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Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff

BOOK: Outcast
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For an instant he checked there, the lantern held high, so that the light of it showered harvest-gold into the farthest
corner of the byre. He looked down at Beric, who crouched there, blinking up at him in the sudden radiance; then his gaze dropped lower still, to the little mongrel who had staggered to her feet at his coming, and was pressing back against Beric’s knees. Then he tramped in, and set the lantern down on the corner of the old manger. ‘Is she badly hurt?’ he asked.
Beric still had his hand on her head, as he stared up with strained eyes at Justinius. ‘I do not know. She came to me by the pool above the camp, and I forgot about her, but she followed me; and we ran into some pack-ponies on the track. I do not think her shoulder is broken, but I cannot be sure. I—my hands have lost their cunning.’
‘Let me look,’ said Justinius. He flung back the folds of his heavy cloak and slipped down on to one knee, holding out a hand to the little cur. She pressed away from it, flattening herself against Beric and growling uncertainly.
‘Men have not been kind to her,’ Beric said.
‘She seems to have found one of the breed to rest her trust in.’ Justinius was advancing his hand very slowly. ‘Poor little lass; nay now, I’ll not hurt you.’ The growling ceased. His hand was on her neck, moving exploringly down her shoulder and foreleg, while Beric watched, making the discovery, even through his desperate anxiety, that Justinius’s hands had the same caring in them now as they had had when they tended his own galled wrist; catching the first glimmering of an idea that perhaps the caring in Justinius’s hands three nights ago had not been entirely a mistake, after all. In a little, Justinius looked up. ‘No, there are no bones broken; nothing amiss that rest and a measure of kindness will not mend. She has had some food?’
Beric nodded, gulping with relief. ‘Cordaella gave me bread and milk for her, when I brought her in, and again a while since.’
‘So; that should suffice for the time being.’ Justinius rose somewhat stiffly, and stood looking down at them. ‘Shall we leave her to sleep, and go back to the house-place now?’
Beric gave his fellow stray a reassuring pat, and rising without a word, picked up the lantern. He knew what was coming, as he followed Justinius out, carefully propping in place the bits of boarding that he had collected to close the lower part of the byre door behind him.
Cordaella had lit the lamp in the atrium, but the ends of the long room were shadowy as always, warming to a mingled glow of lamplight and firelight at the heart. Justinius slipped off his heavy cloak and tossed it across the citron-wood chest, beside his helmet, which already lay there, and tramped across to the fire. When Beric joined him after quenching the lantern and leaving it by the door, he was standing in his favourite position, hands behind back, and bull shoulders a little hunched, staring down into the flames.
There was driftwood on the fire to-night, burning with the blue-and-green flame of salt seas, and mingled with it, the red and saffron of blazing apple logs that stood for the warm, familiar things of the land. A marsh fire, Beric thought.
Justinius looked up. ‘Cordaella has been telling me what happened yesterday,’ he said. ‘Fool that I was, it never occurred to me that others beside myself might see the likeness.’
‘Am I very like her?’
‘Sometimes. You seemed very like her when I came home three nights ago, and saw you standing by the lamp. The odd thing is that now I know it for nothing but a chance resemblance, now also that I know you a little better, it seems to me not so very strong after all.’
Beric said almost defiantly, ‘Why should they have kept the cubling from you?’
‘For no reason in the world, save, as you probably learned from Cordaella, that they gave me his mother unwillingly in the first place. She was of the Brigantes; a tribe that has never taken kindly to the Eagles … . Nay, then, it was a wild notion, I admit; it never touched my mind until the night I saw you among Publius Piso’s slaves.’ Justinius hesitated, and then went on, almost as though it mattered to
him that Beric should understand : ‘I went back next morning. There was nothing to be done that night: Glaucus was drunk. I went back in the morning, prepared to get you from him if I had to pull the house apart to do it. But I was too late; you were already gone. I could get no word of you, and I had to sail for Britain two days later.’ He broke off, staring down into the flames, and for a moment his dark, hawk-nosed face had an oddly shadowed look, despite the firelight on it. Then he asked in quite a different tone: ‘Why did you go down to the camp this morning?’
It seemed like a change of subject, but Beric knew that it was not. ‘I went to find you—to tell you that I was going away,’ he said steadily. ‘But you were not there, and in the end I would have gone without telling you, after all.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the byre. ‘But for
her
, I should have been well away by now.’
