And Beric watched and listened and obeyed, working as he had never worked before; so that by the end of the lesson he was really beginning to have some idea of what it was all about. And then he was happy.
But after the lesson was over and Pridfirth had gone about his own affairs, with the appalling swiftness of a nightmare in which familiar things suddenly become strange and horrible, Beric’s whole familiar world turned traitor.
It began when he looked up from slackening the strap round his middle, to see several of the boys crowding in on him with jeering, hostile faces.
‘Beric has been working very hard,’ said one.
‘He need not waste his sweat. Everyone knows the Red Crests are as much use as cows on the hunting trail!’ said another.
‘Red Crest!’ chanted a third; and they began to jostle him. ‘Ya-ee! Red Crest! Why don’t you go back to your own people?’
Beric faced them, panting a little. All his life he had played and fought and tumbled about with these boys, his pack-brothers; and neither he nor they had had any thought of his not being one of them. But that was all over, since two nights ago. He knew now what old Ffion had meant when he said: ‘If he can hold his own with the pack, after this night’s work, he will make a warrior worth the having.’ He understood perfectly what was happening. He had seen the hound-pack turn on a strange dog before now, or one that was hurt, or different from themselves in any way.
A second-year boy, Cathlan by name, came thrusting through the rest, and gave him a casual buffet on the side of the head. ‘We don’t want little strutting Red Crests in the Spear Brotherhood,’ he said.
Beric staggered, for the blow had been a heavy one; then, with his ear ringing, he recovered himself. ‘Don’t you? But you are going to get one!’ he shouted, and hit Cathlan full on the mouth with all the strength that was in him.
There was a long-drawn gasp from the rest, and Beric, watching the surprise and rage on Cathlan’s face, expected the whole lot of them on top of him next breath, pulling him down like hounds on their quarry. But the rush did not come, and vaguely, as Cathlan flung himself upon him, he realized that the others had drawn back a little, leaving an open space around the two of them. It was to be single combat, then, the stranger against the chosen champion of the pack.
Cathlan was a year older than Beric, and more than a year heavier; also he was a renowned fighter, whereas Beric had never fought in earnest before. But he was fighting in earnest now, fighting for his place in the Clan, and he knew it. He fought like a wild cat, hitting out savagely again and again, with no thought to guard against the hurly-burly blows that he got in return. All around them the squealing and yelping uproar rose, shriller and shriller yet, as the excitement of the onlookers mounted; but in the midst of it he and Cathlan fought in panting silence. They were down on the ground now, rolling over and over in a mass of flailing arms and legs, hitting wildly at each other with short jabbing blows. Then, quite how it happened Beric never knew, Cathlan was underneath. His freckled face all battered and smeared, he glared up at Beric; his mouth was shut tight, and he breathed through flaring nostrils like a stallion, as he struggled to get uppermost. Beric clung on, sobbing, and very near to his last gasp; blood from his nose was spattering down on to the other boy’s furious upturned face; he felt sick and his heart seemed bursting. He set his teeth, and with one last effort, gripping his squirming enemy between his knees, he got Cathlan’s ears in his hands and banged his head again and again on the hard-beaten ground.
He saw the fury turn vague and stupid in the other boy’s face, and felt the fight go out of him. He gave Cathlan’s head a final bang; then he staggered to his feet, and stood with the back of one hand pressed against his dripping nose, staring down at his fallen enemy. Cathlan lay where he was for the space of a dozen heart-beats, and then got up more slowly, licking a burst lip. For a long moment the two stood looking at each other, breathing hard. Then Beric turned on his heel, and with his bleeding nose in the air walked away. The little silent crowd parted, with a new respect, to let him through.
Looking neither to right nor left, he walked straight up through the oak woods, and over the bare hill-shoulder beyond, where the brood mares were at run with their feather-tailed foals beside them; on and on until he came out on to the headland, and along it to its farthermost end. And there, where two paces more would carry him into the Western Sea, he flung himself down on the coarse grass of the cliff-top.
