Mara and Dann

by Doris Lessing

  Beyond the town, the skimmer dropped among the dry grasses of the savannah. Felice got out and fed the machine with the sugar-oil in her cans. Then she said, ‘Get out, you two.’

  The brother and sister stood side by side while the young woman walked all around them, stood examining them. Meanwhile she talked. The town just behind them had only males in it. There was a town near by that had females. They all met at stated times, to mate: at the equinoxes and solstices. You could hardly tell the males and females apart.

  Now, having thoroughly inspected the two, she pronounced judgement.

  ‘You are altogether too appetising, both of you. You’ve got to disguise yourselves a bit.’

  Mara knew she was in danger: she felt her aptitude for fertility strong in her body, and had seen that her black shining hair and her new soft breasts had invited stares. And Dann was a handsome youth and, with all his scars and weals well hidden, looked like a sleek and well fed member of the Kin.

  ‘Runaway slaves,’ said Felice. ‘That’s what you are and that’s what you look like. You’re an invitation to any slave trader. And don’t imagine that all slavers are sweet and kind like me.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Mara, ‘if you had sold me and Dann to the Hadrons, what would you have got for us?’

  ‘Not much. You were in such a terrible state. In good condition, the equivalent of one of your gold coins. Yes, you are right – it was easy to let you go because I wouldn’t have got anything for you anyway.’

  Mara smiled: this exchange was without ill-feeling.

  ‘So I can see I’m not going to make you believe in my kind heart.’

  ‘Have you got a lot saved?’ asked Dann.

  ‘I’m glad to say, yes. A profitable business, buying and selling people.’

  Now she went to her machine, and took from it one of her working uniforms, faded blue, top and trousers and belt, and said, ‘I’ll charge you as little as I can.’ Dann counted small coins into her hand till she said it was enough. ‘You wear it,’ she said to him. ‘You are in even worse danger than your sister is.’

  ‘I know I am,’ said Dann, and this acknowledgement eased Mara’s anxiety, for she had seen how he had been looked at recently, in Chelops. He stripped off his robe, put it into his sack and for a moment stood almost naked. He had on a small loin cloth. Felice laughed and said that she could fancy him herself, but unfortunately fate would soon separate them. Dann responded to Felice’s flirting, and that cheered Mara too. For she secretly feared Dann’s returning to drugs, and being used by men again.

  He put on the tunic and trousers, slipped his knife into a pocket, and again the two stood side by side.

  ‘Better,’ said Felice. ‘You could pass for a workman and his slave.’ She fetched water and bread from the skimmer, and the three sat on the earth and ate and drank. Around them stretched the yellow, beaten-down grasses of the dry season, and under them was the soft detritus of last year’s wet season, for there had been rain here, if not enough. The sky was tall, and so blue, and there was only a little dust in the air.

  ‘We have a long flight,’ said Felice. ‘And when we get to the next town you must go straight to the river and make sure of your places in tomorrow’s boat. Then go for the night to an address I will give you. Pretend you are a couple, it will be safer. Don’t go into the town, they don’t like travellers. If I can refuel I’ll leave straight away for the East. I’m going to sell the skimmer. It’s too hard to get sugar-oil and spare parts.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Dann.

  ‘Then I’ll take what turns up.’ They could see that the idea of throwing herself on the chances of luck invigorated her. ‘I might buy a boat with the skimmer money and run a river service instead.’

  ‘And I suppose I won’t see you again,’ said Mara.

  ‘Well, that’s how we live now: we meet people, we become friends, and then that’s it. Perhaps we’ll run across each other somewhere or other.’

  Dann was drawing a shape in the dust. It was Ifrik. He put a bit of straw down for Rustam, a little stone for the Rock Village, a leaf for Chelops, and then handed Felice a pebble and said, ‘Where will we be tonight?’

  Felice put down the stone half a hand’s span from Chelops. Now it took the span of Dann’s hand, his long fingers at full stretch, to reach between Rustam and where they were going. He said to Mara, ‘See how far we’ve gone already?’

  Felice watched this, not smiling: Mara could see she did not believe they would get much farther.

  Mara said, ‘We did well in Chelops, and you didn’t think we would.’

