Yet still he lingered, irresolute, half minded to go up now, after all, but too lost and bewildered from the events of the last few days to hold steadily to any plan. Behind him he could hear the rise and fall of sound from the town, voices and wheels, hooves and feet, passing and re-passing along the streets—a sound that he had never heard before, and found vaguely exciting. This was the place where the Tribe had risen against the Eagles, a few years before he was born. The Eagles had been too strong for them, and they had been beaten back, with the loss of many men, so that even to-day there were thin places in the Men’s Side of the frontier Clans. Well, that was one thing that they could not lay at his door, Beric thought bitterly.
Above him in the fort that had stood firm against that rising, a trumpet sang out, and he wondered what it meant. To-morrow he would find out.
Meanwhile he turned back to the town. Many lights had pricked out there while he was watching the fort, yellow as dandelions in the dusk, shining from open doorways or from lanterns hanging in porches or at street corners. They cast dim showers of gold across the narrow streets and the passing crowds, and deepened the shadows between light and light to a hazy darkness. Beric was beginning to feel hungry, and very tired, but he did not want to eat or sleep yet; he was too restless.
For a long time he wandered about Isca Dumnoniorum. He found parts of the town that were only half built, so that he realized afresh that this was a new town rising from the blackened ruins of the old one that had been burned down after the rising. He looked in at lamplit shops where they sold red pottery, or loaves, or goldsmith’s work that seemed to him most beautiful, or leather goods, or meat. How odd to buy meat instead of hunting for it, he thought. He caught glimpses of lantern-lit courtyards where men strolled about or lounged at tables and women were going round with wine-jars. Those must be wine-shops; he had heard of such places. In one he saw a man sitting, with a great crimson-crested helmet on the bench beside him, and stopped to stare his fill. The soldiers at the gate had had only steel caps with a knob on top; this was his first real Red Crest. Once or twice he caught glimpses through the doorways of people’s houses, of the small, sheltered world inside; but from these he turned away quickly, because they hurt him, and wandered on again, watching the people in the streets, men and women, British and Roman, slave and free, gathering sounds and sights and smells to lay in a thick layer over the hurt within him.
Presently he found himself again in the centre of the town, standing on the edge of an open square surrounded by colonnades, from the far side of which rose a building that seemed to him huge almost past believing. Surely some very great man must live in such a great hall; yet there was no light in the few high windows, and somehow the place had an air of being empty. Perhaps the great man was away, and his household with him.
Someone stopped beside him to tighten a slipping sandal-strap by the light of a temple lantern under which he was standing, and Beric turned to him on an impulse, and asked, ‘What man lives in there?’
The man, a small, merry-looking individual in a filthy tunic, with a scarlet cap stuck rakishly on the back of his head, straightened up and stared at him with round bright eyes. He looked so blank that Beric thought perhaps he did not speak his tongue, and was just going to try again, more loudly, when the man said, ‘In there?’ jerking a thumb in the direction of the huge building. His voice had the slight nasal twang which Beric came to know later as the accent of Greece.
‘Yes. Surely it must be a very great chieftain to live in so great a house.’
‘Zeus!’ said the man, and laughed. ‘No one lives there; that is the Basilica, and all this here in front of it is the Forum.’
‘Oh,’ said Beric, damped, but still curious. ‘What is it for if nobody lives in it?’
‘For business,’ said the man—‘business of all sorts, that is what it’s for. It’s where the merchants meet—and for everything else that happens in the town. When a robber comes to trial, or a boy to manhood, or a soldier to be honoured, or the townsfolk call a meeting to complain about the drains, it all happens somewhere around the Forum or the Basilica. Where are you sprung from, that you don’t know that?’
Beric pointed in his turn towards the north-west. ‘Over yonder, three days’ trail across the frontier.’
‘Down on a trading trip, eh? Skins or hunting dogs?’
