He dipped a twig in the fire, watching as the tip of it blossomed into flame, and then crossed to the tall bronze lamp. The master of the house should not come home to a twilit atrium. He kindled the lamp, and the flame sprang up raggedly, topped with a wisp of switch; the wick needed trimming. He tended it automatically, as he had tended so many lamps in the house of Piso, seeing the flame steady and grow clear, a slim crocus of light, golden petalled and blue at the heart, that sent the distant Marsh beyond the open doorway retreating into the twilight.
He was still standing by the lamp when the hooves clattered into the steading yard, and Justinius’s deep voice sounded outside, speaking to Servius. Still standing there when steps came along the terrace, and the master of the house appeared in the doorway.
Justinius was in uniform of a somewhat undress kind. He wore no body-armour, only his leather tunic liberally daubed with mud and chalk, and his helmet showed a bare comb without the familiar parade crest. In his fine tunic and banquet-wreath of winter cyclamen at Publius Piso’s table, his dark face, long arms, and too great breadth of shoulder had made him seem grotesque; but here, with the twilit Marsh spread behind his squat, bull-shouldered figure, clad in mired leather and bare bronze, he was no longer grotesque, because he was in his own world. He was like the storm-shaped thorn trees of the Marsh fringe, deep rooted and indomitable, and of the same steadfast and stubborn courage.
At sight of Beric he checked on the threshold, a faintly startled look springing into his eyes. Beric had contrived by this time to rid himself of his beard; and Cordaella had clipped off his matted hair, so that now it was short in the Roman fashion. He was clean and fed, and above all, he had been kindly used; and gaunt and haggard though he was, he looked very different from the terrified, wolfish creature who had fallen beneath Justinius’s window. For a long moment they looked at each other in silence, Beric standing by the lamp, the Drainer of Marshes stock still in the doorway.
Then Justinius stumped forward, leaving the door open to the spring dusk behind him. ‘So. This is famously well. You must be as tough as a mountain pony!’ he said approvingly. Then to the enormous saffron-clad figure who had surged into the inner doorway, ‘Cordaella, I am come home very late—but at least I need no feeding.’
‘I have always cold meat ready dressed for your coming, and there is ewe-milk cheese and a new batch of spice cakes,’ Cordaella said tranquilly.
‘A banquet indeed: but I had dinner in camp. I need no more than a wash.’
Cordaella heaved a sigh for her rejected spice cakes, but did not protest. ‘Servius has taken out the hot water,’ she said.
The Drainer of Marshes laughed, already slipping off his heavy cloak. ‘You are a wonderful woman, Cordaella. It has long been my belief that you possess the second sight.’ He tossed the cloak across the citron-wood chest by the door. ‘Wait for me, Beric, I want to look at your wrist when I come back,’ and turning he went out again, and Beric heard his heavy footsteps crossing the angle of the terrace to his sleeping-place.
Presently he was back, with his leather tunic changed for one of soft rough wool, and carrying fresh linen and salves, which he set down among the orderly litter on the writing-table. ‘I have had to deal with so many sores and gashes and crushed fingers in my time that I am become a reasonably skilled surgeon,’ he said. ‘Show me your back.’
Beric, who had risen from beside the fire at his coming, drew the bronze pin from the neck of his tunic without a word, and slipped it down from his shoulders. Justinius took and turned him round, and there was a long silence. ‘Why was this done?’ Justinius asked at last.
Beric said simply: ‘I tried to kill the Overseer.’
‘Unwise, though possibly justified … . I am not going to meddle with these weals; they are healing well enough on their own … . Yes—now this wrist of yours.’
Watching the Commander’s hands on the bandage, it seemed to Beric more than ever strange and wonderful that Justinius should do this for him, a galley slave; should do it as though he cared. That was the most wonderful thing; not that Justinius should dress his wrist, but that he should do it as though he cared. And presently, when the sore on his wrist had been re-bandaged, still stinging like fire from the cleansing rye spirit, and the Commander pulled his cross-legged camp chair to the fire and sat down with the sigh of a tired man after a long day’s work, Beric squatted down at his feet, content to be with him as his hound might be content.
