The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (29 page)

It was a very obvious hiding-place, so obvious that it offered a bare chance of safety, or at all events respite, because the hunters might well have searched it already. At the worst it would give them a chance to put up some sort of fight; and there was always the dark coming.

The narrow archway, doorless now, gaped blackly in the wall, and they stumbled through into a small courtyard where grass had long since covered the cobbles. Another empty doorway faced them, and Marcus made for it. They were in the guard-room now. Dead leaves rustled to and fro on the floor, and the milky light filtering from a high window embrasure showed them the foot of a stairway in the wall. ‘Up here,’ he gasped.

The steps were of stone and still in good condition, though slippery with damp, and they stumbled upward, the sound of their feet seeming very loud in the silence of the stone shell where a little Roman garrison had lived and worked, keeping watch over the border hills, in the short years when the province of Valentia was more than a name.

They ducked out through a low door under the signal platform, on to the flat roof of the tower, into daylight as translucent as a moonstone after the dark below. As they did so, Marcus was almost blinded by a thrashing of great black wings past his face, and a startled raven burst upward uttering its harsh, grating alarm cry, and flew off northward with slow, indignant wing-beats, caaking as it went.

‘Curse! That will announce our whereabouts clearly to all who may be interested,’ Marcus thought, but was suddenly too tired to care very much. Utterly spent, he lurched across to the far side of the roof, and looked down through a crumbling embrasure. Below him the ground dropped sheer from the tower foot, and through the last filmy rags of the mist he caught the darkness of deep water, far below, a still and sombre tarn brooding on its own secrets, between the spur and the main ridge. Yes, there would be a way out for the Eagle.

On the landward side, Esca was crouching beside a broken place in the parapet, where several large stones had fallen, leaving a gap. ‘They are still beating the furze,’ he muttered as Marcus joined him. ‘It is well for us that there are no dogs with this band. If they do not come before dusk, we may escape them yet.’

‘They will come before dusk,’ Marcus murmured back. ‘The raven has made sure of that. Listen…’ A sound came up to them from below the northern side of the spur, a confused, formless splurge of excitement, faint with mist and distance, that told them all too clearly that the waiting man had understood the raven’s message. Marcus lowered himself stiffly on to his sound knee beside the other, slipped into an easier position, and stretched out sideways, leaning on one arm, his head hanging low. After a few moments he looked up. ‘I suppose I should feel guilty about you, Esca. For me, there has been the Eagle; but what had you to win in all this?’

Esca smiled at him, a slow grave smile. There was a jagged tear in his forehead where a furze root had caught him, Marcus noticed, but under it his eyes looked very quiet. ‘I have been once again a free man amongst free men. I have shared the hunting with my brother, and it has been a good hunting.’

Marcus smiled back. ‘It has been a good hunting,’ he agreed. The soft beat of unshod hooves on turf came drumming up from the mist below; the unseen hunters of the furze cover were casting back towards the open spur, beating as they came, making sure that their quarry did not again slip through them. They would be here soon, but the riders from below would be first. ‘A good hunting; and now I think that is ended.’ He wondered if any word of that ending would one day drift south across the Wall, would reach the Legate Claudius, and through him, Uncle Aquila; would reach Cottia in the garden under the sheltering ramparts of Calleva. He should like them to know … it had been a good hunting, that he and Esca had had together. Suddenly he knew that, despite all outward seeming, it had been worth while.

There was a great quietness in him. The last of the mist was blowing clear away as the wind freshened; something that was almost sunshine brushed fleetingly across the old signal-tower, and he noticed for the first time that a clump of harebell had taken root in a cranny of the fallen parapet close to him, and, late in flowering because of the place in which it grew, still carried one fragile bell aloft on an arching thread-slender stem. It swayed as the wind blew over, and regained its place with a tiny, defiant toss. It seemed to Marcus that it was the bluest thing he had ever seen.

Up over the edge of the spur, three wild horsemen appeared heading for the gateway.

A
S
they dropped from their ponies in the courtyard below, Marcus and Esca drew back from the parapet. ‘Only three, so far,’ Marcus whispered. ‘Don’t use your knife unless you have to. They may be of more use to us living than dead.’

