The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (15 page)

‘More than that, sir.’ Marcus was leaning forward, almost stammering in his sudden desperate eagerness. ‘If the Eagle could be found and brought back, it—it might even mean the re-forming of the Legion.’

‘That also I know,’ said the Legate. ‘And I know a thing which interests me even more. If trouble were to break out again in the north, a Roman Eagle in the hands of the Painted People might well become a weapon against us, owing to the power it would undoubtedly have to fire the minds and hearts of the Tribes. The fact remains that on a mere wind-blown rumour, I can take no action. To send an expeditionary force would mean open war. A whole Legion would scarcely win through, and there are but three in Britain.’

‘But where a Legion could not get through, one man might; at least to find out the truth.’

‘I agree, if the right man came forward. It would have to be one who knew the Northern Tribes and would be accepted by them and allowed to pass; and it would have, I think, to be one who cared very deeply for the fate of the Hispana’s Eagle, else he would not be madman enough to thrust his head into such a hornet’s nest.’ He set down the cup that he had been turning between his fingers while he spoke. ‘If I had had such a one among my young men, I would have given him his marching orders. The matter seems to me serious enough for that.’

‘Send me,’ Marcus said deliberately. His glance moved from one to another of the men round the table; then he turned to the curtained entrance and called, ‘Esca! Hi! Esca!’

‘Now by the—’ began Uncle Aquila, and broke off, for once at a loss for words.

No one else spoke.

Quick footsteps came through the atrium, the curtain was drawn aside, and Esca appeared on the threshold. ‘The Centurion called?’

In as few words as might be, Marcus told him what was toward. ‘You will come with me, Esca?’

Esca moved forward to his master’s side. His eyes were very bright in the lamplight. ‘I will come,’ he said.

Marcus turned back to the Legate. ‘Esca was born and bred where the Wall runs now: and the Eagle was my father’s. Between us we fulfil your conditions finely. Send us.’

The queer silence that had held the other men was shattered abruptly as Uncle Aquila banged an open hand on the table. ‘This is lunacy! Sheer, unmitigated lunacy!’

‘No, but it is not!’ Marcus protested urgently. ‘I have a perfectly sane and workable plan. In the name of Light, listen to me.’

Uncle Aquila drew breath for a blistering reply, but the Legate put in quietly, ‘Let the boy speak, Aquila,’ and he subsided with a snort.

For a long moment Marcus stared down at the raisins on his plate, trying to get the rough plan in his head into some sort of order. Trying also to remember exactly what Rufrius Galarius had told him that would help him now. Then he looked up and began to speak, eagerly, but with great care and long pauses, rather as though he were feeling his way, as indeed he was.

‘Claudius Hieronimianus, you say that it would have to be one whom the Tribes would accept and allow to pass. A travelling oculist would be such a one. There are many sore eyes here in the north, and half the travellers on the roads are quack-salvers. Rufrius Galarius, who used to be a field surgeon with the Second’ (he glanced at his uncle with a half smile), ‘once told me of a man well known to him, who even crossed the Western Waters and plied his trade through the length and breadth of Hibernia, and came back with a whole hide to tell the tale. And if an oculist’s stamp will carry a man safely through Hibernia, of a surety it will carry Esca and me through what was once, after all, a Roman Province!’ He sat up on the couch, almost glaring at the two older men. Placidus he had forgotten. ‘It may be that we shall not be able to bring back the Eagle; but the gods willing, we will at least find out the truth or untruth of your rumour for you.’

There was a long pause. The Legate was looking at Marcus searchingly. Uncle Aquila broke the silence. ‘An enterprising plan, but with one trifling objection to it, which you would appear to have overlooked.’

‘And what is that?’

‘You know rather less than an addled egg about the doctoring of sore eyes.’

‘The same could be said for three out of four quacksalvers on the roads; but I shall go on a visit to Rufrius Galarius. Oh yes, he is a surgeon and not an oculist, I have not forgotten that; but he will know enough of the craft to put me in the way of getting a few needful salves, and give me some idea how to use them.’

Uncle Aquila nodded, as conceding the point.

And then, after a moment, the Legate asked abruptly, ‘How serviceable is that leg of yours?’

