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

‘And now Hennes recruiting officers are out everywhere, to enlist anyone they can talk into going back with them. And they are looking for people like me. But the marshes are a protection. Everyone is afraid of the marshes.’

And all that time of their talk the animal breathed in shallow gasps and did not open its eyes.

The shack filled with dark. She lit the great reed floor candle. The light wavered over the reed ceiling, the reed walls. The chilly damp of the marshes crept into the room. She shut the door and bolted it.

‘Some of those poor wretches running from the wars try and break in here but I give as good as I get.’

He could believe it: she was a strong muscled woman – and she had been a soldier.

She lit a small fire of wood. There was nothing generous about that fire, and Dann could see why: probably this rise with its little wood was the only source of fuel for a long way walking in every direction around. She gave Dann some soup made of marsh fish. The animal was lying very still, while its sides went up and down.

And now it began to cry. It whimpered and cried, while its muzzle searched for the absent teats of its mother, drowned in the marsh.

‘It wants its mother,’ said Kass, and lifted it and cradled it, though it was too big to be a baby for her. Dann watched and wondered why he could not stop crying. Kass actually handed him a cloth for his eyes and remarked, ‘And so who have you lost?’

‘My sister,’ he said, ‘my sister,’ but did not say she had married and that was why he had lost her: it sounded babyish and he knew it.

He finished his soup and said, ‘Perhaps it would like some soup?’

‘I’ll give him some soup tomorrow.’ That meant Kass believed the creature would live.

The cub kept dropping off to sleep, and then waking and crying.

Kass lay on the bed holding the beast, and Dann lay down too, the animal between them. He slept and woke to see it sucking her fingers. She was dipping them in her milk. Dann shut his eyes, so as not to embarrass her. When he woke next, both woman and animal were asleep.

In the morning she gave it more milk and it seemed better, though it was very weak and ill.

The day was like yesterday, they were on the bed with the beast, feeding it mouthfuls of milk, then of soup.

By now she had told him that because of the ice mountains melting over Yerrup, there was a southwards migration of all kinds of animals and that these animals, called snow dogs, were the most often seen.

How was it possible that animals were living among all that ice?

No one knew. ‘Some say the animals come from a long way east and they use a route through Yerrup, to avoid the wars that are always going on along this coast, east of here.’

‘Some say, some say,’ said Dann. ‘Why can’t we know?’

‘We know they are here, don’t we?’ The animals Dann had seen when sleeping out on the side of the cliff were snow dogs. This was a young snow dog, a pup. Hard to match this dirty little beast with the great beasts he had seen, and their fleecy white shags of hair. He was far from white. His hair was now a dirty mat, with bits of marsh weed and mud in it.

Kass wrung out a cloth in warm water and tried to clean the pup, but he hated it and cried.

The helpless crying was driving Dann wild with … well, what? Pain of some kind. He could not bear it, and sat with his head in his hands. Kass tried to shush the animal when it started off again.

And so another day passed, and another night and at last the snow pup seemed really to open its eyes and look about. He wasn’t far off a baby, but must have been walking with his parents when they fell into the marshes.

‘They must have been chased into the marsh,’ said Kass. People were afraid of them. But they did not attack people, they seemed to want to be friendly. People were saying, suppose the snow dogs become a pack, instead of just ones and twos? They would be dangerous then. Yet there were people who used them as guards. They were intelligent. It was easy to tame them.

Kass warmed water, put the pup into it and quickly swirled off the dirt. It seemed to like the warmth. After his bath he was white and fleecy, with large furry paws and a thick ruff round his neck: his intelligent little face looked out from a frame of white ruff.

Then, one day, he actually barked, as if trying out his voice.

‘It sounds like Ruff, Ruff, Ruff,’ said Kass. ‘We’ll call him Ruff.’

And now, at night, they set the pup on one side, wrapped in a blanket, instead of lying between them, and they held each other and made love. Both knew they were substitutes for absent loves – her husband, for Kass. For him, that was not easy. Kira was, had been, his lover, but it was Mara he thought of.

Suppose Kass’s husband came back suddenly?

She said, yes, she was thinking of that. And what did Dann propose to do next?

Dann said he was going to walk, walk right to the end of this side of the Middle Sea.

He was trying her out and she at once said that he was crazy, he didn’t know what he was talking about. And there were at least two wars going on not far along the track. When people came through from there, they brought news, and war was the news they brought.

And Kass knew much more about the Bottom Sea than he did. The opposite north shore did not run in a straight line from the Rocky Gates to – whatever was the end, where it turned to become the southern shore. It was much broken with fingers and fringes of land, and down in the Bottom Sea were a lot of islands, large and small. And that was how the snow dogs came across from the north shore. They swam from island to island.

So what did Dann want to do?

He wanted to walk. He needed to walk. That meant leaving here.

