Mara and Dann mad-1

by Doris Lessing Little Dorrit

  "Dann, you and I — we haven't seen very much, have we? Only everything drying up and fighting and."

  "And poppy and murder," he said.

  "And poppy and murder. Dann, are you still afraid of him — the one you said was following you?" Up he leaped from his chair, away from the question, and stood looking

  out into the glare of mid-morning. "He did try to kill me. He got away." "Where was this? Here?"

  "I'll tell you another time. But I want you to know — if you hear I've gone, then I'll be in Shari waiting for you. Or in Karas."

  "Both are inside the Charad spy system. Dann, did you know that you're in line for a tisitch?"

  Almost from the start Dann had been a platoon leader: ten men. His basic training over, he was made a cent; that is, he had a hundred men under him. If he became a tisitch, then he would be responsible for a thousand men. He would be one of fifty officers immediately under the gener-al — Shabis. And he would become part of the administration of south Charad.

  He had turned himself around, and stood looking closely into her face, in his old way. "Did General Shabis say so?"

  "Yes. They think very highly of you. He said you are the youngest cent they've had. And all the tisitches will be much older than you."

  "I don't want to be an Agre. I don't want to stay in Charad." But she could see he was pleased. Then he said, "Everything is stagnant here, isn't it?"

  "It won't go on being. They are trying to make a truce. Then all of Charad will change."

  "And when is this truce going to happen?"

  "Shabis is trying to get a meeting with General Izrak."

  "Well, good luck. You can't trust them — the Hennes."

  She knew that this was more than a professional soldier talking about an enemy — the automatic thing. "Trust? Who cares about trust? If there's a truce there will have to be safeguards, which means that both sides will lose if they break it."

  "Clever Mara. But you've forgotten, the Hennes are stupid. And, I've noticed, clever people often don't understand stupid ones."

  This talk was sweet to them, after such a long time, almost six months. They could have gone on, but he had to return to his duties. Shabis came in and Dann saluted and stood at ease. Shabis asked Dann about some army problem, and Dann answered well and carefully, but not at too great a length. Mara could see that Shabis was testing him. Then he nodded and said, "Right. Dismiss. You can come and see your sister again soon." Dann saluted and went out, with a look at Mara that claimed her for their plans of escape.

  Shabis sat himself where Dann had been and said, "Mara, how do you like the idea of becoming a spy?" And he laughed at her dismay. "I want you to come with me when we negotiate the truce, and then stay behind to work on the details — and report to me everything you see. It wouldn't be for long."

  "I should be alone? Among the Hennes?" She was really horrified. "I can't tell one from another. I wonder that they can."

  "Sometimes they can't. They all wear some sort of badge or mark."

  "What is wrong with them? There is something."

  "I think it is that the life — you know, the stuff of life — of one person is diluted with them so that ten — or who knows, fifty? — of them are the same as one of us."

  She said,

  "The inward spark,

  The vital flame,

  Can go as quickly as it came."

  "What is that?"

  "I don't know. My mind is full of — things, bits of words, ideas, and I don't know where they come from. Perhaps my childhood."

  "Well, that's it. Their vital spark. Perhaps they don't have it. But they are clever enough at some things. After all, one of them copied that gun and made it work."

  "I don't think that makes me like them any better."

  "Well, are you refusing to do it?"

  "I thought I was your prisoner and had to do as I'm told?" "Is that what you are?"

  "I'll think about it. The trouble is, they make my flesh creep. I don't think I ever understood that saying until I saw the Hennes."

  And she did think, hard and long when she was alone in her room. In her room — alone. What a happiness it was for her, this room, and being alone when she wanted.

  Shabis wanted to change the whole country into something freer, easier, and to use money now spent on fighting and raids for improvement. And yet was there so much spent on war? There were battles, but not often. There were skirmishes. Dann had been right when he said Charad — or at least this part of it — was stagnant. The armies had farms and manufactories, they built towns over old ruins that were everywhere in Charad, they educated the men and the women in the armies, and it was a pretty easy life.

