Outcast (20 page)
Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
‘It was a good dream,’ he said, and flung the stone on to the pile.
In the quiet grey of the next morning, Beric stood with Rhiada and Gelert and the boy Kylan where the track from the base camp ran up into the woods. ‘I wish that you would not go,’ he said. ‘Stay yet one night more, and sing to us again.’
‘Nay, I sang to you last night, but it is in my heart that this is no place for songs just now, and I will not eat where I do not sing. I am for the next village up-river, where maybe there will be less of storm damage to come between men and the music of my harp.’
‘Rhiada——’ Beric said, and hesitated.
‘Cubling?’
‘Rhiada, you will be going back some time? Back to the Clan?’
‘Assuredly, when my wanderings carry me west again.’
‘Will you take a message for me, to Guinear my mother? I promised her, on the night they cast me out, that when I had made a new life among my own people I would send her word —once, and not again—that she might know that it was well with me.’
‘I will tell her,’ Rhiada said. ‘Is there anything beside?’
‘No. Tell her that I have made a new life among my own people, and that it is well with me, and that I remember my promise. That is all.’
‘Maybe it is better so,’ the harper said after a moment. He held out his hands. ‘Good hunting to you, Beric: the sun and moon shine on your trail.’
‘And on yours,’ Beric said a little huskily. ‘And on yours, Rhiada.’ He caught the harper’s hands and gripped them, then stooped quickly to rub the great rough head that Gelert was thrusting against him.
A few moments later, Rhiada, with a hand on the boy Kylan’s shoulder, had turned aside to follow his own trail; and Beric was striding on alone up the track. Behind him he heard a shrill, protesting whine, but no scurry of paws came after him. Gelert had made his choice.
The storm had wrought less havoc here than out on Marsh
Island, but there were gaps in the woods, and all around him as he climbed the oaks and thorns showed the white wounds of torn-off limbs, while the ground about their feet was thick with leaves and broken twigs and branches. Yet, standing still, with their stripped and tattered arms raised to the tumbled blue and grey and silver of the autumn sky, they seemed to Beric to wear their courage and their triumph as though it were a crown of next spring’s green and golden leaves.
Island, but there were gaps in the woods, and all around him as he climbed the oaks and thorns showed the white wounds of torn-off limbs, while the ground about their feet was thick with leaves and broken twigs and branches. Yet, standing still, with their stripped and tattered arms raised to the tumbled blue and grey and silver of the autumn sky, they seemed to Beric to wear their courage and their triumph as though it were a crown of next spring’s green and golden leaves.
The wind break, too, had suffered. The biggest thorn tree was down, and beside it he found Justinius, who had come up to get a hot bath, surveying the tangled mass of branches. ‘We shall have to put in a new sapling,’ he said as Beric halted beside him.
Beric nodded, also looking at the gnarled bole and the long, wind-twisted boughs outflung across the turf. ‘Has the steading suffered much? What of Maia and the colt?’
‘All is well with Maia and the colt, and little amiss with the steading. Like the sluice-bank, we get a certain amount of shelter from Bull Island.’ Justinius half turned towards the house, then paused, looking out over the scarred woods to the estuary. ‘Winter is on the way. Soon the grey geese will be flighting home from the north; we shall hear them overhead any night now.’
‘With the three of us for the work, we shall have the long pasture clear of scrub before the time comes for the spring ploughing,’ Beric said contentedly.
Justinius was silent a moment, then, as they turned back together towards the house, he said: ‘Beric, how would you feel about carrying your shield in the Legions?’
Beric stopped dead in his tracks, and stared at him with startled eyes. ‘Is—that because of what the Legate said yesterday?’ he demanded at last.
‘In a way, though it had occurred to me before. You meant to join the Eagles once, did you not?’
‘Yes.’ Beric rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. ‘Yes, I did; but that was long ago, and—there is all that came after. I—I had not thought——’
‘It might be worth giving a thought to, now that you are free. There is no need for haste, even for a year or two. There is no fixed entrance age for the Centuriate.’
Moving on again, across the bush-grown turf of the long pasture, towards the warm russet huddle of the steading, Beric was no longer in the least startled; it was as though, after that first blank moment, Justinius’s astonishing suggestion had fallen into the place that was waiting for it, and become a familiar part of himself. Half-way across the long pasture, he asked: ‘How would it seem to you, Justinius?’
