He was happy. He was filled with a wild exhilaration that drove out all the confusion and the dregs of old unhappiness that had haunted him so long. This was a clear-cut and simple fight; a personal fight, for the Wall and the Marsh to which it was a rampart, for the green fringe of pasture along the shore that was a promise of better things. Up here, shoulder to shoulder with Justinius in the breach, he had only one thing to do: to keep out the sea that was doing all in its power to come in.
But for a time it seemed a losing fight. Almost as fast as they piled in the chalk and boulders among the driven stakes, they washed out once more, and time and time again, as they struggled to arm the outer side of the breach with thorn faggots to break the force of the seas, the waves tore their work contemptuously away. Beric was crouching far out on the face of the bank, driving more stakes in an effort to secure the thorn-work, when a sea greater than any that had gone before came sweeping in.
He saw the upward rush of it coming, white fringed through the dark, and heard a warning yell, but had no time to do more than fall flat. Yet, as it leapt clear of the crest of the Wall, it seemed to hang there, curving over him for an eternity. It was very still in the hollow of the wave, with the tempest shut out; still and thick with the dark pressure of air. He thought, ‘Cunori was wrong,’ and then something swift and confused and shining, about having at least kept faith with the green fringe of the Marsh. And then the wave curled over.
It seemed to crash down on him with the weight of a world falling. He was blind and stunned and winded. He was being dragged out and down … . His hands had found one of his own stakes to cling to; and it held firm. He hung on, feeling as though his arms were being torn from their sockets and his whole body stretched out like a bit of wet leather; and then suddenly the intolerable drag was gone, and he was lying spreadeagled in the breach, wondering vaguely whether he was still alive. Somebody grabbed him, and he scrambled to his knees and began to drag himself clear.
A voice yelled in his ear, something about thinking he was gone that time.
He shook his head, sobbing for breath. I was not—born to be—drowned.’
It was almost the last of the great waves, the crown of the tempest; but he had no leisure to notice that, until a long while later he realized suddenly that there had been no big seas over the breach for a while. The tide was on the ebb!
The tide was going down, and the light was growing, and away over the tossing wastes of water a bar of sodden primrose showed in the east; and Beric realized that the wetness lashing his face was not spray but drenching rain. For this tide, at least, the Wall was safe.
Presently, with the waves barely reaching the toe of the bank, he scrambled down from the breach after Justinius. The Commander was soaked and squelching as the rest of them; daubed from head to foot with chalk and mud; his eyes were red-rimmed in the leaden light of dawn, and there was a jagged tear along his left cheek-bone as though he had come into violent contact with a thorn faggot. He grinned at Beric, his teeth flashing in the blue-black stubble of a three-days beard, and Beric grinned back, suddenly closer to him than he had ever been before, because they had been fighting for the same thing. There were more men around the breach and along the Marsh behind, Beric thought, than there had been before; it must be that a party from the sluice end had come up at some time in the night to swell their numbers. Justinius swung round on them as they crowded about him, making them the thumbs up as he shouted above the wind: ‘Brave work, lads: we’ve done it!’ Only those nearest to him could hear the words, but the sign did just as well. They returned it to him, half drowned and utterly spent, but all at once grimly jubilant. For a moment it seemed to Beric that they were triumphing too soon, and then he understood. The wind had gone booming round to the north-west. It would blow itself out before long, and meanwhile there would be no more piling up of the seas against the embankment. The Wall was saved.
Suddenly he was so tired that he could barely crawl. It seemed a very long way up to the camp, and he covered the distance in a kind of daze. But when he had eaten his ration of bread and raisins, he left the others to the short spell of rest that Justinius had decreed, and set off for the village, to see that all was well with Rhiada. The gale was sinking already, but even so, he found it hard and unsteady going, for he was leg-weary; as doddery as a day-old calf.
