The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online

friends; then Marcus leapt in under the spearman’s descending thrust, upward and sideways across the chariot bow. His weight crashed on to the reins, whose ends, after the British fashion, were wrapped about the charioteer’s waist, throwing the team into instant chaos; his arms were round Cradoc, and they went half down together. His ears were full of the sound of rending timber and the hideous scream of a horse. Then sky and earth changed places, and with his hold still unbroken, he was flung down under the trampling hooves, under the scythe-bladed wheels and the collapsing welter of the overset chariot; and the jagged darkness closed over him.

IV
THE LAST ROSE FALLS
     
    O N the other side of the darkness was pain. For a long time that was the only thing Marcus knew. At first it was white, and quite blinding; but presently it dulled to red, and he began to be dimly aware of the other things through the redness of it. People moving near him, lamplight, daylight, hands that touched him; a bitter taste in his mouth which always brought back the darkness. But it was all muddled and unreal, like a dissolving dream.
    And then one morning he heard the trumpets sounding Cockcrow. And the familiar trumpet-call, piercing through the unreality like a sword-blade through tangled wool, brought with it other real and familiar things: the dawn chill on his face and an uncovered shoulder, the far-off crowing of a real cock, the smell of lamp-smitch. He opened his eyes, and found that he was lying flat on his back on the narrow cot in his own sleeping-cell. Close above him the window was a square of palest aquamarine in the dusky gold of the lamplit wall, and on the dark roof-ridge of the officers’ mess opposite was a sleeping pigeon, so clearly and exquisitely outlined against the morning sky that it seemed to Marcus as though he could make out the tip of every fluffed-out feather. But of course that was natural, because he had carved them himself, sitting between the roots of the wild olive-tree in the bend of the stream. And then he remembered that that had been a different bird; and the last shreds of his confusion fell away from him.
    So he was not dead, after all. He was faintly surprised, but not very interested. He was not dead, but he was hurt. The pain, which had been first white and then red, was still there, no longer filling the whole universe, but reaching all up and down his right leg: a dull, grinding throb with little sparks of sharper pain that came and went in the dullness of it. It was the worst pain that he had ever known, save for the few blinding moments when the brand of Mithras pressed down between his brows; but he was not much more interested in it than in the fact that he was still alive. He remembered exactly what had happened; but it had all happened so long ago, at the other side of the blackness; and he was not even anxious, because Roman trumpets sounding from the ramparts could only mean that the fort was still safely in Roman hands.
    Somebody moved in the outer room and, a moment later, loomed into the doorway. Marcus turned his head slowly—it seemed very heavy—and saw the garrison Surgeon, clad in a filthy tunic, and with red-rimmed eyes and several days’ growth of beard.
    ‘Ah, Aulus,’ Marcus said, and found that even his tongue felt heavy. ‘You look—as if you had not been to bed for a month.’
    ‘Not quite so long as that,’ said the Surgeon, who had come forward quickly at the sound of Marcus’s voice, and was bending over him. ‘Good! Very good!’ he added, nodding his vague encouragement.
    ‘How long?’ began Marcus, stumblingly.
    ‘Six days; yes, yes—or it might be seven.’
    It seems—like years.’
    Aulus had turned back the striped native rugs, and laid a fumbling hand over Marcus’s heart. He seemed to be counting, and answered only with a nod.
    But suddenly everything grew near and urgent again to Marcus. ‘The relief force?—They got through to us,