Mara did not pull the boy into the house for fear this would bring this enemy after them, but stood at their door, behind some other villagers. She could feel Dann trembling, though now her hands were gripping not a little child but a strong boy whose head was nearly on a level with hers. He stood and shivered as he had years ago, shocked by a mystery: faces that resemble each other, eyes that are alike, while behind lie worlds as different as day and night. But here it was not two faces: there were many.
The newcomers went off, together, and the villagers dispersed, whispering among themselves as if afraid of provoking some new manifestation of this horror: people you could not tell apart, no matter how you stared and matched and compared. And Mara led Dann into the house where, like a small boy, he lay on his bed and hid his face.
Soon a neighbour came to say that these new people were going to stay for a while – ‘and that means until they have eaten everything we have got’ – and she had been told to come to Daima’s house to get food. And that meant, Mara thought, they were afraid to come themselves. And, yes, it was true: ‘They think you are ghosts. They think you are cursed.’
Mara produced half a dozen of the yellow roots, shrivelled but still good. And then she went out to make sure the beasts were safe. The newcomers had taken over empty houses at the end of the village. Mara decided to stay with the milk beasts. Late, when the moon was making shadows around the houses, she saw the shadows thicken and then lengthen like drops before they fall and separate themselves. They were the same-faced ones, moving furtively, crouching and running, and she stood up and shrieked at them, stamping her feet and whirling about, and they went scrambling off, shouting with fear that there were demons in this place.
Dann could not be kept in the house. He was always watching the travellers: leaning against a house wall or even standing quite near them, staring, his face squeezed up and his eyes puckering with the effort of trying to understand. They pretended to ignore him, but they were afraid of him. And soon they left, partly because of their fear and, too, they were hungry.
This event had an effect on Dann. He was restless, but then lay on his bed for hours, staring. He put his thumb in his mouth and sucked it, with the old squelching sound that drove Mara wild with anxiety and irritation. He did not join in the other children’s play, but did come up the hill to sit on the rock with Mara, when she asked him, to break his mood; but when there he only sat, staring down into the village. She said to him, ‘Dann, do you know why people who are alike make you afraid?’ But he did not: in his mind was a door shut fast against memories, and all he knew – if he knew that much, and was not merely experiencing – was that the people who were alike haunted him, challenged him, frightened him. It went on for some days, this new behaviour of Dann’s: listlessness, and a look of apprehension in those deep, dark eyes of his. He wanted to be with Mara, though he seemed not to know he had become a little boy again, reaching for her hand, or pressing close, when some thought she could only guess at made him tremble.
Then one evening two men came into the village, and they were Persons, People – Mahondis. They were directed to Daima’s house by the villagers. But they had not come to see Daima or find the children, of whom they had never heard. They had walked from a long way south of Rustam, hoping to find shelter in that town, because their country was all dried up and dead. But Rustam was full of sand, they said: sand storms had blown over it, filling the houses and burying the gardens. No one lived in Rustam now: no people, no animals. And between Rustam and here, while things were better than in the South, it was dry and there were stretches of country where the trees were dying. Among these were new trees, of the kind that can live in semi-deserts. It seemed that the trees had known what was going to happen because they must have begun growing before the desert-like country appeared. When these two men came to the river and saw there was still some water, they had wept, because it was so long since they had seen waterholes that were not all cracked and dry.
Mara fed these men with sliced roots and milk and said they could use the bed in the outer room and her bed, and she and Daima went into one of the inner rooms for the night. They could hear the men’s deep voices and Dann’s excited voice, talking and laughing too: Dann did not often laugh but he was laughing now.
In the morning everything was quiet. Daima was asleep, and Mara went quickly into the room she and Dann had, and then the outer room; but the men were not there and Dann was not there. Mara ran out and through the village, looking for them. A woman said, Didn’t Mara know? Dann had left with the men very early that morning, all three walking quietly, ‘as if they had stolen something.’ Dann had first run to Mishkita, pulling down her head to kiss her ears and her hairy cheeks, and then running back to the two watching men, crying. It was this – Dann’s crying – that told Mara it was true: Dann had meant to leave, and for good.
Mara went into the house slowly, afraid she would fall. When she told Daima, the old woman put her arms around Mara and held her and rocked her while she wept.
3
It was almost dark in the room, because the door was shut and the window shutter left only a little slit for light. Through this slit fell dusty air. On the rock table sat a spindly creature: tall, with long, knobbly arms and legs, every bit of her skin covered with a brownish dust, and her hair hanging in long, greyish spikes. Her eyes were small and red in a little, bony face. Her brown, glistening garment seemed as fresh and new as at any time these last hundred or so years. This poor thing was Mara, and nearly five years had passed.
