Mara and Dann. Doris Lessing

his arms on the wooden rail, grinning, and watched while Mara dodged about, as the big male beast nudged and pushed and edged Mishka into position, and she sidled and evaded, and came back … and all the time those great hooves were missing Mara by inches. Along the fence of the enclosure now were the men, standing there grinning and hoping that Mara would get a hard kick, or a poke from one of those sharp horns. It seemed to go on for a long time, the pushing and shoving in the enclosure, and Mara tried to get out through the rails of the fence; but the men pushed her back in, and this time she was just under Mishka’s head. The male was on Mishka’s back now and pushing Mishka down, but she was trying not to hurt Mara, keeping her head and shoulders away from the girl. At last it was done. The two beasts stood clear of each other. Mara was trembling so that she could hardly stand, and she felt her pee running down her legs. But she got the rope around Mishka’s horns and stood with her at the place where the opening was. For a good long while Kulik did not take his arms from where they lay on the rail. Then he moved back, lifted off the rail and stood aside. Mara led Mishka out. She did not look at Kulik or at the other men, who were standing there grinning and pleased with themselves.

      ‘Remember, it’s mine if it’s a male,’ said Kulik.

      ‘I promise,’ said Mara.

      ‘She promises,’ said the men to each other, in copies of her little voice, but lisping and silly, not as she spoke.

      She took Mishka back to her place near the others, and stood for a time with her arms around one of the big front legs, because she could not reach any higher; and Mishka put down her soft muzzle and licked Mara’s sweaty, dusty neck for the salt.

      Then she went to Daima and told her. Daima only sat with her head on her old hand at the table and listened.

      ‘Well, let’s hope she takes,’ she said. And Mishka did ‘take’: she was pregnant and she gave birth to a male. Dann could hardly be got away from Mishka and her kid. He adored the little beast, which would look out for Dann, who brought it bits of green he found in the grass, or a slice of the yellow root.

      Mara said, ‘Don’t love that little beast so much, because we can’t keep him.’

      And Daima said, ‘That’s right. He must know what the world is like.’

      ‘Perhaps it won’t always be like this,’ said Mara.

      And then the beast, which Dann called Dann, was taken away by Kulik, who chased Dann off and said, ‘I’m not having any Mahondi brats, get away.’

      Dann could not understand what had happened. He sat silent, puzzled, full of grief; but then it seemed some sort of change took place in him. ‘I hate Kulik,’ he said, but not like a little boy. ‘One day I’ll kill him.’ And he didn’t cry. His face was narrow and tight and suspicious and hard. He was not yet five years old.

       2

      On the low hill overlooking the village was a tall rock, precipitous on three sides and sloping steeply on the village side. There on the top of it sat Mara, looking down at a group of half a dozen boys playing a game of fighting with sticks. Dann was taller than any of them, though he was younger than some, at ten years old, and he was a quick, always watchful child, who dominated them all. Mara was almost grown, with her little bumps of breasts, and she was tall and thin and wiry, and could run faster than the boys, which she had learned to do from having so often to rescue Dann from danger. He seemed to have been born without a sense of self-preservation: would leap off a rock or a roof without looking to see where he was going to land, walk up to a big hissing dragon, jump into a pool without checking if there were stingers or a water dragon. But he was much better, and that was why Mara was up here, watching quite idly, not anxious and on guard as she had been every minute of her days and nights. Only recently had she understood that her long watch was over. She had been strolling from the hill to the village, listening to the singing beetles and her own thoughts, when she had seen Dann rushing towards her with a stick, then past her, and she had whirled to see him attacking a dragon that was following her.

      ‘You should be more careful, Mara,’ he had chided, and not at all as if he were mimicking her constant, Be careful, do be careful, Dann.

      She had gone in to Daima and told her, and the two had wept and laughed in each other’s arms for the wonderful ludicrousness of it. And Daima had said, ‘Congratulations, Mara. You’ve done it. You’ve brought him through.’

      This was her favourite place. Nobody came up here: not Dann, who liked to be always rushing about; not Daima, who was too old and stiff; not the villagers, who said it was full of ghosts. Mara had been here at all times of the day, and at night too, and had never seen or heard ghosts. The danger was the dragons, who were so hungry they would eat anything. That is why she sat on a rock that on three sides they could not climb up, while in front she could slide down on her bottom and be off as soon as she heard the angry hissing. Or she could wait up here, safe, throwing stones down at the dragons if they showed signs of climbing up. This rock rose out of a tumbling and piling of small, rocky hills, full of clefts and crevices where bushes and trees grew, and caves and cliffs and pits that were old traps, and in some places heaps of old walls and roofs. When she had played the What Did You See? game with Daima, she liked best to do this hill, because she was always finding new things.

      ‘And then?’

      ‘The pits have black rings, with bits of chain on the rings.’

      ‘And then?’

      ‘The rings are made of some metal we don’t have.’

      ‘And so?’

      ‘All the same, Daima, I think those pits are quite recent – I mean hundreds of years, not thousands.’

      When Mara said hundreds, she meant a long time; and when thousands, it meant her mind had given up, confessed failure: thousands meant an unimaginable, endless past.

      Up on those hills – for behind the one near the village were piled others – forcing herself between bushes and saplings, squeezing through gaps in boulders, sliding down shaly descents in showers of stones, climbing trees to look over places she could not penetrate because of thick undergrowth, what Mara had slowly understood – and it had been slow, years – was that this was not just, as Daima had told her, a ruined city thousands of years old, or hundreds, or what the villagers saw it as – a place to get stones for building – but layers of habitations, peoples, time. She had been standing between walls still mostly intact, though roots had brought down part of one into a slope of blocks where little lizards sunned themselves, and in front of her was a great wall, many times her height, and wider than Daima’s whole house, and there was not one rock missing from it. The whole wall was carved into stories and they were all about a war: the fighters in baggy trousers and tops and big boots, and they carried all kinds of weapons that Daima could not explain, saying only that once there had been weapons so terrible one of them could destroy a whole city. This wall was celebrating a victory: and certainly it was a description of how these ancient people had seen themselves and their enemies, for the faces of the victors were cruel and fierce and the defeated ones were frightened and pleading. At any rate, it was a story, on that wall, of how people had fought, and some had been killed. But on another wall in the same room, or hall, the blocks of stone were smaller and fitted closer, and were covered over with the fine, hard plaster, and the pictures were coloured. These were the same people, with their flat, broad shoulders and lean bodies, and narrow faces, and there was fighting again, but the weapons were different and so were the clothes. The same people, but from different times. That meant these people had been here for – hundreds? – of years. It meant that between the time of the plain carving of the stone and the time of decorating this smooth, crisp plaster with the coloured pictures, they had discovered the plaster and how to make it stick on rock, and how to mix colours that lasted for – how long? And on another part of the hill she found a part-fallen building with the inner walls carved, but it had earth halfway up the walls. Almost on top of these walls, as if the builders had tried to continue the old ones