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.
