The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

‘I don’t know,’ said Dann. ‘No, I really don’t.’

Griot said nothing. He had taken in all that Dann had said, but his conclusions were not what Dann would have approved of.

At last Griot said, ‘Very well. I’ll do what I can with the refugees. Some of them are not bad. They can teach me a thing or two sometimes. And I’m arranging the food supplies. There is plenty of good fish down in the Bottom Sea – not the muddy marsh rubbish around here. And I shall get some seed grain that I saw growing in water. And there’s a marsh pig we can breed.’

Dann saw that Griot was taking on the tasks that he had expected Dann to do.

‘Thank you, Griot,’ he then said.

Griot saluted, and left.

That salute – Dann certainly did not like it. It was establishing some kind of contract between them that Griot needed.

The encounter between the two young men had been some weeks ago.

Dann tried not to run into Griot or even to notice much what he was doing.

On this day after he had noticed the hair of the animal stuck on the bush, he was lying stretched on his rocky spit, and thinking of the Farm and of Kira, who was pregnant with his child. It would be born soon. And Mara’s child too. Interesting that Griot had not expected him to return to the Farm, yet Griot had stayed there long enough to learn what was going on, and who belonged to whom. That was a joke; Mara belonged to Shabis. And so Dann wouldn’t go back. He thought of Kira and it was painful. How he did love her – and how he did hate her. Love? Well, he loved Mara, so he should not use that same word for Kira. He was fascinated by Kira. Her voice, her way of moving, that slow, lazy, seductive walk … but to be with her was to be humiliated. He thought of how, on the night before he left, she had stretched out her naked foot – and she was as good as naked – and said in that sweet singing voice of hers, ‘Come here, Dann.’ They had been quarrelling. They always quarrelled. He had stood there, a few paces away, and looked at her, and wanted to do what she wanted, which was to get on his hands and knees and crawl to her. She half lay, holding out her naked foot. She was pregnant, but it was too early to show. She needed him to lick her foot. And he desired to, he craved to, he longed to give himself up to her and stop fighting. But he could not do it. She smiled at him, her malicious smile that always made him feel she had cut him with a whip, she had wiggled her toes, and said, ‘Come, Dann’ – and he had turned and run out. He picked up some clothes, some essentials – and left the Farm. He did not say goodbye to Mara because he could not bear to.

Dann lay on his shelf of unsafe rock and knew it was time he left. He was so restless. Well, hadn’t he spent nearly all his life on his feet, walking, walking, one foot after another? He had to be in motion again. But to leave here, leave the Centre, meant going even further away from Mara. She was a few days from here, on the shores of the Western Sea which he was observing for hours of every day from this perch of his, seeing it crash over the rocks down in sheets of foam to the Bottom Sea. The waves he saw break into spray were the same as licked the coast below the Farm. But he had to leave. He told himself it was because of Griot, always spying on him, and now there was this new animal down there, watching him too. He stretched and craned over the edge of his rock finger to see if somewhere was an animal, perhaps expecting more fish from him. For a few minutes he fancied he saw something big and white, but it was too far away. If it was watching Dann, it would be hiding itself. The thought made him feel prickly and caged. No, he must leave, he must go, he would leave Mara.

‘Oh, Mara,’ he whispered, and then shouted her name into the noisy water. It seemed to him her face was in the patterns the water made. A rainbow spanned the Rocky Gates and little rainbows were spinning off and away with the clumps of foam. The air seemed full of light, and noisy movements – and Mara.

He was heavy with sorrow, felt he could easily roll off that rocky protuberance and let himself fall.

He was leaving Kira too – wasn’t he? But he scarcely ever thought of her and the child she was having. His. She had not even bothered to tell him she was pregnant. ‘I don’t think I’d get much of a look in with that child, even if I were a good father, hanging about, waiting for the birth – which must be soon.’ So he excused himself. ‘And besides, I know Mara will see that my child will be looked after, and there is Shabis, and Leta and Donna and probably other people by now.’ It made him uncomfortable, saying my child, though it was. The thought of Kira was like a barrier between him and this soon to be born infant.

He stood up at the very end of the rocky finger and dared the wind to swirl him off. His tunic filled with air, his trousers slapped against his legs: his clothes were willing him to fall, to fly, and he felt the tug and lift of the wind over his whole body. He stood there, upright, not falling, so he left the rock and went to the Centre. There he visited the old woman who screeched at him, and so did the servant: two demented old women, in a bad-smelling room, berating him.

He chose a few things, put them in his old sack, found Griot and told him he would be away for a while.

How those sharp green eyes did peer into his face – his thoughts.

And how much he, Dann, was relying on Griot, and that made him feel even more caged and confined.

