A few moments later he had taken his leave of Rhiada; Gelert also. Gelert had padded whining after him a few paces, then swung back to his master. And going on alone into the burning emptiness, he knew one pang of utter desolation; and then the thought of small Canog came pattering to comfort him, and he realized that if Gelert had changed, so had he. It had not been the sound of Gelert’s paws behind him that he had been missing, as he came up towards Marsh Island.
He passed the outpost camp without meeting anyone, and came down to the end of the Wall. The chalk-stack that stood there ready for use in an emergency glared harshly golden among the flame-tipped furze, but already the fearful brightness was dying, as he struck out along the line of the great embankment. He was lost in a confusion of many thoughts that came and went, eddying and intermingling in his head like the smoke of a windy fire. The coming storm; the shackle-scar on his wrist; Lucilla and Hippias and their lantern; the green fringe of the Marsh; Rhiada and Gelert. He had been so sure that the old life was done with; he had shut it out and put up the bars against it, and now … Odd how the worst gales seemed to come at seed-time or the fall of the leaf—just when the tides were at their highest.
It was dark when he came to the edge of the drainage strip, and the wind, rising with the dusk, was blowing in long, shuddering gusts from the south-west; and the standing water was ruffled like the feathers of a bird with the wind behind it, mealy pale between the darkness of the Marsh and the darkness of the Weald. Still tangled in his thoughts, he took to the narrow boarded cat walk, and so came at last to the sluice under the Weald. It was low tide outside, and the roar of the water down the outlet channel made a deep undertone to the wind that was moaning up from the dark saltings. Along the toe of the Weald the furze and elder scrub were in a turmoil, and the whole night seemed full of fret and shivering and the rising voice of the seven-mile-distant surge. The camp, when he reached it, was purposeful with drilled activity, as the Legionaries came and went about the usual foul-weather precautions, and in the forum before the Commander’s tent men were falling in as though for the march.
The faint gleam of a lantern within the tent threw the long shadow of Centurion Geta on to the canvas by the entrance, and as Beric reached it, he heard the Commander’s voice inside. ‘I leave it to your judgement; if conditions become really ugly, you may have to keep the sluice closed. Better we lose a few days draining, than risk damage to the outlet channel. Good luck, Centurion.’
‘Good luck to you, sir: you’ll maybe need it more than we shall.’ The crested shadow slid across the canvas, and Centurion Geta came ducking out under the low flap.
Beric, ducking in an instant later, found Justinius standing by the lantern which hung from the tent-pole, making some adjustment to the chin-strap of his helmet, which he held in his hands. He looked up as Beric entered, and his eyes in the lantern-light had the cool brightness of a man going into battle.
‘Ah, Beric! I was hoping you would be back soon.’
‘I have been out on Marsh Island.’ Beric thrust the wild hair out of his eyes. ‘They are saying out there that there is going to be the worst storm that has broken on this coast for years. Did you see the sky at sunset?’
Justinius nodded, his hands still busy with the chin-strap of his helmet. ‘I saw the sky at sunset, yes. At least we cannot say that we have had no warning.’
‘How will it go with the sluice-bank, sir?’
‘I am not afraid for this end of the defences in a south-westerly gale; there is a certain amount of shelter from the Weald and from Bull Island. The danger point is where you have just come from. The Wall is not yet as high as I should like, out there; there is no shelter, and the big seas pitch on to the shingle with nothing to break them.’ He had the strap fixed now. He put on his helmet and began to buckle it as he spoke. ‘That is why I am leaving Centurion Geta in charge at this end, and taking half the Century out to Marsh Island to-night.’
So that was the meaning of the gathering in the forum and the words that Beric had heard as he came up. ‘You feel the danger so great?’ he said.
The Commander tested the buckle, and let his hands fall. ‘I have a feeling that everything we have worked for is in jeopardy,’ he said quietly. ‘South-westerly gales there have been before and will be again; this is going to be something more—something that only happens once in a hundred years.’ For an instant his eyes seemed to darken in the lantern-light. ‘The Marsh knows. The Marsh is afraid.’
