The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (11 page)

‘I am sorry. And your mother?’

‘I expect that all is well with my mother,’ Cottia said, matter-of-factly. ‘There was a hunter who had wanted her always, but her parents gave her to my father. And when my father went West of the Sunset, she went to the hunter, and there was no room in his house for me. It was different with my brother, of course. It is always different with boys. So my mother gave me to Aunt Valaria, who has no children of her own.’

‘Poor Cottia,’ Marcus said softly.

‘Oh no. I did not wish to live in that hunter’s house; he was not
my
father. Only …’ Her voice trailed into silence.

‘Only?’

Cottia’s changeable face was suddenly as vixenish as he had guessed it could be. ‘Only I hate living with my Aunt; I hate living in a town full of straight lines, and being shut up inside brick walls, and being called Camilla; and I hate—hate—
hate
it when they try to make me pretend to be a Roman maiden and forget my own tribe and my own father!’

Marcus was quickly coming to the conclusion that he did not like Aunt Valaria. ‘If it is any consolation to you, they seem to have succeeded very ill so far,’ he said.

‘No! I will not let them! I pretend, outside my tunic. I answer when they call me Camilla, and I speak to them in Latin: but underneath my tunic I am of the Iceni, and when I take off my tunic at night, I say, “There! That rids me of Rome until the morning!” And I lie on my bed and think—and think—about my home, and the marsh birds flighting down from the north in the Fall of the Leaf, and the brood mares with their foals in my father’s runs. I remember all the things that I am not supposed to remember, and talk to myself inside my head in my own tongue—’ She broke off, looking at him in quick surprise. ‘We are talking in my tongue now! How long have we been doing that?’

‘Since you told me about your real name being Cottia.’

Cottia nodded. It did not seem to strike her that the hearer to whom she was pouring out all this was himself a Roman: and it did not strike Marcus either. For the moment all he knew was that Cottia also was in exile, and his fellowship reached out to her, delicately, rather shyly. And as though feeling the touch of it, she drew a little nearer, huddling the scarlet folds more closely round her.

‘I like being inside your cloak,’ she said contentedly. ‘It feels warm and safe, as a bird must feel inside its own feathers.’

From beyond the hedge at that moment there arose a voice, shrill as a peahen before rain. ‘Camilla! Ladybird! Oh, my Lady Camilla!’

Cottia sighed in exasperation. ‘That is Nissa,’ she said. ‘I must go.’ But she did not move.

‘
Camilla!
’ called the voice, nearer this time.

‘That is Nissa again,’ said Marcus.

‘Yes, I—must go.’ She got up reluctantly, and slipped off the heavy cloak. But still she lingered, while the screeching voice drew nearer. Then with a rush, ‘Let me come again! Please let me! You need not talk to me, nor even notice that I am here.’

‘Oh, my Lady! Where are you, child of Typhon?’ wailed the voice, very near now.

‘Come when it pleases you—and I shall be glad of your coming,’ Marcus said quickly.

‘I will come tomorrow,’ Cottia told him, and turned to the old rampart slope, carrying herself like a queen. Most British women seemed to carry themselves like that, Marcus thought, watching her drop out of sight round the hedge; and he remembered Guinhumara in the hut doorway at Isca Dumnoniorum. What had happened to her and the brown baby, after Cradoc lay dead and the huts were burned and the fields salted? He would never know.

The shrill voice was raised in fond scolding on the far side of the hedge; and footsteps came across the grass, and Marcus turned his head to see Esca coming towards him.

‘My Master has had company,’ Esca said, laying spearblade to forehead in salute, as he halted beside him.

‘Yes, and it sounds as though she is getting a sharp scolding from her nurse on my account,’ Marcus said a little anxiously, as he listened to the shrill voice fading.

‘If all I hear be true, scolding will not touch that one,’ Esca said. ‘As well scold a flung spear.’

Marcus leaned back, his hands behind his neck, and looked up at his slave. The thought of Guinhumara and her baby was still with him, standing behind the thought of Cottia. ‘Esca, why do all the Frontier tribes resent our coming so bitterly?’ he asked on a sudden impulse. ‘The tribes of the south have taken to our ways easily enough.’

‘We have ways of our own,’ said Esca. He squatted on one heel beside the bench. ‘The tribes of the south had lost their birthright before ever the Eagles came in war. They sold it for the things that Rome could give. They were fat with Roman merchandise and their souls had grown lazy within them.’

‘But these things that Rome had to give, are they not good things?’ Marcus demanded. ‘Justice, and order, and good roads; worth having, surely?’

‘These be all good things,’ Esca agreed. ‘But the price is too high.’

‘The price? Freedom?’

‘Yes—and other things than freedom.’

‘What other things? Tell me, Esca; I want to know. I want to understand.’

Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. ‘Look at the pattern embossed here on your daggersheath,’ he said at last. ‘See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.’

Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. ‘Go on.’

Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside at Cottia’s coming. ‘Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heaven and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to—if they ever had it.’ He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. ‘You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.’

‘The sheath was made by a British craftsman,’ Marcus said stubbornly. ‘I bought it at Anderida when I first landed.’

‘By a British craftsman, yes, making a Roman pattern. One who had lived so long under the wings of Rome—he and his fathers before him—that he had forgotten the ways and the spirit of his own people.’ He laid the shield down again. ‘You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own.’

For a while they were silent, watching Cub at his beetlehunting. Then Marcus said, ‘When I came out from home, a year and a half ago, it all seemed so simple.’ His gaze dropped again to the buckler on the bench beside him, seeing the strange, swelling curves of the boss with new eyes. Esca had chosen his symbol well, he thought: between the formal pattern on his dagger-sheath and the formless yet potent beauty of the shield-boss lay all the distance that could lie between two worlds. And yet between individual people, people like Esca, and Marcus, and Cottia, the distance narrowed so that you could reach across it, one to another, so that it ceased to matter.

