Mara and Dann

When the light began, Mara saw that all over her were bits of the black, greasy stuff from the fire. So the wind had shifted. She said, ‘Dann,’ and he was at once on his feet and looking at the black bits on him. The fire had burned to the edge of the older fire, and gone out. There was smoke everywhere, but it was thinner ahead, where they were going. He took up the water cans, and put the pole on his shoulder, and went bounding off down towards the nearest waterhole; and then he shouted to her and she went to the edge of the little hill, the rock already hot under her feet, and saw him point down. The black from the fires seemed to have over it greyish-yellowish streams, like liquid: earth insects, like a flood, going down to the watercourse. But that was not their destination: the streams were already on their way up the farther ridge. ‘Quick,’ he said, and bounded down, though keeping a distance between him and them; and she followed, shivering now not with weakness but with fear, and plunged after Dann into the biggest waterhole. There they washed the black smears off them, and filled the cans right up, and drank and drank, always watching the earth insects; but saw that the mass was spreading out sideways, towards their waterhole. She wanted to scramble out but he held her, and then, as the insects fell over into the water, he grabbed them with his quick fingers, pulling off their heads and cramming the still squirming bodies into his mouth. He ate several, then saw her face and stopped to think what to do. She was not far off fainting with horror. Along the edge of the water now was a fringe of drowning insects. He stepped through the water to the bank, reached for his big sack, took from it a smaller one, filled it with drowned insects, and then nodded at her to get out of the water. She was afraid, for the insects seemed to be everywhere. But he stepped up and out, carefully, putting his feet between the trickles of insects which, if they had a mind to, could eat him and her to bones in a moment. But no, the insects were going as fast as they could through the waterholes to make new cities for themselves in a part that had not been burned. Yet there was nothing to be seen but the black of the fire, so they would have a long way to go, carrying everything they had: bits of food from their underground farms – which, Mara could see, seemed dry and shrivelled instead of plump and fresh – their babies, and their big mothers, each the size of Mara’s hand, white and fat, and who even as they were being carried along were laying eggs that fell from them like maggots and were gathered up by the insects and carried in their mouths. This was a people moving from one home to another, as the Rock People moved into an empty house if they liked it better than their own. Mara watched Dann step carefully among the insects, who were now more like a flood, a flash flood, when it seemed as if the earth itself was on the move; and she went after him afraid she would set her feet down on them because of her faintness. But soon they were through the insects and going along the ridge again, above the watercourse where the holes were already only half what they were yesterday. Looking back they could see more and more of the insects coming; soon there would be none left in the tall earth towers that were like cities. Up the two went to the place between the rocks, and Dann put the drowned insects on the hot rock, and in a few moments they had lost their juicy, glistening look and were like little sacks of skin. And now Dann gave Mara one of them, looking hard at her, and she put it in her mouth. It tasted on her tongue acid, and pulpy; she pretended it was a bit of fruit. Dann handed her another and another, and she ate them, until she was full. Then off he jumped down back to the swarm, and she saw him scooping the insects out of the rivers of them, putting them into the bag, and in a moment was back, and as he took each one out of the bag he nipped off its head. The insects were hissing and fighting inside the little bag. His hands had been bitten, they were red and swollen. But he went on, beheading them and laying them out on the rock, which was by now almost too hot to touch. He ate them as they cooked, and handed her one after another, and she knew that he was measuring that bony little body of hers with his eyes and thinking, She’s fatter, she’s better. ‘Eat, Mara. Eat, you must,’ he commanded.

By then it was mid-morning. Again they were going to travel through the hottest part of the day. They went parallel to the watercourse. There was no shelter, only rocks and dead trees, their branches reaching up like bones. The fires were behind: ahead the sky was full of dust but not of smoke. Mara longed to give up for the day, go down into the water and lie there, because it was sinking so fast that some of the waterholes were already only mud.