With every day the snow pup was stronger. He sneezed a lot: there was still water in his lungs, they thought. He was a pretty, fluffy young snow dog, who never took his green eyes off them. He loved to lie beside Kass on the bed, but liked better to be with Dann. He snuggled up to Dann and put his head on Dann’s shoulder, as he had been on that walk, or rather run, to get here.

‘He loves you,’ said Kass. ‘He knows you rescued him.’

Dann did not want to leave the snow pup. He did not want to leave Kass but what was the use of that? She had a husband. He loved that animal. That angry fighting heart of Dann melted into peace and love when the snow dog lay by him and licked his face or sucked his fingers. But Dann had to move on. At first he had thought the snow pup would go with him, but that was impossible. Ruff was being fed, carefully, on thin soup and bits of fish and milk, not Kass’s now, but a goat’s, who lived in its pen and bleated because it wanted company.

Ruff could not travel with Dann, and Dann had to move on.

When Dann set forth, the pup wailed and toddled after him along the path. Kass had to run and try to lift him to carry him back. Kass was crying. The snow pup was crying. And Dann cried too.

He told himself that when he was with Kass and the snow pup he had cried most of the time. But he was not someone who cried, he repeated. ‘I don’t cry,’ he said aloud, running faster to get away from the snow pup’s wailing. ‘I never have, so now I must stop.’ Then he realised he had found his pace, he was going at a good loping run along the track, and slowed to a fast walk which would sustain him without tiring. It was a wonderful release for him, and he stopped crying and went on, marshes on one side and cliffs on the other, without stopping or changing pace. No refugees came towards him now. That meant the wars had ended, did it? The fighting was over?

Dark came and he slid over the edge to find a bush he could hide in, or a cleft in the rocks. He dreamed of Kass’s kindly bed, and of her, and of the snow pup, but woke dry-eyed, and had a mouthful or two of her provisions, and returned to the path, the sun full in his face. He saw the marshes were less. By that night on his right hand were moors, and he slept not on a sloping cliff face but on a dry rock under sweet-smelling bushes. To be rid of the dank reek of the marshes … he took in great breaths of clean healthy air and so it was all that day and the next, and he thought he must be careful, or he’d run straight into the fighting, if it still went on. And all that time no people had come towards him along the track. Then he saw them, two – well, what were they? Children? When they came close, stumbling, their knees bending under them, he saw they were youngsters, all bone, with the hollow staring eyes of extreme hunger. Their skins … now, what colour was that? Grey? Were there grey people? No, their skins had gone ashy, and their lips were whitish and cracked. They did not seem to see him; they were going past.

These two were like him and Mara, long ago, ghostlike with deprivation, but still upright. As they came level the girl – it was a girl? – yes, he thought so – nearly fell and the boy put out his hand to catch her, but in a mechanical, useless way. She fell. Dann picked her up and it was like lifting a bundle of thin sticks. He set her by the road on the side where the moors began. The boy stood vaguely, not understanding. Dann put his arm round him, led him to the grass verge, put him near the girl, who sat staring, breathing harshly. He knelt by them, opened his sack, took out some bread, poured water on it to make it easier to eat. He put a morsel in the girl’s mouth. She did not eat it: had reached that stage of starvation where the stomach no longer recognises its function. He tried with the boy – the same. They smelled horrible. Their breath was nasty. Then he tried out his languages, first the ones he knew well, then the odd phrases, and they did not respond at all, either not knowing any of them, or too ill to hear him.

They sat exactly where he had set them, and stared, that was all. Dann thought that he and Mara had never been so far gone they could not respond to danger, had lost the will to survive. He believed these two were dying. To reach the Centre would take many days of walking. They could reach Kass, after a few days, but would be met by her broad sharp knife. Beyond them the moors stretched towards Tundra’s main towns, a long way off. And if they did manage to get themselves up and walk, and reached the marshes, they would probably fall in and drown, or tumble over the edge of the cliffs.

And then, as he sat there, seeing how the morsels of food he had placed in their mouths were falling out again, they crumpled up and lay, hardly breathing. They would die there. Dann sat with them, a little, then went on, but not in his pace, his rhythm: he was thinking of how Mara and he had been so often in danger, but had always come through, had slid through situations because of their wariness and quickness, were saved by their own efforts or because of the kindness of others. And by luck … those two back there had not had luck.

He saw coming towards him a slight figure, walking in a slow obstinate way that Dann knew: this person, a man, was walking on his will, which was far from the ease of how one moved on that rhythm that seemed to come from somewhere else. He was thin, bony, but was in nothing like the bad state of the two youngsters. Dann called out in Mahondi and was at once answered. He could see the man didn’t want to stop, but Dann held out some bread, a dry piece, and walked forward with it, and the man stopped. He was a small wiry fellow, yellowish in colour – which was his own real colour and not because of starvation – with dark serious eyes and black locks of fine hair. He had a sparse beard. This was no thug or rough.

Dann started his interrogation, while the man ate, not in a frantic grasping way, but carefully.

Where had he come from?

From a very long way east.

But surely there is a war?