In the Beginning (10 page)

“You saved me, Va. Without your help I would have died.”

She sat hunched and silent. Dom said:

“Sing for me, Va.”

She looked at him and looked away; he saw loathing in her glance.

• • •

The snows melted at last, and two weeks went by without a further fall. The days were getting longer, the nights less cold. Dom said, one morning:

“The cave has protected us from the bad season, but now the bad season is over. This is a poor land, with not much game. It is time for us to go on, to find a place like your valley.”

Va did not answer; it was almost as though she had not heard what he said. But when he went on she followed as usual, a few paces in the rear.

So they traveled south again, finding game where they could and living on roots the rest of the time. Twice they saw other people, hunters by the look of them, and on each occasion Dom was careful to keep away, and to take cover until they had passed. He knew they could not be his own tribe, even though one lot of hunters carried clubs of bone. It made no difference who they were because to any tribe he was a stranger, to be killed on sight as he would have killed a stranger in the old days.

The law of the tribe said “kill the stranger”—but it said other things as well. It said “beat your women so that they submit to the man who is their master.” It had not been so with Va—he had beaten her but in her heart she had still defied him. Was he her master, after all? He did not know, but he knew what he most wanted—not that she should fear him but
that she should smile, and sing as she had sung in the wood. He no longer beat her but the smiles and songs had not come and, he thought unhappily, never would.

• • •

They came down out of the hills and Dom stared in wonder. He saw water—such an expanse of it as he could not have dreamed existed, water that stretched out for more than a mile in front of them. It lay in shadow under a cloudy sky but as they got nearer sunlight broke through, turning the chill gray-green to gold-dazzling blue. With every step forward it seemed to increase in extent. They descended the last slope and stood on the shore of the lake, and the immensity of it was awesome.

They stayed there many days, always within sight of the great water. The warm season was coming back; there were rains occasionally which soaked them but they dried off quickly in the sun. At last Dom felt his full strength returning after his sickness in the winter.

But though the place itself was attractive, the prospects of game were poor: he found no rabbits and few wild pig. There were roots in plenty and
trees which later might bear fruit—now they were pink and white with blossom—but not much chance of getting meat. The game, he decided, must range farther south; and if they did not come to so vast a water hole as this it meant the whole land there must be well watered. It was time for them to go on again.

When he had come to this conclusion, he told Va. It was a sunny morning and they were eating roots, along with the young green shoots of a plant which grew in abundance near the lake. His stomach longed for the richness of meat.

Va did not answer him but that was not uncommon. He stood up, expecting her to do the same, but she remained squatting a few feet away. He said:

“We are going on, to look for game. Come, Va.”

She spoke then. “I am staying here.”

“No.” Dom shook his head. “We must go on.”

“I cannot.” Her eyes stared blankly at him. “I am heavy.”

He remembered how his own limbs had been heavy, in the cave. He said:

“If you have a sickness I will look after you, as you looked after me. It is the warm season now, and the sickness will soon be over. Then we will go on.”

“No. I shall stay in this place.”

Dom looked at her, puzzled. She rose from her squatting position and stood in front of him. She placed her hand on the curve of her belly.

“This heaviness is not a sickness, I am with child: that is why I will not go on.”

He gazed, understanding the words but scarcely able to believe what they conveyed. With child. . . . He went to her and put his hand on top of hers, feeling her warmth. With great joy he said:

“I shall have a son.”

Va said nothing. Dom repeated the words, almost shouting in his happiness.

“I shall have a son!”

Va stared at him a moment, and turned away.

• • •

Now he had two things to care for—Va, and the child within her body. He cossetted her more than ever, seeking out good things for her to eat, finding moss and leaves and making a soft bed for her to lie on.

One day she said: “I shall need shelter for my baby.”

Dom shook his head. “There is no cave near. I have searched for one.”

Not a cave, she told him, but a hut. He did not know the word and she explained: one of the tree-caves such as there had been in the village. Dom said:

“I cannot make one.”

“I will show you,” Va said.

So she showed him which saplings to uproot, and how to strip them of bark and cut them to a proper length; how to fix them firmly in the earth and tie them with ropes of grass; how to make a roof using other saplings and cover it over with dried grass mixed with mud, and then fix big glossy leaves on top and all round the sides. It took him a long time—twice he had to start again from the beginning—but in the end the hut was built.

