Next morning Felissa accompanied them to the start of the Museum Tour. That was what it had been called once, and she could remember the lines of people stretching almost out of sight, waiting to get in to see the marvels of the past.
In the entrance was a tall metal shape, like a shield, with coils of wire behind it, and under it a button marked Press, in a dozen languages. They pressed, but the machine was dead. Next to this shield, or plaque, was another, and on it in the same languages, which included Mahondi and Charad, the information on the metal sheet, writing which would have come up in lights, had the thing still worked. This writing, on the plaque, in elegant black and yellowish grey, once white, was faded, and in some places illegible. Beside the plaque was a third attempt: a large piece of black slate, and on it, written in coloured earth, the same information as on the other two, but in fewer languages, headed by Mahondi and Charad.
‘Start here for our tour through the ancient civilisations of The Warm Interregnum. Some of the artefacts you will see were brought from the museums of Yerrup while the first wave of the Ice was advancing. All the countries of Yerrup had innumerable museums of old artefacts. A replica of one of their museums will be found at Building 24. The first wave of the Ice crushed and swallowed some cities, but the ones on the edge of the Middle Sea were pushed over into it. There was a period when parts of the Middle Sea were half filled with the remains of the shoreline cities. The Middle Sea was already dry by then. It was this material that was brought here to the shores of North Ifrik to make the cities that copied those that had gone under the Ice. They, in their turn, went the way of all cities, to ruin. And that material was used to make other towns and cities. So some of the cities of Tundra are built of material used by those ancient peoples to make theirs.’
They made their way to Building 24. The first room showed people dressed in skins, hunting, or sitting around fires. ‘These were the people that preceded the ancient Yerrupeans from whom we descend. Observe the shape of their heads. They lived for 140 thousand years. They retreated before the ice waves of the Old Ice Age, and returned to occupy sheltered valleys in the warmer interludes.’
‘They look rather like the Rock People,’ Dann said. He was disturbed. Mara felt the same – sad. It was painful, looking at a long extinct people. ‘Why should we care about them?’ Dann protested, but they did, and moved on, holding hands, pleased the other was there.
The next room took them to the people who succeeded the Neanders. Again, people in skins, living in rough huts or thatched houses, hunting with knives and spears, and also with bows and arrows.
‘I shall make one of those,’ said Dann. ‘Why don’t we have them?’
Mara said she wouldn’t have minded one of those spears at certain points during their travels.
‘Well, Mara, are we being illuminated? I think not. We’d fit in very well here. Perhaps we could even teach them a thing or two about surviving.’
And now at the entrance to a third room was a sign saying No Entrance, and the roof had fallen in. Peering past piles of plaster and tiles, they saw the walls were covered with scenes of wild looking people in boats that were longer and finer than any they had seen.
‘So, we’ll never know about the Peoples of the Sea,’ said Dann. For that was the description of this place.
And the next hall, a large one, The Age of Chivalry, was falling in. People encased in metal shells, with lances and spears of all kinds, with stuffed horses, had slid off them and the horses were bursting open and showing their shredded rag entrails.
It was now midday. Dann wanted to see the building described as Space Adventures, but Mara said she needed the continuity, she was already confused, and he said he didn’t care about continuity. He was sounding angry as well as sad, and Mara too was angry, because of the futility of it all, a senselessness. Where these old people had lived the ice lay as thick as twice the height of the mountain that Daulis had said was where they would find the White Bird Inn. From their bedroom windows they could see it stretching up into the cold sky, and on its summit shone a cap of whiteness, snow and ice.
‘I’m going to start crying, Mara, let’s get out of here.’ And they began wandering about, lost, among this wilderness of buildings, and seeing a tall building, the tallest, went inside and stood limp with astonishment. They were surrounded by machines of a kind and complexity they could never have imagined, though it could be seen they were from the same time as the sun trap. These were not rooms, but halls, of machines once used for travelling between the stars – but stars was not a word they could any longer use as easily as they did, because all over the walls and ceilings were great maps of the sky, and there they saw the patterns of stars they had known all their lives shown as mere local manifestations, inside greater patterns. They saw that what they lived on, this place called Earth, was one of a little sprinkle of planets travelling around a central bright star, their sun; but this was a very minor star, that great pumping engine of heat that so directly ruled their lives, a little star among so many that the words thousands, or even millions, became irrelevant; and Ifrik, which they had learned to know with their feet, putting one foot in front of another, was merely a shape among several on this little ball. And the moon, whose face they knew as well as their own, was …
‘Enough,’ said Mara, ‘I can’t take it in.’
‘I don’t think I like knowing what an ignorant lot of barbarians we are,’ said Dann.
And they put their arms around each other, for comfort. They were looking at a kind of metal box that had all sorts of projections and wires and rods sticking out of it, that had gone to the planet farthest from the sun and had sent back information…But why, and what for, and above all, how? As they left this great building, a wall with writing on it informed them that before this Ice Age had swallowed all the northern parts of the Earth, machines had been sent into space as large as a big town, and in them people were able to live, it was believed indefinitely; and there were those that still believed that these machines existed, travelling about up there. And might even return one day.
