Mara and Dann

  ‘The dogs,’ said Daulis. ‘That’s what they’re trained for.’

  Next, they had to bring each other up to date with their stories.

  Shabis, seeing that it was only a question of time before the other three generals arrested him on some charge or other, fled from Agre, and made his way North, in the same way the others had.

  Shabis did not know how it had been with Mara, except in the barest outline, from Daulis; and having had this outline confirmed, said he wanted to know more later. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘I want to know everything about you. Just to set my imagination at rest. You have no idea the horrible things I was imagining, when you were with the Hennes.’

  Daulis said that they all knew his story.

  Dann told Shabis and Kira what had happened to him.

  Now it was Kira’s turn. She had run into Shabis in Kanaz, and he had looked after her on the journey here. Kira did not say much, but her eyes were on Shabis, and told Mara that it was not Dann Kira wanted, but Shabis. Mara felt this as a stab to her heart, and she thought that loving someone meant that a look, a touch, a sigh in the dark, could flood you with happiness or doubt. She had done better, she thought, when she had had a heart like a stone. She saw Shabis was smiling at her, knowing what she was thinking, wanting to reassure her. And Leta too, who always picked up the slightest nuances of feeling, was smiling at her, It’s all right, Mara.

  And Mara was reassured, she knew Shabis loved her. But she could not prevent a bitter little thought: You don’t know what Kira is like. She glanced at Dann to see what he had caught of this little play of looks, thoughts, feelings, and he was looking at Kira and then, thoughtfully, at Shabis.

  When the night came, they had not finished all they had to tell each other, but next day would do. ‘And next week, and next month, and next year,’ said Shabis, ‘but now it’s bedtime.’

  Kira and Dann went off together – ‘Just like an old married couple,’ said Kira, with a flirtatious look that included them all, but lingered on Shabis. Then Leta and Daulis went, but shyly.

  Mara and Shabis sat on.

  Shabis said, ‘And now I must tell you about the Chelops people.’ His manner had changed, as if he, Shabis, had withdrawn himself, leaving a formal, almost cold voice and eyes where she could see only a man doing his duty.

  From his spies, and from travellers, he had pieced together a story which he believed was more or less accurate. When the townspeople attacked the eastern suburbs, the slaves repelled them. Then the slaves rioted and most of the Hadrons were killed. The Kin collected together a company of themselves, including some babies and children, and slaves who were ready to go with them, and went east, meaning to reach the coast where there was a Mahondi Kin. They did not know a war was being fought in the area between Chelops and the coast. Some were killed, but some escaped, including a woman called Orphne and the head man, Juba. At this point Shabis hesitated, but went on, ‘Orphne is living with Meryx, and they have a child. They reached the coast.’

  Mara was so strongly back, in imagination, in Chelops that, thinking of the people dead, she wept. And then, happy about Orphne, and both happy and unhappy about Meryx, she felt for the second time that day a pang of jealousy so sharp that she got up, staggered blindly to a couch, flung herself down and sobbed. Shabis came after her and, no longer withdrawn into a correctness that was meant to reassure her he did not want her to repudiate her old lover, put his arms around her and she clung to him. Soon he led her off to the bedroom that would be theirs.

  This was not a busy time on the farm. The harvest had been taken in, the fields replanted, and the animals were inside good fences and needed only to be fed and milked. Mara undertook this work, and taught Leta how to do it.

  The big house, spreading over a hill where you could hear the sea booming or sighing all day, all night, was like the end of tales she had seen in an ancient book in the Centre: ‘And so we all lived happily ever after.’ But Mara’s heart, which these days in no way resembled a cold stone, told her otherwise.

  One night she was lying in Shabis’s arms, listening to the sea, when she heard what she thought were the complaining voices of sea birds, but then knew it was Kira’s voice, shouting at Dann.

  Mara quietly got up, and went into the room where they so often all sat about, talking, and as she did so Dann came in from the other side. He was white, and angry. He flung himself down on floor cushions, hands behind his head, and Mara sat by him, and took his hand, which gripped hers then fell away.

