He let the elder scrub sway together again, and turned back to the pool.
Presently a group of girls came to draw water: tall British girls with bracelets of bronze and silver and bright blue glass on their arms. Some of them looked at Beric, but without any particular curiosity, for they saw many strangers these days. One of them smiled at him; but he did not smile back, for the reek of the Alcestis rowing-deck rose between him and them. And the girls went away again. But still Beric sat by the pool, hopeless, and yet with a confused and unreasoning hope that Justinius might return and set the whole world right.
By and by a little half-starved grey cur came timidly oozing to his feet, just as the mongrel in the slave-market had done, and as he had done then, drawn by the fellowship of outcast for outcast, Beric reached out to fondle her. She whined softly, flattening under his hand, shivering and pressing against him, and at last crawled into the long grass beside him, and went to sleep.
The tide that had been low when he came to the pool flowed in over the saltings, and the men and ponies went back to camp. It spread quietly through the chalk and hurdles of the guard wall, and all along the landward side of the Marsh. It began to fall again; and then at last Beric got slowly to his feet. What was the use of waiting, after all? It did not really matter what Justinius thought of him; Justinius would be glad to find him gone. Better to go now.
He turned back towards the track.
Lost in his own private wilderness, he made his way up through the furze and wind-stunted elder, so blind and deaf to the world around him that he never heard the light smother of many small hooves on the track, until, thrusting through a dense mass of blackthorn, he blundered out into the very midst of a string of pack-ponies coming down at a trot towards the camp.
What happened then was so quick and confused that it was over almost before he knew what it was all about. There was a warning shout, a flurry of trampling hooves, and the shrill squeal of a startled pony as it went up in a rearing turn and plunged back on the pony behind it. Beric caught a moment’s swift impression of up-flung heads and tossed manes, a plunging chaos of men and ponies, as he leapt clear; and in the same instant heard an agonized yelp from the many-legged midst of the tumult. He swung round to see the little cur who had come to him by the pool, flung clear, and struggling to her feet with yelp on yelp of pain and terror.
‘Hell and the Furies! What is it that you think you are doing, charging out into the track like that?’ someone shouted; but Beric paid no heed: he was on his knees beside the little mongrel.
One of the drivers was struggling with a scared and angry pony mare almost on top of him. ‘Aie—Aie—Aie—softly, softly now! Be still, daughter of the Dark One!’ But Beric barely heard him, and a few moments later, as the turmoil began to die down, the tall tribesman in charge of the pack-train wheeled his own pony across the track to him, demanding furiously, ‘Are you deaf? Or is it that you wish to have your brains kicked out?’
Beric shook his head impatiently, as at the buzzing of a fly. He was running his hands in sickening anxiety over the little mongrel’s body, while she cried like a child at his touch. She did not seem to have suffered any internal hurt, but clearly she had been caught a glancing kick on her left shoulder, for her crying rose to panic when he touched it, and she could not stand on her left foreleg. Maybe it was broken.
‘It is one of the strays from the camp. Hanging round, she has been, all winter past,’ said the man after a moment. ‘She must have been following you.’
Beric was gathering the small object of misery very carefully into his arms. ‘She is not a stray,’ he said fiercely as he got up. ‘She is mine. Mine to me!’ And he swung on his heel.
The fretting and unruly ponies, and the swearing men he left behind, simply did not exist for him. The poor little brute in his arms was the only thing that mattered. She was woefully light to carry; her ribs stood out under her staring hide, and all her bones felt sharp and brittle. She had ceased her crying, and lay quiet in his arms, as he carried her up the track and across the head of the long pasture to the steading.
Cordaella looked up from the charcoal stove as he appeared in the kitchen-place doorway, and surged towards him, still carrying a small iron skillet. ‘Oh, the gods be thanked that you come back! I have been half out of my wits!—and Servius away since dawn about the new plough or I should have sent him seeking you long since—and what the Commander would say——’ She broke off. ‘Why, what is it that you have there? A stray from the camp?’
‘She is not a stray,’ said Beric for the second time. ‘She is mine.’
‘Since when would that be?’ demanded Cordaella, ruffled out of her usual serenity by the anxious day she had spent.
‘Since a while back,’ said Beric vaguely. ‘She has been kicked on the shoulder by a pack-pony.’
Cordaella looked in silence at the two before her, the haggard young man and the little half-starved mongrel in his arms, and evidently decided that it was no time for asking needless questions, no time for speaking of last night. ‘Aiee, the pair of you!’ she said, in her softest and most wood-pigeon tone. ‘Is she much hurt, then?’
‘I do not know: not yet.’
‘Take her into the old byre, and I will bring you some food for her. I cannot have her under my feet in here, or I shall end by treading on her.’
Beric turned back across the steading yard. He had fetched dry fern from the stable and made a nest of it in the corner of the disused byre, and was settling the dog into it, when Cordaella billowed in after them, carrying a bowl.