For a while they sat in silence, Beric staring into the fire, the Commander gazing down at Beric, until a wild-apple log collapsed with a tinselly rustle into the red hollow under it, and as though the small sound had released something that held them silent, Justinius said: ‘Beric, tell me what passed between the night of Piso’s dinner-party and the night Servius and I found you here under the window.’
Beric continued to stare into the fire in silence for a few moments; then, slowly and fumblingly, for it was two years and more since he had strung more than a score of words together at a time, he began to tell Justinius what he asked. He told about his escape and the farm in the hills, and his trial for robbery, and why it was that he had not told the truth that night. He told about the Alcestis of the Rhenus Fleet, and the crossing to Britain with the new Legate, and the gale; and about Jason. About trying to kill the Overseer, and all that had happened after, until he came up through the mist and saw the light in the window.
He had been staring into the fire all the while, but when the story was done he looked up. Justinius was sitting forward with his arms across his knees, gazing down at him. There was a tense stillness about the Drainer of Marshes, and something in his dark face that made Beric catch his breath without knowing why. The words were out almost before he knew it. ‘Why is it that you look at me so? That night at Publius Piso’s table—and this evening when you came in—and now: as though you sought the answer to a question?’
Justinius smiled. ‘I am sorry. You remind me a little of someone I once knew. That is all.’ He turned his gaze from Beric as though with a conscious tug, and looked instead into the fire. ‘Here is a question for you, at all events: and a large one. Who are you, and where do you come from?’
‘I was fostered by the Dumnonii of the far west,’ Beric said. ‘Before that—I do not know. I think my father was a soldier. He was drowned, and my mother also.’
There was a small, sharp silence, and then, still looking into the fire, Justinius said, ‘Tell me about it.’
And that also Beric told, first the story of the long-ago shipwreck on the Killer Rock, and then, with some confused idea that he wanted to give Justinius something and had nothing else to give, the story of all that had come after, right up to Publius Piso’s dinner-table. It was a story that still hurt in the telling, which perhaps made it a worthwhile gift, after all.
When he had finished, Justinius remained silent for a time. ‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, I see. Thank you for telling me, Beric.’ Then he got up abruptly, and tramped across to the open doorway, and stood there, his shoulders hunched, staring out into the blue dusk.
And in the silence, Beric was suddenly aware of the sound of the wind, a small, desolate wind that came humming and siffling up from the Marsh, to make a faint sea-hushing in the tamarisk beyond the door.
In a little, Justinius turned again, and came back to his seat beside the fire. He looked suddenly very tired, and he leaned forward, holding his hands to the flames as though they were cold; but his eyes when they met Beric’s had lost their strained questioning, and were quiet. It was as though his question, whatever it was, had been answered.
‘You have seen Maia and the foal?’ he said.
Beric nodded, faintly puzzled by the sudden change of subject. ‘He is a fine foal. Like a flame, he will be, when he is grown. It is in my heart that I should like——’ He broke off.
‘You love horses, don’t you?’ Justinius said.
‘I have lived among them and worked with them, after the w
ay of my foster kind, all my life until—a while back.’
Justinius said, ‘Stay and help me break Maia’s foal, and the others that there will be, after him.’
But two evenings later, Beric learned what Justinius’s unasked question had been, and it was a bitter lesson in the learning.
He had been working about the steading with Servius all day; and now the evening meal was over, and the day’s work for the most part over too; and in the kitchen-place, Servius sat before the hearth, mending a broken bridle, while Cordaella sat down to her spinning, and Beric had come out to fetch more wood for the fire. There was plenty of wood already, stacked in its corner by the hearth, but tired though he was, he couldn’t rest. When Justinius had bidden him stay and help break Maia’s foal and he had known that he need not go wandering on again into the cold and the unknown, his overwhelming relief had driven out all else; but now, after two days, his sense of unbelonging, of being shut out, was growing upon him again. It had been that that had driven him out this evening from the firelit kitchen-place and Cordaella spinning, into the steading yard in the dusk; and now, standing beside the wood-pile with a lichened apple log in his hand, he wondered rather desperately whether it would always be like this, always the Alcestis between him and the world, shutting him out. Maybe when Justinius came up from his Wall again it would be different.
