Read Online The Silver Branch [book II] by Rosemary Sutcliff - Free Book Online Page B

her, and the truth will come out that way.’
    The other shook his head. ‘Allectus will find means to warn her not to come.’ He stretched, with an angry and miserable laugh. ‘Well, no good to yelp about it. He did not believe us, and that’s all there is to it. We did our best, and there’s nothing more that we can do;—and if one day, in some stinking little Auxiliary outpost of the Wall, we hear that Allectus has led a Saxon invasion and made himself Emperor, I hope we both find that very comforting.’ He got up, stretching still. ‘The Emperor’s done with us. We’re broke, my lad, broke, and to no purpose. Get off that clothes-chest. I want to start packing.’
    The sleeping-cell was looking as though it had been hit by a whirlwind, when a while later the tramp of feet came up the stair, and there was a rap on the door.
    Justin, who was nearest, opened it, to find one of the Commandant’s messengers standing there. ‘For the Centurion Aquila,’ said the man; and then, recognizing Justin, ‘For you also, sir, if you will take it here.’
    A few moments later he had disappeared into the night, and Flavius and Justin turned to look at each other, each with a sealed tablet in his hand.
    ‘So he could not even wait for tomorrow to give us our marching orders,’ Flavius said bitterly, snapping the crimson thread under the seal.
    Justin broke the thread of his own, and opened out the two leaves of the tablet, hastily scanning the few lines of writing scored on the wax inside. A half-made exclamation from his cousin made him look up in inquiry. Flavius read out slowly, ‘To proceed at once to Magnis on the Wall, to take over command of the Eighth Cohort of the Second Augustan Legion.’
    ‘We are to be posted together, then,’ Justin said. ‘I am to report as Surgeon to the same Cohort.’
    ‘The Eighth,’ Flavius said, and sat down on his cot. ‘I don’t understand—I simply don’t understand.’
    Justin knew what he meant. It scarcely seemed a likely moment to be getting promotion; and yet it was promotion for both of them. Nothing spectacular, just the step up that should have come to them before long, in the normal way of things, but promotion, all the same.
    Outside in the tawny half-light that was all Rutupiae ever knew of darkness, the trumpets sounded for the second watch of the night. Justin gave up the attempt to understand. ‘I’m going to get some sleep,’ he said. ‘We must needs make an early start in the morning.’ In the doorway he turned. ‘C-could it be that Carausius knows he was there, that he was there by his orders, for some purpose best not brought into the daylight?’
    Flavius shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t account for the Saxon’s death.’
    They were silent a moment, looking at each other. The terrible little Emperor would most certainly not allow one man’s life—and he an enemy—to stand between him and his plans, but just as surely, he would have found another way, not poison. Justin would have staked his own life on that without hesitation.
    ‘Maybe he is using Allectus for his own ends, without Allectus knowing,’ he suggested. That would still leave the poisoning where he was convinced that it belonged, at Allectus’s door.
    ‘I simply—don’t know,’ Flavius said: and then suddenly explosive: ‘I don’t know and I don’t care! Go to bed.’

VI
EVICATOS OF THE SPEAR
     
    ‘Y OU have come to the world’s end,’ said Centurion Posides. The three of them were in the Commander’s quarters of Magnis on the Wall, where Flavius had just taken over from the man who would now be his Number Two. ‘I hope you like it.’
    ‘I don’t very much,’ Flavius said frankly. ‘But that is beside the point. I also don’t like the way the garrison bears itself on parade, Centurion Posides, and that is very much to the point.’
    Centurion Posides shrugged; he was a big man with a little, crumpled, bitter face. ‘You’ll see no better anywhere else along