Mara and Dann

2

On the low hill overlooking the village was a tall rock, precipitous on three sides and sloping steeply on the village side. There on the top of it sat Mara, looking down at a group of half a dozen boys playing a game of fighting with sticks. Dann was taller than any of them, though he was younger than some, at ten years old, and he was a quick, always watchful child, who dominated them all. Mara was almost grown, with her little bumps of breasts, and she was tall and thin and wiry, and could run faster than the boys, which she had learned to do from having so often to rescue Dann from danger. He seemed to have been born without a sense of self-preservation: would leap off a rock or a roof without looking to see where he was going to land, walk up to a big hissing dragon, jump into a pool without checking if there were stingers or a water dragon. But he was much better, and that was why Mara was up here, watching quite idly, not anxious and on guard as she had been every minute of her days and nights. Only recently had she understood that her long watch was over. She had been strolling from the hill to the village, listening to the singing beetles and her own thoughts, when she had seen Dann rushing towards her with a stick, then past her, and she had whirled to see him attacking a dragon that was following her.

‘You should be more careful, Mara,’ he had chided, and not at all as if he were mimicking her constant, Be careful, do be careful, Dann.

She had gone in to Daima and told her, and the two had wept and laughed in each other’s arms for the wonderful ludicrousness of it. And Daima had said, ‘Congratulations, Mara. You’ve done it. You’ve brought him through.’

This was her favourite place. Nobody came up here: not Dann, who liked to be always rushing about; not Daima, who was too old and stiff; not the villagers, who said it was full of ghosts. Mara had been here at all times of the day, and at night too, and had never seen or heard ghosts. The danger was the dragons, who were so hungry they would eat anything. That is why she sat on a rock that on three sides they could not climb up, while in front she could slide down on her bottom and be off as soon as she heard the angry hissing. Or she could wait up here, safe, throwing stones down at the dragons if they showed signs of climbing up. This rock rose out of a tumbling and piling of small, rocky hills, full of clefts and crevices where bushes and trees grew, and caves and cliffs and pits that were old traps, and in some places heaps of old walls and roofs. When she had played the What Did You See? game with Daima, she liked best to do this hill, because she was always finding new things.

‘And then?’

‘The pits have black rings, with bits of chain on the rings.’

‘And then?’

‘The rings are made of some metal we don’t have.’

‘And so?’

‘All the same, Daima, I think those pits are quite recent – I mean hundreds of years, not thousands.’

When Mara said hundreds, she meant a long time; and when thousands, it meant her mind had given up, confessed failure: thousands meant an unimaginable, endless past.

Up on those hills – for behind the one near the village were piled others – forcing herself between bushes and saplings, squeezing through gaps in boulders, sliding down shaly descents in showers of stones, climbing trees to look over places she could not penetrate because of thick undergrowth, what Mara had slowly understood – and it had been slow, years – was that this was not just, as Daima had told her, a ruined city thousands of years old, or hundreds, or what the villagers saw it as – a place to get stones for building – but layers of habitations, peoples, time. She had been standing between walls still mostly intact, though roots had brought down part of one into a slope of blocks where little lizards sunned themselves, and in front of her was a great wall, many times her height, and wider than Daima’s whole house, and there was not one rock missing from it. The whole wall was carved into stories and they were all about a war: the fighters in baggy trousers and tops and big boots, and they carried all kinds of weapons that Daima could not explain, saying only that once there had been weapons so terrible one of them could destroy a whole city. This wall was celebrating a victory: and certainly it was a description of how these ancient people had seen themselves and their enemies, for the faces of the victors were cruel and fierce and the defeated ones were frightened and pleading. At any rate, it was a story, on that wall, of how people had fought, and some had been killed. But on another wall in the same room, or hall, the blocks of stone were smaller and fitted closer, and were covered over with the fine, hard plaster, and the pictures were coloured. These were the same people, with their flat, broad shoulders and lean bodies, and narrow faces, and there was fighting again, but the weapons were different and so were the clothes. The same people, but from different times. That meant these people had been here for – hundreds? – of years. It meant that between the time of the plain carving of the stone and the time of decorating this smooth, crisp plaster with the coloured pictures, they had discovered the plaster and how to make it stick on rock, and how to mix colours that lasted for – how long? And on another part of the hill she found a part-fallen building with the inner walls carved, but it had earth halfway up the walls. Almost on top of these walls, as if the builders had tried to continue the old ones upwards, were other, newer walls, the white ones, with colours. This meant that the builders of the top building had not known of the building underneath. Earth had been washed away, so now you could see the two walls, one almost on top of the other. And this whole great area of hills and stones and rocks tumbling everywhere – Mara understood it all, quite suddenly. There had been a very big city of stone walls decorated with carvings. And there had been an earthquake. And on top of and between the half destroyed houses and halls another city had been built, much more beautiful and finely decorated. And that, too, had been tumbled by a quake, but this time the people had not bothered to rebuild. Why hadn’t they? What had happened to them? Where were they? Up here by herself, and even at night, though Daima hated her coming at night, Mara stood with these layers of the past all around her; and sometimes felt herself go cold and frightened, thinking of how they had lived here, all those people, building their houses when the earth shook and everything fell down … And living there again, decorating walls with such care, mixing colours, putting pictures of birds and beasts and feasts, as well as fighting and soldiers, on their walls … And then they had disappeared. People just like herself, she supposed: they had vanished, and no one knew about them. A little girl, overwhelmed by time, the weight of it, thoughts that crammed her brain and made it want to burst, she had climbed up on Daima and shivered and clung. ‘They’ve just gone, gone, gone, Daima, and they were here for so long … And we don’t know their names or anything.’

