Mara and Dann

  No thieves, only the restlessness, the weeping, the mourning, of the people, and the crying of the children. It was so noisy that soon Dann and Mara went on. That day’s march was easy, because it was a huge, jostling crowd, though more than once someone did look closely at Dann, as if he were recognised. The feeding stations were well placed, and frequent. Now Shari was a good way behind, and whenever they reached a high point on the road, everyone turned to see what they could – but there were only columns of dark smoke, which sight brought forth more tears, imprecations, curses, impotent rage. That night was the same as the last, lit dimly by the shrinking moon, and Mara and Dann slept, but not much, for they could not lose the habit of being on guard at all times. There was one difference. Beside the road had stood a little inn, and Mara had darted in, found a knife in the deserted kitchen, and it was now safe in her robe.

  Next day, at mid-morning, they saw Karas ahead, a town smaller than Shari, but pleasant enough. It was where Shabis had been educated, Mara reminded Dann, and said that here somewhere must be the school he had been at.

  And now it was necessary to think carefully about what they would buy. It had been easy to feed themselves on the road here, because of the feeding stations, but now every eating place and inn would be crammed with people. They went to a public square and sat down under a tree on the paving. This was made of differently coloured stones, very attractive, arranged to make patterns and pictures. Some of the pictures were of people not unlike the Neanthes. And there were animals they had not seen, too. People were already lining up to drink from a fountain.

  What were they going to wear? Dann said that in the North Lands men and women both wore long cotton robes, white or striped, cut loose with long, straight, loose sleeves. This design was to allow air to flow easily about the body, for where they were going it would be hot.

  ‘And it hasn’t been hot until now?’ protested Mara.

  She took out from her sack the blue and green loose dresses from Chelops that had never seemed appropriate at any place since, and which she had to associate with the easy life in the deep shade of the courtyard. They did not seem appropriate now either. Then they looked at the exquisite robes she could not bear to part with – but she replaced them at the bottom of the sack. Then the snake dress, which in this strong sunlight seemed to have lost its colour when she held it up, and looked milky and transparent. The two slave tunics were too short and skimpy. They would have to buy robes for the North Lands, so they could be inconspicuous.

  They found a large clothing shop, selling what they wanted. They were called Sahar robes, and they chose two striped ones, in brown and white. The shopkeeper, when he saw the bag of coins that Mara pulled out of her sack, the ones she had snatched from Han on the boat, said he wouldn’t accept them.

  ‘But they are still currency,’ said Dann, with more than a touch of the young General.

  The shopkeeper, an old man peevish with age, grumbled and said that he would make a loss when he changed the coins. Eventually they paid twice what the robes were worth. They bought some pieces of cloth. They bought some leather bottles, for water. Then they asked for a place to change.

  ‘Are you running from the police?’ asked the old man, but he didn’t care.

  ‘No, the army,’ said Mara.

  ‘What have we done to have all these refugees landed on us?’ he grumbled.

  ‘You’ll make a lot of money out of us,’ said Mara.

  ‘I’d rather have peace and quiet. My wife’s dead. If they turn up here expecting me to take them in, who’ll be feeding them and looking after them? This old fool, that’s who.’

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ said Dann, ‘General Shabis has got them surrounded and everyone can go back home soon.’

  ‘And suppose they don’t want to go back home, but want to stay here, in Karas? That’ll be a fine state of affairs.’

  ‘They won’t want to do that,’ said Dann, ‘because Shari is much nicer than Karas.’

  ‘Oh, is that so? And what’s wrong with Karas, tell me that.’

  They changed, made sure their two knives were safely in the new robes, and went to look for an inn to rest in. They already knew what their problem was going to be: everyone, despite their miseries and worries, turned to look at them. This was a most striking young couple, and both knew they would earn trouble because of it.