  ‘True,’ said Felice. ‘And, anyway, good luck. I don’t know why I like you two, but I do.’

  ‘Luck?’ said Dann. ‘It’s knowing that matters.’ He pointed to the place where Felice had said they were going, and said, ‘On the globe this area was all green, and it was full of rivers.’

  ‘What globe?’ said Felice.

  ‘Of how the world was long ago.’

  Felice shrugged. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘On the map that has the Ice all over the north of the world, the north part of Ifrik is not brown, the way it is on the globe, because before the Ice it was all desert – all the north of Ifrik was a desert. But it isn’t now. And on the globe the only part that is green is where we are going: rivers and a lot of green.’

  ‘Rivers, yes,’ said Felice. ‘But not much green, you’ll find.’ Then, ‘But I don’t know what you are talking about, not really.’ She was offended. ‘And let me give you a word of advice. Not all the tall tales you hear in the Mahondi quarter are true. They go in for a lot of mystification, you know, to impress people.’

  And they were off, the sun standing above them, and beneath them the scrubby plain; and then the sun was on their left, shining hot and clear, not dulled by dust; and then it was low; and below them was a river and a small town that as they came down seemed full of people. They landed. The people were what Mara was now used to: a mix of every kind of person, with every shade of skin, and hair sometimes straight and sometimes frizzed, and of every colour. There were no Mahondis, no Hadrons, and none of the kind who looked all the same.

  Already there was a small crowd around the machine. Felice told Mara and Dann an address, pointed where they should go, said, ‘See you some time, somewhere,’ and flew off, this time to the East.

  Mara and Dann were surrounded by staring, curious eyes. Not hostile, or at least not yet. They walked quickly to where they had been directed, followed by stares. It was hot, the wet heat, and they could feel the sweat trickling, and the air going into their lungs was like steam.

  The houses were of wood, a few of mud bricks. The roofs were of grass. It looked a prosperous enough place, certainly not threatened with emptying, as Felice had said these River Towns were.

  They found a little house in a lane. They walked into a room where a big, homely woman was cutting up roots. She looked them up and down, heard that Felice had recommended them, nodded, and said, ‘Sit down.’ They sat at a big, wooden table, laid with bowls and spoons for supper. She put questions to them, which they answered guardedly, saying that they had come from Chelops. She nodded and said, ‘Yes, refugees from Chelops have become rather more than we can manage.’

  Dann asked where the landing stage was, and she said that she would send her son to book them places. Her advice was to stay indoors until they had to go to the boat. ‘A lot of refugees have been robbed,’ she said. ‘You don’t look as if you’ve got much to steal, but one never knows. And there have been a couple of slavers around, too.’ Here she examined Mara’s slave dress, but said nothing.

  She fed them the kind of supper that Mara had not eaten for a long time, of stewed roots, and bread: this was hardly the fare that the Mahondis were used to.

  She did not ask what their relationship was, but showed them a room at the back, with barred windows. The room had several beds in it. Mara lay where she could watch the window, and Dann squatte
d on a bed, and counted out the small money Candace had given them, then dividing it and putting it into little leather bags. He gave her half. He counted the nine gold coins he had left, and tried various places to put them, an inner pocket, his shoes, but ended by choosing one of the little leather bags, where they could seem only another purse of cheap coins. They checked their store of bread, and decided they should try to buy more from their landlady.

  All this went on for a good hour or more, the contriving and planning.

  Mara thought, And this is the difference between having enough, as in Chelops, when all this business of keeping alive takes care of itself, just one of the things you do, and being on the edge, when you think of nothing else.

  They slept, and in the night woke to see the dark outlines of two people trying to get in at the window, but the bars held. They slept again, and Mara dreamed of Meryx and woke thinking she was in his arms. But it was not the dream that had woken her. Dann was thrashing about and fighting in his sleep, and was muttering threats, ‘I’ll kill you,’ with names Mara could not catch, but she thought she heard him say Kulik.

  In the morning she told him he had been dreaming. He said he knew that: he had terrible nightmares most nights. She asked about Kulik, but Dann said that he was only one of the suppliers. Clearly he did not want to talk about it, and they went down, and were given hot tea made from some plant the woman said grew on the river bank, and some bread. They paid what she asked for, enquired if they could buy some bread, were given a few pieces, for a couple of little coins, and went as fast as they could to the river.

