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Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff

BOOK: Outcast
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He turned back the way he had come, twisting shackle and arm-ring together by the slender chain as he went, twisting the switch of rosemary in and out around them both; and crossing the ridge of the Viminal and the vale beyond came up by many winding streets on to the brow of the Pincian. He knew which of the houses there was Valarius’s, although he
had never been inside it, and before the portico he checked, looking up at the dark mass of buildings surrounding the fore-court. Somewhere in there the Lady Lucilla would be asleep. He stood for a little while considering, then, tearing a strip from his already ragged cloak, he muffled the shackle and arm-ring in it, and went into the portico. There was a space between the top of the gate and the arched lintel, and taking careful aim, he tossed the bundle, and heard it fall with a thud and a faint jangle on the other side. Then he turned away from the sleeping house.
In the morning someone would find them, the filed shackle and the Piso arm-ring, twisted together with a switch of rosemary, and bring them to Valarius. No, he was away. To the Lady Lucilla herself; and at first she would be puzzled. But when she heard what had happened, she would understand, and know that he had come here in the dark, and left them for her, because he had no other means of saying good-bye to her.
He took the next street that led downhill and came out at last into the Flaminian Way, the great road that led from the Forum out through the Flaminian Gate, north-east two hundred miles and more, to Rimini.
The Flaminian Way was as crowded and more noisy now in the darkest hour of the night even than it was by day, for though there were fewer people about on foot, and most of the shops were shut, and the litters and chariots of the great folk lacking, the heavy wheeled traffic that was not allowed in the streets of Rome in the daytime was rumbling up and down. There were endless streams of market carts coming and going; great wagons toiling up from the Tiber side, cattle being driven in for slaughter. In one place, as Beric went by, a huge dray, piled with blocks of yellow Lydian marble and drawn by several file of oxen, had got a wheel jammed in a rut, and was holding up the traffic of three streets, while a sweating and swearing knot of men struggled by the light of a couple of lanterns to get it out.
The Flaminian Gate seemed mercilessly bright with lanterns
and torches when he reached it, and the crowds that had been shifting shadows before sprang into sharp-edged reality as they reached it. Beric hesitated for a short while in the deep gloom of a doorway, watching the outgoing stream of traffic, telling himself that even if he
were
searched, as sometimes happened at the gate, there was nothing to betray him—unless the fine new tunic under such a threadbare cloak struck anyone as odd, or his indoor sandals seemed suspicious, unless the slave-ring had left a suggestive mark on his arm: unless his cut lip and torn hands and the bruises on him had any kind of tale to tell—unless—unless——He felt as though ‘Runaway Slave’ were branded on his forehead for all to see. But it was no good standing here until the sun rose and his escape was discovered.
He nerved himself as for a cold plunge, and praying to every god that he had ever heard of, from Sylvan Pan to Lugh of the Shining Spear, thrust off into the stream, just behind a respectable-looking old man leading a donkey whose empty panniers had doubtless been full of vegetables for the market. Nearer and nearer loomed the gate; he was in the full harsh glare of the torchlight now. He walked steadily, keeping very close to the old man, so that the guards, who would have seen him and his donkey many times before, might think that they were together.
Now the torchlit arch was right overhead, and his feet rang hollow in the enclosed space; three more steps—two—one. Out of the tail of his eye, as he drew level, he saw a legionary of the gate guard begin to raise his arm. With his mouth suddenly dry, as though he had bitten a sloe, he reached out familiarly, and laid a hand which he prayed might not be resented on the bony rump of the little donkey. It was not resented, and the legionary, who had merely developed a sudden itch, was rubbing his nose as though he meant to rub it off.
He was through! A few paces more, the torchlight falling away behind him, and drawing aside from the old man and the donkey, he strode forward into the night, following the
road to Rimini, past the white tombs and black-feather cypress trees and huddled hovels that surrounded Rome, while the traffic thinned as carts and donkeys and mule-trains turned off down side-tracks that led to farms and market-gardens.
Just beyond the third milestone, the road to Rimini dipped steeply to a bridge across the Tiber, and then swung right, following the willow-fringed banks, while the Clodian Way, branching from it, held straight on, climbing steeply to the north. Crossing the tawny river, Beric held straight on also, following the Clodian Way up on to higher ground, and then, with sunrise not far away, got off the road and took to the hills.
