I stood where I was, watching the juice of the apricot trickle down the hot wall. A wasp alighted on it, crawled stickily, then suddenly fell, buzzing on its back to the ground. Its body jack-knifed, the buzz rose to a whine as it struggled, then it lay still.

I hardly saw it, because something had swelled in my throat till I thought I would choke, and the golden evening swam, brilliant, into tears. This was the first time in my life that I remember weeping.

The gardeners were coming down past the roses, with baskets on their heads. I turned and ran out of the garden.

CHAPTER THREE

MY room was empty even of the wolfhound. I climbed on my bed and leaned my elbows on the windowsill, and stayed there a long while alone, while outside in the pear tree’s boughs the thrush sang, and from the courtyard beyond the shut door came the monotonous clink of the smith’s hammer and the creak of the windlass as the mule plodded round the well.

Memory fails me here. I cannot remember how long it was before the clatter and the buzz of voices told me that the evening meal was being prepared. Nor can I remember how badly I was hurt, but when Cerdic, the groom, pushed the door open and I turned my head, he stopped dead and said: “Lord have mercy upon us. What have you been doing? Playing in the bull-shed?”

“I fell down.”

“Oh, aye, you fell down. I wonder why the floor’s always twice as hard for you as for anyone else? Who was it? That little sucking-boar Dinias?”

When I did not answer he came across to the bed. He was a small man, with bowed legs and a seamed brown face and a thatch of light-coloured hair. Standing on my bed as I was, my eyes were almost on a level with his.

“Tell you what,” he said. “When you’re a mite larger I’ll teach you a thing or two. You don’t have to be big to win a fight. I’ve a trick or two worth knowing, I can tell you. Got to have, when you’re wren-size. I tell you, I can tumble a fellow twice my weight—and a woman too, come to that.” He laughed, turned his head to spit, remembered where he was, and cleared his throat instead. “Not that you’ll need my tricks once you’re grown, a tall lad like you, nor with the girls neither. But you’d best look to that face of yours if you’re not to scare them silly. Looks as if it might make a scar.” He jerked his head at Moravik’s empty pallet. “Where is she?”

“She went with my mother.”

“Then you’d best come with me. I’ll fix it up.”

So it was that the cut on my cheek-bone was dressed with horse-liniment, and I shared Cerdic’s supper in the stables, sitting on straw, while a brown mare nosed round me for fodder, and my own fat slug of a pony, at the full end of his rope, watched every mouthful we ate. Cerdic must have had methods of his own in the kitchens, too; the barm-cakes were fresh, there was half a chicken-leg each as well as the salt bacon, and the beer was full-flavoured and cool.