‘Give men a chance, first,’ Justinius said.
Beric looked up slowly. ‘Why should I?’ he demanded; and all the black bitterness that the years had bred in him sounded in his voice. ‘Men have not given one to me.’
Something flickered far back in the other’s eyes. ‘I am giving you a chance now,’ he said. ‘I am asking you to take it, Beric.’
‘What can it matter to you?’
Justinius did not answer at once; instead, he turned, and tramped to the door, and stood there, just as he had done three nights ago, staring out across the darkened Marsh. ‘What indeed,’ he said at last. ‘Someone accused me once—I think it was at Piso’s dinner-table—of having a marsh for a wife and a straight paved road for a son; and they spoke more truly than they guessed. But this is my last marsh, and next year, when the work is completed, I take my wooden foil. I have been finding that rather a lonely prospect … . When I came home three nights since, you looked as though you were glad to see me—not as Servius or Cordaella but as someone of my own might be glad. It is twenty years since that happened to me.’ He swung round, looking across the lamplit room. ‘Stay here, Beric.’
Beric stood quite still by the fire, hearing the soft sea-hushing of the wind in the tamarisk as the background to a great quietness. ‘I—will stay, Justinius,’ he said at last, rather hoarsely.
But the old sense of unbelonging was still with him, even now. He was still a stranger in the world he had once belonged to, shut out by the shackle-gall on his wrist, and all that it stood for. Not even Justinius could change that.
XVII
THE WIND RISES
AT first Beric kept to the farm, but little by little, as the summer passed, he came to spend more and more time on the Marsh, where a great earth-bank was rising behind the guard wall, closing the last gap in the sea defences. He had a share in raising that bank, working with the British labour team and the pack-ponies in whose panniers much of the earth was brought from cuts along the edge of the Weald. It should have been good to work with free men again; yet by the summer’s end Beric was no nearer to being one with them than he had been at first. It was as though the reek of the Alcestis’s rowing-deck rose between him and all men, even between him and Justinius, shutting him off from the world he had once belonged to.
But it was not that that had sent him out into the wide emptiness of the Marsh one still September day, instead of spending it at work on the farm, as he usually did when the rest-day came round. It was because he wanted to think, and there was more room for it out there, in the wide, wind-haunted emptiness. He wanted to think about something that had happened yesterday. The mails had just come in, and Justinius had called him into the atrium, and laid a papyrus roll before him, and said: ‘We have won, Beric! You can go down and cry it through the camp that you rowed two years in the Alcestis of the Rhenus Fleet for a crime you never committed, and that the Senate admits it and wipes it off the tablets. I suggest that you do no such thing, for it is none of the camp’s business; but there is nothing under the sun to prevent you.’
The odd thing was that it had not seemed to matter very much. What mattered far more was the thing that had come after, when Justinius had read the Senator Paulus’s letter aloud to him. It was a long letter, with its legal arguments, and hard for Beric to understand; but he understood the important bit.
‘The scales were chiefly tipped in his favour by the extremely fortunate chance that he was seen outside the house of Valarius Longus, on the night of his escape, by an old stable slave who knew him. Immediately I set the needful enquiries on foot, this man, Hippias by name, came forward to swear that on the night in question he was crossing the forecourt to a sick horse, when he heard a sound at the gate, and going to investigate, saw this Beric of yours through the grill, by the light of the portico lantern, just as he was turning away. He called after him, but the boy did not stop. He—Hippias—also swore to having heard cockcrow from the Praetorian Barracks immediately after, the wind being in the right direction. This, of course, makes it well-nigh impossible that, leaving Rome scarcely by dawn, he should have been so far north by dusk, when the robbery took place. When Hippias was asked why he had never spoken of this before, the Lady Lucilla herself came forward to say that he had told her next morning, when he brought her a bundle containing a filed shackle and a silver arm-ring of her father’s household, which he had found under the gate; and she had bidden him keep silent, lest his telling should in any way lead to the boy’s recapture.’
