“Tonight’s work would alter that. We owe our lives to you, and if we get the Eagle back to its own place, that will be your doing.”
Guern shook his head again. “I am of the Selgovae. I have a woman of the tribe to wife, and she is a good wife to me. I have sons, born into the tribe, and my life is here. If ever I was—something else, and my life was elsewhere, all that lies in another world and the men I knew in it have forgotten me. There is no way back through the Waters of Lethe.”
“Then—good hunting to you on your own trails,” Marcus said after a silence. “Wish us well, between here and the Wall.”
“I will wish you well; and it is in my heart that I will wish myself with you. If you win through, I shall hear of it, and be glad.”
“You will have played no small part in it, if we do,” Marcus said, “and neither of us will forget. The Light of the Sun be with you, Centurion.”
They looked back when they had gone a few paces, and saw him standing as they had left him, already dimmed with mist, and outlined against the drifting mist beyond. A half-naked, wild-haired tribesman, with a savage dog against his knee; but the wide, well-drilled movement of his arm as he raised it in greeting and farewell was all Rome. It was the parade-ground and the clipped voice of trumpets, the iron discipline and the pride. In that instant Marcus seemed to see, not the barbarian hunter, but the young Centurion, proud in his first command, before ever the shadow of the doomed legion fell on him. It was to that Centurion that he saluted in reply.
Then the drifting mist came between them.
As they turned away, Marcus found himself hoping that Guern would get back safely to the new life that he had made for himself, that he would not have to pay for the faith that he had kept with them. Well, the mist would give him cover on his homeward way.
Almost as though he had heard his friend’s unspoken thoughts and was answering them, Esca said: “He will hear if we come with our lives out of this, but we shall never hear whether he does.”
“I wish that he had chosen to come with us,” Marcus said. But even as he spoke, he knew that Guern the Hunter was right. There was no way back through the Waters of Lethe.
Two dawns later, Marcus and Esca were still a long way from the Wall. The mist that had met them on the secret way had haunted them ever since; a patchy and treacherous mist that was sometimes no more than a faint blurring of the more distant hills, and at others swooped down on them, blotting out all landmarks in a swirling greyness in which the very ground seemed dissolving away. They would have become lost over and over again but for the hunter’s sense of direction that made Esca able to smell the South as a townsman might smell garlic. And even with that to help them, they could only struggle on with maddening slowness, covering what distance they could when the mist thinned, and lying up wherever they happened to be when it grew too thick to push on any further. Once or twice they came very near to disaster; many times they had to cast back for a way round some pitfall that the mist had hidden from them, and Marcus, who was leaving the route to Esca as usual was having anxieties of his own. His lame leg, which had carried him well enough through the forced marches and weary scrambles of their way south, was beginning to let him down, and let him down badly. He held on doggedly, but he was growing clumsy, and when he stumbled the jar of it made him set his teeth.
That dawn brought them their first warning that the enemy were indeed, as Guern had said, drawing these hills also, when the fitful mist rolled back to show them the figure of a mounted man, evidently on watch, high on a hill-shoulder not more than a bowshot away. Luckily he was not looking their way, and they fell flat among the heather, and spent a bad few moments watching him ride slowly along the ridge, until the mist closed down again.
They spent part of that day lying up in the lee of a great boulder, but started out again while there were still several hours of daylight left. While the mist hung about them, they had had to abandon their plan of travelling only by night, and push on when and how they could.
“How far have we still to go, by your reckoning?” Marcus asked, as he stood trying to rub the stiffness out of his leg.
Esca tightened his rawhide belt, which had become too loose for him, collected his spear and brushed up, as well as he could, the flattened grass where they had been lying.
“It is hard to judge,” he said. “It has been slow travelling in this murk, but I think that I have not brought us greatly out of our way. By the fall of the land, I should say twelve or fourteen of your Roman miles. There; if any hunter comes close to this place, he will see that we have lain there, but from a few paces distant, it will not show.”
