The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (28 page)

And then, as they came down a gentle slope, the air seemed to change, and with it, the feel of the ground under their feet; and suddenly he understood. Bog! Bog with presumably some hidden path across it for those who knew the secret. They came to the edge of it almost as abruptly as to the edge of a pool, and the queer rooty smell of it was all around them. Guern was casting about like a hound cutting across a scent. Suddenly he halted, and his dog with him.

‘Here. It is here,’ he said, speaking under his breath for the first time since their setting out. ‘From now on we must go behind one another. Follow me exactly, and do not halt for so long as a heart-beat; even on the secret way the ground is soft. Do as I bid you and you will cross safely; disobey me, and you will sink.’ It was as simple as that.

‘Understood,’ Marcus murmured back. It was no time or place for needless talk: Mithra alone knew how near the scouting tribesmen might be.

With the dog pressed against him, Guern turned outward to the bog. Marcus moved into place behind him, and Esca brought up the rear. The ground felt spongy under their feet, sucking at them gently at every step that seemed taken only just in time to keep from sinking; and they had gone only a short way when Marcus noticed that a faint mist had begun to rise. At first he took it for no more than the breath of the bog, but soon he realized that it was more than that. Higher and higher it rose, wreathing upward in faint gauzy swathes that closed together overhead. Looking up, he could still see the moon shining, but faintly, through mist-wreathes in a glimmering sky. Mist; the weather of all others that they had cause to dread! And that it should come now! There could be no turning back; yet how was it possible for any man to find such a way as they were following, in this murk? And if they lost it? But that was not good to think about.

The mist was thickening steadily. Soon they were walking almost blind, their world made up of a few feet of sodden turf and tufted bog-cotton, and the occasional glint of water, dissolving into a nothingness of glimmering mist; and there was no sign of any path. But Guern seemed never at a loss, walking lightly and steadily forward, changing his course from time to time, and the other two followed. The dank, rooty smell grew always stronger, colder; the moon was sinking low and the mist losing itself in darkness, and still Guern the Hunter walked on. On and on. It was very silent, only a bittern boomed somewhere to their right, and there came small, evil, sucking noises from the bog.

Marcus had long since got over his first unpleasant doubts of Guern’s ability to find the secret way in the mist, but now he was beginning to wonder how much longer he could keep on at this light, unvarying stride; and then suddenly it seemed to him that the ground was growing firmer underfoot. A few more steps, and he was sure of it. They were drawing up out of the quag. The mist smelled different, chill as ever, but lighter and sweeter. Soon the secret way was behind them, like an evil dream.

By that time dawn was near, and the mist was growing out of the darkness again, no longer glimmering, but dully grey as the ash of a long-dead fire. In the growing light, clear of the last pocket of bog, they halted thankfully in the lea of a clump of ancient thorn-trees and turned to face each other, while the dog lay down at their feet.

‘I have brought you as far as I can,’ Guern said. ‘Every man to his own hunting grounds, and from now on the land is strange to me.’

‘You have brought us clear through the guard of our enemies, and we can fend for ourselves now,’ Marcus said quickly.

Guern shook his ragged head doubtfully. ‘They may be drawing these hills also, for all I know. Therefore travel by night and lie up by day; and if you do not go astray in the mist, nor fall into the hands of the tribesmen, you should reach the Wall some time in the second night from now.’ He hesitated, tried to speak, and hesitated again. At last he said with a kind of half-angry humility: ‘Before our trails divide, it is in my heart that I would see the Eagle once again. It was my Eagle once.’

For answer, Marcus slipped the closely wrapped bundle from its sling, and turning back the folds, laid bare the lost Eagle. It was dark and lustreless in the grey dawn murk; a mere bird-shaped lump of battered metal. ‘It has lost its wings,’ he said.

Guern reached out eagerly as though to take it, then checked, and dropped his hands back to his sides. The betraying gesture tore harshly at something deep in Marcus’s chest, and suddenly he could have howled like a dog. For a long moment he held the Eagle, while the other stood with rigidly bent head, looking down at it, unspeaking. Then, as Guern stepped back, he folded the dark cloth once more over it, and returned it to its place under his cloak.

Guern said, ‘So. I have seen the Eagle once more. Maybe after today I shall not look on a Roman face nor hear my own tongue spoken again… It is time that you were on your way.’