It had been built at a spot which Va picked, on the outskirts of a grove of trees and not far from the point where a wide fast-running stream emptied itself into the lake. It was a good place, Dom thought: she had chosen well. He looked at his work with pride.

• • •

That night they slept in the hut, and though before they slept they heard the rain beating down on the
leafy roof they stayed dry and warm. It was good to listen in such comfort to the rain, good to know that Va was there beside him, good to know that her body sheltered his son. The gladness Dom felt was more like that first time in the wood than anything since had been; it had a feeling of safety in it.

He wanted to tell Va about this, to tell her how wise and good she was, to tell her that whatever happened he would protect her with his life: her and his son. And also he wanted to tell her of the delight he got from looking at her, how beautiful she was. But he did not know the right words. They had not existed in his old language, and though they might have done in hers she had not told him them. All he could do was speak of other things which gave him something of that feeling, things she had shown him.

“You are like the pool in the wood, Va,” he said. “You are like the flowers I put around your neck.”

It was a rainy dusk outside and even dimmer in the hut, but he was close enough to see the details of her face—broader than those of the women of his tribe, the cheekbones higher and the brown eyes
softer and bigger. A softer face altogether than those of the women he had known, but a stronger one also.

“You are like the red flowers that grew in the wood,” he said again.

Va said nothing. From the gentle face the brown eyes looked coldly at him.

10

V
A'S FEELINGS, WHEN SHE REALIZED
that she was pregnant, were of fear and loathing.

In the village the moment of a woman knowing she was carrying a child had been a prized and honored one. She would tell the Village Mother first, then other women, last of all her husband. That night the village made a feast, much like the feast for a marriage, and they sang together: songs of joy in the new life and hope for the future.

Va stared about her. In front lay the flat emptiness of the lake; behind, strange hills and stranger mountains capped with snow. The valley had been a
rich enclosed space, the village a stronghold within it. Here was no valley and no stronghold, no Village Mother to tell, no woman who would rejoice with her and help her make the garments she would wear while the child grew in her. This was an open friendless place, the only person near her this man she hated—this slaughterer of her people, murderer of her father and her brother.

And father of her own child. She hated the child, too, for that, for being sprung from such a one. She would have had it wither inside her if she could.

For three days she kept her secret; only when Dom said they must go on, to find game, did she tell him. In his tribe, she supposed, the women had been accustomed to trekking on with swollen bodies and bearing their babies under a bush somewhere; but she came of a civilized people. A child needed a home, and a home was in one place. This was not the one she would have chosen, but nowhere was except the valley which the savages had ravaged and from which this one savage had taken her. But it was better at least than some of the harsh desert lands through which they had passed, and there was no certainty of their finding anything better.

Their
finding, she thought bitterly, because she knew she still had need of Dom—more so than ever with the months of heaviness and ungainliness that lay ahead. If he had insisted on going on she would have followed before he was out of sight. But she knew also that he had changed in his attitude toward her, no longer beating her but instead trying to win her favor. So she told him she would go no farther and when he looked at her, puzzled but not angry, told him why.

The joy he showed at the news sickened her. “I shall have a son!” he shouted, and she knew him yet again for a savage. In the village sons were welcomed, as were all children, but it was counted a double blessing to bear a daughter first. She thought fiercely: this will be a daughter. My daughter.

• • •

But at least Dom's satisfaction completed the change which she had already noticed in him. He did things for her readily and continually looked for ways to please her. She told him to build the hut, and showed him how, and once even scolded when he did something wrong. She had a quick rush of fear the moment she had done so, but he showed no anger.

It was good to have the hut, good to be able to stay in one place instead of continually moving on. She found suitable stones and put them together to make a hearth, and kept a fire burning there even when she was not using it to roast their meat. She did not really need it because the weather grew warmer every day, but it was a sign of being settled and a recollection of the home she had once known.

Dom, of course, often had to go away to hunt game, which remained scarce in this area. Va was entirely happy then, busying herself with necessary tasks or simply staring out at the lake. It was altogether different from the valley, but she discovered it had a beauty of its own, marked by the changing tints of sunlight and shadow. She grew fond of it.

