The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (7 page)

Here, in the shadow of his own watch-tower, which he used as a study, he was very comfortable indeed, with his elderly wolf-hound Procyon, and the History of Siege Warfare which he had been writing for ten years, for company.

By the dark end of October, Marcus had been added to the household. He was given a sleeping-cell opening on to the courtyard colonnade; a lime-washed cell with a narrow cot piled with striped native blankets, a polished citron-wood chest, a lamp on a bracket high against the wall. Save that the door was differently placed, it might have been his old quarters in the Frontier fort, seven days’ march away. But most of his days were spent in the long atrium, the central room of the house, occasionally with Uncle Aquila, but for the most part alone, save when Stephanos or Sassticca looked in on him. He did not mind Stephanos, his uncle’s old Greek body-slave, who now looked after him as well as his master, but Sassticca the cook was another matter. She was a tall and gaunt old woman who could hit like a man, and frequently did when either of her fellow slaves annoyed her; but she treated Marcus as though he were a small sick child. She brought him little hot cakes when she had been baking, and warm milk because she said he was too thin, and fussed and tyrannized over him, until—for he was very afraid of kindness just then—he came near to hating her.

That autumn was a bad time for Marcus, feeling wretchedly ill for the first time in his life, almost always in pain, and face to face with the wreckage of everything he knew and cared about. He would wake in the dark mornings to hear the distant notes of Cockcrow sounding from the transit camp just outside the city walls, and that did not make it any easier. He was homesick for the Legions; he was desperately homesick for his own land; for now that they seemed lost to him, his own hills grew achingly dear, every detail of sight and scent and sound jewel-vivid on his memory. The shivering silver of the olive-woods when the mistral blew, the summer scent of thyme and rosemary and little white cyclamen among the sun-warmed grass, the songs that the girls sang at vintage.

And here in Britain the wind moaned through the desolate woods, the skies wept, and wet gale-blown leaves pattered against the windows and stuck there, making little pathetic shadows against the steamy glass. There had been wild weather often enough in his own country, but that had been the wild weather of home: here was the wind and rain and wet leaves of exile.

It would have gone less hardly with him if he had had a companion of his own age; but he was the only young thing in the house, for even Procyon had grey hairs in his muzzle, and so he was shut in on himself, and though he did not know it, he was bitterly lonely.

There was just one gleam of light for him in the darkness of that autumn. Not long after he came to Calleva, he had word from Cassius that henceforth the Standard of the Gaulish Fourth would have its gilded laurel wreath to carry on parade; and a little later there came to Marcus himself the award of a military bracelet, which was a thing that he had never for an instant expected. This was not, as the various crowns were, purely a gallantry award; rather it was given for the same qualities which had earned for the Second Legion its titles ‘
Pia Fidelis
’; those titles which were cut deep upon the heavy gold bracelet under the Capricorn badge of the Legion. From the day that it came to him, it was never off Marcus’s wrist; and yet it meant rather less to him than the knowledge that his old cohort had won its first laurels.

The days grew shorter and the nights longer, and presently it was the night of the winter solstice. A fitting night for the dark turn of the year, Marcus thought. The inevitable wind was roaring up through the forest of Spinaii below the old British ramparts, driving with it squalls of sleet that spattered against the windows. In the atrium it was warm, for whatever the peculiarities of Uncle Aquila’s house, the hypercaust worked perfectly, and for the pleasant look of it rather than for need, a fire of wildcherry logs on charcoal burned in the brazier hearth, filling the long room with faint, aromatic scent. The light from the single bronze lamp, falling in a golden pool over the group before the hearth, scarcely touched the limewashed walls, and left the far end of the room in crowding shadows, save for the glim of light that always burned before the shrine of the household gods. Marcus lay propped on one elbow on his usual couch, Uncle Aquila sat opposite to him in his great cross-legged chair; and beside them, outstretched on the warm tessellated floor, Procyon the wolf-hound.

Uncle Aquila was huge; that had been the first thing Marcus noticed about him, and he noticed it still. His joints appeared to be loosely strung together as if with wet leather; his head with its bald freckled top and his bony beautiful hands were big even in proportion to the rest of him, and Authority seemed to hang on him in easy and accustomed folds, like his toga. Even allowing for their twenty years of difference in age, he was not in the least like Marcus’s father; but Marcus had long ago ceased to think of him as like, or unlike, anyone. He was simply Uncle Aquila.

