The thing passed almost before it came, and Beric went on, making for the part of the garden farthest from the cell where the old attendant priest lived. And there, in the black shadows under a tangled mass of evergreens, he settled down with the stolen file. It was maddeningly slow work, and at any moment Glaucus might be going down to gloat over his prisoner, and find him gone. A score of times Beric was on the edge of catching up his file and running while the way was still open, with the shackle still on his wrist, but he could not get out of Rome except by one of the gates, and at the gates there was always the chance of being searched. So, setting his teeth, he went on patiently driving the file back and forth along the scratch that gradually widened and deepened to a furrow on the surface of his shackle; pausing sometimes to feel how the furrow was getting on, and then returning to the ceaseless movement, to and fro, to and fro.
Once the fear came back, whispering with the night wind through the ilex leaves, and left him shivering as it passed on; once he thought he caught the distant notes of a shepherd’s pipe, but when he checked the rasp of his file to listen with a thumping heart and prickling skin, all he could hear above the distant surf-roar of the city was a bird calling across the valley from the pomegranate gardens of the Esquiline.
He had been maybe an hour at his task, maybe two, when the mailed footsteps of the Watch patrol came ringing down the lane; and he froze under the evergreens, as they halted at the gateway, and peering through the leaves saw the glint of the lantern-light on steel caps and corselets. But after a few moments there was a sharp order, and the lantern flickered out of sight, and he heard the mailed footsteps ringing away down the lane. The Lady Lucilla had been right.
With a gasp of relief, Beric set to work again. And not long after, the file broke through the last filament of metal, and he was able to force the shackle open and drag it from his wrist. Now for the silver arm-ring that marked him for a slave of the Piso house. It had been tight enough over his elbow on the night that Nigellus had issued it to him, and his arm had thickened since then, but by spitting on his hand and smearing the spittle again and again over the thickest part of his elbow, to make it slippery, he got it off eventually.
Now at last he could go! He thrust the file into the soft earth, having no further use for it, and got up. Again, as he went back through the garden to the gate, he seemed to catch the faint piping under the leaves; but again, as he checked to listen, it was gone. He checked once more, to break a switch of rosemary from a bush by the gate. Then he was out in the narrow lane, out in the world of men again.
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.
X
THE FARM IN THE HILLS
THE 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 t
he 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.’