She was walking with her eyes kept lowered because of the glare, holding tight to the pole where the water cans hung. Then Dann said, ‘Look ahead, Mara,’ and she did try to unscrew her eyes to see that ahead the ridge went sharply up and into a high country, and down it fell a trickle of water, which was all that was left of the flood of four days ago. But the fall of water was between sharp rocks, and she knew she could never climb there to drink. ‘We’ll stop soon,’ he said. She thought that he sounded as she must have done, talking to him when he was a child. He was coaxing her on. ‘It’s better up there, over the escarpment. You’ll see. Tonight we’ll stay halfway up and tomorrow we’ll be up.’

In the late afternoon they made their way down to the water, which here was not waterholes, had been a really big river, and still flowed slowly from the fall, before it ran farther and became sand and rocks and the sparse, drying holes. Bones everywhere. Big, branching, white bones and, among them, horns and tusks. As they walked to the water’s edge they had to step in the spaces between bones: ribs, and skulls and teeth and little bones that the sun was crumbling into chalky white earth.

She was afraid there might be stingers or even a water dragon still alive and so, evidently, was he. He stood by the side of the shallow stream and poked everywhere into it with the carrying pole, but there was no creature in it, nothing broke the surface. This water was flowing only because of the flood, and the stream had been dry so long nothing had lived, not even a frog or toad. Again they bathed and splashed and drank and filled the cans, and went up among rocks high above the ridge, some distance from the fall, which was whispering its way down – though once that waterfall had been half a mile wide, for where they stopped for the night the stains of water were on the rocks around them, and were so smooth from old water they had to be careful not to slip on them. The light had not yet gone. They sat looking down over where they had come, and saw how the fires were raging away, but going south, away from them. She could not see the village, though it could not be very far – they had been walking slowly because of her weakness. It was all blackened country, and smoke was rising in places from a slow-burning log, or from a pile of bones. She tried to see the hills near the village where the old cities were but they were only a faint blue line away in the smoke. The wind had changed again: no black smuts were falling on them.

She mixed flour with water and again cooked cakes on the rocks. Then they ate another root. Very little flour left now, and eight yellow roots.

‘Up on the top there’s more food,’ he said. And he took out his little bag of greyish coins and laid them out and counted them. ‘We won’t be able to buy much with that,’ he said. And then he stayed, squatting, brooding over the coins, resting lightly on his knuckles, his other hand stirring the coins around. ‘I’ve been thinking, Mara. It’s that gold. The trouble is, how are we going to change those coins? Let’s have a look at them.’ She brought out her bag of gold coins and spread them out on the rock.

‘You know, I’ve never heard about these except as a sort of joke. “As good as gold.” “More precious than gold.” “It’s a gold mine.” But the more I think about it, I remember that it is used. But only by the rich people and that’s why I didn’t think at first …’ He sat stirring his fingers now in the gold coins. ‘They’d kill us if they knew we had these,’ he said.

‘If we can’t change them, then how are we going to eat?’

‘I didn’t say we couldn’t.’ He sat, frowning, thinking.

The little coins lay shining there, and when she touched one it was already hot from the rock.

‘With one of these you could buy a big house,’ he said.

‘Oh Dann, let’s buy a house and live in it – somewhere there’s water all the time.’

‘You don’t understand, Mara.’

Well, she knew she didn’t, and she felt she must have heard this many times already: You don’t understand. ‘Then begin telling me,’ she said.

They were crouching face to face, coins, the gold ones and ugly, thin, grey ones, on a big stone between them, and even up here on a dried up hillside that seemed quite deserted, he lowered his voice.

He took up a big stick and began drawing in the dust between stones. He drew a big shape, longer than wide, and on one side it bulged right out, so that it was like a fat-stemmed throwing stick.

‘That’s the world,’ he said. ‘It is all earth, with sea around it.’

‘The world’ floated up easily into Mara’s mind from long-ago lessons with her parents. ‘The world is bigger than that,’ she said. ‘The world has a lot of pieces of land with water between them.’

He leaned forward, peering into her face. He seemed frightened. ‘How do you know? Who told you? We are not supposed to know anything.’

‘We were taught all that. I was, but you were too little. Our parents told us.’