But these days she did not cling or cuddle up to Daima, for Mara was as tall as she was, and much stronger. Now when she held Daima she felt as if the old woman were the child and she the mother, and she marvelled that this huddle of thin bones held together at all.

Down below the little boys were fighting, a real fight. Often a play fight became that, the Rock People ganging up on Dann because they hated him, but so far he had not been hurt more than bruises and, once, a sprained arm. Mara watched and made herself stay still. ‘You must let him,’ said Daima. ‘You can’t protect him any more. He has to fight his own battles.’ And perhaps letting him fight his own battles had led to his being able to say to Mara, like a grown-up, ‘You should be more careful.’ Now she watched how Dann was defending himself against the kicking, flailing boys, and it was almost more than she could do to stop herself from running down to stand by him and fight with him. It seemed to her even now that her whole life had been only that: Dann, Dann; and that for years all her body had been able to feel was his trembling need for her. Now the fight was a whirl of sticks and legs and stones, and then Dann broke free and ran into one of the empty houses, whose roof had gone, and shouted down at the others from the top of crumbling walls. It was dangerous. A bit of wall fell away from under his feet and he jumped clear. The others did not follow but went off, all together. Dann leaped down, and was off into Daima’s house. He came out with two cans, and went running through the houses to where the milk beasts clustered under their old thorn tree. Their own beast now was not Mishka but Mishka’s daughter, called Mishkita. When Mishka’s milk stopped, Mara went to Kulik and asked that she should be mated again. This time he looked hard and long at her, and she could not read that look. Then he nodded and said, ‘Bring her when she’s ready.’ Mishka was mated with her own son, Dann, and gave birth to Mishkita. Daima had said, ‘Don’t go out by yourself at night, Mara. He’s got a soft spot for you. That’s even more dangerous.’ But Mara did go out at night, and when she saw Kulik smiled and nodded as if he were a friend and not an enemy, while all the time he was near her heart beat with fear of him.

Dann knelt under Mishkita, keeping a watch on those sharp hooves, and milked into the cans. He was quick and skilful. All the time he was looking around for fear of an ambush. He had once beaten up a whole gang of children teasing the milk beasts, and he said that if he ever caught them again they would find out what he could do.

This milk was all that Daima could eat now. If it didn’t rain soon there would be no more milk.

There was only a little of the white flour left, because a trader had come but he had said he thought it wasn’t worth his while if all they could give him was the yellow roots.

Mara had been making experiments. She found grasses that had small, lumpy seeds. She beat the thin, fragile heads of the grass on a stone, got out some grain and beat that on a stone. But for a whole day’s work there was only a cup of flour. She had a stroke of luck when she found, while digging for the yellow roots, a big round root the size of a baby’s head, which was filled with a dense white stuff. She cooked it and, risking that it was poison, ate, while Daima watched, ready with an emetic. But it was not poisonous and made a filling porridge. There were very few green leaves anywhere. They ate, though sparingly, the white flour, in case this was the last they’d see, the yellow roots, and this new white root. They ate sour milk and a little cheese. They were always hungry. Daima said that neither of them had had a square meal in five years and yet were shooting up like reeds after rain. They must be feeding on air, she said. ‘Or dust,’ they joked.

Two years after the children had come to Daima’s house there was a big storm. Not a cloudburst far away, so that brown water rushed in torrents under a bright blue sky. It was real rain. It was sudden and violent. The cisterns outside the houses filled with water, and everyone shared the water in the cisterns outside the empty houses. Daima and the children carried water again and again to the locked-up tank indoors. Soon, there was another storm. The dried-up, yellowish earth and the dead-looking grasses were bursting into life, and there were flowers, and the milk beasts grew fat, and the people lost their dried, dusty look. The waterholes became a river, and the wild animals stood about on the banks at dusk and dawn, and there was a trumpeting and bleating and howling and yapping from both rivers. All the villagers went up to the ridge to look: they had believed there were no animals left. Certainly there were only half of what had been. Because of the storm there were some baby animals born. Kulik and his sons went out to catch the babies: no one was strong enough now to hunt the big animals. They did not share the meat with anyone else in the village. The villagers made a channel for the water of the nearer river to flow into a low place, and there a guard was set, day and night, so the stingers and water dragons did not get into it; and in that pool everyone bathed every day, all at the same time, for safety. There was even a little friendliness shown to Mara and Dann, who took their turn, with Daima, guarding the pool.

And then – that was it. Because there had been two big storms in that rainy season, everyone waited for rain in the next, with cleaned-out cisterns and mended roofs. But there was no rain that season, nor the next, nor the next. That good season with the two storms had been four years ago. Again the waterholes were almost empty in the little river, and the big river had stopped running. Everywhere the bones of animals lay in the dead grass. Extraordinary events were reported. A water dragon, almost dead with hunger, had been attacked by a water stinger half its size; and when the villagers went down together to the waterholes they saw half a dozen stingers fighting over the half-dead beast. And just outside the village a couple of the big black birds that normally ate only seeds and berries attacked in full daylight a wild pig too weak to run away, tearing from its shoulders and neck big beakfuls of flesh, while the pig squealed. And these birds had taken to gathering not far from the milk beasts, to stare at them, moving closer and waiting, and moving in again; and Dann had run out shouting and throwing stones at them. They had flapped off, slowly, so weak they kept sinking and wavering in the air, letting out hoarse, desperate cries. The milk beasts were thin and weak and gave hardly any milk.

Perhaps this next rainy season? – everyone was saying. Or perhaps even another flash flood from up north.