The man was obviously friendly, and Beric, who had been feeling more and more lost and lonely all evening, was very glad to find someone to talk to. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I came down to join the Eagles.’
The Greek looked at him with a suddenly arrested eye. ‘What a young game-cock! Just you by your lone?’
A bleak shadow passed over Beric’s face. ‘Just me by my lone.’
‘So?’ The little man nodded, bright-eyed like a bird. ‘And not a friend nor kinsman in the town? You’ll have spent a lonely evening, I’m thinking,’ he grinned. ‘I’m a seaman and a trader myself, and I know those evenings spent kicking your heels round a strange town where you know not a soul and not a soul knows you.’
Beric returned the grin, grateful for the warmth of a human contact as a lost dog for a friendly pat. ‘I had meant to go straight up to the fort, but it was dusk when I arrived, and I thought I had maybe better leave it until the morning. Besides, I was minded to look round the town; but it is lonely work on my own, even as you say.’
The little seaman looked at him for a silent and considering moment. ‘Have you found yourself a sleeping place for to-night, youngster? No, I’ll be bound you haven’t.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ Beric admitted. ‘Could you tell me of a good place where I could get something to eat, and sleep afterwards? Somewhere that would not cost too much?’
The other shook his head dubiously. ‘I’m not so sure that I can. Oh, there are inns and to spare in Isca Dumnoniorum, but they are not over-eager to take in travellers that arrive out of nowhere after dark.’ Then his eye brightened as with an idea. ‘I’ll tell you what, though; the best thing you can do is to come along with me, back to the Clio! We are all sleeping on board to-night because we sail with the morning tide, but I daresay you’ll not mind being turned out early, and you’ll have pleasant quarters and cheerful company for the night. What do you say to that, now?’
‘I say that I will come,’ Beric said. ‘I will come very gladly.’ He pushed himself off from the column against which he had been leaning, suddenly aware of his leaden weight of weariness.
‘Well said! I like a lad who can make up his mind without arguing. Down this way; we will go to the Golden Tree first —the rest of us will be there, and whatever the state of your belly, mine is as empty as a wine-skin after Saturnalia.’
Beric went with him thankfully down the sloping street to the West Gate, the River Gate, which was still open, though the other gates of the town had been shut since dark. ‘The River Gate stays open most of the night; that’s because half the town is outside it,’ his companion told him. And after a cheerful exchange of insults with the guard, in the unknown tongue which most of Isca Dumnoniorum seemed to speak—but that would be Latin, of course, the tongue of his own people—they passed out through the narrow, lantern-lit archway.
The half of the town outside the River Gate was not the respectable half; that was clear even to Beric; but as they plunged into the maze of narrow ways, instantly he was more at home than he had been in the respectable half within the walls. It was a mere huddle of turf-and-timber bothies between the town walls and the river, dark save for the occasional gleam of a fire-lit doorway. Poor quarter; seamen’s quarter, but also native quarter; and mingled with the other smells, the familiar smell of wood-smoke and horse-droppings about it, that was the smell of home.
Only a few steps from the gate, his new friend, whose name he had by that time discovered was Aristobulo, dived like a rabbit into a dark gash between the crowding hovels, at the end of which Beric caught the silver glint of the river; and half-way down, turned again, into a dimly lighte
d doorway. Beric followed him across what appeared to be a stable, and out through another doorway into a courtyard lit by several hanging lanterns, and stood blinking in the flood of thick yellow radiance. There were a dozen or more men in the courtyard, lounging at their ease on the benches and round the walls, who greeted Aristobulo noisily, and looked with quick curiosity at Beric. One of them asked a question half under his breath in the Latin tongue.
Aristobulo, shouldering into their midst, answered in the same tongue, and then changed quickly to the Celtic, for Beric’s benefit. ‘Look now, lads. I’ve brought back a friend—Beric, his name is—and he’s minded to join the Eagles to-morrow, and maybe rise to Emperor, like many a one before him; but he’s got nothing to do and nowhere to go for the night, so he might as well spend it with us.’