Marcus had been expecting the question. ‘Save that it would not do for the parade ground, very near as serviceable as ever it was,’ he said. ‘If we should have to run for it, it would load the dice against us, I grant you, but in strange country we should not stand a dog’s chance on the run, anyway.’

Again the silence settled. And he sat with his head up, gazing from the Legate to his uncle and back again. They were summing up his chances, and he knew it: his chances of coming through, his chances of doing the thing that he went out to do. Moment by lengthening moment it became more desperately urgent to him that he should win his marching orders. The very life or death of his father’s Legion was at stake; the Legion that his father had loved. And because he had loved his father with all the strength of his heart, the matter was a personal quest to him and shone as a quest shines. But beneath that shining lay the hard fact of a Roman Eagle in hands that might one day use it as a weapon against Rome; and Marcus had been bred a soldier. So it was in no mood of high adventure alone, but in a soberer and more purposeful spirit that he awaited the verdict.

‘Claudius Hieronimianus, you said just now that had you had the right man among your young men, you would have sent him,’ he said at last, able to keep silent no longer. ‘Do I get my marching orders?’

It was his uncle who answered first, speaking to the Legate as much as to Marcus. ‘The gods of my fathers forbid that I should hold back any kinsman of mine from breaking his neck in a clean cause, if he has a mind to.’ His tone was distinctly caustic; but Marcus, meeting the disconcertingly shrewd eyes under his fierce jut of brow, realized that Uncle Aquila knew and understood very much more of what all this was meaning to him than he would somehow have expected.

The Legate said, ‘You understand the position? The Province of Valentia, whatever it once was, whatever it may be again, is not worth an outworn sandal-strap today. You will be going out alone into enemy territory, and if you run into trouble, there will be nothing that Rome can or will do to help you.’

‘I understand that,’ Marcus said. ‘But I shall not be alone. Esca goes with me.’

Claudius Hieronimianus bent his head. ‘Go then. I am not your Legate, but I give you your marching orders.’

Later, after certain details had been thrashed out round the brazier in the atrium, Placidus said an unexpected thing. ‘I almost wish that there was room for a third in this insane expeditionary force! If there were, Bacchus! I would leave Rome to fend for itself awhile, and come with you!’

For the moment his face had lost its weary insolence, and as the two young men looked at each other in the lamplight Marcus was nearer to liking him than he had been since they first met.

But the faint fellowship was short-lived, and Placidus killed it with a question. ‘Are you sure that you can trust that barbarian of yours in a venture of this kind?’

‘Esca?’ Marcus said in surprise. ‘Yes, quite sure.’

The other shrugged. ‘Doubtless you know best. Personally I should not care to let my life hang by so slender a thread as the loyalty of a slave.’

‘Esca and I—’ Marcus began, and broke off. He was not going to make a circus show of his innermost feelings and Esca’s for the amusement of such as Tribune Servius Placidus. ‘Esca has been with me a long time. He nursed me when I was sick; he did everything for me, all the while that I was laid by with this leg.’

‘Why not? He is your slave,’ said Placidus carelessly.

Sheer surprise held Marcus silent for a moment. It was a long time since he had thought of Esca as a slave. ‘That was not his reason,’ he said. ‘It is not the reason that he comes with me now.’

‘Is it not? Oh, my Marcus, what an innocent you are; slaves are all—slaves. Give him his freedom and see what happens.’

‘I will,’ said Marcus. ‘Thanks, Placidus, I will!’

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When Marcus, with Cub at his heels, entered his sleeping-quarters that night, Esca, who was waiting for him as usual, laid down the belt whose clasps he had been burnishing, and asked: ‘When do we start?’

Marcus closed the door and stood with his back against it. ‘Probably the morn’s morning—that is, for myself, at least. The details can wait awhile; but first you had best take this,’ and he held out a slim papyrus roll he had been carrying.

Esca took it with a puzzled glance at his face, and unrolling it, he held it to the lamplight. And watching him, Marcus remembered suddenly and piercingly the moment that afternoon when he had taken off Cub’s collar. Cub had come back to him; but Esca?

Esca looked up from the papyrus, and shook his head. ‘Capitals are one thing,’ he said, ‘but I can make nothing of this script. What is it?’

