The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (12 page)

Marcus had been feeling sick with pain all day, and the heavy sweetness of the flowers seemed to stick in his throat. He had played a thoroughly bad game, and he knew it. He could not lie still. He shifted a little in search of an easier position, and then shifted again, pretending that he had only moved to look at Cub—half grown now, and superbly handsome lying sprawled on the cooling turf beside Procyon, with whom he had long ago made friends.

Uncle Aquila was watching a yellow wagtail on the bath-house roof, and Marcus shifted yet again, hoping that he would not notice.

‘Wound troublesome tonight?’ inquired Uncle Aquila, his eye still following the yellow wagtail as it scuttled after flies on the warm tiles.

Marcus said, ‘No, sir. Why?’

‘Oh, I merely wondered. You are quite sure?’

‘Perfectly.’

Uncle Aquila brought his eye down from the yellow wagtail, and fixed it on Marcus. ‘What a liar you are,’ he remarked conversationally. Then, as Marcus’s mouth tightened, he leaned forward, crashing a huge hand on the draughts-board and scattering the pieces broadcast. ‘This has been going on long enough! If that fat fool Ulpius does not know his craft, I have an old friend in practice at Durinum who does. Rufrius Galarius. He was one of our field surgeons. He shall come and take a look at that leg.’

‘I should not think for a moment that he will,’ Marcus said. ‘It is a long way from Durinum.’

‘He will come,’ said Uncle Aquila. ‘He and I used to hunt boar together. Oh yes, he will come.’

And come he did.

Rufrius Galarius, one-time field surgeon of the Second Legion, was a blue-jowled Spaniard with a merry eye, close curling black hair scarcely touched with grey, and a chest like a barrel. But his blunt wrestler’s hands were very sure and gentle, Marcus found, a few evenings later, when he lay on his narrow cot while his uncle’s friend examined the old wounds.

It seemed a long time before he had finished; and when he had, he replaced the rug, straightened his back and strode swearing up and down the little cell. ‘Who in the name of Typhon searched this wound?’ he demanded at last, swinging round on him.

‘The camp surgeon at Isca Dumnoniorum,’ Marcus said.

‘Been there twenty years, and drunk as a mule-driver at Saturnalia, every night of them,’ snapped Galarius. ‘I know these passed-over camp surgeons. Butchers and assassins, every one!’ He made an indescribable and very vulgar noise.

‘Not every night, and he was a very hard-working soul,’ said Marcus, doing his best for the shaggy and rather pathetic old man whom he remembered with liking.

‘Puh!’ said Galarius. Then his manner changed abruptly, and he came and sat himself down on the edge of the cot. ‘The thing is that he did not finish his work,’ he said.

Marcus ran the tip of his tongue over uncomfortably dry lips. ‘You mean—it is all to do again?’

The other nodded. ‘You will have no peace until the wound has been re-searched.’

‘When—’ Marcus began, and checked, trying desperately to steady the shameful flinching at the corner of his mouth.

‘In the morning. Since it must be done, the sooner it were done the better.’ He put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder, and kept it there.

For a moment Marcus lay rigid under the blunt, kindly hand, then he drew a long, uneven breath, and relaxed, with a rather crooked attempt at a smile. ‘I beg your forgiveness. I think I—am rather tired.’

‘It seems possible,’ agreed the surgeon. ‘You have had rough marching lately. Oh yes, I know. But soon you will have it behind you and better things ahead. I promise you that.’

For a while he sat there, talking of matters that were a long way from tomorrow morning, drifting from the flavour of native oysters to the iniquities of provincial taxgatherers, yarning about the early days on the Silurian frontier, and long-ago boar hunts with Uncle Aquila. ‘We were great hunters, your uncle and I; and now we grow stiff in our joints and set in our ways. Sometimes I think I will pack up and go on my travels again, before it is too late and I am utterly rusted into my socket. But I chose the wrong branch of my calling for that. A surgeon’s craft is none so easily picked up and carried about the world. An oculist’s, now, that is the craft for a follower of Aesculapius with the itch to wander! Here in the north, where so many have the marsh-blindness, an oculist’s stamp is a talisman to carry a man safely where a Legion could not go.’ And he launched out into an account of the adventures of an acquaintance who had crossed the Western Ocean and plied his trade through the wilds of Hibernia, a few years before, while Marcus listened with about half his attention, little guessing that the time was to come when that story would be tremendously important to him.

