The Silver Branch

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘You first, Justin.’

  And suddenly Justin’s old horror of enclosed places, places from which he could not get out again at will, had him by the throat, and it was all he could do to force himself down on hands and knees and through that square of darkness that was like the mouth of a trap, the mouth of a tomb.

  ‘You next,’ Flavius said, and he heard little Cullen coming after him, and then Flavius’s voice again, in a hurried undertone, ‘Aunt Honoria, I’ll stay outside where I can come to your help if need be—and take my chance.’

  ‘Do you really want to kill us all?’ said Aunt Honoria crisply. ‘Get in after the others, and don’t any of you try to get out again until I come for you.’

  And then the three of them were together in the enclosed space. The iron door shut behind them, and they were in darkness such as Justin had never known existed. Black darkness that pressed against one’s eyeballs like a pad. Faintly they heard Aunt Honoria piling logs against the door. ‘Get forward a bit,’ Flavius whispered.

  Justin could sense that they had come out into a wider space. They must be right under the floor of the Atrium, here. He put out a hand and felt one of the fire-brick pillars on which the floor rested, strong pillars so short that if one tried to sit up, the floor would be against one’s shoulders. Justin tried not to think of that. He tried listening instead. He heard Aunt Honoria’s footsteps overhead, and women’s voices somewhere. He could hear the hunt too, very close now. It was odd to hear so much, when one seemed to be miles down below the world of living men. The sounds must come down the wall-flues, he supposed, like the air. Plenty of air coming down the wall-flues; no need to feel as though one couldn’t breathe. ‘Don’t be such a fool,’ he told himself angrily. ‘You can breathe perfectly well; you’re just a bit winded with the running, that’s all; and the Atrium floor isn’t sinking down on top of you either. Breathe slowly—slowly. You can’t panic in here, Justin, you miserable coward; it’s bad enough for the other two without that.’

  How long he lay sweating, with the darkness turned soft and loathsome and suffocating about him, he had no idea; but it could not have been long, because little Cullen’s exhausted panting had scarcely quieted away when there was a furious pounding on one or other of the Atrium doors, and a crash, and then the tramp of feet almost overhead and a ragged splurge of voices, so many and so guttural that it came down to the three in hiding only as a confused roar. Then Aunt Honoria’s voice, raised a little from its usual quietness, clear-cut and imperious. ‘Will someone among you tell me what is the meaning of this?’

  A deep voice, almost unintelligible in its thickness, answered her. ‘Ja, we seek three men that ran this way. Maybe you hide them here?’

  ‘Three men?’ said Aunt Honoria coolly. ‘There are none here but myself and these my slaves, four old women, as you see.’

  ‘So you say, old woman—old thin cow! Now we look.’

  It was at that moment Justin realized that Cullen was no longer beside him. Well, there was nothing to be done about that now save pray that the little man was not doing anything foolish.

  Aunt Honoria’s voice sounded again, cool as ever. ‘Look then, but I tell you beforehand that if you would find these men, whoever they be, then you must search elsewhere.’

  There was a growl of voices and rough laughter, and the swift tramp of feet overhead again. And in the same instant, from somewhere before him in the darkness of the hypocaust itself, came a faint grating sound, a sound that Justin could give no name to save that it was like something shifting. What in the name of Esculapius was Cullen doing? He tensed, waiting for the next thing, but no other sound came out of the darkness. A woman squealed shrilly; and then suddenly the footsteps were everywhere, and a guttural snarl of voices calling to each other, laughing, savage. And after a while Justin felt little Cullen slipping back to his side.

  The steps went to and fro across the Atrium floor, dulled and muffled into a kind of thunderous padding in the enclosed space underneath, dying away and pounding back again as the Saxons scattered questing through the house, like hounds drawing a dense cover. There was a crash somewhere, and a roar of laughter; and a rising babble of other voices, shrill and scared, that must be the household slaves. Once again Aunt Honoria’s voice sounded. But the three listening with straining ears in the dark could make out little of what was passing.

