The Farther Shore - Christie Golden [44]
Maybe they’d have another campout, B’Elanna and her father and Tom and the new little one. Maybe they could start a new family tradition. As for her mother ...
Torres still shuddered whenever she thought about the rite she’d been forced to endure prior to embarking on the Challenge. Her memory was hazy, due no doubt to the fumes emanating from the lava pits, but she remembered enough: heat and pain and nakedness. And yet despite the extremity of the ordeal, it had all felt right, appropriate. She had indeed felt reborn as she ventured out into Boreth’s wilderness. She certainly [130] didn’t want to do it again. But she was glad that there had been something, some kind of ceremony, to mark her departure as something worth doing ... something worth acknowledging.
B’Elanna picked up a skewer and blew on the meat, touching it tentatively until she was certain it wouldn’t burn her mouth. She took a huge bite. Juices flowed down her chin as she chewed. Nothing had ever tasted so delicious. She looked down at the six other makeshift skewers and smiled. She’d sleep with a full belly tonight, and wouldn’t even have to eat a single grub to do so.
The flesh was melting off her. She’d always been slender, even small, but tough and wiry. Now even the faint layer of fat that had softened her musculature was all but gone. She was bone and blood and muscle and sinew. She made good time during the day, had learned to find food to keep her going, and slept like the dead at night. A few months ago, she would have laughed at the notion that such an intense physical ordeal would be “purifying” rather than a hardship. But now, she knew it to be the truth.
With every step she took, she was nearer reconciliation with her mother, and that was a journey that had taken years. She sweated her old grudges into the clay that she carefully layered over her body whenever she ran across any mud. The clay absorbed her emotional toxins as well as her physical ones, and when she did run across a clear pool or waterfall and allow herself the luxury of washing off the dirt, she felt cleaner than she had ever felt in a sonic shower.
Despite herself, she had to admit that she was thriving on this diet of fruit, tubers, grubs, and close-to-raw [131] meat. She could almost feel her body greedily absorbing the nourishment as she feasted on things that once would have made her stomach churn. No wine or replicated beverage tasted as sweet as water from a rushing brook or raindrops caught in a large, carefully positioned leaf. She had no husband or child to take care of, no engines to repair, no crew to manage, no captain to report to. Only the jungle and the sky, and her ceaseless steps over the harsh terrain which would take her toward this next segment of her life.
For the first time, B’Elanna Torres really understood what her mother had been trying to tell her. There was a deep, resonant purity in scoured skin, in hardened muscle, in casting off the vestiges of the comfortable, ordered, technical life. She could hear her heart steadily pumping blood, could feel the oxygen she drew into her three lungs enriching that blood, could feel her muscles working as they obeyed her thought: Keep walking. Here, in the most unexpected of places, was a kind of peace the tormented half-Klingon woman had never thought to find.
“I’ve got to tell Chakotay about this,” she said aloud, to hear herself speak. She’d talked to herself a great deal when she first embarked on this adventure. She had needed to hear a voice, even if it was just her own. Surrounded by people as she had been for the last seven years, solitude and silence was unfamiliar and, if she were to admit the truth, a bit frightening.
But the more time she spent by herself, the more she realized that she wasn’t truly alone; the more time she spent in silence, the more obvious it became that she was embraced by