The Silver Branch [book II] (10 page)

‘So?’ Evicatos said. ‘I know nothing of that. I know only that if he succeeds in this thing, there will be death for my people.’ He checked as though to listen to what he had just said, with a kind of half-wondering interest. ‘My people.—I that am a man without tribe or country. But it seems that my faith reaches back to my own kind, after all.’

‘Will the Painted People agree?’ Justin asked.

‘It is in my heart that they will agree. Always there has been distrust and ill blood between the Picts and my people, until Carausius made his treaty. For seven years, under the treaty, there has been peace. But the Painted People fear us because we are different from them, and because we begin to grow strong among the Western islands and the coastwise mountains; and where the Pict fears, there the Pict hates.’

‘He fears and therefore hates the Eagles also,’ Justin said. ‘And you say that he will make a promise with Allectus?’

‘Aye, he fears the Eagles and he fears the Dalriads,’ Evicatos agreed simply. ‘He would as lief join with us and drive the Eagles into the sea; but he knows that even together, we are not strong enough. Therefore if he can, he will join with the Eagles and drive us. Either way he is rid of one enemy.’

‘Allectus is not the Eagles,’ Flavius said quickly.

‘He will be, with Carausius dead.’ Evicatos looked from one to the other. ‘You know the Wall, and the Cohorts of the Wall; they will shout for whoever wears the Purple, so that he pays them with wine enough. Can you be sure that the Eagles elsewhere are of a different breed?’

No one answered for a moment; and then Flavius said, ‘Your own people know of all this?’

‘I do not speak with my own people, these fifteen years past, but assuredly they know. Yet, knowing, what can they do? If they make war on the Painted People while there is still time, that is to break the treaty; and whether Carausius or Allectus wears the Purple, we, the little people, shall go down before the wrath of Rome.’ Evicatos leaned forward as though to dip into the stir-about. ‘Warn him! Warn this Emperor of yours; it is in my mind that he may listen to you. (We hear things, among the heather.) That is why I bring you to this place, and tell you these things that are death to speak of—that you may warn Carausius of the wind that blows!’

‘Can a blackbeetle warn Almighty Jove? The black-beetle tried it once, and was trodden on for his pains,’ Flavius said bitterly. His head was tilted back, and his eyes gazing out beyond the far rim of hills that dropped southward to the Wall. ‘How are we going to get word to him?’

‘There isn’t much sickness in the fort,’ Justin heard his own voice saying. ‘And there’s always the field surgeon at L-Luguvalium if one should be needed. I’ll go.’

Flavius looked round at him quickly, but before he could speak, Evicatos cut in: ‘
Na
,
na
, if either one of you go, it is deserting, and there will be questions asked. No man will ask questions after me. Write him word of all this that I have told you, and give me the writing.’

‘You mean—you would carry it south yourself?’ Flavius said.

‘Aye.’

‘Why should you be running your head into a wolf-trap on this trail?’

Evicatos, fondling the ears of the great hound beside him, said: ‘Not for the love of your Emperor, but that it may not be death for my own people.’

‘You would do so much—risk so much, for the people that cast you out?’

‘I broke the laws of my kind, and I paid the agreed price,’ Evicatos said. ‘There is no more to it than that.’

Flavius looked at him a moment without speaking. Then he said: ‘So. It is your trail also.’ And then, ‘You know what mercy there will be for you if you fall into the hands of Allectus’s creatures with the writing on you?’

‘I can guess,’ said Evicatos with a small, grim smile. ‘Yet since your names must be on the writing, clear for all to read, that will be a risk fairly shared among us, after all.’

Flavius said, ‘So be it, then,’ and leaned forward to the stir-about pot in his turn. ‘But there is no time to lose. The letter must be on its way tonight.’

‘That is a simple matter. Let one of you come down tonight to watch the cock-fighting in the Vallum ditch. One of your Optios has challenged all comers with his red cock; did you know? There will be many there, British and Roman, and if maybe you and I should speak together among the rest, none will think it strange.’

‘Pray the gods he believes us this time!’ Flavius said, softly and very soberly.

Justin swallowed his last mouthful of bannock without tasting it, and got to his feet, tightening his belt which he had slackened for ease when he sat down. His gaze fell again on the rough altar, on the worn figures and the uneven lettering from which they had scraped the moss.