‘Like that crashed machine the pilgrims were singing their songs to…no Mara, let’s go, I’m so sad I could … ’
They returned to their rooms, hoping not to meet their hosts. Again they were served a meal there, with the message that dear Mara and dear Dann should make up their minds, because time was passing.
That night Dann went off to his room, looking rueful, and embarrassed, and even closed the door between them; but Mara woke in the night to find him holding her, ‘What is it, Mara, what’s wrong?’ She had been calling out to him in her sleep. She had dreamed of peoples who emerged from a kind of mist, running and fighting, always fighting, always looking over their shoulders for enemies; and then one wave vanished and another appeared, dressed differently, of a different skin colour, white or brown or black or yellow, and they too ran, and were hunted, and disappeared, one after another; these long ago peoples had appeared and died out and…She wept and he comforted her, and in the morning he said he wanted to find Felix and ask him certain questions.
‘I am sure those two are mad,’ she said.
‘I suppose that depends on whether their plans succeed or not. If they do, then Felix and Felissa aren’t mad.’
And she said to him softly, ‘Dann, be careful. I am beginning to see that this dream of theirs can be a powerful poison.’
He went to find Felix and she returned to the museums. What intricacies of invention, what cleverness, what seductive ways of living. She liked best some rooms calling themselves ‘A Day in the Life of…’ A woman’s life in a little island called Britain, in the middle of the eleventh millennium, and then in the twelfth millennium. A family at the end of the twelfth millennium, in an enormous city in North Imrik. A farmer in northern Yerrup at the end of the twelfth millennium. That was the period the makers of these museums liked best because of the crescendo of inventiveness of that time. But the end of the story in every buildi
ng was war, and the ways of war became crueller and more terrible. In a room in a building that had only machines of war, was a wall that listed the ways it was thought these ancient peoples would have ended their civilisations even if the ice had not arrived. War was one. She could not understand the weapons: they were so difficult and so complicated. And even when the explanations were clear enough to understand she could not believe what she was reading. Projectiles that could carry diseases designed to kill all the people in a country or city? What were these ancient peoples, that they could do such things? ‘Bombs’ that could…She did not understand the explanations.
There was a recklessness about the ways they used their soil and their water.
‘These were peoples who had no interest in the results of their actions. They killed out the animals. They poisoned the fish in the sea. They cut down forests, so that country after country, once forested, became desert or arid. They spoiled everything they touched. There was probably something wrong with their brains. There are many historians who believe that these ancients richly deserved the punishment of the Ice.’
And in another room: ‘The machines they invented were ever more subtle and complex, using techniques that no one has matched since. These machines it is now believed destroyed their minds, or altered their thinking so they became crazed. While this process was going on they were hardly aware of what was happening, though a few did know and tried to warn the others.’
Shabis had told her that the people alive now were the same as those so clever, but so stupid, ancient peoples, and in Mara’s mind was a little picture of what she had found in the Tower: Dann near death, one man with his throat cut and another nearly dead. Dann had killed that man, but he did not remember it. And there was another picture: of Kulik, with that teeth-bared, ugly grin, and his murderous heart.
When she got back to her room one day, she found Felissa looking with distaste at her old brown snake, or shadow, garment.
‘We don’t have this in our collections,’ she said. ‘Will you give us this one?’
‘But Felissa, your museums are collapsing, they are falling into ruins.’
‘Oh my dear, yes, but that is why we need you and Dann so badly. We could soon get everything back to how it was.’
‘Felissa, I have to say this: I do truly believe that you and Felix are living inside some kind of impossible dream.’
‘Oh no, dearest Mara, you are wrong. Felix and Dann are talking, and I’m so glad.’ She stroked Mara’s arms, and then her face, and murmured, in her intimate, caressing way, ‘Dear, dear Mara.’ And then, brisk and busy, ‘Dear Princess, you are such a lovely girl, I would so like to see you in … ’
Spread over Mara’s bed were gowns and robes that she had noticed hanging in the cupboard but, thinking they were Felissa’s, had not touched them. She had walked through a hall full of clothes, from ancient times, but by then could not take in any more news from the past.
These clothes had been taken from the museum.
‘Please, please, put this one on,’ entreated Felissa, and held up a sky-blue garment of shiny material that had a full skirt, and – this was something Mara had not seen or imagined – was tight about the hips and waist, and had bare shoulders and a bare back. ‘This was a dress they called a ball gown,’ said Felissa, ‘they danced in it.’
‘How is it these things haven’t fallen apart from age?’
‘Oh, these aren’t the originals, of course not. They brought the originals here to Ifrik, when the ice began, to the museums they were making then, and as they faded and decayed they were always copied and replaced. Probably these are nothing like as wonderful as the originals, because we are not as wonderful as those old peoples.’
‘But we are as warlike,’ said Mara.
And now a quick, shrewd glance, far from the intimate, caressing style of her social self.
‘Yes, warlike. I’m sorry to say that is true. But that is what dear Prince Shahmand – Dann – is discussing with my husband.’
