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he said desperately.
    ‘Yes, you can.’
    ‘I
can’t!
I’m going to tell them. I don’t care what they do to me, anything would be better than this!’
    And Aracos had caught him by the shoulders as he had done once before. ‘Now listen! The Gods know why I was fool enough to do what I did for you, but this I know; you’re not going to undo it all now!’
    There had been a long silence, broken only by the voice of the little stream that flowed out from under the shrine, and then Felix had moaned softly, like something with a physical hurt. ‘I could hack myself to pieces! I don’t know what happened and I don’t know it won’t happen again…. If only I could be the one to pay….’
    Aracos had tightened his grip. ‘You’ll pay your share, all right. All your life you’re going to have to wear that circlet of gilded oak leaves throughyour shoulder-strap, and feel men’s eyes on it, and know the truth behind it. Oh, you’ll pay, Felix, so we can cry quits.’

    And he had seen the slack despairing lines of the boy’s face tauten, and his head go up, as he took the strain.
    ‘But what will you do?’ he asked after a while.
    ‘Stay on in Britain. I spent my first year in the province on garrison duty at Burrium. There’s good horse country among the Welsh hills. I might try to get work there. I’ve my gratuity; I shan’t starve while I’m looking for it.’

CHAPTER FIVE
    A whirling moth blundered into the lamp flame, and fell away, singed and sodden, and Aracos was in the present again. He was alone, though he had not heard the young Medic go, and still holding between his hands the battered circlet of gilded oak leaves. In one place the bronze showed through, where the gilt was all rubbed away by the shoulder-strap through which it had been worn for more than eight years.
    Again he remembered Felix’s set face. Oh yes, Felix had paid his price. And in the end – what had the Medic said? ‘He died between my hands, two years ago in Pannonia … of wounds taken in driving off an attack on the supply train he was escorting. It was three days later, before he got them into camp. The Gods know how he kept going so long.’
    A small inward bitterness that had been with Aracos for ten years suddenly fell away. He had been worth saving, that boy. He thought with a detached interest, as though it concerned somebody else and not himself at all, that now he could tell the truth, and be believed. But the thought remained detached. One didn’t betray a friend merely because he was dead.

    But he knew, for no very clear reason, that because that wild day’s work ten years ago hadnot been wasted, because Felix had died in the way he had done, and dying, had sent him the battered circlet of oak leaves, he would bring down the remounts again next spring, and go to the
Rose and Wine Skin
again – and again – and again, until the story grew too threadbare to be bothered with any more, and he had come out beyond it.
    He folded the Corona Civica carefully in its bit of old cloth again, and getting up, opened the door and called down the ladder, ‘Cordaella! Is there any supper left?’

Eagle’s Egg
     
    CHAPTER ONE
    The Girl at the Well
    All right then, if it’s a story you’re wanting, throw another log on the fire. The winters strike colder now than they used to do when I was a young man in Britain: and I’ll tell you….
    Eburacum was a frontier station in my father’s day; your great-grandfather’s. But Roman rule spread northward in one way and another; and by the time I was posted up there as Eagle Bearer to the Ninth Legion it wasn’t a frontier station any more, and the settlement that had gathered itself together under the fortress walls had become a sizeable town, with a forum where the business of the place was carried on, and wine shops, and temples to half a score of different gods.
    Well, so I was ambling up the narrow, crooked street behind the temple of Sulis on one of those dark