to tell them. I don’t care what they do to me, anything would be better than this!’
And Aracos had caught him by the shoulders as he had done once before. ‘Now listen! The Gods know why I was fool enough to do what I did for you, but this I know; you’re not going to undo it all now!’
There had been a long silence, broken only by the voice of the little stream that flowed out from under the shrine, and then Felix had moaned softly, like something with a physical hurt. ‘I could hack myself to pieces! I don’t know what happened and I don’t know it won’t happen again…. If only I could be the one to pay….’
Aracos had tightened his grip. ‘You’ll pay your share, all right. All your life you’re going to have to wear that circlet of gilded oak leaves through your shoulder-strap, and feel men’s eyes on it, and know the truth behind it. Oh, you’ll pay, Felix, so we can cry quits.’
And he had seen the slack despairing lines of the boy’s face tauten, and his head go up, as he took the strain.
‘But what will you do?’ he asked after a while.
‘Stay on in Britain. I spent my first year in the province on garrison duty at Burrium. There’s good horse country among the Welsh hills. I might try to get work there. I’ve my gratuity; I shan’t starve while I’m looking for it.’
CHAPTER FIVE
A whirling moth blundered into the lamp flame, and fell away, singed and sodden, and Aracos was in the present again. He was alone, though he had not heard the young Medic go, and still holding between his hands the battered circlet of gilded oak leaves. In one place the bronze showed through, where the gilt was all rubbed away by the shoulder-strap through which it had been worn for more than eight years.
Again he remembered Felix’s set face. Oh yes, Felix had paid his price. And in the end – what had the Medic said? ‘He died between my hands, two years ago in Pannonia … of wounds taken in driving off an attack on the supply train he was escorting. It was three days later, before he got them into camp. The Gods know how he kept going so long.’
A small inward bitterness that had been with Aracos for ten years suddenly fell away. He had been worth saving, that boy. He thought with a detached interest, as though it concerned somebody else and not himself at all, that now he could tell the truth, and be believed. But the thought remained detached. One didn’t betray a friend merely because he was dead.
But he knew, for no very clear reason, that because that wild day’s work ten years ago had not been wasted, because Felix had died in the way he had done, and dying, had sent him the battered circlet of oak leaves, he would bring down the remounts again next spring, and go to the Rose and Wine Skin again – and again – and again, until the story grew too threadbare to be bothered with any more, and he had come out beyond it.
He folded the Corona Civica carefully in its bit of old cloth again, and getting up, opened the door and called down the ladder, ‘Cordaella! Is there any supper left?’
Eagle’s Egg
CHAPTER ONE
The Girl at the Well
All right then, if it’s a story you’re wanting, throw another log on the fire. The winters strike colder now than they used to do when I was a young man in Britain: and I’ll tell you….
Eburacum was a frontier station in my father’s day; your great-grandfather’s. But Roman rule spread northward in one way and another; and by the time I was posted up there as Eagle Bearer to the Ninth Legion it wasn’t a frontier station any more, and the settlement that had gathered itself together under the fortress walls had become a sizeable town, with a forum where the business of the place was carried on, and wine shops, and temples to half a score of different gods.
Well, so I was ambling up the narrow, crooked street behind the temple of Sulis on one of those dark edge-of-spring evenings when it seems as though all the colour has drained out of the world and left only the grey behind. I was off duty and I was bored. I’d been down at the lower end of the town to look at some new young fighting cocks that Kaeso had for sale, but I hadn’t liked the look of any that he had shown me, and taking it all in all, I was feeling thoroughly out at elbows with the world. And then I rounded the corner of the temple garden; and there, at the well that bubbled up from under the wall, a few paces further up the street, a girl was drawing water. And I knew I’d been wrong about there being no colour left in the world, because her hair lit up that grey stre
et like a dandelion growing on a stubble pile. – No, that’s not right either, it was redder and more sparkling; a colour that you could warm your hands at. And the braids of it, hanging forward over her shoulders ‘thick as a swordsman’s wrist’ as the saying goes.
