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single combat, then, the stranger against the chosen champion of the pack.
    Cathlan was a year older than Beric, and more than a year heavier; also he was a renowned fighter, whereas Beric had never fought in earnest before. But he was fighting in earnest now, fighting for his place in the Clan, and he knew it. He fought like a wild cat, hitting out savagely again and again,
with no thought to guard against the hurly-burly blows that he got in return. All around them the squealing and yelping uproar rose, shriller and shriller yet, as the excitement of the onlookers mounted; but in the midst of it he and Cathlan fought in panting silence. They were down on the ground now, rolling over and over in a mass of flailing arms and legs, hitting wildly at each other with short jabbing blows. Then, quite how it happened Beric never knew, Cathlan was underneath. His freckled face all battered and smeared, he glared up at Beric; his mouth was shut tight, and he breathed through flaring nostrils like a stallion, as he struggled to get uppermost. Beric clung on, sobbing, and very near to his last gasp; blood from his nose was spattering down on to the other boy’s furious upturned face; he felt sick and his heart seemed bursting. He set his teeth, and with one last effort, gripping his squirming enemy between his knees, he got Cathlan’s ears in his hands and banged his head again and again on the hard-beaten ground.
    He saw the fury turn vague and stupid in the other boy’s face, and felt the fight go out of him. He gave Cathlan’s head a final bang; then he staggered to his feet, and stood with the back of one hand pressed against his dripping nose, staring down at his fallen enemy. Cathlan lay where he was for the space of a dozen heart-beats, and then got up more slowly, licking a burst lip. For a long moment the two stood looking at each other, breathing hard. Then Beric turned on his heel, and with his bleeding nose in the air walked away. The little silent crowd parted, with a new respect, to let him through.
    Looking neither to right nor left, he walked straight up through the oak woods, and over the bare hill-shoulder beyond, where the brood mares were at run with their feather-tailed foals beside them; on and on until he came out on to the headland, and along it to its farthermost end. And there, where two paces more would carry him into the Western Sea, he flung himself down on the coarse grass of the cliff-top.
    Ever since he had been strong enough on his legs to get down the steep cliff-tracks, the shelving rocks of the Seal
Strand had been a favourite haunt of his; but he seldom came right out here to the point, because he knew that it was among the rocks of the Point that Cunori his father had found him after the great storm, and the place made him feel unsafe, as though it were a weak spot in the circle of his familiar world, through which another world might break in on him. But to-day the very feeling that usually kept him away from the Point drew him out to it. It was all very odd and bewildering.
    There was an ache in his stomach that was not hunger; an ache that was quite different from anything he had known before, and which he did not understand. He would be free to run with the pack now, he knew that: and yet he felt all the desolation of an outcast. He had won his first fight, and he was triumphant with a hard, harsh triumph. He was afraid, because he had come face to face with things that he had never dreamed of, and the sure foundations of his world had shifted under his feet. He was angry with almost everything under the sun, without quite knowing why; he was lost and shaken and bewildered, and his bruises hurt, and it was all these things twisted together into a hard knot within him that made the ache in his stomach.
    ‘There is a great stone in my belly,’ he told the wheeling gulls, ‘and I do not understand, I do not understand.’
    He noticed the dried blood on the back of his hand, and licked it