Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

by Doris Lessing

  And so Dann, in the back of the boat, sat staring at the retreating ice cliffs. And before they reached shore and safety, a large block of ice that shone blue and green and dusky pink was coming straight for them. To get out of its way they all had to row, Dann too, and then sat resting on their oars to watch it rock past.

  They reached the shore and the waiting snow dogs.

  Dann was white-faced and miserable. He wanted more, more, and closer, and he knew these men would not give him what he wanted.

  He was thinking they were cowards. These were soft people, on these islands. Tender living had made them so. Well, he would talk in the inn of the wonders of the creaking and sliding cliffs, and use what was left of his money to pay others to go with him.

  Dann stood on the shore, gazing at the cliffs, at the black places on the white cliffs, and wondered how long the ice had clung to those frozen sides, how long had it taken to form. He did not know, could not know; he was back in the realm of ‘long, long ago’ and the bitterness of it. He wanted so badly to know…surely answers could be found if only he could go further into the cliffs and then along them, and perhaps even climb up on to the ice and see—what would he see? For one thing, how did the snow dogs survive in all that wilderness of ice? How did they come down the cliffs? He stood and stared and the others, pulling up the boat and making it safe, sent wondering looks at him. There were tears on his face. This was a strange one, this Dann, they might have been saying aloud.

  It was latish in the day, the sun would soon be gone behind the cliffs. It would be better to spend the night and go early tomorrow.

  And so they did. They did not ask Dann for more of his tales, but first Durk, then the others, treated him gently, because of the unhappiness in his face.

  ‘Dann,’ said Durk, in consolation, as they lay down on their goatskins to sleep. ‘You did it, didn’t you? You saw what you wanted?’

  And Dann said, as if to a child, ‘Yes, I did, you’re right, I did see them.’

  Next morning, when they had eaten and left the house clean and tidy, they went out and a pack of snow dogs was sitting about, looking at them.

  ‘Are we going to give some of them a lift over?’ said Dann, and at once the others said, ‘No, we aren’t.’ And ‘Let them swim’ and ‘There’s no room in the boat’.

  As they walked to the boat, Dann saw an old abandoned craft, large, that did not seem to be holed, or useless. Without asking the others, he put rope that he always carried with him into its prow and pulled, and then Durk helped. Dann and Durk pushed the boat on to the waves and Dann tied it to their boat.

  The dogs crowded closer, seeming to know what was being done.

  The young men got on to their boat and were ready to row, their faces, all but Durk’s, critical and sullen.

  ‘The dogs won’t stay on this island,’ said Dann. ‘They always want to go on.’

  ‘They’ll drown, if that boat sinks,’ said one.

  A bold snow dog jumped into the boat, then another, and then there were five in the boat. Others hung back, afraid.

  ‘You’ll have to wait a long time,’ said Durk to them, laughing. ‘No one’s going to come back here if they can help it.’

  But the big animals whined and moved about on the sand, and could not make themselves get on to the boat.

  The first boat set off, all of them rowing, and the boat with the dogs followed on the rope.

  The water was very cold. Surely any dog attempting that swim must drown?

  The waves were tall and sharp, and seemed to be attacking the boat. The winds were belligerent. They had not gone more than a short way when one dog jumped into the sea to swim back. They watched it, but the waves were too high and soon they could not see it.

  ‘Drowned,’ said one youth and did not need to add, ‘I hope.’

  Dann thought of his snow pup and remembered the little beast’s nuzzling at his shoulder.

  Back at their landing stage they watched the animals leap off the old boat, swim to the shore and disappear into a wood.

  Dann descended with Marianthe from their bedroom to the inn’s common-room, expecting hostility, but saw the young men who had gone with him being bought drinks and questioned about the trip. They were enjoying their fame, and when Dann appeared mugs were lifted towards him from all the room.

  Dann did not join the five, but let them keep their moment. He sat with Marianthe, and when people came to lay their hands on his shoulders and congratulate him, he said that without the others, nothing could have been achieved.

  But no one had ever gone so near the ice cliffs, until he came to this island.

  And now Marianthe was saying that it was time for their room to be decorated with the wedding branches and flowers; it was time to celebrate their union.

  Dann held her close and said that she must not stop him leaving—when he did leave.

  In the common-room people were joking about him and Marianthe, and not always pleasantly. Some of the young men had hoped to take the place of her husband and resented Dann. He never replied to the jokes. Now he began to press them for another excursion. Had they ever seen the great fall of water from the Western Sea into this one? Marianthe said her husband wanted to make the attempt, but had been talked out of it. The feeling was that it would take days in even the largest fishing boat and it was not known if there were islands near the Falls where they could restock. But the real reason for the reluctance was the same: what for? was the feeling. Weren’t things all right as they were?

  They were talking of a wildly dangerous event, which they knew must appeal to Dann’s reckless nature, and were satisfied with the trip to the ice cliffs: Dann and the fishermen and Durk were great heroes, and Dann did not say that compared with some of the dangers in his life it was not much of a thing to boast about.

