Read Online The Eagle of the Ninth [book I] by Rosemary Sutcliff - Free Book Online Page B

pretending to be equally Roman and equally bored. He remembered Colosseum crowds, chattering, shouting, quarrelling, laying bets and eating sticky sweets. The British took their pleasures a little less loudly, to be sure, but on almost every face was the same eager, almost greedy look that the faces of the Colosseum crowds had worn.
    A small disturbance near him drew Marcus’s attention to the arrival of a family who were just entering their places on the Magistrates’ benches a little to his right. A British family of the ultra-Roman kind, a large, good-natured-looking man, running to fat as men do who have been bred to a hard life and take to living soft instead; a woman with a fair and rather foolish face, prinked out in what had been the height of fashion in Rome two years ago—and very cold she must be, Marcus thought, in that thin mantle; and a girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen, with a sharply pointed face that seemed all golden eyes in the shadow of her dark hood. The stout man and Uncle Aquila saluted each other across the heads between, and the woman bowed. All Rome was in that bow; but the girl’s eyes were fixed on the arena with a kind of horrified expectancy.
    When the new-comers were settled in their places, Marcus touched his uncle’s wrist, and cocked an inquiring eyebrow.
    ‘A fellow Magistrate of mine, Kaeso by name, and his wife Valaria,’ Uncle Aquila said. ‘Incidentally, they are our next-door neighbours.’
    ‘Are they so? But the little maiden; she is no bud of their branch, surely?’
    But he got no answer to his question then, for at that moment a great crashing of cymbals and a fanfare of trumpets announced that the Games were about to begin. All round the crowded circus there was a sudden quietness and a craning forward. Again the trumpets sounded. The double doors at the far side were flung open, and out from their underground lodgements a double file of gladiators came marching into the arena, each carrying the weapons he would use later in the show. Shout on shout greeted their appearance. For a small colonial circus they seemed rather a good lot, Marcus thought, watching them as they paraded round the arena; too good, maybe, though probably they were all slaves. Marcus was something of a heretic where the Games were concerned; he liked well enough to see a wild-beast show, or a sham fight if it were well done, but to put up men—even slaves—to fight to the death for a crowd’s amusement, seemed to him a waste.
    The men had halted now, before the Magistrates’ benches; and in the few moments that they stood there, Marcus’s whole attention was caught by one of them: a sword-and-buckler man of about his own age. He was rather short for a Briton, but powerful. His russet-brown hair, flung back by the savage pride with which he carried his head, showed the clipped ear that branded him for a slave. Seemingly he had been taken in war, for his breast and shoulders—he was stripped to the waist—were tattooed with blue warrior patterns. But it was none of these things that Marcus saw, only the look in the wideset grey eyes that strained back at him out of the gladiator’s young sullen face.
    ‘This man is afraid,’ said something deep in Marcus. ‘Afraid—afraid,’ and his own stomach cringed within him.
    A score of weapons flashed in the wintry light as they were tossed up with a shout and caught again, and the gladiators wheeled and strode on down the wide curve that led back to their starting point. But the look that he had seen in the young swordsman’s eyes remained with Marcus.
    The first item on the programme was a fight between wolves and a brown bear. The bear did not want to fight, and was driven into battle by the long curling whip-lashes of the attendants. Presently, amid a great shouting from the onlookers, it was killed. Its body was dragged away, and with it the bodies of two wolves it had slain; the others were decoyed back into their wheeled cage for another