Day by day she found new things to do. There were flints along the bank of the stream which she chipped into knives, and she also found a big flat stone with a hollow in the middle which she saw could be used for pounding wheat into flour. She remembered then that farther along the lake she had seen what from a distance might be wild grain, and went back there and found that this was so. It was standing high, but green and small-eared. In a month
or two it would turn gold and the ears hang heavy; then she would gather the wheat and grind it into flour, and so make bread.

There was also flax growing not far away. Remembering how her people had done it, she stripped the plants into fibers which she dried in the sun. Afterward she made a cloth from them, and a dress from the cloth. It was rough material and she had no dyes, but it was better than the skins she had been obliged to wear.

She tried to make pots. There was plenty of good clay in the vicinity, and she took some and laboriously fashioned it into the shape of a pot and set it in the fire to bake. But when the fire died down it was cracked, and even if it had been whole she doubted if it would have held water. She needed to have an oven, such as they had had in the village, to increase the heat of the fire and hold the heat within it while the clay changed into stone.

She would make one, she determined, though not just yet. The year had ripened and she had ripened with it, becoming very big, and slow and clumsy in her movements. Even getting up and down was difficult.

Dom looked after her more carefully than ever. When her time was approaching he did not go away hunting, but brought her fruit from the trees and berries from the bushes to eat. There were fish in the stream and the lake, and he tried to catch them but could not. They slipped away as he waded into the water, and when he threw his club at them from the shore it did them no harm.

One day Va knew her time had come. She thought, for an instant only, of the way it would have been in the village with all the other women to help and comfort her, and then dismissed the thought. She sent Dom away, and crouched in the hut and bore her child, and did the things that were necessary as best she could.

The child cried when she slapped it to make it draw breath, and Dom came to the door of the hut. He looked down at her anxiously as she cradled the baby in her arms. Then he reached his large hands down for the baby, and she gave it to him to hold. He looked at it, and she saw his face broaden in a grin of triumph. He cried:

“In all things you are a good wife. You have given me a son!”

Even in this, Va thought bitterly, she had failed. She had been sure she would bear a daughter.

Dom handed the child back to her.

“Take my son, Va, and feed him.”

Mutely she took the baby and held it to her breast.

• • •

But though it was a boy, Va found that she loved the baby more than she had ever loved anything or anyone in her life—more even than she had loved the Village Mother. She fed him and cared for him and caressed him, rocking him to sleep in her arms. She crooned to him songs of lullaby, which the women of the village had always sung to their babies.

She was doing this one day when Dom came into the hut, and she stopped when she saw him standing there. He asked her to go on singing, but she looked at him with stony eyes; in the end he went away, and she could croon again to her baby. She called him Bel: it was the name of her brother who had been slain by Dom's tribe. She had expected Dom would have a name of his own for the child, but he called him Bel as she did.

The harvest time was over—leaves fell from the
trees, twisting in the wind, and the days shortened and sharpened. The cold season came again; but now they had the hut for shelter, and Dom had stacked wood in piles to keep the fire going during the winter. They had a store of meat also: Va had showed Dom the way they preserved meat in the village, not by cutting it into thin strips and letting it wither in the sun, but by rubbing in salt and hanging it in the smoke of the fire.

Dom still went hunting when the weather was not too harsh, sometimes to parts so distant that he was forced to sleep a night away from the hut. Va loved those times, when she and Bel were alone together, and she could sing to him with no fear of Dom appearing and drying up her voice. It saddened her when Dom returned, but he brought fresh meat and eating this made her milk good and put strength and vigor into Bel's small limbs.

One day Dom took him from her after she had filled his belly. She watched jealously, hating to see him in Dom's arms but knowing there was nothing she could do about it. He was Dom's son as well as hers, and Dom brought the meat that, through her body, sustained him.

Dom put his finger into the baby's hand and it closed into a tiny fist to grasp him. He laughed.

“He is a strong one, our son! You feed him well, Va. He will be a big man when he grows up.”

She did not reply. Gently Dom freed his finger, and ran his hand along Bel's arm.

“He has good limbs, a good right arm. He will wield a mighty club when the time comes.”

“No!” Va shook her head violently. “My son will not have a killing club.”

“He must, if he is to be a hunter.”

