They dragged him off the Overseer at last, half stunned by a blow on the head, and flung him aside, and as he crouched gasping and shuddering against the flying-deck in the grip of two seamen, with the red rage turning grey as cold ashes before his eyes, he knew with helpless fury, by the sounds of someone crowing and bubbling for breath and then being violently sick, that he had not killed Porcus after all.
There were clipped, authoritative voices above him, and the Master’s studded sandals on a level with his eyes; and then the Hortator was unlocking his shackles as he had unlocked Jason’s. They thrust him to his feet, and up on to the flying-deck, and along it to the whipping-post at the break of the foredeck, every man on the rowing-benches craning round to watch. He felt them watching, as he was shackled there with his arms above his head; sullenly resentful on his behalf, bound to him by the fierce bond of the galley slave, yet with a certain wolfish expectancy, none the less. How many floggings he had watched so, at first with loathing, and then, as he grew hardened, with that queer shameful excitement that seemed bound up in some way with the knowledge that it might be his turn next, though it was somebody else’s now.
But this time it was his turn. Porcus, who would not be serviceable again for many days, had been cleared away, and it was Naso the Second Overseer who stepped up behind Beric carrying the whip; not the long stock-whip of the rowing-benches, but the short, many-tailed scourge, every throng of which was jagged with knots which cut like steel. The Hortator and the Master took up their stand a little to one side, and from the poop the remote figure of the Legate looked on with cold impatience of the delay.
After it was over, they left him shackled there for an object lesson, his head hanging far back between his up-drawn shoulders, so that the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes again was a sheet of blue light, which as his sight cleared became the spring sky. He had not been scourged before, and he was vaguely surprised that his back did not hurt more. It was in fact quite numb: but he was filled with a horrible, sick sense of shock, he had a raging thirst, and everything inside him felt broken. Behind him he could hear the rhythmic dip and thrust of the oars, the gasping breaths of the rowers, and all the familiar sounds of a galley under way: but before his eyes was only that empty flame of blue. Little by little he managed to drag his head forward against the strings of fire that seemed to run from the back of it down between his raw shoulders; and above the break of the foredeck the galley’s gilded prow came into his swimming sight, proud and graceful as the arched neck of a swan. He rested his forehead against the whipping-post, between his up-strained arms, and shut his eyes. Presently the life began to return to his numbed back, and with the life, a burning agony that made him writhe. His arms felt as though they were being torn out by the roots, and as the hours crawled by, his thirst became a torment that was almost past enduring.
The sun was gone, and the sky had paled from blue flame to the colour of a fading harebell, when at last his shackles were unfastened and he was allowed to slip down in a huddle to the deck. Someone heaved a bucket of water over him, and that cleared his head a little. He was given a pot of sour wine and water and allowed to drink his fill, which revived him still further, though his throat and tongue were so swollen that at first he could hardly swallow. And the Hortator himself, who kept such matters in his own hands, roughly daubed his back with warm pitch that felt like liquid fire at the time, but seemed to ease the pain somewhat afterwards.
Presently he was marched back to his old place, and thrust down upon the bench, and the irons once more locked on to wrist and ankle. Fumblingly, he put out his hands and found the accustomed hold on the oar-loom, and his body swung without thought into the familiar rhythm. Only the man beside him was strange. And for the first time it struck home to him that Jason, who had rowed beside him only that morning, would not row beside him again. If he shifted his hand along the oar-loom, Jason’s hand would not come up to meet it. Never, never again.
Your oar-mate died, and his body was slipped overboard, and a fox-headed stranger was shackled in his place: and you went on rowing.
It seemed that the inner watch had been relieved sometime during the day, after all, and now they were going on again, to relieve the outer: and the foxy man slid down on to the deck, leaving Beric alone at the oar. How often Jason had slipped down like that; how often he had slipped down himself and lain at Jason’s feet. And now, never any more. The desolation and the hard, hopeless ache of loss rose in him, swallowing up even his bodily misery. But presently it all began to fade. Everything was fading, falling farther and farther away. Even the rhythm of the oars was going from him. And nothing mattered any more … .
