Mara and Dann (3 page)

‘Some cloudburst,' said the woman, and above them was a blue sky without one cloud in it, and the sun shone down on the flood. ‘I saw a river come down once, like this, but it was thirty years ago,' said the man. ‘I was about the age of these children. It was up north. The big dam burst in the hills – no maintenance.' ‘This is no dam,' said the woman. ‘No dam could hold this amount of water.' ‘No,' he said. ‘I'd say the plain above the Old Gorge flooded, and the water got funnelled through the gorge down to here.' ‘A pity we can't stop all this water flooding to waste.'

Meanwhile Dann had found a hollow place in a flat rock where the water was trickling in, and he was sitting in the water. But he was not alone: lizards and snakes were there with him.

‘Dann,' shouted Mara. The child took no notice. He was stroking a big, fat, grey snake that lay beside him in the water, and making sounds of pleasure. ‘Stop it, that's dangerous,' said Mara, looking up at the woman so she could stop Dann; but she did not hear. She was staring off in the direction Mara knew was north, and yet another wall of water was coming down. It was not as high as the others, but enough to push in front of it boulders and dead animals, the big ones with trunks and big ears and tusks.

‘We can't afford to lose any more animals,' said the man. And the woman said, ‘I suppose a few more dead don't make any difference.'

They were speaking very loudly above the sounds of the water and the banging rocks and stones, and the cries of the animals.

At this moment Dann got up out of his pool, unlooping a big green snake that had come to rest around his arm, and climbed up towards them, careful not to step on a snake or an animal too exhausted to move out of his way, and stood in front of the two grown-ups and said, ‘I'm hungry. I'm so hungry.' And now Mara realised she had been hungry for a long time. How long was it since they had eaten? The bad people had not given them food. Before that…Mara's mind was full of sharp little pictures she was trying to fit together: her parents leaning down to say, ‘Be brave, be brave and look after your brother'; the big man with his dark, angry face; before that, the quiet ordinariness of their home before all the terrible things began happening. She could not remember eating: food had been short for quite a long time, but there had been things to
eat. Now she looked carefully at Dann, and she had not done that for days because she had been so thirsty and so frightened, and she saw that his face was thin and yellowish though usually he was a chubby, shiny little child. She had never seen him like this. And she saw something else: his tunic, the brown sack thing of the Rock People, was quite dry. The water had streamed off it as he had climbed out of the rock pool. And her tunic was dry. She hated the thin, dead, slippery feel of the stuff, but it did dry quickly.

‘We don't have much food,' said the man, ‘and if we eat what we have now we might not find any more.'

‘I'm so hungry,' whispered Mara.

The man and the woman looked worriedly at each other.

‘It isn't far now,' he said.

‘But there's all that water.'

‘It'll drain away soon.'

‘Far? Where?' demanded Mara, tugging at the brown slipperiness of the woman's tunic. ‘Home? Are we near home?' Even as she said it her heart was sinking because she knew it was nonsense: they were not going home. The woman squatted down so that her face was on the same level as hers, and the man did the same for the boy. ‘Surely you've got that into your head by now?' said the woman. Her big face, all bone and hollows, her eyes burning out between the bones, seemed desperate with sadness. The man had Dann by the arms and was saying, ‘You must stop this, you must.' But the little boy hadn't said anything. He was crying: tears were actually falling down his poor cheeks now that he had drunk enough to let him cry properly.

‘What did Lord Gorda tell you? Surely he told you?'

Mara had to nod, miserably, tears filling her throat.

‘Well then,' said the woman, straightening up. The man, too, rose, and the two stood looking at each other; and Mara could see that they didn't know what to do or say. ‘It's too much for them to take in,' the woman said, and the man said, ‘Hardly surprising.'

‘But they have to understand.'

‘I do understand. I do, really,' said Mara.

‘Good,' said the woman. ‘What is the most important thing?'

The little girl thought and said, ‘My name is Mara.'