  Shabis wanted to dismiss half the army back into civilian life and, as war receded into the past, keep only enough soldiers for an unexpected attack. But if you took away the army, the generals would have on their hands many thousands of people who were used to discipline and order, looking for work. What work? Everyone was fed and clothed as it was. Shabis said the former soldiers would be useful rebuilding towns and digging out silted rivers. Very well. For a while the invisible bonds of old disciplines would confine them, and then there would come a time when people would have to be forced by needs now satisfied so automatically no one need think about it, to compete for work. There would have to be money and systems of exchange, and if they refused to work or earn then they would not be fed. How simple it all sounded, how easily Shabis talked about it. But there would be a great turbulence and dissatisfaction and as Mara knew, though it seemed Shabis did not, there would follow the threat of poppy. When she said this to him he replied, "There would be punishments for that." For Shabis, the soldier, had to rely on punishments and rebukes. There would follow courts and prisons and police.

  And there were the Hennes, a people within the mass of the Agre, a country within a country. Mara had said, "Why not let the Hennes split off and have their own country? Why do you want them?"

  "They want us," was the reply. "They want what we have. They know we are quicker and cleverer than they are. I believe they think that if they capture our part of Charad — Agre territory — then they will become like us."

  "But if you have a truce, then they must agree to stop trying to take Agre land, and be content with what they have." "Exactly. We will trade and be at peace."

  A likely story, Mara thought. Shabis's life, spent since he was sixteen in the army, had narrowed his mind away from — well, the kind of experience she and Dann had at their fingertips. He did not understand anarchy, disorder, and the rages of frightened people.

  The best part of Mara's life was now the afternoon talks, the "lessons," with Shabis. She was still taking language lessons every morning, though she was speaking pretty well by now, and understood everything that was said. She could write, just a little. Shabis owned an ancient book of tales from the distant past, made of tree bark. It was in

  Mahondi. But her writing lessons were in Charad. She tried to use what she had in her brain — the Mahondi — to puzzle out the written words. Shabis helped her. He was spending more time with her, sometimes three or four hours every afternoon. They set aside one of these hours to say what they had to in Charad, to give her practice.

  What she liked best was to talk about "those long ago people from thousands of years in the past." He said that he didn't have much to tell her, but as they went on, it turned out he did know a good deal, picked up here and there. They were piecing together what they knew, from her memories of her old home, from Daima, from the Mahondis of Chelops. Shabis said that if it had ever been possible to get all the different Mahondi families into one place then a pretty good record of the filtered down knowledge would result. "The trouble is," he said, "that we all know a little but not how it fits together." For instance he had not seen anything like Candace's wall map and the gourd globe, which came from such different times, separated by — well, probably, by hundreds of years. Or thousands. He asked Mara to draw him the map t
hat had the white blanking out the top of it, and brought her a newly prepared white animal skin, as soft as cloth, and sticks of charcoal, and some vegetable dyes. Then he wanted another, of the time before that, when there was no white covering up so much of the picture.

  Sometimes it was by accident that they found out what the other knew. For instance, Shabis remarked that in those long ago times there was a period when people lived to be quite old, even a hundred years or more, while, nowadays, if someone lived to be fifty that was pretty good. "I am an old man, Mara — thirty-five. Then a thirty-five-year-old man was still a young man. And there was a time when women had one child after another and sometimes died young because of it, or were old at forty, but then they discovered some medicine or herb that stopped them having children..."

  "What?" said Mara. "What are you saying?"

  She was staring, she was breathless.

  "What's wrong, Mara?"

  "I can't. I don't think I can take that in... do you mean to say... you're saying that those ancient women, if they took some drug, then they didn't have children?"

  "Yes. It's in the Sand Records."

  "That meant, those women then didn't have to be afraid of men." Shabis said, drily, "I haven't noticed your being afraid."