Beric had listened to the reading of the letter very carefully, and then looked up and said: ‘I was many miles out of Rome by dawn; and sir—there was no lantern in the portico.’
He was quite sure, thinking it over, that it had been Lucilla who had thought of the story. Old Hippias was wonderful with horses, but he had not the kind of imagination that invents lanterns.
Deep in his thinking, he had scarcely noticed where his legs were carrying him, until he woke to find himself right out on the seaward fringe of the Marsh. The sun was westering, and with seven miles or so between him and camp, it seemed a good time to be turning home. He glanced down out of habit, to make sure that the familiar little grey figure was at heel, before he remembered that Canog was up at the steading, engrossed in one fat puppy. He would be glad when that puppy was old enough to be left, and Canog could come with him again. He missed the light padding of her paws behind him, and her powers of conversation—she was a very talkative little dog. It was because of her trick of singing—rather as a pot sings when it is near the boil—that he had called her Canog, a little Song.
Perhaps it was because of the silence where the small sounds of Canog should have been, that, as he turned his steps towards Marsh Island, he suddenly noticed how still everything had grown.
Usually there was a constant shimmer of lark-song above the seaward fringes of the Marsh, but no larks were singing now—even the shore birds were silent; even the faint wind-music that seemed always to ring across the emptiness was stilled, a hollow stillness set round with the sounding of the sea beyond the shingle ridge. It was as though the whole Marsh were holding its breath, waiting for something.
Marsh Island was no more than a mile-long lift of land at the southern corner of the Marsh. It rose only a few feet above the surrounding levels, but the great embankment of the Rhee Wall ran out into it, and so did the lesser shingle ridge that came down the shore line from the northern sluice below Portus Lemanis, and beside the low, turf-roofed huddle of fisher huts at the inland end there was a small outpost camp in charge of an optio. It was a half-way fortress at the bend of the Marsh defences, a windswept stronghold set round with shifting sand dunes and falls of wet brown shingle. And this evening, as he came up through the low dunes that fringed its north-eastern end, Beric felt it to be a fortress on the alert, waiting, as the Marsh was waiting.
He was making for the Rhee Wall—it was better to follow the Wall, after dark, if one was not a Marsh-man born and bred—and usually he would have skirted the island, avoiding camp and village; but to-day, because in a queer way the Lady Lucilla’s lantern had warmed something in him, and made him feel nearer to his own kind, he turned a little aside on a sudden impulse, toward the huddle of fisher huts. Then a thing happened that for a while drove all awareness of the strange brooding silence from his mind.
On the edge of the village he came upon a man sitting at the seaward end of the thorn windbreak. The man’s face was turned toward the estuary and the sea beyond, and a hound lay at his feet: a huge, brindled hound, whose head went up alertly as Beric drew near, showing the star-shaped blaze on his forehead.
With a sudden odd feeling as though his heart had fallen over itself, Beric checked. The dog had begun to growl—a soft, sing-song warning deep in his throat, that changed suddenly into a shrill whine. And as his master turned a blind face from the sea, he sprang up, crouched an instant, and then flung himself upon Beric, yelping in joyous frenzy.
‘Gelert!�
� Beric cried, and crouched down. He had his arms round the great dog’s neck, not for an instant believing that the incredible thing was really happening. It could not be happening; it was a dream! Gelert was thrusting and fawning against his breast, almost beside himself with wild excitement. ‘Gelert! Old Gelert!’ And Gelert jabbed up his muzzle and licked Beric’s face from ear to ear.
But in a little he tore himself free and swerved back to the tall man, who had risen and stood quietly by; then back to Beric in another joyous onslaught: to and fro between them, round and round, yelping and whimpering, his tail lashing their legs. And in the midst of the tumult, Beric was gripping both the tall man’s hands in his. ‘Rhiada! Rhiada, is it truly yourself?’
‘Beric? Is it yourself, then?’
‘Oh Rhiada, it is sun and moon to see you! Yes, it is Beric. Feel, then.’ He released the other’s hands, and stood still, and Rhiada reached out, laughing, and began to run them lightly over his breast and flanks and shoulders.
