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

by Doris Lessing

‘These are all sedative herbs,’ said Kira.

  ‘We have people who are ill,’ said Griot, refusing to surrender Dann to Kira.

  ‘Well, tell Dann it is time he saw his child,’ said Kira. ‘Tell him to come and see me.’

  ‘Yes, I will. And he would want to see his sister’s child too,’ said Griot.

  He was using a tone to Kira he never had when he was here before. He stood his ground while she sparked off anger, muttered something, turned and went out.

  ‘Never mind her,’ said Leta, her voice full of dislike.

  This must be a jolly company of people, Griot thought. He was glad he was not trapped here.

  He asked to sleep on the veranda, so he could slip off in the morning. He slept lightly. In the night he watched Kira come out and stand at the top of the steps, looking out. She only glanced at him, and then went out into the dark.

  Very early he woke and saw her a little way down a slope to where some sheds stood, talking to some people who he knew were newly arrived refugees. They must have come by the marsh roads, not seeing the Centre. The two dogs were with her; when they saw he was awake, they left her and came to wag their tails and lick his hands, and then went a little way with him.

  Before he turned a corner on to the road, he saw Leta on the veranda. Her hair glistened in the early light: it was like sunlight. Her skin was so white: he could never decide what he thought about Albs. They fascinated but they repelled him. That hair—how he wanted to touch it, to let the smooth slippery masses run through his fingers. But her skin…he thought it was like the white thick underbelly skin of a fish.

  Donna’s hair wasn’t fair, like Leta’s, but dark and fine, and where it was parted, or when a breeze blew, the skin showed dead white. Once, Griot knew, all of Yerrup had been filled with these Alb people, all with white fish skins. He didn’t like thinking about it. A lot of people said Albs were witches, the men too, but Griot did not take this seriously: he knew how easily people said others were witches, or had magical powers. And why should he complain? When his soldiers said Dann had magic in him, Griot merely smiled and let them think it.

  Before Griot had even reached the gates of the Centre he heard the commotion in Dann’s quarters: shouts, the snow dog’s barks, Dann’s voice. He ran, and burst into the room where Dann was standing on his bed, arms flailing, eyes and face wild. There was a sickly smell. Dann saw Griot and shouted, ‘Liar. You tricked me. You went to intrigue with Shabis against me.’ The two soldiers on guard, minding Dann, stood with their backs to a wall: they were exhausted and they were frightened. The snow dog sat near them, as if protecting them, and watched Dann, who jumped off the bed and began whirling around, so that his outflung hands just missed first one soldier’s face and then the other’s; he whirled so that his fingers flicked Griot’s cheek, then a foot went out as if to kick Ruff, but the animal sat there, unflinching. He let out a low growl of warning.

  ‘Sir,’ said Griot, ‘General…no, listen, Dann…’

  ‘Dann,’ sneered Dann, still flailing about, ‘so it’s Dann, is it? Inferior ranks address their superiors like that, is that it?’

  Now Griot had had time to see that on a low table was a greasy smeared dish and on that a lump of poppy which had been burning and was still smoking.

  Dann leaped back on the bed and stood, knees bent, hands on his thighs, glaring around. His dark pupils had white edges. He was shaking.

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ he shouted at Griot. ‘I’m going to burn down your precious Centre, full of rubbish, full of dead old rubbish, I’m going to make a fire big enough to scorch all of Tundra.’ He fell back on the bed, obviously to his own surprise, and lay staring up, breathing in fast sharp gasps.

  One of the soldiers said, in a low voice, which was dulled by fear, ‘Griot, sir, the General set fire to the Centre, but we stopped him.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ came the loud voice from the bed. ‘And I will again. What do we want with all this old rubbish? We should burn it and be finished.’

  ‘General, sir,’ said Griot, ‘may I remind you that you asked me not to let you have poppy. It was an order, sir. And now I’m going to take it away.’

  At this up leaped Dann and he jumped off the bed towards the poppy, and then changed his mind, to attack Griot, who stood there as if hypnotised. And he was: he was thinking that in the fearful strength of his seizure Dann could overmaster him easily and in a moment.

