The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (6 page)

Somebody moved in the outer room and, a moment later, loomed into the doorway. Marcus turned his head slowly—it seemed very heavy—and saw the garrison Surgeon, clad in a filthy tunic, and with red-rimmed eyes and several days’ growth of beard.

‘Ah, Aulus,’ Marcus said, and found that even his tongue felt heavy. ‘You look—as if you had not been to bed for a month.’

‘Not quite so long as that,’ said the Surgeon, who had come forward quickly at the sound of Marcus’s voice, and was bending over him. ‘Good! Very good!’ he added, nodding his vague encouragement.

‘How long?’ began Marcus, stumblingly.

‘Six days; yes, yes—or it might be seven.’

It seems—like years.’

Aulus had turned back the striped native rugs, and laid a fumbling hand over Marcus’s heart. He seemed to be counting, and answered only with a nod.

But suddenly everything grew near and urgent again to Marcus. ‘The relief force?—They got through to us, then?’

Aulus finished his counting with maddening deliberateness, and drew the rugs up again. ‘Yes, yes. The best part of a cohort of the Legion, from Durinum.’

‘I must see Centurion Drusillus—and the—the relief force Commander.’

‘Maybe presently, if you lie still,’ said Aulus, turning to deal with the smoking lamp.

‘No, not presently. Now! Aulus, it is an order: I am still in command of this—’

He tried to crane up on his elbow, and his rush of words ended in a choking gasp. For a few moments he lay very still, staring at the other man, and there were little beads of sweat on his forehead.

‘Tch! Now you have made it worse!’ scolded Aulus in a slight fluster. ‘That is because you did not lie still, as I bade you.’ He picked up a red Samian bowl from the chest top, and slipped an arm under Marcus’s head to raise him. ‘Best drink this. Tch! tch! It will do you good.’

Too weak to argue, and with the rim of the bowl jolting against his teeth, Marcus drank. It was milk, but with the bitter taste in it which always brought back the darkness.

‘There,’ said Aulus, when the bowl was empty. ‘Now go to sleep. Good boy; now go to sleep.’ And he laid Marcus’s head back on the folded rug.

Centurion Drusillus came next day, and sitting with his hands on his knees and the shadow of his crested helmet blue on the sunlit wall behind him, gave his Commander a broad outline of all that had happened since he was wounded. Marcus listened very carefully; he found that he had to listen very carefully indeed, because if he did not, his attention wandered: to the crack in a roof-beam, to the flight of a bird across the window, to the pain of his wounds or the black hairs growing out of the centurion’s nostrils. But when the centurion had finished, there were still things that Marcus needed to know.

‘Drusillus, what became of the holy man?’

‘Gone to meet his own gods, sir. Caught between the relief force and ourselves. There was a-many of the tribe went with him.’

‘And the charioteer?—my charioteer?’

Centurion Drusillus made the ‘thumbs down’. ‘Dead as we thought you were when we pulled you from the wreck.’

After a moment’s silence, Marcus asked, ‘Who brought me in?’

‘Why, now, that is hard to say, sir. Most of us had our hand in it.’

‘I had hoped to gain time for the rest.’ Marcus rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. ‘What happened?’

‘Nay now, sir, it was all so quick… Galba doubled back to you, and the rest with him, and it was a time for desperate measures; so we took down the reserves—’twas not much more than a javelin throw—and brought you off.’

‘And got cut to pieces by the chariots in doing it?’ Marcus asked quickly.

‘Not so badly as we might have been. Your wreck broke the weight of the charge.’

‘I want to see Galba.’

‘Galba is in the sick-block, with his sword arm laid open,’ Drusillus said.

‘How bad is the damage?’

‘A clean wound. It is healing.’

Marcus nodded. ‘You will be seeing him, I suppose? Salute him for me, Centurion. Tell him I shall come and compare scars with him if I am on my feet before he is. And tell the troops I always
have
said the Fourth Gaulish was the finest cohort with the Eagles.’

‘I will, sir,’ said Drusillus. ‘Very anxiously inquiring, the troops have been.’ He got up, raised an arm heavy with silver good-conduct bracelets in salute, and tramped off back to duty.

