Mara and Dann mad-1

by Doris Lessing Little Dorrit

  The horses stood waiting. They were stout, stubby little beasts, and certainly not able to carry two people. Besides, Mara had never been on a horse. Nor had Leta. Dann had said he had, once, but it had been a striped horse, different from these, well trained and mild. These horses were anything but mild: they were kicking and bucking, and generally making it clear that they did not enjoy their servitude.

  All kinds of conveyances stood about waiting for customers. "We'll find something," said Daulis to the officer.

  "They're expecting you," was the reply, meaning, Don't waste time.

  They walked slowly along the road, having a good look: there was nothing like it in Bilma, nor in Charad — not since Chelops, where it had been a solid surface of shining black — but this road seemed to be surfaced by a grey spider-web, innumerable tiny lines, like scratches. Daulis said the road had been made long ago, certainly hundreds of years, and no one now knew the secret of this substance.

  It was then mid-afternoon. Ahead was a town, and most of the travellers were making their way there. Daulis said he knew the town, a pretty and prosperous place, and well worth looking at. But they were all tired. The inn they chose was an affair of several storeys, with servants in uniforms, and the room was large, with real beds, not pallets on the floor, and fine hangings at the windows, and carpets.

  They would have to pay for it. Mara changed two coins at the reception table, for their proper value. They lay down to recover. Then they went out to an eating house Daulis knew, and all of them, including Leta, ate very well. Neither Dann nor Mara had eaten this food or imagined it existed, and Dann said to her, "I told you it would get better all the time, didn't I?"

  And Mara said, "I'll agree with you when I'm sure Kulik isn't following us."

  "They wouldn't let him in," said Daulis. "No one comes into Tundra except for some good reason. Like being useful to Tundra."

  "You don't know this man," said Mara. And she actually shuddered. She explained, "You see, you can't get rid of him, ever. It seems he has always been in my life — and Dann's. Why? It's as if he was born to torment us and chase after us, never letting us alone."

  In the room they had to make decisions. To where they would catch a boat going North, would be two days if they took a carriage or carrying-chairs. The coaches did not run here on their rickety rails. If they walked, that would take nearly a week. With one voice, Leta and Mara and Dann averred they would rather die than ever again use a carriage, a carrying-chair, or a coach. Daulis said drily that they were lucky not to be officials, who had no choice.

  "So we are lucky, we can walk if we choose," said Mara gaily, for her spirits were rising, and so were the others'.

  "But we are supposed to be hurrying."

  Daulis said, "Well, if you knew how long they've been waiting, I wouldn't worry about a day or so. Or even a week." And then he said to Mara, "Haven't we something to celebrate, you and I?"

  "What?"

  Leta laughed at her. "You are no longer married, not in Tundra. That ended at the frontier."

  Mara had forgotten. She was surprised to feel a little sinking in her stomach, a giddiness. Regret. She was actually feeling sad, and she said to Daulis, "For a moment then I was really sorry. But don't be alarmed."

  "I've enjoyed being married to you, Mara," said Daulis. "Though some aspects of married love seemed to be wanting. Better be careful never to go back into Bilma, though. Not if you don't want to be married to me."

  "Oh but I might enjoy it, for a while."

  This banter was upsetting Dann. Mara said, "If you are jealous about a convenience marriage, what are you going to be like when I am really married? If I ever am."

  And Dann surprised them by thinking a while and then saying seriously, "I don't know what I will do. I know I won't like it."

  This was an uncomfortable little moment, for Dann and Mara as well as for the others.

  Next morning, when they got back on the big road, they saw a long procession winding out of town. It was a pilgrimage and it was going to visit a shrine. These new words having been explained by Daulis, they joined the end of the procession and were handed bunches of reeds that had been dyed black and dark red. The songs were doleful, and the people's garb was dark and sad, and all the faces wore looks of resigned suffering.

