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

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.) He saw dead men, Lutorius among them; he hoped that there would be horses for Lutorius in the Elysian Fields. Most clearly of all, again and again, he saw Cradoc, lying broken among the trampled bracken of the hillside. He had felt very bitter towards 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.
    Later, the Commander of the relief force came to see him, but the interview was not a happy one. Centurion Clodius Maximus was a fine soldier, but a chilly mannered, bleak-faced man. He stood aloofly in the doorway, and announced that since everything was under control, he intended to continue his interrupted northward march tomorrow. He had been taking troops up to Isca when the Frontier fort’s distress signal had reached Durinum and he had been deflected to answer it. He would leave two Centuries to bring the garrison temporarily up to strength, and Centurion Herpinius, who would take command of the fort until Marcus’s relief could be sent from Isca, when no doubt fresh drafts of auxiliaries would be sent with him.
    Marcus realized that it was all perfectly reasonable. The Relief Force were Legionaries, line-of-battle troops, and in the nature of things a Legionary Centurion ranked above an auxiliary one; and if he, Marcus, was going to be laid by for a while, a relief would of course have to be sent down to take his place until he was once more fit for duty. But all the same, he was annoyed by the man’s high-handed manner, annoyed on Drusillus’s account, and on his own. Also, quite suddenly, he began to be afraid. So he became very stiff, and very proud, and for the rest of the short and formal interview treated the stranger with an icy politeness that was almost insulting.
    Day followed day, each marked off in its passing by lamplight and daylight, food that he did not want, and the changing shadows that moved across the courtyard outside his window. These, and the visits of Aulus and a medical orderly to dress the spear-gash in his shoulder (he had never felt the blade bite, as he sprang in under the spearman’s thrust), and the ugly mass of wounds that seared his right thigh.
    There was some delay about the arrival of his relief from Isca, for several cohort centurions were down with marsh fever; and the moon, which had been new when the tribe rose, waxed and waned into the dark, and the pale feather of another new moon hung in the evening sky; and all save the deepest and most ragged of Marcus’s wounds were healed. That was when they told him that his service with the Eagles was over.
    Let him only be patient, and the leg would carry him well enough, one day, Aulus assured him, but not for a long time; no, he could not say how long. Marcus must understand, he pointed out with plaintive reasonableness, that one could not smash a thigh-bone and tear the muscles to shreds and then expect all to be as it had been before.
    It was the thing that Marcus had been afraid of ever since his interview with Centurion Maximus. No need to be afraid now, not any more. He took it very quietly; but it meant the loss of almost everything he cared about. Life with the Eagles was the only kind of life he had ever thought of, the only kind that he had any training for; and now it was over. He would never be Prefect of an Egyptian Legion, he would never be able to buy back the farm in the Etruscan hills, or gather to himself another like it. The Legion was lost to him and, with the Legion, it seemed that his own land was lost to him too; and the future, with a lame leg and no money and no prospects, seemed at first sight rather bleak