‘But how did they know? Who told them? They don’t tell us anything. They want us to think that what we have is all there is. Like rock rabbits thinking their little hill is everything.’ The sneer was back in his voice.

‘It’s this shape you’ve drawn. I remember it. It is called Ifrik. And it is the piece of earth we live on. Where are we on it? – that’s what I’d like to know.’

He pointed in the middle, well below the bulging out bit.

‘And how far away is Rustam from here?’

He pointed a little distance down, and then put two fingers, almost together, one where he said they were and one where Rustam was.

She felt that she had really become as small and as unimportant as a beetle. In her mind the journey from Rustam was a long one, a change from one kind of life to a completely different one; and now all that had become – because of those two fingers of his, held with a tiny space between them – nothing very much, and she was nothing much too.

But she held herself steady and said, ‘I remember they said that Ifrik was very big. And where are we going tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow and the next day and the next …’ He held his fingers the same tiny distance apart, but now on the opposite side of where he had said they were.

‘And that is north?’

‘It is north. But the real North is …’ And, excited, he pointed to the very top of the space or shape he had drawn.

‘If it has taken us so long to come such a little way then how long to get North?’

‘Why long? It’s been two days.’

‘But …’ she was thinking of that journey by night away from Rustam and knew that he wasn’t. And probably couldn’t.

‘From here, going north, it will get better.’

‘And if we were going south, instead, it would be worse?’

‘Worse, until we got to the very bottom, here …’ and he pointed to the bottom of Ifrik. ‘There are high mountains, and then there is water and green.’

‘So why aren’t we going south?’

‘We’d die trying to get there. Besides, when everything started to dry up and the deserts began, then a lot of the people travelled south, crowds of people, like those earth insects today; everyone went down and down and then through the mountains. But the people there didn’t want them, there wasn’t enough water and food for everyone. There was a war. And all the people from the high, dry lands were killed – because they were weakened by the travelling.’

‘All killed?’

‘So they say.’

‘And when was this?’

‘Before we were born. When the rains began to stop, and there was no food, and the wars began.’

‘Daima ran away from a war. That was a long time before we were born.’

There was a silence then, with the sun going down in its dusty red, the shadows dark and warm between the rocks, the little tinkling of the waterfall.

‘I don’t see how we are going to stay alive,’ she said.

‘I’ve stayed alive, haven’t I? I know how to. You’ll see. But we have to be careful all the time.’ He looked again at the gold coins, thinking. Then he said, ‘Give me two of those strips of cloth you have.’

She fished them out of the bottom of her bag, wondering, sadly, And when am I going to need these again? He was watching her, and she thought, He knows what I am thinking: he’s kind.

He divided the coins into two heaps of twenty-five and tied them, one by one, into the strips of cloth, with a little knot between each. So they wouldn’t clink – she understood; and began to help him. There were soon two knotted cords of twisted cloth lying on the rocks.

‘See if you can tie one around you – high up, above your waist.’

She lifted her tunic and tied one of the cords where he had pointed. The trouble was she had no breasts at all, she was flat. When she showed him, she was ashamed, because across her chest under the flimsy brown the knots of the cord were visible, taller than her little nipples.

The tears splashed off her face on to the stones.

He smiled, and put his hand out, taking a little pinch of flesh where her neck was bare above the tunic. ‘Poor Mara,’ he said, gently. ‘But you’ll be a girl again soon, I promise you.’ And he rocked her a little with his hand, while she smiled and made herself stop crying. ‘All right, take it off.’ She slipped the cord down under her tunic and gave it to him.

‘We’ll get you something to wear that’s thicker and then no one will see what you’ve got under it.’

‘I wish I could have something different, soon.’ And she took up handfuls of the stuff of the tunic, letting them spring back into shape, trying to crush it, destroy it. ‘I do hate it, Dann. I wish I could wear the same as you’ve got on.’

He said nothing and his face changed: he was angry.

‘I know it is a slave’s dress,’ she said. ‘Our slaves used to wear them.’