  The shrine, Daulis said, housed a machine that was certainly many thousands of years old, of a metal now unknown, and it had survived vicissitudes, which included falling to earth like a leaf in a whirlwind, but into a swamp, which saved it. It was believed that Gods had descended to Ifrik in this machine, and the bones of two of these Gods had been sealed inside jars and set inside the machine. There were four pilgrimages every year to this ancient machine, which was guarded by priests, but of a different kind from the ones in Kanaz. The two different orders of priest despised each other, refused to let their followers have anything to do with each other, and had often fought vicious wars, in the past.

  "But," enquired Mara, "why is walking to a place a sign of devotion to that place?"

  "And why," asked Dann, "four times a year? Wouldn't once be enough?"

  "And what," Leta wanted to know, "is the point of the bones?"

  Daulis said that it would be better if questions like these were not asked aloud, because these people were of the sort that would set on critics and even kill them.

  The procession went through more towns, each one prosperous, with well dressed people. What a contrast between the wild and desolate country they had walked through and these towns, which were like dreams of order and delightfulness. Except for police in their black uniforms, like the soldiers'; and several times the police stood on either side of the column of singing pilgrims, looking keenly into every face. At night most pilgrims slept in special pilgrim inns, but the four slipped away to the comfort of good hotels. They rejoined the procession in the mornings. It was tedious. Above all, Leta was getting tired. She was not used to walking, more than move from one bed to another in Mother Dalide's. She did not say this bitterly, as they had heard her speak in the past, but actually laughed. They decided to try the carrying-chairs, as the least uncomfortable way of going faster; and so, two people to a chair, Dann and Mara in one, Leta and Daulis in another, they felt they were covering ground. But it was an interrupted progress. The chair-runners, two behind and two in front — these chairs had no wheels — stopped at certain points, set down the chairs, and fell out, others taking their place. No matter how they were appealed to, the runners shook them about; and at a place where they stopped for a meal, Mara asked about those ancient times when travelling was always comfortable, and Daulis said that more than that, everyone in the world was constantly on the move, very fast and thought nothing of it.

  "How do you know?" was the obvious question.

  "You will soon find out how I know," said Daulis.

  "But why were they always moving?"

  "Because they could."

  "Do you think we would if we could?"

  "I would," said Dann.

  And Mara said, "I would like so much — oh much more than I could tell you — to find a house, in a quiet place that had water, and live there with Dann. And my friends," she added.

  "And your husband?" said Daulis.

  "And I'll have..." Dann stopped.

  "Dann will have Kira," said Mara, and was about to explain Kira, and how Dann had loved her, but Daulis said, "I know about Kira. Shabis has told me about it." And then seriously, to Dann, "I think you may find you'll catch up with her. I think I know where she might be... unless."

  "Unless she's found some man she likes along the way. Isn't that what you were going to say?"

  19

  On this last night before the river, Daulis said they should make the most of the comforts of the inn, because once they were on the boats, the river and lakeside inns would be a very different thing. And so they took care to wash well in the plentiful hot water, and to eat well, and to sleep soundly.

  In the mornin
g they walked along the road they had been following for days, and then they were standing on the edge of water where little waves ran up on to sandy verges and... What did you see, Mara? What did you see? "I saw the road I was on disappear into deep water." They could see it down there, black, clean, no weeds, and little fishes wagging their way across it. Boats of all kinds were drawn up on the shore. But the shore of what? This was not a river, for it did not flow and you could not see the other side, and it was not a lake, but channels between sandy or weedy shoals, and water that just covered shallows.

  A man appeared from a waterside house where boatmen waited, and showed them a flat, wide boat with ample room for them and their bundles. Daulis bargained with him, and Mara parted with two more coins. Eight left. They took their places on piles of cushions on a flat bottom, through which they could hear fussing and lapping, and they looked over the boat edges at water they could touch, and trail their fingers through. Mara and Dann were thinking, water dragons; but the boatman said little fish might nibble their fingers, but that would be the worst. For a while the boatman seemed to be steering by the road they could still see, but then it descended even deeper.

