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 m
ake 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.
‘Here’s one of ‘em, anyhow,’ said a cheerful voice, and then sharpening, ‘Would you now?—Oh, no you don’t, my beauty!’
Beric kicked out wildly, and ducked under the man’s arm, towards the shelter of the scrub that came near to the steading walls; but another man rose in his path, and as he swerved, the first was upon him from behind, bringing him crashing down. He fought like a mountain cat for his liberty, but more men closed in on him, and despite all his frantic struggling, his arms were twisted behind him, and he was dragged to his feet.
Struggling still, he found himself a little later standing before the Centurion in the torchlit house-place, which now looked as though a hurricane had hit it, and where the chest had been dragged out to reveal a square hole just large enough for a man to crawl through, in the wall behind.
‘Here’s one of ’em, sir,’ his captor repeated.
‘One!’ said the Centurion disgustedly. ‘And the rest clear away, thanks to those cursed goats!’ He was a man with a keen, square-chinned face, and he looked the panting captive up and down. ‘You young fool,’ he said contemptuously. ‘It always ends in the galleys or the cross. What did you want to get mixed up with this lot for?’
‘I am not——’ Beric began furiously, and checked. If he told the truth, and they believed him, he would be handed back to Glaucus, and that would mean the salt-mines, more surely than ever now it would mean the salt-mines. If he said nothing, he would be condemned as a robber, and that would mean the galleys or the cross. But at least the galleys were better than the salt-mines; and the cross? Well, at least that was quick, a few days at most, sometimes only a few hours, if the Centurion in charge were merciful and had his man scourged half dead beforehand. With a sudden calm of complete and utter despair, Beric made his choice. He ceased to struggle against the grip of the Legionaries who held him, shook the hair out of his eyes, and stared back at the Centurion, with his mouth set into a straight, defiant line.
‘I suppose you are a runaway slave,’ said the Centurion. ‘Your kind usually are. Well, it is no affair of ours, unless your master comes forward, and if he does, it won’t help you much. How many of you were there? Was Junius the Syrian one of you?’
Beric said no word.
‘You’ll get nothing out of him, sir,’ said his Optio. ‘He is dumb-sullen.’
The Centurion shrugged. ‘They have their own code, these wolves of the hill. All right, take him away. Tie his hands before him,’ and he turned to speak to another man who had just entered.
Beric was thrust back into the storeroom from which he had so lately escaped. His wrists were strapped before him, and he was left in charge of the Legionary who had captured him, while the search for the rest of the band continued. The Legionary was a friendly soul in his way, and seemed to bear Beric no grudge for being a robber, nor for his kick. ‘You don’t give me no trouble, and I won’t give you no trouble, see?’ he said, leaning against the door-post and watching his charge by the light of a candle stuck on a shelf.
The words were somehow familiar, and Beric, drooping against the wall and lost in a daze of hopelessness, seemed to hear them across a long distance of time. But they were not quite right, he thought, not quite right … And then he remembered. You don’t turn difficult, and I don’t jerk this rope, see?’ Ben Malachi’s man had said that, on the evening that Beric was sold into the Piso household. ‘You don’t turn difficult, and I don’t—’
Men came and went through the house-place; outside, they were beating the thick scrub that swept down to the farm walls; but they would not get anyone now. The robbers must have their own ways through the interlacing mass, to the cover of the woods beyond. He was glad that they would not get Rhodope, who had given him food and let him sit by the fire, and hidden him from the others. The goats had stopped bleating. He wondered if the Legionaries had killed them. The sky beyond the little window was beginning to pale to the colour of an aquamarine. Soon it would be day. It would be market day in Rome, he remembered; and he wondered where he would be next market day.
Someone stuck a head in at the door and said, ‘Bring him along. We’re marching.’
‘Any more?’ asked Beric’s guard, as he straightened up.
The other spat disgustedly. ‘Neither hide nor hair of a one. The scrub is riddled with runs.’
They marched Beric out of the storeroom, out of the house. They thrust him into the midst of a score of Legionaries who were falling in in the farm-yard. A defiant bleat sounded from the hillside above, and Beric noticed that the goat-fold was empty. Either the goats had broken out, or someone had contrived to let them out. Maybe that was Rhodope.
The light seemed to be growing very quickly, a fiercer and more fitful light than the dayspring, and snatching a glance over his shoulder as the whole company moved off at the Centurion’s order, Beric saw that they had fired the thatch. The flames looked pale, oddly bloodless in the dawn.
