Eagle's Honour (3 page)

Aracos took up the bundle and slowly folded back the tattered cloth. Inside was a battered circlet of gilded bronze fashioned into the form of oak leaves. The Corona Civica!

‘He said it was yours by rights.’

Aracos was silent for a few moments, holding
the thing gently between his hands. ‘How did he die?’

‘Of wounds taken in driving off an attack on the supply train he was escorting. It was three days later, before he got them into camp. The Gods know how he kept going so long.’

In the silence the wind gusted against the house, and sent a rustling charge of dry leaves along the court outside.

‘I had a feeling,’ the young Medic said at last, ‘that you could have said something in your own defence, tonight, and that you deliberately chose to hold it back.’

‘Did you?’ Aracos said, without interest.

He was remembering how it had all begun, the day when he had gone down from his village in the Rhodope Mountains with two other lads, to the recruiting station at Abdera. He could sit a horse with anyone, and it had not occurred to him that the small sharp pain that sometimes caught him in the chest after running uphill was anything to keep him out of the Thracian Cavalry. At Abdera a man with entwined serpents on the breast of his tunic had made each of them in turn run to the sacred olive tree half a mile away and back without stopping, and then
laid his ear against their chests and listened to something inside. The other two had been accepted, but not Aracos, though he had run faster than either of them. He wondered later if the man had heard the small pain in his chest that the running had given him.

He hadn’t gone home, he would have been shamed, but he found that there was room for other men than warriors under the Eagles, jobs for which you did not have to have anyone listening to your chest. He had liked the man with the entwined serpents, and he was interested by this running and listening; he wanted to know what you could hear inside people that told you they had a pain. And so he had become a medical orderly, with the Thracians at first, then with the Dacian Horse in the far-off province of Britain.

He remembered the great outpost fort of Tri-montum on the skirts of its three-peaked hill. He remembered Felix at Cavalry manoeuvres, Felix in his pennant-bearer’s wolfskin, riding full tilt at the head of the flying squadron, with the long sleeve-pennant of scarlet silk filling with the wind and streaming from its silver serpent-head on the lance point. It was just at the end of those manoeuvres that the youngster had been
thrown and broken his collar bone; but for that they would probably never have even spoken to each other, for clerks and orderlies and such, Aracos had very soon discovered, were in the Legions and Auxiliaries, but not
of
them. The odd thing was that they were very much alike save that Felix was not so dark, so that for all the seven or eight years difference between them, old Diomedes the camp surgeon called them Castor and Pollux, when Felix came to have his shoulder tended.

He remembered news of unrest filtering down from the north at the end of a long dry summer, the smoke signals feathering the sky; the Dacian Wings under those slim scarlet serpent pennants riding out to join the 6th Legion on its forced march northward. He remembered following with the baggage carts in the dust of the marching columns, the heather swimming in the heat, the Pictish harrying that began on the second day; a wolf-pack worrying along their flanks, nightly attacks, scouting patrols that came back bloody and at half strength – one that never came back at all.

He remembered the last night, the knowledge on them all that full battle was coming with the morning; the ordered stir of the camp that never
died down all through the tense hours darkness.

CHAPTER FOUR

In the first ghost-grey light before a misty dawn, Aracos went down to the latrine trenches beyond the horse lines (the Legions never camped a night without digging such trenches and setting up a stockade) and found Felix there, his wolfskin flung behind him, being violently sick.

‘Felix! What is it?’

And then as the boy crouched back on his heels and turned a sweat-streaked face to him, he knew. Felix’s squadron had run into trouble more than once during the forced march north, and lost several men; the last time, he had got back with a friend’s body slung across his horse’s withers, a body with part of the face carried away by a throw-spear, that had still been alive when they set out on the struggle back to camp. That had been once too often.

‘Aracos!’ The boy was shaking from head to foot, and his teeth chattered as though he had a fever. ‘Aracos! Thank the Gods it’s you! Help me—’

Aracos caught his shoulders to steady him. ‘You’re the only one who can do that.’

‘
You can –
you
can
.’

‘How?’

‘There must be something. The German
Berserks chew leaves of some sort, don’t they?’ He was beyond shame; that would come later. ‘I’d get drunk, but it only makes me sleepy.’ He bent his face into his hands.

‘Stop it!’ Aracos said. ‘You can! I’ve known men as sick as a cat in the dawn and fight like tigers an hour later.’

