Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff Read Free Book Online Page A

him, and thrust through them to the doorway. Cunori’s hand came down on his shoulder, halting him an instant; and he looked round, seeing the lean red head of the man who had been his father lit on one side by the friendly firelight, on the other by the remote silver of the rising moon. ‘Already the fever is growing less; there will be good times again for the Clan,’ said Cunori. ‘And when the good times come, they will forget. It may be that in a few years——’
    Beric shook his head. ‘The Clan has cast me out. If, when the good times come again, they forget, it would be but till the next bad harvest. Even you, my father, though you fought for me down yonder by the Council Fire, are you sure in your heart that it is not through me that the bad harvest and the fever came?’
    He waited an instant with a faint hope of denial; but Cunori was a very truthful soul.
    ‘The gods be good to you, my father,’ Beric said, and felt Cunori’s hand slacken and slip from his shoulder as he plunged out into the young night.
    The Council Fire was dying down, but the whole village was still gathered in the open space and around the gateway in the stockade. They drew back from him, silent, hostile, leaving him a wide road; and he strode down it, looking to neither the right nor left. Here and there they cried out after him, words for the averting of evil. They crowded in behind him, and he felt the pressure of their hate thrusting him out; felt it far more clearly than he heard the rattling of spear-butts on shields to drive away evil spirits. He refused to be hurried; he strode steadily on, his shoulders braced and his head up. He reached the gateway, and passed out between the turf banks and the thorn hedge where the blossom showed through the shadows, like foam-curds in a dark wave. A knot of young warriors thrust into the gateway behind him, jostling out on his track, giving tongue like a wolf-pack in full cry; and a flight of stones came whizzing viciously after him.
    The light of the rising moon made for uncertain aim, but even so one caught him in the shoulder and another grazed
his cheek. He knew that it was not Beric they were stoning, but the bad harvest and the fever. ‘Still,’ he thought, ‘they need not have thrown stones! They need not have thrown stones!’ Another caught him full behind the ear and made him stagger in his tracks. He broke into a stumbling run. The shouting and the shield-drumming were growing fainter behind him; and a last stone, flung at extreme range, thudded into the grass beside him.
    ‘They need not have thrown stones,’ he thought dully, over and over again. ‘They need not have thrown stones.’
    How quiet the field-strips were in the first glimmering of moonlight. Kind, the earth was, kinder than men; the familiar field-strips did not throw stones.
    He came to the edge of the oak woods and, slackening his pace, struck into the game-track that led eastward into the moonrise; eastward toward his own people. Presently he might look for a place to sleep, but hunter that he was, he could travel as well by night as by day, and his one thought was to push on, to get away from the village, as far as ever he could, before he stopped to rest.
    There was a sound of flying paws behind him, and the rustle of something slipping low through the undergrowth, and even as he turned to face it, with his hand tightening on his spear-shaft, Gelert brushed by against his leg, circled round, and stood looking up at him, his tail lashing, and the star-shaped blaze on his forehead silver in the moonlight.
    Out of his old life, one living thing—Gelert his dog—had kept unswerving faith with him; had come to be with him. The consciousness that he was a warrior with more than half a year of grown manhood behind him, which had stiffened Beric until now, suddenly deserted him. He squatted down, and with his arms round the great dog’s neck and his face buried in the thick, harsh hair, he cried as Arthmail