He was making for the great coast road, the Aurelian Way. He could have gone out of Rome by that road, and followed it at a safe distance, from the outset: he knew the first few miles well enough, for he had been out that way several times when exercising the Piso horses; but it would have meant going right through the fortifications of Janiculum, and making a long loop down to the coast, so that at the end of the day he would be scarcely any farther north than when he set out. Better to push on this way, edging over towards the coast as he went.
Once, when he was out beyond Janiculum with the horses, he had seen a cohort of the Legions come swinging down the road, marching with a steady, formidable stride that looked as though it had not changed its rhythm in a thousand miles. Watching the Cohort Commander swing by, the lean, brown, dusty men behind him, he had wondered idly to a farmer who had drawn aside like himself, to give them right of way, where they had come from. ‘By the charging boar on their standard,’ the man said, ‘they’ll be a Cohort of the Twentieth —stationed in Britain, so I’ve heard, and has been for nigh on a hundred years.’
And Beric had gazed after them until the dust rose between him and the baggage-train; and then turned to look away up the long paved road by which they had come, with the
sudden homing hunger twisting in his stomach: and asked, ‘Then could you get to Britain, just by following that road?’
‘I could if I was fool enough,’ the farmer had said, and spat into the ditch.
Beric had no real hope that, alone and hunted and without money, he would get back to Britain by following the Aurelian Way or any other; but he turned homeward blindly, without thought, obeying the same instinct that draws the wild geese northward in the spring.
The sun slid up over the landward rim of the hills, with a suddenness that still seemed strange to Beric, used to the long twilights of the north. One moment the world was dark, and the next the darkness had become a bloom of shadow like the bloom on a grape, and the sky overarching it was filling with light that strengthened and strengthened until it seemed to sing. And then the light spilled over, splashing through the still bare oak woods and trickling in runnels of rose and gold down the glens of the distant Apennines. Colour sprang out in the world, the silvery, dusty colours of the south; the soft grey-green of olive trees, the thunderous darkness of the pines. Birds were singing among the climbing oak woods, and here and there the dark carpet of ivy under the trees was flecked with tiny pink cyclamen. And as he climbed, Beric could feel the sun warm on his back.
Behind him, in Rome, the hunt would be up now. Gradually, as though the sun’s warmth was thawing something in him back to life, he began to wake up. Ever since the moment last night when he had come to himself in the dark storeroom, with the horror of the salt-mines upon him, he seemed to have been acting in obedience to some part of himself that did not usually do his thinking for him. Now he was thinking for himself again, and looking back over the night, nothing of it seemed quite real save for the few moments that he had stood outside Valarius’s house, to bid good-bye to the Lady Lucilla. It was now, also, that he realized his empty stomach. But there was nothing to be done about that at present, so he did his best to forget it.
Hour after hour he held on, working steadily over towards the coast, through a land of marshy valleys and steep wooded ridges, from the crests of which, as the day wore on, he began to catch occasional glimpses of the sea.
Towards evening, climbing yet another ridge, he checked among the pine trees on the crest, looking down on a little farm lost among the hills; a stream running by it, fringed with willows that were blurred with the powdery gold of leaf-buds. Odd that he had not noticed, back there in Rome, that the spring was coming. Surely the Piso garden should have told him; but narcissi and anemones were alien flowers having no message for him, whereas a budding willow was a thing he knew and understood. Last year he had known, even in Rome, when the spring was coming in, but unhappy though he had been last year, he had not been Glaucus’s slave.
More than once, that day, he had come to the edge of cultivation, and always he had turned aside, keeping to the woods; but he was so weary, and in such desperate need of food; his light sandals were long since worn through and it was so long since he had gone barefooted that his feet were cut and bleeding; and this little lost farm in the wilderness could surely hold no danger for him. It looked a poor farm, a mere huddle of rudely thatched sheds, a few olives and ill-kept vines on the terraced hillside, a ragged pumpkin patch, a small herd of goats grazing unattended; a small, stubborn clearing among the encroaching tide of juniper and lentisk, wild vine and broom and rosemary, that seemed to clothe all the open spaces among these hills, and swept right to the back wall of the steading. But a feather of smoke rose from the house-place into the evening air, and as Beric hesitated on the ridge, his ears full of the aeolian hum of pines, a woman came out from behind one of the out-buildings, carrying a bucket—a woman in a tunic that was the faded blue of day-old flax flowers.