On the rock bed lay Daima, who was as thin and bony, but her hair was not in shags and rags because Mara combed it. Daima had by her a bag of the brown, shiny stuff, and she was lying on her side and taking out, one by one, all kinds of objects: a comb, a stone, a spoon, a dishevelled red feather, a snake’s shed skin. She looked at them amazed, incredulous. ‘Mara, but there’s nothing here, it’s so little, is this all it is?’ Mara did not answer, because Daima did this over and over again when she was awake. She was saying, Mara knew, Is this all my life has amounted to? At first, Mara had answered, ‘Everything is there. I’ve checked. Nothing is missing.’ But she could not go on saying it, she had so little energy left. Then Daima turned her old eyes on Mara with a close, intent, suspicious inspection; and it was as if she did not know who it was, though she did, for Mara understood that when Daima counted her life out in those possessions from the bag, Mara was among them, for she would touch a bit of cloth or the stone and say, ‘Mara, it is Mara.’ Mara made her face smile as she sat there, and turned her head so that Daima could see her, letting Daima look, and look, the close, deep stare, though she did not know what it was Daima searched for in her face. Perhaps she was making sure Mara was still there with her, for she was uneasy when Mara went out. While she did not know how bad things were out there, she did know it was dangerous.
It was midday. Daima was licking her lips, which were cracked and sore, and blinking her eyes to make some water, they were so dry. Mara went into the inner room where the pile of yellow roots was: only a few left now, only thirteen. She and Daima needed one a day to keep them as much alive as they were. Mara these days did not have the inclination to go out with her digging stick, or go to the waterholes, where there had not been water now for months, let alone climb up the hill to where the old cities were. Mara cut up a root into yellow slices and fed half of them to Daima, who even now when she was so feeble was trying to refuse her share so that Mara could have it.
Almost a year ago there had been another storm, not much of one, and they were just finishing the water Mara had collected then. Out on the plain around the village this rain had plumped the roots that lived many feet down in the earth. They had been shrivelling and were rather like wood: when Mara poked her digging stick into them they were not far off wood. But then the rain came and the roots were juicy again, and that meant Mara and Daima could live a little longer. The big white roots that seemed to absorb water were again like balls
of hard, white pith.
Because of that rain, some people who had decided to leave stayed a little longer; but now no one was left, only the two women. Mara would have gone with the last group, even though Kulik was one of them, if it had not been for Daima, who could not walk.
When every one of the villagers had left, Mara had gone through the rock houses to see if anything had been left, and it was this that spoke most loudly and terribly of what had happened here. There was nothing in the houses. At least there had been a few utensils and some cans, and in each corner some of the yellow roots that were keeping them all alive, and a jar or so of water that they drank a sip or two at a time. But everything had been taken away.
As people died, and it was impossible to bury them in the hard earth because no one had the strength to dig graves, they were put in one of the empty houses and left, with the doors pulled tight shut. The air was so dry they shrivelled into mummies, so light you could pick them up like pieces of wood. But then the big lizards and the dragons, hunting everywhere for food, came into the village and tried to push the doors aside, or force their way through the windows, and one of them even climbed up on a roof and went down through the thatch. Once, these beasts had eaten only vegetable stuff, but they had long ago forgotten they were herbivores and ate anything they could find. They had lain in wait by the waterholes, when there was water, and fought with the water dragons for a share of any meat there was. Mara had come into the front room one morning to see the head and shoulders of a big lizard pushing through the aperture of the window, hissing, its tongue flickering. It wanted Daima, who was asleep on her shelf. Mara had hit the thing with empty water cans, and at last it went out backwards and waddled through the village looking for a way into a house.
That was why the rock doors were always shut now, though Mara believed there could be no lizards left, they must be all dead. But perhaps not. She had not been up to the hill cities for some time, because she was afraid, so she did not know if lizards and dragons were still there. Up in the oldest part of the ruins, Mara had found storerooms deep in the earth; and while there was nothing left of what they had once held – weapons? gold? ornamented dishes and basins and trays, like the ones pictured on the walls? – there had been water. It was old water that tasted bad because of what had fallen into it, but it was real water and for a while she had gone up to collect it. Twice she had scared away the big lizards drinking there, one of them actually standing in the water, so at first she had thought it was a water dragon; but it wasn’t, it was a land dragon. That water had not been replenished by the storm of a year ago, so it must have forced its way up through the rocks from deep under the hills. But the last time Mara saw it there was only a damp stain on rock with scorpions over it, perhaps hoping the water would well up again. From where? These days Mara saw what she looked at differently from how she once had. Hills did not stay the same, she knew that: she had seen the boulders come crashing down hillsides when lightning cracked them open. Waterholes sometimes were dusty pits and were sometimes rivers. Animals that had eaten plants learned to chase humans for their flesh. Once, digging for a root, she had found a small stream running through a rocky place underground; but when she looked for it later it was dry. Who knew what rivers moved under the earth, or had moved and were now dried up? Under the hills up there had been cities upon cities, and the people must have drunk water, so perhaps rivers once ran there that had gone long ago? Everything changed: rivers moved, disappeared, ran again; trees died – the hills were full of dry forests – and insects, even scorpions, changed their natures.