‘I don’t remember.’ But he was remembering something bad.

‘Anything would be better than this,’ she insisted, and then he smiled at last.

Now it was dusk, the material of her tunic was not brown but a soft, glistening black.

‘It’s such funny stuff,’ he said, fingering it and hating it. ‘It changes colour. Sometimes in the strong sun I think it’s white, and then it’s brown again.’

‘Where can I get one like yours?’

‘We’ll have to buy one. And we don’t have enough of the little coins. So we’ll have to wait until we can change a gold one.’ He dropped one of the strings of twenty-five coins into his sack, and one into hers. ‘And now you sleep and I’ll stay awake.’

Mara lay down between the stones, her head on her hand, and was at once asleep, and woke to know Dann was not there beside her. Then she felt his hand over her mouth and heard his whisper, ‘Quiet, there are people.’ Feet moved among stones just below them, closer to the waterfall than they were. Clumsy feet: stones slipped and bounded down off the rocks. The light was in the sky again. The two peered over the edge of a rock and saw a man and a woman clambering down, who stopped, consulted, lay down where they were and slept. ‘Very tired,’ Mara breathed. Then she watched Dann creep down towards the travellers. He was among boulders, and in the dim light could be thought of as a boulder, for he stopped to wait, crept on, stopped … She saw him stoop down near the two sleeping bodies and was back with her at once, with a bag in his hand. They emptied it on the ground. Not much in it, only a little dried fruit and some pieces of flat bread. Dann at once divided the fruit and began eating his share. She thought that the two travellers had come from beyond the Rock Village somewhere, and down there was no food at all. ‘They’ll be hungry,’ she whispered, and saw Dann lean forward to stare into her face. When he did that, he was trying to work out what she was feeling, and what she was expecting him to feel. Then he whispered into her ear, ‘Eat, Mara. If you want us to stay alive, then we have to use our wits.’ She ate. The pieces of bread went into her sack.

Dann slung the cans back on the pole, careful they didn’t clink, and pushed the stolen bag deep into his sack. She slid her end of the pole on to her shoulder, and together they moved on up the sharp ridge, full of rocks. By the time they reached the top the sun was up and they looked back from this higher place at the black from the fires, the smoking logs here and there, and far away the fires themselves, burning slowly down into the south. Between where they were and the fires, nothing green was left, only grey rocks and stones here and there in the black. They went on up and over the escarpment and along the river that was falling behind them in the trickle she had seen from the plain. Mara was walking well, was keeping up easily with Dann. She was sure that her limbs were plumping out, with all the water she had been lying in, and drinking. But when she pinched her thigh through the tunic, and then her forearms, there was still only skin there, not flesh. But she was feeling better.

Now, ahead of them, was an enormous basin of land, with mountains all around it. The river came from a small lake. And the story was the same: once there had been water, big water, probably filling the basin right up to the mountains; but now cracked old mud, which was in places dust, spread out from the edges of the little lake. They were walking over hard, dry mud and bones.

In the lake, which was more of a large pool, she could see movement and said, ‘Are there still water dragons?’

‘No. They have died. But there are water stingers.’

‘Then we daren’t go in the water.’

‘No. When I was coming to you I walked along here. I thought the water was safe. I put a foot in to test it – and I only just got away. It was a big stinger.’

Here, on this side of the mountains, the air was cleaner. The sky was yellowish with dust, and low down, and the sun was making thick, regular rays through it, but it was not smoke. Soon they came to a village. The houses were not made of rocks but of big bricks, with roofs of thatch. A fire had been through here, but not recently, for the black had mostly blown away. The thatch had burned: the houses stood roofless. The inhabitants had left. The two went carefully through every house, room by room, and in every room Dann leaped up to see the tops of the walls, for he said people hid things up there and might have forgotten them. A likely story – both were thinking – with everything so scarce. There were jars in every house for water and food, but no rock cisterns. The jars were very big and it was not possible to carry them away. There was no food, not until the very last house, where Dann had to frighten away scorpions clustered around the door, and there they found in a jar some tightly packed down dry leaves. Dann filled one of his smaller bags with them: he said they were nourishing. While they were doing this they heard voices and hid, and peered out to see going past the couple they had robbed up in the hills. These two were a kind of person Mara had never seen, with great bushes of black hair and almost black skin. But they were so thin, and so weak, it was not possible to say whether really they were solid and strong, or wiry.