  Water had risen up, and covered the road and the land around it. When did that happen? The boatman said, a long time ago. He was tried with hundreds of years? Thousands? — but these words meant nothing to him. He said that his grandfather had told him there was a family tradition that all this, where water was now, had been frozen down to a depth nobody had been able to measure, but then the ice became water.

  This was slow going, finding their way through marsh, then deep water, then marsh again. Sometimes the bottom was so close to the surface the boatman used a pole to push the boat along. Flowers floated on long, swaying stems. Birds ran over pads of leaves, and from a distance it looked as if they were running on the water. Big white birds sat on islands that were of massed weed, which dipped and swung with the ripples from the boat. There were no shores in sight but at evening they came to rest on a little promontory; and the boatman went off to his shelter, and they to an inn of the serviceable kind, and they ate food designed to satisfy hunger, and no more, and they sat about on their pallets talking, while the sunset died over the water. They lay down for the night covered with many blankets, and then there was another day of slow travelling. Mara felt that her thoughts had slowed, and all her life had become just this: sitting in a shallow boat just above water that smelled of weed, looking at Dann's face, at Leta's, at Daulis's, and thinking that she was so much part of them, and they of her, that she could not bear to think they could ever separate.

  Days passed. It grew steadily colder and often cold mists crept about on the water and clung to their faces and hair. They sat wrapped in their grey blankets, even their heads covered. Mara sat dreaming in the water, that was what it felt like, as if she was in the water, in a shell; but what a difference from that other journey, down south, so hot, the water surfaces dazzling and flashing in her eyes, feeling sick, or not, but always the wet heat, the dangers from the water, where the dragons watched and waited and, always, the reminders along the banks of drought.

  Mara saw beneath her a roof of red tiles, where bunches of weed swayed, and then another roof. The travellers were floating over a drowned town, and stretched down their arms to see if they could touch these roofs. The boatman said there had been many towns round about that had sunk down. Big towns. When the ice melted the earth grew soggy and could not hold the weight of the buildings, and they sank, and the water came up. He jested that if they were fishes they could swim for many days through drowned cities. And they certainly knew how to live, in those days, he said, look down there. Beneath them the water was deep and clear, with a white sand bottom, and there was a building grander than anything in the towns they had travelled through. Steps rose into a great arch of an entrance, which was set among white pillars, and there were stairs up to higher levels where terraces held figures of carved stone so lifelike it was easy to believe these were people they had known, or knew now; and the fine roofs, of many different coloured tiles, green and blue and red, had windows in them, and porches, and it seemed the easiest thing in the world to slide over the edge of the boat and land on a terrace and begin walking about there, live there, with friends; and then there will be children, Mara was muttering, there'll be big rivers of fast, fresh water and fountains full of water and little streams running into the house into basins of clear water. Dann was shaking her by the arm, "Mara, Mara." The boatman had stilled the boat, an oar pushing at a tussock of muddy weed to hold them steady. He was looking carefully at Mara, then bent to feel the pulse in her throat. Then he did the same for Leta, who was staring at nothing and breathing badly. Then Daulis, whose eyes were shut, and grimacing as if in pain.

  The boatman and Dann whispered together. Mara was aware of a slow rocking, through her whole body — yet the boat was still. And then knew they were moving again, towards a shore where there was a long building, low-built, roofed with reeds.