There was something so homely in the sight that Beric’s mind seemed to make itself up for him, and almost before he knew it he was out from under the pines, and stumbling wearily downhill towards her.
THE FARM IN THE HILLS
T
HE woman glanced up and saw him coming, then looked quickly and uncertainly towards the house, and up at him again, in a way that suggested, even at that distance, that she was startled—as well she might be, Beric thought, for it was not likely that many strangers found their way up here among the hills. Then she set the bucket down, and stood waiting for him, hands on hips.
‘Good fortune on the house, and on the woman of the house,’ Beric greeted her courteously when, having found his way between the goat-fold and the fly-loud dung-heap, he reached the farm-yard.
‘Good fortune they need, with the master of the house forever off on his own affairs and leaving the vines to go to ruin,’ said the woman. She was a little wizened rat of a woman, with a narrow, fierce face, but her manner, though harsh, was not unfriendly as she looked at Beric. ‘If you have business with my man, you have come on a fool’s errand, for he is from home, as usual.’
Beric shook his head. ‘I have no business with your man. I am going north to—to see my sister who is sick; and I must have missed my way, and seeing this place——’
‘If it is the Aurelian Way you’ve missed, you have indeed. It is three miles and more over yonder,’ the woman interrupted, pointing. ‘You will hardly get back to it before dusk, and there is no inn before the next Twenty-mile station.’
Beric’s mouth twisted a little. ‘The lack of an inn is small odds to me, for I have no money. I—I came away in something of a hurry, you see.’
The woman looked at him shrewdly, uncomfortably shrewdly, but with a sort of contemptuous kindliness. So
you came away in something of a hurry, did you? And by the looks of you, somebody tried their best to stop you coming away at all.’ Then, as Beric remained silent, she laughed. ‘Nay now, I’ve no interest in what you are nor how you came away. What is it that you want?’
Beric’s gaze dropped to the bucket. There was milk in it, as he had hoped there might be. ‘If you could spare me a drink of milk,’ he said, ‘and some rags to tie up my feet. It is a long time since I went barefoot.’
The woman glanced down, noticing the tattered remains of the light sandals he wore, and the spot of blood oozing out from a cut under his big toe; and her fierce face softened a little. ‘You can have your drink of milk,’ she said, almost defiantly, ‘and the rags. I have work waiting for me in the house, and if you will fold the goats and do one or two other odd jobs for me so that I can get on with it, I will give you a bite to eat, too; and you can sleep the night in one of the outhouses.’ And she gave him the bucket and let him drink his fill of the warm, sweet goat’s milk. Then, telling him, ‘You will have no trouble with the goats if you whistle for them. See to them first, and come and tell me when it is done,’ she took back the bucket, and with a final fierce nod departed into the house.
Almost dizzy with relief and weariness combined, Beric set himself to fold the goats, which was done easily enough, for at his first whistle the big herd billy came down to the fold of his own accord, with his she-goats and their kids behind him. At the woman’s order he fetched water from the stream, and broke up and brought in wood for the house from the wood-pile; and then she called him in to his promised supper.
The smoke-blackened house-place had the same depressed and ramshackle air as the whole farm, but a cheerful fire burned in the hearth from which some of the smoke found its way out through a hole in the roof, while the rest hung in a dense blue cloud among the rafters. And the woman pointed Beric to a stool beside the fire, and gave him barley bread and strong goat’s milk cheese and radishes so hot that they brought
tears to his eyes. She let him eat in peace, and asked no question, and he was unutterably grateful.
