Outcast of Narnia

Chapter Seven: The Dryad's Pool

From beneath a mesh of pain, Peter fought and re-fought the battle he had just lost. It had happened suddenly, but he had felt his old sword-fighting skill come back to him swiftly. Cut, parry, thrust. Parry. Parry. Turn, duck, thrust. Shield up!

It was sheer bad luck that he had been spotted so quickly after arriving in the Land of Ruh. Bad luck and timing, running into those soldiers when he had.

The rough wood of the pallet in his cell pressed into his back and it hurt to breathe, let alone to move or turn over. Had it really only been two days since he had stood in Aunt Polly’s sitting room and put on a yellow Ring?

* * *

The Rings had worked like the magic charms they were, and he had found himself whisked out of Aunt Polly’s flat to an aerial view of the receding streets of London, the Old Bailey with its bomb-damaged corner, and the pocks of craters and shattered buildings. But London quickly dwindled into a pinprick, and soon he was outside of England and planet Earth altogether. He was surrounded by blackness, but that quickly changed to a deep green, and just as Aunt Polly had predicted, he found himself rushing upward and out of a pool into the Wood where (almost) nothing ever happens.

He looked around, grasping the Narnian sword he had brought along (Eustace had left it in the keeping of Aunt Polly), and realised at once how right Digory and Polly had been about that Wood. Everything was alive, life seemed to be springing from the ground beneath him, but the place was so turned inward with its own growing that it might soon absorb one into itself. Careful not to let himself get comfortable or to let the magic of the place begin to work on him, he looked around.

Before taking a step away from the pool, he took the sword and used it to mark his spot, cutting a strip out of the turf as Digory had done so long ago. Peter knew he might never find his way back again if he lost that pool. Then he began to walk round it in a careful circle. There were two dry hollows nearby, which he assumed must be Charn and some other world. But how to tell into which world his sisters Lucy and Susan might have disappeared, he had no idea.

He held up his sword and looked at its blade, hoping for a sign. Was there anything within this Narnian object that would draw it towards its home? But the blade looked dull in this land of perpetual rich brown soil, and yellow and green growing things. He set it on the grass and sat down under one of the trees. Suddenly he was hungry. He ate a small packet of tinned meat and biscuits that Aunt Polly had given him. Then he was thirsty, and took a long drink from the pool he had come out of.

He put his hand in to feel for a bottom. It seemed to be only a few inches deep, just as Aunt Polly had said. The water was cool and refreshing, and after his drink he lay down under the tree, remembering that he had been awake since four this morning, and had been worn out by calling for Susan, learning that she had disappeared, and deciding with Polly and Digory that he should go through with the plan alone.

He soon dozed off. “The journey hasn’t taken any time,” he told himself. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

When he woke, the light was just the same, but he felt that his mind now hummed with the growing of the trees and the earth around him. There seemed to be no purpose in doing anything but be-ing there. The turf stretched smoothly out around him, except in one place, where a strip of red earth shone through. Why on earth, he thought, then remembered that he himself had cut the strip.

“I’ve got to think clearly,” he said. “Forward is the only choice.

“He looked at the strip he had marked, the empty hollows next to it, and said, “I’ll start with the first one and work round.” As he walked towards it, he nearly stumbled over a creature, lying, as he had just been doing, under one of the trees. The creature was fairylike, with a pointed chin, slanted eyes, violet skin, and long lashes. She—it looked like a she—was wearing an odd-looking hat with a tiny cage containing some type of live bird.