  In the inn they ordered a meal, and while they waited Dann, smiling, elated, triumphant, drew as large a map of Ifrik as would fit on to the table top, put a mark for Rustam, one for the Rock Village, one for Majab and one for Chelops. He made thick branchy lines for the rivers, little dots for the River Towns and for Goidel, marked Shari and Karas, and sat with the span of his long fingers stretched wide to cover the distance they had come. The two sat smiling at each other, pleased with themselves.

  Dann said, ‘On that old gourd globe, from here to the Middle Sea was desert. Sand. Sahar. Only one river, Nilus. On the wall map, thousands of years later, no desert, but a lot of different kinds of country. But two big rivers. Nilus and Adrar. Both flow north. Both have lots of little rivers running into them. We are a long way from both of them. Nilus is away to the east and Adrar the same distance to the west. To reach either would be a major effort in itself. There are no rivers ahead of us, I think. The next town north of here is Bilma. Then Kanaz. Bilma is some days’ walk from here. I know there are Thores people ahead. A spy told me. And Neanthes.’

  ‘And Mahondis? The Kin said that Mahondis were the predominant people all over Ifrik?’

  ‘So where are they all?’

  It was pleasant sitting together in this inn, pleasant in Karas, an old trading town, full of travellers from everywhere even when it was, as now, filling with refugees. So crowded and clamorous became this room that they decided to go. They filled their water bottles, bought bread and dry fruit for the road, and Mara took two of the coins off the cord, and hid them in her pocket under her knife: she did not want unfriendly eyes to watch her fumbling for the cord under her gown.

  It was a long day’s fast walk to the frontier. Inns and resting places close to a frontier are of particular interest to the authorities in every country, and, as the two approached the Inn at the Edge, a large building reddened by the flaring sunset, every sense was alert and they were ready to take to their heels. They had debated whether to sleep outside, under the stars, but they were tired and needed a rest. They believed that they were the first of the overflow from Karas to arrive here. As they walked through a room crowded with travellers, a sharp-eyed woman who was evidently the proprietor watched them, and they knew that not a detail escaped her.

  Mara asked for a room, preferably on the ground floor, and at the back, and when she added the excuse ‘because we sleep badly and need quiet,’ the shrewd little smile on the woman’s face said she heard this request often. Then she remarked that runners from Shari and from Karas were expected. They told her that Shari was under siege, but she knew that already. They saw that she was probably as well equipped with informers as any warlord or city official. ‘They often have interesting news,’ said she. ‘I don’t always tell them what they want to know. It depends.’

  Now was the moment for a coin to appear. The trouble was, Mara believed that a whole coin was too much for what they wanted, which was only a warning if the runners knew about them.

  ‘Can you change this?’ said Mara.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed and glinted: she was certainly not one who did not know what a gold coin was. She took the coin from Mara as if she had been given it, and, resting her two hands on the counter, the coin lying between them, she looked full at Mara and then at Dann.

  ‘Interesting news about the young General,’ she said. ‘You’d not think that General Shabis’s favourite would run off, in the middle of a war.’ But she smiled, at Dann and then at Mara. ‘They are saying it was for love.’

  She took up the coin, deliberately, and put it deep between her breasts. Then she said, ‘Ther
e are ways across the frontier that avoid the roads and the guards.’

  Mara fetched the other coin from her pocket, and the woman took it from her.

  ‘You rest. I’ll call you if you have to run for it.’

  In the room she gave them, at the back, with a low window, there were two beds and they looked comfortable, but it seemed too dangerous to sleep. They lay down with their belongings close to them.

  Mara thought how sweet it had been, the sharing of the time before sleep, with Meryx, the lazy chat about this and that, the intimacy, and how sweet this would be now with Dann, if their ears were not straining.

  ‘If Shabis caught up with you – would he punish you?’

  ‘He would have to. Death sentence. Discipline.’

  ‘Yet he loves you.’

  ‘It’s not me he loves.’ He sounded tired and irritated. ‘Mara, didn’t you ever think it was a bit odd, your being in his house?’

  ‘That wasn’t his home. It was where he worked.’

  ‘And did you ever wonder why the Hennes abducted you?’