A gleam of lantern-light fell into his eyes, and he realized dreamily that people were standing over him. He could understand what they said to each other, though their voices seemed to fall down to him from a great distance, but it was quite beyond him to speak, or even show that he understood: and it did not matter. Nothing mattered.
‘Here’s the other one as good as gone,’ Naso was saying disgustedly.
Someone was freeing him yet again from his shackles; someone whose head was a dark blot between him and the light. ‘Odd how they do this sometimes, after a flogging,’ said the voice of the Hortator. ‘Pff! Out like a candle.’
‘Any use keeping him?’
‘None in the world. He’s got barely a score of breaths in him. Even if he pulled round, it would be weeks—maybe months—before he would be fit to row again.’
‘Slip him over, then, sir?’
‘Might as well,’ said the Hortator briefly. ‘Save burying him to-morrow when we reach Dubris. If he drifts ashore, someone else can deal with him.’
Hands dragged Beric up by his arms and legs, and he was aware of a grunt, and a backward scuffling that might have lasted for years, or for a single heartbeat—he neither knew nor cared. He was almost unconscious as they slipped him over the side.
XIV
THE HOUSE ABOVE THE MIST
BUT Beric, as Cunori his foster father had once said, was not born to be drowned.
The shock of the water on his parched and aching body, the fiery sting of it in his weals, acted on him like a cold douche on the face of a sleeper. He went down and down into the black depths, and came up again with bursting lungs and coloured sparks dancing before his eyes, but once more sharply conscious. Drawing in great gasps of air, he trod water, and quite deliberately watched the stern braziers of the convoy go by. If he shouted, he might be picked up: but then there would be the galleys again. Better the sea than that. The sea would be kinder than man had been. Ever since he had first tumbled into the water from the shelving rocks of the Seal Strand, without thought or fear, much as the seal calves did, the sea had been his friend, and he felt it as a friend now, the buoyant lift of it under him like a hand bearing him up. The third transport passed so close to him that he felt her wash as she went by; but the moon was behind a cloud, and nobody saw him, and the transports went on. The Janiculum passed at some little distance, the rhythmic beat of the oars coming to him faintly along the rise and dip of the water, and the red glow of her stern brazier grew smaller and smaller in the distance.
He was alone with the dark, swinging seas.
He had very little idea of being picked up, even less of making land, but he was not in the least afraid. The pain in his back was growing less, and sometimes he almost fell asleep, but the part of himself that had taken charge on the night that he escaped from the Piso house had taken charge again, and knew that if he went to sleep he would drown. It would be much easier to let go, and drown; but the part of him that had taken charge was determined that he should not let go.
For a time he simply drifted, waiting for daylight, but the galley had been closer to the shore than he guessed, closer perhaps than the Hortator had realized when he was slipped overboard, and the tidal stream was carrying him shoreward all the while. So it was that, with the moon still high in the glimmering sky, suddenly,
and scarcely daring to believe it, Beric saw land! Land in the distance, glimpsed only for a moment as the swell lifted him, then lost again as he slipped down into the hollow; but as he strained his eyes towards it from the next crest of the swell, there it was again, a low shoreline smudged like a silver shadow along the rim of the seas. He struck out towards it, and after that there was no more peaceful drifting, only a heart-bursting fight for life that had suddenly become real and urgent to him again.
But the sea that had given him up unharmed once did so again, and with the moonlight fading into the dawn, very near to his last gasp, he found his feet in shallow water, and staggered up through the lazy creaming surf on to an oyster-pale shingle beach. Among the drifted sea-wrack on the tide-line he collapsed with hanging head. There he was very sick, crawled a little farther up on the beach, and was sick again.
