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

then?’
    Aulus finished his counting with maddening deliberateness, and drew the rugs up again. ‘Yes, yes. The best part of a cohort of the Legion, from Durinum.’
    ‘I must see Centurion Drusillus—and the—the relief force Commander.’
    ‘Maybe presently, if you lie still,’ said Aulus, turning to deal with the smoking lamp.
    ‘No, not presently. Now! Aulus, it is an order: I am still in command of this—’
    He tried to crane up on his elbow, and his rush of words ended in a choking gasp. For a few moments he lay very still, staring at the other man, and there were little beads of sweat on his forehead.
    ‘Tch! Now you have made it worse!’ scolded Aulus in a slight fluster. ‘That is because you did not lie still, as I bade you.’ He picked up a red Samian bowl from the chest top, and slipped an arm under Marcus’s head to raise him. ‘Best drink this. Tch! tch! It will do you good.’
    Too weak to argue, and with the rim of the bowl jolting against his teeth, Marcus drank. It was milk, but with the bitter taste in it which always brought back the darkness.
    ‘There,’ said Aulus, when the bowl was empty. ‘Now go to sleep. Good boy; now go to sleep.’ And he laid Marcus’s head back on the folded rug.
    Centurion Drusillus came next day, and sitting with his hands on his knees and the shadow of his crested helmet blue on the sunlit wall behind him, gave his Commander a broad outline of all that had happened since he was wounded. Marcus listened very carefully; he found that he had to listen very carefully indeed, because if he did not, his attention wandered: to the crack in a roof-beam, to the flight of a bird across the window, to the pain of his wounds or the black hairs growing out of the centurion’s nostrils. But when the centurion had finished, there were still things that Marcus needed to know.
    ‘Drusillus, what became of the holy man?’
    ‘Gone to meet his own gods, sir. Caught between the relief force and ourselves. There was a-many of the tribe went with him.’
    ‘And the charioteer?—my charioteer?’
    Centurion Drusillus made the ‘thumbs down’. ‘Dead as we thought you were when we pulled you from the wreck.’
    After a moment’s silence, Marcus asked, ‘Who brought me in?’
    ‘Why, now, that is hard to say, sir. Most of us had our hand in it.’
    ‘I had hoped to gain time for the rest.’ Marcus rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. ‘What happened?’
    ‘Nay now, sir, it was all so quick… Galba doubled back to you, and the rest with him, and it was a time for desperate measures; so we took down the reserves—’twas not much more than a javelin throw—and brought you off.’
    ‘And got cut to pieces by the chariots in doing it?’ Marcus asked quickly.
    ‘Not so badly as we might have been. Your wreck broke the weight of the charge.’
    ‘I want to see Galba.’
    ‘Galba is in the sick-block, with his sword arm laid open,’ Drusillus said.
    ‘How bad is the damage?’
    ‘A clean wound. It is healing.’
    Marcus nodded. ‘You will be seeing him, I suppose? Salute him for me, Centurion. Tell him I shall come and compare scars with him if I am on my feet before he is. And tell the troops I always have said the Fourth Gaulish was the finest cohort with the Eagles.’
    ‘I will, sir,’ said Drusillus. ‘Very anxiously inquiring, the troops have been.’ He got up, raised an arm heavy with silver good-conduct bracelets in salute, and tramped off back to duty.
    Marcus lay for a long time with his forearm across his eyes, seeing against the blackness of his closed lids picture after picture that Drusillus had left behind him. He saw the relief force coming up the road, tramp-tramp-tramp, and the dust rising behind them. He saw the last stand of the tribesmen crumble and the moon-crested fanatic go down. The British town a smoking ruin and the little fields salted by order of the relief force Commander. (Wattle-and-daub huts were easily rebuilt,