Ever since he had been strong enough on his legs to get down the steep cliff-tracks, the shelving rocks of the Seal Strand had been a favourite haunt of his; but he seldom came right out here to the point, because he knew that it was among the rocks of the Point that Cunori his father had found him after the great storm, and the place made him feel unsafe, as though it were a weak spot in the circle of his familiar world, through which another world might break in on him. But to-day the very feeling that usually kept him away from the Point drew him out to it. It was all very odd and bewildering.
There was an ache in his stomach that was not hunger; an ache that was quite different from anything he had known before, and which he did not understand. He would be free to run with the pack now, he knew that: and yet he felt all the desolation of an outcast. He had won his first fight, and he was triumphant with a hard, harsh triumph. He was afraid, because he had come face to face with things that he had never dreamed of, and the sure foundations of his world had shifted under his feet. He was angry with almost everything under the sun, without quite knowing why; he was lost and shaken and bewildered, and his bruises hurt, and it was all these things twisted together into a hard knot within him that made the ache in his stomach.
‘There is a great stone in my belly,’ he told the wheeling gulls, ‘and I do not understand, I do not understand.’
He noticed the dried blood on the back of his hand, and licked it off, tasting it salt, with a sweetness under the salt. He lay for a long time on his front, looking down. There was a lazy wind blowing, stirring the dry heads of the sea-pinks on the ledges, and sighing through the rough grass by his ear, with a clear, high note—almost a singing—above the soft, wet roar of the never-ceasing surge. The sea was lazy too; the slow, unceasing combers breaking far out, the foam-laced shallows playing delicately, kitten-wise, with the black rocks and the little shingle beaches. He watched the water come swinging in, greening as it shallowed, laced and curdled and frilled with foam, with a slap and a delicate curl-back on to itself as it met the flat surface of a rock, creaming up between them in threads of white; then draining out again with a shrill hushing over the shingle, to join with the next wave—and the next—and the next. Sometimes a gull’s wings would sweep by below him; once it was the grey-blue wings of a peregrine falcon who had an eyrie on one of the ledges with two young in it. But he did not watch them. The stone in his belly came between him and them, and he had too many things to think about.
His own father and mother, for instance. He had scarcely ever thought about his own father before, because Cunori had always been there, filling that place for him; and he had never thought about his own mother at all, because it was beyond him to imagine any mother but Guinear. But he thought about them now, watching the lazy wavelets creaming among those black rocks, realizing suddenly, and for the first time, that they had not been just people in a story, but real people, though he knew nothing about them save that his father had looked like a soldier, and his mother had had golden-brown hair. His people, and he theirs.
A slight movement close to him made him look round; and there, just squatting on to his haunches a few paces away, was Cathlan.
Beric rolled over and sat up, ready for the fight to begin again if it had to; and the two of them sat and looked at each other. Cathlan’s face was smeared with dried blood, and his bruises were dark upon him; but he did not look as though he had come to re-start the fight; and there was an odd expression on his battered face—a sort of elaborate carelessness.
‘What have
you come here for?’ Beric demanded in a small, gruff voice.
‘It is hot,’ said Cathlan, ‘and I am very bloody. I came to bathe.’
‘There is water in the stream by the training ground.’
‘Too crowded,’ said Cathlan, with a sniff. ‘All the rest are splashing in it; besides, I like best to bathe in the sea.’
‘Go you and bathe in the sea, then,’ said Beric.
‘Umph!’ grunted Cathlan non-committally. He stared thoughtfully at a gull that swept overhead. ‘Let you and me go down to the Seal Strand and bathe now,’ he suggested.
‘I do not want to bathe.’
‘Come on,’ Cathlan urged, still casually. ‘You are all bloody too, and your nose wants washing.’
‘Your mouth looks like a blackberry,’ Beric told him.
