The Eagle of the Ninth

As he threaded his way among the crowding huts beyond the forum, it struck Marcus again how untouched this place was by Rome. The Tribe found the forum and basilica useful to hold their markets in. One or two men had laid aside their hunting-spears to become Roman officials, occasionally one even saw a Roman tunic. […] But all the same, here in Isca Dumnoniorum, Rome was a new slip grafted onto an old stock—and the graft had not yet taken.

(Wattle-and-daub huts were easily rebuilt, and salted fields would bear again in three years, but not all the years in eternity would bring back the young men of the tribe, he thought, and was surprised to find that he cared.) […] Most clearly of all, again and again, he saw Cradoc, lying broken among the trampled bracken of the hillside. He had felt very bitter toward Cradoc; he had liked the hunter and thought that his liking was returned; and yet Cradoc had betrayed him. But that was all over. It was not that Cradoc had broken faith; simply that there had been another and stronger faith that he must keep. Marcus understood that now.

[Marcus] was wondering for the first time—he had not thought to wonder before—why the fate of a slave gladiator he had never before set eyes on should matter to him so nearly. But it did matter. Maybe it was like calling to like; and yet it was hard to see quite what he had in common with a barbarian slave.

“Name of Light! Do I have to tell you in so many words that I really do not imagine a clipped ear to be the dividing line between men and beasts? Have I not shown you clearly enough all this while? I have not thought of equal or unequal, slave or free, in my dealings with you, though you were too proud to do the same for me! Too proud! Do you hear me? […]”

She broke off, looking at him in quick surprise. “We are talking in my tongue now! How long have we been doing that?”

“Since you told me about your real name being Cottia.”

Cottia nodded. It did not seem to strike her that the hearer to whom she was pouring out all this was himself a Roman: and it did not strike Marcus either. For the moment all he knew was that Cottia also was in exile, and his fellowship reached out to her, delicately, rather shyly.

“You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we see our hosts break against the discipline of your troops, as the sea breaks against a rock. And we do not understand, because all these things are of the ordered pattern, and only the free curves of the shield-boss are real to us. We do not understand. And when the time comes that we begin to understand your world, too often we lose the understanding of our own.”

Abruptly, the Roman stooped to unbuckle the heavy bronze-studded collar from the wolf’s neck. Cub was full grown now, though not yet come to his full strength, and the time had arrived when he must have his choice of returning to the wild. You could tame a wild thing, but never count it as truly won until, being free to return to its own kind, it chose to come back to you. Marcus had known that all along, and he and Esca had made their preparations with infinite care, bringing Cub to this spot again and again, that he might be sure of the way home if he wished to take it.

“Doubtless you know best. Personally I should not care to let my life hang by so slender a thread as the loyalty of a slave.”

“Esca and I—” Marcus began, and broke off. […] “Esca has been with me a long time. He nursed me when I was sick; he did everything for me, all the while I was laid by with this leg.”

“Why not? He is your slave,” said Placidus carelessly.

Sheer surprise held Marcus silent for a moment. It was a long time since he had thought of Esca as a slave. “That was not his reason,” he said. “It is not the reason that he comes with me now.”

“Is it not? Oh, my Marcus, what an innocent you are; slaves are all—slaves. Give him his freedom and see what happens.”

“Your manumission—your freedom,” Marcus said. “I made it out this evening, and Uncle Aquila and the Legate witnessed it. Esca, I ought to have given it to you long ago; I have been a completely unthinking fool, and I am sorry.”

Lastly, he took from the breast of his tunic his olive-wood bird—his olive-wood bird. It was polished smooth and dark with years of carrying; rather a clumsy and ridiculous little bird, now that he came to look at it, but dear to him; and its dearness made it a fitting sacrifice. It had been part of his life, something that continued back from him to the wild olive tree in the loop of the stream, and the life and places and things and people that the wild olive tree belonged to. And suddenly, as he laid it in the hollow among the tiny stars of the rowan blossom, it seemed to him that with it—in it—he was laying the old life down too.

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.

The friendliness of the tribesmen gave him no sense of guilt in what he was going to do. They had welcomed and sheltered him and Esca, and in return Esca had hunted and herded with them, and he had doctored their sore eyes with all the skill that he possessed. In all that there was no debt on either side, no room for guilt. In the matter of the Eagle, they were the enemy, an enemy worthy of his steel. He liked and respected them; let them keep the Eagle if they could.