Several of the men laughed, as though something in this struck them as funny; and Beric wondered what it was. He thought perhaps it was the reference to the Emperor. But whatever it was, they nodded to him in friendly fashion, and one of them, who seemed to be their chief, said: ‘Any friend of yours, Aristobulo,’ while another made room for them on a bench in the corner; and in a very short time, not quite sure how it all happened, Beric found himself sitting on the bench, helping himself out of a bowl of stewed goat’s-flesh which a stout woman in a pink tunic and a great deal of glass jewellery had brought out and set between him and his new friend Aristobulo. The fat woman poured wine for him into an earthen cup, and he drank it because he was thirsty; but he did not like it very much, not as much as heather beer, not even as much as milk.
Now that his eyes were used to the light, and he had leisure to look about him, he saw that the building that enclosed the courtyard was reed-thatched like a British house-place; but right across one plastered wall there was daubed in yellow paint a sprawling tree—that was why the place was called the Golden Tree, he supposed—with many birds in its branches, oddly shaped birds, but jewel-coloured. He was free to look at the men around him, too, for they were talking together in their own tongue while they ate and drank, leaving him for the moment to himself.
They were lean men, with a ranging, winter-wolf air about them, and eyes that looked used to long distance. They wore short tunics and loose short cloaks, much stained and faded, and several of them had close-fitting caps such as the one Aristobulo wore. The chief among them, who seemed to be called Phanes, was a very tall man, powerfully and beautifully built, who fascinated Beric because his close, curled beard was dyed vermilion and he wore gold drops in his ears like a woman. He was so unlike anything that Beric had seen before that he sat staring at him with the wheat-cake and strong cheese that had followed the stew untouched in his hand, until the tall man, looking round for the woman of the house to refill his cup, caught the stare. Beric flushed up to the roots of his hair, but Phanes only laughed, with a fierce, merry flash of white teeth in his vermilion beard, and lifted his empty cup to him. Beric lifted his own in reply, but something in the other’s snapping laughter made him faintly uneasy; all at once, so deep down in his mind that he was scarcely aware of it, a little warning hammer began to beat. ‘Danger! danger!’ He was not quite sure that he trusted these men.
He thrust the doubt away as base ingratitude to Aristobulo, who had been friendly to him in this town of strangers. And then Aristobulo himself, who had been deep in argument with a barrel-chested man beside him, turned to draw Beric into the talk. Wonderful talk it was, too, when they changed their tongue for his benefit and he could understand it—shining talk that they tossed from one to another like a bright ball: of sea monsters and sea fights and voyages whole moons out of sight of land. One man, it seemed, had sailed half the world over in search of a magical golden fleece, and had the most incredible adventures on the way; while Aristobulo himself told of birds with heads like beautiful women, whose sweet singing lured seamen to their deaths.
‘I suppose,’ said Aristobulo, looking round at his comrades and from them to Beric—‘I do suppose as I am the only man save one that has heard that song and lived. It was this way. Ye see, the Captain I was serving with—not Phanes—was a very wily man, and when he knew that we were drawing near to the island where these Sirens sing, he gave orders that all of us were to stop our ears with beeswax, that we might not hear, while he was bound to the mast and his ears left free, so that he might hear the song but not go to it. So it was done, and we held to our course, and by and by we sees the island in the distance, and then we sees by the Captain’s face that he’s begun to hear the song. Lit up, it did, like as if he saw his heart’s desire before him. And then he began to struggle to get free of his bonds, but they was too surely tied; pull and strain at them, he did, and we could see him crying out to us to untie him, but a’ course we couldn’t hear nothing. Presently we come close alongside the island: little and low it was, and flowery, and there on it stood the three Sirens, like great birds, and their heads as the heads of women with long golden hair. And all among the little bright flowers there was bones a-lying—the bleached white bones of sailor men! Now the beeswax in my left ear weren’t stuffed home as surely as it should a’ been, and suddenly a trickle of the song that the Sirens were singing got through—faint like the sea in a shell, it was, but ’twas enough! I pulls out the bit of wax, and the song comes flooding in, so sweet as never mortal song in this world, and up I jumps to fling myself overboard and go to it, for I hadn’t got no choice. But my mate sees what’s in the wind, and he ups with his fist and catches me such a blow under the ear that I goes out like a candle. And the next thing I know, the island is only a shadow in our wake, and the Captain sitting on the deck and sobbing like a babe.’ Aristobulo wagged his head sadly. ‘But there’s times when I wish I’d never heard that song: comes between me and my vittles, now and again, it do.’
