The Eagle of the Ninth [book I]

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Normally when they camped in the wild they took turns to sit up and keep the fire in while the other slept, but here, with four walls round them and a pile of thorn branches across the door to keep the horses in, there could be no need for that. For a while he lay wakeful, every nerve jumping with a queer expectancy; but he was tired, and the spread skins and the fragrant, high-piled bracken were very comfortable. And before long he fell asleep, and dreamed that he was watching Legionaries at pilum practice, quite ordinary Legionaries, save that between their chin-straps and the curves of their helmets—they had no faces.

  He woke to a sense of light, steady pressure below his left ear, woke quietly and completely as people roused in that way always do, and opened his eyes to see that the fire had sunk to a few red embers and Esca was crouching beside him in the first faint pallor of the dawn. The evil taste of the dream was still in his mouth. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

  ‘Listen.’

  Marcus listened and felt a small unpleasant chill trickling up his spine. His own eerie fancies of last night returned to him uncomfortably. Maybe Esca had been right about this place, after all. For somewhere in the abandoned fort, somebody—or some thing—was whistling the tune of a song that he knew well. He had marched to it more than once, for though an old song, it was a favourite with the Legions, and for no particular reason had outlived many and many that they picked up and marched to for a few months and then forgot.

  ‘Oh when I joined the Eagles,

  (As it might be yesterday)

  I kissed a girl at Clusium

  Before I marched away.’

  The familiar words joined themselves to the tune in Marcus’s head, as he rose silently, and stood getting his stiffened leg into marching order. The whistling was drawing nearer, becoming every moment more clearly recognizable:

  ‘A long march, a long march, and twenty years in store, When I left my girl at Clusium, beside the threshing-floor.’

  There were many more verses, all describing girls that the maker of the song had kissed in different parts of the Empire; but as Marcus went purposefully to the doorway, and Esca stooped to drag aside the thorn branches, the whistling ceased, and a voice—a husky voice with a queer, brooding quality in it, as though the singer’s thoughts were turned inward and backward—took up the song at the last verse of all:

  ‘The girls of Spain were honey-sweet,

  And the golden girls of Gaul:

  And the Thracian maids were soft as birds

  To hold the heart in thrall.

  ‘But the girl I kissed at Clusium

  Kissed and left at Clusium,

  The girl I kissed at Clusium

  I remember best of all.

  ‘A long march, a long march, and twenty years behind, But the girl I kissed at Clusium comes easy to my mind.’

  Rounding the end of the barrack row, they came face to face with the singer, who was standing in the Sinister Gate. Marcus had not known what he had expected to see—perhaps nothing, which would have been worst of all. But what he did see pulled him up in astonishment, for the man—it was no ghost—standing with his hand on the bridle of a rough-coated pony, was one of the Painted People, such as he had lived among all summer.

  The man had checked at sight of Marcus and Esca, and stood looking at them warily, with upflung head, like a stag when it scents danger; his hunting-spear held as though for instant attack. For a moment they surveyed each other in the dawn light, then Marcus broke the silence. By now he could make himself understood without much trouble in the dialect of the Northern Tribes. ‘It has been a good hunting, friend,’ he said, pointing to the carcass of a half-grown roe-buck that was slung across the pony’s back.

  ‘Good enough until I can do better,’ said the man. ‘There is none to spare.’

  ‘We have food of our own,’ Marcus said. ‘Also we have a fire, and unless it seems good to you to build your own or eat your meal raw, you are welcome to share it.’

  ‘What do you here, in the Place of Three Hills?’ asked the man suspiciously.

  ‘Camp for the night. Not knowing how far we might be from a village, and judging that rain was on the way, it seemed to us a better sleeping-place than the open moor. Is not the Place of Three Hills free to all, or only to the raven and the lizard—and yourself ?’