Suddenly he remembered the flood of sunset light in his sleeping-cell at Calleva, that evening when Esca and Cub and Cottia had come to him in his desperate need. He called it up now, like golden water, like a trumpet call, the Light of Mithras. He hurled it against the darkness, forcing it back—back—back.

How long he stood like that he never knew, until he saw the blue spark strengthen slowly, sink a little, and then lick up suddenly into a clear, small flame.

“If it were yet in the place we took it from, it would still be a danger to the frontier—a danger to other Legions. Also it was my father’s Eagle and none of theirs. Let them keep it if they can. Only it is in my heart that I wish we need not have made Dergdian and his sword-brethren ashamed.”

And the sunset seemed to echo his mood. A most wonderful sunset; the whole western sky on fire, and high overhead, torn off, hurrying wind clouds caught the light and became great wings of gold that changed, even while Marcus watched them, to fiery scarlet. Stronger and stronger grew the light, until the west was a furnace banked with purple cloud, and the whole world seemed to glow, and the upreared shoulder of the mountain far across the loch burned crimson as spilled wine. The whole sunset was one great threat of coming tempest; wind and rain, and maybe something more. Suddenly it seemed to Marcus that the crimson of that distant mountain shoulder was not wine, but blood.

They looked back when they had gone a few paces, and saw him standing as they had left him, already dimmed with mist, and outlined against the drifting mist beyond. A half-naked, wild-haired tribesman, with a savage dog against his knee; but the wide, well-drilled movement of his arm as he raised it in greeting and farewell was all Rome. It was the parade-ground and the clipped voice of trumpets, the iron discipline and pride. In that instant Marcus seemed to see, not the barbarian hunter, but the young Centurion, proud in his first command, before ever the shadow of the doomed legion fell on him. It was to that Centurion that he saluted in reply.

“I suppose I should feel guilty about you, Esca. For me, there has been the Eagle; but what had you to win in all this?”

Esca smiled at him, a slow grave smile. There was a jagged tear in his forehead where a furze root had caught him, Marcus noticed, but under it his eyes looked very quiet. “I have been once again a free man amongst free men. I have shared the hunting with my brother, and it has been a good hunting.”

“You are not a slave now.”

“No, I am your freed-man now. It is strange. I never thought of that until this evening.”

Marcus had never thought of it either, but he knew that it was true. You could give a slave his freedom, but nothing could undo the fact that he had been a slave; and between him, a freed-man, and any free man who had never been unfree, there would still be a difference. Wherever the Roman way of life held good, that difference would be there. That was why it had not mattered, all these months that they had been away; that was why it mattered now.

Faintly into the silence, down the soft wet wind, stole the long-drawn, haunting notes of the trumpets from the transit camp, sounding for the third watch of the night. To Marcus, still gazing down blindly at the place where the square hole had been, it seemed that they were sounding with unbearable sadness for the lost Eagle, and for the lost Legion that had marched into the mist and never come marching back. Then, as the distant trumpets quickened into the shining spray of notes that ended the call, suddenly his sense of failure dropped from him like a tattered cloak, and he knew again, as he had known in the ruined signaltower while the hunt closed in below, that it had all been worthwhile.

“Esca, you are a Roman citizen.”

Esca was puzzled, almost a little wary. “I am not sure that I understand. What does it mean?”

It meant so much; rights, and duties. It could even, in a way, mean the canceling of a clipped ear, for if a man were a Roman citizen, that fact was stronger than the fact that he had been a slave. Esca would find that out, later. Also, in Esca’s case, it was his honourable quittance, the wooden foil of a gladiator who had won freedom with honour in the arena; the settlement of all debts.

Suddenly he knew why Uncle Aquila had come back to this country when his years of service were done. All his life he would remember his own hills, sometimes he would remember them with longing; but Britain was his home. That came to him, not as a new thing, but as something so familiar that he wondered why he had not known it before.

Somewhere a door slammed, and Esca’s step sounded below in the colonnade, accompanied by a clear and merry whistling.

Oh when I joined the Eagles,
(As it might be yesterday)
I kissed a girl at Clusium
Before I marched away.

And it came to Marcus suddenly that slaves very seldom whistled. They might sing, if they felt like it or if the rhythm helped their work, but whistling was in some way different; it took a free man to make the sort of noise Esca was making.