  And then, quite suddenly, it seemed that it was over.

  The distant distressful babble of women’s voices still reached them faintly, but the guttural tones of the Saxons had blurred into the night, and the padding footsteps sounded no more overhead. The scared voices of the slaves sank away little by little into quiet; and again they waited.

  And then, faintly through the iron door, they heard the logs being shifted. The iron door opened; lamplight burst in upon them in a dazzling beam, and Aunt Honoria’s voice said, ‘I’m sorry to have left you here so long. It has taken me all this while to soothe my silly women and get them safely back to their own quarters.’

  A few moments later the three of them, covered with ash and charred brick-dust, were standing in the stoke-house; and in the blessed sense of space above his head and air to breathe, Justin stood drawing in great gasps of breath as though he had been running. Flavius said quickly, ‘You are not scathed, Aunt Honoria?’

  ‘I am not scathed. I have had a somewhat anxious time; no more.’

  The Atrium, when they were back in it a few moments later, bore testimony to the Saxon’s passing, in broken furniture and hangings torn down, mud trampled across the tesserae, and the painted plaster of one wall scored across and across as with a dagger, in the sheer wanton pleasure of breaking and marring. Aunt Honoria wasted no look on the damage, as she crossed to the shrine of the household gods and set the flower-shaped lamp on the altar.

  ‘What a good thing our household gods are only bronze,’ she said. ‘The altar lamp was silver.’ Then she turned to the tattered and grimy figures behind her. ‘When did you return from Gaul?’

  ‘We have not been in Gaul,’ Flavius said. ‘We put your bracelets to a better use this side of the water, Aunt Honoria.’

  She searched his face with those beautiful eyes, so bright under the wrinkled lids and the eye-paint. ‘So you have been in Britain all this while? A year and the half of a year? and could you not have found means to send me word, just once, or twice, in all that time?’

  Flavius shook his head. ‘We have been busy, Justin and I and some others; busy on the sort of work you do not risk dragging your family into.’

  ‘So.’ Aunt Honoria said, and her gaze went to little Cullen in his tattered motley on the edge of the lamplight. ‘And here is one of those others?’

  Justin and Flavius turned to look at the little Fool as though becoming truly aware of him for the first time. Somehow, after that first startled moment of unbelief when the lantern-light showed them his face as he struggled with his captors, there had been nothing to spare for surprise. But now all at once they realized the astonishing thing that had happened. That this was Cullen the Fool of Carausius, whom they had never once thought of as amongst the living, since his lord was dead.

  It was Cullen himself who answered first. ‘Na, Lady, I am Cullen that was hound to Curoi the Emperor. And though for long and long I have been seeking these two, it was not until tonight, by all the wheeling stars of the sky, that I found them again in my need.’

  ‘You have been seeking us?’ Flavius said.

  The little man nodded vehemently. ‘Seeking and seeking, because my Lord Curoi bade me.’

  ‘The Emperor bade you? When—what is it that you mean?’

  ‘Two years ago last seed-time he wrote a letter, and when it was written, he gave it to me, and bade me take it to you if he should—die. He gave it to me because he knew that he could trust me; he said I was the most faithful of hunting dogs. But when he was slain’—Cullen showed his teeth as a hound shows them—‘they caught and held me captive a while and a long
while to make them laugh. And when at last I broke free, I went North—my Lord said I should find you on the Wall.’ He sounded reproachful. ‘But you were gone, and I could get no word of you for another long while, until a woman in the street of the Golden Grasshopper at Magnis told me you were gone South on the road to Gaul. Then South I came—and this evening, those who held me captive aforetime knew me again in the streets of Calleva.’

  Flavius nodded. ‘And the letter? Have you the letter yet?’

  ‘Should I have come without it?’ Cullen said. From the breast of his tattered motley he brought out something long and curved, muffled close in rags, and unwinding it gently as a woman loosing her babe from its swaddling bands, laid bare his Silver Branch.