  For an instant the man did not answer, then slowly and deliberately he reversed the spear in his hand, so that he was carrying it with head trailing, as a man carries his spear when he comes in peace. ‘I think that you will be the Healer of sore eyes, of whom I have heard?’ he said.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I will come and share your fire.’ He turned and whistled, and in answer to the summons, two swift brindled hunting dogs came springing up through the bracken to join him.

  A few moments later they were back in their shelter, and the small, shaggy pony, free of his burden now, was hitched to a fallen beam beside the door. Esca threw a birch branch on to the red embers, and as the silver bark blackened and flared up, Marcus turned for a better look at the stranger. He was a middle-aged man, lean and powerful, his eyes wary and a little furtive under the wild hair that was coarse and grey as a badger’s pelt; he wore nothing but an ochre-coloured kilt, and in the light of the fire his body and arms were covered all over with bands of tattooing, after the manner of the Painted People. Even on his cheeks and forehead and the wings of his nostrils the blue curves and spandrils showed. The dogs were nosing at the body of the deer which lay at his feet, and as their master stooped to cuff them away, the firelight fell strongly slantwise across his forehead, throwing into relief the scar of a curiously shaped brand, just between the brows.

  Esca squatted down by the fire and put more strips of smoked meat to broil in the hot ash, then sat with his arms across his knees and his spear within easy reach, watching the stranger under his brows; while the stranger, kneeling over the flattened carcass of the buck—which had been gralloched already—began to skin it with the long hunting-knife which he drew from his raw-hide belt. Marcus also watched him, though less obviously. He was puzzled. The man seemed a tribesman like any other of his kind; yet he had sung ‘The Girl I Kissed at Clusium’ in good Latin; and at some time, years ago to judge by the faintness of the scar, he had been initiated into the Raven Degree of Mithras.

  He might of course have learned the song from the Legionaries who had served here; he was fully old enough for that. Mithra sometimes found followers in unexpected places. But taking the two things together, it was unusual, to say the least of it, and Marcus had been looking for something unusual all summer.

  The hunter had laid back a large flap of hide from the flank and haunch of the buck. He cut thick collops of meat from it, and a shapeless lump with the hair still on, which he flung to the dogs who crouched beside him. And while they fought over it, snarling and worrying, he heaved up what remained of the carcass and flung it across a half-rotten tie-beam, where it hung, the dangling legs out of reach of the hounds. He put the collops that he had cut for his own eating to broil in the hot ash, rubbed his hands on his kilt, for they were juicy, and sitting back on his heels, peered from Marcus to Esca and back again with a strange intent look, as though their faces—Marcus’s at all events—had some meaning for him which he could not fathom.

  ‘I thank you for the heat of your fire,’ he said, speaking less roughly than he had done before. ‘It is in my heart that I might have been swifter to reverse my spear; but I had not thought to find any before me, here in the Place of Three Hills.’

  ‘I can well believe that,’ Marcus said.

  ‘Aye, in all the years that I have come here on the hunting trail, never until now have I found any man here before me.’

  ‘And now you have found two. And since we share the same fire,’ said Marcus with a smile, ‘surely we should know each other’s names. I am Demetrius of Alexandria, a travelling oculist, as you seem to know, and this, my friend and spear-bearer, is Esca Mac Cunoval, of the tribe of the Br
igantes.’

  ‘The Bearers of the blue war-shield. You have heard maybe of my tribe, if not of me,’ added Esca, and his teeth flashed white in his tanned face as he lifted his head and smiled.

  ‘I have heard of your tribe—a little, yes,’ said the stranger, with, as it seemed to Marcus, a hint of grim amusement in his voice, though there was no amusement in his gaunt face, as he blinked at the fire. ‘For myself, I am called Guern, and I am a hunter, as you see. My rath lies upwards of a day’s trail to the west, and I come here sometimes for the sake of the fat deer to be had in the hazel woods yonder.’

