The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] (19 page)

After a short while footsteps sounded outside, and Esca and Guern came ducking in, followed almost at once by the small herdsman and an even younger boy, both very like Guern in face, and already tattooed as he was, against the day when they would be warriors. They watched the strangers warily under their brows, and drew back against the far wall of the hut, while their mother brought bowls of black pottery from some inner place, and served the steaming stew to the three men sitting side by side on the bed-place. She poured yellow mead for them into the great ox-horns, and then went to eat her own meal on the far side of the fire, the woman’s side, with the small girl child in her lap. The younger boy sat with her, but the elder, suddenly overcoming his distrust, came edging round to examine Marcus’s dagger, and finished up by sharing his bowl.

They were a pleasant small family, yet oddly isolated in a land where most people lived in groups for greater safety; and it seemed to Marcus that here was another hint of the unusual to add to the song and the brand of Mithras…

It was next morning that he got the final proof of his suspicions.

That morning, Guern decided to shave. Like many of the British tribesmen, he went more or less clean shaven save for his upper lip, and he was certainly in need of a shave. As soon as he announced his intention, preparations began as though for a solemn festival. His wife brought him a pot of goose-fat to soften his beard, and the whole family gathered to watch their lord and master at his toilet; and so, amid an enthralled audience of three children and several dogs, sitting in the early light before the hut-place door, Guern the Hunter set to work, scraping away at his chin with a heart-shaped bronze razor. How little difference there was between children, all the world over, Marcus thought, looking on with amusement, or fathers, or shaving, for that matter; the small patterns of behaviour and relationship that made up family life. He remembered the fascination of watching his own father on such occasions. Guern squinted at his reflection in the polished bronze disc his patient wife was holding for him, cocked his head this way and that, and scraped away with an expression of acute agony, that made Marcus look forward with foreboding to the day when he and Esca would have to rid themselves of their own beards.

Guern had begun to shave under his chin, tipping his head far back, and as he did so, Marcus saw that just under the point of his jaw, the skin was paler than elsewhere, and had a thickened look, almost like the scar of an old gall. It was very faint, but still to be seen; the mark made by the chin-strap of a Roman helmet, through many years of wearing it. Marcus had seen that gall too often to be mistaken in it, and his last doubt was gone.

Something forbade him to tax Guern with his old life, here at the heart of the new life that he had made. And so a little later, while preparing to take the trail once more, he reminded the hunter of his promise, to set them on their way to the next village. He had a mind to go westward, he said, and Guern replied willingly enough, that since westward there were no more villages for two days’ trail, if they were set on going that way, he would ride with them the first day and share their camp that night.

So presently they set out. And in the long-shadowed evening, many miles to the west, the three of them ate their evening meal in the curved lee of a rocky outcrop, and afterwards sat together round their small fire. Their three mounts, each hobbled by a rein from the head to the left foreleg to prevent them straying, cropped contentedly at the short hill-turf that spread here and there like green runnels among the bell-heather. Below them the hills rolled away north-westward, falling gradually to a blue haze of low ground, maybe forty miles away, and Marcus followed the fall of them with his eyes, knowing that somewhere in that blueness the wreck of Agricola’s northern wall slashed across the land, severing Valentia from the country beyond that the Romans called Caledonia and the Celts Albu; knowing that somewhere beyond the blueness was the lost Eagle of his father’s Legion.

In all the world there seemed no sound but the dry soughing of the wind through the heather, and the sharp yelp of a golden eagle circling the blue spirals of the upper air.

Esca had drawn back a little into the heather, and sat polishing his spear, and Marcus and Guern were alone by the fire, save for the hunter’s favourite hound, who lay, nose on paws, with his flank against his master’s thigh. Presently Marcus turned to his companion. ‘Soon, very soon now, our ways part,’ he said, ‘but before you go your way and I go mine, there is a question that I have in my heart to ask you.’

‘Ask, then,’ said the other, playing with his dog’s ears.

Marcus said slowly, ‘How did you come to be Guern the Hunter who once served with the Eagles?’

There was a sudden flicker in the other’s eyes; and then for a long moment he became very still, with a sullen stillness, peering at Marcus under his brows, in the way of the Painted People. ‘Who told you such a thing?’ he asked at last.