‘Then I give her my thanks,’ Justinius said. ‘Why were you going, Beric? Was it because of what you overheard yesterday?’
Beric nodded.
‘Remember, when I bade you stay, it was after I knew the truth about you, not before.’
‘I think that you would not turn back from a thing because the living heart was gone out of it,’ Beric said wretchedly. ‘Beside—it is more than the thing I overheard. When you bade me stay, I was glad, because I had not thought; but now I have thought; I was afraid when I went down to the camp this morning—afraid lest any should know me for what I am. There can be no place within the reach of Rome for a runaway galley slave.’
‘For a runaway galley slave, no,’ Justinius said. ‘You, however, are in very different case. You were put overboard from your galley for dead. There is no hunt on your trail; the galleys are done with you as surely as you with them … . Nevertheless, it is not good to live out one’s life, even a little, in hiding. I also have been thinking, and the fruit of my thinking is this: that since you went to the galleys for a
crime of which you were guiltless, the sooner we prove it the better.’
Beric caught a sharp breath, and then let it go very carefully. ‘Prove it? How—could we prove it?’
‘Do you remember Calpurnius Paulus, the ancient Senator who was my neighbour at dinner that night? I have not many friends, but he is one of them. It is in my mind that he is the man to take the matter up.’
Beric stared at him in silence for a long moment, while his whole meaning sank in. ‘But—but sir——’ he burst out at last, stammering in his desperate urgency. ‘Even if he did—if he did, and I were proved guiltless, and the old sentence wiped away—I should be Glaucus’s slave again.’
‘No, you would never be Glaucus’s slave again,’ Justinius said. He turned and crossed to his writing-table, and taking a key from the breast of his leather tunic, unlocked a small battered coffer that stood there, and began to turn up the contents. ‘When I went back to the Piso house that morning and found you gone, that was the one thing I could do—to make sure that at least you did not fall into Glaucus’s hands again. He was naturally most unwilling to sell you to me; but—I know certain things about that young man that he would not wish known to his world.’ There was a small, grim smile on Justinius’s mouth. ‘I am not fond of such weapons, but in the circumstances——’ He left the sentence unfinished, and taking a slim papyrus roll from the coffer, tossed it to Beric. ‘I had this made out at the same time.’
Beric caught and unrolled it, and remained a long time staring down at the few lines of writing within. It was his manumission, his freedom from the arm-ring. So he had been a free man, when he came to trial in that law-court in Rome, with the mistral blowing. If only he had known!
‘The name must of course be altered,’ Justinius said. ‘I never imagined Hyacinthus to be your own name, but it was the only one I knew you by.’
Beric let the scroll fly back on itself. ‘You have carried this thing a long time.’
‘I have been near to destroying it, more than once.’ Justinius closed the lid of the coffer, and came back to the fire. ‘But I suppose that, against all reason, I hoped that you might come for it, one day.’
‘Oh no, not I, but the son you thought I might be,’ Beric said, hopelessly.
Justinius hesitated. ‘I suppose so, yes—in the first place.’
‘Better for you that the cubling died. We make poor sons, we who row the Empire’s galleys; living after the ways of beasts, we forget how to live after the ways of men.’ Beric kicked savagely at a log, and watched the sudden flare of flame. ‘I can find no place here. Let me stay until the dog is strong again, then let us both go. We shall do better in the wilds than among men, she and I.’
‘Give men a chance, first,’ Justinius said.
Beric looked up slowly. ‘Why should I?’ he demanded; and all the black bitterness that the years had bred in him sounded in his voice. ‘Men have not given one to me.’
Something flickered far back in the other’s eyes. ‘I am giving you a chance now,’ he said. ‘I am asking you to take it, Beric.’
‘What can it matter to you?’
Justinius did not answer at once; instead, he turned, and tramped to the door, and stood there, just as he had done three nights ago, staring out across the darkened Marsh. ‘What indeed,’ he said at last. ‘Someone accused me once—I think it was at Piso’s dinner-table—of having a marsh for a wife and a straight paved road for a son; and they spoke more truly than they guessed. But this is my last marsh, and next year, when the work is completed, I take my wooden foil. I have been finding that rather a lonely prospect … . When I came home three nights since, you looked as though you were glad to see me—not as Servius or Cordaella but as someone of my own might be glad. It is twenty years since that happened to me.’ He swung round, looking across the lamplit room. ‘Stay here, Beric.’