  "The marsh sickness," said the boatman, and tied the boat up to a stump. He lifted Leta and carried her to the building and inside it. He came back and tried to prod Daulis into movement, but he was lying sprawled on his back, eyes shut. Dann and the boatman between them carried him up to the building, which was an inn. Mara must have slept, for the next thing was, she lay in the boatman's arms, being taken to the building; and then she glimpsed a tall, thin, worried woman, arguing with the boatman, saying she couldn't be responsible for three ill people. And then Mara was lying on a bed, a floor bed, in a big room, but it was a poor one, where the reeds above them were broken and needed repair, and on the edges of the gap in the roof hung water drops, which splashed down into a basin set under them. Across the room Leta lay on her pallet, very still, her arms flung out. Daulis was doubled up on his pallet, clutching his stomach and groaning. There was a horrible smell. Mara thought, Oh, I hope I haven't fouled myself; and that was the last she knew until she came to herself again and saw Dann's face just above her, wrenched with anxiety. He was wiping her face. Beyond Dann, the tall woman was kneeling by Leta, who was pointing at her bag where she kept her dried herbs. The woman spread out the herbs on a cloth and Leta pointed at one, saying "Boil it. Give it to us in water." And then she fell back into unconsciousness. Daulis was lying propped up, a rug pulled tight around him. He looked very bad. He's dying, Mara thought. And then, Perhaps I am dying. And Leta? But Dann, poor Dann, what will he do, all alone? Mara sank back into the dark but kept coming to herself, seeing little bright scenes she would remember. Leta, lying with arms flung out, that bright hair dull and soaked with sweat. Daulis, so very ill. The tall woman, taking pails out, but another time she was carrying them in. Dann, always Dann, bending over her, over Daulis, over Leta, and she heard his, "Mara, Mara, you mustn't die, please come back." She heard groaning, which she at first thought was hers, but it was Daulis. Sometimes it was full day, when she came drifting up, and the pale sun was shining down through the hole in the reeds, and there was sweat on Leta's face and on Daulis's; and sometimes it was dark and a lamp stood on the floor in a corner. Once she felt a weight and saw that Dann had fallen asleep where he sat by her, and his upper body was lying across hers. She was dreaming, oh, what dreams: she was running, running with enemies after her, always on the point of catching her; she was choking in dust storms; she was so hungry her stomach was like knives; and then she was conscious of the sweetest warmth, and her arms were full of a little boy, her little brother, Dann, who stroked her face and loved her; but then what was in her arms was not Dann but a baby, hers, and in her sleep she muttered and cried out that she had to go to her baby; and she held Crethis, the lovely girl who was a little child; and how sad Mara was, how sorrowful, when she momentarily came back to herself and saw that Dann was kneeling by Leta, holding a cup of something to her mouth, or that the tall woman knelt by Daulis, calling his name, to bring him back.

  Sometimes when she woke she did not know whether
she was in this wretched marsh-side inn, in a room where you could see the sky, or back in the Rock Village. And now she saw Daima across the room, sitting with her hands folded, smiling at Mara, and then holding out her arms so that Mara could run into them. "Daima," wept Mara, "I never thanked you, I never told you how I loved you, and yet without you I would have died a hundred times over." But it was Dann's face she saw, when she opened her eyes, "Don't cry Mara, don't, you've been having bad dreams, but it's all right. You are getting better. Look, drink this." Mara swallowed down a bitter liquid that made her stomach churn and rebel.

  Then Leta was up on her feet, while the thin woman held her steady with an arm across her back, and the two walked slowly up and down the room. Leta was getting her strength back. But Daulis still lay like a corpse. Mara could see from Dann's face, as he ministered to Daulis, and the cool inspection the thin woman gave to Daulis, standing to look down at him, that they believed he was dying. And now Mara was grieving because of kind Daulis, who had rescued her: Why have I taken it for granted? Oh, oh, oh; and Dann came hurrying, "What is it Mara? Where is the pain?" But it was her heart that was hurting her, thinking of kind Daulis, dead.

  He didn't die, though he was the last to recover. Leta and Mara were practising walking back and forth around the room, and then outside, until the cold from the marsh drove them back in, while he still lay unconscious. They began to eat, mostly the porridge prepared for them by their hostess, who was called Mavid, and was a widow, just surviving here on the rare customers the boatmen brought her — though usually the boats went past to the better inns farther on. She was very good to them. More than once she made Dann sleep, and herself sat up, because she was worried about him. Dann had become thin again, and Mara too. When they stood examining each other, like people who have not met for a while, they knew that yet again they mirrored each other: two tall, thin creatures with anxious eyes deep in their heads.