Mara and Dann

  It occurred to her that when people had said ‘up North’ – perhaps for hundreds of years, in the cities and towns farther south – what they meant was this city here. Perhaps even for thousands of years they had talked everywhere in Ifrik about this wonderful place. No, not thousands: for some reason cities did not live so long. Cities were like people: they were born and lived and died.

  Later, when the light went, the servant came in with a jug of milk and some little cakes. His wrist was bandaged. He never took his eyes off her, and sidled out of the room, terrified. He said something under his breath and it was not friendly. Well, tomorrow she would begin to learn this language and then no one would say things she could not understand.

  Before she slept she went out to see the glitter of the stars…And lingered there until she saw that a soldier was watching her: he was on guard. She went in and to bed thinking about Dann and how soon she could see him.

  Next morning, at breakfast, Shabis asked about the scars around Dann’s waist, and she said that had happened when he was very ill in Chelops. Shabis said that there were parts of Ifrik where slaves wore chains around their waists with blunt barbs on them, making scars rather like Dann’s. She said she had never heard of anything like that. He nodded, after a while; she supposed he believed her, but did not mind much. She thought, I’m not going to care about him; we’ll be going North.

  The Charad lessons were with an old woman, a good teacher, and Mara learned fast. Every morning lessons in Charad and every afternoon, for at least an hour, or longer, if he had time, Shabis taught her, by a simple means. She asked questions and he answered them. Only occasionally he said, ‘I don’t know.’ She protested she was so ignorant and she did not know what questions to ask, but he said that when she ran out of questions then it would be time to worry.

  She asked to see Dann. He said that he was in that stage of training when it would be disadvantageous to interrupt it, and Dann was doing so well, that would be a pity.

  11

  Most evenings Shabis was not there; on reconnaissance, he said, or instructing his soldiers. Then she learned he had a wife. Since he did not mention her, she did not. Would she like it if he wanted to sleep with her? At the thought, her body woke and wailed that it missed Meryx and did not want anyone else. And indeed the thought of him was so painful that she refused to let herself think of him. That time when she had lain every night in Meryx’s arms, as if that was the normal thing to do, instead of being cold or hungry or exhausted, or on the run, now seemed like some other life and in another time. To wake in the dark to feel the breathing wonder of a body you loved passionately, tenderly…No, she did not want to think of it, or even remember.

  Now she was glad Shabis had a wife and was not there in the evenings, for she was able to sit quietly and think of what she had learned in the day, from Shabis, and in her study of Charad.

  Another boat arrived on the canal, from down South, and it was stopped long enough to get news. The drought had not broken in the South, and there had been no rain at all. Things were very bad. And Chelops? Nothing definite, only that there had been fighting. She wondered if, when the next boat came, the Chelops Mahondis would be on it, or perhaps even Hadrons? And what was happening in the River Towns? The ones farthest south were emptying, but Goidel was not too bad.

  The days passed and then it was weeks. Dann came to see her. They had been sending each other messages, ‘I am fine. How are you?’ – that kind of thing.

  Mara watched him walk towards her. The army had fed him and he had lost his lean, knobbly look, like a gnawed bone at his worst. He had grown taller. He was good-looking, very, in his uniform and he moved with confidence. Once, every movement he made was of a hunted thing. They did not embrace but sat looking at each other. They were in her room, where she slept. Dann glanced at the wall pictures, then again, then was caught by them, and only with difficulty left them to sit and talk. It was a shock to see the uniformed man in this room, adding to it yet another layer of time. For she had joked with Shabis that from her shoulders down, in this room, she lived in an ancient civilisation more wonderful than anything people now could imagine, but from the shoulders up, she was a mud-hut dweller. But Dann belonged in a modern barracks.

  ‘Mara, when are we going to leave?’

  She had known he was going to say this. ‘How can we? How far would we get?’

  ‘We’ve managed before.’

  ‘Not in a country where everybody’s movements are known. And if you left the army that would be treason, and the punishment for that is death.’

  He began moving restlessly in his chair, the old Dann, a barely controlled rebelliousness.

  Mara got up to look into the next room to see if anyone was listening. The young boy whose wrist she had broken was tidying near the door. He ran out when he saw her. Now she knew enough Charad to understand what he said: he was calling her witch, bag, hag, snake. She called after him in Charad similar epithets and saw him panic.

  ‘What is this Shabis like?’ asked Dann.

  ‘You should know. You go out with him often enough on reconnaissance.’

  ‘All right – yes, he’s brave. He never asks us to do what he won’t do himself. But that isn’t what I meant.’

  ‘He is married.’

  ‘I know.’ His smile, worldly wise and cynical, was something the army had taught him.

  ‘And I haven’t forgotten Meryx.’

  Dann hesitated, then said gently, ‘Mara, Meryx is probably dead.’

  ‘Why? How do you know?’