‘Nay, I know by your voice and your hands, and by Gelert’s joy … . It is yourself and it is myself. But you are a man now, cubling—Aiee! Shoulders like an ox, you have.’
Presently the light, quick laughter, the exclaiming and the breathless half-sentences of their meeting falling quiet, they sat down together under the windbreak, while Gelert, sneezing violently, collapsed panting at the harper’s feet.
And Beric drew a deep breath, and understood for the first time that it was not, after all, a dream. ‘Rhiada, but what brings you here?’ he demanded in utter bewilderment.
Rhiada put up a hand to feel with sensitive fingers for the harp he carried strapped to his shoulder. ‘That which brings me anywhere, where there are men to listen to me and my harp. After you—left the Clan it seemed to me that the time was come for me to go also. So I took a boy from one of the villages to be my eyes—Kylan, he is over yonder with the fisher-folk now—and went. I have lived a wandering life since then, playing my harp up and down the land, wherever there are men to listen to me.’
Beric looked round at him quickly. ‘Was that because of me?’
Rhiada smiled. ‘I had always a mind to see the world.’
‘And Gelert? How comes Gelert to be with you?’
‘Gelert came to me after your going. He would not run with Cunori’s hounds. And so when I left too, I asked him of Cunori. It is in my heart that he knew I should bring him to you, one day; and behold, I have brought him.’
Beric looked down at the great brindled hound, remembering very vividly how he had cried with his arms round Gelert’s neck, on the night that the Clan had cast him out. ‘Nay, that was long ago, and he lies at another man’s feet now,’ he said. And Gelert, knowing that he was being talked of, raised his head to look from one to the other, his tail thumping, then dropped his chin back on to the harper’s feet.
‘Let him choose for himself.’
‘He has already chosen,’ Beric said, and knew that it was true. After a moment he asked: ‘Rhiada, have you ever been back?’
‘Twice. I was back at seed-time.’
‘How——’ Beric began, and checked. He had shut his foster kin away from him so long, they and the old life and the whole Clan that had betrayed him, and now it was very hard to let them in again. Oddly enough, it was because of Lady Lucilla’s lantern, which had clearly nothing to do with the matter, that he managed to ask at last: ‘How was it with them? With Cunori my foster father and the sons of his hearth?’
‘Well enough,’ said Rhiada.
‘And Guinear my mother?’
‘I heard her laugh, but I think that she has not forgotten.’
‘And—Cathlan my Spear brother?’
‘Cathlan has taken a girl of the Clan to wife, and there is a man-child in his hut.’
Silence fell between them, a silence filled with the sounding of the sea, hollow in the unnatural quiet. Then Rhiada asked: ‘And you? What brings you to this place?’
Beric did not answer at once; and his eyes went down to the bronze bracelet that he wore to cover the shackle-scar on his wrist. ‘I work on the great sea-wall that we are raising to hold back the tides from the Marsh,’ he said at last.
‘So, all these four years?’
‘No, since last spring only. I—was in other places before then.’
Despite himself, his voice had hardened, and Rhiada said after a moment: ‘They were not good, those other places?’
‘No,’ said Beric. ‘They were not good.’
Rhiada turned towards him a little, his head lifted, as though he were waiting for something more. Then, as Beric remained silent, he turned back to the sea, saying: ‘Tell me about this wall, and this Marsh of yours. Surely it is a fine thing to bring land out of the sea.’
So, sitting with his arms about his updrawn knees, gazing out over the wandering waters of the estuary, where redshank and curlew were feeding on the ebb tide, he told Rhiada about the Marsh. Now that the first astonishment was over, it did not seem strange to be sitting here talking to Rhiada. Kindling to his theme as he went on, he told him about the huge banks, and the sluices under the Weald, explaining with great care how the sluice-bank, as it rose, had dammed up the water behind it, so that now there was a shallow lake along the whole landward edge of the Marsh, and how the sluices, closed when the tide rose high, and opened as soon as it began to fall, would have drained it by next summer. He told him about the green fringe of pasture along the seaward shore, that was for a promise of what the whole Marsh would be one day, with the hungry sea shut out. ‘Fine grazing there will be for many sheep, one day, from the sea-wall to the Weald. That will be a good thing, to have helped in the making.’