  He began going out with the fishermen; they seemed to think he had earned the right, because of his daring adventure to the ice cliffs. He learned the art of catching many different kinds of fish, and became friends with the men. All the time he was thinking of the northern icy shores and their secrets, hoping to persuade them to take him close again. He asked many questions, and learned very little. He was up against their lack of curiosity. He often could not believe it when he asked something and heard, ‘We’ve never needed to know that,’ or some such evasion.

  The bitterness of his ignorance grew in him. He could not bear it, the immensity of what he didn’t know. The pain was linked deep in him with something hidden from him. He never asked himself why he had to know what other people were content to leave unknown. He was used to Mara, who was like him, and longed to understand. Down here on this lovely island, where he was a stranger only in this one thing—that these people did not even know how ignorant they were—he thought of Mara, missed her and dreamed of her too. Marianthe said to him that he had been calling out for a woman, called Mara. Who was she? ‘My sister,’ he said and saw her politely sceptical smile.

  How it isolated him, that smile, how it estranged her. He thought that back in the Centre Griot would not smile if Dann talked of Mara, for he had lived at the Farm.

  The pain Dann felt was homesickness, but he did not suspect that: he had never had a home that he could remember, so how could he be missing one?

  He must leave. Soon, he must leave, before Marianthe’s disappointment in him turned to worse. But still he lingered.

  He liked being with the girls who helped Marianthe with the inn’s work. They were merry, teased and caressed him, and made fun. ‘Oh, why are you so serious, Dann, always so serious, come on, give me a smile…’ He thought that Kira could be one of them—but even as he did, knew her presence would end the laughter. Well, then, suppose she had been born here, in this easy pleasant place, rather than as a slave, with the threat of being taken for breeding by the Hadrons, would she then have been kind and loving, instead of always looking for an advantage, always ready to humiliate? Was he asking, then, if these girls, whose nature was to cares
s and charm, had been born for it? But here Dann was coming up against a question too hard for him: it was a matter of what people were born with. Had Kira been born hard and unkind? If these girls had been born into that city, Chelops (now gone into dust and ashes), would they have been like Kira? But he could not know the answer, and so he let it go and allowed himself to be entertained by them.

  Now a thought barged into his mind that he certainly could not welcome. If Mara had been born here, would she, like these girls, have had adroit tender hands and a smile like an embrace? Was he criticising Mara? How could he! Brave Mara—but fierce Mara; indomitable and tenacious Mara. But no one could say she was not stubborn and obstinate—she could no more have smiled, and yielded and teased and cajoled than…these girls could have gone a mile of that journey she and he had undergone. But, he was thinking, what a hard life she had had, never any ease, or lightness, never any…fun. What a word to apply to Mara; he almost felt ashamed—and he watched Marianthe’s girls at a kind of ball game they had, laughing and playing the fool. Oh, Mara, and I certainly didn’t make things easier for you, did I? But these thoughts were too difficult and painful, so he let them go and allowed himself to be entertained.

  He stood with Marianthe at her window, overlooking the northern seas, where sometimes appeared blocks of ice that had fallen from the cliffs—though they always melted fast in the sun. Below them was a blue dance of water that he knew could be so cold, but with the sun on it seemed a playfellow, with the intimacy of an invitation: come on in, join me…Dann asked Marianthe, holding her close from behind, his face on her shining black curls, if she would not like to go with him back up the cliffs and walk to the Centre, and from there go with him to see that amazing roar and rush of white water…even as he said it, he thought how dismal she would find the marshes and the chilly mists.

  ‘How could I leave my inn?’ she said, meaning that she did not want to.

  And now he dared to say that one day he believed she would have to. That morning he had made a trip to the town at the sea’s edge that had waves washing over its roofs.

  ‘Look over there,’ he said, tilting back her head by the chin, so she had to look up, to the distant icy gleams that were the ice mountains. Up there, he said to her, long long ago had been great cities, marvellous cities, finer than anything anywhere now—and he knew she was seeing in her mind’s eye the villages of the islands; you could not really call them towns. ‘It is hard for us to imagine those cities, and now anything like them is deep in the marshes up there on the southern shore.’ Marianthe leaned back against him, and rubbed her head against his cheek—he was tall, but she was almost as tall—and asked coaxingly why she should care about long ago.

  ‘Beautiful cities,’ he said, ‘with gardens and parks, that the ice covered, but it is going now, it is going so fast.’

  But she mocked him and he laughed with her.

  ‘Come to bed, Dann.’

  He had not been in her bed for three nights now and it was because, and he told her so, she was in the middle of her cycle, so she could conceive. She always laughed at him and was petulant, when he said this, asking how did he know, and anyway, she wanted a child, please, come on Dann.

  And this was now the painful point of division between them. She wanted a child, to keep him with her, and he very much did not.

  Marianthe had told her woman friends and the girls working at the inn, and they had told their men, and one evening, in the big main room, one of the fishermen called out that they had heard he knew the secrets of the bed.

  ‘Not of the bed,’ he said. ‘But of birth, when to conceive, yes.’

