The Lantern Bearers (book III)

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Aquila suddenly saw himself going to the Commandant in that last moment, laying his drawn sword at his feet, saying, ‘Sir, everything is in order. Now let me go.’ Would Callistus think that he was mad or hysterical? No, oddly enough—for there had never been a word between them save in the way of duty—he knew that Callistus would understand; but he knew also that Callistus would have no choice but to refuse. The choice was his. Quite clearly and coldly, in the still moment after the three days’ turmoil, he knew that he must make it alone.

  He turned to his old, grey-whiskered optio beside him, who had taught him all that he knew of soldiering, all that he knew of the handling of a troop—he had been so proud of his troop—and gripped his leather-clad shoulder an instant.

  ‘God keep you, Aemilius. I’ll be back.’

  He turned to the head of the landing-bridge and crossed over, quickly and openly as though in obedience to some last-moment order. No chance to bid good-bye to Felix, none to take leave of Nestor, his horse. He strode by the last remaining figures on the jetty, the native dockyard hands, no one particularly noticing him in the fading light, back through the Watergate into the desolate fort.

  Everything in him felt bruised and bleeding. He had been bred a soldier, coming of a line of soldiers, and he was breaking faith with all the gods of his kind. Going ‘wilful missing’. The very words had the sorry sound of disgrace. He was failing the men of his own troop, which seemed to him in that moment a worse thing than all else. Yet he did not turn back again to the waiting galleys. He knew that what he was doing was a thing that you couldn’t judge for other people, only for yourself; and for himself, he did not know if it was the right thing, but he knew that it was the only thing.

  He was scarcely aware of his direction, until he found himself at the foot of the Pharos. The ramp for the fuel-carts led steeply upward to the vast plinth, and at the head of it the mouth of the covered way gaped dark and empty in the gathering dusk. He mounted the ramp quickly and strode forward into the darkness. He was in the square hollowness of the tower foot where the fuel-carts were housed. The carts were there now, ranged side by side, mere blots of darkness in the lesser darkness. The dry, musty smell of baled straw was in his nostrils, and the sharp tang of pitch that had soaked into the stones of the walls. He turned to the narrow stairway that wound up the wall like the spiral twist of a snail shell, and began to climb.

  He was only half-way up when he heard, faintly through the thick walls from the world outside, the trumpets sounding the Commandant on board. Any moment now he would be missed. Well, they would have little time for searching. They would not miss the tide for one junior officer gone wilful missing. He climbed on, up and up, stumbling a little, through chamber after chamber, with the sense of height increasing on him, past the deserted quarters where the men on beacon duty had lived like peregrine falcons high above the world. The grey dusk seeping through the small windows showed the dark shapes of the debris they had left behind them—rough wooden furniture and cast-off gear, like the stranded flotsam on the shore left when the tide flows out, as Rome’s tide was flowing out. Up and up until the stairway ran out into open air, and he ducked at last through a little low-set doorway into complete darkness, into the ‘Immediate Use’ fuel store just below the signal platform. Feeling with outstretched hands, he found the ranged barrels of pitch, the straw and brushwood and stacked logs. A gap opened to his questing hand between the brushwood and the wall, and he crawled into it and crouched there, pulling the brushwood over again behind him.

  It wasn’t a good hiding-place, but the tide would be already on the turn.

  For what seemed a very long time he crouched there, his heart beating in slow, uneven drubs. From far, far below him, in another world, he thought he heard the tramp of mailed sandals, and voices that shouted his name. He wondered what he should do if they came up here and found him, skulking like a cornered rat under a garbage pile; but the time passed, and the footsteps and the calling voices came and went, hurrying, but never mounted the stairs of the forsaken tower. And presently the trumpets sounded again, recalling the searchers lest they lose the tide. Too late now to change his mind.