The furze, as he made his way through it, seemed to have come to little harm; but the thorn trees of the Island windbreaks, streaming before the dying gale, showed the battle-scars of many torn-off branches, while here and there they had been uprooted altogether. The village when he reached it was a scene of utter desolation, though already there were folk about in the wind and the driving rain, moving among the storm havoc with the fatalistic lack of fuss of those who live by the sea and know what it can do. Huts had been unroofed, and canoes torn away; one lay smashed against the sheepfold wall. Sand was everywhere, drifted deep between the huts. And looking down across the saltings left bare by the ebbing tide, Beric wondered vaguely why they looked different, until he realized with a queer feeling of unbelief that the nearest arm of the river was not where he had expected it to be, but had cut a new course for itself and now ran close in under the shingle falls of the Island.
A man carrying a spade and a coil of hide-rope checked beside him, his gaze travelling out in the same direction. ‘We shall have easier launching for the fishing now—until in another year there comes another storm, and maybe the river goes elsewhere.’ He nodded to Beric, and trudged on, leaning into the wind.
Beric found Rhiada sitting beside the rekindled fire in the headman’s hut, among women and children, hounds and sheep and poultry; all the village had brought their livestock within doors before the storm reached its height. He was nursing his beloved harp, and Gelert and the boy Kylan and an unknown girl-child all slept against his knees. Beric did not attempt to reach him through the crowded, reeking, smoke-filled place, but crouching in the low doorway where the sand had drifted, he called,’ Rhiada.’
Rhiada lifted his head, careful not to wake the three who slept against his knees, and answered softly, ‘Beric.’
‘Is it well with you?’
‘It is well with me. How is it with you?’
‘We have saved the Wall,’ Beric croaked; and ducked out again into the dying gale. All was well with Rhiada, and they had saved the Wall, and there was nothing more that needed to be said at the moment. Somehow he dragged himself back to the breach, where men were already at work repairing the guard wall, while others laboured on the damaged embankment itself, and Justinius tramped up and down, ankle-deep in churned mud and standing water, directing operations.
The leaden weight of his weariness lifted after a time, and all that day he worked steadily, while the gale died down, and the drenching rain-swathes swept along the Wall, blotting out the Marsh as with a grey, draggle-tailed curtain. The afternoon tide came flooding in over the saltings, driving the men on the guard wall back on to the bank itself: short, steep seas with wind and tide setting against each other. But the wind that had been an enemy these many tides past was become an ally now, tending, if anything, to hold back the water, so that when it ebbed again, there was little new damage to be dealt with. And every tide after this would be less high than the tide before.
By that time the gale had sunk to a fitful wind that swooped in scattered gusts about the Marsh, driving the rain-squalls now this way, now that, and everything was sodden and spent and oddly at peace. Beric had returned to his pack-ponies, fetching down more big stones from beyond Marsh Island, when, as he neared the Wall again, he saw several horses standing to one side, in charge of a couple of Legionaries, and a little group of officers standing before the place where the breach had been.
There was a big stooping man, whom he had seen before and knew to be the Commandant from Portus Lemanis; a couple of young staff officers wrapped close in their scarlet cloaks, and Justinius, standing as usual with his hands behind his back, looking more t
han ever squat and storm-shaped by contrast with the man who stood beside him, tall and aloof in the gilded bronze of a Legate.
Beric had completely forgotten, in the press of more important things, that the Legate was coming to inspect the sea defences. He must have come down to the sluice, found only Centurion Geta and his small party there, and hearing what had happened out at the far end, come on to see for himself. With the tide high, that must have meant getting the horses along the cat walk or wading them through the drainage strip; but it would take more than that, Beric thought, to keep Cornelius Chlorus the Legate from carrying out a plan, once made. He checked for an instant, then went doggedly ahead, skirting the ragged hole where the earth had been taken to pack the breach, to the pile close beside the little group, where the loads were being dumped for immediate use.
‘And what a storm! Zeus! I never remember such a wind!’ he heard the Commandant’s slightly over-ripe voice, as he brought the weary pony to a halt.
