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later, leaving the usual holding-garrison behind us, we marched out for Corstopitum.
    A Legion on the march – that’s something worth the seeing; the long winding column, cohort after cohort, the cavalry wings spread on either side and the baggage train following after. A great serpent of mailed men, red-hackled with the crests of the officers’ helmets, and whisding whatever tune best pleases them at the moment – ‘Payday’ perhaps, or ‘The Emperor’s Wineskins’, or ‘The Girl I kissed at Clusium’, to keep the marching time. Four miles to the hour, never slower, never faster, uphill and down, twenty miles a day. … And me, marching up at the head, right behind the Legate on his white horse, carrying the great Eagle of the Legion, with the sunlight splintering on its spread wings; and its talons clutched on the lighting-jags of Jupiter, and the gilded laurel wreaths of its victories….
    Aye, I was the proud one, that day! For I’d seen Cordaella among the crowd that gathered to see us off, and she had seen me and waved to me. And I was through with garrison duty andgoing to join the fighting, and win my promotion and maybe make a name for myself and come back with the honours shining on my breast; and all for my girl Cordaella. And my breast swelled as though the honours were already there. – What a bairn I was, what a boy with my head chock-full of dreams of glory, for all the great lion-skin that I wore over my armour, and the size of my hands on the Eagle shaft, and my long legs eating up the Northward miles!

    But it was three years and more before we came marching back; and there were times when I came near to forgetting Cordaella for a while, though never quite.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Eagle’s Egg
    We joined Agricola with the Twentieth Legion at Corstopitum, and marched on North across the great Lowland hills until we were joined by the main part of the Second and the Fourteenth that had come up through the western country of last summer’s campaigning. Then we headed on for the broad Firth that all but cuts Caledonia in half. The Fleet met us there, and we spent the rest of the summer making a naval base. You need something of that sort for supplies, and support, when you can’t be sure of your land lines of communication behind you. We saw a bit of fighting from time to time, but seemingly the Lowland chiefs were still too busy fighting with each other, to make a strong show against us, so mostly it was just building; first the supply base, and then with the winter scarce past, a string of turf and timber forts right across the low-lying narrows of the land.

    Sick and tired we got of it, too, and there began to be a good deal of grumbling. I mind Lucius, a mate of mine growling into his supper bannock that he might as well have stayed at home and been a builder’s labourer – and me trying to give him the wink that the Cohort Commander was standing right behind him. It’s odd, the small daft things not worth remembering, that one remembers across half a lifetime….
    But in the next spring, when we started the big push on into the Highlands, we found a difference.
    Somehow, sometime in that second winter, the Caledonians had found the leader they needed to hammer them into one people. Calgacus, his name was, I never saw him, not until the last battle; but I got so that the bare mention of his name would have me looking over my shoulder and reaching for my sword. It was the same with all of us, especially when the mists came down from the high tops or rain blotted out the bleak country as far as a man could see. Oh yes, we saw plenty enough fighting that summer, to make up for any breathing space we’d had in the two before.
    Agricola was too cunning a fox to go thrusting his muzzle up into the mountains, with every turfof bog-cotton seemingly a war-painted warrior in disguise, waiting to close the glens like a trap on his tail. Instead, he closed them himself, with great forts in the mouths of each