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

by Doris Lessing

  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?

  Yes, two, bad ones. The one nearest here had fought itself to a standstill, there was no one left but real soldiers, preparing to make a stand. The one further along was raging. His own country had been invaded; there was civil war. He had left, made a circuit around the further war, knowing it was there, had worked for a farmer for shelter, and some food. And now, what would he find if he went on?

  Dann told him, carefully, watching him nod, as he took in the important points. He must not let himself fall into the marshes or over the cliffs. If he went on long enough he would come to a vast complex of buildings, called the Centre, and there he could find a man called Griot, who would help him.

  And why did Dann do all this for this stranger? He liked him. He was reminding him of someone, a friend who had helped him, Dann thought, and there was something about that intelligent face…

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘They call me Ali.’ He added, trusting Dann as Dann trusted him, ‘I was the king’s scribe. I had to run away—I was too well known.’

  ‘And your country’s name?’

  Dann had never heard it. It was beyond Kharab—and Dann scarcely knew where that was.

  He gave this Ali a hunk of Kass’s bread, and watched him hide it in his clothes, before he went on, hesitant at first, because he was tired, but then stronger, and steadily. Then he turned and looked back at Dann and gave a little bow, hand on his heart.

  And as Dann watched him, thinking of him as a friend—why did he feel he knew this Ali?—he heard shouts and the sounds of running feet. What he saw then made him drop over the edge of the cliff, though it was steep there, because he knew these people meant danger. A large noisy crowd and they were hungry, and some wounded, with old dried blood on them, and half-healed cuts. If they knew he had food they would kill him. He could see all this from that one glance.

  He did not put his head up over the edge until they had gone on.

  He knew Ali was quick and clever enough to hide from them.

  And what was Griot going to do with this crowd of bandits when they turned up?

  He saw near him a quite large path. Down he went between slabs of dark rock that had been smoothed by water, thinking that previous descents to the Bottom Sea had taken him half a day, but the Middle Sea was deeper here, for darkness fell when there was a long way to go. He ensconced himself for the night in a shelter for travellers, hoping he would not have company, but though he slept with his knife ready there was no knock, or intruding feet, or the strong smell of an animal. He stood outside the hut door as the sun rose, seeing that this part of the Middle Sea was full of islands, some whose tops were level with and even higher than the edges of the sea. And the islands were wooded, he could see that, easily now, and there were lights on them that went out as the sunlight grew strong.

  He was thinking of those two who probably still lay by the side of the track, whom he had seen wavering towards him, as if blown by the wind, hatchlings in a storm—and why should he care more about them than so many others? But he did think of them. The crows or other raptors of the wild moor would have found them by now.

  He let the sun flush his stiff limbs with warmth and took the path again. Many used it. Before he reached the edge of the Bottom Sea he saw another travellers’ hut. Wood. He had become so used to reed roofs, walls, reed everything that it was pleasant to see well-honed planks and solidly encompassing roofs of wooden tiles.

  It was well past midday now. The sky blazed and the sea was very blue and full of sharp little waves. Very cold water—his fingers went numb at once. On the shore was a flat place where a post stood on the water’s edge. He saw two things; that it was submerged a third of the way up, and that fish traps were tied to it. The post was to hold a boat and so he had only to wait and there would be a boat. There was a bench. He sat and looked across at the nearest island from where he could expect the boat. He could be seen from there. Probably the boatmen kept a lookout and came over when they saw someone waiting. He drowsed—down here he did not feel fearful, or the anxiety of watchfulness. He was woken by a boat scraping at the landing place. In the boat was a youth and a snow dog, which leaped out and ran up the cliff. The youth said, smiling, ‘I give them a lift, to save them a swim.’

  Dann asked in Mahondi, ‘How much to take me over?’ but the youth shook his head, and Dann tried Charad and then Tundra and heard, ‘What’s your money?’

  Dann had handfuls of different coinages, and the youth nodded at the Tundra coins.

  He was not asking much; Dann got into the boat and they set off.

  What was the name of the island? Dann asked all the necessary questions until, when he said, ‘Are you part of Tundra?’ he encountered a hostile response: Dann saw that he was up against strong local pride.

  The islands saw themselves as a unit and they had fought off any attempts to possess them, though Tundra had tried.

  ‘They’ve given up now. Tundra’s lost its teeth,’ he said, repeating what Dann had heard from Kass. ‘They are not what they were. We hear everyone’s had enough of Tundra government.’ They were in the middle of the crossing, the sunlight burning up off the water. It was hotter down here than it ever was up on the cliffs.

  ‘So I believe,’ said Dann, wanting to hear more, but not what he heard then.

  ‘They say that the old Centre’s got a new lease on life. There’s a new master now, one of the old line. General, they call him, but he’s Prince as far as I am concerned. We like the old ways, here. If there was a bit of law and order up there again things would be easier for us.’

