The Eagle

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Suddenly, to Marcus’s tired mind, it seemed that there were others besides themselves in the little lamplit shrine; notably two: a slight, dark man, with an eager face beneath the tall crest of a First Cohort Commander; and a shock-headed tribesman in a saffron kilt. Yet when he looked at the tribesman, he was gone, and in his place the young Centurion he had once been.

  “Here lies the Eagle of the Ninth Legion, the Hispana,” the Legate was saying. “Many times it found honour in the wars, against foes abroad and rebellion at home. Shame came to it; but at the end it was honourably held until the last of those who held it died beneath its wings. It has led brave men. Let it lie forgotten.”

  He stepped back.

  Esca looked questioningly to Uncle Aquila, then at a sign from him, stooped to the segment of solid-moulded tessera which stood upreared against the wall, and fitted it carefully back into place over the hole. It had been well contrived, this hiding place that Uncle Aquila had had made for his papers; with the segment replaced and the pattern completed, no trace of it remained, save for one all but invisible chink just wide enough to take a knife-blade.

  “Tomorrow we will seal it up,” said Uncle Aquila, heavily.

  Faintly into the silence, down the soft wet wind, stole the long-drawn, haunting notes of the trumpets from the transit camp, sounding for the third watch of the night. To Marcus, still gazing down blindly at the place where the square hole had been, it seemed that they were sounding with unbearable sadness for the lost Eagle, and for the lost Legion that had marched into the mist and never come marching back. Then, as the distant trumpets quickened into the shining spray of notes that ended the call, suddenly his sense of failure dropped from him like a tattered cloak, and he knew again, as he had known in the ruined signaltower while the hunt closed in below, that it had all been worthwhile.

  He had failed to redeem his father’s Legion, since it was past redeeming, but the lost Eagle was home again, and would never now be used as a weapon against its own people.

  He raised his head at the same time as Esca, and their eyes met. “A good hunting?” Esca seemed to be asking.

  “It was a good hunting,” Marcus said.

  XXI

  The Olive-Wood Bird

  That winter was not an easy one for Marcus. For months he had mercilessly overtaxed his lame leg, and when the strain was over, it quite suddenly took its revenge. He did not much mind the pain it gave him, save when it kept him awake at night, but he did most bitterly mind finding himself shackled by the old wound again, when he had thought that all that was over. He felt ill, and he was wildly impatient, and he missed Cottia through the dark winter days as he had never missed her before.

  Also there was the old nagging question of the future still to be settled. For Esca, the future was simpler—simpler as to the outward things at all events. “I am your armour-bearer, though I am no longer your slave,” he said when they discussed the question. “I will serve you, and you shall feed me, and between whiles maybe I will turn hunter, and that will bring in a sesterce from time to time.” Even before the year turned Marcus had spoken to his uncle about his old idea of becoming somebody’s secretary; but Uncle Aquila had disposed of his capabilities to be anybody’s secretary in a few well-chosen and blistering words, and when he proved stubborn in the plan, finished up by making him promise to wait at least until he was strong again.

  The year drew on to spring, and slowly Marcus’s leg began to strengthen under him once more. March came, and the forest below the ramparts was flushed with rising sap, and the many thorn trees which gave it its name began to feather the wooded hills with white. And quite suddenly the House of Kaeso woke up. For a few days slaves came and went, scurrying about it; hangings were shaken out of doors, and the fumes of the freshly lit hypocaust fire blew into the slaves’ quarters of Uncle Aquila’s house and created unpleasantness between the two households. Then one evening, returning from the baths, Marcus and Esca met a hired mule-carriage being driven away empty from the house of Kaeso, and glimpsed a mass of luggage being carried indoors. The family had returned.

  Next morning Marcus went down to the foot of the garden, and whistled for Cottia, as he had been used to do. It was a wild day of blustering wind and thin, shining rain, and the little native daffodils in the rampart curve tossed and streamed before the gusts like points of wind-blown flame, with the shrill sunshine slanting through their petals. Cottia came with the wind behind her, up round the end of the swaying hedge, to join him under the bare fruit trees.