The evening meal was over, and old Stephanos had set out a draughts-board on the table between Marcus and his uncle, and gone his way. In the lamplight the ivory and ebony squares shone vividly white and black; Uncle Aquila’s men were already in place, but Marcus had been slower, because he was thinking of something else. He set down his last ivory man with a little click, and said: ‘Ulpius was here this morning.’

‘Ah, our fat physician,’ said Uncle Aquila, his hand, which had been poised for an opening move, returning to the arm of his chair. ‘Had he anything to say worth the listening to?’

‘Only the usual things. That I must wait and wait.’ Suddenly Marcus exploded between misery and laughter. ‘He said I must have a little patience and called me his dear young man and wagged a scented fat finger under my nose. Fach! He is like the white pulpy things one finds under stones!’

‘So,’ agreed Uncle Aquila. ‘None the less, you
must
wait—there being no help for it.’

Marcus looked up from the board. ‘There’s the rub. How long can I wait?’

‘Hmph?’ said Uncle Aquila.

‘I have been here two months now, and we have never spoken of the future. I have put it off from one visit of that pot-bellied leech to the next because—I suppose because I have never thought of any life but following the Eagles, and I do not quite know how to begin.’ He smiled at his uncle apologetically. ‘But we must discuss it sometime.’

‘Sometime, yes: but not now. No need to trouble about the future until that leg will carry you.’

‘But Mithras knows how long that will be. Do you not see, sir, I cannot go on foisting myself on you indefinitely.’

‘Oh, my good lad, do try not to be such a fool!’ snapped Uncle Aquila; but his eyes under their jut of brow were unexpectedly kindly. ‘I am not a rich man, but neither am I so poor that I cannot afford to add a kinsman to my household. You do not get in my way; to be perfectly honest, I forget your existence rather more than half the time; you play a reasonably good game of draughts. Naturally you will stay here, unless of course’—he leaned forward abruptly—‘is it that you would rather go home?’

‘Home?’ Marcus echoed.

‘Yes. I suppose you still have a home with that peculiarly foolish sister of mine?’

‘And with Uncle-by-Marriage Tullus Lepidus?’ Marcus’s head went up, his black brows twitched almost to meeting point above a nose which looked suddenly as though there was a very bad smell under it. ‘I’d sooner sit on Tiber-side and beg my bread from the slum women when they come to fill their water-pots!’

‘So?’ Uncle Aquila nodded his huge head. ‘And now, that being settled, shall we play?’

He made the opening move, and Marcus answered it. For a while they played in silence. The lamplit room was a shell of quiet amid the wild sea-roaring of the wind; the small saffron flames whispered in the brazier, and a burned cherry log collapsed with a tinselly rustle into the red hollow of the charcoal. Every few moments there would be a little clear click as Marcus or his uncle moved a piece on the board. But Marcus did not really hear the small peaceful sounds, nor see the man opposite, for he was thinking of things that he had been trying not to think of all day.

It was the twenty-fourth evening of December, the eve of the winter solstice—the eve of the birth of Mithras; and quite soon now, in camps and forts wherever the Eagles flew, men would be gathering to his worship. In the outposts and the little frontier forts the gatherings would be mere handfuls, but in the great Legionary Stations there would be full caves of a hundred men. Last year, at Isca, he had been one of them, newly initiated at the Bull-slaying, the brand of the Raven Degree still raw between his brows. He ached with longing for last year to be given back to him, for the old life and the comradeship to be given back to him. He moved an ivory man a little blindly, seeing, not the black-and-white dazzle of the board before his eyes, but that gathering of a year ago, filing out by the Praetorian gate and downhill to the cave. He could see the crest of the centurion in front of him up-reared blackly against the pulsing fires of Orion. He remembered the waiting darkness of the cave; then, as the trumpets sounded from the distant ramparts for the third watch of the night, the sudden glory of candles, that sank and turned blue, and sprang up again; the reborn light of Mithras in the dark of the year…

A great gust of wind swooped against the house like a wild thing striving to batter its way in; the lamplight jumped and fluttered, sending shadows racing across the chequered board—and the ghosts of last year were once more a year away. Marcus looked up, and said, as much for the sake of shutting out his own thoughts as for anything else, ‘I wonder what possessed you to settle here in Britain, Uncle Aquila, when you could have gone home?’

