Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff

They came at last to a gateway in a
high wall, and passed through, with the exchange of a few words between the porter and Ben Malachi’s slave. Beric was standing in a wide courtyard already growing shadowy in the fading light, and people were swarming in as it seemed from every side, to gather round him, pointing and staring and asking questions that he could not find enough Latin to answer. Then someone who seemed to be in authority joined the group and spoke to Ben Malachi’s man, and quite suddenly Ben Malachi’s man had slipped off the halter and gone his way.
    Left alone in the strange courtyard, Beric had one moment of blind panic. Ben Malachi’s man had been a brute, but at least he had been a familiar brute; and now he was gone. Two girls in the group nudged each other, giggling. ‘We shan’t be keeping this one long,’ said one of them. ‘He’s soft in the head—just look at him.’
    ‘You have no call to laugh at him, even if he is, Tina,’ said another, more kindly.
    ‘Best get him cleaned up before Nigellus sees him,’ said a third.
    And an impatient voice snapped at Beric himself. ‘Well, don’t stand there all night, looking like a mooncalf.’
    He heard them woollenly, through the throbbing in his head. And then he was stumbling across the courtyard and along a passage-way after someone’s broad back. The broad back led him to a place where there was a plunge-bath, and he pulled off his filthy rags and got in, slowly and carefully, like an old man. The cold water felt wonderful on his hot, dirt-parched skin, and the chill of it seemed to clear his head; and he scrubbed himself with silver sand, and soaked, and scrubbed again. It was good to feel clean after so many moons.
    He stayed in the plunge-bath until the slave who had brought him there came back and demanded to know whether he thought he was a fish; and then he got out and rubbed himself down and pulled on the tunic which the man tossed to him —a tunic of unbleached wool, soft and clean—and followed him out. His own stinking rags they left on the bath-house
floor, to be collected and burned by anybody who happened to feel like it, if anyone ever did. That, Beric was to realize later, was typical of the house of Piso.
    Without any clear idea of how he got there, he found himself in a small lamp-lit room, standing before a thin grey man, who sat looking at him appraisingly across a table littered with tablets and papyrus rolls. ‘Ah yes, the new slave,’ said the man in tones of quiet authority. He glanced at a tablet in his hand.’ Your name is Beric?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Beric hoarsely.
    The grey man wrote it down on a scroll before him. ‘So. My name is Nigellus, and I am the steward of this household. You will take most of your orders from me.’
    Beric said ‘Yes’ again.
    Nigellus let the scroll fly back on itself abruptly. ‘Panteon will find you somewhere to sleep, and the cook will give you a meal if you are hungry. But first——’ He took up something from the table before him, and held it out. ‘See if this will go over your elbow. If not, I have a larger one.’
    Beric took it from him. It was a broad silver arm-ring, stamped with a badge of some sort; and he stared at it stupidly, holding it between his hands as though he did not know what to do with it.
    ‘It is the badge of the house of Piso,’ said the steward. ‘All Publius Piso’s slaves wear such an arm-ring. Put it on, and go.’
    Without a word, Beric ran the thing up his left forearm and began to work it over his elbow. It was a tight fit, but he managed it at last, and looked up again, just as the grey man reached out to set aside the scroll in which he had entered the new slave’s name: and saw, half revealed by the updrawn sleeve, the rim of just such another arm-ring sparkling in the lamplight.
    His gaze jerked up to the steward’s face, and encountered a faint flicker in his eyes that might have been amusement or bitterness. ‘Oh yes, I