Eagle's Honour by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online Page A

old soldiers’ grievances about pay and leave and living conditions. ‘We’ve had enough!’ they shouted. ‘We’ve had enough!’
    ‘You’ll have had more than enough, and the Painted People down on us, if you don’t break up and get back on duty!’ Vipsanius yelled back at them.
    But the sullen crowd showed no sign of breaking up or getting back, on duty. And suddenly, only half-believing, I understood just how ugly things might be going to turn. Not much harm done up to now, but if something, anything, tipped matters even a little in the wrongdirection, the whole crowd could flare up into revolt, and a revolt has a way of spreading that puts a heath-fire to shame.

    Centurion Dexius said, Thank you, Centurion, I will take over now.’ And then he glanced round for me. ‘Standard-bearer.’
    ‘Here, Sir,’ says I, advancing smartly.
    ‘Go and fetch out the Eagle, and we’ll see if that will bring them to their senses.’
    I left him standing there, not trying to shout them down or anything, just standing there, and went to fetch the Eagle.
    In the Saccellum, part office and part treasury and part shrine, the lamp was burning on the table where the duty centurion would sit all night with his drawn sword before him – when not doing Rounds or out trying to quell a riot – and the Eagle on its tall shaft stood against the wall, with the Cohort standards ranged on either side of it.
    I took it down; and as I did so its upward shadow, cast by the lamp on the table engulfed half the chamber behind it, as though some vast dark bird had spread wing and come swooping forward out of the gloom among the rafters. Used though I was to the Eagle standard, that great swoop of dark wings made me jump halfout of my skin. But it was not the moment to be having fancies. I hitched up the Eagle into Parade Position, and out I went with it.
    The Senior Centurion had quieted them down a bit; well, the look on his face would have quieted all Rome on a feast day; and when they saw the Eagle, their growling and muttering died away till I could hear a fox barking, way up the glen, and the vixen’s scream in answer. But they still stood their ground, and I knew the quiet wouldn’t last. And there was I, standing up with the Eagle, not knowing quite what to do next; and truth to tell, beginning to feel a bit of a fool. And then suddenly it came to me; what I had to do next; and I pulled out the duck’s egg from inside my tunic and held it up.
    And, ‘Now look what you’ve done, you lot!’ said I. ‘Behaving like this you’ve upset the Eagle so much its laid an egg!’
    I have noticed more than once in the years since then, that it is sometimes easier to swing the mood of a whole crowd than it is to swing the mood of one man on his own. Aye, a dicey thing is a crowd.
    There was a moment of stunned silence, and then someone laughed, and someone else took up the laugh, and then more and more, a roarof laughter and a surge of stamping and back-slapping that swept away all that had gone before.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Last Battle
    And so we were still in Inchtuthil, and more or less in one piece, when the Legate came back to us, fat and prosperous as a moneylender after his winter in Corstopitum. And then Agricola came up from the Naval Base with the rest of the army, and as soon as the grass stood high enough to feed the cavalry horses, the advance was on again.
    It was not easy going. No set-piece battles, but we had to fight for every hill pass and river ford; arrows came at us from every thicket, and once, the Painted Men fired the forest ahead of us when the wind was blowing our way. But at last, a weary long while it seemed since we marched from Inchtuthil, we came up towards the first dark wave-lift of the Grampians. – They call the place Mons Graupius, now; it hadn’t got a name then; at least it hadn’t got a name in our tongue, it just seemed like the world’s end. – And wehad word back from the scouts that we had sent way