  ‘She doesn’t love me,’ he said, and Mara said nothing. Then he turned to her, put his arms around her and said, ‘Mara, why can’t we be together? We ought to be together … But now you’ve got Shabis.’ And his arms seemed to go cold, and withdrew.

  Mara said, ‘It’s going to be hard for both of us, loving other people.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed you have any difficulty loving Shabis.’

  She sat by Dann, close, in the dark room where a sky full of stars showed through a big square window, with the so familiar feel of him, the smell of him, her little brother, her companion through so much; and she knew that she loved Shabis but she always would love Dann more and nothing could change that.

  ‘Who made these laws in the first place?’

  She said, ‘I told you, Nature made them. I saw it all in the Centre.’

  ‘The Centre, the Centre – suppose I don’t care about children and posterity?’

  Mara sat silent, allowing herself to think of the happiness of loving Dann; and then this dream dissolved with the coldest of reminders, because from nowhere, or from deep inside her, came the words, ‘You’d kill me, Dann, if we loved each other. It would be so – violent.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  She could only say, ‘I just think something like that would happen.’

  He stroked her face, ‘I love you so much, Mara.’

  ‘And I you.’

  ‘Am I really such a violent person?’

  ‘Yes. And I am too. We have been made violent. And if we fought – it wouldn’t be with words.’

  ‘You are sure of that, Mara?’

  ‘I’m not sure of anything.’

  He began playing with her hair, long black hair, and she stroked his, so like hers. She put her arm under his head and her arm over his shoulders. So they reclined beside each other, as they had so often, and then she felt his hand fall, slide down her shoulder, and to his side. His eyes were shut; he had gone to sleep.

  She sat holding him for a long time, and then saw a light move on the floor, looked up and Shabis was there, with a lamp which he set in a corner on the floor. He settled himself opposite them. He nodded to Mara: It’s all right.

  The big room was a different place, with the lamp spreading around it an intimate circle of yellow light. The square of starlit night in the wall, the sound of the sea, seemed to have retreated. A wildness had gone. Dann sighed, but it was more like a moan. Mara saw that his face was stained with tears, and then that Shabis had opened his arms to her and was waiting. After a moment – she could do nothing else – she gently slid away from Dann, went to Shabis, and was beside him as she had been by Dann.

  ‘Mara,’ he said softly, ‘there isn’t anything you can do.’

  Soon she fell asleep, inside the comfort of his arms. And then Shabis, too, fell asleep.

  It was cold. Dann started up, staring around him as he usually did on waking, for a possible enemy. He saw he was safe, and then that Mara was asleep in Shabis’s arms.

  He stood looking down at them. Mara seemed to shrink and shiver as through the window came a cold blast from the stars. He took a blanket and laid it gently over his sister. He hesitated, frowned, and spread it to cover Shabis as well. He went out, not into the room he shared with Kira, but into the night and down to the sea, the dogs at his heels.

  Next morning at breakfast he announced that all this hanging about was driving him mad. He wanted to see for himself how the water from the Wes
tern Sea was splashing through the Rocky Gates into the Middle Sea, and then go north until he stood right under the ice mountains to find out if it was true they were melting. He wanted to walk down the dry side of the Middle Sea until he reached the water at the bottom and then walk all around the water line till he got back to where he started. He wanted to raid the Centre for things they could use here on the farm.

  These excursions were vetoed because the farm work would soon be starting. Then Leta suggested that when the weather was better he should go and fetch Donna, whom they had agreed would be invited to live here. Daulis said it would not be dangerous, if Dann travelled at night and kept well clear of the Centre.

  They could all see that Dann was on the point of demanding Mara should go with him, but he stopped himself.

  ‘Five Mahondis and two Albs,’ said Kira. ‘A new kind of Kin.’

  ‘You are going to like Donna,’ said Daulis.

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t. I like Leta, don’t I?’

  ‘Do you?’ said Leta, laughing.