“Then he will not be a hunter. He will tame cattle, as my forefathers did, and grow wheat and other crops. When he has to kill an animal for food, he will do it with kindness and ask pardon of the spirit of the beast. He will not murder for the love of murdering.”

She had spoken sharply. Dom did not reply at once. Then he said:

“He must be a hunter. The time will come when I am too old and feeble to protect you; then our son must do it.”

“I will not have him made into a savage! He will be like my brother, whose name I gave him—a boy of happiness and gentleness and love.”

Dom stared at her. “Your brother is dead.”

She spat at him. “I know it, and you killed him!”

“He is dead because although he was gentle and happy and loving his right arm was not strong enough. Those may be good things, but without strength they are nothing.”

“You killed him,” she said. “For that I hate you, and always will.”

He gave her back the baby, and his face was dark and unhappy.

“You have taught me many things, Va,” he said, “and I have been glad of the teaching. And you have brought many good things into my life: most of all this son, and your own self. But what I said was true. Nothing can grow unless a strong arm shields it.”

He went out of the hut to where the wind was blowing snow along the lakeside.

• • •

The snows melted and the air grew milder: days lengthened and the sun shone more often. Above the hut the trees and bushes put out fresh green points, which slowly uncurled into new leaves.

Bel grew bigger and stronger all the time. He talked and laughed, in his own tongue which as yet
was neither Va's nor Dom's; and he learned to crawl, slowly and awkwardly at first, then more and more nimbly. Va did not have to carry him with her everywhere, and could do things while he played.

She found plants which were good to eat, or bore fruits that were, and put them together in a patch of earth near the hut, digging them in carefully as she had seen the men do in the village, and taking water to them in a shell when there was not rain enough. She had saved some of the seeds of wild grain from the previous autumn and she planted this, too, in a spot where she could tend it and pick it easily when the new seeds were ripe. She hunted along the shore, and found strange small animals in low water that had skins as hard as rock, but with flesh inside that was good and sweet once they had been baked in the fire. In the nesting season she gathered the eggs of the big birds that fed on the fish in the lake.

Often she stood by the lakeside watching them. They flew low over the surface of the water, probing it with keen eyes, and then plunged down like sharp-pointed stones, to emerge with fishes wriggling in their beaks. Va wished she were a bird and able to do that. When she waded into the water the fish fled
away as they had fled from Dom, and all her skill in swimming could not bring them within her grasp.

One day, though, before Dom went off to hunt for game, he spoke of how much harder the hunting was than in the old days, when the tribe had sent out boys and old men to encircle the beasts and chase them down the funnel of beaters toward the waiting hunters. Now he had to run animals down by himself, with no help. There were antelope less than a day's journey to the south, but they were too fleet-footed for him to have any hope of catching one.

Va thought of this after he had gone, as she watched the fish that swam in the stream near the hut. They were speckled brown and yellow, about a foot in length, and they would stay for a long time in one spot, motionless except for the small beat of fins that kept them in place against the current. But if she put a toe in the water, or even let her shadow come between them and the sun, they turned and darted downstream, almost too fast for the eye to follow.

If someone were waiting down there, as Dom said the hunters had stood waiting for the antelope . . . ? She shook her head. The fish were so much smaller and moved too fast through the slip
pery water for anyone to catch them. But if there were something in the water to stop and hold them? A cloth? But they would see it, and draw back.

It was not until hours later, as she was plaiting grass into cords to mend the roof of the hut which the wind had blown awry, that the idea came to her. If one knotted many cords together, with holes between them not quite big enough for a fish to swim through . . . with the stream freely flowing through the fish might not notice it and might rush into it and be held fast. Then one could lift the net up and easily take out the fishes on dry land.

As soon as she had mended the roof she set to work to make a net. She did not finish it that day and was particularly glad when Dom did not return at night: this was an idea she did not wish to share with him. Early next morning she started again, with Bel crowing at her feet. When she had finished the net she took it down to the stream.

She had already marked a good place where the stream narrowed and ran more deeply. She realized the net would need to be anchored on either side, and hammered two sticks into the ground to hold it. The net lay across the entire width of the stream and
the water flowed through it, unimpeded. Va looked at it with satisfaction, then went upstream to the spot where the fish hovered, nose to current.