  “I heard you whistle,” she said, “and so I came. I have brought your bracelet back to you.”

  “Cottia!” Marcus said. “Why, Cottia!” and stood looking at her, making no move to take the bracelet that she held out to him. It was almost a year since their last meeting, but he had expected her to wait as she had been then. And Cottia had not waited. She stood before him much taller than she had been, with her head up, and returned his look, suddenly a little uncertain. Her soft golden-green mantle was swathed closely round her over the straight white folds of her tunic; one end of it, which had been drawn over her head, had fallen back, and her flaming hair that had been used to blow wild, was braided into a shining coronal so that she seemed more than ever to carry her head like a queen. Her lips were touched with red, and her eyebrows darkened, and there were tiny gold drops in her ears.

  “Why, Cottia,” he said again, “you have grown up,” and felt suddenly a little ache of loss.

  “Yes,” said Cottia. “Do you like me grown up?”

  “Yes—yes, of course,” Marcus said.

  “Thank you for looking after my bracelet for me. Uncle Aquila told me how you came to see him about it before you went away.” He took the heavy gold bracelet from her and sprang it on to his wrist, still looking at her as he did so. He found that he did not know how to talk to her, and as the silence lengthened, he asked with desperate politeness, “Did you like Aquae Sulis?”

  “No!” Cottia spat the word between little pointed teeth, and her face was suddenly bright with fury. “I hated every moment of Aquae Sulis! I never wanted to go there; I wanted to wait for you because you told me you might be home before the winter closed in. And all winter I have had no word of you save one little—little message in some silly letter your uncle sent mine about the new town water supply; and I have waited, and waited, and now you are not at all glad to see me! Well, neither am I at all glad to see you!”

  “You little vixen!” Marcus caught her wrists as she turned to run, and swung her round to face him. Suddenly and softly he laughed. “But I am glad to see you. You do not know how glad I am to see you, Cottia.”

  She was dragging away from him, wrenching at her wrists to free them, but at his words she checked, looking up into his face. “Yes, you are now,” she said wonderingly. “Why were you not, before?”

  “I did not recognize you, just at first.”

  “Oh,” said Cottia, a little blankly. She was silent a moment, and then asked with sudden anxiety: “Where is Cub?”

  “Making love to Sassticca for a bone. He is growing greedy.”

  She drew a deep breath of relief. “All was well with him, then, when you came home?”

  “He was very thin; he would not eat after you left. But all is well with him now.”

  “I was afraid of that; that he would fret, I mean. It was one of the things that made me not want to go to Aquae Sulis; but I could not take him with me, truly I could not, Marcus. Aunt Valaria would never have allowed it.”

  “I am very sure she would not,” Marcus said, his mouth quirking as he thought of the Lady Valaria confronted with the suggestion that she should take a young wolf to a fashionable watering-place.

  By this time they were sitting side by side on Marcus’s cloak spread on the damp marble bench, and after a few moments Cottia asked: “Did you find the Eagle?”

  He looked round at her, his arms resting across his knees. “Yes,” he said at last.

  “Oh,
Marcus, I am so glad! So very glad! And now?”

  “Nothing now.”

  “But the Legion?” She searched his face, and the sparkle died in her own. “Will there not be a new Ninth Legion, after all?”

  “No, there will never be a Ninth Legion again.”

  “But, Marcus—” she began, and then checked. “No, I will not ask questions.”

  He smiled. “One day, maybe, I will tell you the whole story.”

  “I will wait,” said Cottia.

  For a while they sat there, talking by fits and starts, but silent for the most part, glancing at each other from time to time with a quick smile, and then away again, for they were unexpectedly shy of each other. Presently Marcus told her about Esca, that he was no longer a slave. He had expected her to be surprised, but she only said, “Yes, Nissa told me, just after you went away, and I was glad—for you both.” And then they were silent again.

