The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (10 page)

And at that moment, as though called up by the intensity of his longing, a swiftly driven chariot came whirling up the street beyond the bath-house wall.

Marcus reached out and took his tunic from Esca, saying as he did so, ‘Not often that we hear anything but a vegetable cart in this street.’

‘It will be Lucius Urbanus, the contractor’s son,’ Esca said. ‘There is a back way from his stables which comes through behind the temple of Sull-Minerva.’ The chariot was passing the house now, and evidently the driver was having trouble, for the crack of a whip and the loud burst of swearing reached them through the bath-house wall, and Esca added with disgust, ‘It should be a vegetable cart and drawn by an ox. Listen to him! He is not worthy to handle horses!’

Marcus pulled the folds of fine wool over his head and reached for his belt. ‘So Esca also is a charioteer,’ he said, fastening it.

‘I was my father’s charioteer,’ Esca said. ‘But that was a long time ago.’

And suddenly Marcus realized that he could ask Esca, now, about the time before his ear was clipped. It would no longer be walking in without leave. He shifted a little, making a quick gesture towards the foot of the couch, and as the other sat down, he said: ‘Esca, how did your father’s charioteer come to be a gladiator in the Calleva arena?’

Esca was buckling his own belt; he finished the task very deliberately, and then, locking his hands round one updrawn knee, sat silent for a moment, staring down at them. ‘My father was a Clan Chieftain of the Brigantes, lord of five hundred spears,’ he said at last. ‘I was his armour-bearer until such time as I became a warrior in my own right—with the men of my tribe that happens after the sixteenth summer. When I had been a year or more a man among men and my father’s charioteer, the Clan rose against our overlords, for the lust for freedom that was in us. We have been a thorn in the flesh of the Legions since first they marched north; we, the bearers of the blue war-shield. We rose, and we were beaten back. We made our last stand in our strong place, and we were overwhelmed. Those of the men’s side who were left—there were not many—were sold as slaves.’ He broke off, jerking up his head to look at Marcus. ‘But I swear before the gods of my people, before Lugh the Light of the Sun, that I was lying for dead in a ditch when they took me. They would not have taken me, else. They sold me to a trader from the South, who sold me to Beppo, here in Calleva; and you know the rest.’

‘You alone of all your kin?’ Marcus asked after a moment.

‘My father and two brothers died,’ Esca said. ‘My mother also. My father killed her before the Legionaries broke through. She wished it so.’

There was a long silence, and then Marcus said softly: ‘Mithras! What a story!’

‘It is a common enough story, still. Was it so very different at Isca Dumnoniorum, do you suppose?’ But before Marcus could answer, he added quickly, ‘None the less, it is not good to remember too closely. The time before—all the time before—that is the good time to remember.’

And sitting there in the thin March sunshine that slanted down through the high window, without either of them quite knowing how it happened, he began to tell Marcus about the time before. He told of a warrior’s training; of river-bathing on hot summer days when the midges danced in the shimmering air; of his father’s great white bull garlanded with poppies and moon flowers for a festival; of his first hunt, and the tame otter he had shared with his elder brother… One thing led to another, and presently he told how, ten years before, when the whole country was in revolt, he had lain behind a boulder to watch a Legion marching north, that never came marching back.

‘I had never seen such a sight before,’ he said. ‘Like a shining serpent of men winding across the hills; a grey serpent, hackled with the scarlet cloaks and crests of the officers. There were queer tales about that Legion; men said that it was accursed, but it looked stronger than any curse, stronger and more deadly. And I remember how the Eagle flashed in the sun as it came by—a great golden Eagle with its wings arched back as I have seen them often stoop on a screaming hare among the heather. But the mist was creeping down from the high moors, and the Legion marched into it, straight into it, and it licked them up and flowed together behind them, and they were gone as though they had marched from one world into—another.’ Esca made a quick gesture with his right hand, the first two fingers spread like horns. ‘Queer tales there were, about that Legion.’

‘Yes, I have heard those tales,’ Marcus said. ‘Esca, that was my father’s Legion. His crest will have been the scarlet hackle next after the Eagle.’

