The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (17 page)

‘We shall not have far to seek,’ Esca said, ‘if we follow the stream downward.’

Marcus quirked an eyebrow at him. ‘What tells you that?’

‘Smoke. Over the shoulder of the hill yonder; I caught the blur of it against the birch-trees, a while back.’

‘It could be heath fire.’

‘It was hearth fire,’ Esca said with simple conviction.

Marcus relaxed again on the grass. Then, as though on a sudden impulse, he drew his dagger and fell to cutting small square turfs from the fine burnside grass, loosening and lifting them with infinite care. Having cut as many as he wanted, he drew the arching briars and the hemlock leaves back over the scars, and shifting farther up the bank, began to build them one a-top the other.

‘What is it that you do?’ Esca asked, after watching him in silence for a while.

‘I build an altar,’ Marcus said, ‘here in the place of our first halt.’

‘To what god?’

‘To my own god. To Mithras, the Light of the Sun.’

Esca was silent again. He did not offer to help with this altar to Marcus’s god, who was not his; but he drew closer and sat hugging his knees and looking down at the work. Marcus went on trimming and shaping the sods; the crumbling soil was faintly warm under his fingers, and a low-hanging rowan branch cast ring-streaked shadows over his intent hands. When the altar was finished and squared to his satisfaction, he cleaned and sheathed his dagger, and brushed away the scatter of loose soil from the surrounding grass with his palms. Then with scraps of birch bark and dry sticks and sprigs of dead heather—Esca helped him gather these—he built a small fire on the altar top. He built it very carefully, hollowing it slightly in the middle, as though to make a nest for something that he loved, and breaking a creamy curd of blossom from the rowan spray, nipped floweret from floweret, and scattered them over all. Lastly, he took from the breast of his tunic his olive-wood bird—his olive-wood bird. It was polished smooth and dark with years of carrying; rather a clumsy and ridiculous little bird, now that he came to look at it, but dear to him; and its dearness made it a fitting sacrifice. It had been part of his life, something that continued back from him to the wild olive-tree in the loop of the stream, and the life and places and things and people that the wild olive-tree belonged to. And suddenly, as he laid it in the hollow among the tiny stars of the rowan blossom, it seemed to him that with it—in it—he was laying the old life down too.

He held out his hand to Esca for the flint and steel which he always carried on him.

The golden sparks that he struck out dropped on to the tinder-dry scraps of birch bark, and hung there an instant like jewels; then, as he blew on them, nursing them to life, they flared up into crackling flame; a flower of flame with the olive-wood bird sitting at its heart like a dove on her nest.

He fed the fire carefully, with bits of wood from a fallen branch that Esca brought him.

A
LL
that summer Marcus and Esca wandered through the abandoned Province of Valentia, crossying and re-crossing from coast to coast, and making steadily northward. They ran into no serious trouble, for Rufrius Galarius had spoken the truth when he said that the oculist’s stamp was a talisman that would carry its owner anywhere. In Valentia, as in the rest of Britain, there were many people with marsh ophthalmia, and Marcus did his best for those who came to him for help, with the salves which the old field surgeon had shown him how to use. They were good salves, and Marcus had common sense and gentle hands and the craftsman’s dislike of a job ill done, and so he succeeded better than most of the few quack-salvers who had passed that way. The tribesmen were not exactly friendly; it was not in them to be friendly towards men not of their own tribe, but they were certainly not unfriendly. There was generally somebody in each village who would give them food and shelter at the day’s end; and always, if the way was difficult to find or dangerous to follow, a hunter from one village would act as their guide to the next. They would have paid well, too, for Marcus’s skill, with a palmful of jet beads, a fine javelin-head or a dressed beaver skin—things which would have fetched many times the value of the salves, south of the Wall. But Marcus was not in this adventure to make a fortune, nor did he wish to jingle round the country loaded like a trader, and he shelved the difficulty by saying to each offer, ‘Keep it for me until I come again on my way south.’