‘I should be very content that we work this place together,’ Justinius said quietly. ‘Equally, I have always hankered for a son following in my old service!’
They walked on in silence.
Whole patches of the lichen-gold tiles had been stripped from the roofs of the steading, and twigs and leaves and small branches were lying everywhere, driven into corners until Servius had leisure from more important repairs to get rid of them. But as they reached the end of the terrace, Beric saw that the tamarisk was still there, the feathery dark branches still dusted with pale blossom; and Canog sat in a brief blur of sunshine against the lime-washed wall, with her fat puppy firmly attached to her.
She raised her head at Beric’s nearing, her plumy tail thumping softly, her eyes lustrous in her small, woolly face. She detached herself from the puppy and started to meet him, then swerved back to her son, picked him up by the roll of fat behind his neck, and managing him with some difficulty, for he was already too big for her, came pattering along the terrace and dumped him all a-sprawl on Beric’s feet, with the air of one bestowing her treasure on her best-beloved.
And Beric, stooping to pick up the small, fat creature, had a sudden feeling of coming home from a journey. ‘This is my belonging-place,’ he thought. ‘Whether I stay, or whether I go forth again, it will still be here. It will keep faith with me.’ And swiftly come and gone as the shadow of a wheeling gull that swept along the terrace, the remembrance of Jason’s
Island brushed him by, an island scarlet with anemones after the winter rains.
Island brushed him by, an island scarlet with anemones after the winter rains.
There came a flicker of saffron yellow in the warm shadows beyond the open house-place door, and Cordaella surged calmly into view, the silver filigree pendants swinging in her ears. ‘Your breakfast is ready,’ she said, as though if there had been a storm she had not noticed it. ‘And I have baked new bread; come you and eat it while it is hot.’
ROMAN BRITAIN The Romney Marsh area
Celt, Roman, Saxon, Norman and English have all had a hand in winning Romney Marsh from the sea, and making it safe afterwards. But it seems likely that it was the Romans with their genius for engineering who first began draining operations on a big scale. If that was so, then the Rhee Wall, the ancient sea defence which you can still trace here and there, running from Appledore to New Romney, may well have been built in the first place by just such a force of Legionaries working under just such an Engineer Centurion as I have made Beric find there when he comes to the Marsh, in the last part of this book.
The Eagle of the Ninth
The Silver Branch
Warrior Scarlet
The Lantern Bearers
Tristan and Iseult
Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
Flame-Colored Taffeta
The Shining Company
Sword Song
The Silver Branch
Warrior Scarlet
The Lantern Bearers
Tristan and Iseult
Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
Flame-Colored Taffeta
The Shining Company
Sword Song
Text copyright © 1955 by Rosemary Sutcliff
Pictures copyright © 1955 by Richard Kennedy
Pictures copyright © 1955 by Richard Kennedy
All rights reserved
First published in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, 1955
eISBN 9781429936903
First eBook Edition : May 2011
First American edition published by Henry Z. Walck, 1955
First Sunburst edition, 1995
First Sunburst edition, 1995
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sutcliff, Rosemary.
Outcast / Rosemary Sutcliff; pictures by Richard Kennedy.
p. cm.
Sutcliff, Rosemary.
Outcast / Rosemary Sutcliff; pictures by Richard Kennedy.
p. cm.
1. Great Britain—History—Roman period, 55 B,G.—A,D. 449—Juvenile
fiction. [1. Great Britain—History—Roman period, 55 B.C.-A.D. 449—
Fiction. 2. Slavery-Fiction.] I. Kennedy, Richard, 1910— ill.
II. Title.
PZ7.S9560u 1995 [Fic]—dc20 94-46355 CIP AC
fiction. [1. Great Britain—History—Roman period, 55 B.C.-A.D. 449—
Fiction. 2. Slavery-Fiction.] I. Kennedy, Richard, 1910— ill.
II. Title.
PZ7.S9560u 1995 [Fic]—dc20 94-46355 CIP AC
Other books
The Girl with the Golden Spurs by Ann Major
Make You Blush by Beckett, Macy
whiskey witches 02 - blood moon magick by blooding, s m
Seven Princes by Fultz, John R.
Counterfeit Courtship by Christina Miller
Brides of Idaho by Ford, Linda;
Royal Captive by Marton, Dana
Wilt by Tom Sharpe
The Fix Up (First Impressions #1) by Tawna Fenske