Marcus lay for a long time with his forearm across his eyes, seeing against the blackness of his closed lids picture after picture that Drusillus had left behind him. He saw the relief force coming up the road, tramp-tramp-tramp, and the dust rising behind them. He saw the last stand of the tribesmen crumble and the moon-crested fanatic go down. The British town a smoking ruin and the little fields salted by order of the relief force Commander. (Wattle-and-daub huts were easily rebuilt, and salted fields would bear again in three years, but not all the years in eternity would bring back the young men of the tribe, he thought, and was surprised to find that he cared.) He saw dead men, Lutorius among them; he hoped that there would be horses for Lutorius in the Elysian Fields. Most clearly of all, again and again, he saw Cradoc, lying broken among the trampled bracken of the hillside. He had felt very bitter towards Cradoc; he had liked the hunter and thought that his liking was returned; and yet Cradoc had betrayed him. But that was all over. It was not that Cradoc had broken faith; simply that there had been another and stronger faith that he must keep. Marcus understood that now.

Later, the Commander of the relief force came to see him, but the interview was not a happy one. Centurion Clodius Maximus was a fine soldier, but a chilly mannered, bleak-faced man. He stood aloofly in the doorway, and announced that since everything was under control, he intended to continue his interrupted northward march tomorrow. He had been taking troops up to Isca when the Frontier fort’s distress signal had reached Durinum and he had been deflected to answer it. He would leave two Centuries to bring the garrison temporarily up to strength, and Centurion Herpinius, who would take command of the fort until Marcus’s relief could be sent from Isca, when no doubt fresh drafts of auxiliaries would be sent with him.

Marcus realized that it was all perfectly reasonable. The Relief Force were Legionaries, line-of-battle troops, and in the nature of things a Legionary Centurion ranked above an auxiliary one; and if he, Marcus, was going to be laid by for a while, a relief would of course have to be sent down to take his place until he was once more fit for duty. But all the same, he was annoyed by the man’s high-handed manner, annoyed on Drusillus’s account, and on his own. Also, quite suddenly, he began to be afraid. So he became very stiff, and very proud, and for the rest of the short and formal interview treated the stranger with an icy politeness that was almost insulting.

Day followed day, each marked off in its passing by lamplight and daylight, food that he did not want, and the changing shadows that moved across the courtyard outside his window. These, and the visits of Aulus and a medical orderly to dress the spear-gash in his shoulder (he had never felt the blade bite, as he sprang in under the spearman’s thrust), and the ugly mass of wounds that seared his right thigh.

There was some delay about the arrival of his relief from Isca, for several cohort centurions were down with marsh fever; and the moon, which had been new when the tribe rose, waxed and waned into the dark, and the pale feather of another new moon hung in the evening sky; and all save the deepest and most ragged of Marcus’s wounds were healed. That was when they told him that his service with the Eagles was over.

Let him only be patient, and the leg would carry him well enough, one day, Aulus assured him, but not for a long time; no, he could not say how long. Marcus must understand, he pointed out with plaintive reasonableness, that one could not smash a thigh-bone and tear the muscles to shreds and then expect all to be as it had been before.

It was the thing that Marcus had been afraid of ever since his interview with Centurion Maximus. No need to be afraid now, not any more. He took it very quietly; but it meant the loss of almost everything he cared about. Life with the Eagles was the only kind of life he had ever thought of, the only kind that he had any training for; and now it was over. He would never be Prefect of an Egyptian Legion, he would never be able to buy back the farm in the Etruscan hills, or gather to himself another like it. The Legion was lost to him and, with the Legion, it seemed that his own land was lost to him too; and the future, with a lame leg and no money and no prospects, seemed at first sight rather bleak and terrifying.

Maybe Centurion Drusillus guessed something of all this, though Marcus never told him. At all events he seemed to find the Commander’s quarters a good place to spend every off-duty moment, just then; and though Marcus, longing to be alone like a sick animal, often wished him at the other side of the Empire, afterwards he remembered and was grateful for his centurion’s fellowship in a bad time.

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A few days later, Marcus lay listening to the distant sounds of the new Commander’s arrival. He was still in his old quarters, for when he had suggested that he should go across to the sick-block, and leave the two rooms in the Praetorium free for their rightful owner, he was told that other quarters had been made ready for the new Commander, and he was to stay where he was until he was fit to travel—until he could go to Uncle Aquila. He was lucky, he supposed rather drearily, to have Uncle Aquila to go to. At all events he would know quite soon now whether the unknown uncle was like his father.