Flavius, glancing up at him, caught the direction of his gaze, and turned his own the same way. Abruptly he took a silver sestercia from his belt, and pressed it into the turf before the altar. ‘Surely we also have sore need that the Fates be kind,’ he said.

Behind them, Evicatos was gathering up the remains of the food, tying up the neck of the meal-bag, as he had done after the other hunting meals that they had eaten together. On the fringe of the scrub, downstream, a feathering of vivid colour caught at Justin’s eyes, where a tangle of dogwood had burst into its autumn flame. He walked down the burnside to the thicket, made careful selection, and broke off a long spray on which the leaves were scarlet as a trumpet-call. Something rustled among the deeper shadows as he did so; something that might be only a fox, but as he turned away he had a feeling of watching eyes behind him that were not the eyes of fox or wild cat.

The other two were waiting for him with the ponies, when he rejoined them twisting the spray into a rough garland; and he stopped on to one knee and laid it on the weather-worn altar. Then they turned away and mounted, whistling the dogs to heel, and rode with Evicatos of the Spear down the burnside, leaving the bare bowl of the hills empty once more, save for the wheeling peregrines and the thing that had rustled in the shadows of the scrub. And behind them Justin’s dogwood garland was bright as blood upon the lichened stone, where an unknown soldier of their Legion had made his own desperate appeal to the Fates, a hundred, two hundred years ago.

In the Commander’s quarters that evening they wrote the letter between them, their heads bent together in the pool of lamplight, over the tablets open on the table.

It was just finished and the tablet sealed, when a knock came at the door. Their eyes met for an instant, then Justin swept up the tablet into the flat of his hand, as Flavius bade the visitor enter, and the Quartermaster appeared. ‘Sir,’ said the Quartermaster, saluting, ‘I have brought the new supply lists. If you could spare me an hour, we could get them settled.’

Justin had risen, also saluting. In public he kept up very carefully the formalities between the Cohort Surgeon and the Cohort Commander. ‘I will not take up any more of your time, sir. Have I your permission to leave camp for an hour or so?’

Flavius looked up at him under red, fly-away brows. ‘Ah yes, the cocking main. Put something on our man’s bird for me, Justin.’

The great Vallum that had been the frontier before the Wall was built, had become of late years a vast, unsavoury ditch choked with tattered and stinking hovels, small dirty shops and temples, garbage piles, and the dens of the legionaries’ hunting dogs. The smell of it met Justin like a fog as he crossed the coast-to-coast road and dropped into it by the steps opposite the Praetorian Gate of Magnis. In an open space a spear-throw from the foot of the steps a crowd was already gathered, jostling round the makeshift arena and thronging the steep slopes of the Vallum on either side; shadowy in the autumn dusk save for the glow of a brazier here and there among them, and the splashing yellow light of one big lantern in their midst. Justin made his way towards it, shouldering through the noisy, shifting throng.

He could see no sign of Evicatos as yet; not that it would be easy to pick out one man from that shifting, shadowy crowd. But on the edge of the lantern light he found Manlius, who had returned to full duty only a few days before, and checked beside him. ‘Well, Manlius, how is the leg?’

Manlius looked round, grinning in the lantern-light. ‘Good as new, sir.’

Justin’s heart warmed to him, because it had been a long fight and a hard one to mend that leg, and now it was as good as new. Anyone who had been hurt or ill under his hands always called out that humble and surprised warmth in Justin. It was one of the things, though he did not know it, that made him a good surgeon. ‘So. That makes fine hearing,’ he said, and the warmth was in his voice.

Manlius said rather gruffly, as though he were ashamed, ‘If it hadn’t been for you, sir, I’m thinking I’d be out of the Eagles now, with one leg to hobble on.’

‘If it hadn’t been for yourself also,’ Justin said after a moment. ‘It takes two, you know, Manlius.’

The legionary glanced at him sideways, then straight ahead again. ‘I see what you mean, sir. None the less, I don’t forget all you done for me; nor I don’t forget the Commander with his face all over blood, hauling that cursed great beam off me when I thought I was about done for.’

They were silent then, among the noisy crowd, neither of them skilled in words, and neither with the least idea what to say next. Finally Justin said, ‘Do you back our man and the red cock?’