  Mara said, ‘I think quite soon there won’t be any Mahondis. I saw that in the Centre. Tribes – different kinds of people – they just die out.’

  ‘Soon?’ said Kira.

  ‘Well,’ said Mara laughing, ‘a hundred years.’

  ‘Not thousands, then?’

  Mara was teased by them because thousands appeared in her talk as often as The Centre.

  ‘I don’t want to wait until the weather is better,’ said Dann. ‘Why not now? And there’s another thing: we are always talking about the next season, the next year. Suddenly, I’m a farmer. Being a soldier suited me better.’

  Daulis said gently, you could say coaxingly, smiling at Dann – the others joked that if Shabis was Dann’s father, then Daulis was his big brother – ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t fighting to be done one of these days, General Dann.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Shabis.

  ‘Well, Daulis, well General Shabis, defending a farm is not the same thing as defending a country.’

  ‘Perhaps it will feel the same when you’ve worked on it and made it your own,’ said Mara, intending to sound calm, and calming. She knew the others were anxious about Dann, his restlessness, his discontent. She felt differently. Here in this place, this one place, were two men, two Mahondis. Two men had haunted Dann all his life, the good one and the bad one, sometimes merging into one, always a threat. These two men, Daulis and Shabis, were good men, had absorbed that past, and Dann was for the first time in his life feeling safe. Besides, a very bad man lay dead on the mountain, and Dann had killed him, as long ago he said he would. Or believed that he had killed him, at least most of the time. He felt safe: and that is why he permitted himself petulance and complaint. Probably this was what it was like being a parent, knowing why a child was like this or that, because of some event or incident, even a little thing, that the child had forgotten; but you couldn’t say to the child, who was growing up to be a person, doing his best to forget the bad things, ‘This is why you do this,’ ‘I know why you do that.’

  Kira said, ‘And what about me when Dann goes off?’

  ‘It’ll give you a rest from my impossible behaviour.’

  ‘You mustn’t go for long, because there’s going to be a lot of work, as I know, from Chelops. But we had slaves there to help.’

  Here Dann and Mara protested, ‘But Kira, we were slaves too,’ and, ‘You were a slave, Kira.’

  ‘What? Nonsense.’ And she went on protesting. She had decided to remember, as her truth, that she had had slaves to do her bidding – true to a point – and that she had not been one.

  Mara insisted, ‘We were the Hadrons’ slaves.’

  ‘Then how was it we lived so well and had everything we wanted? How was it we ran everything?’

  ‘Did you run everything for the Hadrons?’ Shabis asked.

  ‘Most things. But we were their slaves. They had got so fat and lazy and disgusting…’ And now Mara cried out, remembering, ‘We must not let ourselves get like that, it frightens me even thinking about it.’

  ‘Better slaves than be like Hadrons,’ said Dann.

  ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with having slaves,’ said Kira, ‘not if you treat them well.’

  ‘We aren’t going to have slaves,’ said Dann.

  ‘Then there’ll be a lot of work, even for seven people.’

  There was another little scene, equally suggestive of the possible developments in the lives of our travellers.

  After a week of storms, of crashing and roaring seas, the sun shone and the sea lay quiet. For the first time in days they were all on the verandah, stretching themselves in the warmth. The two big dogs were there too, asleep, the sun hot on their fur. They were so peaceful there, these great animals, so harmless, just as if, at nights, their growls, or a sudden outbreak of barks at some threat they saw or heard, did not often alert the nerves of the people in the house, so that they got up and stood at a window to see the dangerous beasts outlined black against the sea or sky, staring out, motionless, watching.

  On the warm brick of a pillar were two little lizards, bright green, with blue heads and yellow eyes.

  ‘Oh they’re so pretty,’ said Kira. ‘I do love them so.’

  Mara and Dann grimaced at each other, and Kira saw it and said, ‘More songs without words. What is it this time, do tell us?’

  ‘We told you about the big lizards,’ said Dann. ‘And anyway, I’m getting sick of it. We’ve been sitting here day after day talking about what we’ve done. I’d rather talk about the future.’