  More time passed, and he knew that the galleys would be slipping down the broad river-way between the marshes. And then once more he heard the trumpets. No, only one. The call was faint, faint as the echo of a seabird’s cry; but Aquila’s ear caught the sad, familiar notes of the call. In one of those galleys slipping seaward, somebody, in savage comment on what had happened, or merely in farewell, was sounding ‘Lights Out’.

  And now that it was all over, now that the choice was made, and one faith kept and one faith broken, Aquila drove his face down on to his forearm against the whippy roughness of the brushwood bundles, and cried as he had never cried before and would never cry again.

  A long while later he turned himself about in his hiding-place, and ducked out on to the narrow stairway, spent and empty as though he had cried his heart away. Dusk had long since deepened into the dark, and the cold moonlight came down the steps from the beacon platform, plashing silvery from step to step. And as he checked there, leaning against the wall, the silence of the great fortress came up to him, a silence of desolation and complete emptiness. On a sudden impulse he turned upward towards the moonlight instead of down into the blackness that swallowed the descending stairway, and stumbled up the last few steps, emerging on the beacon platform.

  The moon was riding high in a sky pearled and feathered with high wind-cloud, and a little wind sighed across the breast-high parapet with a faint aeolian hum through the iron-work of the beacon tripod. The brazier was made up ready for lighting, with fuel stacked beside it, as it had been stacked every night. Aquila crossed to the parapet and stood looking down. There were lights in the little ragged town that huddled against the fortress walls, but the great fort below him was empty and still in the moonlight as a ruin that had been hearth-cold for a hundred years. Presently, in the daylight, men would come and strip the place of whatever was useful to them, but probably after dark they would leave it forsaken and empty to its ghosts. Would they be the ghosts of the men who had sailed on this tide? Or of the men who had left their names on the leaning gravestones above the wash of the tide? A Cohort Centurion with a Syrian name, dying after thirty years’ service, a boy trumpeter of the Second Legion, dying after two …

  Aquila’s gaze lengthened out across the marshes in the wake of the galleys, and far out to sea he thought that he could still make out a spark of light. The stern lantern of a transport; the last of Rome-in-Britain. And beside him the beacon stack rose dark and waiting… On a sudden wild impulse he flung open the bronze-sheathed chest in which the fire-lighting gear was kept, and pulled out flint and steel and tinderbox, and tearing his fingers on the steel in his frantic haste, as though he were fighting against time, he struck out fire and kindled the waiting tinder, and set about waking the beacon. Rutupiae Light should burn for this one more night. Maybe Felix or his old optio would know who had kindled it, but that was not what mattered. The pitch-soaked brushwood caught, and the flames ran crackling up, spreading into a great golden burst of fire; and the still, moonlit world below faded into a blue nothingness as the fierce glare flooded the beacon platform. The wind caught the crest of the blaze and bent it over in a wave; and Aquila’s shadow streamed out from him across the parapet and into the night like a ragged cloak. He flung water from the tank in the corner on to the blackened bull’s-hide fire-shield, and crouched holding it before him by the brazier, feeding the blaze to its greatest strength. The heart of it was glowing now, a blasting, blinding core of heat and brightness under the flames; even from the shores of Gaul they would see the blaze, and say, ‘Ah, there is Rutupiae’s Light.’ It was his farewell to so many things; to the whole world that he had been bred to. But it was something more: a defiance against the dark.

  He vaguely, half expected them to come up from the town to see who had lit the beacon, but no one came. Perhaps t
hey thought it was the ghosts. Presently he stoked it up so that it would last for a while, and turned to the stairhead and went clattering down. The beacon would sink low, but he did not think it would go out much before dawn.

  He reached the ground level; the moonlight hung like a silver curtain before the doorway, and he walked out into it and across the deserted fortress, and out through a postern gate that stood open, and away. He had the sudden thought that for the sake of the fitness of things he should have broken his sword across his knee and left the pieces beside Rutupiae Light, but he was like to need it in the time that lay ahead.