The food put fresh life into him, and presently he began to look about him, and notice things that he had been too dazed with weariness to notice at first; small things, that puzzled him. He noticed that the little fierce woman, who had sat down to her spinning, had her faded and dirty tunic clasped at the shoulder with a brooch of goldsmith’s work that he did not think the Lady Poppaea would have been ashamed to wear. He noticed that a shawl over a nearby chest against the wall—though it too was dirty—was a thing of flower-petal colours, glimmering with silver thread. It seemed strange that such things could have come from the profits of a half-derelict farm. The wine that she had given him in an earthen cup was not the sour, muddy stuff that he would have expected, either. And surely there were more benches and stools about than seemed likely—as though there was often company here … .
And then the warmth and food combined into a sleepiness that welled up in him, so that he noticed nothing more.
He found that it was dark, and the woman had lit a little lamp and was telling him impatiently to come with her, and he got up like an obedient dog, and lurched after her. She opened a door at the far end of the room, and led him through, holding the lamp high. ‘You can sleep here,’ she said. ‘I’ll dare swear you have slept in worse places.’
Looking hazily round him in the lamplight, Beric thought that he certainly had. It was a storeroom of sorts, but not disused like the one in which he had been imprisoned last night. Flour-baskets were stacked in one corner, the earthen floor moon-pale around their bases; there were oil-jars, and a few spare farm implements, a stack of yellow dried pumpkins, a couple of tall wine-jars in a rough stand. In another corner were a pile of rough-dressed goat-skins with the hair still on them, and the woman pointed to these. ‘You can make yourself a bed there: don’t go damaging the skins. I want to
sell them. You shall have some rags for your feet in the morning.’
And before Beric could get out a sleep-blurred word of thanks, she was gone. The door rattled to behind her, and he was alone in the dark. Taking his direction from the pale window-square high in the wall, he groped his way over to the corner she had pointed out, and lay down, rolling himself in his cloak and pulling a couple of the ill-smelling skins over him. The door was a bad fit, and from where he lay he could see a broad crack of gold all down one side of it, which was a friendly thing to see in the darkness. He stretched out, settling his head on his arm, and the warm black waves of sleep engulfed him.
How long he slept, he had no idea. He woke with a crash, to a confusion of sounds: to loud voices and tramping footsteps beyond the ramshackle door, and a sense of danger thrusting in out of the night. One of the voices was that of the woman, raised and startled.
‘Milo! I thought you were working the Alban Hills! What in the name of Typhon brings you back into these parts so soon?’
A man’s voice answered, with a deep, reckless note of laughter in it. ‘What but your bright eyes, Rhodope?’
The woman gave an impatient snort. ‘I suppose you have run into trouble.’
‘Trouble enough,’ another voice answered, grumblingly. ‘We got word of a rich caravan, but Florus mishandled his end of the business, and when we came on them they had twice the escort we were prepared for. So we lost Carpus and the Cyclops, and got not so much as a denarius or a dab of spikenard in exchange. And now Junius has split the band up again, until the breeze dies out.’
‘So here we come, back to our old hunting grounds,’ a third voice cut in. ‘And behold’—there was a brutal laugh, and a jingling as of a bag of coins being rattled up and down—‘the luck changes on the first day. The small bands are best, after all.’
‘Put it in the usual place,’ said the woman. ‘And don’t tempt your luck by crowing about it.’
‘You seem not overjoyed to see us, Rhodope.’ It was the man she had called Milo. ‘Would you by any chance have been entertaining a Tribune of the Watch, behind our backs?’
Rhodope laughed, half angrily. ‘You startled me. I was not expecting you, and I thought you might be robbers.’
There was a roar of appreciation at the jest, and Beric, lying rigid on his elbow in the dark, realized that there must be six of the men at the very least.
‘Well, now that you
are
here, I suppose you will be wanting food,’ the woman said ungraciously.
‘Food! Yes—food and wine: much wine!’ several voices answered her, rising together in a ragged clamour that had unmistakably the note of the wolf-pack in it. ‘Bring us wine, Rhodope—much wine to keep us happy while you make ready the food!’ There was a confused sound of stools and benches being scraped on the earthen floor, and men flinging themselves down and stretching out their legs, and the chink and rattle of weapons being laid aside.