‘No one. I go by a song, and the scar between your brows. But most of all by the gall-mark under your chin.’

‘If I were—what you say,’ Guern growled, ‘what need have I to tell you of it? I am a man of my tribe, and if I was not always so, there is none among my sword-brethen who would speak of that to a stranger. What need, then, have I to tell?’

‘None in the world,’ said Marcus, ‘save that I asked you in all courtesy.’

There was another long silence, and then his companion said, with a queer mingling of sullen defiance and a long-forgotten pride, ‘I was once Sixth Centurion of the Senior Cohort of the Hispana. Now go and tell it to the nearest Commander on the Wall. I shall not stop you.’

Marcus took his time, sitting quiet and searching the fierce face of the man before him. He was looking for any trace that might be left under the painted hunter of the Roman centurion of twelve years ago; and presently he thought he had found it. ‘No patrol could reach you, and you know it,’ he said. ‘But even if it were not so, still there is a reason that I should keep my mouth shut.’

‘And that reason?’

Marcus said, ‘That I bear on my forehead a mark which is brother to the mark that you bear on yours,’ and with a quick movement he freed the crimson riband that bound the silver talisman in place, and jerked it off. ‘Look!’

The other bent forward swiftly. ‘So,’ he said lingeringly. ‘Never before have I known one of your trade who made his evening prayer to Mithras.’ But even as he spoke, his gaze narrowed into a new intentness, became like a daggerthrust. ‘Who are you? What are you?’ he demanded; and suddenly his hands were on Marcus’s shoulders, wrenching him round to face the last windy gold of the sunset. For a long moment he held him so, kneeling over him and glaring into his face; while Marcus, with his lame leg twisted under him, stared back, his black brows frowning, his mouth at its most disdainful.

The great hound crouched watchfully beside them, and Esca got quietly up, fingering his spear; both man and hound ready to kill at a word.

‘I have seen you before,’ said Guern in a rasping voice.

‘I remember your face. In the Name of Light, who are you?’

‘Maybe it is my father’s face that you remember. He was your Cohort Commander.’

Slowly Guern’s hands relaxed and dropped to his side. ‘I should have known,’ he said. ‘It was the talisman—and the beard. But none the less, I should have known.’ He sat rocking himself a little, almost as if he were in pain, his eyes never leaving Marcus’s face. ‘What is it that you do, your father’s son, here in Valentia?’ he said at last. ‘You are no Greek of Alexandria, and I think that you are no eye doctor.’

‘No, I am no eye doctor. Nevertheless, the salves that I carry are good, and I was shown how to work with them by one skilled in their use. When I told you that I had followed my father’s trade, that at least was the truth. I followed it until I got me this leg and my discharge, two years ago. As to what I do, here in Valentia—’ he hesitated, but only for an instant. He knew that in this one matter, at least, he could trust Guern utterly.

And so, very briefly, he told him what it was he did in Valentia, and why. ‘And when it seemed to me that you were not as the other hunters of the Painted People,’ he finished, ‘it seemed to me also that from you I might learn the answer to my questions.’

‘And could you not have asked me at the first? Because I was drawn to you, not knowing why, and because you spoke the Latin tongue that I had not heard these twelve years, I brought you to my own place, and you slept under my roof and ate of my salt; with this hidden in your heart concerning me. It would have been better that you asked me at the first!’

‘Much better,’ Marcus agreed. ‘But all that I had in my heart concerning you was a guess, and a wild guess enough! If I had spoken out to you without first being sure, and found too late that you were, after all, no other than you seemed, would there not have been Ahriman the Dark One to pay?’

‘What is it that you want to know?’ Guern said dully, after a moment.

‘What became of my father’s Legion. Where is the Eagle now?’

Guern looked down at his own hand, on the head of the great dog who was once more lying quiet beside him; then up again. ‘I can answer the first of your questions, at least in part,’ he said, ‘but it is a long story, and first I will mend the fire.’

He leaned forward as he spoke, and fed the sinking flames from the pile of thorn branches and heather snarls beside him. He did it slowly, deliberately, as though holding off the moment when he must begin his story. But even when the flames sprang up again, he still squatted silent on his haunches, staring into the smoke.

