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off, tasting it salt, with a sweetness under the salt. He lay for a long time on his front, looking down. There was a lazy wind blowing, stirring the dry heads of the sea-pinks on the ledges, and sighing through the rough grass by his ear, with a clear, high note—almost a singing—above the soft, wet roar of the never-ceasing surge. The sea was lazy too; the slow, unceasing combers breaking far out, the foam-laced shallows playing delicately, kitten-wise, with the black rocks and the little shingle beaches. He watched the water come swinging in, greening as it shallowed, laced and curdled and frilled with foam, with a slap and a delicate curl-back on to itself as it met the flat surface of a rock, creaming up between them in threads of white; then draining out again with a
shrill hushing over the shingle, to join with the next wave—and the next—and the next. Sometimes a gull’s wings would sweep by below him; once it was the grey-blue wings of a peregrine falcon who had an eyrie on one of the ledges with two young in it. But he did not watch them. The stone in his belly came between him and them, and he had too many things to think about.
    His own father and mother, for instance. He had scarcely ever thought about his own father before, because Cunori had always been there, filling that place for him; and he had never thought about his own mother at all, because it was beyond him to imagine any mother but Guinear. But he thought about them now, watching the lazy wavelets creaming among those black rocks, realizing suddenly, and for the first time, that they had not been just people in a story, but real people, though he knew nothing about them save that his father had looked like a soldier, and his mother had had golden-brown hair. His people, and he theirs.
    A slight movement close to him made him look round; and there, just squatting on to his haunches a few paces away, was Cathlan.
    Beric rolled over and sat up, ready for the fight to begin again if it had to; and the two of them sat and looked at each other. Cathlan’s face was smeared with dried blood, and his bruises were dark upon him; but he did not look as though he had come to re-start the fight; and there was an odd expression on his battered face—a sort of elaborate carelessness.
    ‘What have you come here for?’ Beric demanded in a small, gruff voice.
    ‘It is hot,’ said Cathlan, ‘and I am very bloody. I came to bathe.’
    ‘There is water in the stream by the training ground.’
    ‘Too crowded,’ said Cathlan, with a sniff. ‘All the rest are splashing in it; besides, I like best to bathe in the sea.’
    ‘Go you and bathe in the sea, then,’ said Beric.
    ‘Umph!’ grunted Cathlan non-committally. He stared
thoughtfully at a gull that swept overhead. ‘Let you and me go down to the Seal Strand and bathe now,’ he suggested.
    ‘I do not want to bathe.’
    ‘Come on,’ Cathlan urged, still casually. ‘You are all bloody too, and your nose wants washing.’
    ‘Your mouth looks like a blackberry,’ Beric told him.
    Cathlan began to grin and checked as he discovered that it hurt. ‘I know. It was a good fight.’
    There was another silence, but of quite a different kind. ‘Yes,’ Beric said at last, wonderingly. Yes.’
    ‘I’ll wager there would not be two better fighters than you and me in all the Dumnonii,’ said Cathlan, with deep satisfaction. ‘Let you and me go and bathe now.’
    They got to their feet, and made their way back along the headland, pulling off their kilts as they ran, scrambling down to the shelving rocks where the grey seals came to bask at ebb tide. And there, sitting in the swinging, foam-laced shallows, they washed each other’s hurts with great thoroughness.
    From that day forward, Beric and Cathlan hunted together.

III
    THE OUTCAST
    S O for six years Beric ran with the pack, learning to be a warrior and a hunter; something of a farmer too, though the cattle and the field-strips were for the most