  ‘There’s been more fighting in Chelops. The people from the town went up into the eastern suburbs and massacred Hadrons and quite a few Mahondis.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  ‘Kira. She came up on the last boat. She had heard about it from some refugees. She agreed to be a soldier here, but she’s not much good at doing what she’s told, and so she’s looking after animals.’

  ‘Do you see Kira?’

  He answered only the surface of her question with, ‘We meet in the eating house. We are friends.’

  She had learned what she needed to know and she was pleased. So he had a friend. She said, ‘Dann, I’m learning to read and write in Charad, as well as talking. And I’m learning a lot of things. It’s what I’ve always wanted.’

  ‘It’ll be useful when we go North.’

  ‘Dann, have you ever wondered why we say North, North?’

  ‘Of course I have. And it is because everyone has said that things are better.’

  ‘They are better here.’

  ‘But this isn’t what I was hoping for.’

  ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘it isn’t.’

  ‘They say that North – really North – there are all kinds of things and people and we’ve never seen anything like them.’

  ‘Dann, you and I – we haven’t seen very much, have we? Only everything drying up and fighting and…’

  ‘And poppy and murder,’ he said.

  ‘And poppy and murder. Dann, are you still afraid of him – the one you said was following you?’

  Up he leaped from his chair, away from the question, and stood looking out into the glare of mid-morning. ‘He did try to kill me. He got away.’

  ‘Where was this? Here?’

  ‘I’ll tell you another time. But I want you to know – if you hear I’ve gone, then I’ll be in Shari waiting for you. Or in Karas.’

  ‘Both are inside the Charad spy system. Dann, did you know that you’re in line for a tisitch?’

  Almost from the start Dann had been a platoon leader: ten men. His basic training over, he was made a cent; that is, he had a hundred men under him. If he became a tisitch, then he would be responsible for a thousand men. He would be one of fifty officers immediately under the general – Shabis. And he would become part of the administration of south Charad.

  He had turned himself around, and stood looking closely into her face, in his old way. ‘Did General Shabis say so?’
>
  ‘Yes. They think very highly of you. He said you are the youngest cent they’ve had. And all the tisitches will be much older than you.’

  ‘I don’t want to be an Agre. I don’t want to stay in Charad.’ But she could see he was pleased. Then he said, ‘Everything is stagnant here, isn’t it?’

  ‘It won’t go on being. They are trying to make a truce. Then all of Charad will change.’

  ‘And when is this truce going to happen?’

  ‘Shabis is trying to get a meeting with General Izrak.’

  ‘Well, good luck. You can’t trust them – the Hennes.’

  She knew that this was more than a professional soldier talking about an enemy – the automatic thing. ‘Trust? Who cares about trust? If there’s a truce there will have to be safeguards, which means that both sides will lose if they break it.’

  ‘Clever Mara. But you’ve forgotten, the Hennes are stupid. And, I’ve noticed, clever people often don’t understand stupid ones.’

  This talk was sweet to them, after such a long time, almost six months. They could have gone on, but he had to return to his duties. Shabis came in and Dann saluted and stood at ease. Shabis asked Dann about some army problem, and Dann answered well and carefully, but not at too great a length. Mara could see that Shabis was testing him. Then he nodded and said, ‘Right. Dismiss. You can come and see your sister again soon.’ Dann saluted and went out, with a look at Mara that claimed her for their plans of escape.

  Shabis sat himself where Dann had been and said, ‘Mara, how do you like the idea of becoming a spy?’ And he laughed at her dismay. ‘I want you to come with me when we negotiate the truce, and then stay behind to work on the details – and report to me everything you see. It wouldn’t be for long.’

  ‘I should be alone? Among the Hennes?’ She was really horrified. ‘I can’t tell one from another. I wonder that they can.’

  ‘Sometimes they can’t. They all wear some sort of badge or mark.’

  ‘What is wrong with them? There is something…’

  ‘I think it is that the life – you know, the stuff of life – of one person is diluted with them so that ten – or who knows, fifty? – of them are the same as one of us.’

  She said,

  ‘The inward spark,

  The vital flame,

  Can go as quickly as it came.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. My mind is full of – things, bits of words, ideas, and I don’t know where they come from. Perhaps my childhood.’

  ‘Well, that’s it. Their vital spark. Perhaps they don’t have it. But they are clever enough at some things. After all, one of them copied that gun and made it work.’

  ‘I don’t think that makes me like them any better.’

  ‘Well, are you refusing to do it?’

  ‘I thought I was your prisoner and had to do as I’m told?’

  ‘Is that what you are?’

  ‘I’ll think about it. The trouble is, they make my flesh creep. I don’t think I ever understood that saying until I saw the Hennes.’

  And she did think, hard and long when she was alone in her room. In her room – alone. What a happiness it was for her, this room, and being alone when she wanted.

  Shabis wanted to change the whole country into something freer, easier, and to use money now spent on fighting and raids for improvement. And yet was there so much spent on war? There were battles, but not often. There were skirmishes. Dann had been right when he said Charad – or at least this part of it – was stagnant. The armies had farms and manufactories, they built towns over old ruins that were everywhere in Charad, they educated the men and the women in the armies, and it was a pretty easy life.