  Justin wondered at its silence in his hands until he saw the wisp of sheep’s wool sticking through the opening of the largest apple, and realized that, as well as the outer wrappings, each apple had been packed with wool to silence it. ‘Other things I have carried for Curoi my Lord in this hiding-place. It is a good hiding-place,’ Cullen was saying. He did something to the end of the enamelled hand-piece, and drew out from it a roll of papyrus not much thicker than a man’s finger. ‘Sa, here it is, safe where it has lain these more than two years past.’

  Flavius took and unrolled it with great care, turning to the little lamp on the altar. The papyrus was so thin that the flame shone through it pinkish until he tipped it to catch the light on the surface. Justin, looking over his shoulder, saw Carausius’s bold writing flash up blackly from the fragile sheet.

  ‘To Centurion Marcelus Flavius Aquila, and to Tiberius Lucius Justinianus, Cohort Surgeon, from Marcus Aurelius Carausius, Emperor of Britain, Greeting,’ he read. ‘If ever you read this it will be that the man of whom you sought to warn me has slipped beneath my guard in the end. And—as though it mattered—if I should have no more speech with you in this world, I would not have you think I sent you from me in anger. You young fools, if I had not sent you to the Wall as being of no further use to me, you would have been dead men within three days. I salute you, my children. Farewell.’

  There was a long silence. Only the faint whisper of the rain and the distant night-time sounds of the city. The noise of the hunt had quite died away. Flavius let the thin papyrus roll up on itself, very gently. Justin was staring at the flame of the lamp; a slender, spear shaped flame, blue at the heart, exquisite. There was a small aching lump in his throat, and somewhere below it, a small aching joy.

  ‘So he d-did believe us,’ he said at last. ‘He knew, all the time.’

  ‘A great man, our little Emperor,’ Flavius said huskily, and slipped the roll into the breast of his ragged tunic.

  XIV

  AN ANCIENT ENSIGN

  AS he did so, from somewhere just beneath their feet came a thud, followed by a rustle as of falling plaster.

  ‘What is that?’ Flavius said, after a moment’s startled hush.

  Little Cullen squirmed slightly, as a dog squirms in apology when he knows he has been doing what he should not. ‘Maybe it is the stone that moved in one of the pillars that hold up the floor. When we were down there I crept forward to hear better what went on, and it moved under my hand as I felt before me in the dark. It might be that I disturbed something.’

  So that was what the sound in the darkness of the hypocaust had been.

  ‘Ah well, better the house falling down than more Saxons,’ Flavius said, and put out a hand to the lamp on the altar. ‘Aunt Honoria, may I take this? Better perhaps that I go see what has happened. Cullen, come you and show me.’

  Aunt Honoria, who had seated herself in the one unbroken chair, rose. ‘While you are gone I’ll see to some food for you.’

  Justin went with neither his Great-Aunt nor Flavius. There was no point in his going with either, and he was possessed suddenly of an odd stillness, a certainty that something very strange was coming. And he stood beside the little altar, waiting for it to come. With the lamp gone, it was almost as dark as it had been in the hypocaust. He heard the wind and the rain, and the waiting silence of the poor scarred house. He heard the other two moving below the floor, a grunt that was unmistakably Flavius, the soft, formless sound of something being shifted, followed by a muffled exclamation; and in a little the sounds of movement drawing away toward the door.

  And then the other two were back, the shadows circling and racing before the lamp in Cullen’s hand. Flavius carried something else, a shapeless bundle of some sort, and as Cullen set the lamp once more on the altar, and the light steadied, Justin, casting a questioning glance at his cousin, was struck by the look of hushed excitement on his face.

  ‘All’s well?’ he asked.

  Flavius nodded. ‘The house isn’t falling down. The side had come out of an old hiding-place in one of the hypocaust pillars—the plaster must have crumbled away. And inside was—this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I—do not know yet.’ Flavius turned to the lamp, and began very carefully to turn back the dark, musty-smelling folds of cloth in which the thing was wrapped. ‘The wool is rotten as tinder,’ he said. ‘But look at these inner folds, where the lamplight falls. Look, Justin, you can see that it has been scarlet!’