Presently he gathered himself together, and on hands and knees dragged himself on again. He came to a breast-high wall of chalk lumps piled between hurdles, and got over it somehow: he crawled over the broad top of the shingle embankment he found beyond, and rolled down on the landward side, and there, with the hairy grasses under him, and the sea sounding softly behind the wall, he lay where he fell, and sank into a kindly blackness.
It was full daylight when he awoke, but he could not judge the time of day in a world that had no sun and no shadow, only mist. Soft, drifting swathes of mist into which the marsh blurred away and lost itself on all sides, and out of which came the crying and calling of shore birds. Beric thrust up on to an elbow, catching his breath as the pain tore at his back, and gazed about him in bewilderment. How had he come to be in this place? His sudden movement startled a heron standing reflectively one-legged on the edge of a shallow pool close by, and instantly the other leg came down, the great wings opened, and the bird swept into the air, a crested arrow-head of grace and power. Beric watched it disappear into the mist. It was beautiful; it would have made Jason glad, as the wild geese had made him glad, he thought.
Jason! As though the name had been a key, something seemed to fly open in his head, and the memory of all that had happened came flooding through.
He staggered to his feet, the marsh tilting and swimming crazily around him, and began to run. He stumbled and fell, and got up again; he floundered into shallow water and out once more, and still ran on. Behind him was the sea, and the sea meant the galleys. He stumbled on with bursting heart, snatching a frantic glance over his shoulder from time to time, as though he thought to see the Alcestis herself, like some nightmare creature as swift by land as by water, come neighing after him through the sea-smelling mist.
The mist! It was growing thicker all the time. When first he woke he had been able to see quite a long way, but now the creeping whiteness had closed in on him, so that his whole world, moving as he moved, was a few feet of sodden grass, sometimes a dissolving gleam of water, sometimes the cry of a bird in the eerie stillness, and always the racing drub of his own terrified heart. Little by little his panic died, and he slowed to a stumbling walk, but still the one clear thought in his mind was to get away from the sea, and he struggled on, doggedly, in what he vaguely hoped was the right direction. Then there began to be another thought in his mind, growing steadily more urgent: the thought of water. There was water all about him, but it was salt. Somehow that seemed like a thing that somebody had done on purpose, because they knew that he was thirsty—so thirsty.
So when, a long while later, he caught faint man-made sounds ahead of him, his first thought was that there might be someone there who would tell him where to find water; or even give it to him; for as he checked to listen, it seemed to him that the sounds were made by men working, and where men worked, there might be water for them to drink. Food too; but he was not interested in food, only in water. He started forward, then hesitated, looking down at himself, realizing for the first time that he was stark naked, seeing himself gaunt as a wolf in a famine winter, his blackened and salt-parched skin, the place on his wrist where the shackle had eaten into his flesh and become a sore. But he must have water. Driven by his desperate need, he started forward again. It seemed to him that he stumbled on a long way without the sounds drawing any nearer; and then suddenly the mist swayed back like a curtain, and they burst upon him terrifyingly close. Right before him there loomed, out of the wreathing whiteness, a small shaggy pony standing stocky and dejected under the great panniers on his back, from which two men were unloading lumps of chalk; but Beric’s startled gaze went past them to the mist-silvered outlines of other men beyond, who seemed to be packing the lumps of chalk between hurdles and rough masses of blackthorn, to make a wall like the one that he had come over at dawn.
For a stunned moment he simply stood and stared at the little mist-enfolded scene before him, then, as the pony moved on, and another took its place, he dropped flat and froze. There was no mistaking those leather-clad men on the wall, there was certainly no mistaking the tall figure with the crested helmet outlined against the further mist, who stood looking on. He had all but blundered into a working party of the Eagles.
‘This stuff is too small,’ the Centurion said—Beric heard him clearly—and then raised his voice to call to someone farther along the line of the wall. ‘Ho, Melas! Tell Anthonius we’re building a wall, not making a tessellated pavement.’