‘Come with us,’ Marcus said on a sudden impulse.

Guern’s ragged head went up, and he stared at Marcus under his brows. For an instant he actually seemed to be considering the idea. Then he shook his head. ‘My welcome might be an over-warm one. I have no yearning after death by stoning.’

‘Tonight’s work would alter that. We owe our lives to you, and if we get the Eagle back to its own place, that will be your doing.’

Guern shook his head again. ‘I am of the Selgovae. I have a woman of the tribe to wife, and she is a good wife to me. I have sons, born into the tribe, and my life is here. If ever I was—something else, and my life was elsewhere, all that lies in another world and the men I knew in it have forgotten me. There is no way back through the Waters of Lethe.’

‘Then—good hunting to you on your own trails,’ Marcus said after a silence. ‘Wish us well, between here and the Wall.’

‘I will wish you well; and it is in my heart that I will wish myself with you. If you win through, I shall hear of it, and be glad.’

‘You will have played no small part in it, if we do,’ Marcus said, ‘and neither of us will forget. The Light of the Sun be with you, Centurion.’

They looked back when they had gone a few paces, and saw him standing as they had left him, already dimmed with mist, and outlined against the drifting mist beyond. A half-naked, wild-haired tribesman, with a savage dog against his knee; but the wide, well-drilled movement of his arm as he raised it in greeting and farewell was all Rome. It was the parade-ground and the clipped voice of trumpets, the iron discipline and the pride. In that instant Marcus seemed to see, not the barbarian hunter, but the young centurion, proud in his first command, before ever the shadow of the doomed legion fell on him. It was to that centurion that he saluted in reply.

Then the drifting mist came between them.

As they turned away, Marcus found himself hoping that Guern would get back safely to the new life that he had made for himself, that he would not have to pay for the faith that he had kept with them. Well, the mist would give him cover on his homeward way.

Almost as though he had heard his friend’s unspoken thoughts and was answering them, Esca said: ‘He will hear if we come with our lives out of this, but we shall never hear whether he does.’

‘I wish that he had chosen to come with us,’ Marcus said. But even as he spoke, he knew that Guern the Hunter was right. There was no way back through the Waters of Lethe.

Two dawns later, Marcus and Esca were still a long way from the Wall. The mist that had met them on the secret way had haunted them ever since; a patchy and treacherous mist that was sometimes no more than a faint blurring of the more distant hills, and at others swooped down on them, blotting out all landmarks in a swirling greyness in which the very ground seemed dissolving away. They would have become lost over and over again but for the hunter’s sense of direction that made Esca able to smell the south as a townsman might smell garlic. And even with that to help them, they could only struggle on with maddening slowness, covering what distance they could when the mist thinned, and lying up wherever they happened to be when it grew too thick to push on any farther. Once or twice they came very near to disaster; many times they had to cast back for a way round some pitfall that the mist had hidden from them, and Marcus, who was leaving the route to Esca as usual, was having anxieties of his own. His lame leg, which had carried him well enough through the forced marches and weary scrambles of their way south, was beginning to let him down, and let him down badly. He held on doggedly, but he was growing clumsy, and when he stumbled the jar of it made him set his teeth.

That dawn brought them their first warning that the enemy were indeed, as Guern had said, drawing these hills also, when the fitful mist rolled back to show them the figure of a mounted man, evidently on watch, high on a hill-shoulder not more than a bowshot away. Luckily he was not looking their way, and they fell flat among the heather, and spent a bad few moments watching him ride slowly along the ridge, until the mist closed down again.

They spent part of that day lying up in the lee of a great boulder, but started out again while there were still several hours of daylight left. While the mist hung about them, they had had to abandon their plan of travelling only by night, and push on when and how they could.

‘How far have we still to go, by your reckoning?’ Marcus asked, as he stood trying to rub the stiffness out of his leg.

Esca tightened his rawhide belt, which had become too loose for him, collected his spear and brushed up, as well as he could, the flattened grass where they had been lying.

‘It is hard to judge,’ he said. ‘It has been slow travelling in this murk, but I think that I have not brought us greatly out of our way. By the fall of the land, I should say twelve or fourteen of your Roman miles. There; if any hunter comes close to this place, he will see that we have lain there, but from a few paces distant, it will not show.’

They set out once more on the long march south.