‘Of course, sir—and you?’ Manlius replied with obvious relief.

‘Assuredly. I have a wager with Evicatos of the Spear. Also I want to ask him about the skin of the wolf that the Commander killed today. Have you seen him anywhere in this crowd?’

‘No, sir, can’t say I have.’

‘Ah well, he’ll be somewhere about.’ Justin nodded, friendly-wise, and side stepped between two legionaries, emerging on the lantern-lit edge of the arena. Somebody provided him with an upturned pail to sit on, and he sat, huddling his cloak around him for warmth. Before him stretched an open space covered with rush matting, in the centre of which a yard-wide ring daubed in chalk shone white in the light of the lantern rigged overhead. Above the lantern, the sky was still barred with the last fading fire-streaks of the sunset, but down here in the Vallum it was already almost dark, save where the light of the lantern fell on eager faces thronged about that shining chalk circle.

And now two men had pushed out from their fellows in the arena, each carrying a large leather bag which wriggled and bounced with the angry life inside it. And instantly a solid roar went up from the crowd. ‘Come on, Sextus, show ’em what the red can do!—Ya-ah! Call that dunghill rooster a fighting cock?—Two to one on the tawny devil!—Give you three to one on the red!’

One of the men—it was the Magnis Optio—was undoing the neck of his bag now, bringing out his cock, and there was a redoubled burst of voices as he handed it to a third man who stood by to see fair play. The bird he held up was indeed worth shouting for: red and black without a pale feather anywhere, slim and powerful, very much a warrior stripped for battle, with his close-cut comb, clipped wings, and square docked tail. Justin saw the lantern-light play on his quivering wings, the fierce head in which the black, dilating eyes were brilliant as jewels, the deadly iron spurs strapped about his ankles.

The third man handed him back to his owner, and the other cock was produced in his turn. But Justin took less notice of him, for just as he was held up to view, Evicatos appeared on the far side of the arena, while at the same instant somebody edged through the crowd into the vacant space at his side, and the voice of Centurion Posides said, ‘All the world is here, it seems, even to our Cohort Surgeon. I did not know that you were one for the fighting cocks, my Justin.—Nay, no need to shy like a startled horse, or I shall think you have an unquiet conscience.’ For Justin had indeed jumped slightly at the sound of his voice.

Centurion Posides was friendly enough, these days, but Justin had never come to like him. He was a man with a grudge against the world—a world that had denied him the promotion he thought it owed him. Justin was sorry for him; it must be hard to go through life bearing it a grudge, but he certainly did not want him at his shoulder just now. However, it would be a while yet before he need do anything about passing on the letter under his cloak. ‘I am n-not, usually,’ he said, ‘but I have heard so much about this red cock that I felt I must c-come and judge his fighting p-powers for myself.’ (Oh, curse that stutter, it would have to betray him now, just when he most needed to seem completely at ease!)

‘We must be very healthy just now, up at the fort, that our Surgeon can spend the evening at a cocking main after a whole day’s hunting,’ said Posides in the faintly aggrieved tone that was usual with him.

‘We are,’ Justin said quietly, mastering his stutter with a supreme effort, ‘or I should not be here.’ He had meant to add ‘Centurion Posides’, but he knew that the P would be his undoing, so he left it, and turned his attention firmly to what was passing on the matting before him.

The tawny cock had been returned to its owner, and to the accompaniment of much advice from rival supporters, the two men had taken their places and set their cocks down at opposite sides of the chalk circle. Now, suddenly as their owners loosed them, the birds streaked forward, and the fight was on.

It did not last long, that first fight, though it was fierce enough while it lasted. It ended with a lightning strike of the red’s spurs, and a few feathers drifting sideways on the matting, and the tawny cock lying a small dead warrior, where he had fallen.

His owner picked him up, shrugging philosophically, while the other man took up his crowing and triumphant property. Bets were being settled, and quarrels breaking out in a score of places at once, as generally happened at a cock-fight, and under cover of the noise and the shifting of the crowd, Justin murmured something about speaking to Evicatos of the Spear about the Commander’s wolf-skin, and getting up, made his way round to the far side of the ring. Evicatos was waiting for him, and as they came together, close-jammed in the crowd, the sealed tablet passed between them under cover of their cloaks.