  "You don't understand. Daima used to tell me and tell me until I sometimes got angry with her, Remember when you meet a man, he could make you pregnant. Think if you're in your fertile period and if you are, then be on your guard."

  "My dear Mara, it sounds as if you are accusing me."

  "You just don't know what it means, always to be thinking, Be careful, they are stronger than you are, they could make you pregnant."

  "No, I suppose I don't."

  "I cannot even begin to imagine what it could be like, being at ease when you meet a man. And then, when it suits you, at the time you want it, you have a baby. They must have been quite different from us, those women in ancient times. So different." She was silent, thinking. "They were free. We could never be free, in that way." Now she was remembering Kulik, how she had dodged and evaded and run away, and even had nightmares. Dreams of helplessness. That was the point. Being helpless.

  She told him about Kulik, and how glad she had been when the drought stopped her flow. She said that when she had her fertile times she sometimes did not go out of the rock house, she was so afraid of him.

  Her voice was tense and tight and angry when she spoke of Kulik, and Shabis was so affected by it, he at first got up and walked about the room, then came back, and sat down and took her hands. "Mara, please don't. You're safe here. I promise you, no one would dare." And then, as her hands lay limp in his, he withdrew them and said, "It's strange, sitting here talking about fear of pregnancy, when most talk now is about the opposite. Did you know that if one of our women soldiers gets pregnant, then there is a feast, and everyone makes a fuss of her? She has a special nurse assigned to her."

  There was something in his face and his voice; she said suddenly, "You haven't had children?

  "No."

  "And you wanted them."

  "Yes."

  "I'm so sorry, Shabis."

  She was thinking wildly, I could give him a child — and was shocked at herself. She had wanted to have a child with Meryx, to console him, to prove.

  "No, I'm not like your Meryx. I'm not infertile. I had a child with a woman I met when I was on a campaign. But she was married and the child is now part of her family."

  She was thinking, We go around in circles — women do. I could give Shabis a child, and then I would be stuck here in Charad, and I'd never be able to leave and go North.

  Not long after that afternoon, Shabis said that his wife wanted to meet her, and invited her to supper.

  12

  Mara had not seen much more than what immediately surrounded what she lived in — Shabis's H.Q. — partly because the sentry stopped her if she showed signs of walking off and, too, because she felt Shabis did not want her to be noticed. Now, on the evening of the supper, she walked with Shabis through ruins, of the kind she knew so well, and then into an area that had been rebuilt to resemble what that long ago city might have looked like. Here were fine houses, streets of them. Here were stone figures in little, dusty gardens. The house they stopped at had a lantern hanging outside the door, made of coloured stone sliced so thin that the flame inside it showed the pink and white veining. A big vestibule was decorated with more lamps, of all kinds, and with hangings, and a door of a wood Mara had never seen, which sent out a spicy smell, opened into a large room that reminded Mara of the family meeting room in Chelops. The furniture, though, was much finer, and there were rugs on the floor so beautiful she longed to kneel down beside each one, and examine it at her leisure. A woman had come in, and at first glance Mara distrusted her. She was a large, handsome woman, with her hair piled up on her head and held there with a silvery clasp, and she was smiling — so Mara thought — as if her face would soon split. She was all smiles and exclamations, "So this is Mara, at last," and she pressed Mara's hands inside hers, and narrowed her eyes and smiled and stared into her face. "How wonderful to see you here in my house. I've been trying to get Shabis to bring you but my husband is so busy — but you know that better than I do." So she went on, smiling, and poisonous, and Mara let that flow by her, while she was thinking, vastly dismayed, that here in this fine house with this woman was Shabis's real life; it was where he spent his evenings, when he left her, Mara, in his office, and where he spent his nights, no doubt in a room as fine as this one — with this woman.

