Eagle's Honour (5 page)

When the darkness ebbed again, he was lying on his back with men standing round him, and one kneeling over him with an ear pressed to his chest, just as the man had done who turned him down for the Thracian Horse.

‘He just loomed up out of the darkness and
went head first into the fire,’ someone said. ‘Has he been at the barley spirit?’

‘No,’ said the man with an ear to his chest, and the voice was that of Diomedes, the surgeon. Then, straightening up, ‘Poor brute, he must have felt it coming on him and hidden away like a sick animal.’

Another voice pointed out, ‘You heard what these men said; he hasn’t just been lying around here all day, sir.’

‘I said hidden away, not lying around. I imagine he thought the worst was over, and was on his way back to duty when it took him again.’

In the end, they had decided that he had some sort of rift in his heart that the strain of the campaign had worsened, and he was invalided out with a small sickness gratuity, just about the time the news came through that Felix had won the Corona Civica for clearing the Picts from the hill spur after the Wing Captain was killed, and thereby most likely saving the Legion.

They had been back at Trimontum leaving the north quiet behind them, a good while by then, and Aracos was going south next day with a returning supply train; south, and out from the service of the Eagles.

Felix had hunted him out, where he had gone down the river glen to make a last small sacrifice at the Altar to Fortune which one of the garrison had put up long ago. The boy looked old and haggard, as though he were the one who had been ill. ‘I cannot go through with this!’ he said desperately.

‘Yes, you can.’

‘I
can’t!
I’m going to tell them. I don’t care what they do to me, anything would be better than this!’

And Aracos had caught him by the shoulders as he had done once before. ‘Now listen! The Gods know why I was fool enough to do what I did for you, but this I know; you’re not going to undo it all now!’

There had been a long silence, broken only by the voice of the little stream that flowed out from under the shrine, and then Felix had moaned softly, like something with a physical hurt. ‘I could hack myself to pieces! I don’t know what happened and I don’t know it won’t happen again…. If only I could be the one to pay….’

Aracos had tightened his grip. ‘You’ll pay your share, all right. All your life you’re going to have to wear that circlet of gilded oak leaves through
your shoulder-strap, and feel men’s eyes on it, and know the truth behind it. Oh, you’ll pay, Felix, so we can cry quits.’

And he had seen the slack despairing lines of the boy’s face tauten, and his head go up, as he took the strain.

‘But what will you do?’ he asked after a while.

‘Stay on in Britain. I spent my first year in the province on garrison duty at Burrium. There’s good horse country among the Welsh hills. I might try to get work there. I’ve my gratuity; I shan’t starve while I’m looking for it.’

CHAPTER FIVE

A whirling moth blundered into the lamp flame, and fell away, singed and sodden, and Aracos was in the present again. He was alone, though he had not heard the young Medic go, and still holding between his hands the battered circlet of gilded oak leaves. In one place the bronze showed through, where the gilt was all rubbed away by the shoulder-strap through which it had been worn for more than eight years.

Again he remembered Felix’s set face. Oh yes, Felix had paid his price. And in the end – what had the Medic said? ‘He died between my hands, two years ago in Pannonia … of wounds taken in driving off an attack on the supply train he was escorting. It was three days later, before he got them into camp. The Gods know how he kept going so long.’

A small inward bitterness that had been with Aracos for ten years suddenly fell away. He had been worth saving, that boy. He thought with a detached interest, as though it concerned somebody else and not himself at all, that now he could tell the truth, and be believed. But the thought remained detached. One didn’t betray a friend merely because he was dead.

But he knew, for no very clear reason, that because that wild day’s work ten years ago had
not been wasted, because Felix had died in the way he had done, and dying, had sent him the battered circlet of oak leaves, he would bring down the remounts again next spring, and go to the
Rose and Wine Skin
again – and again – and again, until the story grew too threadbare to be bothered with any more, and he had come out beyond it.

He folded the Corona Civica carefully in its bit of old cloth again, and getting up, opened the door and called down the ladder, ‘Cordaella! Is there any supper left?’

Eagle’s Egg

CHAPTER ONE

The Girl at the Well

All right then, if it’s a story you’re wanting, throw another log on the fire. The winters strike colder now than they used to do when I was a young man in Britain: and I’ll tell you….

Eburacum was a frontier station in my father’s day; your great-grandfather’s. But Roman rule spread northward in one way and another; and by the time I was posted up there as Eagle Bearer to the Ninth Legion it wasn’t a frontier station any more, and the settlement that had gathered itself together under the fortress walls had become a sizeable town, with a forum where the business of the place was carried on, and wine shops, and temples to half a score of different gods.

Well, so I was ambling up the narrow, crooked street behind the temple of Sulis on one of those dark edge-of-spring evenings when it seems as though all the colour has drained out of the
world and left only the grey behind. I was off duty and I was bored. I’d been down at the lower end of the town to look at some new young fighting cocks that Kaeso had for sale, but I hadn’t liked the look of any that he had shown me, and taking it all in all, I was feeling thoroughly out at elbows with the world. And then I rounded the corner of the temple garden; and there, at the well that bubbled up from under the wall, a few paces further up the street, a girl was drawing water. And I knew I’d been wrong about there being no colour left in the world, because her hair lit up that grey street like a dandelion growing on a stubble pile. – No, that’s not right either, it was redder and more sparkling; a colour that you could warm your hands at. And the braids of it, hanging forward over her shoulders ‘thick as a swordsman’s wrist’ as the saying goes.

You can guess the next bit, I dare say. Up I strolled, and stood beside her, and gave her my best smile when she turned round.

‘That pail is much too heavy for a little bird like you,’ said I. ‘Better let me carry it for you.’

She stood and looked at me out of the bluest and brightest eyes I’d ever seen in any girl’s head; not smiling back, but as though something
amused her, all the same: and I got the feeling that I was not the first of our lads who had offered to carry her bucket home for her from the well of Sulis.

‘It is not, really,’ she said, ‘and I am quite used to it’

‘“Never carry your own bucket if you can find somebody else to carry it for you”. That’s what we say in the Legions, more or less,’ I told her. And I picked up the brimming pail from where she had set it on the well curb, and stood ready to carry it wherever she wanted.

‘Then – that is our house, yonder at the bend of the street,’ she said. ‘The one with the workshop beside it and the big blue flower painted on the wall.’

And the laughter was still in her, because I had hoped it was much further off than that; and she knew it.

I should have to make the most of the little distance there was. I walked as slowly as possible, making a great show of not spilling the water, and said, ‘Why have I not seen you before? With that bonny brightness of hair I couldn’t have missed you.’

‘I do have a cloak with a hood to it,’ she said. And then, stopping her teasing. ‘But indeed I
have not been long in Eburacum. My brother is making the picture-floor in the new Council Chamber, and he brought me up with him from Lindum, because he thinks that a growing town like this would be a good place for a craftsman to settle.’

And then we had reached the door, and I put the pail down, and she thanked me. We stood for an instant looking at each other, and an odd thing happened. We both turned shy.