He told Rhiada also, without quite realizing it, a good deal about Justinius, for Justinius and the Marsh were very much part of each other. Only he made no mention of how or why Justinius had taken him as a son into his hearth-place, for that story was not his to tell; and though Rhiada asked many questions, he did not ask that. Beric remembered that he never asked questions that were best not answered; it was one of the things that made him good to talk to. It was good to talk to Rhiada now. Somehow telling Rhiada about the Marsh, about the promise of the Marsh, and the small, windswept steading on the fringe of the Weald, made him see it more clearly himself, and seeing, know suddenly how much it all meant to him.
A soft puff of wind blew in Beric’s face, and he realized that the waiting quiet was gone, and in its place a faint, rustling unrest, a sense of coming turmoil. The estuary was running angry gold, and the sunset burning like a great fire behind the steep prow of Bull Island, where the Legionaries of six working seasons ago had made their altar to Mithras the Bull-slayer, the Lord of Light. Again the wind came up from the estuary, rustling low through the hairy grasses, and the roar of the surf at the seaward end of the Island seemed to have grown suddenly louder. Surf on shore and swell in the offing; that meant wild weather somewhere, already. Gelert whimpered uneasily, without lifting his head from the harper’s feet, and Beric saw that little shivers were running through him. Gelert knew, and so did the gulls. The gulls had all flown inland.
He drew his legs under him, checked an instant sniffing the air like a hound, then got up. ‘It is in my heart that I will be away back to camp.’
‘Maybe that is as well, for I think the Marsh grows uneasy.’ Rhiada was on his feet almost as he spoke, and set a hand lightly on Beric’s shoulder. ‘I will come with you through the village.’
As they reached the huddled fisher huts, the sunset was leaping up behind Bull Island like the flare of flame when a log falls on the hearth, and already the village was stirring into action. Along the strand below the huts men were beginning to drag the canoes farther up for safety, the younger women hauling with them, while the older ones gathered in doorholes, murmuring together in hushed tones and staring anxiously into the flaming sky. Somewhere a child cried as though it were frightened. The whole village and the Marsh beyond were uneasy, filled with the beginning
of dread.
Rhiada paused, giving a shrill whistle, and instantly a boy of fifteen or so broke away from the men about the canoes and came up to them. He was a tall boy, with a thatch of fiery hair that shone almost scarlet in the wild light, and his eyes were dancing with excitement. ‘They say that there is going to be a storm,’ he announced to Rhiada, after a long stare at Beric. ‘The old headman says that there is going to be such a storm as there has not been on this coast since he was a boy! He says the Marsh knows! What is it you would have me do, Rhiada?’
‘Come with me to the edge of the village; I shall need your eyes when I turn back.’
So they went on, with the boy tagging a little jealously behind them.
When they came out from the huts, it seemed to Beric that the whole vast emptiness of the Marsh was full of fire, and awe touched him so that he halted in his tracks. He had seen other wild sunsets on the Marsh, but never one like this, never quite this lurid intensity of colour glowing in the breast-high furze and kindling the tawny levels to furnace gold; the whole world burning under a tiger sky of wind-rippled flame; never this fearful glory that was not so much a sunset as a message—a warning—written in fire across the evening.
‘I will come no farther with you,’ Rhiada said, checking beside him. ‘For you will travel swiftest alone.’
‘You will be here—afterwards? You will not go before I see you again?’
‘I shall be here,’ Rhiada said: and then, ‘What is it like, this sunset of which the women whisper?’
Beric was silent an instant. How could one describe this fearful shining, this scorching and piercing radiance to Rhiada in the dark? ‘It is fire and wings and a drawn sword,’ he said at last.
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