  Silence fell between the three, while the daylight grew around them, and the dogs snarled and tussled over their lump of meat. Then Marcus, idly peeling a bit of stick, began half under his breath to whistle the tune that had so startled him an hour before. Out of the corner of his eyes he was aware that Guern had started and looked towards him. For a few moments he continued with the peeling and the whistling, and then, seeming suddenly to tire of his pastime, tossed the stick into the fire and looked up. ‘Where did you learn that song, friend Guern the Hunter?’

  ‘Where else but here?’ said Guern. For an instant his face took on a look of blank stupidity, but Marcus had an idea that behind it he was thinking furiously. ‘When this was a Roman fort there were many Roman songs sung here. That one I learned from a centurion who used to hunt boar with me. I was only a boy, but I have a good memory.’

  ‘Did you pick up any Latin, other than the words of the song?’ Marcus shot at him, speaking in that language.

  The hunter made as if to answer, checked, and looked at him an instant slantwise, under down-twitched brows. Then he spoke in Latin, very slowly, like a man fumbling back across the years for a speech that comes halfforgotten to his tongue. ‘A few words I remember still, such words as soldiers use.’ Then, dropping back into the Celtic speech, ‘Where did you learn that song?’

  ‘I have followed my trade in fortress towns before now,’ Marcus said, ‘and ones that were not deserted to the wild boar, as the Place of Three Hills. I have a quick ear for a tune.’

  Guern leaned forward to turn the cooking meat with his hunting-knife. ‘Yet surely you can have been but a short while at this trade you practise. There are not many years under that beard of yours.’

  ‘Maybe there are more than there seem,’ Marcus said, and stroked the beard tenderly. It had grown well in the months since he came north, though it was still very clearly a young beard. ‘Moreover, I began early, following my father’s foot-steps in the way of sons… And talking of this trade of mine, are there any that have sore eyes in your village?’

  Guern poked experimentally at the meat. He seemed to be making up his mind about something; and after a few moments he looked up as though he had made it. ‘I am an out-dweller, living to myself and my family,’ he said, ‘and we have no sore eyes for your healing. None the less, if you wait until my hunting is done, you are very welcome to come with me; and we will eat salt together, and later I will set you on your way to another village. That is for the place that you have given me at your fire.’

  For an instant, Marcus hesitated; then, with the instinct still strong upon him that this man was not what he seemed, he said, ‘All ways are alike to us. We will come, and gladly.’

  ‘There is more flesh on my kill than I had thought,’ said Guern, suddenly and shamefacedly, and stood up, knife in hand.

  So the three of them ate fresh broiled buck together, in good fellowship; and a day later, when Guern’s hunting was done, they set out, Marcus and Esca riding, and the hunter leading his own pony, across whose back was bound the carcass of a great red stag, and the dogs cantering ahead. Swishing through the rain-wet bracken they went, over the heathery shoulder of three-headed Eildon and away into the west, leaving the red sandstone fort deserted once again to the creatures of the wild.

  XIII

  THE LOST LEGION

  GUERN’s homestead, when they reached it, proved to be a bleak huddle of turf huts high among the dark moors. A small boy herding wild-eyed cattle up from the drinking-pool to the night-time shelter of the cattle-yard greeted their appearance with a kind of fascinated dismay. Evidently strangers were not in his scheme of things, and while stealing constant sly peeps at them, he took care to keep the great herd bull, which he managed with casual pokes and slaps, between him and danger, as they went on towards the rath together.

  ‘This is my house,’ said Guern the Hunter, as they reined in before the largest of the huts. ‘It is yours for so long as it pleases you.’

  They dismounted, while the yelling small boy and the lowing herd pelted by in the direction of the cattle-yard, and, tossing the reins over a hitching-post, turned to the doorway. A girl child of perhaps eighteen months old, wearing nothing but a red coral bead on a thong round her neck to ward off the Evil Eye, sat before the door, busily playing with three dandelions, a bone, and a striped pebble. One of the hounds poked a friendly muzzle into her face as he stalked past her into the darkness, and she made a grab at his disappearing tail, and fell over.

