The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

rush, ‘Let me come again! Please let me! You need not talk to me, nor even notice that I am here.’
    ‘Oh, my Lady! Where are you, child of Typhon?’ wailed the voice, very near now.
    ‘Come when it pleases you—and I shall be glad of your coming,’ Marcus said quickly.
    ‘I will come tomorrow,’ Cottia told him, and turned to the old rampart slope, carrying herself like a queen. Most British women seemed to carry themselves like that, Marcus thought, watching her drop out of sight round the hedge; and he remembered Guinhumara in the hut doorway at Isca Dumnoniorum. What had happened to her and the brown baby, after Cradoc lay dead and the huts were burned and the fields salted? He would never know.
    The shrill voice was raised in fond scolding on the far side of the hedge; and footsteps came across the grass, and Marcus turned his head to see Esca coming towards him.
    ‘My Master has had company,’ Esca said, laying spearblade to forehead in salute, as he halted beside him.
    ‘Yes, and it sounds as though she is getting a sharp scolding from her nurse on my account,’ Marcus said a little anxiously, as he listened to the shrill voice fading.
    ‘If all I hear be true, scolding will not touch that one,’ Esca said. ‘As well scold a flung spear.’
    Marcus leaned back, his hands behind his neck, and looked up at his slave. The thought of Guinhumara and her baby was still with him, standing behind the thought of Cottia. ‘Esca, why do all the Frontier tribes resent our coming so bitterly?’ he asked on a sudden impulse. ‘The tribes of the south have taken to our ways easily enough.’
    ‘We have ways of our own,’ said Esca. He squatted on one heel beside the bench. ‘The tribes of the south had lost their birthright before ever the Eagles came in war. They sold it for the things that Rome could give. They were fat with Roman merchandise and their souls had grown lazy within them.’
    ‘But these things that Rome had to give, are they not good things?’ Marcus demanded. ‘Justice, and order, and good roads; worth having, surely?’
    ‘These be all good things,’ Esca agreed. ‘But the price is too high.’
    ‘The price? Freedom?’
    ‘Yes—and other things than freedom.’
    ‘What other things? Tell me, Esca; I want to know. I want to understand.’
    Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. ‘Look at the pattern embossed here on your daggersheath,’ he said at last. ‘See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.’
    Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. ‘Go on.’
    Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside at Cottia’s coming. ‘Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heaven and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to—if they ever had it.’ He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. ‘You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.’
    ‘The sheath was made by a British craftsman,’ Marcus said stubbornly. ‘I bought it at Anderida when I first landed.’
    ‘By a British craftsman, yes, making a Roman pattern. One who had lived so long under the wings of Rome—he and his fathers before him—that he had forgotten the ways and the spirit of his own people.’ He laid the shield down again. ‘You are the builders of coursed stone walls, the makers of straight roads and ordered justice and disciplined troops. We know that, we know it all too well. We know that your justice is more sure than ours, and when we rise against you, we