  The snow dog walked in a calm considered way to where the two men faced each other and took Dann’s right arm, lifted to strike, in his big jaws and held it. Dann whirled about. A knife had appeared in his other hand, but it was not clear if Dann meant it for Ruff or for Griot. The snow dog let himself move with Dann’s movement but did not let go.

  Griot said, ‘Sir, you ordered me to keep the poppy from you.’

  ‘Yes, but that wasn’t me, it was The Other One.’

  And now, hearing what he had said he stood transfixed, staring—listening? He was hearing…what?

  ‘The Other One,’ muttered Dann. Yes. Mara had said it, the other one, she had said it reminding him of what he was capable of, reminding him of how he had gambled her away. The Other One…and Dann. Two.

  Just where he was standing now, he and Mara had stood and he had heard her tell him, because of some folly he was about to commit, ‘You wouldn’t do it but the other one would.’

  The Other One. Which one was he now? The snow dog let Dann’s arm fall from those great jaws and returned to where he had stationed himself, near the two bemused soldiers.

  ‘The Other One,’ Dann said. He whirled about, so that they all thought he might be beginning again with his flailing and his threatening, but instead he took up the dish with the smoking poppy on it and thrust it at Griot.

  ‘Take it. Don’t let me have it.’

  Griot beckoned one of the soldiers, handed him the dish and said, ‘Get rid of it. Destroy it.’ The soldier went out with the dish.

  Dann watched this, eyes narrowed, his body quivering; he slackened and let himself fall on the bed.

  ‘Come here, Ruff,’ he said.

  The snow dog came, jumped up on the bed and Dann put his arms round him. He was sobbing, a dry painful weeping, without tears. ‘I am thirsty,’ he croaked.

  The remaining soldier brought him a mug of water. Dann drank it all, began to say, ‘More, I need more…’ and fell back, and was asleep, the snow dog’s head on his chest.

  Griot ordered the soldier to go and rest, and see to it that there were replacement guards. He needed to sleep, too.

  That scene with Dann—but he had seemed more like a demented impostor—had gone so fast Griot hadn’t understood what was happening. He needed to think about it. Afraid to go too far from Dann, he lay on the bed in the adjacent room and left the door open.

  The other one, Dann had said.

  He, Griot, needed to ask someone—Shabis? It was Mara he needed to talk to. If he could bring her back, even for a few moments, he would know exactly what to ask her.

  Through the open door Griot watched the two replacement guards enter from outside and stand by the wall. Ruff growled a soft warning, but let his great tail wag, and fall. He slept. Dann slept. Griot slept.

  And woke to silence. In the next room Dann had not moved, neither had the snow dog, and the two soldiers dozed, sitting with their backs to the wall. A peaceful silence.

  Griot withdrew, washed, changed, ate, inserting himself again into this life, in the Centre. He then took up his position at the table in the great hall. There he spent the hours after the midday meal, thinking, calculating supplies and seeing any soldier who wanted to see him. Usually he could be sure of a stream of supplicants, with their interpreters, since there might be a dozen languages Griot did not know in the course of an hour or two. Today there were none. The soldiers were confused. Worse, they were afraid. Everyone knew that their General whose absences, whose unpredictability, added to his prestige, had gone very mad and that he had tried
to set fire to the Centre. They would not know how or what to ask Griot, if they did come to speak to him, which was every soldier’s right. Griot sat on at his table. They were in their huts in the camp, waiting. For Griot, for explanations. For Dann, most of all.

  If they didn’t know what to think, Griot didn’t either. His feeling for Dann had been not far off awe, something much higher than the respect for a superior. For days, before going to the Farm, he had been nursing that scarred body, with its weals around the waist, which could only be from the sharp claws of a slave’s punishment chain. Well, Griot had been a slave: they all feared that tight metal chain with its spikes more than any other punishment. He had seen Dann rave, from poppy, and if it hadn’t been for the snow dog Dann might easily have killed Griot.

  So what did he think now? One thought was the obvious one. He, Griot, had created the army out there, for it was that, if a small one. He, Griot, ran it, maintained it, fed it, planned for it. If Dann died, or finally went mad, or walked away again somewhere, Griot would be its ruler, and what did he think about that?