  Shabis wanted to dismiss half the army back into civilian life and, as war receded into the past, keep only enough soldiers for an unexpected attack. But if you took away the army, the generals would have on their hands many thousands of people who were used to discipline and order, looking for work. What work? Everyone was fed and clothed as it was. Shabis said the former soldiers would be useful rebuilding towns and digging out silted rivers. Very well. For a while the invisible bonds of old disciplines would confine them, and then there would come a time when people would have to be forced by needs now satisfied so automatically no one need think about it, to compete for work. There would have to be money and systems of exchange, and if they refused to work or earn then they would not be fed. How simple it all sounded, how easily Shabis talked about it. But there would be a great turbulence and dissatisfaction and as Mara knew, though it seemed Shabis did not, there would follow the threat of poppy. When she said this to him he replied, ‘There would be punishments for that.’ For Shabis, the soldier, had to rely on punishments and rebukes. There would follow courts and prisons and police.

  And there were the Hennes, a people within the mass of the Agre, a country within a country. Mara had said, ‘Why not let the Hennes split off and have their own country? Why do you want them?’

  ‘They want us,’ was the reply. ‘They want what we have. They know we are quicker and cleverer than they are. I believe they think that if they capture our part of Charad – Agre territory – then they will become like us.’

  ‘But if you have a truce, then they must agree to stop trying to take Agre land, and be content with what they have.’

  ‘Exactly. We will trade and be at peace.’

  A likely story, Mara thought. Shabis’s life, spent since he was sixteen in the army, had narrowed his mind away from – well, the kind of experience she and Dann had at their fingertips. He did not understand anarchy, disorder, and the rages of frightened people.

  The best part of Mara’s life was now the afternoon talks, the ‘lessons,’ with Shabis. She was still taking language lessons every morning, though she was speaking pretty well by now, and understood everything that was said. She could write, just a little. Shabis owned an ancient book of tales from the distant past, made of tree bark. It was in Mahondi. But her writing lessons were in Charad. She tried to use what she had in her brain – the Mahondi – to puzzle out the written words. Shabis helped her. He was spending more time with her, sometimes three or four hours every afternoon. They set aside one of these hours to say what they had to in Charad, to give her practice.

  What she liked best was to talk about ‘those long ago people from thousands of years in the past.’ He said that he didn’t have much to tell her, but as they went on, it turned out he did know a good deal, picked up here and there. They were piecing together what they knew, from her memories of her old home, from Daima, from the Mahondis of Chelops. Shabis said that if it had ever been possible to get all the different Mahondi families into one place then a pretty good record of the filtered down knowledge would result. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘that we all know a little but not how it fits together.’ For instance he had not seen anything like Candace’s wall map and the gourd globe, which came from such different times, separated by – well, probably, by hundreds of years. Or thousands. He asked Mara to draw him the map that had the white blanking out the top of it, and brought her a newly prepared white animal skin, as soft as cloth, and sticks of charcoal, and some vegetable dyes. Then he wanted another, of the time before that, when there was no white covering up so much of the picture.

  Sometimes it was by accident that they found out what the other knew. For instance, Shabis remarked that in those long ago times there was a period when people lived to be quite old, even a hundred years or more, while, nowadays, if someone lived to be fifty that was pretty good. ‘I am an old man, Mara – thirty-five. Then a thirty-five-year-old man was still a young man. And there was a time when women had one child after another and sometimes died young because of it, or were old at forty, but then they discovered some medicine or herb that stopped them having children…’

  ‘What?’ said Mara. ‘What are you saying?’

  She was staring, she was breathless.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mara??
??

  ‘I can’t…I don’t think I can take that in…do you mean to say…you’re saying that those ancient women, if they took some drug, then they didn’t have children?’

  ‘Yes. It’s in the Sand Records.’

  ‘That meant, those women then didn’t have to be afraid of men.’

  Shabis said, drily, ‘I haven’t noticed your being afraid.’

  ‘You don’t understand. Daima used to tell me and tell me until I sometimes got angry with her, Remember when you meet a man, he could make you pregnant. Think if you’re in your fertile period and if you are, then be on your guard.’

  ‘My dear Mara, it sounds as if you are accusing me.’

  ‘You just don’t know what it means, always to be thinking, Be careful, they are stronger than you are, they could make you pregnant.’

  ‘No, I suppose I don’t.’

  ‘I cannot even begin to imagine what it could be like, being at ease when you meet a man. And then, when it suits you, at the time you want it, you have a baby. They must have been quite different from us, those women in ancient times. So different…’ She was silent, thinking. ‘They were free. We could never be free, in that way.’ Now she was remembering Kulik, how she had dodged and evaded and run away, and even had nightmares. Dreams of helplessness. That was the point. Being helpless.