He turned back to the house at last, with as many logs as he could carry. There had been rain earlier in the day, and the ground was soft, so that his footsteps made little sound, and he had almost reached the half-open door of the kitchen-place when Cordaella’s voice speaking his name in a soft undertone brought him to a halt. ‘Servius, do you—notice anything about Beric?’ she was asking, and something in her tone held him where he was, listening.
‘I’ve noticed that he works like a fiend half the time, and the other half stands and stares at the work as though he expected it to do itself,’ said Servius.
‘Maybe you would find it none so easy to work steadily yourself, if you were used to working with a lash at your back!’ Cordaella told him with soft indignation, and then: ‘Well enough you know what I mean.’
There was a moment’s silence, filled with the low thrumming of Cordaella’s spindle, and then Servius said grudgingly, ‘Aye, I know what you mean. He’s a bit like the Commander’s wife, as I remember her. Maybe he comes of the same tribe—the Brigantes are all alike as peas in a pod, to my way of thinking.’
‘It is his eyes, and the way he carries his head … . Beautiful, she was—and she going against all her kin to wed with the Commander.’
Servius sniffed. ‘Women’s talk! If there had been aught amiss between her and her kin, would she have taken the cubling back to show them, when ’twas born?’
‘Maybe her heart turned to her kin, when she had the cubling to show them.’ Cordaella’s wood-pigeon voice was soft and troubled with old regrets. ‘But I knew there would be no good come of it. There was a robin weeping in the birch tree by the gate as the mule-cart passed out. If the Commander had not been already away up-country to his road-making, I’d have gone to him then and there, to ride after her and bring her back.’
‘Think he would have listened to you?’ demanded Servius dampingly, and in the tone of one who had heard the story many times before.
‘Nay now, that is a thing that we shall never know. Away up-country he was, and before he marched into camp again they were beyond his fetching back.’
‘Aye, the fever killed quickly, that summer,’ Servius agreed. There was another silence, and then Cordaella said: ‘It is in my heart that if the babe had lived, he would have looked much as this one does, save for the seal the galleys have set on him.’
‘Now do not you be getting fancies, my lass,’ Servius begged. ‘The cubling died with his mother, and that was the end of the story.’
‘I have begun to wonder, these past few days. ’Twould have been an easy thing for her kin to have told the Commander so, and kept the babe for their own training in the tribe. It is in my heart that the Commander wonders too. What else was it made him look like a man struck by black frost, that first night, when the boy seemed like to die?’ Cordaella’s voice suddenly shook. ‘Think, Servius—if it should be!’
Beric flung the door wide, and strode in upon their startled silence. ‘My mother was drowned, and my father was drowned, and it is in my heart that I would I had been drowned too!’ he said, and crashed the logs that he carried down in their corner. Cordaella gave a soft cry of distress, and half rose from her stool, but he flung past her to the inner door. On the threshold he turned for an instant. ‘The Commander is not wondering any more,’ he said harshly. ‘The Commander knows.’ Then he walked straight out through the atrium, and across the angle of the terrace to his sleeping-cell, and pitched down on to his cot.
He lay there for a long time with his head in his arms, thinking, while the dusk flowed up from the Marsh and deepened into the dark. Once, Cordaella’s footsteps came to the door, and he knew that she was standing just outside. He heard her sigh, heavy and soft and troubled; and then her footsteps went away again, and he was left to his thinking. He had felt very like a lost dog who has found someone to belong to, and it had all been a mistake. It had not been for him at all, the caring in Justinius’s hands. He had been a fool to think that it was. What was he, washed up from the galleys, that Justinius should look on him with kindness for his own sake? Lying there in the dark, the slow waves of bitterness washed over him. There was no place for him here, after all; no place for him anywhere in the world of men that had cast him out, and made him a slave and sent him to the galleys. So he would go to the wild, and be done with men. He would go now.
He had half risen from the cot when suddenly it came to him that he could not go without telling Justinius. He was not at all sure why, but he knew that he could not. In the morning he would find Justinius and tell him, and then he would go, and it would all be over.
He lay down again, with the quietness of utter desolation, and went to sleep.
