Mara and Dann (39 page)

Sometimes sandbanks appeared ahead, and on them the water dragons lay, and slid into the water when the boat appeared. The banks were too far on either side to see the details of nests and birds' lives; nor did they see animals standing to drink, because they ran away when they saw the boat. And so, day after day, they went along. Every night they tied up, sometimes in a town or village, sometimes at an inn that stood by itself on the bank, waiting for the river travellers. All these inns and guest houses were simple, and clean, and pleasant. They supplied evening and morning meals of bread, and sometimes cheese, and vegetable stew, and a drink made from palm tree juice. The travellers were given big communal rooms to sleep in, or were four, five, six in a room. Dann and Mara were never out of each other's sight. The towns were like Goidel, each one with its own individuality, expressing itself in the eyes and faces and ways of moving and talking of the inhabitants, which Mara found invigorating, a challenge, because she had not till recently known living, busy towns full of confidence, each one needing to be understood, like a person. When the boat was tied up in the evenings, sometimes she and Dann wandered about the streets, looking – always – into faces, perhaps risking the purchase of a fruit, or sweets, or a small cake, for its taste of this place, so different from other places. Sometimes Dann would stare so long and hard at someone that he, or she, would be annoyed, and disturbed, and stare back: What do you want?

‘Who is this person you are waiting to see, Dann? Please, tell me.'

But he did not answer. Sometimes she thought he did not hear, so deep was he in this inner pursuit. Sometimes, trying to keep contact with him, staying close, she might talk, commenting on what they saw, for minutes, half an hour, with no reply from him at all. Yet later he might say something that meant he had heard her, had stored up what she said. These evening strolls through the towns they visited were delightful to her but, she thought, not to him. How could they be, when he was so fearful and on guard? Yet he said unexpectedly, ‘I like these walks with you, Mara. I look forward to them all day, on the boat.'

Day after day. Sometimes Dann came back to crouch by her and measure on the wood of the boat's deck a little distance with his fingers:
how far they had come on this boat. And then, how far since Chelops. Then, the Rock Village. When he drew a capacious shape of Ifrik, on the planks, other people saw, and joined in, showing with their hands the distances they had come – but none as far as Dann and Mara. Some of them knew the shape of Ifrik. Others stared, and puzzled, and could not take in what Mara and Dann explained.

Most of the time Dann was up in the front of the boat watching the sun device. There were six guards, always changing. At night Han left two guards when she went ashore to eat or sleep, but usually stayed on the boat, with the guards. More than once one was Dann, but Mara hated that, afraid she would not see him again, and could not sleep. Han used Dann more and more. This dried-up woman, like a tall, clever old monkey, so quick and alert, watched the men guards all the time, seeing if they drifted into a day dream or turned their faces away too long from the sun trap. Dann seemed able to stay alert all the time. He stood in the prow, balancing on his set-apart feet, sideways on to the sun trap, so that he could see all the boat (and, Mara knew, anyone who might be creeping up on him), and his eyes moved slowly and steadily around the faces of the travellers, to the trap, and then around again. He saw at once if someone went too close to the trap, or was careless in settling their bags and sacks. People begged Han to let them see the sun trap, and sometimes she agreed, but stood near it, and them, watching every movement. And they would stand staring at the square of metal, which was unknown now, something invented in the distant past and forgotten, this square which seemed like a blank, dully shining surface. But then, if you stared into it, there were changes and shifts of light in its depths, and colours too, strengthening and fading, like the colours of water or sky at sunset and sunrise, so it was as if you stared into water, deep water; and it was always with surprise and unease that the travellers saw – returning to themselves out of the illusory depths of the metal – that it was after all only a piece of something not far off the tin they had used all their lives made into cups and plates and containers, and which came from manufactories that some of them had seen. Just a square of metal, flat and thin, nothing to it, which you might kick aside or throw on to a rubbish heap; and yet it was something to make you feel awe or even terror, because this bit of nothing much, that looked as if it had come off a scrap heap, could make this boat move upstream day after day, pushing aside the waters of this great river.