But when the other looked up again, he knew that he was wrong; he had served with the Eagles long enough to know the look on the face of a man who had reached the end of what he could take. Now, what in the name of Night’s Daughters was to be done? Whatever it was, it must be done quickly.

Scarcely realising what he did, he caught up the wolfskin and dragged the boy to his feet, and an instant later was crouching with him behind the long mound of earth turned up by the trench diggers. ‘Listen – I can’t give you anything; I can’t and I won’t!’ Then as Felix made a convulsive movement, ‘No
listen;
there’s only one way out – we’re about the same size, and like enough to pass in the dust of fighting. Strip off those leathers.’

‘You mean you—’

‘Yes.’ Aracos was already yanking at a shoulder buckle.

‘You can’t.’

‘I’ve got to, haven’t I? Quick now, off with your breeks.’ Felix obeyed him, but his eyes had a strange blankness, as though he did not hear. Aracos snatched the breeks from him and dragged them on. ‘Where’s your horse.’

Felix’s gaze turned on him with the same blankness.

‘Your horse! Where’s he picketed?’

‘The end of the second line.’

‘Right.’ He had the tunic on now, belt, sword belt, the great wolfskin with the head pulled well forward on his brows. ‘I’m away now. Don’t follow for a hundred heart-beats. Then make for the baggage park, lie up in one of the tilt carts nearest to the stockade until I come back, and pray to the Gods, for your own sake as well as mine, that I
do
come back. I’ll whistle “The Girl I Kissed at Clusium”. Don’t move until you hear the tune.’

The young pennant-bearer still seemed in a daze, but he could not wait to make sure he understood. All he could do was to take the youngster’s place and hope for a miracle to bring them both through the day without disaster.

Looking back, he still did not know whether he had done right, he only knew that at the time there had seemed nothing else that he could do, and that the miracle had happened. In the ordered bustle of the camp, with the watch fires turning sickly and scarcely a finger of light in the sky, he had got through the issue of food, collected the serpent pennant from its place with the Cohort Colours and the Eagle itself before the Legate’s tent. He had seen it done so often
that he made no obvious mistake in the ceremonial; and at half-light, with morning mist thickening among the hills, found himself riding, still unrecognised, behind the Captain at the head of the two wings of Dacian Horse.

The manoeuvring for position, the coming and going of Scouts, the hurried Councils of War in the Legate’s tent, belonged to yesterday, and he had known nothing of them anyway; his business in life was the medical supplies, not the tactics of hill warfare. And now, as they rode down into the steep river valley across the narrows of which the Tungrians had been standing to all night, and took up their position in reserve behind the steadily forming battle line, his business was with the light sleeve of scarlet silk lifting and stirring from the lance shaft in his hand; to carry out the pennant-bearer’s duties with no betraying mistake, and to keep his face hidden.

The rising mist was warm and milky, no freshness in it. The waiting seemed interminable.

And then far ahead, a flurry of shouting broke the silence, and all along the battle line and the ranks of the Reserves ran a tiny ripple of the nerve ends, like an unheard touch on the taut strings of a harp. Somewhere out in front the Roman outposts were already engaged. The
shouting came nearer; Pictish war horns were snarling in the mist and the Roman trumpets crowed in answer. And now, to the shouting, was added a clanging and clashing and an earth-shaking rumble that Aracos had heard before, but never from the fighting-ranks, and out of the mist swept a column of war chariots, driven and manned by naked, blue-painted warriors.

They swept across the Roman front, raining down throw-spears which the Legionaries caught for the most part on their shields, and wheeling about on the steepening skirts of the hillside, would have cut in between the first rank and the second. But the Cretan archers posted between the Asturian squadrons on the left flank, wheeled half left as they passed, and loosed a flight of short arrows into their midst, aiming for the teams rather than the men. Team after team came down in kicking chaos and a rending crash of broken yoke-poles and torn-off wheels; the charge lost shape and impetus, and swung away, straightening itself back into some kind of order as it went; and from farther to the right, another column came screaming down upon the Roman battle line. The mist was growing ragged before the light breeze that had begun to wake with the dawn, and a brief gleam of light from the rising sun slid into the eyes of the archers on the right wing, making their aim less sure; a team went down here and there, but the wild head of the column was into the Tungrian Cavalry before they could be stopped, and in the same instant, from dead ahead, a wave of foot-warriors came yelling out of the mist and flung themselves upon the pilums of the main battle line. The pilums drank blood, but there seemed always more, where the first wave had come from.