‘The farther south, the worse. The farther north, the better. There’s water up there. It still rains there. There is a big desert, they say, and it is drying everything around its edges, but you can go around it.’
‘There is going to be a desert here.’
‘Yes.’
‘We use words like south and north and east and west, but why do we? Where do they come from?’
He said with a laughing sneer, as if he had suddenly become another person, ‘The Rock People are just stupid. Stupid rock rabbits.’
‘All these words come from somewhere. I think from the Mahondis.’
He jeered again, ‘The Mahondis! You don’t understand. They aren’t anything – we aren’t. There were people once – they knew everything. They knew about the stars. They knew … they could talk to each other through the air, miles away …’ His mood was changing: he seemed to be wanting to laugh, but properly, then giggle…‘From here to the Rock Village. From here to – up north. To the end of North.’
And now she found herself giggling too.
‘You’re laughing,’ he said, laughing. ‘But it’s true. And they had machines that could carry a hundred people at a time …’
‘But we had sky skimmers.’
‘But these could go on flying without coming down for days …’
And suddenly they were laughing aloud, for the ridiculousness.
‘And they had machines so big that – bigger than the Rock Village.’
‘Who told you all this?’
‘People who know what’s up North. There are places there where you can find out about the old people – the ones that lived long ago. And I’ve seen pictures.’
‘The pictures on the old walls?’
‘No, in books.’
‘When we were little there were books.’
‘Not just paintings on leather and leaves. They used to have books made of … It’s a very thin, fine stuff, white, and there can be a hundred pages in a book. I saw some pages from an old book … they were crumbling …’ His mood changed again. He said furiously, ‘Mara, if you only knew … We think the Rock People are just – rabbits. But those people, the ones that lived long ago – compared to them we are beetles.’
Now the dark was coming up through the rocks. He said, ‘I’m going to sleep. But you must stay awake. Do you know how to? When you get sleepy, then wake me. Don’t wake me suddenly or I’ll hit you. I’ll think you’re an enemy – do you see? You slept a bit earlier.’ And there and then he lay down on the rock and was asleep.
And now it was really dark. There was no moonlight: the moon was almost full, but the sky was too full of smoke and dust to see it, or the stars. Mara sat with her back against a rock and her head whirled with everything she had been hearing. She wanted to cry, and would have cried, but stopped herself, thinking, Bad enough to lose all that water in sweat, but I can stop myself crying. She thought of her life all these years with Daima, who told her tales, full of all kinds of things the little girl had thought were made up – just stories – but now Mara was wondering if Daima’s tales were true after all. But mostly they had played What Did You See? And what had Mara seen! The inside of a neighbour’s rock house. The details of the scaly skin of a land lizard. A dead tree. ‘What did you see, Mara?’ ‘The branches stick up like old bones. The bark has gone. The wood is splitting. In every crack insects are living.’ But they aren’t now: the flames have killed them, every one. ‘The birds come and sit in the dead trees and go off, disappointed. There are birds’ skeletons in the trees. When the skeletons fall to the ground you can see they are like us. They have legs and feet and their wings are like arms.’ ‘And what else did you see, Mara?’ ‘The dead wood of the different trees is different, sometimes light and spongy and sometimes so heavy and hard I can’t push my thumbnail into it.’ ‘And what else, Mara?’ ‘There are the roots deep in the ground that I dig up.’ And that was what she had seen, all those years. The village. The Rock People. The animals, always fewer and then gone. The lizards and dragons – but they had gone too. Mishka, darling Mishka, who had licked her face clean, and then Mishkita. And the earth insects … insects, scorpions, insects, always more of them … Well, even the scorpions would have been burned up by now, probably.
And that was all. She had not gone farther than the dead cities in the hills. ‘What did you see, Mara?’ ‘I saw pictures of people, but they were not like us, but a different brown, with differently shaped bodies, painted eyes, rings on their hands and in their ears. I saw …’ Perhaps those were the people that Dann said had been so clever that they knew everything?
Mara was staying awake easily because of her sad and ashamed thoughts. Then she wanted to pee and was afraid to move and wake Dann. She crawled away, trying not to make a sound, and squatted paces away. There was a lot of pee now, and her pee place was no longer sore. Her body was not burning and aching and itching and crying out for water. When she crawled back she saw Dann’s eyes were open, watchful gleams in the dark.
‘Did you hear something?’ he asked.
‘No.’
His eyes closed and he was instantly asleep. A little later he rolled towards Mara, and was hugging her. ‘Mara, Mara,’ he said, in a thick voice, but it was childish, a little boy’s voice. He was asleep. He snuggled up to her and she held him, her heart beating, for she was holding her little brother; but at the same time he was dangerous, and she could feel his tube thick and hot on her thigh. Then his arms fell away. He was sucking his thumb, suck, suck. Then silence. He rolled away. She could never tell him that he had sucked his thumb. He would probably kill her, she thought. Then was surprised at the thought, which had come so easily.
Before Dann fell asleep, while he watched his sister, he had been thinking, Why am I here? Why did I come for her? She’s such a poor, sick, feeble thing. But all he knew was that ever since he had heard from travellers that there were people alive in the old village, he had had to come. He did not know why, but he was restless, he was unhappy, he could not sleep. He had to look for her. She was mistaken, thinking he had not seen monkeys. He had, in cages – and people too, in cages. He thought she looked like a little monkey, with big, sad eyes and a naked head. But she was already fattening a little. She was no longer just a skeleton with a bit of skin over the bones and enormous dry, hungry eyes. And that was in only two days. At the waterhole he had seen something he first thought was an animal, with its long claws and filthy mats of hair on its head; but now he knew her again, for certain looks of hers, and movements, and memories, were coming back. They were all of warm arms and a soft voice, of shelter and comfort and safety. He was trying to match what he saw: the little, spindly creature, all bones, with the memories his limbs and body held, of soft, big, kind arms, everything big and soft and warm.
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.’