  ‘Of course. But it was all because they thought I was pregnant by Shabis. Another breeding programme.’

  ‘And how would they know you were pregnant? Shabis’s wife sent a message to Izrak that you were pregnant by Shabis. She wanted to get rid of you.’ She was silent with the shock of it. ‘She was jealous. Surely you aren’t surprised?’

  ‘I didn’t even know he had a wife, at first.’

  ‘And when you did?’

  ‘I suppose I thought that if … I thought it must be all right.’

  ‘You are a funny woman. You didn’t even notice he was in love with you?’

  ‘No. All I cared about was – he was teaching me. That’s all. I’ve never been so happy in all my life, Dann.’

  He laughed. She did not like the laugh. The male soldiers at the watchtower laughed like that, talking about women.

  ‘And if I’m so strange, what about you? That boy of yours in the headquarters in Shari … You left him just like that, you didn’t care.’

  ‘Mara, I told him every day, sometimes several times a day, that I was going to leave. One day I’d just walk off and leave and he had to be prepared for that.’

  ‘All the same, he was jealous; if looks could kill, then…’

  ‘He came to H.Q. and begged me to take him as an army servant. He had run away from the Hennes. He wanted to work for me. And so he did.’ Again, she did not like his laugh. ‘He was in rags and he was starving when he came. He was fed. He was given a uniform. He’ll find another officer to take him on. He’s probably done that already.’

  ‘And you don’t care.’

  ‘I care more about Kira, as it happens.’ She saw him lift his head up off the pillow, to see how she reacted. She was astonished. ‘Kira and I were together. I wanted her to come with me when I was posted to the Northern Army, but she likes her comforts, Kira does. She preferred her nice little house and her nice little life. And her nice poppy.’ He mimicked Kira’s, ‘But I only smoke a little bit, Dann, just a teeny little bit sometimes, Dann … She’s probably got someone else already too.’

  ‘And you had that boy and Kira going at the same time.’

  ‘You know what, Mara? Because you were living with Meryx all that time, all cosy and nice, you talk like an old woman.’

  ‘All that time,’ said Mara, fierce. ‘It was less than a year.’

  ‘A long time, for people like us.’ He yawned. ‘We do get about Mara, don’t we?’

  From the big communal room came a commotion. Voices raised sharply. Commands.

  ‘We’d better leave,’ said Dann.

  At this the door opened and in came the proprietor. ‘Time to go,’ she said. ‘They’re after you, all right. Go out through the window. There’s a girl there. She’ll show you the way.’ And then, turning back to say it, ‘Good luck. You’ll be safe when you’re across.’ She went out.

  ‘People like us,’ said Dann.

  ‘Or very much don’t like us.’

  ‘But they always like the gold. Quick.’ He was out of the window, and gone; and she followed him. A young girl was crouching in the bushes, her eyes glinting in the light that fell from the window. She went fast out of the garden, looking back to see if they followed. The moon was a tiny yellow slice, and the stars were brighter; the stars glittered and crowded and the starlight was strong enough to make faint shadows. In a moment the three were running through trees and a pursuer would find it hard to see them at all: birds or ghosts flying through the forest.

  16

  It was past midnight when the girl gasped, ‘Here it is,’ meaning the frontier; but there was nothing to be seen, only a line of hills where they jumped and scrambled through rocks. Then the forest continued: great, old trees with a soft litter beneath that absorbed the sounds of their running feet. Mara and Dann expected her to go back, but she ran on with them until they stopped on the crest of a rise, and pointed forward. The sky was lightening. The town they were looking down on spread widely, and as far as they could see north. The lights of the town were low and little, netting the darkness in a dim twinkling. Here the girl said, ‘I’m going back,’ and was already off when both Dann and Mara caught hold of her. They needed to know certain things. First, what language was spoken here? Charad, she said, surprised that there could be even the possibility of another language, for the foreign talk she heard at the inn was as strange to her as the night cries of the birds they had been hearing. What money did they use? Money, she said. Mara fetched out from the bottom of her sack a little handful of old coins, and the girl shook her head when she saw them, putting out her hand to touch them, disbelieving. Did things go well here? Was Bilma prosperous? Was it suffering drought? What were the people who ruled this country like? But the two saw that she was a girl whose longings had been satisfied when she got employment at that grand dynamic centre, the Inn at the Edge, the last in Charad on the road north, where travellers passed through with tales of lands she had scarcely heard of. And one day a handsome young man would come to the inn and … All this they knew about the skinny little girl whose meagre flesh was not because she had lacked food, but because she was still a child. Mara offered her some of old Han’s coins, but she giggled, and said that she was only doing as she had been ordered. And off she ran, disappearing into the trees.