‘Would you ever return to the Farm, Griot?’

‘No.’

Dann waited.

‘It’s Kira. She wanted me to be her servant.’

‘Yes,’ said Dann.

‘I’ve had enough of that.’

‘Yes,’ said Dann, who had been a slave – and worse.

‘She is a cruel woman,’ said Griot, lowering his voice, as if she might overhear.

‘Yes,’ said Dann.

‘So, you’ll be off, then?’

Dann had gone a few paces when he felt the need to turn, and he did, and saw Griot’s betrayed face. But had he made Griot any promises? He had not.

‘Griot, I’ll be back.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know.’

Dann made himself march away from Griot’s need.

Dann set off around the edge of the Middle Sea, going east. He had meant to walk right round the edges of the Bottom Sea, but that was before he had seen it, so rough, often piled with detritus from rockfalls. Up here on the top edge there was a road, more of a track, running between the precipitate fall to the water and the marshes. He had left the stale mouldy smell of the Centre, but the smell of the marshes was as bad: rotting vegetation and stagnant water. He walked, thinking of Mara and the past. His mind was full of Mara, and of sorrow, though he had missed the news of her death. She had died giving birth. The messenger from the Farm had come running to the Centre, but Dann had left. Griot had thought of sending the messenger after Dann, but said that Dann was away. Griot was glad he did not have to tell Dann. During his time at the Farm he had observed, had taken everything in. He knew how close Mara and Dann were: one had only to see them together. He knew the two had walked all the way up Ifrik through many dangers; his own experience had told him what a bond shared danger was. He had seen that Dann suffered, because Mara belonged not to him but to her husband Shabis. To tell Dann his sister was dead: he was in no hurry to do it.

Dann had wanted to leave the Centre – leave the past – because of the weight of sorrow on him, which he believed he understood. It was natural. Of course he was bereft, but he would get over it. He had no intention of subsiding into unhappiness. No, when he got walking, really moving, he would be better. But he had not got into his stride, his rhythm: it was what he needed, the effortlessness of it, when legs and body were in the swing of the moment, a time different from what ruled ordinary sitting, lying, moving about – never tiring. A drug it was, he supposed, to walk like that, walking at its best, as he had done sometimes with Mara, when they were into their stride.

But Mara was not here with him.

He kept at it, thinking of Mara; well, when did he not? She was always there with him, the thought of her, like the reminder of a beating heart: I am here, here, here. But she wasn’t here. He let his feet stumble him to the very edge of the declivity that ended in the Bottom Sea, and imagined her voice saying, Dann, Dann, what did you see? – the old childhood game that had served them so well. What was he seeing? He was staring into streaming clouds. Water – again water. His early life had been dust and drought, and now it was water. The abrupt descent before him ended in water and a blue gleam of distant waves, and behind him the reedy swampy ground with its crying marsh birds went on for ever … but no, it did not. It ended. And on the other side of the northern cloud mass, he knew, were shores loaded with ice masses. Much more to the point surely was, Dann, Dann, what do you know? He knew that the vast emptiness of the gulf before him had been sea that came up almost to where he stood now, with boats on it, and there had been cities all around its edge. He knew that cities had been built all over the bottom of the sea, when it was dry, which were now under water, and on islands, still inhabited, but many of those had emptied, were emptying because everyone knew how fast the waters were rising, and could engulf them. Everyone knew? No, he had met people coming to the Centre who knew nothing of all this. He knew, though. He knew because of what the Mahondis knew, fragments of knowledge from distant pasts. ‘It is known,’ one would say, giving the information to another, who did not have it, because they came from a different part of Ifrik. ‘It is known that …’

It was known that long ago when the Ice first came creeping and then piling into mountains all over Yerrup, the mass and pack of ice had pushed all those wonderful cities along the edge of that shore that stood opposite to him now, though he could not see it, over the sides and into the great gulf which was already half full of detritus and debris, before the people of that time – and who were they? – had taken up the stones and blocks of cement that had built the old cities and used them for the cities on the land which was now behind him, but then things changed, the Ice began to melt and the cities sank down. That was when the tundra turned into water. Cold, cold, a terrible cold that destroyed all Yerrup but how was it this sea, the Middle Sea, had been a sea but then was empty? ‘It was known’ that at some time a dryness, just as frightful as the all-destroying Ice, had sucked all the water out of the Middle Sea and left it a dry chasm where cities were built. But it did not fit – these bits of fact did not fit. His mind was a map of bits of knowledge that did not connect. But that was what he did know, as he looked into the moving dark clouds, and heard the seabirds calling as they dropped their way down to the lower sea. And, at his back, the marshes, and beyond them, for they had an end, scrub and sand and dust, Ifrik drying into dust. He and Mara had walked through all that, walked from deserts into marshland, and both were on their way to their opposites, through slow changes you could hardly see, you had to know.

