The Eagle

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  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 laid-back 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 toward 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 afterward, 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.”

  “I am so
rry. And your mother?”

  “I expect that all is well with my mother,” Cottia said, matter-of-factly. “There was a hunter who had wanted her always, but her parents gave her to my father. And when my father went West of the Sunset, she went to the hunter, and there was no room in his house for me. It was different with my brother, of course. It is always different with boys. So my mother gave me to Aunt Valaria, who has no children of her own.”

  “Poor Cottia,” Marcus said softly.

  “Oh no. I did not wish to live in that hunter’s house; he was not my father. Only…” Her voice trailed into silence.

  “Only?”

  Cottia’s changeable face was suddenly as vixenish as he had guessed it could be. “Only I hate living with my aunt; I hate living in a town full of straight lines, and being shut up inside brick walls, and being called Camilla; and I hate—hate—hate it when they try to make me pretend to be a Roman maiden and forget my own tribe and my own father!”

  Marcus was quickly coming to the conclusion that he did not like Aunt Valaria. “If it is any consolation to you, they seem to have succeeded very ill so far,” he said.

  “No! I will not let them! I pretend, outside my tunic. I answer when they call me Camilla, and I speak to them in Latin: but underneath my tunic I am of the Iceni, and when I take off my tunic at night, I say, ‘There! That rids me of Rome until the morning!’ And I lie on my bed and think—and think—about my home, and the marsh birds flighting down from the north in the Fall of the Leaf, and the brood mares with their foals in my father’s runs. I remember all the things that I am not supposed to remember, and talk to myself inside my head in my own tongue—” She broke off, looking at him in quick surprise. “We are talking in my tongue now! How long have we been doing that?”

  “Since you told me about your real name being Cottia.”

  Cottia nodded. It did not seem to strike her that the hearer to whom she was pouring out all this was himself a Roman: and it did not strike Marcus either. For the moment all he knew was that Cottia also was in exile, and his fellowship reached out to her, delicately, rather shyly. And as though feeling the touch of it, she drew a little nearer, huddling the scarlet folds more closely round her.

  “I like being inside your cloak,” she said contentedly. “It feels warm and safe, as a bird must feel inside its own feathers.”

  From beyond the hedge at that moment there arose a voice, shrill as a pea-hen before rain. “Camilla! Ladybird! Oh, my Lady Camilla!”

  Cottia sighed in exasperation. “That is Nissa,” she said. “I must go.” But she did not move.

  “Camilla!” called the voice, nearer this time. “That is Nissa again,” said Marcus. “Yes, I—must go.” She got up reluctantly, and slipped off the heavy cloak. But still she lingered, while the screeching voice drew nearer. Then with a rush, “Let me come again! Please let me! You need not talk to me, nor even notice that I am here.”

  “Oh, my Lady! Where are you, child of Typhon?” wailed the voice, very near now.

  “Come when it pleases you—and I shall be glad of your coming,” Marcus said quickly.

  “I will come tomorrow,” Cottia told him, and turned to the old rampart slope, carrying herself like a queen. Most British women seemed to carry themselves like that, Marcus thought, watching her drop out of sight round the hedge; and he remembered Guinhumara in the hut doorway at Isca Dumnoniorum. What had happened to her and the brown baby, after Cradoc lay dead and the huts were burned and the fields salted? He would never know.

  The shrill voice was raised in fond scolding on the far side of the hedge; and footsteps came across the grass, and Marcus turned his head to see Esca coming towards him.

  “My Master has had company,” Esca said, laying spear-blade to forehead in salute, as he halted beside him.

  “Yes, and it sounds as though she is getting a sharp scolding from her nurse on my account,” Marcus said a little anxiously, as he listened to the shrill voice fading.

  “If all I hear be true, scolding will not touch that one,” Esca said. “As well scold a flung spear.”

  Marcus leaned back, his hands behind his neck, and looked up at his slave. The thought of Guinhumara and her baby was still with him, standing behind the thought of Cottia. “Esca, why do all the frontier tribes resent our coming so bitterly?” he asked on a sudden impulse. “The tribes of the South have taken to our ways easily enough.”

  “We have ways of our own,” said Esca. He squatted on one heel beside the bench.

  “The tribes of the South had lost their birthright before ever the Eagles came in war. They sold it for the things that Rome could give. They were fat with Roman merchandise and their souls had grown lazy within them.”

  “But these things that Rome had to give, are they not good things?” Marcus demanded.

  “Justice, and order, and good roads; worth having, surely?”

  “These be all good things,” Esca agreed. “But the price is too high.”

  “The price? Freedom?”

  “Yes—and other things than freedom.”

  “What other things? Tell me, Esca; I want to know. I want to understand.”

  Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. “Look at the pattern embossed here on your dagger-sheath,” he said at last. “See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.”

  Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. “Go on.”

  Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside at Cottia’s coming. “Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heaven and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to—if they ever had it.” He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. “You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.”

  “The sheath was made by a British craftsman,” Marcus said stubbornly. “I bought it at Anderida when I first landed.”

  “By a British craftsman, yes, making a Roman pattern. One who had lived so long under the wings of Rome—he and his fathers before him—that he had forgotten the ways and the spirit of his own people.” He laid the shield down again. “You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own.”

  For a while they were silent, watching Cub at his beetle-hunting. Then Marcus said, “When I came out from home, a year and a half ago, it all seemed so simple.” His gaze dropped again to the buckler on the bench beside him, seeing the strange, swelling curves of the boss with new eyes. Esca had chosen his symbol well, he thought: between the formal pattern on his dagger-sheath and the formless yet potent beauty of the shield-boss lay all the distance that could lie between two worlds. And yet between individual people, people like Esca, and Marcus, and Cottia, the distance narrowed so that you could reach across it, one to another, so that it ceased to matter.

  VIII

  The Healer with the Knife

  Marcus had said, “Come when you like,” and Cottia had said, “I will come tomorrow.” But it was not so simple as that, after all. Kaeso would have made no particular difficulty, for he was an easy-going and kindly man, very eager to stand well with his Roman fellow-Magistrate.
But Aunt Valaria, always so careful to follow the custom of what she called “civilized Society,” was very sure that it was not the custom for gently nurtured Roman maidens to take themselves into other people’s gardens and make friends with the total strangers they found there. It was not as though Aquila had ever shown himself in the least friendly.

  Marcus of course knew nothing of this; he only knew that Cottia did not come tomorrow, nor the day after. And he told himself that there was no reason why she should. It had been to see Cub that she came in the first place, and having seen him, why should she come again? He had thought that perhaps she wanted to be friends, but it seemed that that had been a mistake, and it did not much matter.

  And then on the third day, when he had sworn to himself that he would not look for her coming any more, he heard her calling his name, softly and urgently, and when he looked up from the spear-blade that he had been burnishing, there she was, standing where he had first seen her, among the wild fruit trees.

  “Marcus! Marcus, I could not get free of Nissa before,” she began breathlessly. “They say that I must not come again.”

  Marcus laid down the spear, and demanded, “Why?”

  She glanced quickly over her shoulder into her own garden. “Aunt Valaria says it is not seemly for a Roman maiden to do as I have done. But I am not a Roman maiden; and oh, Marcus, you must make her let me come! You must!”

  She was hovering on the edge of flight, even while she spoke, and clearly it was no time for needless talk or long explanations. “She shall let you come,” Marcus said quickly, “but it may take time. Now go, before they catch you.” He made her a swift half-laughing obeisance, palm to forehead, and she turned and dropped out of sight.