In the Beginning by John Christopher

Author:John Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

8

THE WOOD, WHEN THEY GOT there after fleeing from the village, was an entirely different place for Va. In the past it had been special to her; her mother and the Village Mother had known that she went to it but not even they had ever gone there with her. The wood had been a place to be alone and private; to enjoy times of happiness, more rarely to console herself when her heart was sore.

And in the wood the most important part was the pool, where she had bathed, or fed the squirrels with nuts, or simply sat and thought. It had seemed right that it had been at the pool that she had found Dom, because the pool was an abode for dreams and wonders.

After having it to herself for so long it had been strange, but good also and exciting, to have someone to share it with. She had loved it very deeply in the past but those two days with Dom—the nursing and the teaching and the playing—had been the best of all. Even what had happened at the end—the killing of the squirrel—although it marred the memory, had not destroyed it.

It was destroyed now, though, and the wood itself changed beyond recognition. It had turned into a place of gloom and horror, almost as much so as the desert of death that had been her home. When, after he had eaten, Dom offered her some of the fruit she had picked at his command, she could not possibly have taken it. It was not just because of her misery or her hatred of him: everything here was poisoned, and she would have choked on the fruit she had once loved.

She made his bed as he ordered her, and sat on the ground near him. She thought of all those she had loved whom Dom’s tribe had murdered—her mother and grandmother, father, brother—and all those who had been her friends, like Gri.

Yet she had not seen Gri’s body. It was true that she had not seen all the slain—in the end she had averted her eyes from the ugliness of the slaughter—but it might be, as the Village Mother had suggested, that some had escaped in the first confusion. Gri might have escaped. If she could only find him they could go away together to a different land, forgetting the piles of corpses and remembering only the living—helping each other to remember.

First, though, she had to be free of Dom. She watched him in the moonlight, waiting for signs that he was asleep, and at last heard his breathing become quiet and deepen. When she rose carefully to her feet, watching still, he did not move. So she began to creep away from the clearing and then, hearing him rouse up behind her, ran hard through the black and silver trees.

The beating he gave her when he caught her hurt, but it was not so bad as the feeling inside herself of having failed, and in doing so having failed the Village Mother.

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