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her mouth, and pressed them there, staring at him with widened eyes. ‘What have you under your cloak?’ she asked after a moment, in a harsh whisper.
    Cunori squatted down beside her, almost in the warm ash of the fire, and put back the wet folds. ‘See,’ he said; ‘I brought it for you. Take it.’

    But she made no move to take it. ‘Not!’ she whispered. ‘Oh no, no!’
    ‘It is a fine little cub,’ Cunori persisted, thrusting away with his free hand an exploring grey muzzle that came under his arm.
    ‘It is not mine,’ she said flatly.
    ‘If you do not take it soon it will not matter whose it is,’ Cunori said. ‘And I might as well have left it on the rocks below the headland where I found it, to die with its mother.’
    She raised her eyes swiftly to his face. ‘Its mother?’
    Cunori told her how he had found the babe, and she listened, looking from him to the tiny spent thing in his hands and back. But she only said again: ‘It is not mine; not my babe.’
    ‘Nevertheless, do you take it. It is a fine cub, a man cub!’ Cunori poked the baby at her, hopefully, but she flinched away. The warmth had begun to revive the faint life that still flickered in the creature, and suddenly it set up a thin, exhausted crying. Cunori looked anxiously at Guinear; he had been so set on bringing her the babe—it had seemed as though it was meant for her; he had not thought about it very clearly, but he felt very clearly indeed that she had lost a child and it had lost its mother, and somehow it was right that they should be put together. It fitted, and he liked things to fit.
    But the terribly thin wailing did what all Cunori’s urging could not do. Quite suddenly, with a little sound that was almost a sob, Guinear leaned forward and reached out her hands. ‘Give him to me,’ she said. ‘It is not so that you should hold a babe.’

II
    PACK LAW
    T HEY called him Beric, and Cunori gave a black ram lamb to the gods for him; and he had his first taste of solid food from the tip of Cunori’s dagger so that he might grow up to be a great warrior. And in his second year Guinear pricked the warrior patterns of the Tribe on his brown baby skin, and rubbed woad into the prick-marks, and afterwards gave him as much wild honeycomb as ever he could eat, to comfort the smart of his wounds and still his howling.
    Nine times the gales of autumn beat over the village; nine times the lambing season came round and the Men’s Side kept the wolf guard on the sheep-folds through the bitter winter nights; nine times the sea-pinks bloomed along the cliffs, spilling down to join hands with the spray that beat upon the rocks below. And there were three sons in Cunori’s house-place; and it was time for Beric, the eldest of them, to begin his training.
    Every year when the harvest was in there came a great day in the village, and from all the Clan territory the people poured into it. They gathered in the open space at the heart of the village, where the cattle were penned in time of trouble; and there, in the presence of the whole Clan, all the boys who had turned fifteen since last harvest received their weapons from their fathers, and became men and warriors. And after that the cooking-pits were opened and the whole roast boar carcasses lifted out, and there was a great feast, with much heather beer and harp music; and the warriors of the Clan danced the Dance of Fire and the Dance of the Chariot Charge and the Dance of New Spears, under the admiring eyes of the Women’s Side. Before the Romans came with their meddlesome patrols it had been a much greater day, and
all the Clans of the Dumnonii had gathered together at the Tribal Dun at Uxella, and there had been long and terrible rites that were secret between the Druids and the New Spears, before the boys received their weapons. The glory was departed now, before the shadow of the Eagles, and the great and powerful Druid-kind had almost ceased to be. Beric could just remember