And then the man said to the little boy, ‘And what is your name?'

‘It's Dann,' said Mara quickly, in case he had forgotten; and he had, because he said, ‘It isn't my name. My name isn't Dann.'

‘It's a question of life and death,' said the man. ‘You've got to remember that.'

‘Better if you could try to forget your real name,' said the woman. And Mara thought that she easily could, for that name was in her other life, where people were friendly and kind and she wasn't thirsty all the time.

‘I'm hungry,' said Dann again.

The two grown-ups looked to see that the rock behind them did not have a snake on it. There were a couple of lizards and some scorpions, who did not look as if the water had discouraged them. They must have emerged from crevices to see what the disturbance was all about. The man took up a stick and gently pushed it at the scorpions and lizards, and they disappeared into the rocks.

The four of them sat down on the rock. The woman had a big bag tied around her waist. Water had got into it, but the food inside was so well wrapped in wads of leaves that it was almost dry, only a little wet. There were two slabs of thick white stuff, and she broke each slab into two so they each had a piece. Mara took a bite and found her mouth full of tasteless stuff.

‘That's all there is,' said the woman.

Dann was so hungry he was taking big bites and chewing and swallowing, and taking another bite. Mara copied him.

‘Anything you don't finish, give back,' said the woman. She was not eating but watching the children eat. ‘Eat,' said the man to her. ‘You must.' But he had only eaten a little himself.

‘Is it the Rock People's food?' asked Dann, surprising his sister, but pleasing her, for she knew that he did notice things, remembered, and came out with it later, even when you'd think he was too little to understand.

‘Yes, it is,' said the man, ‘and you'd better learn to like it because I doubt whether you'll get much else – at least, not for a while.'

‘Probably for a good long while,' said the woman, ‘the way things are going.'

The man and the woman stood up and went forward to the very edge of a rock to take a good, long look at the water. It was still at the same height. And all the hills were crowded, simply crammed, with animals waiting for the flood to go down, just as they were. Down below, the great plain of brown water hurried past, still carrying bushes where little animals clung, and trees where big animals balanced; but now it seemed that there was less fret and storm in the water.

‘It has reached its peak,' said the woman.

‘If there isn't more to come,' said the man.

The sky was still a hard, clear blue, like a lid over everything. The sun was shining hot and fierce, and there were no new big waves from the north.

Dann had gone to sleep holding a half-eaten hunk of the white stuff. The woman took it from him and put it in her bag. She sat down and her eyes closed and her head fell forward. The man's eyes closed and he sank down, asleep.

‘But we must keep awake,' the little girl was pleading, ‘we must. Suppose the bad people come? Suppose a snake bites us?' And then she tumbled off to sleep, but later only knew she had been asleep because she was scrambling up, thinking, Where's my brother? Where are the others? And her head was aching because she had been lying in the sun, which had moved and was going down, sending pink reflections from the sky across the water. But the water that had covered everything had gone down and was a river racing down the middle part of the valley. Dann was awake and holding the hand of the woman, and they were standing higher up where they could see everything easily. This hill was now surrounded by brown mud, and the yellow grasses were just beginning to lift up.

‘Where are we going to cross over?' asked the woman.

‘I don't know, but we've got to,' said the man.

Now the rocks around them did not have animals all over them, for they were carefully making their way back towards the high ground on the ridge. Mara thought that soon they would all be thirsty again. And then: We'll be thirsty too, and hungry. They had slept all afternoon.

‘I think it would be safe to have a try,' said the man. ‘Between the waterholes there will be hard ground.'

‘A bit dangerous.'

‘Not as dangerous as staying here if they are coming after us.'

The dark was filling the sky. The stars came out, and up climbed a bright yellow moon. The mud shone, the tufts of grass shone, and the fast water that was now a river shone.

The man jumped down off the rocks and down the hill to the bottom, where his feet squelched as he took a few steps. ‘It is hard underneath,' he said.

