When a great storm came, the Roman trading vessel was wrecked on the treacherous coast of southwest Britain, and the infant son of a Roman soldier was the only survivor. Beric grew up with a Briton tribe, but to his foster people he remained an alien, one of the Red Crests. So when bad times came, the tribe held him responsible and cast him out.

Rejected by the only life he knew, the boy turned to his own people, but Rome too rejected him. Lost, bewildered, a captive in his father's land, he escaped from slavery, only to be captured again and condemned to labor for the rest of his life on the rowing benches of a galley of the Rhenus fleet.