Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

also,’ said Nigellus.

VI
    A FRIEND AND AN ENEMY
    F OR the first few days that he wore the Piso arm-ring Beric lived in a state of perpetual bewilderment, so that his head felt hot all the time, and nothing and nobody seemed quite real. And then, very slowly, he began to get his breath back and be able to look about him. His head stopped feeling hot, and he began to learn his way about the courts of the great house on the Viminal Hill, where at first he had got constantly lost, and through the unfamiliar pattern of the days, and even which were which of his fellow slaves.
    There were many slaves in the household of Publius Piso, and they all had a tendency to do bits and pieces of each other’s work, while somebody else did theirs—or did not, as the case might be. That was not Nigellus’s fault; it was partly because the Lady Poppaea was in the habit of calling to any slave she saw and ordering him to drop what he was doing and run instantly and do something else; partly because Publius Piso changed his slaves so often that there were always some in the household who did not know their jobs. Publius Piso was forever buying and selling slaves; Beric soon learned that. The only one who seemed safe from that habit of his was Nigellus. Nigellus had been his body-slave when they were both boys, had gone with him through his Tribune Service with the Legions, and risen slowly to be the steward of his household, and had become so much a part of him that he would as soon have thought of selling his own right arm.
    At first Beric wondered why none of the slaves ran away. It would have been quite easy, for they were often sent on errands into the city, and sometimes they had time off, and could go out and spend it as they chose. And then he realized that it was because most of them knew no other life,
and for the few like himself who did, there was nowhere to run to. To run away would mean going underground, perhaps joining the robbers, to live at all. There was little future in that.
    At least he was no longer hungry, nor beaten without cause.
    Officially he was a house slave, but it was not long before he began to find his way into the stables. He liked old Hippias, who had charge there, and who liked him in return; and with the horses—Publius Piso kept fine horses and did not sell them as often as he did his slaves—he was less lonely than with his fellow slaves.
    His world was a slave’s world, ruled by Nigellus, and the family he served were figures moving in another world, seen at a distance. Publius Piso was a fussy man, but under the fuss and the self-importance a kindly man, who might even have been kind to his slaves if it had occurred to him that they had feelings. His wife, the Lady Poppaea, was a very different matter; fat and white and fretful, and without kindness. The Lady Lucilla was her mother over again, though not fretful. But that, Beric thought, was probably because she was only fifteen. Maybe the Lady Poppaea had not been fretful when she was fifteen. And then there was Glaucus; Glaucus, with his gay good looks and his lazy, laughing manner, standing out from his family like a goldfinch among sparrows.
    So Beric saw them, coloured but flat, like figures in a fresco, those first few months that he belonged to them.
    The autumn rains had broken soon after he joined the household and the winter came, and there was snow on the Alban Hills, that he could glimpse from an upper window of the slaves’ quarters. And then the snow went, and the first faint promise of spring began to stir. And Beric’s longing for his own hills and his freedom, that had never left him for a moment, grew quick and urgent within him. ‘It must be so that the wild geese feel when they fly north in the spring,’ he thought, ‘and the swallows when they come from the south to nest under our eaves. But the swallows and the wild
geese are free to go when they hear the call.’ It was all the worse, in a way, because by that time he