  Dann thought of saying, ‘I was recently in the Centre and that’s just gossip,’ but did not want to define himself too early—if at all. He liked not being known, being free, himself.

  They reached the shore and saw a couple of snow dogs half concealed in some trees.

  ‘They wait and hope that one of us’ll give them a lift. They can swim, but it’s a good bit of a swim for them, with all that hair getting wet. Some of the boatmen give them a hand. I do, but others don’t. They’re harmless. I think that they never saw humans before coming here. They’re curious about us.’ And so he chattered, while they balanced on the waves and until they landed at a little town, already lit for the night. It was a cheerful scene, and under Dann’s feet was hard dry ground and there was a smell of woodsmoke. The boatman, Durk, said that that inn over there, the Seabird, was a good one, run by his parents.

  Dann knew this was advice better ignored, in a town where everyone to do with travelling was in the pay of the police, but he thought he had nothing to fear now, particularly if Tundra�
�s agents were not welcome. He wandered for a while about the streets, enjoying the fresh sea air, and admiring the solid comfortable buildings of wood and stone. Plenty of stone for building here: there was solid rock just below the earth surface. No houses here were going to sink into marsh.

  He found himself expected at the inn and spent the evening in the common-room, listening to the talk. A pleasant crowd, of people who all knew each other. They were interested in Dann, but too polite to ask questions. They watched him, though, as he ate his supper of fish, and a kind of porridge made of a grain he did not know.

  How unlike they were to the Thores, though they too were a short people, a good head shorter than Dann. The Thores were stubby, with light bones and black short straight hair. Their skin colour—could one say of skin that it was greenish? Compared with the light warm brown of these people, yes. Dann had seen on Kass’s cheekbones a sheen of green, and blueish shadows in her neck. Now he saw this, in retrospect, looking at these faces where the brown had reddish tints. And their hair—black—was all waves and curls. What a cheerful crowd they were, and living without fear. Not a weapon in the room—except for Dann’s hidden knife.

  They were pleased when he asked questions, which were answered from all over the room.

  There were a thousand people on this island. All the islands lived by trading fish from this well-stocked sea. They dried it, cured it in many different ways and carried it up the cliffs to sell in the towns along the shore to the east. But the wars had ended all that and fish was piling up at their warehouses. They planned to try an expedition across the moors into Tundra’s big towns, though they must expect to be careful: there was disorder now the government was weak.

  They also sold fishing nets made from marsh reed, fetched down from what they called, simply, ‘up there’.

  They made cloth from a variety of the reed, and every kind of basket and container, some that could hold water. One of the islands was not hilly, was flat enough for fields, and grain was grown. All had goats, which gave milk and meat and hides. They lived well, they told Dann; and feared nobody.

  Dann asked if it would be easy to make a journey from island to island until he could stand under the ice cliffs of Yerrup, for he longed to see them for himself.

  It was possible, was the answer, but not advisable. The ice masses were so unstable these days you never knew when they were going to crack and fall. Sometimes you could hear the ice cracking even here, so far away.

  Dann saw they had no conception that their way of life would soon change, and on some islands, the lower ones, end. Yet ‘up there’ everyone knew it. The inhabitants of the lower islands would move to the higher ones, and then to the higher ones still—did they know that under the waves that surrounded them were the ruins of great cities? No, they laughed when he mentioned this and said there were all kinds of old stories about that time.

  These people did not want to know. And it was not the first time, after all, that he observed this phenomenon: people whose existence was threatened and did not know it. Would not. They could not bear it.

  How long before the water rose and covered this pleasantly wooded prosperous island? In the morning he walked to the shore and went a good way along it. The water was rising fast. Not far along the coast houses stood in water, some submerged.

  When he mentioned them at the inn there were jests and laughter, and he heard, ‘Oh, yes, we know, but it’ll last us our time, and our children’s.’

  At the inn he shared a large room that had several beds. One of them was the boatman’s, Durk, who was a son of the house. Only couples had their own bedrooms. The corresponding room, for women, had a snow dog as guardian, sleeping across the threshold.

  This was so comfortable, this inn, these people, but Dann was restless and told Durk he wanted to go to the end of this long island. Durk said there was no inn there, Dann that he was used to sleeping out. Durk was uneasy, and intrigued. ‘But it will be cold,’ he said.

  Dann told him he would take with him goatskin rugs, and added, ‘I’ll look after you.’

  He was seeing this young man as a youth, a boy, even, but they were the same age. Dann lay in the dark, seeing stars bright through the square of the window, thought of Kass and of his snow pup, and then of the hard dangerous histories of everyone he had ever known. Down here it was—but really, another world, safe. They were safe, at least for a time. They were comfortable and safe, well fed and safe, and Dann was seeing them as children, as a childlike people. He lay awake and watched the stars move. Durk was across the room, and a couple of other local youths. Most of the beds were empty: the wars ‘up there’ were disrupting movement. Sometimes people had come to trade who had walked a whole cycle of the sun to get there. Sometimes they stayed, enticed by the island’s way of life, and the safety.