Marcus’s heart had begun to race, and suddenly he felt a little sick.

‘You never knew your father’s Legion,’ Guern began at last. ‘No, and if you had, you would have been too young to read the signs. Too young by many years.’ He had changed his tongue to Latin, and with the change, all that was of the tribes in him seemed to have dropped away. ‘The seeds of death were in the Hispana before ever it marched north that last time. They were sown sixty years ago, when men of the Legion carried out the Procurator’s orders to dispossess the Queen of the Iceni. Boudicca her name was; maybe you have heard of her? She cursed them and their whole Legion, it is said, for the treatment that she had at their hands, which was hardly just, for they had their orders: if she was minded to curse anyone, it had better have been the Procurator himself. But a woman who thinks herself wronged is seldom over particular where her thrust lands, so that it draws blood. Me, I am not one to set much store by cursings, or I was not in the old days. But be that as it may, the Legion was cut to pieces in the rising that followed. When at last the rising failed, the Queen took poison, and maybe her death gave potency to her cursing.

‘The Legion was re-formed and brought up to strength again, but it never prospered. Perhaps if it had been moved elsewhere it might have been saved, but for a Legion to serve year after year, generation after generation, among tribes who believe it to be accursed is not good for that Legion. Small misfortunes bloat into large ones, outbreaks of sickness are set down to the working of the curse, instead of the marsh mists; the Spaniards are a people quick to believe in such things. So it became harder to find recruits, and the standard of those taken grew lower, year by year. It was very slow at first—I have served with men no older than myself, who remembered the Ninth when it was only a little rough and run to seed. But at the last it was terribly swift, and when I joined the Legion as a centurion, two years before the end—I was promoted from the ranks of the Thirtieth, which was a proud Legion—the rind seemed sound enough, but the heart was rotten. Stinking rotten.’

Guern the Hunter spat into the fire.

‘I strove to fight the rot in my own Century at first, and then—the fighting grew to be too much trouble. The last Legate was a hard and upright man without understanding—the worst man to handle such a Legion—and soon after his coming the Emperor Trajan withdrew too many troops from Britain for his everlasting campaigns; and we who were left to hold the Frontier began to feel the tribes seethe under us like an over-ripe cheese. Then Trajan died, and the tribes rose. The whole North went up in flames, and barely had we settled with the Brigantes and the Iceni when we were ordered up into Valentia to hammer the Caledonians. Two of our cohorts were serving in Germany; we had suffered heavy casualties already, and leaving a cohort to garrison Eburacum and be cut to shreds by the Brigantes if they happened to feel like it, that left well under four thousand of us to march north. And when the Legate took the omens in the usual way, the sacred chickens had gone off their feed and would not touch the pulse he threw to them. After that we gave ourselves up for doomed, which is a bad state of mind for a Legion to march in.

‘It was autumn, and almost from the start the mountain country was blanketed in mist, and out of the mist the tribesmen harried us. Oh, it never came to a fight; they hung about our flanks like wolves; they made sudden raids on our rearguard and loosed their arrows into us from behind every tuft of sodden heather, and disappeared into the mist before we could come to grips with them; and the parties sent out after them never came back.

‘A Legate who was also a soldier might have saved us; ours had seen no more of soldiering than a sham fight on Mars Field, and was too proud to listen to his officers who had, and by the time we reached Agricola’s old headquarters on the Northern Wall, which was to be our base, upward of another thousand of us had gone, by death or desertion. The old fortifications were crumbling, the water supply had long since given out, and the whole North had gathered in strength by then. They sat round the walls and yelled, like wolves howling to the moon. We stood one attack in that place. We rolled the dead down the scarp into the river; and when the tribes drew off to lick their wounds, we chose a spokesman and went to the Legate and said: “Now we will make what terms we can with the Painted People, that they may let us march back the way we came, leaving Valentia in their hands, for it is no more than a name, and a name that tastes sour on the tongue at that.” And the Legate sat in his camp chair, which
we
had had to carry for him all the way from Eburacum, and called us evil names. Doubtless we deserved the names, but they did not help. Then more than half of us mutinied, many of my own Century among them.’