Rhiada had said much the same thing, so had the headman out on Marsh Island; but Rhiada and the headman were Celts, seeing as the Celt sees, and from them it had seemed natural. From Justinius, the words, spoken in quiet and deadly earnest, had a rather frightening potency.
He saw the look on Beric’s face, and smiled, tightening his belt. ‘Blame it on my British grandam,’ he said, turning for his cloak.
Beric caught it up and brought it to him. ‘I will come out, too, sir.’
‘Having but this breath of time got back?’ Justinius, busy with the bronze fibula at his shoulder, nodded towards a bowl of loaves and a slab of cheese on the camp table. ‘Eat first, then go down to the picket lines. We are turning half the pack-train out, and the ponies will take some handling in this wind. The Optio in charge will want every man he can get.’
‘What of Antares?’
‘Antares stays in camp.’ Justinius had already turned to the tent-flap, when his eye fell on a set of tablets lying beside the bread and cheese on the table, and he checked. ‘And at this time, of all others, I must needs receive a message from the Commandant at Lemanis, that the new Legate is up there to see off a vexillation of the Legion for service in Germany, and proposes to give himself the pleasure of inspecting my sea defences in two days’ time.’
It was a moment before the full import of that piece of news touched home to Beric, and he said: ‘The Legate Cornelius Chlorus?’
‘The Legate Cornelius Chlorus,’ Justinius agreed, his eyes on Beric’s face.
The name seemed to fall into a trough of quiet between gust and gust of the rising wind. Beric stood very still, staring at Justinius with wide, hard eyes. Then, afar off, a fresh gust wakened. It came roaring up across the saltings, nearer and nearer, to burst in a booming spray of sound against the canvas walls of the tent. The light of the lantern leapt and swung, sending Justinius’s bull-broad shadow licking up the wall; then, as the gust passed on, Beric said levelly: ‘It is in my heart that I hope we shall have got our gale over, for him.’
‘It is in my heart that I hope we shall have some sea defence left for his inspection,’ said Justinius. ‘A sad pity it would be, if he were to get his sandals wet.’ Then he was gone, head down into the windy darkness, with his heavy cloak beating like great wings behind him.
After his going, Beric stood for a few moments staring past the glow of the lantern, seeing, not the bare brown canvas of the tent wall, but an aloof, eagle-crested figure on the poop of the Alcestis.
He heard an order outside, and the tramp of feet. Then he caught up the loaves and cheese and stowed them down the breast of his tunic, and, quenching the lantern, ducked out himself into the wind and the night, heading down through the camp towards the picket lines.
XVIII
THE GREAT STORM
DAWN broke over the Marsh, with the gale mounting steadily, and out at the far end, where there was no shelter from Bull Island or the Weald, the wind seemed like a living enemy bent on tearing the little settlement out by the roots as though it had been a furze bush and whirling it away into the sea. Beric had been at work with the pack-train since midnight, loading boulders from the long ridge behind the sea-wall, which, running north-east as it did, stood in no danger with the gale in this quarter; and bringing them across the fringe of Marsh Island, to unload beside the chalk dump, ready for use if the Rhee Wall started to go. Even in the shelter of the dunes it was hard to stand, and the small, sturdy pony that was Beric’s charge turned its tail to the wind, ducking
its head and straddling its legs far out, seeming to be chiefly kept from blowing away itself by the growing load in its canvas panniers.
Yesterday the warm brown falls of shingle and the grass-bound dunes had been gay with patches of yellow homed poppies, with broom and sea lavender and the little almond-scented convolvulus. They were torn and beaten down now, broken and whirled away or streaming out flat with the harsh dune-grasses; and the wind roaring across the dunes drove before it stinging clouds of sand to blind and choke the men working there. Beric had never known such a wind; not even on the wild headlands of his old home; and yet something in him exalted in it, triumphing wildly and fiercely, because the Rhee Wall had stood one tide without breaching.
