Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online

she released him with a little sob, and let her hands drop to her side.

    ‘They say it is through me that evil times have come upon the Clan,’ he said dully. He was vaguely aware that Cunori had entered behind him and was standing by the doorway, and that Arthmail and Arthgal had appeared from somewhere, frightened and subdued.
    His mother put out her hands to him again, her eyes straining in her head. ‘What will you do? Where will you go?’
    ‘I will go to my own people,’ Beric said.
    There was a long silence, and then his mother said in a dry, harsh voice: You will need food—food and money; wait, and I will get them.’
    While he stood beside the fire, staring blindly down into the flames, she began to move about, gathering dried meat and barley cake and stowing them in a leather bag. She fetched a slender hunting-spear that had been his companion on many game trails; she brought out a new cloak, warm and thick, of her own weaving; and going to the kist in the inner chamber, took from it some money. ‘It is Roman money,’ she said, as she tied it in a scrap of cloth and added it to the food in the leather bag. ‘You will need money in the place that you go to.’
    And still Beric stood rigidly beside the fire, watched by the scared boys and uneasy hounds; and Cunori stood in the entrance, peering out. ‘The sky grows light to moonrise,’ he said, without looking round. ‘Are you nearly done?’
    ‘I have done now,’ Guinear said, in the same dry, harsh voice. She returned to Beric by the fire. ‘Here is food for your journey, and money, and a spear, and a new cloak to keep you warm.’
    He took them from her, and flung the cloak round him, and was just stabbing home the pin of the bronze shoulder-brooch when someone else thrust past Cunori in the doorway, and he swung round to see that it was Cathlan, carrying a light hunting-spear.
    ‘I was afraid you would be already gone,’ Cathlan said breathlessly. ‘It is my best throw-spear, and you will be needing a spear. Take it, Beric.’

    ‘I have spears of my own,’ Beric said, ‘but I take it for the good hunting that we have had together. Do you take this one of mine, for the same reason.’
    As the weapons changed hands, Cathlan asked: ‘What will you do, among your own people?’
    Beric glanced a little uncertainly at the spear in his hand, then up again at the friend who had given it to him. ‘Maybe I will join the Eagles.’
    For a moment he knew that it was on Cathlan’s tongue to say, ‘I will go with you.’ But the moment passed, and Cathlan said: ‘Good hunting to you, my brother.’
    ‘And to you,’ Beric said, turning with him to the doorway. For an instant he felt Cathlan’s arm hard and heavy across his shoulders; and then his friend was gone, as quickly as he had come.
    ‘The first rim of the moon is above the hills,’ said Cunori.
    ‘Bid the moon tarry but for a single heart-beat,’ Beric said, and turned again to his mother. ‘Guinear, my mother, you do not believe that I have brought trouble upon the Clan?’
    ‘I do not know. I do not care.’ Guinear held him close, and his head was down on her shoulder. ‘I know only that you have always been my son, my little first-born son, and that I love you … .’
    ‘Oh, Mother! Mother!’
    ‘Send me word,’ she begged. ‘Find means to send me word, one day——’
    ‘One day, when I have made a new life among my own people, I will send you word,’ Beric promised. ‘Once, that you may know that it is well with me, and then never again. Better you forget that there were ever three sons at the hearth fire.’
    ‘I shall not forget, not the son that was my first-born.’ His mother strained him close an instant, then thrust him away. ‘The Sun and the Moon be with you, little Cub.’
    ‘And with you, my mother.’ Beric stooped for his bundle and the spear that lay beside it. He shook off his weeping brothers and the troubled and bewildered hounds that
thronged about