  The room was full of men and women, and some children. By now he knew them all. Their faces had on them the same expression when they looked at him. Not antagonistic, exactly, but ready to be. He was always testing them, even when he did not mean to.

  Now one fisherman called out, ‘And where did you get all that clever stuff from, Dann? Perhaps it is too deep for us.’

  Here it was again, a moment when something he said brought into question everything he had ever said, all his tales, his exploits.

  ‘Nothing clever about it,’ Dann said. ‘If you can count the days between one full moon and the next full moon, and you do that all the time, then you can count the intervals between a woman’s flows. It is simple. For five days in the middle of a woman’s cycle a woman can conceive.’

  ‘You haven’t told us who told you. How do you know? How is it you know this and we don’t?’ A woman said this, and she was unfriendly.

  ‘Yes, you ask me how I know. Well, it is known. But only in some places. And that is the trouble. That is our trouble, all of us—do you see? Why is it you can travel to a new place and there is knowledge there that isn’t in other places? When my sister Mara arrived at the Agre Army—I told you that story—the general there taught her all kinds of things she didn’t know but he didn’t know about the means of controlling birth. He had never heard of it.’

  Dann was standing by the great counter of the room where the casks of beer were, and the ranks of mugs. He was looking around at them all, from face to face, as if someone there could come out, there and then, with another bit of information that could fit in and make a whole.

  ‘Once,’ he said, ‘long ago, before the Ice came down up there’—and he pointed in the direction of the ice cliffs—‘all the land up there was covered with great cities and there was a great knowledge, which was lost, under the Ice. But it was found, some of it, and hidden in the sands—when there were sands and not marshes. Then bits and pieces of the old knowledge travelled, and it was known here and there, but never as a whole, except in the old Centre—but now it is in fragments there too.’

  ‘And how do you know what you know?’ came a sardonic query, from the eldest of the fishermen. Real hostility was near now; they were all staring at him and their eyes were cold.

  Marianthe, behind the counter, began to weep.

  ‘Yes,’ said one of the younger fishermen, ‘he makes you cry; is that why you like him, Marianthe?’

  That scene had been some days ago.

  And now, this afternoon, was the moment when Dann knew he had to go…

  ‘Marianthe,’ he said, ‘you know what I’m going to say.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Marianthe, would you really be pleased if I went off leaving you with a baby? Would you?’

  She was crying and would not answer.

  In the corner of the room was his old sack. And that was all he had, or needed, after such a long time here—how long? Durk had reminded him that it was nearly three years.

  He went down to the common-room, holding his old sack.

  All the eyes in the room turned to see Marianthe, pale and tragic. People were eating their midday meal after returning from fishing.

  One of the girls called out, ‘Some men were asking for you.’

  ‘What?’ said Dann, and in an instant his security in this place, or anywhere on the islands, disappeared. What a fool he had been, thinking that the descent to the Bottom Sea and a few hops from island to island had been enough to…‘Who were they?’ he asked.

  A fisherman called out, ‘They say you have a price on your head. What is your crime?’

  Dann had already hitched his sack on to his shoulders and, seeing this, Durk was collecting his things too.

  ‘I told you, I ran away from the army in Shari. I was a general and I deserted.’

  A man who didn’t like him said, ‘General, were you?’

  ‘I told you that.’

  ‘So your tales were true, then?’ someone said, half regretful, part sceptical still.

  Dann, standing there, a thin and at the moment grief-stricken figure, so young—sometimes he still looked like a boy—did not look like a general, or anything soldierly, for that matter. Not that they had ever seen a soldier.

  ‘Nearly all were true,’ said Dann, thinking of how he had softened everything for them. H
e had never told them that once he had gambled away his sister, nor what had happened to him in the Towers—not even Marianthe, who knew of the scars on his body. ‘They were true,’ he said again, ‘but the very bad things I did not tell you.’

  Marianthe was leaning on the bar counter, weeping. One of the girls put her arms round her and said, ‘Don’t, you’ll be ill.’

  ‘You haven’t said what they looked like,’ said Dann, thinking of his old enemy, Kulik, who might or might not be dead.

  At last he got out of them that there were two men, not young, and yes, one had a scar. Well, plenty of people had scars; ‘up there’ they did, but not down here.

  Durk was beside Dann now, with his sack. The girls were bringing food for them to take.

  ‘Well,’ called a fisherman, from over his dish of soup and bread, ‘I suppose we’ll never hear the rest of your tales. Perhaps I’ll miss you, at that.’

  ‘We’ll miss you,’ the girls said, and crowded around to kiss him and pet him. ‘Come back, come back,’ they mourned.

  And Dann embraced Marianthe, but swiftly, because of the watching people. ‘Why don’t you come up to the Centre?’ he whispered, but knew she never would—and she did not answer.

  ‘Goodbye, General,’ came from his chief antagonist, sounding quite friendly now. ‘And be careful as you go. Those men are nasty-looking types.’

  Dann and Durk went to the boat, this time not stopping at every island, and to Durk’s, where his parents asked what had kept him so long. The girl Durk had wanted was with someone else and averted her eyes when she saw him.