Beric packed the last stone into the pannier on his side of the pony, and seized its halter. In a sudden lull of the wind, he shouted to the tribesman who had been loading on the other side: ‘Does this often happen, hereabouts?’
The man—he was old and weather-beaten, with the farsighted eyes of men used to the sea—shook his head. ‘There has not been such a wind as this in my time, nor I doubt there was such a wind in my father’s time, nor my father’s father’s. It is in my heart that there will be women wailing along the coast to-morrow.’
He turned to another pony and driver, that had just come battling up, and Beric urged his own pony round into the wind, and with an arm across its neck, started off yet again on the return trip. Far ahead, he could see another laden pony and its driver, battling into the wind; soon, if he looked back, he would see another behind him. Before long he passed a pony with its empty panniers rolled up and strapped close, heading with its driver in the opposite direction. Then a second and a third. So it had been going on since midnight, while with every trip the wind worsened. Well, this would be the last trip for them; after this would be a rest, and other men and ponies taking over.
Heads down into the wind, Beric and the pony struggled back together along the fringe of Marsh Island, halting at times to lean up against the gusts, plunging forward again when the gusts passed. At last, through the lashing, breast-high furze of the inland slope, they came out below the camp and turned down to the end of the Rhee Wall. Several men were in action around the growing dump; the pony ahead of them was being led away as Beric and his pony staggered up, and the man who had helped with its unloading turned to the new-comers. Between them he and Beric unloaded the weary little brute, and got its wildly flapping panniers rolled close before they carried it clean away. When it was done, the Optio in charge jerked his head towards the camp. ‘All right. Get him picketed, and turn in.’
In the little outpost camp everything was clewed up and pegged down, secured against the wind and weather. And all at once, as he picketed the pony in the makeshift lines behind the open turf-roofed store-shed, where stakes and hurdles were stacked ready in case of need, Beric found himself remembering the Alcestis, her decks cleared for foul weather. The thought of her came to him without any of the old horror. Black beans, and sun-dazzle on heaving water, he remembered, scourge and heart-break-and yet something more; something that the groaning rabble of her rowing-benches had known, the night they fought to save her from the Barrier Sands. A floating hell, the Alcestis of the Rhenus Fleet, yes: but he knew suddenly that never a wind would rise in all his life that would not taste salt on his lips and blow back to him, with an odd tugging at his heartstrings, the buoyant lift of the galley, and the straining swing of the white-fir oars.
With the pony at last watered and fed, he battled off past the roped stack of thorn faggots, to the barrack row, which was packed now—as indeed every corner of the camp that offered shelter was packed—with tribesmen and Legionaries off duty and getting what rest they could. Somebody gave him hard bread and a cake of raisins, and he ate them, drank at the communal water-jar, and stretched out thankfully in a vacant corner. Here, sheltered from the gale which howled across the low turf roof, and warmed with the warmth of close-packed bodies, he drowsed among the turmoil, until somebody fell over his legs and he woke to hear, beneath the shrieking overtones of the wind, the long-drawn boom and crash of the seas on the outer slope of the Wall, and knew that another tide was upon them.
The wind seemed higher than ever, and the spray was flying far across the Marsh, as he fought his way out to the picket lines again.
All that was left of that day, all the long night, and all the long day after, the wind screamed across the Marsh; and tide after tide rose, each one higher than the last, and hurled itself upon the Rhee Wall, and sank back only as though to gather strength for the next attack. The foul-weather patrols fought their way to and fro along the Wall, on the outlook for any sign of damage, and somehow men and ponies were fed and watered—water was carefully rationed by now, for the springs on Marsh Island showed signs of giving out, under the extra demand. Time passed like a wild dream. They lost all sense of being part of a world that had other people and other things in it; they were a tiny storm-swept world of their own, with nothing outside their frontier but shrieking grey chaos. Only one thing remained steadfast and constant, and that was the squat figure of the Commander, who seemed, during those wild days and nights, to be everywhere at once; his helmet crammed down on his forehead, his cloak long since abandoned, bringing always a feeling of strength and increase to the men who found him among them.