‘Your manumission—your freedom,’ Marcus said. ‘I made it out this evening, and Uncle Aquila and the Legate witnessed it. Esca, I ought to have given it to you long ago; I have been a completely unthinking fool, and I am sorry.’

Esca looked down to the thing in his hands once more, and again back to Marcus, as though he was not sure that he understood. Then he let the roll spring back on itself, and said very slowly: ‘I am free? Free to go?’

‘Yes,’ Marcus said. ‘Free to go, Esca.’

There was a long dragging silence. An owl cried somewhere afar off, with a note that seemed at once desolate and mocking. Cub looked from one to the other, and whined softly in his throat.

Then Esca said, ‘Is it that you are sending me away?’

‘No! It is for you to go, or stay, as you wish.’

Esca smiled, the slow grave smile that always seemed to come a little unwillingly to his face. ‘Then I stay,’ he said, and hesitated. ‘It is perhaps not only I who think foolish thoughts because of the Tribune Placidus.’

‘Perhaps.’ Marcus reached out and set both hands lightly on the other’s shoulders. ‘Esca, I should never have asked you to come with me into this hazard when you were not free to refuse. It is like to prove a wild hunt, and whether or no we shall come back from it lies on the knees of the gods. No one should ask a slave to go with him on such a hunting trail; but—he might ask a friend.’ He looked questioningly into Esca’s face.

Esca tossed the slender papyrus roll on to the cot, and set his own hands over Marcus’s. ‘I have not served the Centurion because I was his slave,’ he said, dropping unconsciously into the speech of his own people. ‘I have served Marcus, and it was not slave-service … My stomach will be glad when we start on this hunting trail.’

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Next morning, promising to pay his old friend another visit on his way north again in the autumn, the Legate departed with Placidus, escorted by half a squadron of Cavalry. And Marcus watched them ride away down the long road to Regnum and the waiting galleys, without quite the heart-ache that the sight would once have given him, before he set about his own preparations.

Esca’s freedom caused less interest, and certainly less ill-feeling in the household than might have been expected. Sassticca, Stephanos, and Marcipor had all been born slaves, the children of slaves; and Esca, the freeborn son of a free chieftain, had never been one with them, even while he ate at their table. They were old and well content with things as they were; they had a good master, and slavery sat easy on them, like an old and familiar garment. Therefore they did not greatly begrudge freedom to Esca, accepting it as something that was likely to have happened one day or another—he and the young master having been, as Sassticca said, the two halves of an almond these many moons past, and only grumbled a little among themselves, for the pleasure of grumbling.

And anyhow, with Marcus going off—as the household had been told—about some sudden business for his uncle next day, and Esca going with him, no one, including Esca, had much time for raising difficulties or even for feeling them.

That evening, having made the few preparations that were needful, Marcus went down to the foot of the garden and whistled for Cottia. Lately she had always waited to be whistled for; and she came out to him among the wild fruit-trees under the old ramparts, with one end of her damson-coloured mantle drawn over her head against the heavy spring shower that had come with her.

He told her the whole story as briefly as might be, and she heard him out in silence. But her face seemed to grow sharper and more pointed in the way that he knew of old, and when he had finished, she said, ‘If they want this Eagle back; if they fear that it may harm them, where it is, let them send someone else for it! Why need
you
go?’

‘It was my father’s Eagle,’ Marcus told her, feeling instinctively that that would make sense to her as the other reasons behind his going would never do. A personal loyalty needed no explaining, but he knew that it was quite beyond him to make Cottia understand the queer, complicated, wider loyalties of the soldier, which were as different from those of the warrior as the wave-break curve of the shield-boss was from the ordered pattern of his dagger sheath. ‘You see, with us, the Eagle is the very life of a Legion; while it is in Roman hands, even if not six men of the Legion are left alive, the Legion itself is still in being. Only if the Eagle is lost, the Legion dies. That is why the Ninth has never been re-formed. And yet there must be more than a quarter of the Ninth who never marched north that last time at all, men who were serving on other frontiers, or sick, or left on garrison duty. They will have been drafted to other Legions, but they could be brought together again to make the core of a new Ninth. The Hispana was my father’s first Legion, and his last, and the one he cared for most of all the Legions he served in. So you see …’