Towards evening a faint wind began to stir; and before it, the mist, which had been thick all day, grew ragged as a beggar’s cloak.

‘If the wind rises, we may lose this witches’ brew at last,’ said Marcus, as they halted at the curve of a narrow glen to make sure of their direction.

Esca lifted his head and sniffed, like an animal grown suddenly wary. ‘Meanwhile it is in my heart that we should do well to find ourselves a fox-hole until dusk.’

But they had left the finding of their fox-hole too late. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the mist seemed to curl back on itself. It spread sideways like blown smoke; the brown heather and golden bracken across the burn warmed suddenly through the drifting swathes, and next instant a cry, high and carrying and oddly triumphant, pierced upward from the far side of the glen, and a saffron-kilted figure started from cover and ran, crouching low, for the hill-crest. Esca’s spear followed him, but it was too far for a throw. In six racing heart-beats he had reached the sky-line and dropped out of sight, crying his summons as he ran.

‘Downhill,’ Esca said harshly. ‘Into the woods.’

They swung in their tracks, towards the nearest tongue of the birch woods that were spreading like a stain through the ragged mist, but even as they did so, the signal cry rose from among the golden trees in answer. There was no escape that way; and as they turned again, from far up the glen behind them the same cry went up, thin as a bird’s call. Only one way lay open for them, and they took it; straight uphill to their right, and what lay over the hill-crest only the Lord of the Legions knew.

They gained the crest somehow, Marcus was never sure how, and as they hesitated an instant on the bare ridge, the cry—it was changing its quality now, becoming a hunting cry—rose again behind them, and was answered and flung up out of the mist below, closing in. They must have blundered into a large band of the hunters. Southward along the ridge, a dark mass of furze seemed to offer a certain amount of cover, and they dived into it like hunted animals going to ground, and began to work their way forward into its heart.

After that all was a blurred confusion of mist and jagged furze branches, and a chaos of dark islands swirled through by tawny tides of bracken and bilberry; of lying rigid among the dagger-sharp furze-roots with a suffocating reek of fox in their throats and the horror of the hunted in their racing hearts, while death with many heron-tufted war-spears stalked them through the dark maze. There were men all round them, on horseback, on foot, thrusting heedless of torn skin through the spiney branches, leaping high on stiff legs like hunting dogs who seek their quarry in long grass, giving tongue like hunting dogs too, now on this side, now on that. Once a probing spear struck like a snake within a span of Marcus’s shoulder. And then quite suddenly they realized that against all seeming possibility, the hunt had missed them. It had swept over them and was no longer all around them, but behind!

They began to work forward on their stomachs again, with slow, agonizing caution. They could not tell where they were going, save that it was away from the enemy behind them. A dark and evidently much-used tunnel in the furze opened to them, and they slid into it, Esca leading. The reek of fox grew stronger than ever. The tunnel curved, leading them slightly downhill, and there was nothing to do but follow it, no breaking out through the dense furze that walled and roofed it in. It ended suddenly on the edge of the cover, and before them a spur of rocky, bush-grown turf ran out at an angle from the main ridge. Swathes of mist, drawn up out of the deep glen, were still drifting across it before the rising wind, but at the farthest point, upward of a bowshot away, something that might be a broch loomed through the greyness. It did not look promising, but they could not stay where they were, for it seemed to them that the sounds of the hunt were drawing nearer again, and there could be no turning back.

So they struck out into the open, getting what cover they could from the rocks and scrub, in search of some way down. But it seemed that there was no way down. The north-western slope would have been easy enough, but as they crouched among the bushes at the edge of it, the jink of a pony’s bridle-bit came up to them, and the movement of men waiting. That way was securely stopped up. The south-eastern scarp dropped practically sheer into drifting mist-wreaths, out of which rose the indefinable sense and smell of deep water. There might be a way out for the Eagle, there, but there was certainly none for Marcus. Driven on by the sound of the hunt questing through the furze behind them like hounds after a lost scent, they struggled on a few steps, then checked, panting and desperate, looking this way and that, with eyes that strained to find some way of escape. But Marcus was almost done, and Esca had his arm round him. They could go no farther even if the way were clear; they were trapped, and they knew it. The building that they had glimpsed through the mist was quite clear now; not a broch at all, but an old Roman signal-tower. They gathered themselves together and made for it.