Presently Galarius got up, stretching until the little muscles cracked behind his bull-shoulders. ‘Now I go to talk hunting with Aquila until bedtime. Do you lie still, and sleep as well as may be, and I shall be back early in the morning.’

And with a brusque nod, he turned and strode out into the colonnade.

With him, most of Marcus’s hard-held courage seemed to go too. He was horrified to find that he was shivering—shivering at the smell of pain as a horse shivers at the smell of fire. Lying with his forearm pressed across his eyes, he lashed himself with his own contempt, but found no help in it. He felt cold in his stomach and very alone.

There came a sudden pattering across the floor, and a cold muzzle was thrust against his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see Cub’s grinning head within a few inches of his own. ‘Thanks, Cub,’ he said, and shifted a little to catch the great head between his hands as Cub put his fore-paws on the cot and blew lovingly in his face. It was near to sunset, and the light of the westering sun was flooding into the cell, splashing like quivering golden water on walls and ceiling. Marcus had not seen it come, and it seemed to break singing on his sight, as a fanfare of trumpets breaks upon the ear. The light of Mithras, springing out of the dark.

Esca, who had come hard behind Cub, appeared in the doorway, sending a great thrust of shadow up the sunlit wall as he came to Marcus’s side. ‘I have spoken with Rufrius Galarius,’ he said.

Marcus nodded. ‘He will need your help in the morning. You will do that for me?’

‘I am the Centurion’s body-slave; who but I should do it?’ Esca said, and bent to disentangle the blanket.

As he did so, sounds of a scuffle arose somewhere in the courtyard. Stephanos’s old bleating voice was raised in protest, and then a girl’s, high, clear, and hard. ‘Let me pass. If you do not let me pass, I’ll bite!’ The scuffle seemed to be resumed, and an instant later a howl of anguish from Stephanos told all too clearly that the threat had been carried out. As Marcus and Esca exchanged questioning glances, flying feet came along the colonnade, and Cottia burst into the doorway, a burnished, warlike figure, with the setting sun making a nimbus round her.

Marcus raised himself on one elbow. ‘You little vixen! What have you done to Stephanos?’

‘I bit his hand,’ said Cottia, in the same clear, hard voice. ‘He tried to keep me out.’

The scuff-scuff of hurrying sandals sounded behind her even while she spoke, and Marcus said urgently, ‘Esca, in the name of Light, go and keep him out of here!’ He felt suddenly that he could not deal with a righteously indignant Stephanos at this moment. Then, as Esca strode out to do his bidding, he turned on Cottia. ‘And what is it that you suppose you are doing here, my Lady?’

She came close, thrusting in beside Cub, and stood looking down at him accusingly. ‘Why did you not tell me?’ she demanded.

‘Tell you what?’ But he knew what.

‘About the Healer with the Knife. I saw him come in a mule carriage, through the storeroom window, and Nissa told me why he came.’

‘Nissa talks too much,’ Marcus said. ‘I did not mean that you should know until it was all over and done with.’

‘You had no right not to tell me,’ she said stormily. ‘It was mine to know!’ And then in an anxious rush, ‘What will he do to you?’

Marcus hesitated an instant, but if he did not tell her, the unspeakable Nissa undoubtedly would. ‘I am to have the wound cleaned up. That is all.’

Her face seemed to grow narrower and more sharply pointed while he looked at it. ‘When?’ she asked.

‘In the morning, very early.’

‘Send Esca to tell me when it is over.’

‘It will be
very
early,’ Marcus said firmly. ‘You will scarcely be awake by then.’

‘I shall be awake,’ Cottia said. ‘I shall be waiting at the bottom of the garden. And I shall wait there until Esca comes, whoever tries to take me away. I can bite others besides Stephanos, and if anyone tries to take me away, I will, and then I shall be beaten. You would not like to know that I had been beaten because you would not send Esca, would you, Marcus?’

Marcus recognized defeat. ‘Esca shall come and tell you.’

There was a long pause. Cottia stood very still, looking down at him. Then she said, ‘I wish it could be me instead.’

It was a thing more easily said than meant, but Cottia did mean it. Looking at her, Marcus knew that. ‘Thank you, Cottia. I shall remember that. And now you must go home.’