  Behind them, in the bare swaying branches of the wild pear tree, a blackbird with a crocus-coloured bill burst into song, and the wind caught and tossed the shining notes down to them in a shower. They turned together to look up at the singer, swaying against the cold blown blue of the sky. Marcus narrowed his eyes into the thin dazzle of sunlight and whistled back, and the blackbird, bowing and swaying on the wind-blown branch, its throat swelling with an ecstasy of song, seemed to be answering him. Then a cloud came sailing across the sun, and the bright world was quenched in shadow.

  At the same moment they heard a horse coming down the street, its hoof-beats ringing on the wet roadway. It stopped before the house, or before the next one; Marcus could not be sure which.

  The blackbird was still singing, but when he turned to look at Cottia, a shadow that was not merely the passing cloud seemed to have touched her. “Marcus, what is it that you will do now?” she asked suddenly.

  “Now?”

  “Now that you are strong again. You are strong again, aren’t you?” Then swiftly: “No, I do not believe you are, you were limping more, just now, than you were when I saw you last.”

  Marcus laughed. “I have been lying up like a sick badger all winter, but I am mending fast now.”

  “That is the truth?”

  “That is the truth.”

  “Then—what will you do? Will you go back to the Legions?”

  “No. I should do well enough in a skirmish, maybe, but I could not march my Cohort down from Portus Itius to Rome at twenty miles a day, and I should certainly be no use on the parade-ground.”

  “The parade-ground!” Cottia said indignantly. “I have seen them on the parade-ground through the gates of the transit camp. They march about in straight lines with all their legs working together, and make silly patterns of themselves while a man with a voice like a bull shouts at them. What has that to do with the fighting of wars?”

  Marcus hastily gathered his wits together to make Cottia understand what it had to do with the fighting of wars, but he did not have to struggle with the explanations, for she hurried on without waiting for an answer. “Then if you cannot go back to the Legions, what will you do?”

  “I am not—quite sure.”

  “Perhaps you will go home,” she said; and then seemed suddenly to realize her own words, and her eyes grew frightened. “You will go back to Rome, and take Cub and Esca with you!”

  “I do not know, Cottia, truly I do not know. But I do not suppose for a moment that I shall ever go home.”

  But Cottia did not seem to hear him. “Take me too.” Suddenly her voice broke almost into a wail. “They will build the city wall round here soon, and you could not leave me in a cage! You could not! Oh, Marcus, take me too!”

  “Even if it were to Rome?” Marcus said, remembering her old wild hatred of all things Roman.

  Cottia slipped from the bench, and turned to him as he got up also. “Yes,” she said. “Anywhere at all, if only it was with you.”

  Two distinct waves of feeling swept over Marcus, so close upon each other that they were almost one. The first was the joyful surprise of finding, and the second the desolation of losing again…How was he to explain to Cottia that possessing nothing in the world, without even a trade to his hands, he could not take her with him?

  “Cottia,” he began wretchedly. “Cottia, my heart—it is no use—” But before he could get any further, he heard Esca calling, with a note of excitement in his voice. “Marcus! Where are you, Marcus?”

  “Down here. I am coming,” he shouted back, and caught Cottia’s hand. “Come with me now, anyway.”

  Rain had begun to spatter round them, but the sun was out again and the rain shone as it fell. Cub met them at the courtyard steps, circling about them and barking joyously, his straight bush of a tail streaming out behind. And hard behind Cub, was Esca. “This has just come for you,” he said, holding out a slim, sealed papyrus roll.

  Marcus took the roll from him, raising his brows at the sight of the Sixth Legion’s signum on the seal; while Cottia and Esca and Cub all greeted each other after their fashion. In the act of breaking the thread he glanced up to see Uncle Aquila stalking toward them.

