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

woods, the skies wept, and wet gale-blown leaves pattered against the windows and stuck there, making little pathetic shadows against the steamy glass. There had been wild weather often enough in his own country, but that had been the wild weather of home: here was the wind and rain and wet leaves of exile.
    It would have gone less hardly with him if he had had a companion of his own age; but he was the only young thing in the house, for even Procyon had grey hairs in his muzzle, and so he was shut in on himself, and though he did not know it, he was bitterly lonely.
    There was just one gleam of light for him in the darkness of that autumn. Not long after he came to Calleva, he had word from Cassius that henceforth the Standard of the Gaulish Fourth would have its gilded laurel wreath to carry on parade; and a little later there came to Marcus himself the award of a military bracelet, which was a thing that he had never for an instant expected. This was not, as the various crowns were, purely a gallantry award; rather it was given for the same qualities which had earned for the Second Legion its titles ‘ Pia Fidelis ’; those titles which were cut deep upon the heavy gold bracelet under the Capricorn badge of the Legion. From the day that it came to him, it was never off Marcus’s wrist; and yet it meant rather less to him than the knowledge that his old cohort had won its first laurels.
    The days grew shorter and the nights longer, and presently it was the night of the winter solstice. A fitting night for the dark turn of the year, Marcus thought. The inevitable wind was roaring up through the forest of Spinaii below the old British ramparts, driving with it squalls of sleet that spattered against the windows. In the atrium it was warm, for whatever the peculiarities of Uncle Aquila’s house, the hypercaust worked perfectly, and for the pleasant look of it rather than for need, a fire of wildcherry logs on charcoal burned in the brazier hearth, filling the long room with faint, aromatic scent. The light from the single bronze lamp, falling in a golden pool over the group before the hearth, scarcely touched the limewashed walls, and left the far end of the room in crowding shadows, save for the glim of light that always burned before the shrine of the household gods. Marcus lay propped on one elbow on his usual couch, Uncle Aquila sat opposite to him in his great cross-legged chair; and beside them, outstretched on the warm tessellated floor, Procyon the wolf-hound.
    Uncle Aquila was huge; that had been the first thing Marcus noticed about him, and he noticed it still. His joints appeared to be loosely strung together as if with wet leather; his head with its bald freckled top and his bony beautiful hands were big even in proportion to the rest of him, and Authority seemed to hang on him in easy and accustomed folds, like his toga. Even allowing for their twenty years of difference in age, he was not in the least like Marcus’s father; but Marcus had long ago ceased to think of him as like, or unlike, anyone. He was simply Uncle Aquila.
    The evening meal was over, and old Stephanos had set out a draughts-board on the table between Marcus and his uncle, and gone his way. In the lamplight the ivory and ebony squares shone vividly white and black; Uncle Aquila’s men were already in place, but Marcus had been slower, because he was thinking of something else. He set down his last ivory man with a little click, and said: ‘Ulpius was here this morning.’
    ‘Ah, our fat physician,’ said Uncle Aquila, his hand, which had been poised for an opening move, returning to the arm of his chair. ‘Had he anything to say worth the listening to?’
    ‘Only the usual things. That I must wait and wait.’ Suddenly Marcus exploded between misery and laughter. ‘He said I must have a little patience and called me his dear young man and wagged a scented fat finger under my nose. Fach! He is like the white pulpy things one finds