  A big boat, about thirty paces in length, and half as much wide, was tied up to a stump, and people were already going aboard. Mara and Dann took their places on a bench under a little roof of reeds, and felt the wet river heat soak them and their clothes. There were tiny biting insects, in clouds. The passengers were making fans from anything they had, bits of clothing, their hands, even a flap of bread. Then a boy came running and jumped on to the boat just as it moved. He was selling fans made of river grass. Mara and Dann bought two and sat fanning away the insects, while the boy made a prodigious leap from the boat to the bank, earning applause, and the town they had scarcely seen moved away from them into the past.

  And so Mara and Dann, who had known in their lives only drought and dust, thirst and anxiety over water, were floating on a river that seemed to them enormous; but it had been wider, they could see, for the water had, though not recently, filled the banks to the brim. Now the level was a good ten feet lower, and grass was growing over the part of the banks that had once known only lapping water and river weeds. And there were water dragons, who were lying on the banks, half in and half out of the water, some of them half as long as the boat. Two men propelled the boat, standing at the prow and at the stern, using long poles. That meant the water could not be very deep: when the river was full, poles would not have found the bottom to propel the boat from. The boatmen wore loose, baggy trousers tucked into their shoes, and tops that tied at the neck, and cloth tied tight over heads and necks to keep the midges off, but their faces were red and lumpy from bites. Their hands were inside bags of material tied at the wrists.

  There were twenty passengers: men and women, and two children. Mara’s eyes kept going to the children, to reassure her that they were healthy and well fed.

  Mara believed that she might be pregnant. Or was it that she hoped she was? It seemed that her body yearned, craved, a child – or was it Meryx she was longing for? And if she was pregnant, what would Dann say, when everything was so difficult already?

  North: he wanted to go north, north to water, leaving the drought behind. But were they going to stop at the first place not threatened with dryness? How far was North? What was North? From the map on Candace’s wall North was only a whiteness, was ice and snow, covering half the world. She thought, Perhaps that is where all the water is, held in ice and snow, that can’t move and flow? Is that what people from the South mean when they say that the water is up North?

  It was very hot and the water dazzled. Mara drowsed and was woken by the plop and splash of the water dragons sliding into the water off the banks. These dragons had been in the rivers for thousands of years: the pictures on the walls of the Rock Village said so. And they were just the same, great clumsy monsters with long jaws full of irregular, ugly teeth and bulging with meat and confidence. Perhaps they planned to overturn this boat? If they all got together they were strong enough to do it. She asked Dann to ask the boatman in front, who said that sometimes when the boat was overloaded and low in the water the dragons might try to leap up and take a passenger. And did they succeed? ‘Oh sometimes,’ said the boatman, bad-tempered because of the midges. ‘Sit down and keep still, or they’ll have a bite off you.’

  The day went on, so hot, so damp, a torment of midges, and the boatmen let down containers into the stream and brought up water which all the passengers drank and poured over themselves, and then they asked for more. Was there disease in the water? If so they were all too hot to care. They wanted only to drink. And then had to pee it out, over the edge of the boat, no one attempting much modesty or concealment, because of the languors of the heat. That day they stopped at sunset at a small town that was used to the boat travellers and took no notice of them. They all went together, for protection, to an inn that fed them root stew and bread and sour fruit, stewed. They all slept in a very big room, on reed mats, stretching out arms and legs, as naked as they could manage, trying to believe that it was cooler because it was night. But Mara kept herself covered. Her pallet was next to Dann’s, so she could wake him if he had bad dreams.