  “Curiosity is one of the privileges of extreme old age,” said Uncle Aquila, towering over the group in the entrance to the colonnade.

  Marcus unrolled the crackling papyrus sheet. He was half blind with the dazzle of the day outside and the written words seemed to float in the midst of red and green clouds. “To Centurion Marcus Flavius Aquila, from Claudius Hieronimianus, Legate of the Sixth Victrix, Greeting,” the letter began. He skimmed the few close lines to the end, then glanced up and met Cottia’s wide golden eyes fixed on him. “Are you a witch out of Thessaly, to draw down the moon in a net of your hair? Or is it only the Other Sight that you have?” he said; and returned to the letter in his hand.

  He began to read it a second time, more carefully, taking it in, as he had scarcely been able to do at first, and giving them the gist of it as he went along. “The Legate has laid that matter before the Senate, and their ruling is as we knew it must be. But he says that ‘in just recognition of service to the State, which is nonetheless real that it must remain unpublished…’” He looked up quickly. “Esca, you are a Roman citizen.”

  Esca was puzzled, almost a little wary. “I am not sure that I understand. What does it mean?”

  It meant so much; rights, and duties. It could even, in a way, mean the cancelling of a clipped ear, for if a man were a Roman citizen, that fact was stronger than the fact that he had been a slave. Esca would find that out, later. Also, in Esca’s case, it was his honourable quittance, the wooden foil of a gladiator who had won freedom with honour in the arena; the settlement of all debts. “It is as though they gave you your wooden foil,” he said; and saw Esca, who had been a gladiator, begin to understand, before he returned again to his letter.

  “The Legate says that for the same service, I am to be awarded the gratuity of a time-expired Cohort Centurion—paid in the old style, part sesterces, part land.” A long pause, and then he began to read word for word. “Following the established custom, the land-grant will be made over to you here in Britain, as the province of your last military service; but a good friend of mine on the Senate benches writes to me that if you so wish, there should be no difficulty in working an exchange for land in Etruria, which I believe is your own country. The official documents will be reaching both of you in due course, but since the wheels of officialdom are notoriously slow, I hope that I may be the first to give you the news…”

  He stopped reading. Slowly the hand which held the Legate’s letter dropped to his side. He looked round at the faces that crowded him in: Uncle Aquila’s wearing the look of someone watching with detached interest the result of an experiment; Esca’s face with an alert and waiting look in it; Cottia’s, grown all at once very pointed and white; Cub’s great head upraised and watchful. Faces. And suddenly he wanted to escape from them all; even from Cottia, even from Esca. They were part of all his plans and calculations, they belo
nged to him and he to them, but for this one moment, he wanted to be alone, to realize what had happened without anyone else entering in to complicate it. He turned away from them and stood leaning against the half wall beside the courtyard steps, staring away down the rain-wet garden where the little native daffodils were a myriad points of dancing flame under the wild fruit trees.

  He could go home.

  Standing there with the last cold spattering of the shower blowing in his face, he thought, I can go home, and saw behind his eyes the long road leading south, the Legion’s road, white in the Etruscan sunlight; the farmsteads among their terraced olive trees, and the wine-darkness of the Apennines beyond. He seemed to catch the resiny, aromatic smell of the pine forests dropping to the shore, and the warm mingling of thyme and rosemary and wild cyclamen that was the summer scent of his own hills. He could go back to all that now, to the hills and the people among whom he had been bred, and for whom he had been so bitterly homesick, here in the North. But if he did, would there not be another hunger on him all his life? For other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling?

  Suddenly he knew why Uncle Aquila had come back to this country when his years of service were done. All his life he would remember his own hills, sometimes he would remember them with longing; but Britain was his home. That came to him, not as a new thing, but as something so familiar that he wondered why he had not known it before.

  Cub thrust a cold muzzle under his hand, and he drew a long breath and turned once again to the others. Uncle Aquila stood still with arms folded and huge head a little bent, looking on with that air of detached interest.