  Which here, close to the town, stood sparse and often with a branch or two lopped off. And between the edge of the forest and the beginning of the town stretched soiled and beaten grass, where an occasional shack or hut stood.

  Under the last of the great, untouched forest trees – new to both of them, for neither had seen a forest like this, where trees were two or three times the height of the savannah trees – they sat down to rest, and to talk. Decisions had to be made. First they pooled what they knew, or had been told, about Bilma.

  It was large and powerful, but not the main city of the North Lands. It was a trading town: several trade routes passed through it or ended here. Like all the towns of the North Lands it was governed by a military junta that had got power in a rebellion, and the central government to which they paid tribute was weak, or at least lax, and each town in its district or province was virtually self-governing. The climate was not the same as in the south, which was sharply defined rainy seasons with long periods of dryness between. Here the forests of the North Lands were watered by mild rains in the summer, but the winters were severe. Farther north still, so Dann had heard, the winters might last months.

  They needed now to sleep and to eat, but they were afraid to sleep. They had some bread left. They had not seen fruit as they ran but, in the dark, fruits and the big leaves of some trees had been indistinguishable. There was a small stream. They drank. The stream had thick bushes along it, and they hid in them, and did sleep a little but were startled awake thinking there were voices; but what had wakened them were birds. They lay and saw birds, so many, of all sizes and kinds, listened to their talk in so
many different voices – but meanwhile it was midday and they did not know what to do next.

  Mara said, ‘You realise that our problem has always been how to change money?’

  ‘Our main problem might have been that we had no money.’

  And now Mara took the cord of coins out from under her robe, laid it down and said, ‘Thirteen left.’

  Dann laid on the earth four coins, and said, touching his waist, ‘Ten left here.’ And then, ‘We shouldn’t use any more of yours. We might be separated again.’ He slid out of his long, new robe, and sat before her naked except for the little loin cloth, suddenly a slim boy, really not more than that, all the weight and importance of General Dann gone. He was so beautiful, this lithe, elegant youth, and yet Mara had to look at the savage scar around his waist … He had his knife out and the point was in his flesh just above the scar and he levered out a coin, which fell on the earth between them, shining and clean and new, though with a bit of blood on it. He was pale and his lips set, but he levered out another. Then two on the other end of the scar.

  ‘I used two to buy presents for Kira,’ he said. ‘So I know how to do it. And it’s not too bad.’ But he was looking sick.

  ‘Enough,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ And he went on until there were six on the earth. ‘Six still inside and safe,’ he said. The scar was bleeding. Dann took a bit of cloth from the sack, and wetted it in the stream, and dabbed and dabbed at the blood, but it kept coming.

  ‘I wish we had Orphne here to tell us what plants to use.’

  ‘Or Kira. She picked up a lot from Orphne. But the plants are different here.’

  ‘Perhaps not so different.’ Mara began searching along the banks of the stream, pulling at the plants and smelling them; and then she found one, a greyish plant with spiky leaves, whose smell was not unlike one that Orphne used to stop bleeding. She offered this to Dann. He sniffed at it, vigorously chewed a bit, then smeared the juice from his mouth on to the raw places. The bleeding stopped, but it was a real wound and looked ugly.