‘But not to-night, eh, lad?’ said the barrel-chested man, with an eye on the cheese, and there was a general laugh; and another man put in: ‘Talking of cheese—that minds me of the time …’
So it went on. And as Beric listened, gradually the little warning hammer beat softer and softer yet; and ceased to beat at all.
Presently Phanes lounged to his feet, stretching until the little muscles cracked behind his shoulders. ‘Time we got back to the ship, lads,’ he said. ‘Herope and Castor will be growing tired of being left in sole charge of the live-stock.’
‘What live-stock is that?’ Beric asked his new friend curiously, as they all struggled to their feet.
‘Only a few leash of hunting dogs being shipped to Rome, and some poultry for the voyage. The hounds fight if they get a chance,’ said Aristobulo.
The men who were nearest to them, and caught his words, glanced at each other with a glint of laughter. And again Beric wondered why; and again the little warning woke and beat in his brain. ‘Danger! danger!’ But it was gone again almost before it came.
The men were settling their scores with the fat woman in pink, but when Beric brought out his few coins she patted his arm with a podgy brown hand, looking at him out of eyes rimmed with black stibium, that must once have been beautiful, and said: ‘Nay now, Honey. They have seen to all that.’
For an instant her hand tightened on his arm, as though she was half minded to hold him back to say something to him, but Aristobulo was calling to him to come on, and with a quick word of thanks, he hurried to join his new friend at the courtyard entrance. ‘Aristobulo, she says you paid for me—I did not mean——’
‘Why, lad, I don’t ask a friend to supper and expect him to pay!’ Aristobulo grinned companionably, and flung an arm round Beric’s shoulder and swept him off after the rest.
They strolled in a bunch down the twisting alleyway, exchanging a passing word here and there with others of their kind, and came out on the river bank, where a rough jetty thrust out into the water. And, lying alongside, the first ship that Beric had ever seen at close quarters. The Clio was a battered little tub, a fine sea vessel, but not beautiful, save with that beauty which comes with
absolute fitness for the use for which a thing was created. But to Beric, seeing her in the moonlight, dark against the fish-scale silver of the river, save for the tawny glow of a brazier at her stern, the furled sail on her yard like a folded wing against the sky, she seemed unbelievably strange and mysterious, a creature of the sea, part gull, part dolphin, lying asleep on the bright surface of the water.
A plank ran from the jetty, over the ship’s side, and the men were crowding up it. Beric followed, sniffing for the first time the mingled smell of rope and pitch and salt-soaked timber which was the smell of ships; and Aristobulo brought up the rear. Two men who had been sitting by the brazier uncoiled themselves and got up, and there was a rapid exchange of question and answer between them and Phanes, as they glanced at Beric. Some of the crew gathered round the brazier, others remained leaning over the side to talk to a couple of tribesmen on the bank; and Beric, with the living sensation of the deck beneath his feet, stood looking round him wide-eyed at the moon-washed curve of the high stern, at the stout mast rising up and the dark wing-curve of the furled sail against the glimmering sky.
Then Aristobulo touched him on the arm. ‘If you’ve stared your fill, ‘tis time we were turning in, for the morning tide turns seaward early. Down the hatch, here.’