Esca nodded, and returned his hunting-knife to his belt. Life and the urgency of doing had taken hold of them again. Flattened against the wall on either side of the stairhead they waited, listening to their pursuers questing through storehouse and guard-room. ‘Fools!’ Marcus breathed, as a shout told them that the stairway had been spotted; and then came a rush of feet that checked at the floor below and then came on, storming upward.

Marcus was a good boxer, and much practice with the cestus last winter had made Esca something of a boxer also; together, weary though they were, they made a dangerous team. The first two tribesmen to come ducking out through the low doorway went down without a sound, like poled oxen: the third, not so completely caught unawares, put up more of a fight. Esca flung himself upon him, and they crashed down several steps together, in a flailing mass of arms and legs. There was a short, desperate struggle before Esca came uppermost, and staggering clear, heaved an unconscious man over the doorsill.

‘Young fools,’ he said, stooping for a fallen spear. ‘A hound puppy would have known better than that.’

Two of the tribesmen—they were all very young—lay completely stunned where they had fallen; but one was already stirring; and Marcus bent over him. ‘It is Liathan,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to him. Do you tie up and gag the other two.’

The young warrior groaned, and opened his eyes to find Marcus kneeling over him with his own dagger to his throat, while close by, Esca was hastily trussing and gagging the two unconscious men with strips torn from the cloak of one of them. ‘That was a mistake,’ Marcus said. ‘You should have kept with the rest of the hunt, not come thrusting in here on your own.’

Liathan lay looking up at him. His black eyes were hard with hate; blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. ‘Maybe we saw the raven and we sought to be First Spear, lest a lowland tribe claim the Eagle-god for its own,’ he said between shut teeth.

‘I see. It was a brave thing to do, but extremely stupid.’

‘Maybe; but though we fail, there will be others here soon.’ There was a gleam of savage triumph in the black eyes.

‘So,’ Marcus nodded. ‘When they come, these others, you will tell them that we are not here; that we must after all have slipped by in the mist; and you will send them back the way they came, over the main ridge yonder, towards the sunrise.’

Liathan smiled. ‘Why will I do these things?’ He glanced for a contemptuous instant at the dagger in Marcus’s hand. ‘Because of that?’

‘No,’ said Marcus. ‘Because when the first of your friends sets foot on the stair, I shall send the Eagle—here it is—into the tarn which lies below this place. We are still a long way from the Wall, and you will have other chances—you or others of the hunt—before we reach it; but if we die here, you will lose whatever chance you have of retaking the Red Crests’ god.’

For a long moment Liathan lay staring up into Marcus’s face; and in that silent moment there grew a light smother of hoof-beats and a distant burst of shouting. Esca rose quickly and crossed, half crouching, to the broken parapet. ‘The hunt is up,’ he said softly. ‘They have done with the furze cover. Aiee! Like a wolf-pack, they close in.’

Marcus withdrew the dagger, but his eyes never left the young tribesman’s face. ‘Choose,’ he said, very quietly. He got up and moved backward to the far parapet, unwrapping the Eagle as he did so. Liathan had risen also, and stood swaying a little on his feet, looking from Marcus to Esca and back again. Marcus saw him swallow, saw him lick the cut on his lip. He heard the sounds of the inclosing hunt, very near now, the men giving tongue like excited hounds; and from the emptiness at his back, only the plaintive cry of a marsh bird in the wind-haunted silence. He let the last violet fold fall from the Eagle, and held it up. The evening light, spreading as the mist thinned, struck on the savage, gilded head.

Liathan made a queer gesture of defeat. He turned and strode rather shakily to the broken parapet, and leaned over. The first of the hunt was almost at the gateway, and a shout from under the walls greeted his appearance. Liathan called down to them: ‘They are not here, after all. They must have slipped through the other way in this accursed mist.’ He pointed wildly, and his voice broke like the crying of a storm bird. ‘Try the woods yonder; they will likely have bolted that way.’

A confusion of fierce voices answered him and a pony whinnied shrilly; he drew back from the parapet as though coming hot-foot to follow his words, and as the hunt flung back on itself, turned once more to Marcus.