The scorpions were in the village. Mara had to watch every step. They had come in for the dead people. She had watched them trying to squeeze in through the cracks in houses, or down through the roof stones. And they did squeeze through. You could hear them scuttling and rattling about in the houses, eating up the corpses. Then the villagers had begun something new. Instead of finding an empty house and putting their dead into it, they fitted corpses into the cisterns that stood outside the door of every house. Sometimes the dead person had to be put in bent double. Then the heavy stones were put back on. The scorpions could not get in, because the lids always fitted perfectly to keep the dust out of the water. As you walked through the village, the scorpions clustered on the tops of the cisterns … Waiting? For what? And then they died. There were dead scorpions everywhere. But there were scorpions that had not died, that were able somehow to live – eating what? – and they were bigger than the old ones had been. It would be easy to think that there were two kinds of scorpion, big and little ones; but no, some were growing larger, and very fast. Once, Mara would have kicked a scorpion out of the way, but she would be afraid to now, for these new beasts could take a hand off, or a big piece of flesh out of a leg.
Mara sat on the rock table, with her feet pulled up, just in case there was something she had overlooked – a scorpion or a smaller, half-grown lizard that had hidden in the empty rooms – and she had long, interesting thoughts while she watched over Daima’s sleep. Perhaps one day, as far into the future as the old cities in the hills were in the past, people would find this village half buried in dust, or perhaps deep under the dust, and the bones in the cisterns, and they would say, ‘These ancient people buried their dead just outside their houses in rocky graves.’ They would find the bones of big lizards in the deep rocky pools in the hills because – who knew? – the water might start filling the pools up there again, and they would say, ‘There were two kinds of lizard, or dragon, and they both lived in water.’ They would find the pig bones scattered about over the plain and see the marks of bird claws and beaks and say, ‘These birds killed and ate pigs.’
But what was worrying Mara now was that they might also be able to say, ‘In those days there were insects, earth insects, the size of a thumb.’ When Mara looked out over the plain where she had dug for roots she could see everywhere circles showing pale on darker old grass. The under-earth insects whose tall homes dotted the plain – though they hadn’t when Mara and Dann first came: these great hard-earth heaps were new – came up from their tunnels at night to chew up the dry old grass with jaws like the pincers of stingers, though not as big yet, and the fragments of grass made these whitish circles. They must have watercourses running deep under their heaps for the earth of their galleries was wet. The villagers had even thought of how they could dig down through one of these insect cities until they reached water; but not only were they afraid of the insects that thought nothing of eating up a small animal in a few minutes, they did not have the strength left to dig, nor did they have anything better than wooden sticks to dig with.
These insects were rapidly growing larger. So far they did not seem to want to move far from their homes, but Mara had watched a column of them marching towards the hills of the old cities – so many of them you could not think of counting them: brownish, glistening, fat insects with their pincered heads – and she had simply run away. Every day she expected to see their brown columns trickling through the houses.
While the milk beasts were still alive these insects had been the villagers’ greatest worry. A guard was put on the beasts, day and night, to watch the grass tussocks for the scorpions and the lizards and then, when they noticed how the earth insects were growing large and bold, for their columns.
One night this problem was solved for them. Travellers had come through, pushed the weakened villagers aside and driven off the milk beasts. Mara cried as she had not since Dann went away. She loved Mishkita, and now there was nothing left for her except Daima, who she knew would soon die. And yet quite soon they would have had to kill the milk animals, for they gave so little milk now and there was nothing to give them to eat. Mishkita’s teats had been red and sore from being squeezed to get milk. And Mara had seen something that had made her frantic with the sadness of it. Mishkita had spread her legs and bent her head under her body, careful that her horns would not poke the flesh, and sucked at her own teats. She was so despera
te, for she was given only two or three of the yellow roots every day and it was weeks since she had been given a drink of water – it was when Mara had found the old water up in the hills. Mara had found herself thinking, as she stood with her arm over the beast’s back, and Mishkita’s nuzzle in her neck, licking, licking, because of the salt, Perhaps poor Mishkita will not be sorry when her life is over. And that made her think of her own: would she, Mara, be pleased if one day she were surprised by one of the big lizards, or found the earth insects scrambling over her as she slept? She thought for a long time about this. Every day was so hard, such a struggle, and she was feeling so weak and often so dizzy – and yet she thought, No, I don’t want to die yet. When Daima dies I’ll go north by myself and then …