Beric stood quite still by the fire, hearing the soft sea-hushing
of the wind in the tamarisk as the background to a great quietness. ‘I—will stay, Justinius,’ he said at last, rather hoarsely.
But the old sense of unbelonging was still with him, even now. He was still a stranger in the world he had once belonged to, shut out by the shackle-gall on his wrist, and all that it stood for. Not even Justinius could change that.
THE WIND RISES
A
T first Beric kept to the farm, but little by little, as the summer passed, he came to spend more and more time on the Marsh, where a great earth-bank was rising behind the guard wall, closing the last gap in the sea defences. He had a share in raising that bank, working with the British labour team and the pack-ponies in whose panniers much of the earth was brought from cuts along the edge of the Weald. It should have been good to work with free men again; yet by the summer’s end Beric was no nearer to being one with them than he had been at first. It was as though the reek of the
Alcestis
’s rowing-deck rose between him and all men, even between him and Justinius, shutting him off from the world he had once belonged to.
But it was not that that had sent him out into the wide emptiness of the Marsh one still September day, instead of spending it at work on the farm, as he usually did when the rest-day came round. It was because he wanted to think, and there was more room for it out there, in the wide, wind-haunted emptiness. He wanted to think about something that had happened yesterday. The mails had just come in, and Justinius had called him into the atrium, and laid a papyrus roll before him, and said: ‘We have won, Beric! You can go down and cry it through the camp that you rowed two years in the
Alcestis
of the Rhenus Fleet for a crime you never committed, and that the Senate admits it and wipes it off the tablets. I suggest that you do no such thing, for it is none of the camp’s business; but there is nothing under the sun to prevent you.’
The odd thing was that it had not seemed to matter very much. What mattered far more was the thing that had come
after, when Justinius had read the Senator Paulus’s letter aloud to him. It was a long letter, with its legal arguments, and hard for Beric to understand; but he understood the important bit.
‘The scales were chiefly tipped in his favour by the extremely fortunate chance that he was seen outside the house of Valarius Longus, on the night of his escape, by an old stable slave who knew him. Immediately I set the needful enquiries on foot, this man, Hippias by name, came forward to swear that on the night in question he was crossing the forecourt to a sick horse, when he heard a sound at the gate, and going to investigate, saw this Beric of yours through the grill, by the light of the portico lantern, just as he was turning away. He called after him, but the boy did not stop. He—Hippias—also swore to having heard cockcrow from the Praetorian Barracks immediately after, the wind being in the right direction. This, of course, makes it well-nigh impossible that, leaving Rome scarcely by dawn, he should have been so far north by dusk, when the robbery took place. When Hippias was asked why he had never spoken of this before, the Lady Lucilla herself came forward to say that he had told her next morning, when he brought her a bundle containing a filed shackle and a silver arm-ring of her father’s household, which he had found under the gate; and she had bidden him keep silent, lest his telling should in any way lead to the boy’s recapture.’
Beric had listened to the reading of the letter very carefully, and then looked up and said: ‘I was many miles out of Rome by dawn; and sir—there was no lantern in the portico.’
He was quite sure, thinking it over, that it had been Lucilla who had thought of the story. Old Hippias was wonderful with horses, but he had not the kind of imagination that invents lanterns.
Deep in his thinking, he had scarcely noticed where his legs were carrying him, until he woke to find himself right out on
the seaward fringe of the Marsh. The sun was westering, and with seven miles or so between him and camp, it seemed a good time to be turning home. He glanced down out of habit, to make sure that the familiar little grey figure was at heel, before he remembered that Canog was up at the steading, engrossed in one fat puppy. He would be glad when that puppy was old enough to be left, and Canog could come with him again. He missed the light padding of her paws behind him, and her powers of conversation—she was a very talkative little dog. It was because of her trick of singing—rather as a pot sings when it is near the boil—that he had called her Canog, a little Song.
Perhaps it was because of the silence where the small sounds of Canog should have been, that, as he turned his steps towards Marsh Island, he suddenly noticed how still everything had grown.