Uncle Aquila moved his piece with meticulous care before he answered with another question. ‘It seems very odd to you, that anyone free to go home should choose to strike his roots in this barbarous country?’

‘On a night like this,’ said Marcus, ‘it seems odd almost past believing.’

‘I had nothing to take me back,’ said the other, simply. ‘Most of my service years were spent here, though it was in Judaea that my time fell due for parting with the Eagles. What have I to do with the South? A few memories, very few. I was a young man when first I saw the white cliffs of Dubris above the transport galley’s prow. Far more memories in the North. Your move…’

Marcus moved an ivory man to the next square, and his uncle shifted his own piece. ‘If I settled in the South, I should miss the skies. Ever noticed how changeful British skies are? I have made friends here—a few. The only woman I ever cared a denarius for lies buried at Glevum.’

Marcus looked up quickly. ‘I never knew—’

‘Why should you? But I was not always old Uncle Aquila with a bald head.’

‘No, of course not. What was—she like?’

‘Very pretty. She was the daughter of my old Camp Commandant, who had a face like a camel, but she was very pretty, with a lot of soft brown hair. Eighteen when she died. I was twenty-two.’

Marcus said nothing. There seemed nothing to say. But Uncle Aquila, seeing the look on his face, gave a deep chuckle. ‘No, you have it all quite wrong. I am a very selfish old man, perfectly well content with things as they are.’ And then, after a pause, he harked back to an earlier point in their discussion. ‘I killed my first boar in Silurian territory; I have sworn the blood brotherhood with a painted tribesman up beyond where Hadrian’s Wall stands now; I’ve a dog buried at Luguvallium—her name was Margarita; I have loved a girl at Glevum; I have marched the Eagles from end to end of Britain in worse weather than this. Those are the things apt to strike a man’s roots for him.’

Marcus said after a moment, ‘I think I begin to understand.’

‘Good. Your move.’

But after they had played a few more moves in silence, Uncle Aquila looked up again, the fine wrinkles deepening at the corners of his eyes. ‘What an autumnal mood we have wandered into! We need livening up, you and I.’

‘What do you suggest?’ Marcus returned the smile.

‘I suggest the Saturnalia Games tomorrow. We may not be able to compete quite on equal terms with the Colosseum, here at Calleva; but a wild-beast show, a sham fight with perhaps a little blood-letting—we will certainly go.’

And they went, Marcus travelling in a litter, for all the world, as he remarked disgustedly, like a Magistrate or a fine lady. They arrived early, but by the time they were settled on one of the cushioned benches reserved for the Magistrates and their families (Uncle Aquila was a Magistrate, though he had not come in a litter), the amphitheatre just outside the East Gate was already filling up with eager spectators. The wind had died down, but the air struck cold, with a clear, chill tang to it that Marcus sniffed eagerly while he pulled the folds of his old military cloak more closely round him. After being so long within four walls, the sanded space of the arena seemed very wide; a great emptiness within the encircling banks up which the crowded benches rose tier on tier.

Whatever else of Rome the British had not taken to, they seemed to have taken to the Games with a vengeance, Marcus thought, looking about him at the crowded benches where townsfolk and tribesmen with their womenfolk and children jostled and shoved and shouted after the best places. There was a fair sprinkling of Legionaries from the transit camp, and Marcus’s quick glance picked out a bored young tribune sitting with several British lads all pretending to be equally Roman and equally bored. He remembered Colosseum crowds, chattering, shouting, quarrelling, laying bets and eating sticky sweets. The British took their pleasures a little less loudly, to be sure, but on almost every face was the same eager, almost greedy look that the faces of the Colosseum crowds had worn.

A small disturbance near him drew Marcus’s attention to the arrival of a family who were just entering their places on the Magistrates’ benches a little to his right. A British family of the ultra-Roman kind, a large, good-natured-looking man, running to fat as men do who have been bred to a hard life and take to living soft instead; a woman with a fair and rather foolish face, prinked out in what had been the height of fashion in Rome two years ago—and very cold she must be, Marcus thought, in that thin mantle; and a girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen, with a sharply pointed face that seemed all golden eyes in the shadow of her dark hood. The stout man and Uncle Aquila saluted each other across the heads between, and the woman bowed. All Rome was in that bow; but the girl’s eyes were fixed on the arena with a kind of horrified expectancy.