Cathlan began to grin and checked as he discovered that it hurt. ‘I know. It was a good fight.’
There was another silence, but of quite a different kind. ‘Yes,’ Beric said at last, wonderingly. Yes.’
‘I’ll wager there would not be two better fighters than you and me in all the Dumnonii,’ said Cathlan, with deep satisfaction. ‘Let you and me go and bathe now.’
They got to their feet, and made their way back along the headland, pulling off their kilts as they ran, scrambling down to the shelving rocks where the grey seals came to bask at ebb tide. And there, sitting in the swinging, foam-laced shallows, they washed each other’s hurts with great thoroughness.
From that day forward, Beric and Cathlan hunted together.
III
THE OUTCAST
SO for six years Beric ran with the pack, learning to be a warrior and a hunter; something of a farmer too, though the cattle and the field-strips were for the most part tended by the women. He learned to handle horse and hound, sword and spear and the man-high long-bow of the tribes. He learned to follow a three-day-old spoor as though it were a beaten trail. And little by little he forgot, almost as completely as the rest of the pack seemed to do, that he had ever had to fight for his right to run with them.
When he was twelve, Keri, the beautiful, brindled mate of Bran, had puppies; and Cunori gave the finest of the litter to Beric, to be his own hunting companion. Beric called the pup Gelert, and for long months, during which he learned as much as Gelert did, he gave up every free moment to training him; so that by the time the hound was a year old and the boy thirteen, they could think with one mind, as a hunter and his hound should do.
And then at last the fifteenth harvest of his life was gathered in, and the Feast of New Spears came round again, and it was time for Beric to receive his weapons and become a man. At fifteen, he was smaller and stockier than his fellows, with narrower hands and feet, but despite Istoreth’s accusation of six years ago, there was little in his square brown face with the cleft chin and level eyes, nor in his tawny colouring, to set him apart from the rest. Many races went to the making of Rome, and if there was Latin blood in him, without doubt there was Celtic also. Certainly, standing with the other boys of his year on this long-awaited Night of New Spears, he had no thought of any difference between them. His mind did go back to that other Feast of New Spears, six years ago, to the small boy who had looked forward so eagerly to this one—and to what had happened after; but only as one looks back to old, unhappy things that have nothing to do with the present. The present was good, and the future would be good too, the future in which he and Cathlan together would become great men in their Clan, hunters and warriors without equal.
But the future which looked to Beric that night to be as straight and shining as the white ash shaft of his new war-spear was to be a very different one, after all.
The months that followed his initiation into the Men’s Side were bad months for the Clan; bad ones for the whole Tribe. The harvest had been a lean one, wrecked by summer storms, and all through the autumn and the wild wet winter the hunting was bad; and when the lambing time came many of the lambs were born dead, and often the ewes died too, as happened sometimes in a wet season. Just after the turn of the year one of the Clan’s chief hunters was killed by a boar. Spring came suddenly and early, but instead of better times, it brought fever.
It was after the fever came that Beric began to notice people looking at him; looking and whispering. At first he thought that he was imagining things, or maybe sickening for the pestilence himself, but soon he realized that it was not that. The Men’s Side began to leave a little space between him and them when they gathered together. Only Cunori his father and Rhiada the Harper seemed untouched by the general unease; and Cathlan, who stood shoulder to shoulder with him on all occasions, with a bright-eyed defiance that somehow hurt Beric more deeply than the drawing aside of the other men could do. Once he saw a woman make the sign against evil as she passed him. He did not need to wonder what it all meant, for deep within him, he knew; and the knowledge turned him cold, remembering that six-year-distant fight with Cathlan, and the hostile faces of the other boys crowding in on him; remembering the dog-pack turning on the stranger in their midst. But with the surface of his mind he could not believe that such a thing could happen—not to him—not at the hands of his brothers.
