Mara and Dann (44 page)

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 that 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.

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.

Outside the hut an earth road went through the camp, eastward, and she was able to get an impression of the place. Hennes guards stood outside a big building, holding guns, which she knew now were not just for show, and they were outside other buildings, probably stores. The Hennes who was guarding her began a steady loping run, and she jogged along beside him. He made no effort to speak to her. She was tired, having walked all night, and wondered why it was considered necessary that she should exercise. But she understood that these were creatures of habit: prisoners must exercise every day. Having left the camp behind, and finding herself in open scrubland, she said to him, breathless, that she was tired, and he stopped, turned and began jogging back. It was as if she had reached out and turned him around by the shoulder. Late afternoon: the sun seemed to flatten the huts, sheds and tents of the camp down into the long black shadows. On a parade ground outside the camp soldiers were drilling while officers barked orders. This was the same kind of drill, the same orders, as she had been hearing in the other army. If she had not learned Charad she would be feeling very frightened now, and lost: in her mind she thanked Shabis for her mornings of language lessons.

As they passed the large building with the guards, a group of Hennes emerged and stood watching her. She thought that probably one was the General – certainly they all had the look of authority. What could they be making of her, this Mahondi female jogging slowly past them, so unlike them and unlike, too, most of the Agre they were used to? At that moment she saw, emerging from a tent, two of the race of people from the walls of Shabis's headquarters, and the room she had been sleeping in. Tall, light, with elegant long limbs, and narrow heads, creatures as far from the ugly thick Hennes as could possibly be – but they seemed to be servants of some kind, carrying food plates.

In her hut she was brought a meal by the same Hennes warder, and then, ready to sleep again, lay down; but instead was awake for a long time, thinking. What did they want her for? What had the spies told them? Breeding? Again? Well, what else did she expect? A female was for breeding, and with the fertility falling, falling – here, too, and everywhere in Charad – of course a woman with all her eggs in her…But the Hennes would not know about all that: even Shabis hadn't, until she told him. There was one thing she was sure of, and it was that rather
lie with a Hennes she would kill herself. So, that solved that…No, it didn't. She would not kill herself. To have survived everything she had and then…No. But she would not breed. She would make sure there would not be sex during her fertile period: she lay thinking about the ways she could use to avoid penetration. And then, she would escape. She would run away and find Dann and…She slept, and woke thinking she was back in the Rock Village, because of the way this old slippery tunic slid about her.