Late summer came, and the rowan-trees that had been in new flower when Marcus built his altar in the glen of their first halt were heavy now with flaming bosses of berries; and on an August noon they sat side by side, looking down through the birch-woods to the great firth which half cut Valentia from what lay beyond. It was a day like a trumpet blast, the wooded hills swimming in the heat, and at their backs the mares stamped and fretted, swishing their tails against the cloud of flies that beset them. Marcus sat with his hands locked round his updrawn knees and stared out across the firth. The sun was hot on the nape of his neck, scorching his shoulders through the cloth of his tunic, and he would have dearly liked to copy Esca, lying on his stomach beside him, who had discarded his tunic altogether and now went stripped to the waist like the Painted People. But to ride round the country in his bracco would have been beneath the dignity of Demetrius of Alexandria, and he supposed that he must continue to stew in his woollen tunic.

He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the sunbaked birch-woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings. But he was not really conscious of any of these things.

‘We have missed the trail somehow,’ he said abruptly. ‘It is in my mind that we have come too far north. We are all but up to the old frontier now.’

‘The Eagle is surely more likely to be found beyond the northern wall,’ said Esca. ‘The tribesmen would scarcely leave it in territory that was even in name a Roman province. They will have carried it away into one of their holy places.’

‘I know,’ Marcus said. ‘But the traces should be in Valentia; and if the accounts of Caledonia that we have heard are true, we stand small chance of sighting our quarry among the mountains, unless we have some trail to follow. We shall simply wander up through Caledonia until we fall into the sea off the northernmost headland.’

‘A holy place is apt to spread signs of itself abroad, for those, having eyes to see, who come even a little near,’ Esca suggested.

Marcus sat silent for a moment, still hugging his knees. Then he said, ‘When there is nothing, nothing at all, to guide a man in his choice, then it is time to lay the choice on the gods,’ and fishing in the breast of his tunic, he brought out a small leather bag, and from the bag, a sesterce.

Esca rolled over and sat up, the blue warrior patterns moving on arms and breast as the muscles slid under his brown skin.

The disc of silver lay in Marcus’s palm, showing the head of Domitian crowned with laurel; a small thing to hold their destinies. ‘Heads we push on, ships we try a cast back,’ Marcus said, and sent the coin spinning into the air. He caught it on the back of his hand, clapping the other over it, and for an instant their eyes met, questioningly. Then Marcus lifted the covering hand and they looked down at the winged victory on the obverse side of the coin, which had been called ‘Ships’ from the days of the Republic, when the design had been the prow of a galley.

‘We turn south again,’ Marcus said.

Turn south they did; and a few nights later they encamped in the old fort which Agricola had raised at Trinomontium, the Place of Three Hills.

Thirty years ago, when Valentia was a Roman province in more than name, before Agricola’s work had been all undone by meddling from the Senate, Trinomontium had been a busy fort. A double cohort had drilled in the wide forum and slept in the barrack rows; there had been many horses in the stables, cavalry manoeuvres on the gentle southern slope below the ramparts, with the riders crested with tossing yellow plumes, the usual baths and wineshops and the turf bothies of the women’s quarters; and over all, the crested sentries marching to and fro. But now the wild had flowed in again; grass covered the cobbles of the streets, timber roofs had fallen in, and the red sandstone walls stood gaunt and empty to the sky. The wells were choked with the debris of thirty autumns, and an elder-tree had taken root in one corner of the roofless shrine where once had stood the cohort’s standard and the altars of its gods, and had thrust a jagged gap in the wall to make room for itself. In all that desolation the only living creature that Marcus and Esca found as they wandered through it in the heavy stillness of the summer evening, was a lizard basking on a fallen block of stone, which darted off like a whip-lash at their approach. Looking down at the stone, Marcus saw roughly carved on it the charging boar of the Twentieth Legion. Somehow the sight brought the desolation home to him very sharply.

‘If ever the Legions come north again, they will have a fine building job on their hands,’ he said.

The hoof-beats of their led mounts sounded unnaturally loud in the silence; and when they halted at a crossways, the silence that came rushing in on them seemed almost menacing.

‘It is in my heart that I wish we had pushed on to the next village,’ Esca said, half under his breath. ‘I do not like this place.’