  In the morning they were off again. The river did not change, rolling along, glossy green and clear, because it was the dry season, with some green trees along it where there were birds, actually birds, most of which Mara and Dann had never seen. On either side the country was dry and yellowish, and tall dry grasses fringed the banks. This was the country that had once been the green part of Ifrik, long, long ago, with great forests, and innumerable feeder streams – so Candace had said – and those streams had baby streams running into them. Now no forests, only savannah, and water running slow and low between dry banks. For seven days they travelled up the river, stopping every night in little towns where the inns that served the river trade seemed all the same; and at the end of that time they had gone up Ifrik the breadth of Dann’s forefinger laid in the dust of the map he drew to show Mara. And now there was a choice: to get off this boat and rest a little in the town that filled the fork between this tributary and the larger river, or to transfer to another boat, and go on, for this boat was returning to where it had started, which was where they had got on. Mara would have liked to stop, but Dann did not want to. He was driven by his need to go north, always north. Most of the passengers transferred to the new boat, a bigger one. None seemed to know where they were going, only that it must be better than where they had come from. Not all were from Chelops: some were from Majab. Mara and Dann had come farther than any of them, but were discreet about their origins. Bad enough that the passengers from Chelops knew that they were Mahondis, and hated them for it. Mara would see how Dann looked from face to face of these people, the close, intent look she knew so well: was he recognising faces, friends or enemies, from his time in the Tower? If so, he gave no sign. At night Mara always lay within touching distance, because she was afraid of what he might say in his sleep, or shout out if she did not wake him fast enough from his nightmares.

  This river they were on now was a very different affair. It was wider, and though the top part of its banks showed that it had shrunk in its bed, it was still much deeper than the river they had been on, which now seemed a mere stream in comparison. To use poles here was not possible; there were two oarsmen on each side, and a man to steer. This boat was lower in the water, and kept to the middle of the river, well away from the dragons that crowded its banks. On the tributary, towns and villages had appeared infrequently
, but here they seemed almost continuous. All were of baked mud bricks, with reed thatched roofs – clearly there were no forests near this river: on either side spread the thorny scrub of semi-desert, and even, in patches, the hot yellow glare of real desert. Thick reeds grew along the banks, and clumps of bamboo. The trees were all varieties of palm. This landscape was new to all the passengers, and the boatmen had to keep explaining what they were travelling through.

  On the first stop at a town much larger and finer than any on the other river, they all walked close together, looking out for possible assailants, though the boatmen said these were peaceful people who welcomed travellers for the money they brought in. In this inn they could choose to sleep in a big communal room or in smaller rooms, and Mara and Dann managed to get one of these for themselves. They had not been alone for days, and now they were able to count what coins they had left and talk freely. In fact their supply of small coins was running low, and to change a gold one in inns such as these was out of the question: very likely these people would never have heard of such a thing outside of some tale, or legend. Now there was a bit of luck. One of the boatmen fell ill and had to be left behind. Dann offered to replace him, and so could travel free. He was in the middle of the boat, at the side, and Mara sat just behind him and watched him row. The blue outfit Felice had given him was much too hot, and he only wore a loincloth, like all the male passengers. Mara was watching the muscles work in that strong muscled back: a fine back, yes, but much too thin. All the travellers were losing flesh fast, they sweated so much, and it was too hot to eat. Mara held out her arm free of her sleeve and knew that if Orphne could see her and Dann she would be ordering them special food and rest. Meanwhile Dann was pulling his oar from sunrise to sunset. He was so strong, and so quick in learning everything, always ready to haul water out of the river for everyone to drink, helping people on and off the boat, making himself the best of the oarsmen, so that he could keep his job. At least, in the very middle of the river, the midges were absent. Mara watched the banks with their reeds and tufty palms glide past, and averted her eyes, and then shut them. She was feeling sick, longed to get off the boat and lie down. The dazzle on the water, even the regular splash of water dripping off the oars, made her queasy, and she more than once vomited over the side. On the bench beside her was a woman, who had not said much till then, but now she spoke very low, ‘You had better not let anyone know what you are carrying, if you know what’s good for you.’ Then it was that Mara realised she was pregnant and thought that she after all had not had much confidence in Meryx’s fertility, if she had to be told she was pregnant by this stranger. ‘There’s plenty of people who’ll make a grab for you if they know what you’ve got,’ this woman went on, and she took from her bag a fistful of dried leaves and said, ‘Chew these, they settle the stomach.’ Mara chewed, and they were bitter and dry, but her sickness stopped. This new friend, one of the last people to leave Majab, was Sasha, and she stayed in the seat near Mara, just behind Dann, and kept an eye on her, making her chew dry bread, and drink water, always more water.