  3

  The Wolves of the Sea

  THE posting-stations were still in existence, but to use them without a military permit cost money, and Aquila had never been one to save his pay, so it was upward of a week later when he came at last up the track from the ford, on an evening of soft mizzle rain. He saw the light in the atrium window and made for it, brushing the chill, spattering drops from the low branches of the damson tree as he mounted the terrace steps. He crossed the terrace and opened the atrium door, and stood leaning against the doorpost, feeling like a very weary ghost.

  Margarita, who would have been baying her head off at a stranger’s footfall before he was half-way up the valley, had risen, stretching and yawning her pleasure, and came padding across the tiled floor to greet him, with her tail swinging behind her. For an instant he saw the familiar scene caught into perfect stillness in the candle light as though it were caught in amber: his father and Demetrius with the chess board between them—they often played chess in the evenings, on a board with faint ridges between the ivory and ebony squares; Flavia sitting on the wolfskin rug before the low fire, burnishing the old cavalry sword that she had taken down, as she often did, from its place above the hearth. Only the look on their faces, turned towards the door, was not familiar; the blank, startled, incredulous look, as though he were indeed a ghost that had come back to them mired with the white chalky mud of his journeying.

  Then his father said, frowning, ‘Is that you, Aquila?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘I thought that the last of the Eagles had flown from Britain.’

  There was a little silence. Then Aquila said, ‘I have deserted the Eagles.’

  He pushed off from the doorpost, and came in, closing the door behind him against the rain that was dark on the shoulders of his leather tunic. Old Margarita was rubbing her head against his thigh, and he put down a hand to fondle her, without being aware that he did so. He was standing before his silent father now. Demetrius would not judge him, he knew: Demetrius judged no man but himself; and Flavia would care for nothing but that he had come home. But with his father it would be another matter. ‘I belong to Britain,’ he heard himself saying; not trying to defend himself, simply telling his father what had happened. ‘More and more, all those three days, I found that I belonged to Britain. And in the end—I let the galleys sail without me.’

  For a long moment his father still sat silent, with the chess-piece he had been holding when Aquila entered still in his hand. His face, turned full on Aquila, was stern and uncompromising. ‘Not an easy choice,’ he said at last.

  ‘Not an easy choice,’ Aquila agreed, and his voice sounded hoarse in his own ears.

  His father set down the chess-piece with careful precision.

  ‘Nothing, nothing, Aquila, excuses deserting the Eagles. But since it seems to me very probable that in your place I should have done the same as you have done, I can scarcely pass judgement on you.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Aquila said, staring straight before him. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Old Demetrius smiled a little under his long upper lip, and shifted his own piece on the board.

  And Flavia, who had sat ever since he appeared in the doorway, as though caught in some witch’s spell of stillness, flung aside the naked sword and sprang up, and came running to set her hands on his shoulders. ‘Oh, Aquila, I’m so glad, glad, glad that you did let them sail without you! I thought I should have died when your letter came … Does Gwyna know you are here?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Aquila said.

  ‘I’ll go and tell her, and we’ll bring you some food—much, much food. You look so hungry. You look—’ She broke off, her eyes searching his face. ‘Oh, my dear, you said that I had grown up in a year, but you have grown up in twelve days.’

  She put her arms round his neck, and held him fiercely close, her cheek pressed against his; then ran from the room calling, ‘Gwyna! Gwyna! Aquila’s home again! He has come back to us after all, and we must feed him!’

  Behind her, Aquila crossed to the fire that burned British fashion on a raised hearth, at the end of the room, and held his hands to it, for he was cold with the rain. Standing there, he said to his father, only half in question, ‘No word out of Gaul?’

  ‘I imagine the withdrawal of our last troops is all the word out of Gaul that we shall ever receive,’ his father said. He turned in his chair to follow the direction of Aquila’s voice. ‘Rome has cut her losses, where the province of Britain is concerned, and what the future holds for the province, or for any of us, God knows. Whatever it is, I am glad that you will be sharing it with us, Aquila.’