She drew back obediently, as Esca reappeared in the doorway. ‘I will go home. When may I come again?’

‘I do not know,’ Marcus said. ‘Esca shall come and tell you that also.’

Without another word she turned and walked out into the golden light. At a sign from Marcus, the slave fell in behind her, and their steps sounded fainter and fainter along the colonnade.

Marcus listened to them until they faded into silence, lying quiet, with the familiar rough warmth of Cub’s head under his hand. He was still unpleasantly cold in the pit of his stomach, but he no longer felt alone. In some way that he did not understand, Cub and Esca and Cottia had comforted and steadied him for what was coming.

The golden light was fading, and into the quietness stole a shimmering thread of bird-song, the thin, regretful autumn song of a robin in the wild pear-tree; and he realized that summer was nearly over. Suddenly he knew, with a sense of discovery, that it had been a good summer. He had been homesick, yes, dreaming night after night of his own hills, and waking with a sore heart; but none the less, it had been a good summer. There had been the day that Cub discovered how to bark. Marcus had been almost as surprised as Cub. ‘But wolves never bark,’ he said to Esca; and Esca had said: ‘Rear a wolf with the dog-pack and he will do as the dog-pack does in all things.’ And Cub, proud of his new accomplishment, had filled the garden with his shrill puppy clamour for days. Other small sharp-edged memories sprang to meet him: twists of hot pastry brought out by Sassticca and eaten by the four of them as a feast; the hunting-bow which he and Esca had built between them; Cottia holding his olive-wood bird in her cupped hands.

A kind summer, a kingfisher summer; and suddenly he was grateful for it.

He slept that night quietly and lightly as a hunter sleeps, and woke to the call of distant trumpets sounding

Cockcrow from the transit camp.

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It was so early that the gossamer still lay thick and dewgrey over the courtyard grass and the smell of the dayspring was cold and fresh in the air when Rufrius Galarius returned; but Marcus had been waiting his coming for what seemed a long time. He returned the surgeon’s greeting, and explained, ‘My slave is gone to shut up the wolf-cub. He should be back at any moment.’

Galarius nodded. ‘I have seen him. He is also fetching sundry things that we shall need,’ he said, and opening the bronze case that he had brought with him he began to set out the tools of his trade on the chest top.

Before he had finished, Esca was back, carrying hot water and new linen, and a flask of the native barley spirit which Galarius considered better than wine, though fiercer, for cleansing a wound. ‘There will be more hot water when you need it,’ he said, setting the things down on the chest top beside the instrument case; and came to stand over Marcus, a little as Cub might have done.

Galarius finished his preparations, and turned. ‘Now, if you are ready?’

‘Quite ready,’ Marcus said, tossing off the blanket, and shut his teeth for what was coming.

A long while later he drifted out of the darkness that had come roaring up over him before the work was finished, to find himself lying under warm rugs, with Rufrius Galarius standing beside him with a square hand set over his heart, as old Aulus had stood in that other waking, just a year ago. For one confused moment he thought that it was still that other waking and he had dreamed in a circle; and then, as his sight and hearing cleared somewhat, he saw Esca standing just behind the surgeon, and a huge shadow in the doorway that could only be Uncle Aquila, and heard the despairing howls of Cub shut in the storeroom: and came back to the present like a swimmer breaking surface.

The ache of the old wound was changed to a jangling throb that seemed to beat through his whole body with a sickening sense of shock, and involuntarily he gave a little moan.

The surgeon nodded. ‘Aye, it strikes sharp at first,’ he agreed. ‘But it will ease presently.’

Marcus looked up rather hazily into the blue-jowled Spaniard’s face. ‘Have you done?’ he mumbled.

‘I have done.’ Galarius drew up the blanket. There was blood on his hand. ‘In a few months’ time you will be a sound man again. Lie still and rest now, and this evening I will come back.’

He gave Marcus’s shoulder a small brisk pat, and turned to gather up his instruments.

‘I leave him in your hands. You can give him the draught now,’ he said to Esca, over his shoulder as he went out. Marcus heard him speak to someone in the colonnade. ‘Enough splinters to quill a porcupine; but the muscles are less damaged than one might expect. The boy should do well enough now.’