  Justin looked; and then put out his hands to take the mass of tindery cloth as the last folds fell away—scarlet: scarlet for a military cloak.

  Flavius was holding an eagle of gilded bronze. Green-stained with verdigris where the gilding was gone, battered, mutilated—for where the great back-swept silver wings should have sprung from its shoulders were only empty socket-holes staring like blind eyes; but defiant in its furious pride, unmistakably an Eagle still.

  Justin drew a long breath. ‘But it is an Eagle!’ he whispered unbelievingly. ‘I mean—it is the Eagle of a Legion.’

  ‘Sa, it is the Eagle of a Legion,’ Flavius said.

  ‘But—only one such Eagle was ever lost in Britain.’

  They looked at the thing in silence, while little Cullen, with an air of being very well pleased with himself, after all, stood swinging his hound’s tail behind him with little flicks of his rump, and looking on. The lost Ninth Legion, the lost Hispana that had marched into the Northern mists and never returned…. ‘But how could it be that one?’ Justin whispered at last. ‘Who could have brought it South again? None of them ever got back.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Flavius said. ‘But Marcus’s father disappeared with the Ninth, remember, and there was always that story in the family about an adventure in the North … Maybe he went to find out the truth and bring back the Eagle. A Roman Eagle in the hands of the Painted People would be a powerful rallying point. Justin, do you remember once—one evening at the farm, we were wondering how it all started; why he got that gratuity and land-grant from the Senate? Don’t you see it all fits?’

  ‘But—but if he brought it back, why should it have been hidden here? Why was the L-legion never re-formed?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly hidden, it was buried before the Altar,’ Flavius said. ‘Maybe it was disgraced. We shall never know. But there could have been reasons.’ In the circle of lamplight, a soft yellow rose of lamplight in the darkened house, they looked at each other with growing excitement and certainty; while little Cullen stood by, swinging his hound’s tail behind him. ‘And I’d wager all I have that this is the Ninth’s lost Eagle!’

  Aunt Honoria, who, unnoticed by any of them, had returned a little before, set down the bundle of food on a nearby table, and said, ‘So, you have found a lost Eagle, under the floor. At another time I will wonder and care and be amazed, but now it seems to me that it is not the time to be discovering lost Eagles. Here is food—the hunt may rouse up again at any moment, it will be dawn in an hour, and after this disturbance the Fates alone know how soon Volumnia and the rest will be stirring—let you take it, and go.’

  Flavius did not seem to hear the last part of this speech. His head was up and his eyes suddenly blazing bright under the red fly-away brows. He held the ba
ttered thing against his breast. ‘But it is the time of all others to be discovering lost Eagles! We have our dunghill legion—and now the gods send us a standard to follow, and who are we to refuse a gift of the gods?’

  ‘So, take it with you. Only take it now, and go!’

  Flavius had turned from her to the shrine, the Eagle still held against his breast, looking to the tiny crocus-flame of the lamp, or to the little bronze figures of the household gods in their niches, Justin was not sure which; or through them to something beyond. ‘I take it for the old Service again,’ he said.

  And as though in answer, far off and faintly down the wind came the long-drawn, haunting notes of Cockcrow sounding from the transit camp without the Walls.

  ‘Flavius dear,’ said Aunt Honoria very gently, ‘I have had a rather trying night, and I feel my temper none too sure within me. Will you please go, before I lose it and box all your ears?’

  And so a few moments later they stood ready to depart; Flavius with the Eagle once more wrapped in the remains of what had once been a military cloak, Justin with the food-bundle under his arm. Aunt Honoria had taken the lamp into another room, that it might not outline them in the doorway, and slipped out first herself to see that all was quiet, before she beckoned them after her. At the last moment, as they stood in the Atrium doorway with the soft rain blowing in their faces, Flavius said, ‘You have heard the news, that Constantius’s sails have been sighted off Tanatis?’