The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] Read Online Free PDF Page A

in his mind even while he made his choice. It was to the rest of the sheaf what a king is to his bodyguard; the shaft darkened with much handling, the iron blade perfect in shape as a laurel leaf, engraved with a strange and potent design that swirled like the eddies in running water. The weight of the head was counter-balanced by a ball of enamelled bronze on the butt, and about its neck was a collar of blue-grey heron’s feathers.
    ‘I have not seen the like of this before,’ Marcus said. ‘It is a war spear, is it not?’
    Cradoc’s hand caressed the smooth shaft. ‘It was my father’s war spear,’ he said. ‘It was in his hand when he died—up yonder under our old ramparts where the fortress walls stand now. See, the mark is still upon it … his own blood, and the blood of his enemy.’ He parted the heron’s feathers to show the neck of the shaft blackened by an old stain.
    A little while afterwards, carrying his newly-won boar spear, Marcus made his way back towards the Praetorian gate. Children and hounds were playing together in the low sunshine, and here and there a woman in a hut doorway called the evening greeting to him as he passed. It all seemed very peaceful, and yet he was filled with an uneasy feeling that the peace was only a film—a veil like that which the girl Guinhumara had drawn behind her eyes—and that underneath, something very different was stirring. Again he remembered Hilarion’s warning.
    For the collar of the old war spear had been lately renewed, and the heron’s feathers were still bright with the lustre of a living bird.
    In all likelihood that spear had been refurbished many times, kept bright by a son in memory of his father; and yet, he wondered suddenly, in how many of these thatched homesteads had an old spear been put in fighting trim? Then he shook his shoulders impatiently, and strode on at a quickened pace up the steep way to the gate. He was simply growing toadstools, even as Hilarion had prophesied. All this because of a few feathers. Yet even a feather might show which way the wind blew.
    If only they could have had a good harvest!

III
ATTACK!
     
    I N the dark hour before the dawn, two nights later, Marcus was roused out of his sleep by the Duty Centurion. A pilot lamp always burned in his sleeping-cell against just such an emergency, and he was fully awake on the instant.
    ‘What is it, Centurion?’
    ‘The sentries on the south rampart report sounds of movement between us and the town, sir.’
    Marcus was out of bed and had swung his heavy military cloak over his sleeping-tunic. ‘You have been up yourself ?’
    The centurion stood aside for him to pass out into the darkness. ‘I have, sir,’ he said with grim patience.
    ‘Anything to be seen?’
    ‘No, sir, but there is something stirring down there, for all that.’
    Quickly they crossed the main street of the fort, and turned down beside a row of silent workshops. Then they were mounting the steps to the rampart walk. The shape of a sentry’s helmet rose dark against the lesser darkness above the breastwork, and there was a rustle and thud as he grounded his pilum in salute.
    Marcus went to the breast-high parapet. The sky had clouded over so that not a star was to be seen, and all below was a formless blackness with nothing visible save the faint pallor of the river looping through it. Not a breath of air stirred in the stillness, and Marcus, listening, heard no sound in all the world save the whisper of the blood in his own ears, far fainter than the sea in a conch-shell.
    He waited, breath in check; then from somewhere below came the kee-wick, kee-wick, wick-wick, of a hunting owl, and a moment later a faint and formless sound of movement that was gone almost before he could be sure that he had not imagined it. He felt the Duty Centurion grow tense as a strung bow beside him. The moments crawled by, the silence became a physical pressure on his eardrums. Then the sounds came again, and with the