The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (22 page)

A figure stooped out under the low lintel into the torchlight. The figure of a man, stark naked save for the skin of a grey dog-seal, the head drawn over his own. The Seal Clan greeted his coming with a quick, rhythmic cry that rose and fell and rose again, setting the blood jumping back to the heart. For an instant the man—Sealpriest or man-seal—stood before them, receiving their acclamation, then with the clumsy scuffling motion of a seal on dry land, moved to one side of the doorway; and another figure sprang out of the darkness, hooded with the snarling head of a wolf. One after another they came, naked as the first had been, their bodies daubed with strange designs in woad and madder, their head-dresses of animal pelts or bird-feathers, the wings of a swan, the pelt of an otter with the tail swinging behind the wearer’s back, the striped hide of a badger shining black and white in the torchlight. One after another, prancing, leaping, shuffling; men who were not merely playing the part of animals, but who in some strange way, impossible of understanding, actually
were
for the moment the animals whose skins they wore.

One after another they came, until for every clan of the tribe, a totem priest had joined the grotesque dance—if dance it could be called, for it was like no dance that Marcus had ever seen before, and none that he wanted ever to see again. They had swung into a chain, into a circle, hopping, scuffling, bounding, the animal skins swinging behind them. There was no music—indeed music of any sort, however weird, however discordant, seemed worlds away from this dancing; but there seemed to be a pulse beating somewhere—perhaps a hollow log being struck with an open palm—and the dancers took their time from it. Quicker and quicker it beat, like a racing heart, like the heart of a man in fever; and the wheel of dancers spun faster and faster, until, with a wild yell, it seemed to break of its own spinning, and burst back to reveal someone—something—that must have come unnoticed into its midst from the blackness of that doorway in the barrow.

Marcus’s throat tightened for an instant as he looked at the figure standing alone in the full red glare of the torches, seeming to burn with its own fierce light. An unforgettable figure of nightmare beauty, naked and superb, crested with a spreading pride of antlers that caught the torch-light on each polished tip, as though every tine bore a point of flame.

A man with the antlers of a stag set into his head-dress so that they seemed to grow from his brow—that was all. And yet it was not all; even for Marcus, it was not all. The people greeted him with a deep shout that rose and rose until it was like a wolf-pack howling to the moon; and while he stood with upraised arms, dark power seemed to flow from him as light from a lamp. ‘The Horned One! The Horned One!’ They were down on their faces, as a swathe of barley going down before the sickle. Without knowing that he did so, Marcus stumbled to his knee; beside him Esca was crouching with his forearm covering his eyes.

When they rose again, the priest-god had drawn back to the threshold of the Place of Life, and was standing there, his arms fallen to his sides. He burst into a spate of speech, of which Marcus could understand just enough to gather that he was telling the tribe that their sons who had died as boys were now reborn as warriors. His voice rose into pealing triumph, passing little by little into a kind of wild chant in which the tribesmen joined. Torches were springing up all along the close-packed throng, and the standing stones were reddened to their crests and seemed to pulse and quiver with the crashing rhythm of the chant.

When the triumphal chanting was at its height, the priest-god turned and called, then moved from before the doorway; and again someone stooped out from the darkness of the entrance into the glare of torches. A red-haired boy in a chequered kilt, at sight of whom the tribesmen sent up a welcoming shout. Another followed, and another, and many more, each greeted with a shout that seemed to burst upward and break in a wave of sound against the standing stones, until fifty or more New Spears were ranged in the great forecourt. They had a little the look of sleep-walkers, and they blinked dazzled eyes in the sudden blaze of torches. The boy next to Marcus kept running his tongue over dry lips, and Marcus could see the quick panting of his breast, as though he had been running—or very much afraid. What had happened to them in the dark, he wondered, remembering his own hour, and the smell of bull’s blood in the darkened cave of Mithra.

After the last boy, came one last priest, not a totem priest, as the others had been. His head-dress was made of the burnished feathers of a golden eagle, and a long roar burst from the crowd, as the curtain dropped clashing into place behind him. But to Marcus everything seemed for the moment to have grown very still. For the last comer was carrying something that had once been a Roman Eagle.

