The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. Doris Lessing

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