‘It was well done, was it not?’

Marcus nodded without speaking. Through one of the embrasures he was watching the hunt streaming back along the spur and into the furze cover of the main ridge, men on ponies and men on foot, calling to each other, gathering others as they went; dissolving into the last shreds of the mist. He brought his gaze back to the young tribesman. ‘Truly it was well done,’ he said, ‘but keep your head down, lest any straggler should look back and think it strange to see you still here.’

Liathan lowered his head obediently—and sprang. Sprang like a wild cat. But Marcus, warned by some flicker of his eyes an instant before, flung himself sideways, half falling, with the Eagle under him, and as he did so, Esca was upon the highlander and brought him crashing down.

‘You fool,’ Marcus said a moment later, staggering to his feet and looking down at Liathan, who lay squirming under Esca’s knees. ‘You young fool; there are two of us and only one of you.’

He crossed to the two bound men, and after satisfying himself that all was well with them, tore off some more strips from the cloak that lay beside one of them, and returned to Esca. Between them they bound the hands and feet of the young warrior, who had ceased to struggle and lay rigid with his face turned from them.

‘We can leave the gag for the moment,’ Marcus said when it was done. He picked up the Eagle and began to fold it close once more. ‘Esca, do you go and make sure the ponies are safe. We shall need them.’

When Esca was gone, he got up stiffly and turned to the southern parapet. The upland tarn lay clear and dark now beneath the steep fall of the spur. The hills were blown almost clear of the mist, though it still scarfed the glen with white; and the evening was coming swiftly, swiftly. And somewhere southward beyond those hills, not far now, surely, was the Wall.

‘Why did you come among us, calling yourself a healer of sore eyes, to steal from us the winged god?’

Marcus swung round in answer to the furious voice behind him. ‘In the first place, am I so lacking as a healer of sore eyes? At least your brother’s son will not be blind.’ He leaned one shoulder wearily against the parapet, and stood gazing down reflectively at his captive. ‘In the second, I came to take back—not to steal, for it was never yours—
take back
the winged god, because it was the Eagle of my father’s Legion.’ Instinctively he knew that with Liathan, as with Cottia, that was the part that would make sense; knew also that it was better for the peace of the frontier that the thing be kept a private feud between himself and the tribes.

There was a queer little flicker in Liathan’s dark eyes. ‘So my grandfather was right,’ he said.

‘Was he? Tell me about this rightness of his.’

‘When the priest-kind found the winged god was gone,’ Liathan said, with a kind of defiant willingness to talk, ‘my grandfather swore it was you who had taken it. He said you had the face of that Chieftain of the Red Crests he had seen killed under the wings of the god, and that he had been blind and doting not to know you for his son. But when we had followed you and searched your gear and found nothing, we said among ourselves that the grandfather grew old and fanciful. Then Gault the fisherman found your ring-brooch by the shore of the loch, and the bank pulled down and a hollow place under the waterline. And later, we heard a strange tale from the rath where your sword-brother was taken sick; and we knew. And my grandfather said, “I was right, after all, who am never wrong,” and he sent for me, for my brother had been savaged by a seal and was too sick of the wound to go to the Hosting. He sent for me, and said: “It may be that it is you who will hunt him down, for there is a link of fate between his line and ours. If it be so, kill him if you can, for he has put shame on the gods of the tribe; but also give him his father’s ring, for he is his father’s son in more than blood.”’

There was an instant’s complete silence; and then Marcus said: ‘You have it now?’

‘On a thong round my neck,’ Liathan said sullenly. ‘You must take it for yourself, since my hands are bound.’

Marcus lowered himself on to his sound knee, and slipped a hand warily under the shoulder-folds of the other’s cloak. But it was no trick; he found the ring, which had worked round to the back, and drawing it out, cut the thong, and slipped it on to his bare signet finger. The light was beginning to fade, and the great stone that had been full of green fire when he saw it last, was coolly dark as ilex leaves, lit only by a faint surface reflection of the sky. ‘If the fortunes of war had gone otherwise, and Esca and I had fallen to your spears, you would have had small chance to give me my father’s ring. How, then, would you have carried out your grandfather’s bidding?’ he asked curiously.