It was Merddyn who had sown the seeds of the mischief; Merddyn the Druid, dead these many years. Merddyn had foretold the wrath of the gods on the Clan for taking into itself one of the accursed breed that had torn apart their holy places and butchered their priesthood. People had not paid much heed at the time, for the old man was crazy; they had forgotten, when he died, and only remembered a little, six harvests ago. But now they were beginning to remember very clearly, the memory running to and fro among them like a rising wind through long grass. They looked at each other, and saw the memory behind each other’s eyes, and Istoreth, who had not forgotten his grudge against Cunori, whistled it up again if ever it looked like sinking so that it grew and gained strength.
On an evening towards the end of the spring, Beric came home late to the evening meal which he knew his mother would be keeping warm for him, and found her alone in the big living-hut, and sitting idle with her hands in her lap, which was a thing very strange with her. She looked up quickly as he entered, and at sight of her white, strained face he checked on the threshold, while Gelert brushed past him and padded over to the fire.
‘Mother, what is wrong?’ he asked in swift anxiety. ‘Where are Father and the small ones?’
‘I have sent Arthmail and Arthgal to my sister’s for a little,’ she said dully. ‘Your father is with the rest of the Men’s Side round the Council Fire. Did you not see the gathering as you came by?’
He shook his head. ‘I have been up along the hill-run, trying out the black colt, and I came in by the higher gateway. I’ll go down——’
‘No!’ his mother cried; and then added more quietly: ‘Eat your supper first. It has been keeping warm a long time, and see, it is your favourite—venison stew with herbs.’ She took a smoking bowl from the hot ash as she spoke, thrusting aside Gelert’s enquiring muzzle.
Beric never moved from the threshold. Suddenly his throat felt dry. ‘This gathering—has it to do with me?’
His mother hesitated, looking into the bowl of stew, and then up into his eyes. Still carrying the bowl, though she had clearly forgotten about it with most of her mind, she rose, and came to him in the entrance. ‘It has to do with you.’
‘I will go down and take my place in it,’ Beric said.
‘No. You must bide until you are summoned.’
He went past her and sat down miserably beside the fire. ‘They think it is through me that the lambing was bad this year and the pestilence has come,’ he said. ‘I know.’
His mother followed him, still with the bowl. ‘Beric, Little Cub, try to eat. You must be hungry.’
He took the bowl from her and tried, but he was not hungry now, though he had been very hungry a few moments ago. He was still trying when a shadow darkened the entrance, and Cunori entered.
Beric sprang
to his feet, oversetting the bowl, and stood looking at him with in-caught breath; then realized sickeningly that Cunori was finding it hard to meet his eyes. The silence hung heavy between them. ‘I am to go down with you, to the Council Fire?’ he asked at last.
The other nodded, watching the hounds as they brushed past him to snuffle into the rushes after the spilled stew. Then he raised his head and looked at Beric: an odd look, troubled, angry, and ashamed. ‘Bring your weapons with you, my son.’
Without a word, Beric turned to the far shadows, and took from their usual place his heron-tufted war-spear and proud bronze shield. He felt quite numb, as one can feel from a blow, if it be hard enough. Part of him had known that this was coming, but he had contrived somehow to hide the knowledge from himself because the thing had been too horrible to look at. And now it had come.
Still without a word, without even a glance at his mother standing as though frozen beside the hearth, he turned to follow his father out into the dusk. In the doorway he checked an instant to thrust back Gelert, who tried to follow him; then he went on.
Spear in hand, shield high on shoulder, he strode down towards the glow of the fire that he could see between the crowding huts. The whole village seemed gathered in the central space, when he came out into it; the Men’s Side gathered with their hounds around the Council Fire, and behind them, out of the direct range of the firelight, a dim crowd in the dusk that he knew were the women and boys. In the utter silence they parted to let him through, and, obeying a gesture from his father, he passed him, and walked forward, down the broad, hostile lane that opened for him, out into the firelit circle; and came to a stand, just as he had done six harvests ago, before the place where the Chieftain sat.