‘Doubtless you are not alone in that.’ The Legate gave the harsh, snapping laugh that Beric remembered well.’ I imagine that we have just experienced one of those storms which become local legend, and are spoken of as “The Great Storm” by the great-grandchildren of the men whose mud huts it blew down. Sea-walls, also, for that matter. Do you know, Commander, I was more than doubtful, when I started from Lemanis this morning, of finding much of these sea defences of yours yet standing.’
‘The same doubt occurred to us, at one time,’ Justinius said drily.
There was a pause. Beric, unloading on one side of the pony while a sandy-haired tribesman worked on the other, knew that the Legate was watching the men at work on the breach. ‘Will you have all safe by the next tide?’ he heard.
‘Our patchwork has already stood one tide. Before the next rises, the bank will be fully secured.’
‘I am no expert, but should the bank not be higher, at so exposed a point?’
‘Yes,’ said Justinius, with a faint edge to his deep voice. ‘It should, and eventually it will be. It would have been by now, if I had ever been allowed more than two-thirds of the men I applied for.’
Beric misjudged his cast, and the stone rattled down the pile again to the pony’s feet, making it fling up its head, snorting, and begin to back. He had it checked in an instant, but as he did so, he was suddenly aware that the Legate, his attention caught by the scuffle, had turned from the breach and was watching him. For a moment something seemed to tighten in his stomach; then he looked up, straight into the hard face under the eagle-crested helmet. The face of the man who had killed Jason—he and Porcus and Rome between them. And Beric had tried to kill Porcus because he could not reach Rome or the Legate. But save for Jason himself, it all seemed thin and far off now.
There was no flicker of recognition in the Legate’s eyes. ‘Hard work,’ he said tersely.
‘Hard work,’ Beric agreed. ‘But I’ve known harder.’
There was something in his tone that the Legate was clearly not used to hearing from native labour when he deigned to speak to it, and his brows lifted a little.
Then Justinius took over. ‘Sir, I present to you one of my household, Beric.’
The Legate’s gaze was faintly surprised as Beric raised his hand in salute. It moved consideringly over his mired figure and the place where the sodden remains of his tunic had been ripped off one shoulder, lingered on his face, and then flicked to Justinius. Your son?’
‘Only since the spring,’ Justinius said quietly.
‘So? You make up for lost time, it seems, by breaking him to your trade the hard way.’ The cool gaze flicked back to Beric. ‘When you come to drain the Empire’s Marshes on your own account, at least none of your men will be able to tell you that you demand of them what you have not done yourself. Do you carry your shield in my Legion? The mud makes a difference, of course, but I think that I have not seen you before.’
Beric shook his head. ‘I carry no shield in your Legion or any other.’
The Legate’s brows rose a shade further. Surprising! I should have thought that any son of Justinius, even one dating from the spring——’ He left the sentence unfinished, and with a careless, but perfectly friendly nod, turned away to ask Justinius some question about the work. A few moments later the whole party were moving off towards the outpost camp.
Behind them, Beric turned quietly back to the pony. The sodden and desolate levels of the Marsh darkening under a new rain-squall seemed to him suddenly to shine. He felt empty and clean and light. It was like the moment in his dream, when Jason had said: ‘See, we thought that they were iron, but all the while they were only made of rushes.’ And he had looked down and seen that his shackles were of plaited green rushes, and snapped them with a finger, and gone free. He did not know quite when the thing had happened, nor why; save that the storm and the fight for the Rhee Wall and the green fringe of the Marsh had been in some way to do with it; and the Lady Lucilla and Hippias and their lantern; and Rhiada coming out of the old life with Gelert at his heels and leaving the door open behind him. Those had been the things that mattered. But it was just now, when Cornelius Chlorus the Legate, who did not much matter, had looked at him as one who had never seen him before, that suddenly he had known that he was free. Free of the old unhappy things and the bitterness of betrayal that had been like an evil fog between him and the world. Free of the shackle-gall on his wrist.