They set out once more on the long march south.
Toward evening a faint wind began to stir; and before it, the mist, which had been thick all day, grew ragged as a beggar’s cloak.
“If the wind rises, we may lose this witches’ brew at last,” said Marcus, as they halted at the curve of a narrow glen to make sure of their direction.
Esca lifted his head and sniffed, like an animal grown suddenly wary. “Meanwhile it is in my heart that we should do well to find ourselves a fox-hole until dusk.”
But they had left the finding of their fox-hole too late. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the mist seemed to curl back on itself. It spread sideways like blown smoke; the brown heather and golden bracken across the burn warmed suddenly through the drifting swathes, and next instant a cry, high and carrying and oddly triumphant, pierced upward from the far side of the glen, and a saffron-kilted figure started from cover and ran, crouching low, for the hill-crest. Esca’s spear followed him, but it was too far for a throw. In six racing heartbeats he had reached the skyline and dropped out of sight, crying his summons as he ran.
“Downhill,” Esca said harshly. “Into the woods.”
They swung in their tracks, towards the nearest tongue of the birch woods that were spreading like a stain through the ragged mist, but even as they did so, the signal cry rose from among the golden trees in answer. There was no escape that way; and as they turned again, from far up the glen behind them the same cry went up, thin as a bird’s call. Only one way lay open for them, and they took it; straight uphill to their right, and what lay over the hill-crest only the Lord of the Legions knew.
They gained the crest somehow, Marcus was never sure how, and as they hesitated an instant on the bare ridge, the cry—it was changing its quality now, becoming a hunting cry—rose again behind them, and was answered and flung up out of the mist below, closing in. They must have blundered into a large band of the hunters. Southward along the ridge, a dark mass of furze seemed to offer a certain amount of cover, and they dived into it like hunted animals going to ground, and began to work their way forward into its heart.
After that all was a blurred confusion of mist and jagged furze branches, and a chaos of dark islands swirled through by tawny tides of bracken and bilberry; of lying rigid among the dagger-sharp furze-roots with a suffocating reek of fox in their throats and the horror of the hunted in their racing hearts, while death with many heron-tufted war-spears stalked them through the dark maze. There were men all round them, on horseback, on foot, thrusting heedless of torn skin through the spiney branches, leaping high on stiff legs like hunting dogs who seek their quarry in long grass, giving tongue like hunting dogs too, now on this side, now on that. Once a probing spear struck like a snake within a span of Marcus’s shoulder. And then quite suddenly they realized that against all seeming possibility, the hunt had missed them. It had swept over them and was no longer all around them, but behind!
They began to work forward on their stomachs again, with slow, agonizing caution. They could not tell where they were going, save that it was away from the enemy behind them. A dark and evidently much-used tunnel in the furze opened to them, and they slid into it, Esca leading. The reek of fox grew stronger than ever. The tunnel curved, leading them slightly downhill, and there was nothing to do but follow it, no breaking out thro
ugh the dense furze that walled and roofed it in. It ended suddenly on the edge of the cover, and before them a spur of rocky, bush-grown turf ran out at an angle from the main ridge. Swathes of mist, drawn up out of the deep glen, were still drifting across it before the rising wind, but at the furthest point, upward of a bowshot away, something that might be a broch loomed through the greyness. It did not look promising, but they could not stay where they were, for it seemed to them that the sounds of the hunt were drawing nearer again, and there could be no turning back.
So they struck out into the open, getting what cover they could from the rocks and scrub, in search of some way down. But it seemed that there was no way down. The northwestern slope would have been easy enough, but as they crouched among the bushes at the edge of it, the jink of a pony’s bridle-bit came up to them, and the movement of men waiting. That way was securely stopped up. The southeastern scarp dropped practically sheer into drifting mist-wreaths, out of which rose the indefinable sense and smell of deep water. There might be a way out for the Eagle, there, but there was certainly none for Marcus. Driven on by the sound of the hunt questing through the furze behind them like hounds after a lost scent, they struggled on a few steps, then checked, panting and desperate, looking this way and that, with eyes that strained to find some way of escape. But Marcus was almost done, and Esca had his arm round him. They could go no further even if the way were clear; they were trapped, and they knew it. The building that they had glimpsed through the mist was quite clear now; not a broch at all, but an old Roman signaltower. They gathered themselves together and made for it.