He picked up Dann, who was sleepy and silent, and said to Mara, ‘Can you manage?'

When Mara jumped down there was a thickness of mud under her feet, but a hardness under that. The moonlight was so strong it made big shadows from the rocks, and from the branches that were stuck in the mud, and sad shadows from the drowned animals lying about everywhere. The grasses dragged at their feet, but they went on, past the hill where they had been first, and where now there were no animals at all, and then they reached the edge of the river. The other side seemed a long way off. The man picked up one of the torn-off branches, held the leafy part, carefully stepped to the very edge of the water. He poked the branch in and it went right down. He went squelching along the edge and tried again, and it went down. He did it farther along and this time the wood only went in to about the height of the children's knees. ‘Here,' he said, and the woman lifted Mara up. The two big people stepped into the brown water, which was racing past, rippling and noisy, but not deep, not here. The man went ahead with Dann, poking the wood of the branch into the water at every step, and the woman, with Mara, was just behind. Mara thought, Suppose the flood comes down now? We'll be drowned. And she was trembling with fear. They were right in the middle now, and everything glistened and shone because of the moon, which was making a gold edge on every ripple. The mud on the other side of the water was a stretch of yellowish light. They were going so slowly, a step and then a stop, while the man poked the water, and then another step and a stop. It seemed to go on and on, and then they were out of the water and on the mud. Close by were some trees. They had had water quite high up their trunks, though usually they were on the edge of a waterhole. They seemed quite fresh and green, and that was because they were here, not far from water, while the trees around Mara's home were dying, or dead. There were dark blotches on the branches. Birds. They must have been sitting here safely all through the flood.

Now they were well past the water. Mara felt herself being set down, while the woman's whole body seemed to lift itself up because of the relief of not having Mara's weight. And again Mara thought, She must be so tired, and weak too, because I'm not so heavy really.

They were walking carefully through the dirty and wet tussocks of grass, away from the water. They reached the rise that was as far as they had been able to see from the top of the big hill they had been on and, when they were over it, ahead were trees, quite a lot. So this couldn't be anywhere near their home – Mara had been thinking wildly, although
she knew it couldn't be true, that perhaps they were going back home. She was trying to remember if she had ever seen so many trees all together. These had their leaves, but as she passed under them she could smell their dryness. These thirsty trees must have been thinking of all that water rushing past, just over the ridge, but they couldn't get to it.

The man stumbled and fell because he had tripped over a big white thing. It was a bone. He was on his feet at once, telling Dann, who had taken another tumble and was wailing, ‘Don't cry, hush, be quiet.'

Ahead was another river, full of fast water, and the wet had reached all the way up here to the edge of the trees and had pushed away earth from under a bank, making a cave; and in the cave were a lot of white sticks: bones. The man poked his branch into the bones and they came clattering out.

‘Do you realise what we are seeing?'

‘Yes,' said the woman, and although she was tired she was actually interested.

‘What is it, what is it?' Mara demanded, tugging at the woman's hand and then at the man's.

‘This is where the old animals' bones piled up, and the water has exposed them – look.'

Mara saw tusks so long and thick they were like trees; she saw enormous white bones; she saw cages made of bones, but she knew they were ribs. She had never imagined anything could be this big.

‘These are the extinct animals,' said the man. ‘They died out hundreds of years ago.'

‘Why did they?'

‘It was the last time there was a very bad drought. It lasted for so long all the animals died. The big ones. Twice as big as our animals.'

‘Will this drought be as long as that?'

‘Let's hope not,' he said, ‘or we'll all be extinct too.' The woman laughed. She actually laughed; but Mara thought it was not funny, it was dreadful. ‘Really we should cover all these bones up again and mark where they are, and when things get better we can come and examine them properly.'

He believed that things were going to get better, Mara thought.

‘No time now,' the woman said.

The man was poking with his branch at the wet earth, and it was falling away and the bones kept tumbling out, clashing and clattering.