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part tended by the women. He learned to handle horse and hound, sword and spear and the man-high long-bow of the tribes. He learned to follow a three-day-old spoor as though it were a beaten trail. And little by little he forgot, almost as completely as the rest of the pack seemed to do, that he had ever had to fight for his right to run with them.
    When he was twelve, Keri, the beautiful, brindled mate of Bran, had puppies; and Cunori gave the finest of the litter to Beric, to be his own hunting companion. Beric called the pup Gelert, and for long months, during which he learned as much as Gelert did, he gave up every free moment to training him; so that by the time the hound was a year old and the boy thirteen, they could think with one mind, as a hunter and his hound should do.
    And then at last the fifteenth harvest of his life was gathered in, and the Feast of New Spears came round again, and it was time for Beric to receive his weapons and become a man. At fifteen, he was smaller and stockier than his fellows, with narrower hands and feet, but despite Istoreth’s accusation of six years ago, there was little in his square brown face with the cleft chin and level eyes, nor in his tawny colouring, to set him apart from the rest. Many races went to the making of Rome, and if there was Latin blood in him, without doubt there was Celtic also. Certainly, standing with the other boys of his year on this long-awaited Night of New Spears, he had no thought of any difference between them. His mind did go back to that other Feast of New Spears, six years ago, to the
small boy who had looked forward so eagerly to this one—and to what had happened after; but only as one looks back to old, unhappy things that have nothing to do with the present. The present was good, and the future would be good too, the future in which he and Cathlan together would become great men in their Clan, hunters and warriors without equal.
    But the future which looked to Beric that night to be as straight and shining as the white ash shaft of his new war-spear was to be a very different one, after all.
    The months that followed his initiation into the Men’s Side were bad months for the Clan; bad ones for the whole Tribe. The harvest had been a lean one, wrecked by summer storms, and all through the autumn and the wild wet winter the hunting was bad; and when the lambing time came many of the lambs were born dead, and often the ewes died too, as happened sometimes in a wet season. Just after the turn of the year one of the Clan’s chief hunters was killed by a boar. Spring came suddenly and early, but instead of better times, it brought fever.
    It was after the fever came that Beric began to notice people looking at him; looking and whispering. At first he thought that he was imagining things, or maybe sickening for the pestilence himself, but soon he realized that it was not that. The Men’s Side began to leave a little space between him and them when they gathered together. Only Cunori his father and Rhiada the Harper seemed untouched by the general unease; and Cathlan, who stood shoulder to shoulder with him on all occasions, with a bright-eyed defiance that somehow hurt Beric more deeply than the drawing aside of the other men could do. Once he saw a woman make the sign against evil as she passed him. He did not need to wonder what it all meant, for deep within him, he knew; and the knowledge turned him cold, remembering that six-year-distant fight with Cathlan, and the hostile faces of the other boys crowding in on him; remembering the dog-pack turning on the stranger in their midst. But with the surface of his
mind he could not believe that such a thing could happen—not to him—not at the hands of his brothers.
    It was Merddyn who had sown the seeds of the mischief; Merddyn the Druid, dead these many years. Merddyn had foretold the wrath of the gods on the Clan for taking into itself one of the accursed breed that had torn apart their holy