  Two evenings after Aquila’s homecoming, they had a fire again, not so much for warmth as to fight the cheerlessness of the summer gale beating against the walls; and with dinner over and the candles lit—you couldn’t get oil for the lamps any more—the atrium had taken on its winter aspect, the sense of safety and shelter within firelit walls, and the storm shut out, that belongs to winter time. Aquila had drawn a stool to the side of the hearth, and Flavia had settled herself on the rug beside him, leaning against his knee while she combed and combed her hair. The chessboard had not been brought out tonight, and instead Demetrius, with a scroll spread before him on the table, where the candlelight fell brightest, was reading to their father from The Odyssey.

  ‘“For two days and two nights we lay there, making no way and eating our hearts out with despair and the unceasing labour. But on the third morning bright-haired Dawn gave us clear daylight; wherefore up went our masts and white shining sails … Indeed that time I all but came unscathed to my Fatherland, only for the swell and the sea currents and a north wind which united against me as I worked round Cape Maleia and drove me wide to Cythera.”’

  Aquila heard the familiar sentences above the beating of the wind, and realized for the first time that Demetrius had a beautiful voice. His gaze wandered about the room that he had known all his life, brushing over the small household shrine with the sign of the Fish painted on the wall above it, the couches with their coverings of deerskins and gay native rugs, his father’s sword hanging above the hearth, the pretty tumble of women’s gear—Flavia had never in her life put anything away. His gaze lingered on his father’s face, alert and listening in the firelight, his hand with the great dolphin ring fondling Margarita’s head on his knee; on Demetrius’s grey and gentle features bent over his scroll. Demetrius had been a slave until their father had bought him to be their tutor, and given him his freedom; and when he was no longer needed as a tutor, he had stayed to be Flavian’s steward and his eyes. Demetrius was a stoic, a man to whom life was a discipline to be endured with dignity and death a darkness to be met without flinching. Maybe that was what he had taught himself in his slave days, to make them bearable. It came to Aquila suddenly how terrible it must be to be a stoic: but he did not believe that Demetrius was really like that; he loved ideas and people too much. His gaze dropped to Flavia, combing her hair in the firelight that made a glow all round her. She was looking up at him through the dark, flying strands as she flung it this way and that, sweeping the comb through it. And as she combed, she was humming, so softly that the sound would not reach her father or Demetrius at all; a dark, thin, sweet humming that Aquila could barely catch above the voices of the summer storm.

  He bent down towards her, his arm across his knee. ‘What are you noonin
g?’

  She glimmered with laughter. ‘Perhaps I make a singing magic. What would you say if I told you that I combed my hair—just like this—and made a singing magic, on the evening that the galleys sailed, to call you home again?’

  He looked at her with unexpected soberness. ‘I don’t know. But I do not think that I should ever feel quite the same about you again.’

  Flavia stopped combing. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I knew that you would not. That is why I did not do it, though I longed to—you can’t know how I longed to—because I knew that if I did, and it worked, I should have to tell you. I don’t know why, but I should have to tell you, and I couldn’t bear that you should not feel the same about me again.’

  ‘Do you know,’ Aquila said, ‘I don’t think I could, either.’

  A few weeks ago he would not have dreamed of saying that to Flavia; he would scarcely have thought it to himself. But now it was different; now, when the present moment mattered so much, because there mightn’t be anything to come after.

  The wind that was roaring up the valley fell away into a long trough of quiet, and in the hush, faint and far off and infinitely sad, rose the hunting cry of a wolf. Aquila cocked up his head, listening. It wasn’t often that you heard the wolves in the summer, they were a winter sound; and hearing the long-drawn howl between gust and gust of the storm, he grew freshly aware of the warmth and shelter of the firelit atrium.