‘Why not?’ Marcus asked. ‘You did not mind it when we were here before.’ For they had turned aside to look at the derelict fort on their way north, hoping against hope that it might hold some clue for them.

‘That was at noon. Now it is evening, and soon the light will go.’

‘We shall do well enough with a fire,’ Marcus said in surprise. ‘We have slept out time and again since we started on this venture, and had no trouble while the fire burned. And surely the only creatures likely to lair in these ruins are wild pig, and we have seen no signs of any such.’

‘I have not been a hunter since first I could hold a spear, without growing used to sleeping in the wild,’ Esca said, in the same suppressed voice. ‘It is not the forest folk that make me cold between my shoulders.’

‘What, then?’

Esca laughed, and broke off his laughter midway. ‘I am a fool. Maybe the ghosts of a lost Legion.’

Marcus, who had been gazing out over the grass-grown forum, looked round quickly. ‘It was a cohort of the Twentieth that served here, never the Ninth.’

‘How do we know where the Ninth served,’ Esca said, ‘after they marched into the mist?’

Marcus was silent for a moment. He came of a breed that did not trouble unduly about ghosts, but he knew that with Esca it was quite otherwise. ‘I do not think that they would bring us any harm, if they did come,’ he said at last. ‘It seemed to me that this would be a good place to sleep, especially with the curlews calling rain as they are this evening; but if you say the word, we will find a sheltered place among the hazel woods, and sleep there.’

‘I should be ashamed,’ Esca said simply.

Marcus said, ‘Then we had best set about choosing our quarters.’

They settled finally on one end of a barrack row, where the roof had not fallen in, and the few feet of timber and rotten thatch made a shelter from the coming rain. There they unloaded the mares, rubbed them down and turned them loose in the long building, in the British fashion; after which Esca went off to gather a few armfuls of fodder, and bracken for bedding, while Marcus collected a stock of the rotten timber which lay about, and got a fire going, watched with close attention by Vipsania and Minna.

Later that evening the tumble-down shelter bore a much more cheerful aspect; a small fire burned brightly at its entrance, the smoke finding its own way round the batwing edge of the rotten thatch, into the darkening sky; and the piled bracken in the far corner spread with the sheepskins which by day were folded to serve as saddles. Marcus and Esca ate some of the food which they had brought with them from last night’s village, coarse barley bannock and strips of strong part-smoked deer meat, which they broiled over the fire; and afterwards Esca lay down at once to sleep.

But Marcus sat for a while beside the fire, watching the sparks fly upward, hearing nothing but the occasional shifting of the mares in the farther shadows. From time to time he bent forward to put more wood on the fire; otherwise he sat quite unmoving, while, on the piled bracken against the wall, Esca slept the quiet, light sleep of the hunter. Looking at him, Marcus wondered whether he would have had the courage to lie quietly down to sleep on what he believed to be haunted ground. With the full dark, the rain came up, soft, heavy swathes of rain; and the swish and whisper of it on the rotten thatch seemed to deepen the utter desolation of this place that had once been living and was now dead. Marcus found himself listening with straining ears to the silence, his thoughts growing full of crowding ghosts that came and went along the rampart walls and through the forsaken forum, until it was all he could do to make himself bank the fire and lie down beside Esca.

Normally when they camped in the wild they took turns to sit up and keep the fire in while the other slept, but here, with four walls round them and a pile of thorn branches across the door to keep the horses in, there could be no need for that. For a while he lay wakeful, every nerve jumping with a queer expectancy; but he was tired, and the spread skins and the fragrant, high-piled bracken were very comfortable. And before long he fell asleep, and dreamed that he was watching Legionaries at pilum practice, quite ordinary Legionaries, save that between their chin-straps and the curves of their helmets—they had no faces.

He woke to a sense of light, steady pressure below his left ear, woke quietly and completely as people roused in that way always do, and opened his eyes to see that the fire had sunk to a few red embers and Esca was crouching beside him in the first faint pallor of the dawn. The evil taste of the dream was still in his mouth. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.