  The doorway was so small that Marcus had to bend double under the heather thatch, as he stepped over the little sprawling figure and followed his host steeply down into the firelit gloom. The blue peat-smoke caught him by the throat and made his eyes smart, but he was used to that by now: and a woman rose from beside the central hearth.

  ‘Murna, I have brought home the Healer of sore eyes and his spear-bearer,’ said Guern. ‘Do you make them welcome while I tend to their horses and the fruits of my hunting.’

  ‘They are very welcome,’ said the woman, ‘though praise be to the Horned One, there are no sore eyes here.’

  ‘Good fortune on the house, and on the women of the house,’ Marcus said courteously.

  Esca had followed their host out again, trusting no one but himself to see to the mares, and Marcus sat down on the roe deerskin that the woman spread for him on the piled heather of the bed-place, and watched her as she returned to whatever she was cooking in the bronze cauldron over the fire. As his eyes grew used to the peat-smoke and to the faint light which filtered down through the narrow doorway and the smoke-hole in the roof, he saw that she was much younger than Guern: a tall, raw-boned woman with a contented face. Her tunic was of coarse reddish wool, such as only a poor woman would have worn in the south; but clearly she was not a poor woman, or rather her husband was not a poor man, for there were bracelets of silver and copper and blue Egyptian glass on her arms, and the mass of dull-gold hair knotted up behind her head was held in place with amber-headed pins. Above all, she was the proud possessor of a large bronze cauldron: Marcus had been long enough in the wilderness to know that a bronze cauldron, more than anything else, brought a woman the envy of her neighbours.

  After a short while footsteps sounded outside, and Esca and Guern came ducking in, followed almost at once by the small herdsman and an even younger boy, both very like Guern in face, and already tattooed as he was, against the day when they would be warriors. They watched the strangers warily under their brows, and drew back against the far wall of the hut, while their mother brought bowls of black pottery from some inner place, and served the steaming stew to the three men sitting side by side on the bed-place. She poured yellow mead for them into the great ox-horns, and then went to eat her own meal on the far side of the fire, the woman’s side, with the small girl child in her lap. The younger boy sat with her, but the elder, suddenly overcoming his distrust, came edging round to examine Marcus’s dagger, and finished up by sharing his bowl.

  They were a pleasant small family, yet oddly isolated in a land where most people lived in groups for greater safety; and it seemed to Marcus that here was another hint of the unusual to add to the song and the brand of Mithras…

  It was next morning that he got the final proof of his suspicions.

  That morning, Guern decided to shave. Like many of the British tribesmen, he went more or less clean shaven save for his upper
lip, and he was certainly in need of a shave. As soon as he announced his intention, preparations began as though for a solemn festival. His wife brought him a pot of goose-fat to soften his beard, and the whole family gathered to watch their lord and master at his toilet; and so, amid an enthralled audience of three children and several dogs, sitting in the early light before the hut-place door, Guern the Hunter set to work, scraping away at his chin with a heart-shaped bronze razor. How little difference there was between children, all the world over, Marcus thought, looking on with amusement, or fathers, or shaving, for that matter; the small patterns of behaviour and relationship that made up family life. He remembered the fascination of watching his own father on such occasions. Guern squinted at his reflection in the polished bronze disc his patient wife was holding for him, cocked his head this way and that, and scraped away with an expression of acute agony, that made Marcus look forward with foreboding to the day when he and Esca would have to rid themselves of their own beards.

  Guern had begun to shave under his chin, tipping his head far back, and as he did so, Marcus saw that just under the point of his jaw, the skin was paler than elsewhere, and had a thickened look, almost like the scar of an old gall. It was very faint, but still to be seen; the mark made by the chin-strap of a Roman helmet, through many years of wearing it. Marcus had seen that gall too often to be mistaken in it, and his last doubt was gone.