After the semi-darkness of the Mamertine prison in which he had lain for four days, the sunlight was white and blinding. Beric blinked in the brightness of it that seemed to dazzle his whole head instead of only his eyes. He was standing under guard in the courtyard of one of the city’s lesser law-courts; he was itching all over with bug-bites, and there was a mistral blowing, blowing stray bits of garbage in from the street to eddy and rustle in corners.
There had been several people tried already that morning, for robbing or fire-raising, giving short weight, or cutting purses in the lower city. It was growing late, and the Magistrate in charge was in a hurry; and now they were trying Beric—trying him as one of the band of Junius the Syrian, which had robbed a merchant on the Aurelian Way six nights ago. The only one, unfortunately, who had been rounded up. The merchant himself, who with his head heavily bandaged had just given evidence, could not swear to it that Beric had been one of the band who had attacked him, but as it had been dusk, and he had been taken by surprise and hit on the head from behind, that proved nothing, and his slaves had been too busy running to be any more help. Not that it mattered very much; the robbery had been carried out by the band of Junius, and Beric was obviously a member of the band—the Centurion who had captured him described how he had been taken trying to escape from the robbers’ hide-out. Therefore he must surely be guilty of the robbery. And when the time came for the prisoner’s defence, there was none. Beric had wondered sometimes, while he was in prison, what would happen if he could get word to the Lady Lucilla; but anything that the Lady Lucilla might do to help him would deliver him again to Glaucus and the salt-mines, just as surely as though Glaucus himself should chance to walk through the law-court at this moment. Beric had held stubbornly to his choice, all these five days, but now suddenly he wished that he had not, and a wild fear of what was coming rose in him. If it should be the cross! From the salt-mines he might escape—no one ever did, but still, he might—but if it were the cross there would be no time.
He started forward, opening his mouth to cry out that he was not a robber, that he was a slave of the house of Publius Lucianus Piso, and had run away, and that he was in the farm when it was raided only because the woman Rhodope had given him shelter for the night. But one of his guards drove a hand across his mouth, bidding him shut it, and the moment passed.
And now the Judge, who was certainly in a hurry, was summing up. He was a very large man with a puffy face that looked as though it was made of tallow, and a fretful manner; he was behind time, and Jupiter alone knew when he would get home to his midday meal, for even when the wretched youth had been found guilty, there would still be the matter of his sentence to settle.
He thought about the sentence while he
waited in mounting impatience for the jury to make up their minds. He would have liked to make it the cross, as some relief for his feelings at being kept from his waiting meal; but he was a conscientious man. The boy was obviously strong and built for endurance, and since the plague in the autumn the Navy was temporarily a little short of galley slaves.
The jury had made up their minds and were casting their votes by marked tablets dropped into a jar. An official brought the jar and set it before the Judge, and began to count.
‘Guilty!’
Beric licked dry lips and waited, while the Judge and his assistants bent their heads together. Then the moment came; and the Judge turned his tallowy face full upon him. ‘Prisoner, for the hideous crime of which you have been convicted, we sentence you to the galleys, there to row at the oar, henceforth until your life’s end.’
Beric had wondered what he would feel when the moment came. He felt nothing. He noticed very clearly the exact colour—grey—blue over milky green—of a wilting cabbage leaf which the mistral had blown against the foot of a column nearby, the sharply frilled edge of it, and the rim of shadow that followed its outline so faithfully underneath. He knew that he would never forget the colour of that cabbage leaf, nor the way the big veins branched, nor the rim of shadow under the edge.
XI
THE ALCESTIS OF THE RHENUS FLEET
THE wide waters of the Rhenus caught the first shrill gleam of the early northern sunlight, flashing silver as it flowed out from the mist-haunted darkness of the forest, and lapped along the river ramparts and the jetties of Colonia Agrippina. On the west bank—the Roman bank of the river—the little colonial town, capital of the Lower Rhenus Province, sat compactly within its walls, with the usual native fringe huddled about it, and the big camp that was the winter station of the Twenty-second Legion; its cleared cornland, and the vineyards where the vines were in young leaf. On the far bank stretched the forests and the marshes of Barbarian Germany, and between them flowed the broad river, the frontier along which passed and re-passed the patrol galleys of the Rhenus Fleet.