M
ARCUS
had said ‘Come when you like,’ and Cottia had said, ‘I will come tomorrow.’ But it was not so simple as that, after all. Kaeso would have made no particular difficulty, for he was an easygoing and kindly man, very eager to stand well with his Roman fellow-Magistrate. But Aunt Valaria, always so careful to follow the custom of what she called ‘civilized Society’, was very sure that it was not the custom for gently nurtured Roman maidens to take themselves into other people’s gardens and make friends with the total strangers they found there. It was not as though Aquila had ever shown himself in the least friendly.

Marcus of course knew nothing of this; he only knew that Cottia did not come tomorrow, nor the day after. And he told himself that there was no reason why she should. It had been to see Cub that she came in the first place, and having seen him, why should she come again? He had thought that perhaps she wanted to be friends, but it seemed that that had been a mistake, and it did not much matter.

And then on the third day, when he had sworn to himself that he would not look for her coming any more, he heard her calling his name, softly and urgently, and when he looked up from the spear-blade that he had been burnishing, there she was, standing where he had first seen her, among the wild fruit-trees.

‘Marcus! Marcus, I could not get free of Nissa before,’ she began breathlessly. ‘They say that I must not come again.’

Marcus laid down the spear, and demanded, ‘Why?’

She glanced quickly over her shoulder into her own garden. ‘Aunt Valaria says it is not seemly for a Roman maiden to do as I have done. But I am not a Roman maiden; and oh, Marcus, you must make her let me come! You
must
!’

She was hovering on the edge of flight, even while she spoke, and clearly it was no time for needless talk or long explanations. ‘She
shall
let you come,’ Marcus said quickly, ‘but it may take time. Now go, before they catch you.’ He made her a swift half-laughing obeisance, palm to forehead, and she turned and dropped out of sight.

Marcus returned to his burnishing. The whole incident had come and gone as quickly as the flight of a bird across the garden, but behind it he was suddenly happier than he had been for three days.

That evening, after talking it over with Esca, he laid the whole problem before Uncle Aquila.

‘And what,’ inquired Uncle Aquila when he had finished, ‘do you suggest that I should do about it?’

‘If you could make a few neighbourly remarks to the Lady Valaria the next time you cross her path, I think it would help.’

‘But Jupiter! I scarce know the woman, save to bow to her as Kaeso’s wife.’

‘Which is exactly why a few neighbourly remarks seem indicated.’

‘And what if she becomes neighbourly in return?’ demanded Uncle Aquila in blighting tones.

‘She cannot invade you here in your stronghold, at all events, since there are no womenfolk to receive her,’ Marcus pointed out, quite unblighted.

‘There is truth in that, admittedly. Why do you want the chit to come?’

‘Oh—because she and Cub understand each other.’

‘And so I am to be thrown to the lions in order that Cub may have his playmate?’

Marcus laughed. ‘It is only one lion, or rather lioness.’ And then the laughter left him. ‘Uncle Aquila, we do need your help. I would contrive to play Perseus for myself, but at this stage nothing I could do would in the least avail to rescue Andromeda. It is a job for the head of the household.’

‘It was peaceful in this house before you came,’ said Uncle Aquila with resignation. ‘You are an unutterable nuisance, but I suppose you must have your own way.’

Marcus was never quite sure how it was brought about. Certainly Uncle Aquila never appeared to bestir himself at all in the matter, but from that time forward there began to be more of surface friendliness between the two houses, and before the woods below the old ramparts had thickened into full leaf, Cottia had become a part of life in the Aquila household, and came and went as it pleased her, and as it pleased Marcus.

Esca, who was by nature silent and withdrawn with anyone save the young Roman, was somewhat prone at first to stand on his dignity as a slave, where she was concerned; but he lowered his barriers to her little by little, so far as it was in him to lower them to anyone who was not Marcus. And Marcus tyrannized over and laughed at her, and was content in her company; he taught her to play ‘Flash the Fingers’, a game beloved of Legionaries and gladiators; and told her long stories about his old home in the Etruscan hills. Telling Cottia about it, conjuring up for her the sights and sounds and smells, seemed somehow to bring it all nearer and ease the ache of exile; and as he told about it, he would catch again that first glimpse of the farmstead from the corner of the hill track where the wild cherry-trees grew. ‘There were always a lot of pigeons strutting and fluttering about the courtyards and the roofs, and their necks would catch the sunlight and shine iridescent green and purple; little white stock-doves, too, with coral-pink feet. And when you came into the courtyard they would all burst upwards with a great deal of fuss, and then come circling down again round your feet. And then old Argos would come out of his kennel and bark and wag his tail at the same time; and there would be a wonderful smell of whatever was for supper—grilled river trout, perhaps, or fried chicken if it was a special occasion. And when I came home in the evening, after being out all day, my mother would come to the door when she heard Argos barking…’

Cottia never tired of hearing about the farm in the Etruscan hills, and Marcus, homesick as he was, never tired of telling her. One day he even showed her his olivewood bird.

But towards the summer’s end he began to have more and more trouble with the old wound. He had grown so used to the dull ache of it that often he could forget about it altogether, but now there was a jangling sharpness in the old ache, that could not be forgotten, and sometimes the scars were hot to touch and reddened and angry to the sight.

Matters came to a head on a hot August evening, when Marcus and his uncle had just played out their usual game of draughts. It had been a blazing day, and even out here in the courtyard there seemed no air. The evening sky was drained of all colour by the day’s heat, a bleached and weary sky, and the scent of the roses and cistus in the courtyard jars hung heavy in the air, as smoke hangs in misty weather.