Duncton Wood by William Horwood Read Free Book Online Page A

get away. “You think this snow’s just here for your special pleasure? Well, come with me...”
    She wanted to run from him, to get away from his anger and his voice that was getting louder. She wanted the safety of Sarah. But looking up at his angry gaze she could not move a paw but in the direction in which he pointed – toward the pastures. But she didn’t want to go there.
    “Please can I go back to the home burrow?”
    Mandrake cuffed her not once or twice but several times, so that her head stung and she found herself running tearfully before him toward the pastures, through a wood in which the snow that had once fallen delicate and light was beginning to swirl and whose trees were starting to strain before a blizzard.
    She was cold and Mandrake was wild; her teeth chattered in fear. If she opened her mouth as she ran, to gain breath as Mandrake rushed her through the wood, the bitter wind seemed to want to blow her apart.
    Then she was at the wood’s edge, and forced by Mandrake to gaze out onto the pastures whose grass was gray with a thin layer of snow over which more snow whined with the blizzard.
    “Still think it’s pretty, still think it’s something to dance to?” roared Mandrake above the wind.
    Then he pushed her out from the protection of the wood into the killer wind and her screams and sobs lost themselves in its wild bitterness, and her tears were part of the stinging blizzard snow. Until she was so far out from the wood that it was lost behind her in the storm and the only solid thing she could see was the dark shape of Mandrake himself, crouched like a black rock against the wind, snow swirling around him.
    Mandrake seemed no longer interested in her, turning his attention instead to the blizzard and raising a paw against it as if searching for something beyond it that was threatening him and which he hated and would defy.
    “Thought you could kill me, you bastard; thought Mandrake would yield. Siabod, you’re nothing, your Stones are a nothing, Arthur is nothing, you...” and then he began to roar and rage at the blizzard, his language changing into the harsh tongue of Siabod whose words were like talon thrusts. He was no longer immobile rock but a moving mass of dark shadow and anger raging at the bitter wind and ignoring the harsh snow that flailed against his snout and mouth. But his roars began to get more high-pitched and wilted before the wind into what seemed the bleatings and mewings of a creature lost, and Rebecca’s fear was gone.
    She wanted to reach out and take him to her, tell him he was safe and so she shouted Mandrake! Mandrake! into the deafening wind. He turned to her and she saw that in his eyes, so menacing before, there was a terrible fear and a loss so great that she could only reach out to it....
    He hit her as she came to him, the look of loss replaced again by anger, and then he turned her to the wind and snow and shouted into her above the sound of the blizzard “This is what I faced, this is the force you face, and you Rebecca will never yield to it because you are part of me who knew Siabod once and defied its death...” and she wanted to cry no no no this isn’t it, it isn’t it isn’t, but she was too young to know the words and the words only cried inside her and so she sobbed and struggled to get free. But she never forgot what she was unable to say, just as she never forgot the power of his grip as he forced her to face the blizzard wind. Nor could she forget the strangest thing – how safe she felt as he held her there.
    That was what happened to Rebecca with Mandrake in mid-February, and what mole can doubt that in those wild half-remembered moments her love for him grew deep? Had he not shown her something of himself?
    Yet what a shuddering memory it soon became, and how much more afraid of him she grew.
    Still, through that bleak winter there were some comforts. Sarah would sit with her and tell stories about her family. She would play with her