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the open end of Uncle Aquila’s courtyard, two shallow steps flanked by a bush of rosemary and a slender bay-tree led down into the garden. It was a rather wild garden, for Uncle Aquila did not keep a fulltime garden slave, but a very pleasant one, running down to the crumbling earthworks of British Calleva. In some places the fine stone-faced city walls were already rising. One day they would rise here too, but as yet there was only the curved wave-break of old quiet turf, glimpsed between the branches of wild fruit-trees; and where the bank dipped, stray glimpses over mile upon mile of forest country rolling away into the smoke-blue distance where the Forest of Spinaii became the Forest of Anderida, and the Forest of Anderida dropped to the marshes and the sea.

To Marcus, after being cooped within doors all winter long, it seemed a wonderfully wide and shining place when he reached it for the first time some days later; and when Esca had left him to go off on some errand, he stretched himself out on the bench of grey Purbeck marble, under the wild fruit-trees, his arms behind his head, gazing upwards with eyes narrowed against the brightness, into the blown blue heights of heaven, which seemed so incredibly tall after roof-beams. Somewhere in the forest below him, birds were singing, with that note of clear-washed surprise that belongs to the early spring; and for a while Marcus simply lay letting it all soak into him, the wideness and the shine and the bird-song.

Close beside him, Cub lay curled into a compact ball. Looking at him now, it was hard to believe what a small fury he could be, crouched over his food-bowl with laidback ears and bared milk-teeth, Marcus thought. Then he took up the task that he had brought out with him. He was one of those people who need something to do with their hands at all times, even if it is only a stick to whittle; and something of the craftsman in him demanded always to have an outlet. If he had not been wounded, he would have turned that craftsmanship to the making of a happy and efficient cohort; things being as they were, he had turned it this spring to overhauling and renovating the Celtic weapons which were the only ornament Uncle Aquila allowed on his walls. Today he had brought out the gem of the small collection, a light cavalry buckler of bull’s hide faced with bronze, the central boss exquisitely worked with red enamel; but the straps must have been in a poor state when Uncle Aquila came by it, and now they were ready to tear like papyrus. Laying out his tools and the leather for the fresh straps beside him on the broad seat, he set to work to cut away the old ones. It was a delicate task, needing all his attention, and he did not look up again until he had finished it, and turned to lay the outworn straps aside.

And then he saw that he was no longer alone with Cub. A girl was standing among the wild fruit-trees where the hedge ran up into the slope of the old earthwork, and looking down at him. A British girl, in a pale saffron tunic, straight and shining as a candle-flame; one hand raised to thrust back heavy masses of hair the colour of red baltic amber, which the light wind had blown across her face.

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then the girl said in clear, very careful Latin, ‘I have waited a long time for you to look up.’

‘I am sorry,’ Marcus said stiffly. ‘I was busy on this shield.’

She came a step nearer. ‘May I see the wolf-cub? I have not seen a tame wolf-cub before.’

And Marcus smiled suddenly, and laid aside his defences with the shield he had been working on. ‘Surely. Here he is.’ And swinging his feet to the ground, he reached down and grabbed the sleeping cub by the scruff of his neck, just as the girl joined him. The wolfling was not fiercer than most hound puppies, save when annoyed, but being bigger and stronger for his age, he could be very rough, and Marcus was taking no chances. He set Cub on his feet, keeping a restraining hand under his small chest. ‘Be careful; he is not used to strangers.’

The girl gave him a smile, and sat down on her heels, holding out her hands slowly to Cub. ‘I will not startle him,’ she said. And Cub, who at first had crouched back against Marcus, ears flattened and hairs bristling, seemed very slowly to change his mind. Warily, ready to flinch back or snap at any sign of danger, he began to smell at her fingers; and she held her hands quite still, to let him. ‘What is his name?’ she asked.

‘Just Cub.’

‘Cub,’ she said crooningly. ‘Cub.’ And as he whimpered and made a little darting thrust towards her, against Marcus’s guarding hand, she began to caress the warm hollow under his chin with one finger. ‘See, we be friends, you and I.’

She was about thirteen, Marcus imagined, watching her as she played with Cub. A tall, thin girl, with a pointed face wide at the temples and narrow at the chin; and the shape of her face and the colour of her eyes and hair gave her a little the look of a young vixen. If she were angry, he thought, she would probably look very like a vixen indeed. He had the glimmering of an idea that he had seen her before, but he could not remember where.