What do you know, Dann? – I know that what I see is not all there is to know. Isn’t that of more use than the childish What did you see?

He returned to the track and saw stumbling towards him a man ill with exhaustion. His eyes stared, his lips cracked with his panting breath, but although he was at his limits he still moved a hand to the hilt of a knife in his belt, so that Dann could see he had a knife. Just as Dann’s instinct was; his hand was actually moving towards his knife when he let it fall. Why should he attack this man, who had nothing he needed? But the man might attack him: he was well-fed.

‘Food?’ grunted the stranger. ‘Food?’ He spoke in Tundra.

‘Walk on,’ said Dann. ‘You’ll find a place where they’ll feed you.’

The man went on, not in the easy stride Dann was wanting to find, but on the strength of his will. If he didn’t fall into a marsh pool, he would reach the Centre and Griot would feed him.

What with? That was Griot’s problem.

Dann went on, slowly, thinking that it was easier to walk fast on dust and sand than on this greasy mud that had already been trodden and squashed by a thousand feet. Plenty of people had been this way. More were coming. Dann stood at the side of this track and watched them. They had walked a long distance. Men, then some women, even a child, who had dull eyes and bad breathing. He would die, this child, before he got to the Centre. In Dann’s sack was food, which would save the child, but Dann stood there and watched. How would he ever get into his stride, his own beautiful rhythm, when these refugees came past, came past …

He had not made much progress that day, and he was already tired. The sun was sinking over there in the west, behind him. Where was he going to sleep? There wasn’t a dry bit of earth anywhere, all was wet and mud. He peered over the edge of the chasm to see if he could find a good rock to stretch out on but they all sloped: he would roll off. Well, why not? He didn’t care if he did. He went on, looking down at steep and slippery rocks that had been smoothed by thousands of years of the rub of water – but his mind gave up: it was hurting, to think like this. At last he saw a tree growing aslant, a few paces down. He slid to it on glassy rocks and landed with his legs on either side of the trunk. This was an old tree. And it was not the first that had grown on this site. Remnants and fragments of older trees lay about. Dann pulled out some bread from his sack, hung the sack on a low branch and lay back. It was already dark. The night sounds were beginning, birds and beasts he did not know. Overhead was the moon, for the clouds had gone, and he stared at it, thinking how often its brightness had been a threat to him and Mara when they had been trying to escape notice … but he didn’t have to hide now. Dann slept and woke to see a large animal, covered with heavy shags of white hair, standing near him on its hind legs, trying to pull down his bag with the food in it. He sat up, found a stone and flung it, hitting the side of the animal who snarled and escaped, sliding and slipping on scree, before reaching some rocks.

It was halfway through the night, and chilly, but worse than that, damp, always so damp. Dann wrapped himself well and thought that if he put the bag with the food under him, the hungry animal might attack him to get it. So he left the bag where it was on the branch and dozed and woke through the rest of the night, waiting for the animal to return. But nothing happened. The sun rose away to the east where – he knew – the shores of the Middle Sea ended, and beyond them unknown lands and peoples. For the first time a doubt appeared in his mind. He had been thinking – for such a long time now – that he would walk to the end of this sea and then … but how far was it? He had no idea. He did not know. He ate some bread, drank water from a little stream running down from the marshes and climbed back to the path. He was stiff. He must find his pace again, which could carry him all day and – if necessary – all night.

On his right the marshes were opening into larger pools, and places where you could stand and look down through water on to the roofs of towns. And what roofs – what towns. He remembered the boatman who had brought him and Mara north: he had said he didn’t enjoy looking down to see buildings so much better than anything anyone knew how to build now. It made him miserable, he said. Yes, thought Dann, exactly, it did make one miserable. Perhaps this weight of sorrow on him was simply that: he was ashamed, surrounded always by a past so much more clever and wonderful and rich than anything they had now. Always now you came up against long ago … long, long ago … once there was … once there were, people, cities and, above all, knowledge that had gone.

So, what did he know? When you came down to it? Over there the ice mountains were melting over Yerrup and their water poured all along those coasts he could not see, down into the Middle Sea. Water poured from the Western Sea down over the Rocky Gates into the Middle Sea. The marshes had been frozen solid as rock where cities had been built to last for ever but now they stood down there deep under water. And southwards, beyond the marshes, Ifrik and its rivers were drying into dust. Why? He did not know. He knew nothing.

Dann’s thoughts were stumbling as wearily as his feet, he was burdened with the weight of his ignorance. And of his shame. Once, long ago, people knew, they knew it all, but now …