It was a very obvious hiding place, so obvious that it offered a bare chance of safety, or at all events respite, because the hunters might well have searched it already. At the worst it would give them a chance to put up some sort of fight; and there was always the dark coming.
The narrow archway, doorless now, gaped blackly in the wall, and they stumbled through into a small courtyard where grass had long since covered the cobbles. Another empty doorway faced them, and Marcus made for it. They were in the guardroom now. Dead leaves rustled to and fro on the floor, and the milky light filtering from a high window embrasure showed them the foot of a stairway in the wall. “Up here,” he gasped.
The steps were of stone and still in good condition, though slippery with damp, and they stumbled upward, the sound of their feet seeming very loud in the silence of the stone shell where a little Roman garrison had lived and worked, keeping watch over the border hills, in the short years when the province of Valentia was more than a name.
They ducked out through a low door under the signal platform, on to the flat roof of the tower, into daylight as translucent as a moon-stone after the dark below. As they did so, Marcus was almost blinded by a thrashing of great black wings past his face, and a startled raven burst upward uttering its harsh, grating alarm cry, and flew off northward with slow, indignant wing-beats, caaking as it went.
Curse! That will announce our whereabouts clearly to all who may be interested, Marcus thought, but was suddenly too tired to care very much. Utterly spent, he lurched across to the far side of the roof, and looked down through a crumbling embrasure. Below him the ground dropped sheer from the tower foot, and through the last filmy rags of the mist he caught the darkness of deep water, far below, a still and sombre tarn brooding on its own secrets, between the spur and the main ridge. Yes, there would be a way out for the Eagle.
On the landward side, Esca was crouching beside a broken place in the parapet, where several large stones had fallen, leaving a gap. “They are still beating the furze,” he muttered as Marcus joined him. “It is well for us that there are no dogs with this band. If they do not come before dusk, we may escape them yet.”
“They will come before dusk,” Marcus murmured back. “The raven has made sure of that. Listen…” A sound came up to them from below the northern side of the spur, a confused, formless splurge of excitement, faint with mist and distance, that told them all too clearly that the waiting man had understood the raven’s message. Marcus lowered himself stiffly on to his sound knee beside the other, slipped into an easier position, and stretched out sideways, leaning on one arm, his head hanging low. After a few moments he looked up. “I suppose I should feel guilty about you, Esca. For me, there has been the Eagle; but what had you to win in all this?”
Esca smiled at him, a slow grave smile. There was a jagged tear in his forehead where a furze root had caught him, Marcus noticed, but under it his eyes looked very quiet. “I have been once again a free man amongst free men. I have shared the hunting with my brother, and it has been a good hunting.”
Marcus smiled back. “It has been a good hunting,” he agreed. The soft beat of unshod hooves on turf came drumming up from the mist below; the unseen hunters of the furze cover were casting back towards the open spur, beating as they came, making sure that their quarry did not again slip through them. They would be here soon, but the riders from below would be first. “A good hunting; and now I think that is ended.” He wondered if any word of that ending would one day drift south across the Wall, would reach the Legate Claudius, and through him, Uncle Aquila; would reach Cottia in the garden under the sheltering ramparts of Calleva. He should like them to know…it had been a good hunting, that he and Esca had had together. Suddenly he knew that, despite all outward seeming, it had been worth while.
There was a great quietness in him. The last of the mist was blowing clear away as the wind freshened; something that was almost sunshine brushed fleetingly across the old signaltower, and he noticed for the first time that a clump of harebell had taken root in a cranny of the fallen parapet close to him, and, late in flowering because of the place in which it grew, still carried one fragile bell aloft on an arching thread-slender stem. It swayed as the wind blew over, and regained its place with a tiny, defiant toss. It seemed to Marcus that it was the bluest thing he had ever seen.