You can guess the next bit, I dare say. Up I strolled, and stood beside her, and gave her my best smile when she turned round.
‘That pail is much too heavy for a little bird like you,’ said I. ‘Better let me carry it for you.’
She stood and looked at me out of the bluest and brightest eyes I’d ever seen in any girl’s head; not smiling back, but as though something amused her, all the same: and I got the feeling that I was not the first of our lads who had offered to carry her bucket home for her from the well of Sulis.
‘It is not, really,’ she said, ‘and I am quite used to it’
‘“Never carry your own bucket if you can find somebody else to carry it for you”. That’s what we say in the Legions, more or less,’ I told her. And I picked up the brimming pail from where she had set it on the well curb, and stood ready to carry it wherever she wanted.
‘Then – that is our house, yonder at the bend of the street,’ she said. ‘The one with the workshop beside it and the big blue flower painted on the wall.’
And the laughter was still in her, because I had hoped it was much further off than that; and she knew it.
I should have to make the most of the little distance there was. I walked as slowly as possible, making a great show of not spilling the water, and said, ‘Why have I not seen you before? With that bonny brightness of hair I couldn’t have missed you.’
‘I do have a cloak with a hood to it,’ she said. And then, stopping her teasing. ‘But indeed I have not been long in Eburacum. My brother is making the picture-floor in the new Council Chamber, and he brought me up with him from Lindum, because he thinks that a growing town like this would be a good place for a craftsman to settle.’
And then we had reached the door, and I put the pail down, and she thanked me. We stood for an instant looking at each other, and an odd thing happened. We both turned shy.
‘Do you go to the well at the same time every day?’ I managed at last.
And she said, ‘Most days, yes,’ already picking up the bucket.
‘Maybe we’ll meet there again, some time—’ I began. But before I could finish, she had gone in, and the door was quietly and gently shut in my face.
I did not even know her name.
Well, I could probably get that from her brother if I went along to the Council Chamber and admired his floor. I had seen and spoken with him more than once already. No problem there. But the girl had not really gone deep with me, yet, and I strolled back to the fortress thinking about the Council House and the things that had led up to it.
It was just about a year since the General Agricola had come out from Rome with orders to bring Caledonia, away north of us, within the frontiers of the Empire. He had taken the Second and Fourteenth Legions and pushed up through South Western Caledonia, and pegged down the country with a handful of forts and marching camps. – A friend of mine who was with the Second at the time told me it was pretty dull: not much serious fighting because the local tribes didn’t know how to combine and seemingly hadn’t found a leader strong enough to hammer them into one war-host.
At summer’s end, when Agricola came back out of the wilds, he let it be known that there would be help from the Treasury for any town that liked to smarten itself up, with a new bathhouse, say, or a council chamber or a triumphal arch. Somehow he’d got it into the heads of the local chiefs that it was beneath their dignity to live in towns that looked like broken-down rookeries, while in the south of Britain the people had public buildings that Rome herself would not be ashamed of. So architects and craftsmen were got up from the south and back in the autumn Eburacum had started building a fine new Council Chamber.
It had been a mild winter, and so the work had gone forward most of the time, and by winter’s end most of the work was done and the thick fluted roof tiles were in place, so that the floor could be begun. A real Roman picture-floor that was to be the chief glory of the place. In the early days the Elders had meant to bring in a Roman artist. But after a while, when the money began to run short, they had had to shorten their ideas to match.
And so came Vedrix, up from Lindum, instead. I’ve always been interested in seeing how things are made; and so, as I say, I’d already got into the way of wandering along sometimes, when I was off-duty, to watch him at work with his hammer and chisel, cutting his little cubes of chalk and sandstone, and brick and blue shale, and fitting them together into his picture.