When Rhodope spoke again, it was from just outside the storeroom. ‘You can start on what is in that jug. I’ll be back with some more before it is empty.’ She opened the door and slipped quickly through, closing it behind her, and next instant she was bending over Beric, who, doing the only thing he could think of, had dropped flat and shut his eyes as she opened the door. He could hear her breathing, and the light of the lamp she carried shone red through his closed lids. There was a moment’s tingling pause, and then, ‘No need to pretend to be asleep,’ she whispered. ‘None but the dead could sleep through this uproar.’
Beric opened his eyes, screwing them up against the swimming dazzle of light, and saw her face hovering over him, fierce as a dagger thrust. ‘You are a runaway slave, aren’t you?’ she whispered. Then savagely, as he made to spring up, ‘Lie still, you young fool, if you want to see the sun rise! I’ll not give you up to the Watch. I’ve been a slave myself.
Nor I’ll not give you up to the wolves in there, because being what you are, you cannot carry tales of this house to the Watch, for the Watch would as lief get their hands on you as they would on us. So you can thank your gods if you have any, for the white mark of the slave ring on your arm, for it has saved your throat to-night. You understand?’
Beric nodded wordlessly.
Someone beyond the door had begun to sing, and the woman glanced toward the sound, and hurried on: ‘If they knew you were here, even that would not save you, for they are lads that take no chances: but if you lie still, no harm will come to you, and they will be gone by dawn. Then you can go your way.’
She nodded once, fiercely, as though to drive her point home, and turning away, took down a great jug from a shelf and began to fill it from one of the wine-jars in the corner. The voices in the room were growing impatient, as she reached out to the lamp which she had set down and quenched it. Then she took up the wine-jug and opened the door. The voices seemed to rush in upon Beric, and then fall back again, as it closed behind her.
The men greeted her reappearance with loud complaints that she had been a long time and the jug was empty. ‘The glim went out,’ Beric heard her say. ‘It will have done you no harm to draw breath between swallows.’
‘So long as we have the wherewithal to swallow now,’ someone said.
For a while Beric lay frozen, every nerve in his body on the stretch, listening to the grumble of voices in the next room, where the men seemed to have settled into a quieter mood than the boisterous one in which they had arrived, catching the smell of frying meat and the strong whiff of garlic, and watching with strained eyes the crack of smoky lamplight down the side of the door. Then his utter weariness overcame him, and uneasily, by fits and starts, he began to drowse. He tried desperately to keep awake, afraid that if he slept he might roll over with a thud or fling out an arm and overset something,
and so betray himself. But it was no good: little by little sleep claimed him once more.
Yet again he was roused with a start, this time by the bleating of the big herd billy, taken up by the shriller bleating of the other goats in the fold. Almost in the same instant he heard a startled curse from the next room: a few muttered words followed by swift and stealthy movements, and then the crack of light went out. There was a scraping sound, as of a chest being dragged out from the wall, and a few moments later, dragged back again: and almost before it ceased, there came a quick tramping outside, a crisp order, and then a thunder of blows against the house-place door, that ended in a splintering crash as it burst open, and a rush of heavily shod feet.
Beric was up and crouching by the door by that time, and squinting through the crack. The room was in darkness, save for the red embers of the dying fire, but he could see that it was full of men, and certainly not the men who had been there before.
‘Lights!’ someone was demanding. ‘Licinius, get a
light
, man! Hell and Furies! How can we rout them out in the dark?’
Someone thrust a torch into the red embers, and began to whirl it aloft; and it spluttered into life, casting a fierce and fitful glare on to bronze shoulder-pieces and naked sword-blades, and the crimson crest of a Centurion’s helmet. Men were scattering and questing to and fro in obedience to sharply rapped-out orders. ‘Typhon take those goats!’ the Centurion swore. ‘If they had not given the alarm, we should have had the whole pack.’
‘We’ll have them yet, sir,’ said his second. ‘They’ll not get past the lads outside.’
But Beric had already turned from the door to the high pale square of the window, his one thought to make his escape before it was too late. For the second time in a day and a night he reached for the high sill of a storeroom window, and swung himself up. It was a larger window than the other had
been, and he climbed through without trouble, stiff and sore though he was, and dropped literally into the arms of the Legionaries who had drawn a cordon round the house.

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