The Silver Branch [book II] Read Online Free PDF Page A

we manage. Couldn’t change.’
    They spent five days at the farm, and it was during those five days that Justin first really discovered Britain. The bare winter woods dappled like a partridge’s breast, the slow, broad voices of the farm-hands, the lapwings on the winter plough-land; the low, long house itself, built on to by succeeding generations but holding still at its heart the smoke-blackened atrium, used as a store-room now, that had been the original houseplace, built by another Marcus Flavius Aquila making a home for himself and his British wife and the children that came after—these were all Britain to Justin.
    He had that other Marcus Flavius Aquila much in mind during those days while, with Flavius, he poked happily about the byres and barns, or helped old Buic the shepherd in the lambing-pens. It was as though, because he also was of Marcus’s blood, the old house, the whole downland valley was a link between them.
    He was thinking about that Marcus the last evening of all, as he and Flavius leaned side by side on the wall that kept the Downs from sliding into the vine terraces on the warm southern slope. From where they were, they could see the whole farm lying clear down to the shores of the forest that closed the valley at last, all quenched and quieted in the first faint thickening of the winter twilight.
    ‘It is queer, you know, Justin,’ Flavius said suddenly, ‘I’ve never been here for more than a few weeks at a time, since—since I was very small; but ever since I can remember it has been home to me.’ He propped himself more comfortably against the old dry-stone wall. ‘The place looks well enough, all things considered.’
    ‘What particular things?’ Justin asked.
    ‘Me being away with the Eagles, for one thing,’ Flavius said. ‘I ought really to have stayed at home and helped Servius run the farm. But you know how it is with us; the old Service is in all our blood; look at you, you’re a surgeon, but you couldn’t break away from the Eagles, even so. Luckily Servius is a better farmer than I could ever be—but it isn’t an easy world for farmers and the small estates nowadays. Things must have been so much simpler when my namesake first cleared this valley and made his home here.’
    They were silent a few moments, and then Flavius added, ‘You know, I’ve so often wondered what lay behind the starting of our farm.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    Flavius hesitated a moment. ‘Well, see now,’ he said at last. ‘He—Marcus—was only a very junior Centurion, if family accounts be true, when he was lamed in some tribal rising or other, and invalided out; and yet the Senate gave him the full land grant and gratuity for a time-expired Centurion. That isn’t like the Senate.’
    ‘Maybe he had a powerful friend on the Senate benches,’ Justin suggested. ‘Such things do happen.’
    Flavius shook his head. ‘I doubt it. We aren’t a family that collects powerful friends.’
    ‘A reward, a special p-payment of some kind, then?’
    ‘That seems more likely. The question is, what was it for?’
    Justin found that the other had turned his head to look at him, clearly hesitating on the edge of saying something. ‘You have an idea about that?’
    ‘I’m—not sure.’ Flavius most unexpectedly flushed up to the roots of his fiery hair. ‘But I’ve always wondered whether it could have been anything to do with the Ninth Legion.’
    ‘The Ninth Legion?’ Justin said, a little blankly. ‘The one that was ordered up into Valentia in the troubles, and was never seen again?’
    ‘Oh, I know it sounds far-fetched. I wouldn’t speak of it to anyone but you. But his father disappeared with the Ninth Legion, remember; and there’s always been a vague story in the family of some sort of an adventure in the North in his wild young days before he married and settled down. It’s just that, and a sort of—feeling I have—you know.’
    Justin nodded. He knew. But he said only, ‘I