A
MAN
stepped out from the ranks of the tribe, stripped and painted as for war, and carrying shield iand spear; and at the same instant a boy started forward. The two—they were clearly father and son—came together in the centre of the open space, and the boy stood with shining pride to take shield and spear from his father’s hand. Then he turned slowly on his heel, showing himself to the tribe for their acceptance; turned to the place where Cruachan was hidden by the darkness; turned last of all to the new moon, which had strengthened from a pale feather to a sickle of shining silver in a deep-green sky; and brought his spear crashing down across his shield in salute, before following his father, to stand for the first time among the warriors of his tribe.

Another boy stepped out, and another, and another; but Marcus was aware of them only as moving shadows, for his eyes were on the Eagle; the wreck of the Ninth’s lost Eagle. The gilded wreaths and crowns that the Legion had won in the days of its honour were gone from the crimson-bound staff; the furious talons still clutched the crossed thunderbolts, but where the great silver wings should have arched back in savage pride, were only empty socket-holes in the flanks of gilded bronze. The Eagle had lost its honours, and lost its wings; and without them, to Demetrius of Alexandria it might have seemed as commonplace as a dunghill cock; but to Marcus it was the Eagle still, in whose shadow his father had died; the lost Eagle of his father’s Legion.

He saw very little of the long-drawn ritual that followed, until at last the Eagle had been carried back into the dark, and he found himself part of a triumphal procession led by the New Spears, heading back for the dun: a comettail of tossing torches, a shouting like a victorious army on the homeward march. As they came down the last slope they were met by the smell of roasting meat, for the cooking-pits had been opened. Great fires burned on the open turf below the dun, flowering fiercely red and gold against the remote, sheeny pallor of the loch below, and the women linked hands and came running to join their returning menfolk and draw them home.

Only a few men who were not of the tribe had cared to go with the warriors to the Place of Life. But now the ceremonies were over and it was time for feasting; and traders and soothsayers and harpers had thronged in from the encampment, a party of seal-hunters from another tribe, even the crews of two or three Hibernian ships; they crowded with the warriors of the Epidaii around the fire and feasted nobly on roast meat, while the women, who did not eat with their lords, moved among them with great jars of fiery yellow metheglin, to keep the drinking-horns brimming.

Marcus, sitting between Esca and Liathan at the Chieftain’s fire, began to wonder if the whole night was going to be spent like this, in eating and drinking and shouting. If it was, he should go raving mad. He wanted quiet; he wanted to think; and the joyous uproar seemed to beat inside his head, driving all thought out of it. Also he wanted no more metheglin.

Then quite suddenly the feasting was over. The noise and the vast eating and deep drinking had been, maybe, only a shield raised against the too-potent magic that had gone before. Men and women began to draw back, leaving a wide space of empty turf amid the fires; dogs and children were gathered in. Again torches flared up, casting their fierce light on to the empty space. Again there came that sense of waiting. Marcus, finding himself beside the Chieftain’s grandfather, turned to the old man, asking under his breath, ‘What now?’

‘Dancing now,’ said the other without looking round. ‘See…’

Even as he spoke, the flaming brands were whirled aloft, and a band of young warriors sprang into the torch-lit circle and began to stamp and whirl in the swift rhythm of a war-dance. And this time, strange and barbaric as it might be, Marcus found this was dancing as he understood the word. Dance followed dance, blending into each other so that it was hard to tell where one ended and another began. Sometimes it would seem that the whole men’s side was dancing, and the ground would tremble under their stamping heels. Sometimes it would be only a chosen few who leapt and whirled and crouched in mimic hunting or warfare, while the rest raised the terrifying music of the British before battle by droning across their shield-rims. Only the women never danced at all, for the Feast of New Spears had nothing to do with womenkind.

The moon had long since set, and only the fierce light of fire and torches lit the wild scene, the twisting bodies and brandished weapons, when at last two rows of warriors stepped out on to the trampled turf and stood facing each other. They were stripped to the waist like the rest of the men’s side, and carried shield and feathered war spear; and Marcus saw that one rank was made up of the boys who had become men that day, and the other of their fathers who had armed them.

‘It is the Dance of the New Spears,’ Esca told him as the two lines swept together with upraised shields. ‘So, we dance it, too, we the Brigantes, on the night our boys become men.’