  Dann lay with his hand on his knife’s hilt, and thought for the first time in his life that perhaps he was mistaken to see people who were fed and unthreatened as inferior. What was wrong with living in what he thought of as a sort of easy dream? They were happy. It was a word Dann did not have much acquaintance with. Content. They did not lock their doors. No one kept watch on any of the islands.

  Dann made himself lie quietly, loosened and at ease, not clenched and wary, and thought he might as well stay down here—why not? For one thing, he had promised Griot he would return. He had promised, so he must—soon, not yet. And there was the Farm, where Mara would have her child by now, and Kira, with hers—his. It was not Kira’s child he thought of as his, though, but Mara’s. Kira might be kin, but she was certainly not his kind.

  In the morning at the communal table was a woman who said she was a refugee from the war nearest to here. She had arrived down at the shore last night, waited for someone to come, and had swum over. She was in a poor way, from lack of food, but her eyes burned with the intention to survive. She was claiming asylum. But if she fed herself up a bit she would easily get a husband, he was sure.

  Dann set off, with Durk, his sack full of provisions, to see the island. He could not at first understand what it was he was experiencing, a refreshment of his whole self, a provisioning, like a fine and heady food. Then he did. He had not seen ever in his life whole forests of healthy trees, but only trees standing in dust, trees dying of dryness, trees that seemed whole and well until you saw a limpness in their leaves and knew that drought was attacking their roots. And here were trees of a kind he had never seen, dark trees that spired up, their boughs made of masses of thin sharp needles, sending out a brisk aromatic scent; and light graceful trees with white trunks that shivered and shimmered in the smallest breeze. There were bushes that crept about over the rocky earth, laden with berries. Dann told Durk of what he had experienced in the drought-struck lands of southern Ifrik, and saw that he was not being believed. Durk listened to him talk, with an appreciative grin, as if he were a storyteller who had embarked on a tall tale.

  When they reached the end shore, with a further island in sight, Dann lay down to sleep on a mat of the springy low bushes, and Durk said he would too, as if this were a great adventure for him. Lying side by side, Dann in his cotton jacket, Durk covered by the goatskin rug, stars closer and brighter than they ever were ‘up there’, Dann was ready to fall asleep but Durk asked him to go on talking about his adventures. And that is how Dann found how he could keep himself on this trip, when he had so little money, and no means of getting any. There was no shortage of labour here, and it was skilled labour. Fishermen whose fathers and grandfathers had voyaged for fish, travelled in their little boats everywhere in the islands. There were specialists who dried and cured the fish. Others traded it, climbing to ‘up there’. Youngsters looked after goats, and women farmed grain. Dann’s skills were not needed.

  When they returned to the inn, Dann said he would tell tales of his early adventurous life, in return for his food and his bed. That evening the common-room was full. Durk had gone around spreading the news that this visitor of theirs was a storyteller
.

  The big room, well lit with its fish-oil lamps, was crowded, and Dann stood by the bar counter and looked around, trying to judge how they would take his tales, and wondered which they would like best. He stood frowning, the long fingers of his left hand across his mouth, as if they were censoring memories. He was not like professional storytellers, who are affable and know how to hold people’s eyes, how to pause, make a suspense, come in with surprises, spring a joke at tense moments. They saw a tall, too thin young man, his long black hair held by a leather band, standing hesitating there, and that face of his, so unlike theirs, was full of doubt. But it seemed like pain to them.

  Where should he begin? If Mara had been here, she would start a long way before he could, because his memories began when he ran away from the Rock Village with the two men who treated him so badly. There were children in the room, who had been promised stories. He could not tell about some of the ways he had been mistreated to children. He began his tale with the dust drifts and dried rivers, with the bones of dead animals lying in heaps where floods had carried them earlier. He saw the children’s faces grow dubious, and then a child began crying, hushed by its mother. Dann told of how he had hidden behind a broken wall and saw carried past on the shoulders of porters wooden cages that had in them captives from a war who would be sold in the slave markets. And a child cried out and its mother took him out.

  ‘I see’, said Dann, smiling in a shamefaced, desperate way, ‘that my memories are not for children.’

  ‘Yes, I think so too,’ said another mother.

  And so Dann’s memories emerged softened and some became comic. When he heard his audience laughing for the first time he felt he could laugh himself, with relief.

  Then things became serious again when he said he had met travellers who said that his sister was alive in the Rock Village, and he made his way south, when everyone was running north. He evaded the places where it seemed everything was burning, even the soil, saw the gold and red of the fires flickering through the hills, and found Mara, so near death she was like an old monkey, with filthy matted lumps of hair he had to scrape off with his knife, and skin stretched tight over her bones.