‘Here is milk for her with some bread in it,’ she said as she gave it into his hand. “Twill be better than scraps, for her little starved belly.’ She stood for a few moments looking down at the two of them with a mountainous tenderness, then turned to the low-set doorway. ‘There will be food for you when you come for it. Come soon, for it is in my heart that you will be hungry also,’ she told him. Then she was gone.
Beric gave the little mongrel the bread and milk, and when she had licked the last drops out of the bowl, set himself to have another look at her shoulder. The instant his hand came near it she began to cry and shudder as before, but she made no attempt to pull away, nor did she snap, as an injured dog so often does; indeed after a while she put down her ragged head and licked his thumb. There did not seem to be any break, but he could not be sure. He had dealt often enough in the old days with hounds when they were sick or had been fighting, but his hands seemed to have grown dull on the oar-loom, and she was so small—less than half Gelert’s size. Justinius would know, he thought; if only he came home to-night.
Justinius! For an instant he sat completely still, staring straight in front of him. He had brought the dog back instinctively, to the place that had given him sanctuary in his own need, without thought of the fact that he had not been coming back himself. Well, that did not matter now: the only thing that mattered was his fellow stray.
Through what was left of the day, he waited, hoping for Justinius’s return. He ate the food that Cordaella gave him and did various jobs for her about the steading, and between whiles returned to the byre to be greeted every time with a piteous whimper and a softly thumping tail.
Evening was slipping into the dark, and the stars were out over the Marsh, when at last he heard the sound of hooves on the trackway. It might not be Antares, but somehow he was sure that it was. Squatting beside his dog, he waited, one hand on her suddenly raised head, as the soft triple beat came nearer. Now the beat changed tone as the horse swung aside from the track. It was Antares; Antares coming across the long pasture, clattering to a halt in the steading yard.
There was a gleam of lantern-light on the beaten earth; Justinius’s voice and then Servius’s; they must have arrived home at the same time; the wood-pigeon voice of Cordaella, soft and urgent; and then all lost in the clip-clop of Antares’ hooves as he was led stableward.
The dog whimpered, her ears pricking under Beric’s fingers, and
he soothed her, squatting beside her in the thick darkness of the byre. A little time passed, and there was no sound save those that came from Antares’ stable.
Beric was in the act of getting up to go in search of Justinius, when tramping footsteps came across the steading yard, a gleam of golden light running before them along the ground, and the Commander himself, with a lantern in his hand, loomed into the byre doorway.
For an instant he checked there, the lantern held high, so that the light of it showered harvest-gold into the farthest corner of the byre. He looked down at Beric, who crouched there, blinking up at him in the sudden radiance; then his gaze dropped lower still, to the little mongrel who had staggered to her feet at his coming, and was pressing back against Beric’s knees. Then he tramped in, and set the lantern down on the corner of the old manger. ‘Is she badly hurt?’ he asked.
Beric still had his hand on her head, as he stared up with strained eyes at Justinius. ‘I do not know. She came to me by the pool above the camp, and I forgot about her, but she followed me; and we ran into some pack-ponies on the track. I do not think her shoulder is broken, but I cannot be sure. I—my hands have lost their cunning.’
‘Let me look,’ said Justinius. He flung back the folds of his heavy cloak and slipped down on to one knee, holding out a hand to the little cur. She pressed away from it, flattening herself against Beric and growling uncertainly.
‘Men have not been kind to her,’ Beric said.
‘She seems to have found one of the breed to rest her trust in.’ Justinius was advancing his hand very slowly. ‘Poor little lass; nay now, I’ll not hurt you.’ The growling ceased. His hand was on her neck, moving exploringly down her shoulder and foreleg, while Beric watched, making the discovery, even through his desperate anxiety, that Justinius’s hands had the same caring in them now as they had had when they tended his own galled wrist; catching the first glimmering of an idea that perhaps the caring in Justinius’s hands three nights ago had not been entirely a mistake, after all. In a little, Justinius looked up. ‘No, there are no bones broken; nothing amiss that rest and a measure of kindness will not mend. She has had some food?’
Beric nodded, gulping with relief. ‘Cordaella gave me bread and milk for her, when I brought her in, and again a while since.’
‘So; that should suffice for the time being.’ Justinius rose somewhat stiffly, and stood looking down at them. ‘Shall we leave her to sleep, and go back to the house-place now?’
Beric gave his fellow stray a reassuring pat, and rising without a word, picked up the lantern. He knew what was coming, as he followed Justinius out, carefully propping in place the bits of boarding that he had collected to close the lower part of the byre door behind him.
Cordaella had lit the lamp in the atrium, but the ends of the long room were shadowy as always, warming to a mingled glow of lamplight and firelight at the heart. Justinius slipped off his heavy cloak and tossed it across the citron-wood chest, beside his helmet, which already lay there, and tramped across to the fire. When Beric joined him after quenching the lantern and leaving it by the door, he was standing in his favourite position, hands behind back, and bull shoulders a little hunched, staring down into the flames.
There was driftwood on the fire to-night, burning with the blue-and-green flame of salt seas, and mingled with it, the red and saffron of blazing apple logs that stood for the warm, familiar things of the land. A marsh fire, Beric thought.