The mist closed down again, and with no thought now of finding water, no thought of anything save escape, Beric stumbled to his feet and lurched blindly away into the drifting whiteness, with the terror of the galleys once more baying at his heels.
After that, the mist began to gather inside his head. He fell more and more often as time went by; but always the fear of the galleys got him up again, and kept him lurching and staggering on. He was on sodden salting now; land that would be submerged at high tide. Perhaps he was going to be drowned after all; but he was not afraid of being drowned, only of the galleys. The light was beginning to fade, the mist to turn cobweb grey. Very soon now, he knew, he must lie down, and not get up again. And then all at once it seemed to him that the mist that drifted into his face had a new smell, a warmer, rootier smell, leaf-mould in it, even a whisper of woodsmoke. It was a smell that promised shelter, and the familiar things of forest country, and Beric stumbled towards it as a lost traveller suddenly recognizing the road home.
The ground began to rise, and almost at once furze-bushes came looming out of the cobweb mist to meet him; and at once he seemed to be in another world, with the marsh and the sea and the galleys shut out. A little farther, he was on the edge of a small dark pool. He had found so many pools, but surely this one among the furze must be fresh water. In frantic haste he dropped beside it, and scooped up water in his palms and tasted it. It was fresh and sweet: and with a sob, he dropped his head and began to lap like a dog.
When he had drunk his fill, he stayed by the pool for a little while. Here, among the dark, sheltering furze, it would be good to go on lying, and not try to get up, any more. But even here, with the horror of the galleys shut out, something dragged him to his feet one last time, and sent him staggering on. The ground was still rising gently, and all at once the scent of moss and leaf-mould was all about him, and he was among the trees: low-growing, wind-shaped oak and thorn trees, that he felt rather than saw, in the mist and the deepening dusk. Sick and shuddering, crashing through the undergrowth like a wounded beast, he struggled on up the gentle slope, with no idea where he was going, or why.
Little by little the grey mist that had almost melted into the deepening dusk began to grow out of it again; it began to warm around him, taking on the faint colour at the heart of a pearl shell, and he came out of it almost as abruptly as a swimmer breaking surface, into the last soft after-flush of a lantern-yellow sunset.
The gentle lift of the land was levelling out; ahead of him the thorn trees ran on, squat and hardy and storm-shaped; but to the left was open turf, and there, standing out from the thorns as though feeling no need of shelter, with the pale w
isps of mist curling almost to its terrace steps, with nothing but empty sky beyond, the long, low huddle of a farm-steading rose dark against the fading light.
The place had an air of being wind-shaped, storm-stunted, like the thorn trees among which Beric stood, by the winter gales that had roared across its low roofs; of being deeply and staunchly rooted, as they were, into the stuff of this high fringe of the marsh. There was a light in the house-place window, and it seemed to draw Beric, as though it were a hand reached out to him, as though the house itself had reached out to him friendly-wise, promising the nearness of his own kind. But what had he to do with men? Men had been none so gentle with him that he should feel the need of their nearness now. Nevertheless, he did need it. The knowledge had been growing in him, for a long while past, that he was going to die to-night; and outcast as he was, he was lonely.
If he could crawl closer, and find some corner to lie down, where he would see the light in the window … .
That was the last clear thought he had, but through the fog that seemed to swirl up in his head his overwhelming desire to get nearer to the lighted window must have remained with him, for suddenly, without even wondering how he got there, he found himself on the terrace before the house.
The light shone before him in the dusk; a blurred and swimming square of gold with the feathery branches of a tamarisk spraying darkly across one corner. He groped his way towards it. Then his knees gave under him, and he crumpled up and sank quietly forward on to his face. He twisted over a little, stretching out one hand to touch the edge of the soft stain of light that fell across the terrace, and settled his head on his other arm, with a long sigh.
The next thing he knew was the sound of voices, and a dazzle of strong yellow lantern-light splashing on to his face, and starting to his elbow, he saw two men standing over him.