Usually there was a constant shimmer of lark-song above the seaward fringes of the Marsh, but no larks were singing now—even the shore birds were silent; even the faint wind-music that seemed always to ring across the emptiness was stilled, a hollow stillness set round with the sounding of the sea beyond the shingle ridge. It was as though the whole Marsh were holding its breath, waiting for something.
Marsh Island was no more than a mile-long lift of land at the southern corner of the Marsh. It rose only a few feet above the surrounding levels, but the great embankment of the Rhee Wall ran out into it, and so did the lesser shingle ridge that came down the shore line from the northern sluice below Portus Lemanis, and beside the low, turf-roofed huddle of fisher huts at the inland end there was a small outpost camp in charge of an optio. It was a half-way fortress at the bend of the Marsh defences, a windswept stronghold set round with shifting sand dunes and falls of wet brown shingle. And this evening, as he came up through the low dunes that fringed its north-eastern end, Beric felt it to be a fortress on the alert, waiting, as the Marsh was waiting.
He was making for the Rhee Wall—it was better to follow
the Wall, after dark, if one was not a Marsh-man born and bred—and usually he would have skirted the island, avoiding camp and village; but to-day, because in a queer way the Lady Lucilla’s lantern had warmed something in him, and made him feel nearer to his own kind, he turned a little aside on a sudden impulse, toward the huddle of fisher huts. Then a thing happened that for a while drove all awareness of the strange brooding silence from his mind.
On the edge of the village he came upon a man sitting at the seaward end of the thorn windbreak. The man’s face was turned toward the estuary and the sea beyond, and a hound lay at his feet: a huge, brindled hound, whose head went up alertly as Beric drew near, showing the star-shaped blaze on his forehead.
With a sudden odd feeling as though his heart had fallen over itself, Beric checked. The dog had begun to growl—a soft, sing-song warning deep in his throat, that changed suddenly into a shrill whine. And as his master turned a blind face from the sea, he sprang up, crouched an instant, and then flung himself upon Beric, yelping in joyous frenzy.
‘Gelert!’ Beric cried, and crouched down. He had his arms round the great dog’s neck, not for an instant believing that the incredible thing was really happening. It could not be happening; it was a dream! Gelert was thrusting and fawning against his breast, almost beside himself with wild excitement. ‘Gelert! Old Gelert!’ And Gelert jabbed up his muzzle and licked Beric’s face from ear to ear.
But in a little he tore himself free and swerved back to the tall man, who had risen and stood quietly by; then back to Beric in another joyous onslaught: to and fro between them, round and round, yelping and whimpering, his tail lashing their legs. And in the midst of the tumult, Beric was gripping both the tall man’s hands in his. ‘Rhiada! Rhiada, is it truly yourself?’
‘Beric? Is it yourself, then?’
‘Oh Rhiada, it is sun and moon to see you! Yes, it is Beric. Feel, then.’ He released the other’s hands, and stood
still, and Rhiada reached out, laughing, and began to run them lightly over his breast and flanks and shoulders.
‘Nay, I know by your voice and your hands, and by Gelert’s joy … . It is yourself and it is myself. But you are a man now, cubling—Aiee! Shoulders like an ox, you have.’
Presently the light, quick laughter, the exclaiming and the breathless half-sentences of their meeting falling quiet, they sat down together under the windbreak, while Gelert, sneezing violently, collapsed panting at the harper’s feet.
And Beric drew a deep breath, and understood for the first time that it was not, after all, a dream. ‘Rhiada, but what brings you here?’ he demanded in utter bewilderment.
Rhiada put up a hand to feel with sensitive fingers for the harp he carried strapped to his shoulder. ‘That which brings me anywhere, where there are men to listen to me and my harp. After you—left the Clan it seemed to me that the time was come for me to go also. So I took a boy from one of the villages to be my eyes—Kylan, he is over yonder with the fisher-folk now—and went. I have lived a wandering life since then, playing my harp up and down the land, wherever there are men to listen to me.’
Beric looked round at him quickly. ‘Was that because of me?’
Rhiada smiled. ‘I had always a mind to see the world.’
‘And Gelert? How comes Gelert to be with you?’
‘Gelert came to me after your going. He would not run with Cunori’s hounds. And so when I left too, I asked him of Cunori. It is in my heart that he knew I should bring him to you, one day; and behold, I have brought him.’