  Mara was wearing the brown snake-tunic, over Meryx's trousers, because this woman, Shabis's wife, had said she wanted to see this material her husband had told her about. Now began a whole business of her feeling the stuff, shuddering Ugh, saying how she admired Mara for being prepared to wear the horrible thing — for years? Shabis had told her. How brave Mara was. And when Mara left here, as she, Panis, believed Mara intended to do, she, Panis, was asking a big favour: Please leave this garment behind so that Shabis and I may have a memento of you.

  Shabis was uncomfortable, but smiling. Mara could see that this evening was something that had to be got through. Meanwhile, through a good, but fortunately short meal, the eyes of this woman who owned Shabis were suspicious, cold, moved from her to Shabis, and when one answered the other, or a joke was attempted, the black eyes in that cold face glittered with hate. How stupid this was, thought Mara, how very far she was from it all, for that life of loving or jealous looks seemed buried somewhere south in Chelops where — so reports were now coming in from the travellers — fire had raged through all the eastern suburbs.

  As soon as the meal was over, Shabis said that he was sure Mara was tired, after studying so hard all day, and that he would walk back with her. Panis was so angry at this it was clear Shabis could not possibly walk back with Mara, who said it was only a short way, a few streets, and she would walk by herself. Mara could see Shabis hated this: he was pale with anxiety for her, and with anger, too. He was actually about to defy his wife and set off with Mara when Panis gripped his arm with two hands and said, "I am sure a few minutes' walk in the dark will be nothing to Mara, after all she's done and seen."

  Shabis said, "The password for tonight is 'Duty,' if the sentry tries to stop you."

  It was a night when the sky was black, and occluded, the clouds of the rainy season still being with them. Mara walked quietly along the centre of the restored street, where lamps hung outside every house, so that she could see everything, and then into the streets of the ruined area. She went carefully, for it was very dark. And then a shadow moved forward from a deep shadow, and she was just about to say the password, "Duty," when a hand came over her mouth and she was carried off, one Hennes holding her feet and one her shoulders, and keeping her mouth tightly covered by an enormous, sour-smelling hand. She was carried in this way through the ruins, always in the shadows that edged the already dark streets; and then a group of shadows stole forward
when they were in a street in the eastern verges of the ruined town, and she was carried in a litter made by interlaced arms as solid as tree trunks until she was set down near a company of fifty Hennes soldiers. Her mouth was bound with cloth, and she was marched into Hennes territory, keeping up a steady pace all night, until the light came, and then she was in a camp made of mud-brick, and tents of thick, dark cloth. This was an army camp, unlike the towns the Agre army lived in. It was a very big camp. They took the cloth off her mouth and pushed her into a hut, set a candle down in a corner, said that there was bread and water there, in that corner, and that she would be summoned to General Izrak.

  Her first thought was that now she and Dann were in two armies that were enemies. Her second was that she was separated from her sack, from which she was never apart, for she felt her life depended on it. All her possessions were in it. The two ancient Mahondi robes. Two pretty dresses from Chelops. Meryx's clothes, a whole outfit and a tunic, for she was wearing the trousers of another with this brown tunic. And a comb, a brush, soap, toothbrush. A bag of the coins she had snatched up from that boat when Han fell among those deadly feet. Not very much, but her own, and without them she possessed nothing but the trousers and tunic she wore and the light bark shoes the Agre wore. Well, what of it? She was still here wasn't she? — standing healthy and strong and not at all afraid, because she knew she was a match for the Hennes. There was a low bed, and she fell on it and slept and did not wake until late afternoon. Now she saw that the window was barred and the door did not open from inside. This prison was no more than the merest shed: she could probably be through these rough mud walls in an hour or two. There was a door into a room with a lavatory and a basin with water. She used them. More or less clean, she stood by the window to see what she could, which was only expanses of reddish earth and some more sheds and tents; and then in came a Hennes and said that the General would see her tomorrow, and meanwhile she must exercise. He did not look at her in any way she was used to: his gaze was directed towards her but did not seem to take her in. His way of speaking, monotonous, but at the same time jerky, disturbed her, as everything Hennes did, but she knew she must not give way to this.