Presently he began asking questions.
‘I took milk from the deer that Hawkon has,’ answered Wooma. ‘And the woman Flint caught me and beat me. So I ran away here, into the forest, to escape her, and to make magic against her.’
‘You have magic?’ Ogo was awed, and a little repelled. The rest of her tale had passed over his head. Milk from the deer—what crazy talk is this? But magic—that is familiar enough. And dangerous.
‘No.’ Wooma was quick to see his shrinking. ‘I am Wooma. I have no magic of my own. But I found Flint hopping in the likeness of a frog, and I killed her. I said, This frog is not a frog: it is the woman Flint that Hawkon has taken. And I beat her with a stone like this, three times. So now Flint is dead and Wooma is afraid to go back.’
Ogo shuddered, and looked about him uneasily. ‘Where is this place? Where is the Koor?’
She pointed to the shadow of the tree they sat under. ‘See, lord, the dark ghost of the tree.’ She pointed to a near bush. ‘See, lord, the bush.’
‘I see them,’ assented Ogo.
‘When the dark ghost has crawled to the bush, and touches him, we are in the squat of Koor.’
‘I am thirsty,’ said Ogo. He could not believe that Koor’s squat was so near, a mere hour’s journey; for his surroundings were unfamiliar. He was suspicious of Wooma, but answered her nothing. ‘I am thirsty.’
She rose, and stretched out her hand, and led him to the slope of a green hill dotted with juniper bushes. To us, who watch, the scene may suggest an ancient map, with stiff little trees pictured in black upon a yellow ground, dolphins riding the sea, and at the base of this particular hill three words of flowing script to tell us that here a spring gushes. It pleased Ogo, when he had quenched his thirst at this spring, to climb the hillside in search of he knew not what. Perhaps it was in his mind, though not in his consciousness, that a man might lie up there, in the shadow of a juniper bush, and be secure from a surprise attack. He was glad to be out of reach of those tall forest trees, and took pleasure in the fading brightness that lay on the grassy slope. Each small blade and spear cast its individual shadow—faint pencillings on a green and golden quilt. Ogo and Wooma lay quiet in each other’s arms, forgetful of danger. A rabbit, within a spear’s length of the bush that sheltered them, came out of his burrow and listened. The shadow of the bush grew longer. It was the hour of stillness and mellowing light, the pause between day and dark, when colours deepen under the varnish of sunset, and the voices of birds, calling infrequently a belated phrase, assume the clarity and remoteness of familiar legend. In the west, the gold of the sky gradually darkened to red. The sun spilled himself on the horizon. For a moment the lovers turned from each other to stare at this dying and immortal majesty. To Ogo the sight was full of meaning and portent, as always; but now a hint of new meaning was mingled with the old. An emotion stirred in him that was neither fear nor desire. His child mind became full of questions, and in this woman, or in something that made this woman mysteriously himself, he seemed to find the hint of an answer. In the having of her there was not only pleasure and power, but a third joy, release; and these three now were fused for Ogo in the emotion that man, in later childhood, has called beauty. Ogo laid a light hand on her bosom, then pointed towards the sky, trying to express his sense of some quality shared by these two objects of his love. But the thought, the feeling, was inarticulate. Responding to his caress, Wooma grinned lovingly. His face remained grave, his eyes full of the question that filled his heart. He was aware of a vital need: he wanted to give himself utterly to this woman, to pour out his life at her feet as the sun-god poured the blood of his splendour on the far edge of the world.
He came very close to her and spoke in her ear. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You are my woman. You are Ogo and I am Wooma. Listen. I will tell you my name.’
CHAPTER 8
THE HERD CALLS AND THE LOVERS ANSWER
Ogo’s shame was too radical a growth to die: it went on existing side by side with this new exultant feeling of release and fulfilment. There was room in him for these contradictions: his mind, because he never looked into it, accommodated them without the smallest difficulty. And at present, with Wooma at hand to see and touch, joy was uppermost. He was not even now capable of questioning the rightness of the law that condemned him; and yesterday, in the first onset of his despair, the mere instinct of gregariousness and the driving torment of guilt might have sent him back to Koor and to death. He had not in that moment doubted that he must suffer the penalty of his crime; nor even, so profound his identity with the tribe, wished to do so. But with the going down of the sun, the long warm night of friendliness and love, and the waking that found beauty still in his arms, the scope and direction of his being were imperceptibly changed. Shame, not repudiated, was forgotten. Pride lifted his head. Towards the world in general he felt masterful; towards Wooma he felt, not only swaggeringly possessive, but patrimaternal, as though she had been, as no doubt his idea of her was, a very part of himself, child begotten and born of his conscious and unconscious desires. The penalties he and she had incurred were well known to him: for the man, death; for the woman, mutilation, and a banishment that in practice amounted to death. Except at the seedtime sacrifice, when the earth-god demanded the blood of a ripe virgin, the killing of a woman after puberty was of bad omen: it was sufficient that the offending female should be formally cast out, with the curse of Hasta on her head, and driven with spears into the wild, so that she might carry her contamination to a foreign people, or, as was more probable, be eaten by wolves or die of starvation and the terror of the curse. This was the fate that Ogo feared for Wooma; for though it was all a matter of tradition and hearsay, no event of the kind being in his personal memory, there were tales in plenty, a body of sacred legend, to give force and shape to his imaginings. It was necessary therefore that he should take Wooma as far as possible away from the Koor squat. As for himself, he was enlarged and completed in this woman, and his appetite for life was doubled.
Of these facts however—especially of the need for flight—he was something less than conscious, except in fleeting moments of alarm. With even more decision than usual, the present—its needs and its joys—occupied him to the exclusion of remote dangers; and when he and Wooma had come down from their high place, and foraged for food, and caught a young rabbit and shared it, they turned their attention again to each other and spent the morning in idle amorous play. Yesterday and its terrors seemed far away indeed: the new life alone was real. The gods having not yet stricken them, they had forgotten the gods. Yet pictures that might at any moment become plans were forming in Ogo’s mind. He fell into a long silence.
‘What are you seeing?’ asked Wooma. Silence she could endure, but not pensiveness. It troubled her that he should have thoughts secret from her. ‘What are you seeing, Ogo? Wooma is here.’
‘I am seeing a river,’ said Ogo, ‘with many fishes in it that a man might catch with his hands. I am seeing a small squat near this river, and a man and a woman eating the fishes.’
‘The man is Ogo. And the woman is Wooma, his woman.’
‘It is so.’
He continued his daydreaming. The door of the squat opened towards the river. There was the forest for hunting in and the river for escape. And at the river’s end there was the sea.