Up over the edge of the spur, three wild horsemen appeared heading for the gateway.
XIX
Tradui’s Gift
As they dropped from their ponies in the courtyard below, Marcus and Esca drew back from the parapet. “Only three, so far,” Marcus whispered. “Don’t use your knife unless you have to. They may be of more use to us living than dead.”
Esca nodded, and returned his hunting-knife to his belt. Life and the urgency of doing had taken hold of them again. Flattened against the wall on either side of the stairhead they waited, listening to their pursuers questing through storehouse and guard-room. “Fools!” Marcus breathed, as a shout told them that the stairway had been spotted; and then came a rush of feet that checked at the floor below and then came on, storming upward.
Marcus was a good boxer, and much practice with the cestus last winter had made Esca something of a boxer also; together, weary though they were, they made a dangerous team. The first two tribesmen to come ducking out through the low doorway went down without a sound, like poled oxen: the third, not so completely caught unawares, put up more of a fight. Esca flung himself upon him, and they crashed down several steps together, in a flailing mass of arms and legs. There was a short, desperate struggle before Esca came uppermost, and staggering clear, heaved an unconscious man over the doorsill.
“Young fools,” he said, stooping for a fallen spear. “A hound puppy would have known better than that.”
Two of the tribesmen—they were all very young—lay completely stunned where they had fallen; but one was already stirring; and Marcus bent over him. “It is Liathan,” he said. “I’ll see to him. Do you tie up and gag the other two.”
The young warrior groaned, and opened his eyes to find Marcus kneeling over him with his own dagger to his throat, while close by, Esca was hastily trussing and gagging the two unconscious men with strips torn from the cloak of one of them. “That was a mistake,” Marcus said. “You should have kept with the rest of the hunt, not come thrusting in here on your own.”
Liathan
lay looking up at him. His black eyes were hard with hate; blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Maybe we saw the raven and we sought to be First Spear, lest a lowland tribe claim the Eagle-god for its own,” he said between shut teeth.
“I see. It was a brave thing to do, but extremely stupid.”
“Maybe; but though we fail, there will be others here soon.” There was a gleam of savage triumph in the black eyes.
“So,” Marcus nodded. “When they come, these others, you will tell them that we are not here; that we must after all have slipped by in the mist; and you will send them back the way they came, over the main ridge yonder, towards the sunrise.”
Liathan smiled. “Why will I do these things?” He glanced for a contemptuous instant at the dagger in Marcus’s hand. “Because of that?”
“No,” said Marcus. “Because when the first of your friends sets foot on the stair, I shall send the Eagle—here it is—into the tarn which lies below this place. We are still a long way from the Wall, and you will have other chances—you or others of the hunt—before we reach it; but if we die here, you will lose whatever chance you have of retaking the Red Crests’ god.”
For a long moment Liathan lay staring up into Marcus’s face; and in that silent moment there grew a light smother of hoof-beats and a distant burst of shouting. Esca rose quickly and crossed, half crouching, to the broken parapet. “The hunt is up,” he said softly. “They have done with the furze cover. Aiee! Like a wolf-pack, they close in.”
Marcus withdrew the dagger, but his eyes never left the young tribesman’s face. “Choose,” he said, very quietly. He got up and moved backward to the far parapet, unwrapping the Eagle as he did so. Liathan had risen also, and stood swaying a little on his feet, looking from Marcus to Esca and back again. Marcus saw him swallow, saw him lick the cut on his lip. He heard the sounds of the in-closing hunt, very near now, the men giving tongue like excited hounds; and from the emptiness at his back, only the plaintive cry of a marsh bird in the wind-haunted silence. He let the last violet fold fall from the Eagle, and held it up. The evening light, spreading as the mist thinned, struck on the savage, gilded head.
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