Beric looked down at the great brindled hound, remembering very vividly how he had cried with his arms round Gelert’s neck, on the night that the Clan had cast him out. ‘Nay, that was long ago, and he lies at another man’s feet now,’ he said. And Gelert, knowing that he was being talked of, raised his head to look from one to the other, his tail thumping, then dropped his chin back on to the harper’s feet.
‘Let him choose for himself.’
‘He has already chosen,’ Beric said, and knew that it was true. After a moment he asked: ‘Rhiada, have you ever been back?’
‘Twice. I was back at seed-time.’
‘How——’ Beric began, and checked. He had shut his foster kin away from him so long, they and the old life and the whole Clan that had betrayed him, and now it was very hard to let them in again. Oddly enough, it was because of Lady Lucilla’s lantern, which had clearly nothing to do with the matter, that he managed to ask at last: ‘How was it with them? With Cunori my foster father and the sons of his hearth?’
‘Well enough,’ said Rhiada.
‘And Guinear my mother?’
‘I heard her laugh, but I think that she has not forgotten.’
‘And—Cathlan my Spear brother?’
‘Cathlan has taken a girl of the Clan to wife, and there is a man-child in his hut.’
Silence fell between them, a silence filled with the sounding of the sea, hollow in the unnatural quiet. Then Rhiada asked: ‘And you? What brings you to this place?’
Beric did not answer at once; and his eyes went down to the bronze bracelet that he wore to cover the shackle-scar on his wrist. ‘I work on the great sea-wall that we are raising to hold back the tides from the Marsh,’ he said at last.
‘So, all these four years?’
‘No, since last spring only. I—was in other places before then.’
Despite himself, his voice had hardened, and Rhiada said after a moment: ‘They were not good, those other places?’
‘No,’ said Beric. ‘They were not good.’
Rhiada turned towards him a little, his head lifted, as though he were waiting for something more. Then, as Beric remained silent, he turned back to the sea, saying: ‘Tell me about this wall, and this Marsh of yours. Surely it is a fine thing to bring land out of the sea.’
So, sitting with his arms about his updrawn knees, gazing
out over the wandering waters of the estuary, where redshank and curlew were feeding on the ebb tide, he told Rhiada about the Marsh. Now that the first astonishment was over, it did not seem strange to be sitting here talking to Rhiada. Kindling to his theme as he went on, he told him about the huge banks, and the sluices under the Weald, explaining with great care how the sluice-bank, as it rose, had dammed up the water behind it, so that now there was a shallow lake along the whole landward edge of the Marsh, and how the sluices, closed when the tide rose high, and opened as soon as it began to fall, would have drained it by next summer. He told him about the green fringe of pasture along the seaward shore, that was for a promise of what the whole Marsh would be one day, with the hungry sea shut out. ‘Fine grazing there will be for many sheep, one day, from the sea-wall to the Weald. That will be a good thing, to have helped in the making.’
He told Rhiada also, without quite realizing it, a good deal about Justinius, for Justinius and the Marsh were very much part of each other. Only he made no mention of how or why Justinius had taken him as a son into his hearth-place, for that story was not his to tell; and though Rhiada asked many questions, he did not ask that. Beric remembered that he never asked questions that were best not answered; it was one of the things that made him good to talk to. It was good to talk to Rhiada now. Somehow telling Rhiada about the Marsh, about the promise of the Marsh, and the small, windswept steading on the fringe of the Weald, made him see it more clearly himself, and seeing, know suddenly how much it all meant to him.
A soft puff of wind blew in Beric’s face, and he realized that the waiting quiet was gone, and in its place a faint, rustling unrest, a sense of coming turmoil. The estuary was running angry gold, and the sunset burning like a great fire behind the steep prow of Bull Island, where the Legionaries of six working seasons ago had made their altar to Mithras the Bull-slayer, the Lord of Light. Again the wind came up from the estuary, rustling low through the hairy grasses, and the
roar of the surf at the seaward end of the Island seemed to have grown suddenly louder. Surf on shore and swell in the offing; that meant wild weather somewhere, already. Gelert whimpered uneasily, without lifting his head from the harper’s feet, and Beric saw that little shivers were running through him. Gelert knew, and so did the gulls. The gulls had all flown inland.

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