On his other side Tradui leaned towards him, asking, ‘Do not your people hold the Feast of New Spears?’

‘We hold a feast,’ Marcus said, ‘but it is not like this. All this is strange to me, and I have seen many things tonight that make me wonder.’

‘So?—and these things?’ The old man, having got over his first annoyance with Marcus over the toad’s fat, had gradually become more friendly as the days went by; and tonight, warmed still further by the feasting and the metheglin, he was eager to enlighten the stranger within his gates. ‘I will explain them to you, these things at which you wonder; for you are young and doubtless wish to know, and I am old and by far the wisest man in my tribe.’

If he went warily, Marcus realized, here might be a chance to gather certain information that he needed. ‘Truly,’ he said, ‘wisdom shines from Tradui the Chieftain’s grandsire, and my ears are open.’ And he settled himself, with a most flattering show of interest, to ask and listen. It was slow work, but little by little, drawing the old man on with all the skill he possessed, listening patiently to a great deal that was of no use to him whatever, he gathered the scraps of knowledge that he needed. He learned that the priest-kind had their livingplace in the birchwoods below the Place of Life, and that no guard was kept over the holy place, no watch of attendant priests.

‘What need?’ said the old man when Marcus showed surprise at this. ‘The Place of Life has guardians of its own, and who would dare to meddle with that which is of the Horned One?’ He broke off, abruptly, as though catching himself in the act of speaking of forbidden things, and stretched out an old thick-veined hand with the fingers spread horn-wise.

But presently he began to talk again. Under the influence of the metheglin and the torch-light and the dancing, he, too, was remembering his own night: the long-ago night when he had been a New Spear, and danced for the first time the warrior dances of the tribe. Never taking his eyes from the whirling figures, he told of old fights, old cattle-raids, long-dead heroes who had been his sword-brothers when the world was young and the sun hotter than it was now. Pleased at finding an attentive listener who had not heard the story before, he told of a great hosting of the tribes, no more than ten or twelve autumns ago; and how he had gone south with the rest—though some fools had said that he was too old for the war-trail, even then—to stamp out a great army of the Red Crests. And how, having given them to the wolf and to the raven, they had brought back the Eagle-god that the Red Crests carried before them, and given it to the gods of his own people in the Place of Life. The Healer of sore eyes must have seen it tonight when it was carried out and shown to the men’s side?

Marcus sat very still, his hands linked round his updrawn knees, and watched the sparks fly upward from the whirling torches.

‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘I have seen such Eagle-gods before, and I wondered to see it here. We are always curious, we Greeks; also we have small cause to love Rome. Tell me more of how you took this Eagle-god from the Red Crests; I should like to hear that story.’

It was the story that he had heard once already, from Guern the Hunter; but told from the opposite side; and where Guern’s story had ended, this one went on.

Much as he might tell of a bygone hunting that had been good, the old warrior told how he and his sword-brethren had hunted down the last remnants of the Ninth Legion, closing round them as a wolf-pack closes round its prey. The old man told it without a shadow of pity, without a shadow of understanding for the agony of his quarry; but with a fierce admiration that lit his face and sounded in every word.

‘I was an old man even then, and it was my last fight, but
what
a fight! Ayee! Worthy to be the last fight of Tradui the Warrior! Many a night when the fire sinks low, and even the battles of my youth grow thin and cold, I have kept warm thinking of that fight! We brought them to bay at last in the bog country a day north of the place they call the Three Hills; and they turned like a boar at bay. We were flushed with easy triumph, for until that day it had been very easy. They crumbled at a prick, but that day it was not so. Those others had been but the flakings of the flint, and these were the core; a small core, so small… They faced outward all ways, with the winged god upreared in their midst; and when we broke their shield-wall, one would step over his fallen brother, and lo, the shield-wall would be whole as before. We pulled them down at last—aye, but they took a goodly escort of our warriors with them. We pulled them down until there were left but a knot—as many as there are fingers on my two hands—and the winged god still in their midst. I, Tradui, I slew with my last throw-spear the priest in the spotted hide who held the staff; but another caught it from him as he fell, and held it so that the winged god did not go down, and rallied the few who were left, yet again. He was a chieftain among the rest, he had a taller crest, and his cloak was of the warrior scarlet. I wish that it had been I who killed him, but one was before me…