Night came again, the third night of the gale, and still, as it wore on, the embankment held, though whole stretches of the guard wall had been torn away, and replaced with makeshift hurdle-work by men labouring feverishly between tides. Now the tide was running up again, and in the picket lines Beric crouched with the rest of the British drivers, each man beside his pony, as he had done every time the tide rose toward the Wall. Deafened by long use, he had almost ceased to hear the roar of the gale; there was shelter here behind the store-shed, and looking up past the prick of the pony’s ears he could see the bright smear of the moon through the curdled skies that scudded overhead like driven sheep. Sometimes the clouds thinned, and the moon peered through, with a nimbus of murky rainbow colours round it, before they drove across again. Then it began to seem that the skies were standing still, and the moon above them and the dark Marsh below were rushing through the night, on and on—faster and faster——
He realized that somebody was shaking him and yelling in his ear. He did not catch the words, but he had no need to. This was it!
All around him, his fellow drivers were scrambling up. In a daze, he stumbled to his feet, and almost before he was fully awake, was heading down through the furze towards the Wall, with his arm over the neck of a willing but puzzled pony, the blown tail of the next a yeasty blur in the dark ahead of him. There were men waiting by the chalk and boulder dumps, to load the pack-beasts; the work went forward with urgent speed in the hurly-burly darkness, and in a very short time, the panniers filled now with glimmering lumps of chalk, Beric and the pony were off again, fighting their way down the Wall.
In the midst of the straggling pack-train laden with chalk and boulders, stakes and thorn faggots, Beric stumbled onward with his arm across his pony’s neck, and its wiry mane lashing in his face. He was fighting to keep close in to the foot of the bank, where there was a little shelter from the gale that rushed shrieking overhead, but again and again the gusts sent them staggering out sideways into the Marsh, and it was all that he could do to get the pony’s head into the wind again and beat back. He had no idea how far they had to go, knowing only that somewhere in front of them was a breach in the Wall, and it seemed a gruelling long way; but in reality they had not gone far when a faint shout out of the hurly-burly ahead told them that they had reached the place.
The moon rode clear at that moment, and the flying silver light showed them all too plainly the seas breaking clear over the embankment on a front more than a spear-throw wide. And already a ragged hollow was forming in the dark outline of the crest, which grew deeper and broader with every wave that crashed across it and came pouring down to deluge the
men below.
The Legionaries were already on the scene, and among the moving shapes, the gleam of moonlight picked out for an instant the squat, purposeful figure of the Commander, striking a spark of fire from the bare comb of his helmet. There were men up in the breach, driving stakes to hold the boulders and great lumps of chalk, while others, well behind the Wall, were filling the big two-man hods with earth. Here also there were men for the unloading, dark shadows starting out of the gale-torn darkness, as Beric halted the pony; hands that tumbled out the glimmering chunks of chalk on to the growing pile by the breach; and then he was round again, urging the pony back the way it had come.
How many times he made the trip he had no idea, but every time he returned with a load he saw that, despite all the efforts of the men struggling to check it, the breach was growing deeper.
He was in the act of turning the pony once more, when the moon rode clear again, and, snatching a glance over his shoulder, he saw Justinius up there in the breach, outlined against the racing sky. Even as he looked, the lip of a green sea swept over the embankment, and for a moment the figures in the breach were lost in a spreading burst of spray. Beric was barely conscious of thrusting the pony’s halter upon a shadow that chanced at that instant to be standing near; he only knew that almost before the wind had whipped the last of the spray away, he was up beside Justinius in the crumbling breach.
The gale had ceased to blow in gusts; up here it was one continuous shrieking blast that flattened his breath into his body. The tide, piling in over the saltings, three feet above its normal height at springs, had completely engulfed the makeshift guard wall at the toe of the defences, and was swirling unchecked far up the embankment; the great, swinging seas flinging in blow after blow, as though to pound the Wall to pulp. And Beric, choking with the force of the wind, half blind with spray as he struggled to pack in the raw lumps of chalk, could feel the bank tremble and vibrate under him like a plucked harp-string.