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

under stones!’
    ‘So,’ agreed Uncle Aquila. ‘None the less, you must wait—there being no help for it.’
    Marcus looked up from the board. ‘There’s the rub. How long can I wait?’
    ‘Hmph?’ said Uncle Aquila.
    ‘I have been here two months now, and we have never spoken of the future. I have put it off from one visit of that pot-bellied leech to the next because—I suppose because I have never thought of any life but following the Eagles, and I do not quite know how to begin.’ He smiled at his uncle apologetically. ‘But we must discuss it sometime.’
    ‘Sometime, yes: but not now. No need to trouble about the future until that leg will carry you.’
    ‘But Mithras knows how long that will be. Do you not see, sir, I cannot go on foisting myself on you indefinitely.’
    ‘Oh, my good lad, do try not to be such a fool!’ snapped Uncle Aquila; but his eyes under their jut of brow were unexpectedly kindly. ‘I am not a rich man, but neither am I so poor that I cannot afford to add a kinsman to my household. You do not get in my way; to be perfectly honest, I forget your existence rather more than half the time; you play a reasonably good game of draughts. Naturally you will stay here, unless of course’—he leaned forward abruptly—‘is it that you would rather go home?’
    ‘Home?’ Marcus echoed.
    ‘Yes. I suppose you still have a home with that peculiarly foolish sister of mine?’
    ‘And with Uncle-by-Marriage Tullus Lepidus?’ Marcus’s head went up, his black brows twitched almost to meeting point above a nose which looked suddenly as though there was a very bad smell under it. ‘I’d sooner sit on Tiber-side and beg my bread from the slum women when they come to fill their water-pots!’
    ‘So?’ Uncle Aquila nodded his huge head. ‘And now, that being settled, shall we play?’
    He made the opening move, and Marcus answered it. For a while they played in silence. The lamplit room was a shell of quiet amid the wild sea-roaring of the wind; the small saffron flames whispered in the brazier, and a burned cherry log collapsed with a tinselly rustle into the red hollow of the charcoal. Every few moments there would be a little clear click as Marcus or his uncle moved a piece on the board. But Marcus did not really hear the small peaceful sounds, nor see the man opposite, for he was thinking of things that he had been trying not to think of all day.
    It was the twenty-fourth evening of December, the eve of the winter solstice—the eve of the birth of Mithras; and quite soon now, in camps and forts wherever the Eagles flew, men would be gathering to his worship. In the outposts and the little frontier forts the gatherings would be mere handfuls, but in the great Legionary Stations there would be full caves of a hundred men. Last year, at Isca, he had been one of them, newly initiated at the Bull-slaying, the brand of the Raven Degree still raw between his brows. He ached with longing for last year to be given back to him, for the old life and the comradeship to be given back to him. He moved an ivory man a little blindly, seeing, not the black-and-white dazzle of the board before his eyes, but that gathering of a year ago, filing out by the Praetorian gate and downhill to the cave. He could see the crest of the centurion in front of him up-reared blackly against the pulsing fires of Orion. He remembered the waiting darkness of the cave; then, as the trumpets sounded from the distant ramparts for the third watch of the night, the sudden glory of candles, that sank and turned blue, and sprang up again; the reborn light of Mithras in the dark of the year…
    A great gust of wind swooped against the house like a wild thing striving to batter its way in; the lamplight jumped and fluttered, sending shadows racing across the chequered board—and the ghosts of last year were once more a year away. Marcus looked up, and said, as much for the sake of shutting out his own thoughts as for anything