XVI
ANOTHER STRAY
HE woke in the first water-cool light of morning, with the green plover crying over the Marsh, and without giving himself time to think, stumbled up from the cot, and set out to find Justinius.
It was so early that no one was stirring as he made his way along the terrace, and he crossed the head of the long pasture and passed out between the thorn trees of the wind break to the track beyond, never looking back. It was better not to look back.
The track led gently downward, and through the budding branches of oak and hazel and the twisted thorns with their fleece of blossom he could glimpse the sodden flatness of saltings and the silver gleam of mud flats left bare by the tide, and many waters winding down to the estuary. Presently the track curved left, turned sandy and ran out into gorse and stunted elder and harsh sea-grasses. And away to the right was the huddle of a native fishing village, and the slender dugout canoes of the fisher-folks drawn up above the tide-line. But ahead of him the track ran on, curving still, to the gate of something that he knew must be the camp. Beric halted an instant at sight of the rough encircling stockade, the square-set rows of tents and cabins beyond, suddenly afraid to go on down the track and into this camp of the Eagles, so afraid that his throat tightened, and he had to swallow and keep on swallowing. But he must go on if he was to find Justinius, and after a moment he straightened his shoulders and walked forward.
At the gate of the camp, under the roughly painted Capricorn badge of the Second Legion, a sentry leaned on his pilum and watched the world go by. Beric stopped before him, and said a little hoarsely because of the tightness in his throat, ‘I want the Commander.’
‘Oh you do, do you?’ said the man cheerfully. ‘Well, you’ll not get him.’
There was a small silence, and then Beric, his gaze going past the man into the morning activity of the camp, said, ‘If I come too early, I will wait.’
‘You are welcome to, b
ut he’s not in the camp. Gone up to Portus Lemanis yesterday, about the ragstone quarrying.’
‘Portus Lemanis? Where is that?’
‘Up that way.’ The sentry jerked a thumb northward. ‘Ten miles and more, round by the Weald.’
Beric hesitated. ‘When is it that you suppose he will come back?’
‘There now, if he didn’t go without telling me!’ said the sentry, with heavy irony. Then, seeing the trouble in Beric’s face, he changed his tone. ‘Is it that it must be the Commander? Centurion Geta would not do? He is down at the sluice-bank now.’
‘No, it is for the Commander. I will come back. It is a small matter,’ Beric said.
As he turned away, he knew that the sentry was staring after him; and suddenly he felt the betraying weals on his back burning through his tunic, and it was all he could do not to run.
He had been a fool to follow Justinius down here, of course; even if he had found him in camp, the Commander would have had more important things to think about than the affairs of such as Beric. But what now? He did not know. He started back the way he had come, then without any idea why he did so turned into a faint path that sniped off to the right. A few paces brought him to a small, still pool among the furze and elder, and after standing irresolutely on the brink for a little while, he sat down beside it. It did not seem to matter very much what he did. He was simply drifting.
It was not until he had been sitting there some time that he became aware of a mingling of sounds drifting up from the Marsh below him. For a while he paid no heed to it, then, with a kind of dreary half-interest, shifted to one side, and parting the elder scrub looked down on a scene of ordered activity framed in the budding branches. Less than a sling-throw away, where the higher ground sank at last into the Marsh, he saw the squat grey mass of a ragstone sluice set into the toe of the gentle slope, the inlet channel behind it leading out northward into the enclosed Marsh, the outlet curving south into the saltings towards the estuary. And from the outer side of the sluice itself, a low guard wall formed of a double row of hurdles and thorn faggots ran seaward, dwindling thread-thin into the distance, reinforced after maybe a mile by the start of the main shingle bank, before both were lost in the greater distance beyond. All along the guard wall he saw a constant two-way trickle of pack-ponies, outward bound, their canvas panniers laden with chalk that gleamed rawly white against the soft tawny of the Marsh, or winding home with their panniers hanging empty; while all along the guard wall men were at work unloading them and packing the rough chalk lumps between the hurdles. Then the figure of a tall Centurion appeared, and the scene was complete; the scene that he had stumbled on in the mist, six days ago—or ten—or twelve; he did not know.