  There was one central thing here, not to be encompassed in an easy fact, or statement: Dann’s fame, or whatever the emanation from him could be called, had spread everywhere through the cities of Tundra. Griot had discovered this for himself. He had gone in disguise into Tundra, taking the dangerous way through the marshes, and had sat about in eating houses and bars, drinking for long tedious evenings in inns, gossiping in market places. Everyone knew that the old Mahondis were dead, but there were new young ones, and it wasn’t just ‘the Mahondis’ but one, the young General, Dann. Some said his name was Prince Shahmand, but where had all that come from? Not Griot! It was the old woman, spinning her webs, using her network of spies—which now was Griot’s network. But the name was General Dann, and that had not been the old woman’s. It was a strange and unsettling thing, listening to that talk. Dann had not been so very long at the Centre before he had gone to the Farm, had not been long there again before going on his adventure to the Bottom Sea. Yet that had been enough to set the talk running, to fire imaginations. He had a life in the thoughts of the peoples of Tundra. They expected that he would fill the Centre with its old power and that once again it would dominate all of Tundra. Tundra power was weakening fast and so they waited for the Good General, for Dann. What name could you put to that fame of his? It was an illusion, as Shabis had said. It was a flicker of nothing, like marsh gas, or the greenish light that runs along the tops of sea waves—Griot had seen that, in his time. It had no existence. Yet it was powerful. It was nothing. Yet people waited for General Dann.

  Griot had created an army, an efficient one, but Griot was nothing at all, compared with Dann, who possessed this—what?

  Griot sat pondering this, sitting quiet and long in the great hall, a small figure underneath the tall pillars and airy fluted ceilings that still held traces of long-ago colours, clear reds, blues, yellows, green like sea water. He did not much care about all that but supposed that old grandeur did connect somewhere with Dann’s glamour. Did it? But why should he care about Dann’s qualities, if he did not care now about Dann, who would have killed him? But he did. Griot’s not very long life, his hard and dangerous life, had not taught him love or tenderness, except for a sick horse he had tended in one of the places he had stopped—for a while—before having to run away again. He understood Dann’s feeling for the snow dog. But now Griot was thinking that if he had loved Dann, there was nothing left of what he had loved him for. But that word, love, it made him uncomfortable. Could the passionate admiration of a boy for an officer far above him be called love? He did not think so. Where was that handsome, kindly young officer—captain, then general? There was only the unreal thing, his ability to set fire to the expectations of people who had never even met him.

  Griot thought of that terribly scarred body, which he had nursed like—well, like the wounded horse whose life he had saved.

  He was really very unhappy. Where there should have been General Dann, a strong healthy man, there was a sick man who was at that moment sleeping off a bout of poppy.

  Then he saw coming from Dann’s apartment Ruff, the snow dog, and behind him, Dann, white-faced, frail, cautious of movement, but himself.

  Himself. Who? Well, he wasn’t the other one—whoever he was.

  Why was Griot so sure? He was. He was conscious that to say it was no answer to terrible questions—which he did not feel equipped to deal with. But he was equipped to say, ‘That’s Dann, there he is.’

  Dann sat down opposite Griot, yawned and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not mad now.’ (He could have said, ‘I am not him now.’)

  Then Dann said, and it wasn’t careless, or casual—no, he had been thinking he must say it, and mean it: ‘I am sorry, Griot.’ Did he remember he could have killed Griot if Ruff hadn’t stopped him?

  ‘First,’ he went on, in this considering way he was using, as if checking off things he had planned to say, ‘first, Griot, there is the question of your rank. I was stupid—what I said.’ (He didn’t say, ‘what he said.’) ‘You are responsible for everything. You’ve done it all. And yet the soldiers don’t know what to call you.’

  Griot sat waiting, suffering because Dann was, looking at Dann who was not looking at him, and that was because his eyes were hurting, Griot could see: light from high up, where the many windows were, fell in bright rays. Dann moved his head back, out of the brilliance, and blinked at Griot.

  ‘If Shabis could make me a learner general—did you know that, Griot? I and others of Shabis’s—pets, we were learner generals. But they called us general.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Griot quietly, but hurt: he found it so hard to accept that he had made so small an impression on Dann at a time when Dann had been everything for him.

