Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

buildings, its triumphal arches and towering statues, all seeming at that distance like some exquisite toy carved from old ivory and peopled with many-coloured atomies; the hills rising from it amethyst-shadowed in the evening light, the Palatine with its palaces, the Capitoline with its temples, the green pomegranate gardens of the Esquiline. ‘You might as well be a bird—an eagle, up here,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, I expect you might; but oh, please be careful!’ Lucilla begged. ‘Finish picking those figs and then come down.’
    Beric turned his back on Rome, and busied himself with gathering the figs he had come for and passing them down to her. Then he jumped down himself, with the last few still in his hand. ‘See, they are the best on the tree,’ he said, holding them out to show her.
    She took one of them, its sun-warm purple skin splitting to show the pink flesh inside, and began to eat it. ‘In nine days I shall be a married woman, and it will be beneath my dignity to eat figs warm off the tree,’ she said, a little regretfully.
    ‘Yes, my Lady.’ Beric added the rest of the fruit to those in the basket, and looked up again. ‘It is in my heart that I hope you will be very happy.’
    Lucilla looked at him almost wonderingly, with the half-eaten fig in her hand. ‘You said that as though you really cared,’ she said. ‘So few people do. They are too busy being pleased that Father has arranged such a good match for me.’
    Beric began to stutter. ‘I—I do care, my Lady. You have been kind to me, and I—would do anything, so that you should be happy.’
    ‘I—think I shall be,’ said the Lady Lucilla, and suddenly she smiled. ‘I like Valarius. I have liked him ever since I can remember, and he likes me; and he is kind and just. And if you like the husband your father chooses for you, and he likes you——’ She finished the fig and licked her fingers;
and then, as Beric remained silent, she asked: ‘How are the marriages made in Britain?’
    ‘Sometimes they are made between our fathers, but usually it is just that when a young man has slain his first wolf, and is free to marry, he looks among the maidens of the Tribe, and when he finds the right one, if she be willing, he goes to her father and asks for the maiden; and unless something stands in the way, there is a feast, and the maiden’s father gives the young man his best spear, and he takes the maiden home to his own hut, to be his woman.’
    ‘It sounds nice for the maiden,’ said Lucilla, with a half sigh. ‘Sometimes it happens so with us, too, but not often. Almost always it is our fathers who choose. And if Father had chosen me a husband of my own age, it might have been someone like Glaucus, who would have been unkind to me because I am not pretty like Claudia and Dometella.’
    Beric looked up from adding a last fig to the basket, and their eyes met in quick understanding. So she also had suffered at Glaucus’s hands.
    ‘Beric,’ Lucilla said suddenly. ‘Beric——’
    And he knew that he had been right; there was something she wanted to say to him.
    ‘Yes, my Lady?’
    ‘Beric, when I go to Valarius’s house, would you like to come with me? Father has given me Aglæa, my nurse, and I think—I am sure—that he would give you to me, if I asked him.’
    Beric could not answer at once. To escape from Glaucus, to go with the Lady Lucilla, who treated him as a human being, and be part of her household and Valarius’s, who was kind and just and not for ever selling his slaves, it seemed a thing too good to be true.
    ‘Would you like that, Beric?’ Lucilla said. ‘If you would, I will ask my father when he comes home.’
    ‘Oh, my Lady, I would like it—I would!’ Beric took the plump sticky hand she held out to him, and bent, and laid it to his forehead.
     
     

    For three days Beric carried his little newly-lit hope with him. It lay down with him at night, and sounded in the first twittering of sparrows under the eaves