Justinius looked up. ‘Cordaella has been telling me what happened yesterday,’ he said. ‘Fool that I was, it never occurred to me that others beside myself might see the likeness.’
‘Am I very like her?’
‘Sometimes. You seemed very like her when I came home three nights ago, and saw you standing by the lamp. The odd thing is that now I know it for nothing but a chance resemblance, now also that I know you a little better, it seems to me not so very strong after all.’
Beric said almost defiantly, ‘Why should they have kept the cubling from you?’
‘For no reason in the world, save, as you probably learned from Cordaella, that they gave me his mother unwillingly in the first place. She was of the Brigantes; a tribe that has never taken kindly to the Eagles … . Nay, then, it was a wild notion, I admit; it never touched my mind until the night I saw you among Publius Piso’s slaves.’ Justinius hesitated, and then went on, almost as though it mattered to him that Beric should understand : ‘I went back next morning. There was nothing to be done that night: Glaucus was drunk. I went back in the morning, prepared to get you from him if I had to pull the house apart to do it. But I was too late; you were already gone. I could get no word of you, and I had to sail for Britain two days later.’ He broke off, staring down into the flames, and for a moment his dark, hawk-nosed face had an oddly shadowed look, despite the firelight on it. Then he asked in quite a different tone: ‘Why did you go down to the camp this morning?’
It seemed like a change of subject, but Beric knew that it was not. ‘I went to find you—to tell you that I was going away,’ he said steadily. ‘But you were not there, and in the end I would have gone without telling you, after all.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the byre. ‘But for her, I should have been well away by now.’
‘Then I give her my thanks,’ Justinius said. ‘Why were you going, Beric? Was it because of what you overheard yesterday?’
Beric nodded.
‘Remember, when I bade you stay, it was after I knew the truth about you, not before.’
‘I think that you would not turn back from a thing because the living heart was gone out of it,’ Beric said wretchedly. ‘Beside—it is more than the thing I overheard. When you bade me stay, I was glad, because I had not thought; but now I have thought; I was afraid when I went down to the camp this morning—afraid lest any should know me for what I am. There can be no place within the reach of Rome for a runaway galley slave.’
‘For a runaway galley slave, no,’ Justinius said. ‘You, however, are in very different case. You were put overboard from your galley for dead. There is no hunt on your trail; the galleys are done with you as surely as you with them … . Nevertheless, it is not good to live out one’s life, even a little, in hiding. I also have been thinking, and the fruit of my thinking is this: that since you went to the galleys for a crime of which you were guiltless, the sooner we prove it the better.’
Beric caught a sharp breath, and then let it go very carefully. ‘Prove it? How—could we prove it?’
‘Do you remember Calpurnius Paulus, the ancient Senator who was my neighbour at dinner that night? I have not many friends, but he is one of them. It is in my mind that he is the man to take the matter up.’
Beric stared at him in silence for a long moment, while his whole meaning sank in. ‘But—but sir——’ he burst out at last, stammering in his desperate urgency. ‘Even if he did—if he did, and I were proved guiltless, and the old sentence wiped away—I should be Glaucus’s slave again.’
‘No, you would never be Glaucus’s slave again,’ Justinius said. He turned and crossed to his writing-table, and taking a key from the breast of his leather tunic, unlocked a small battered coffer that stood there, and began to turn up the contents. ‘When I went back to the Piso house that morning and found you gone, that was the one thing I could do—to make sure that at least you did not fall into Glaucus’s hands again. He was naturally most unwilling to sell you to me; but—I know certain things about that young man that he would not wish known to his world.’ There was a small, grim smile on Justinius’s mouth. ‘I am not fond of such weapons, but in the circumstances——’ He left the sentence unfinished, and taking a slim papyrus roll from the coffer, tossed it to Beric. ‘I had this made out at the same time.’
Beric caught and unrolled it, and remained a long time staring down at the few lines of writing within. It was his manumission, his freedom from the arm-ring. So he had been a free man, when he came to trial in that law-court in Rome, with the mistral bl
owing. If only he had known!
‘The name must of course be altered,’ Justinius said. ‘I never imagined Hyacinthus to be your own name, but it was the only one I knew you by.’
Beric let the scroll fly back on itself. ‘You have carried this thing a long time.’
‘I have been near to destroying it, more than once.’ Justinius closed the lid of the coffer, and came back to the fire. ‘But I suppose that, against all reason, I hoped that you might come for it, one day.’
‘Oh no, not I, but the son you thought I might be,’ Beric said, hopelessly.
Justinius hesitated. ‘I suppose so, yes—in the first place.’
‘Better for you that the cubling died. We make poor sons, we who row the Empire’s galleys; living after the ways of beasts, we forget how to live after the ways of men.’ Beric kicked savagely at a log, and watched the sudden flare of flame. ‘I can find no place here. Let me stay until the dog is strong again, then let us both go. We shall do better in the wilds than among men, she and I.’