Soon there were many shoals and sandbanks and Han navigated herself,
not leaving the task to one of the guards who, when the river was deep enough, had only to stand at the tiller and keep the boat moving straight. Now Han swung the boat from this side of the river to the other, or between sandbanks, and two guards stood on one side and two on the other to ward off a shoal or push the boat off a shallow bank. There were no rocks on this river, only sand, that shifted as the currents flowed. Day after day…Mara felt she had been on this boat all her life, and would never leave it, each night sleeping in an inn so like all the others she sometimes felt she had not left the last one, each morning embarking and settling on the same bench; and feeling, as the boat swung out into the stream, that the walk around this particular town, and the restless sleep in the inn, had not happened, for the reality was the river, the shoals, the sandbanks, the shores that slid backwards with their trees and birds; and sometimes, deep in the water, fish or the stubbornly following water dragons. It seemed that the dragons had divided up the river, for as the boat entered a stretch of water they saw nosing towards them four or five from the sandbanks; and these would follow for a while, and then propel themselves away to where there was a flat beach or a bank. And then another population of the creatures would take over. Day after day…and then there was a change, and it was in the air. Instead of the smell of river water, and sometimes a blast of hot sand smell, there was a bad taint coming to them from ahead of the boat, and then it went, to be forgotten, but came again, stronger; and soon there were foul blasts of air in their faces, and before long the smell was continuous. People were being sick over the side of the boat, or sat holding cloth to their faces. That night Han went ashore to the proprietor of the guest house and conferred with him for a long time, while she eyed the travellers eating their frugal meal. Or deciding they could not eat, for it was not possible to avoid the smell here, no matter where they sat or how they shut the doors and windows.

Han called them together and said that there had been a war, probably still going on, in the territory they were going to pass through, and there were great numbers of people fleeing from the war, living how they could on either side of the river. They had no food. They often had only the clothes they wore. They were dying. All they had was water. If the passengers wanted to go on, they would have to pass between banks crowded with these desperate people. The alternative was to return, going back downriver. She took it that no one wanted to do that. Then, tomorrow would be a difficult day. Everyone must be ready to fend off possible attempts by
boarders, and above all, to defend the sun trap. She was going to position ten of the strongest men by the sun trap. She wanted contributions from everyone to buy a big sack of bread to throw to the refugees: she waited while people gave a few small coins each. She told everyone to find a stick, and sharpen it. Before they left for the boat in the morning, there would be a tub of water by the door of the inn, full of strong smelling herbs, and they should soak cloths or even bits of clothing in it, and tie these around their faces, because then the smell would be less.

Next morning this crowd of people, who by now knew each other very well, went down to the boat in a wary company, and each held a long stick or a knife. On the boat Han positioned ten guards all together around the sun trap, Dann in charge of them, and made the rest of the men line the sides of the boat, with the women around the back, all with their weapons. She stood at the prow steering, watching everything and everybody. The smell was by now almost unendurable. For a couple of hours the boat went steadily up the middle of the river, in and out of the sandbanks, while corpses floated past and the water dragons fought over them. Then they turned into a new reach of the river, and there they were, the desperate people, massed on the banks, staring at the boat. Then a shout went up and from both shores they crowded into the water which was shallow almost to the middle. Nowhere was the river deep. In a moment they were splashing, wading, swimming to the boat. The dragons snatched and snapped at this fresh meat. Several of the attackers were dragged down out of sight, or struggled in the shallows with the beasts, but on they all came, hundreds, cursing, wailing, screaming, pleading. In a moment the guards at the front were beating off people trying to climb up the front of the boat. Someone reached up to cling on to the sun trap but Dann knocked him off into the water. All along both sides of the boat the passengers were using sticks, poles, oars – anything – to push the refugees back. A woman drowned: she could not swim. Some children reached a sandbank and began leaping up at the boat as it passed, and were beaten down. Mara, who was at the back with the women, saw how the people who had been shoved off the sides tried to swim after the boat. Han took the big bag of bread and threw bread into the water; soon all the attackers were fighting over the bread, snatching it from each other, eating it as they swam or waded. Then that stretch of river with its crowds was past, but the danger was not over, because there was another bend, and more swarms of refugees.