A fiery little runt of a man, he was, with a white bony face that changed all the time, and hair like a bunch of carrots – and that’s an odd thing, too, because later, when I saw him and his sister together, their hair was the same colour; and yet hers never made me think of a bunch of carrots – and a lame leg that he told me once had mended short after he broke it when he was a boy. But he was the kind of artist-craftsman who could turn his hand to most things and make a good job of them. So later on, when that floor was finished, it was a pretty good floor on the whole, though I still think the leopard looked a bit odd. But I suppose when you remember that he had never seen a real one, and had only a painted leopard on a cracked wine jar to copy, the wonder is that it didn’t look odder still.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The picture-floor was only just a few days begun when I first saw my red-haired girl at the Well of Sulis. I spent a good deal of my free time watching it grow in the next few days also, for I’d found Vedrix an interesting fellow to talk to before I knew he was brother to the bonniest girl in all Eburacum, I certainly didn’t find him less interesting afterwards.
CHAPTER TWO
Marching Orders
I didn’t ask him her name, though. Somehow I found I didn’t want to ask that of anyone but herself. So I waited, and for quite a while I was not off duty at the right time again. But at last the waiting was over, and we both chanced together once more at the Well of Sulis; and I carried her pail home for her again; and that time we got as far as telling each other our names on the door-sill.
‘Now that we’ve met again, we should know each other’s names,’ I said. ‘Mine is Quin tus, what is yours?’
‘Cordaella,’ she said, tucking in the ends of her hair that were being teased out by the wind.
‘That’s a beautiful name,’ said I. ‘It fits you.’
And suddenly she laughed at me. ‘So I have been told.’ And she ran inside and shut the door on me again.
Then the day came when I had the sneezing fever.
‘Do they not give you anything for that, up at the fort?’ she said.
I had a sudden picture inside my head, of myself going up on Sick Parade, to bother Manlius the fort surgeon with my snufflings, and what he would say if I did. And that made me laugh so much despite my aching head, that I started coughing again, and leant against the doorpost choking and sneezing enough to put any girl off me for life. But she turned suddenly kind, and said, ‘Come you in to the fire, and I will give you something. I have some herb skill, even if your fat fort surgeon has none.’
And she brought me in and sat me down by the fire on the central hearth of the warm smoky house-place; and she set the old slave-woman who came out of the shadows at her call, to heating water in a little bronze pot over the flames, while she herself fetched herbs and a lump of honeycomb from some inner place; and when they had boiled all together, she poured the brew off into a cup and gave it to me, saying, ‘Now, drink – as hot as you can.’
So, more to please her than for any faith I had in it, I sipped and snuffled my way through the scalding brew. It was sweet with the honey and greasy with the melted comb-wax, and the smoke of all the nameless herbs that had gone into it seemed to go right to the back of my nose and drift around inside my skull, so that for a moment I thought the top was comi
ng off my head. But in a little it began to ease the aching, and truly I think that I began to mend from that moment.
Aye well, in one way and another, we contrived to see quite a bit of each other as that spring drew on. And after a while I kissed her, and she kissed me back as sweet as a hazel-nut. But it was after we had kissed each other, that we began to be unhappy. More and more unhappy. I daresay that sounds odd and the wrong way round, but we had our reasons, – seeing that the Legions don’t allow any marrying ‘below the vine staff’; below the rank of Centurion, that is.
‘Maybe you will get promotion,’ Cordaella said again and again.
But I wasn’t very hopeful. It seemed to me that what I wanted was so tremendous that the Gods would surely never give it to me. ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘and maybe not. Anyway it will not be for a long time, and your brother has other plans for you. You told me so yourself.’
‘There are two words as to my brother’s plans,’ said Cordaella, with a sniff. But there could be no sniffing at the Legion’s rule about marrying below the vine staff.
I went round by the new Council Chamber on my way back to barracks, to have a word with Vedrix. I hadn’t much idea what I was going to say to him, but there might be something; and anyway it was better than not saying or doing anything at all.
I heard the light tapping of his little hammer before I came in from the forecourt, and there he was squatting among his sticks of shale and sandstone, cutting them up into fine pavement cubes and setting them in place in the pattern. He was working on the ivy-leaf border, and I did not interrupt him; just stood looking, until he came to a good stopping place and sat back on his heels and grinned up at me like a fox.
Eagle's Honour Page 3