Eagle's Honour (8 page)

It wasn’t particularly loud, but there was an
ugly note to it; a snarling note; ‘Come on, lads, let’s get the prisoners out!’ and other voices taking up the cry.

I remember Dexius’s face as he got up and strode past me to the door; and suddenly knowing that we had all been quite wrong about him; that he wasn’t soft at all. – More the kind of man who gets a reputation for being good-tempered and fair-game, because he knows that if he once lets his temper go and hits somebody he probably won’t leave off till he’s killed them.

I had only just started my supper, so I snatched a hard-boiled duck’s egg from a bowl on the table and shoved it down the front of my uniform, and dashed out with the rest.

Outside on the parade-ground a crowd was gathering. Some of them had makeshift torches. The flare of them was teased by the thin wind that was blowing, and their light fell ragged on faces that were sullen and dangerous. Vipsanius the duty centurion was trying to deal with the situation, but he didn’t seem to be having much success, and the crowd was getting bigger every moment.

Daddy Dexius said coolly, ‘What goes on here, Centurion?’

‘They’re refusing to go on watch, Sir,’ said
Vipsanius. I mind he was sweating up a bit, despite the edge to the wind.

‘We’ve had enough of going on watch in this dog-hole, night after filthy night!’ someone shouted.

And his mates backed him up. ‘How much longer are we going to squat here, making a free target of ourselves for the blue painted barbarians?’

‘If Agricola wants to fight them, why doesn’t he come up and get things going?’

‘Otherwise why don’t we get out of here and go back where we came from?’

Men began shouting from all over the crowd, bringing up all the old soldiers’ grievances about pay and leave and living conditions. ‘We’ve had enough!’ they shouted. ‘We’ve had enough!’

‘You’ll have had more than enough, and the Painted People down on us, if you don’t break up and get back on duty!’ Vipsanius yelled back at them.

But the sullen crowd showed no sign of breaking up or getting back, on duty. And suddenly, only half-believing, I understood just how ugly things might be going to turn. Not much harm done up to now, but if something, anything, tipped matters even a little in the wrong
direction, the whole crowd could flare up into revolt, and a revolt has a way of spreading that puts a heath-fire to shame.

Centurion Dexius said, Thank you, Centurion, I will take over now.’ And then he glanced round for me. ‘Standard-bearer.’

‘Here, Sir,’ says I, advancing smartly.

‘Go and fetch out the Eagle, and we’ll see if that will bring them to their senses.’

I left him standing there, not trying to shout them down or anything, just standing there, and went to fetch the Eagle.

In the Saccellum, part office and part treasury and part shrine, the lamp was burning on the table where the duty centurion would sit all night with his drawn sword before him – when not doing Rounds or out trying to quell a riot – and the Eagle on its tall shaft stood against the wall, with the Cohort standards ranged on either side of it.

I took it down; and as I did so its upward shadow, cast by the lamp on the table engulfed half the chamber behind it, as though some vast dark bird had spread wing and come swooping forward out of the gloom among the rafters. Used though I was to the Eagle standard, that great swoop of dark wings made me jump half
out of my skin. But it was not the moment to be having fancies. I hitched up the Eagle into Parade Position, and out I went with it.

The Senior Centurion had quieted them down a bit; well, the look on his face would have quieted all Rome on a feast day; and when they saw the Eagle, their growling and muttering died away till I could hear a fox barking, way up the glen, and the vixen’s scream in answer. But they still stood their ground, and I knew the quiet wouldn’t last. And there was I, standing up with the Eagle, not knowing quite what to do next; and truth to tell, beginning to feel a bit of a fool. And then suddenly it came to me; what I had to do next; and I pulled out the duck’s egg from inside my tunic and held it up.

And, ‘Now look what you’ve done, you lot!’ said I. ‘Behaving like this you’ve upset the Eagle so much its laid an egg!’

I have noticed more than once in the years since then, that it is sometimes easier to swing the mood of a whole crowd than it is to swing the mood of one man on his own. Aye, a dicey thing is a crowd.

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then someone laughed, and someone else took up the laugh, and then more and more, a roar
of laughter and a surge of stamping and back-slapping that swept away all that had gone before.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Last Battle

And so we were still in Inchtuthil, and more or less in one piece, when the Legate came back to us, fat and prosperous as a moneylender after his winter in Corstopitum. And then Agricola came up from the Naval Base with the rest of the army, and as soon as the grass stood high enough to feed the cavalry horses, the advance was on again.

It was not easy going. No set-piece battles, but we had to fight for every hill pass and river ford; arrows came at us from every thicket, and once, the Painted Men fired the forest ahead of us when the wind was blowing our way. But at last, a weary long while it seemed since we marched from Inchtuthil, we came up towards the first dark wave-lift of the Grampians. – They call the place Mons Graupius, now; it hadn’t got a name then; at least it hadn’t got a name in our tongue, it just seemed like the world’s end. – And we
had word back from the scouts that we had sent way up ahead, that Calgacus was waiting for us among the wooded gullies of the lower slopes, the whole Caledonian war-host with him.

Agricola halted the Legions, and gave orders for the usual war camp to be pitched.

The great square was measured out, and the banks and stockades thrown up; the General’s pavilion set up in the midst of all, with the tents of the Legates on either side, and the Eagles of the four Legions ranged in front. The camp fires, one to each fifty men, were built in long straight rows, and the horse-lines and baggage park pegged out in position; the guards were posted and a meal of hard bannock and sour wine issued to all of us, and we settled in for the night.

But the nights are short in the north at that time of year, and it was morning soon enough, and Caledonians and Romans alike stirring for battle.

Tacitus, Agricola’s son-in-law, who wrote a history of that campaign later, sets down a fine fiery dawn-of-battle speech for Calgacus. I learned it almost by heart, in after years, for it’s a good speech though not over polite to us Romans.

Something like this, it went: ‘My brothers, – this I bid you to remember when the war horns sound: there is nothing beyond us but the sea; and even on the sea the galleys of the Red Crests prowl like wolf packs. Therefore there can be no retreat for us, we conquer or we die. And we shall conquer! The Roman victories came not by their strength but by our weakness, and our weakness was that we were many Tribes divided among ourselves. Now we stand together as one People, and we are strong! They are fewer in number than we, they are strangers under strange skies; the mountains and the forests are enemies to them and friends to us…. My brothers, we have this choice: victory at whatever cost, and freedom, or the Roman yoke upon our necks, our women enslaved, our young men carried off to serve the Romans at the other end of the world! We have heard of the Roman Peace, but in truth, they make a desolation and call it Peace! Keep that in your hearts as you rush into battle!’

Aye, a good rabble-rousing speech. – Though come to think of it, I wonder how Tacitus knew what he said, or if he said anything like that at all.

I do know what Agricola said, for I heard him,
when he harangued us, standing on a tub of arrowheads.

‘Comrades,’ says he, ‘we have fought through more than one campaign together. I think that you have been content with your General; I know that I have been well enough satisfied with my soldiers.’ (I thought about the Eagle and the egg!) ‘We have pushed on further than all other of our armies, and here we stand in the farthest part of Britain, where never any man carried the Eagles before. But though the land is strange to us, the men we fight today are the same as those we fought and routed and forced back in earlier time. They ran then, and they’ll run again; it is because they are so good at running that they have lasted so long. So now, lads – one good sharp heave for the glory of old Mother Rome, and the thing is done!’