Again the guards were beating off people trying to reach up for a hold
on the projecting sun trap. Again the water dragons dragged people under. Again the screams and cries and pleas filled the travellers with a frenzy of fear themselves, and they were crueller than with the earlier attackers. This was a bigger crowd, and they seemed to be well established on both banks, in a hundred different varieties of shack, shelter, hut, and lean-to. The smell here was worse, too, because of these refugee camps. Because they had been longer on the banks, they had attacked boats before, as could be seen by the way they were planning the assault. For ten minutes or so there was a real battle, and both Mara and Dann were in the thick of it, Dann at the front of the boat, Mara at the back. And then, another bend, and the din was gone. One minute it seemed the whole world was shrieks, yells, the sound of wood hitting flesh – and they were again on a peaceful river where trees and reeds stood along the banks. There were no water dragons: they had all gone downstream to the feast. The wind blowing into their faces meant that the smell had gone. And the travellers sank down into their places, took the cloths off their faces, and sat exhausted, while the fear and anger left them.

What would happen to those refugees? What had happened to the inhabitants of Rustam and the Rock Village, of Chelops and many other towns which had emptied because of the long drought? What did happen to people who lost their little place and had to flee? And if those refugees they had left behind did go back to their homes, what would they find, who would they find?

The boat was again moving slowly ahead. It had been two weeks since they had left Goidel. Now Han made them all listen, and said that because of the lowness of the water and the necessity of dodging the banks and shoals, and the nastiness of the attacks, she wanted more money from them. They realised that she did this on all these trips – this ugly, yellow, monkey woman with her little greedy eyes; they hated her, but they all paid out what she asked, because they were dependent on her knowledge of the river. More than once there had been mutters and grumbles, that they should throw her overboard and take the boat on themselves. But without her they would be aground on a sandbank within a few minutes, and they knew it. Mara gave her a bag of small coins. So much had been paid out for food and lodging at the inns for her and Dann that she now had only a few little coins left. And there was so much of this journey still to come before they got – where? North. Everyone talked all the time about ‘up there' and ‘up north' where things were so much better. How did they know? Who did know? When Han was asked if she knew she said, with her short, ugly
little laugh, which despised the world, ‘It depends where you end up, doesn't it?'

Now the travellers had to brace themselves for another trial. In a couple of days, Han said, they would reach the canal where there would be a whole day of propelling the boat between banks so close that from them even a child could jump on to the deck. She had been up this way six months before, with no danger at this one place where it could be almost expected – the canal; but the war that had made refugees of so many people had spread this way from the East, and bands of soldiers were roaming the country. Han was keeping a closer watch than usual. Her eyes were always on the move, first one bank, and beyond it to the savannah, then the other bank, then ahead, as the river turned a bend, and behind, from where they had come.

Next day, they heard shouts, gruff commands, the thudding of feet on hard earth, and the boat was running level with a band of soldiers. When they turned their heads – all at the same moment – to stare at the boat, their faces were all alike: these were another version of the people who seemed, every one, to be cut from the same mould. They were heavy, ugly people. Their hair was a pale frizz. They were as alike as insects. They were Hennes soldiers, said Han: the Hennes were rulers in these parts. It was easy to imagine those robustly planted legs, stamp, stamp, stamp, as the legs of a single organism, perhaps one of those long, shiny, brown insects like worms, the length of a forearm, and their legs moving all together, like a rippling fringe. And the brown uniforms made a blur, like a long, brown crawler which, if crushed, shows it is filled with a whitish ooze. Easy to believe, too, that the Hennes were filled with it, and not with the healthy red blood of real people.