Dann pulled himself by a door to see all around the top of the wall. Only part of the thatch had burned here. He let out a shout, and reached out, and threw down a thin roll of cloth, which had inside it a garment like Dann’s. The cloth was a little scorched but not the robe. Mara took off her old skin-like tunic, which she had worn day and night for years, and was in this robe or dress that was made of a vegetable fibre, a soft, coarse cloth. She was actually crying because of her joy. She was about to throw the old brown garment – though it was as good as new, with not a mark on it, not a tear – away into a corner, goodbye, goodbye, you horrible thing, when Dann caught it up and said, ‘No, we can sell it.’ And stuffed it into her sack. Now they had seven of them.

With this new robe, which had been white once but was now a light brown, from dust, she felt she had thrown off her old life and was wearing a new life, though there was another person’s smell on it, and she knew that it was stained with that person’s sweat. But she could wash this dress and make it hers. And now Dann pulled out of her sack her cord of knotted coins, and she tied it just above her waist, and it could not be seen under the thick material. The cloth the dress had been rolled in would come in useful, for something.

The two went back to the edge of the lake, or pool, and stood looking at it. Mara wished she dared wash her dress there, and let it dry on her. Dann was silent. Mara saw on his face something she had not seen before: it was anger, or pain, or fear – but she could not decipher it. He only stared at the dirty little lake, and at the dried mud, and then over the lake to the mountains. She was afraid to ask, What’s wrong? – but he turned his head towards her, and she understood that if he could cry, could sob, could allow weakness, then that is what he would be doing now. It was pain she was looking at. ‘Why?’ he whispered. ‘Why? I don’t understand. It was all water. When I ran away that time, it was water from here all around to the mountains. Why should everything go dry, why does the rain just stop, why? – there must be a reason.’ And he came stepping across the hard mud ridges and took her by the shoulders and peered deep into her face, as if she must know the reason.

She said, ‘But those cities, the ones near the Rock Village, they had people in them for thousands of years, Daima said, and now they are just nothing.’ And as she spoke, she thought that she used the word thousands because Daima did, yet she still did not know more than the ten fingers on her hands, the ten toes on her feet. Long ago she had been taught more than that, in the school at home, but in her mind it was the same as if she said hundreds or thousands, and yes – there was another word – millions. He let his hands fall and said, ‘We walk over all these bones, all the time.’ She knew that tears wanted to come into those sharp, clever eyes of his, which were beautiful when he sat thinking, or had just woken; but his mouth was tight. ‘When I came this way to get you I saw skulls, people’s skulls, piles – I couldn’t count them.’ And now his face was so close to hers she could feel the heat from it on her cheeks. And his eyes seemed to press into hers. ‘Why is it happening, Mara? Why don’t we understand anything? No one knows why anything happens.’

And then he let her go, turned away, picked up the end of his pole and waited for her to lift hers. ‘There was a boat,’ he said. ‘That was only a week ago.’ His voice sounded ordinary again. They went on, carefully, well beyond the edge of wet, for in both their minds was the thought that if a water dragon or a lizard had survived it could be up and out of that water to get one of them. The water stingers rattled as they moved, so you could hear them. She was thinking, I say words like day or week, or year, and never think what I am saying, but behind these words are what they are. I know what a day is because the sun shines in it, and then there is dark, and I say night. But why a week, and why a year? She was tormented, haunted, by memories that refused to come properly into her mind: she had been taught these things, she was pretty sure. And now she did not know what a year measured, or why the rain fell or did not fall, or that the stars were … Of course she had known about the stars: she remembered her father holding her up to look at them, and saying, ‘That one there is …’ But she had forgotten all the names.