Now that he could sit up, he could look out into the courtyard, and see the rose-bush in its wine-jar, just outside his window. There was still one crimson rose among the dark leaves, but even as he watched, a petal fell from it like a great slow drop of blood. Soon the rest would follow. He had held his first and only command for just as long as the rose-bush had been in flower… It was certainly pot-bound, he thought; maybe his successor would do something about it.

His successor: whoever that might be. He could not see the entrance to the courtyard, but quick footsteps sounded along the colonnade and then in the outer room, and a moment later the new Commander stood in the doorway; an elegant and very dusty young man with his crested helmet under one arm. It was the owner of the chariot team which Marcus had driven in the Saturnalia Games.

‘Cassius!’ Marcus greeted him. ‘I wondered if it would be anyone I knew.’

Cassius crossed to his side. ‘My dear Marcus; how does the leg?’

‘It mends, in its fashion.’

‘So. I am glad of that, at all events.’

‘What have you done with your bays?’ Marcus asked quickly. ‘You are not having them brought down here, are you?’

Cassius collapsed on to the clothes-chest and wilted elegantly. ‘Jupiter! No! I have lent them to Dexion, with my groom to keep an eye on them, and him.’

‘They will do well enough with Dexion. What troops have you brought down with you?’

‘Two Centuries of the Third: Gauls, like the rest. They are good lads, seasoned troops; been up on the wall laying stone courses and exchanging the odd arrow now and then with the Painted People.’ He cocked a languid eyebrow. ‘But if they can give as good an account of themselves in action as your raw Fourth have done, they will have no need to feel themselves disgraced.’

‘I think there will be no more trouble in these parts,’ Marcus said. ‘Centurion Maximus took good care of that.’

‘Ah, you mean the burned villages and salted fields? A punitive expedition is never pretty. But I gather from your embittered tone that you did not take warmly to Centurion Maximus?’

‘I did not.’

‘A most efficient officer,’ pronounced Cassius, with the air of a grey-headed Legate.

‘To say nothing of officious,’ snapped Marcus.

‘Maybe if you saw the report he sent in when he got back to Headquarters, you might find yourself feeling more friendlily disposed towards him.’

‘It was good?’ asked Marcus, surprised. Centurion Maximus had not struck him as the type who sent in enthusiastic reports.

Cassius nodded. ‘Rather more than good. Indeed, before I marched south there was beginning to be talk of some trifle—say a gilded laurel wreath—to make the standard of the Gaulish Fourth look pretty when it goes on parade.’

There was a short silence, and then Marcus said, ‘It is no more than we—than they deserve! Look, Cassius, if anything more than talking comes of it, send me word. I will give you the direction to write to. I should like to know that the cohort won its first honours under my command.’

‘Possibly the cohort would like to know it too,’ said Cassius gruffly, and lounged to his feet. ‘I am for the bathhouse. I am gritty from head to foot!’ He paused a moment, looking down at Marcus, with his air of weary elegance quite forgotten. ‘Do not worry. I shall not let your cohort go to ruin.’

Marcus laughed, with a sudden aching in his throat. ‘See that you do not, or I swear I shall find means to poison your wine! They are a fine cohort, the best with the Legion: and—good luck to you with them.’

Outside in the courtyard, the last crimson petals fell in a little bright flurry from the rose-bush in the old wine-jar.

U
NCLE
AQUILA lived on the extreme edge of Calleva. One reached his house down a narrow side street that turned off not far from the East Gate, leaving behind the forum and the temples, and coming to a quiet angle of the old British earthworks—for Calleva had been a British Dun before it was a Roman city—where hawthorn and hazel still grew and the shyer woodland birds sometimes came. It was much like the other houses of Calleva, timbered and red-roofed and comfortable, built round three sides of a tiny courtyard that was smoothly turfed and set about with imported roses and gum-cistus growing in tall stone jars. But it had one peculiarity: a squat, square, flat-roofed tower rising from one corner; for Uncle Aquila, having lived most of his life in the shadow of watch-towers from Memphis to Segedunum, could not be comfortable without one.