‘How did you know about Cub?’ he asked at last.

She looked up. ‘Narcissa, my nurse, told me—oh, about a moon ago. And at first I did not believe it, because Nissa so often gets her stories wrong. But yesterday I heard a slave on this side of the hedge call to another, “Oh worthless one, thy Master’s wolf-whelp has bitten my toe!” And the other called back, “Then the gods grant that the taste of it will not make him sick!” So I knew that it was true.’

Her imitation of Esca and Marcipor the house slave was unmistakable, and Marcus flung up his head with a crow of laughter. ‘And it did!—at all events, something did.’

The girl laughed too, joyously, showing little pointed teeth as white and sharp as Cub’s. And as though their laughter had unlocked a door, Marcus suddenly remembered where he had seen her before. He had not been interested enough in Kaeso and Valaria to remember that they lived next door, and although he had noticed her so vividly at the time, he had not remembered the girl he had seen with them, because Esca, coming immediately afterwards, had been so much more important; but he remembered her now.

‘I saw you at the Saturnalia Games,’ he said. ‘But your hair was hidden under your mantle, and that was why I did not remember you.’

‘But I remember you!’ said the girl. Cub had wandered off after a beetle by that time, and she let him go, sitting back and folding her hands in her lap. ‘Nissa says you bought that gladiator. I wish you could have bought the bear too.’

‘You minded very badly about that bear, didn’t you?’ said Marcus.

‘It was cruel! To kill on the hunting trail, that is one thing; but they took away his freedom! They kept him in a cage, and then they killed him.’

‘It was the cage, then, more than the killing?’

‘I do not like cages,’ said the girl in a small hard voice. ‘Or nets. I am glad you bought that gladiator.’

A little chill wind came soughing across the garden, silvering the long grass and tossing the budding sprays of the wild pear- and cherry-trees. The girl shivered, and Marcus realized that her yellow tunic was of very thin wool, and even here in the shelter of the old earthworks it was still very early spring.

‘You are cold,’ he said, and gathered up his old military cloak which had been flung across the bench. ‘Put this on.’

‘Do you not want it?’

‘No. I have a thicker tunic than that flimsy thing you are wearing. So. Now, come and sit here on the bench.’

She obeyed him instantly, drawing the cloak around her. In the act of doing so, she checked, looking down at the bright folds, then up again at Marcus. ‘This is your soldier’s cloak,’ she said. ‘Like the cloaks the centurions from the transit camp wear.’

Marcus made her a quick mocking salute. ‘You behold in me Marcus Aquila, ex-Cohort Centurion of Gaulish Auxiliaries with the Second Legion.’

The girl looked at him in silence for a moment. Then she said, ‘I know. Does the wound hurt you still?’

‘Sometimes,’ Marcus said. ‘Did Nissa tell you that too?’

She nodded.

‘She seems to have told you a deal of things.’

‘Slaves!’ She made a quick, contemptuous gesture. ‘They stand in doorways and chatter like starlings; but Nissa is the worst of them all!’

Marcus laughed, and a small silence fell between them; but after a little while he said: ‘I have told you my name. What is yours?’

‘My aunt and uncle call me Camilla, but my real name is Cottia,’ said the girl. ‘They like everything to be very Roman, you see.’

So he had been right in thinking she was not Kaeso’s daughter. ‘And you do not?’ he said.

‘I? I am of the Iceni! So is my Aunt Valaria, though she likes to forget it.’

‘I once knew a black chariot team who were descended out of the Royal Stables of the Iceni,’ Marcus said, feeling that perhaps Aunt Valaria was not a very safe subject.

‘Did you? Were they yours? Which strain?’ Her face was alight with interest.

Marcus shook his head. ‘They were not mine, and I only had the joy of driving them once; it was a joy too. And I never knew their strain.’

‘My father’s big stallion was descended from Prydfirth, the beloved of King Prasutogus,’ said Cottia. ‘We are all horse-breeders, we of the Iceni, from the King downward—when we had a king.’ She hesitated, and her voice lost its eager ring. ‘My father was killed, breaking a young horse, and that is why I live with my Aunt Valaria now.’