  ‘Good,’ said Shabis, ‘because we really must have a serious talk about our plans for the season after next. We need to allocate work.’

  ‘Well don’t allocate any to me,’ said Kira. ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Oh thanks for telling me,’ said Dann. ‘Well, congratulations.’

  ‘I was going to wait a day or so to be sure, but this seemed to be a good time.’ And she was genuinely surprised that he was hurt. ‘Oh, Dann, you’re so touchy.’

  ‘I think I might be pregnant,’ said Mara.

  ‘I suppose you did bother to tell Shabis,’ said Dann.

  Leta said, ‘I’m not pregnant, but whores don’t get pregnant so easily.’

  When she struck this note, all of them criticised her, as now. ‘Oh Leta, do stop it.’ ‘Leta, you know you must forget all that.’ And, from Daulis, ‘Please, Leta, don’t.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Kira, with the casual honesty that was the nicest thing about her, ‘I wouldn’t have got anywhere without men. But I’m not going to call myself a whore.’

  ‘Could we just stop talking about the past?’ said Dann.

  ‘Very well,’ said Shabis. ‘You start, Dann. What kind of work do you think you’d be good at, on the farm?’

  Dann ignored him, looked straight at his sister, and said, ‘Mara, tell me honestly, no, truthfully, the real truth: when you wake up in the morning, isn’t it the first thing you think of – how far you’re going to go today, one foot after another, another little bit of the way up Ifrik? And the two of us together? Even if the thing you think about after that is Shabis?’

  Mara took her time, smiling at him, eyes full of tears. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, it’s true, but…’

  ‘I just wanted to hear you say it,’ said Dann.

  Author’s Note

  One day last autumn my son Peter Lessing came in to say that he had just been listening, on the radio, to a tale about an orphaned brother and sister who had all kinds of adventures, suffered a hundred vicissitudes, and ended up living happily ever after. This was the oldest story in Europe. ‘Why don’t you write something like that?’ he suggested. ‘Oddly enough,’ I replied, ‘that is exactly what I am writing and I have nearly finished it.’

  This kind of thing happens in families, but perhaps not so often in laboratories.

  Mara and Dann is a reworking of a very old tale, and it is found no
t only in Europe but in most cultures in the world.

  It is set in the future, in Africa, called Ifrik because of how often we may hear how the short a becomes a short i.

  An Ice Age covers all the northern hemisphere.

  I cannot be the only person who, hearing that the most common condition for the northern parts of the world is to be under – sometimes – miles of ice, shivers, not because of imagined cold winds, since every one of us is equipped with that potent talisman for survival, It can’t happen to me, making it impossible for us to weaken ourselves by brooding on possible calamities, but from the thought that one day, thousands of years in the future, our descendants might be saying, ‘In the 12,000-year interval between one thrust of the Ice Age and the next, there flourished a whole story of human development, from savagery and barbarism to high culture’ – and all our civilisations and languages, and cities and skills and inventions, our farms and gardens and forests, and the birds and the beasts we try so hard to protect against our depredations, will amount to a sentence or a paragraph in a long history. But perhaps it will be a 15,000-year interregnum, or less or more, for our experts say that the next Ice Age, already overdue, may begin in a year’s time or in a thousand years.

  Mara and Dann is an attempt to imagine what some of the consequences might be when the ice returns and life must retreat to the middle and southern latitudes. Our past experiences help to picture the future. During the hardest of previous periods of ice, the Mediterranean was dry. During warmer intervals, when the ice withdrew for a while, the Neanderthals returned from exile in the south to take up life again in their still chilly valleys. If they did not see their sojourns south as exile, why did they always return?

  Perhaps it is the Neanderthals who will turn out to have been our truest ancestors, having bequeathed to us our amazing diversity, our ability to live in any clime or condition and, above all, our endurance. I like to imagine them, with their great experience of ice, posting a watch for the advancing white mountains.

  April 1998