  ‘So, how about it, Griot? I suppose I am General Dann, if you say I am, but you should be a general too, General Griot.’

  ‘I’d like to be captain,’ said Griot, remembering the handsome young captain Dann who was in his memory still as something to aim for.

  ‘Then we’ll have to be careful no one gets promoted above captain,’ said Dann. ‘We are making up this army from scratch, aren’t we, Griot? So we can say what goes. General Dann and Captain Griot. Why not?’ And he laughed gently, looking through the bright light at Griot with eyes that watered; he wanted Griot to laugh with him. There was something gentle and tentative about all this, and Griot found himself wanting to walk round the table, lift Dann up and carry him back to his bed. Dann was trembling. His hand shook.

  ‘I am going to address the soldiers,’ he said, and Griot heard another item on Dann’s mental list ticked off.

  ‘Yes, I think you should,’ said Griot. ‘They are pretty disturbed.’

  ‘Yes. The sooner the better. And at some point we must talk about the Centre…it’s all right, I’m not going to burn it down. I’m not saying I don’t want to.’ He lifted his head and sniffed, as Ruff might have done—as Ruff did, too, because Dann did. Griot allowed the smell of the Centre, which he usually shut away from him, in his mind, to enter, and wrinkled up his nose, as Dann was doing. A dank grey smell, and now it had a hint of burning in it, too.

  ‘Dann, there is something I found out about the Centre and you’d be interested…’

  Dann waved this away. ‘Call the soldiers,’ he said.

  Griot went out, looking back to see Dann sitting blinking there in the light, which was about to slide away and leave him in shadow. The snow dog put his head on Dann’s thighs and Dann stroked it. ‘Ruff,’ he said, and he said it passionately, ‘you’re my friend, Ruff. Yes, you’re my friend.’

  And I am not, Griot said to himself. I am not.

  Soon a thousand soldiers stood at ease on the space called the parade ground, or the square, between the main Centre buildings and the camp of shed and huts. Too small a space, but there was nowhere for it to expand. On one side of the camp were the cliffs of the Middle Sea and on the other
the marshes began. The camp could expand only one way, along the edge of the Middle Sea, and it was, and too fast. On the north side of the Centre its walls were sinking into wet. Between them and the cliffs were the roads needed to bring the crops and the animals from their pastures, and the fish catches from the sea.

  Dann stood at ease, wearing the old gown he slept in—lived in, these days. Beside him sat Ruff, his head as high as Dann’s chest. Opposite Ruff sat the phalanx of snow dogs, with their minders, one to a dog. The animals were very white and they glistened in the gloomy scene. Behind the snow dogs were the soldiers. They were of every kind and colour. The majority were stocky, strong, solid people, probably Thores, or of Thores stock, but there were many Kharabs, tall and thin, and mixes of people from all along the coasts, from the wars; they were still coming in every day. The presence of people from the River Towns, so far south, was evidenced by the ranks of shiny very black faces, and there was even a little platoon of Albs, with skin like Leta’s or modified shades of it. The hair was of all kinds. Not one of them had Leta’s pale hair, like light. All colours, all sizes, and hair long and black, like Dann’s, to the tight close curls of the River Towns, and the many shades of brown from the East. There were all kinds of clothes. Some still wore the rags they had arrived in. Griot simply could not get enough clothes for them, of any sort, let alone standard clothes that would make a uniform. Despairing, Griot had bought fleece cloth from Tundra and dyed it red, and every soldier, no matter what he wore under it, had over his or her shoulder a red woolly blanket, needed on most days of the year, chilly, cold, always damp. Without these red blankets they would have nothing to identify them. Throw them away and they would be a rabble.

  Dann stood there, silent, for a while, smiling, letting them have a good look at him. Then he said, ‘I am sure you know that I have been ill.’ He waited, watching those faces, which would show—what? Derisive smiles? Impatience? No, they all stood and waited, serious, attentive.

  ‘Yes, I have been very ill.’ He waited. ‘I was ill from the poppy.’ Now a different silence gripped the soldiers. A seabird speeding along the cliff edge cut the silence with its wings. It screamed and another answered from where it floated far out beyond the cliffs.