‘Well, is it a good dream?’ demanded the sandy tribesman in exasperation. And he found that he was standing stock still, and staring at the boulder in his hands as though he had never seen such a thing before. It was warmly brown, and the rain had brought up the pattern on it. Speckled like a peewit’s egg, it was. Beautiful.
‘It was a good dream,’ he said, and flung the stone on to the pile.
In the quiet grey of the next morning, Beric stood with Rhiada and Gelert and the boy Kylan where the track from the base camp ran up into the woods. ‘I wish that you would not go,’ he said. ‘Stay yet one night more, and sing to us again.’
‘Nay, I sang to you last night, but it is in my heart that this is no place for songs just now, and I will not eat where I do not sing. I am for the next village up-river, where maybe there will be less of storm damage to come between men and the music of my harp.’
‘Rhiada——’ Beric said, and hesitated.
‘Cubling?’
‘Rhiada, you will be going back some time? Back to the Clan?’
‘Assuredly, when my wanderings carry me west again.’
‘Will you take a message for me, to Guinear my mother? I promised her, on the night they cast me out, that when I had made a new life among my own people I would send her word —once, and not again—that she might know that it was well with me.’
‘I will tell her,’ Rhiada said. ‘Is there anything beside?’
‘No. Tell her that I have made a new life among my own people, and that it is well with me, and that I remember my promise. That is all.’
‘Maybe it is better so,’ the harper said after a moment. He held out his hands. ‘Good hunting to you, Beric: the sun and moon shine on your trail.’
‘And on yours,’ Beric said a little huskily. ‘And on yours, Rhiada.’ He caught the harper’s hands and gripped them, then stooped quickly to rub the great rough head that Gelert was thrusting against him.
A few moments later, Rhiada, with a hand on the boy Kylan’s shoulder, had turned aside to follow his own trail; and Beric was striding on alone up the track. Behind him he heard a shrill, protesting whine, but no scurry of paws came after him. Gelert had made his choice.
The storm had wrought less havoc here than out on Marsh Island, but there were gaps in the woods, and all around him as he climbed the oaks and thorns showed the white wounds of torn-off limbs, while the ground about their feet was thick with leaves and broken twigs and branches. Yet, standing still, with their stripped and tattered arms raised to the tumbled blue and grey and silver of the autumn sky, they seem
ed to Beric to wear their courage and their triumph as though it were a crown of next spring’s green and golden leaves.
The wind break, too, had suffered. The biggest thorn tree was down, and beside it he found Justinius, who had come up to get a hot bath, surveying the tangled mass of branches. ‘We shall have to put in a new sapling,’ he said as Beric halted beside him.
Beric nodded, also looking at the gnarled bole and the long, wind-twisted boughs outflung across the turf. ‘Has the steading suffered much? What of Maia and the colt?’
‘All is well with Maia and the colt, and little amiss with the steading. Like the sluice-bank, we get a certain amount of shelter from Bull Island.’ Justinius half turned towards the house, then paused, looking out over the scarred woods to the estuary. ‘Winter is on the way. Soon the grey geese will be flighting home from the north; we shall hear them overhead any night now.’
‘With the three of us for the work, we shall have the long pasture clear of scrub before the time comes for the spring ploughing,’ Beric said contentedly.
Justinius was silent a moment, then, as they turned back together towards the house, he said: ‘Beric, how would you feel about carrying your shield in the Legions?’
Beric stopped dead in his tracks, and stared at him with startled eyes. ‘Is—that because of what the Legate said yesterday?’ he demanded at last.
‘In a way, though it had occurred to me before. You meant to join the Eagles once, did you not?’
‘Yes.’ Beric rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead. ‘Yes, I did; but that was long ago, and—there is all that came after. I—I had not thought——’
‘It might be worth giving a thought to, now that you are free. There is no need for haste, even for a year or two. There is no fixed entrance age for the Centuriate.’