She held out the dress. Mara pulled off her robe and got the thing on somehow, but her waist was too thick for it and it gaped. She stood in front of a big glass that Felissa wheeled in from her own room and saw herself – and fell on the bed laughing.
‘But you look beautiful, Mara,’ Felissa fussed.
Mara took it off.
Now, to her amazement, Felissa removed her garments that were composed of so many veils and draperies of grey and white, and stood revealed in long pink drawers, and a kind of harness for her breasts. ‘Yes, these are from the museum too. But they are beginning to rot and we do not have the means to replace them so I thought I might as well have the benefit.’
She took from the cupboard a pink gown, all laces and frills, and put it on. She paraded up and down, glancing at herself in the looking-glass, and then at Mara, smiling. Mara saw she did this often: these clothes were not really here for Mara, Felissa wanted Mara to admire her.
And she was a pretty old thing, or perhaps not so old, quite slim still, but her limbs were hardly … And Mara could not prevent herself looking at her own smooth, fine, silky limbs.
Mara sat there while the modes and fashions of hundreds of years paraded in front of her. She had not heard of fashions, until now, and found the idea of it amazing and even absurd. From time to time Felissa cooed, ‘Oh, do try this on, Mara, it would suit you.’ But that was not the point of this little scene.
Mara sat on, smiling, and thought that nothing more ridiculous had ever happened to her than to watch an elderly brown-skinned woman parading about in clothes made for thousands-of-years-ago women – white women, who clearly had a very different shape, for not one of Felissa’s experiments closed at the waist. Mara imagined these clothes on Leta, and found that hard too. That great bundle of fair, shining hair – yes, that would suit some of these dresses.
And so passed that afternoon. That night, when Dann came to their rooms, he went straight into his and shut the door. He did this as if casually, but it was a bad moment, and his conscious glance at her showed it. She wanted to know about his discussions with Felix, so she knocked, and there was no answer. She knocked louder. He came to open the door, and she knew who it was who stood there frowning.
‘I don’t like this place and I want to go,’ she said.
‘Just a little bit longer.’
‘What does he want you to do?’
‘He wants me to raise an army from the local youngsters. There are a great many, he says, that are dissatisfied and they want the Centre to be the way it once was. This place is like a fortress. He says I was General Dann and I should know about war. Well, I do know, Mara.’ And she saw his suddenly foolish, proud smile.
‘And we would feed this army by stealing food from the farmers?’
‘But they would benefit, because we would protect them.’
‘Protect them from what? This place has a good government, Daulis said so.’
‘The government would be on our side. They like the Centre.’
‘So why do the farmers need protection?’
‘Oh, there are raids sometimes. Don’t nag at me, Mara. I need to know more before I tell you.’ And he shut the door in her face.
Mara spent some days in the museums. She was in a place where she could satisfy every hunger she had for knowledge, for information, to find out – learn. Some of the buildings were as good as hours of talking with Shabis. Even a wall, with a few lines of fading words, could tell her at a glance about things she had puzzled over all her life. She felt her brain was expanding. She felt she was soaking up new thoughts with every breath she took. And all the time she was thinking of Dann, with this Felix, whom she hardly saw, because he disliked and distrusted her and knew she was trying to persuade Dann to leave. This ruthless, cold man, with his social smiles and courtly manners, was not stupid. Felissa was stupid, because of a conceit of herself that made it impossible to discuss anything. Any conversation at once returned to Felissa. For instance, Mara a
sked her about the tombs in the sand that had held old books, old records, the city that had been found when the sands shifted; and Felissa at once said that she knew nothing about it. Mara persisted: she had been told about The City of the Sands.
‘Who told you? It’s nonsense. What sands?’
‘Those leather books in the museum. There’s a notice saying they were copied from books made of paper made from reeds.’
‘If there ever was a sand city I’d know about it. I’ve made it my business to know everything.’
Now Felissa was meeting her as she came back from her days spent wandering through the things, and peoples, and tales of the ancient world, to clutch her hands, and stroke them, and murmur how happy she was that Dann and Felix were getting on so well, and how wonderful it would be if Mara could soon tell them she was pregnant.
Dann was silent, was morose, was very far from Mara, who watched him and Felix walking together, back and forth, in the great empty space between the outer fortress wall and the inner building. The good-looking, elegant Felix, and handsome Dann – they made a fine couple. Dann was deferring to Felix, perhaps not in words, but his demeanour was respectful, and the tones of his voice almost obsequious. And she knew only too well the rather foolish inflated look that was getting worse every day.
If she did not end this now it would be too late.
One night, when he shut the door between them, she knocked until he opened it. There he stood, the other one, and she heard without surprise, ‘Mara, I’m going to do it. There’s everything here to make something wonderful. And look at me – everything that has happened to me, and my being a soldier, it all fits. Even you must see that.’ And he turned away, pulling the door to shut it, but she held the door and said, ‘Dann, I’m leaving tomorrow, by myself if I have to.’
He whirled about, his face ugly with suspicion and with anger. ‘You can’t leave. I won’t let you.’
‘Your marvellous plans depend on one thing. On me. On my womb.’ And she tapped her stomach. ‘And I’m leaving.’
Mara and Dann Page 50
