Eagle's Honour (6 page)

‘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 coming 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.

‘Odd to think of our Elders sitting here solemnly in their Roman tunics and on carved Roman chairs, to settle the affairs of the city. Not so long ago, when there was any settling to be done, the chiefs gathered to the council fire, and sat on their spread bulls’-hides with their weapons left outside.’

‘Ever so civilised it’s getting in these parts,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘So the noble General Agricola would have us believe. If we are busy enough being Roman and civilised, we shall not notice that we are only strengthening our own bondage.’

There was a sudden harsh silence, and then I heard my own voice saying, ‘You mind, don’t you? I did not think that you minded.’

‘Because I make a picture-pavement for the Romans and the British-Romans?’ he said; and then, carefully fitting another cube into its place, ‘How should I not mind that Rome rules me and my people, who have been free?’

‘I don’t know,’ I floundered a bit. ‘I suppose I thought – well, artists and poets and such don’t seem to mind so much about who actually holds the rule, so long as they can get on with making their statues or their songs as they like.’

Vedrix set another little cube in place, settling it down with his round-nosed mallet. ‘We of the Tribes,’ he said, ‘we don’t divide people up, as you Romans do, into neat bundles – soldiers or tent-makers or wine merchants or poets. I’d have been out with the fighting men in the Troubles three years since, but for this short leg of mine.
– I can handle a spear as well as most, but I’m slow on the hills, and that makes a man dangerous to his comrades.’