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

‘Beautiful cities,’ he said, ‘with gardens and parks, that the ice covered, but it is going now, it is going so fast.’

But she mocked him and he laughed with her.

‘Come to bed, Dann.’

He had not been in her bed for three nights now and it was because, and he told her so, she was in the middle of her cycle, so she could conceive. She always laughed at him and was petulant, when he said this, asking how did he know, and anyway, she wanted a child, please, come on Dann.

And this was now the painful point of division between them. She wanted a child, to keep him with her, and he very much did not.

Marianthe had told her woman friends and the girls working at the inn, and they had told their men, and one evening, in the big main room, one of the fishermen called out that they had heard he knew the secrets of the bed.

‘Not of the bed,’ he said. ‘But of birth, when to conceive, yes.’

The room was full of men and women, and some children. By now he knew them all. Their faces had on them the same expression when they looked at him. Not antagonistic, exactly, but ready to be. He was always testing them, even when he did not mean to.

Now one fisherman called out, ‘And where did you get all that clever stuff from, Dann? Perhaps it is too deep for us.’

Here it was again, a moment when something he said brought into question everything he had ever said, all his tales, his exploits.

‘Nothing clever about it,’ Dann said. ‘If you can count the days between one full moon and the next full moon, and you do that all the time, then you can count the intervals between a woman’s flows. It is simple. For five days in the middle of a woman’s cycle a woman can conceive.’

‘You haven’t told us who told you. How do you know? How is it you know this and we don’t?’ A woman said this, and she was unfriendly.

‘Yes, you ask me how I know. Well, it is known. But only in some places. And that is the trouble. That is our trouble, all of us – do you see? Why is it you can travel to a new place and there is knowledge there that isn’t in other places? When my sister Mara arrived at the Agre Army – I told you that story – the general there taught her all kinds of things she didn’t know but he didn’t know about the means of controlling birth. He had never heard of it.’

Dann was standing by the great counter of the room where the casks of beer were, and the ranks of mugs. He was looking around at them all, from face to face, as if someone there could come out, there and then, with another bit of information that could fit in and make a whole.

‘Once,’ he said, ‘long ago, before the Ice came down up there’ – and he pointed in the direction of the ice cliffs – ‘all the land up there was covered with great cities and there was a great knowledge, which was lost, under the Ice. But it was found, some of it, and hidden in the sands – when there were sands and not marshes. Then bits and pieces of the old knowledge travelled, and it was known here and there, but never as a whole, except in the old Centre – but now it is in fragments there too.’

‘And how do you know what you know?’ came a sardonic query, from the eldest of the fishermen. Real hostility was near now; they were all staring at him and their eyes were cold.

Marianthe, behind the counter, began to weep.

‘Yes,’ said one of the younger fishermen, ‘he makes you cry; is that why you like him, Marianthe?’

That scene had been some days ago.

And now, this afternoon, was the moment when Dann knew he had to go …

‘Marianthe,’ he said, ‘you know what I’m going to say.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Well, Marianthe, would you really be pleased if I went off leaving you with a baby? Would you?’

She was crying and would not answer.

In the corner of the room was his old sack. And that was all he had, or needed, after such a long time here – how long? Durk had reminded him that it was nearly three years.

He went down to the common-room, holding his old sack.

All the eyes in the room turned to see Marianthe, pale and tragic. People were eating their midday meal after returning from fishing.

One of the girls called out, ‘Some men were asking for you.’

‘What?’ said Dann, and in an instant his security in this place, or anywhere on the islands, disappeared. What a fool he had been, thinking that the descent to the Bottom Sea and a few hops from island to island had been enough to … ‘Who were they?’ he asked.

A fisherman called out, ‘They say you have a price on your head. What is your crime?’

Dann had already hitched his sack on to his shoulders and, seeing this, Durk was collecting his things too.

‘I told you, I ran away from the army in Shari. I was a general and I deserted.’

A man who didn’t like him said, ‘General, were you?’

‘I told you that.’

‘So your tales were true, then?’ someone said, half regretful, part sceptical still.

Dann, standing there, a thin and at the moment griefstricken figure, so young – sometimes he still looked like a boy – did not look like a general, or anything soldierly, for that matter. Not that they had ever seen a soldier.

‘Nearly all were true,’ said Dann, thinking of how he had softened everything for them. He had never told them that once he had gambled away his sister, nor what had happened to him in the Towers – not even Marianthe, who knew of the scars on his body. ‘They were true,’ he said again, ‘but the very bad things I did not tell you.’

Marianthe was leaning on the bar counter, weeping. One of the girls put her arms round her and said, ‘Don’t, you’ll be ill.’

‘You haven’t said what they looked like,’ said Dann, thinking of his old enemy, Kulik, who might or might not be dead.

At last he got out of them that there were two men, not young, and yes, one had a scar. Well, plenty of people had scars; ‘up there’ they did, but not down here.

Durk was beside Dann now, with his sack. The girls were bringing food for them to take.

‘Well,’ called a fisherman, from over his dish of soup and bread, ‘I suppose we’ll never hear the rest of your tales. Perhaps I’ll miss you, at that.’

‘We’ll miss you,’ the girls said, and crowded around to kiss him and pet him. ‘Come back, come back,’ they mourned.

And Dann embraced Marianthe, but swiftly, because of the watching people. ‘Why don’t you come up to the Centre?’ he whispered, but knew she never would – and she did not answer.

‘Goodbye, General,’ came from his chief antagonist, sounding quite friendly now. ‘And be careful as you go. Those men are nasty-looking types.’

Dann and Durk went to the boat, this time not stopping at every island, and to Durk’s, where his parents asked what had kept him so long. The girl Durk had wanted was with someone else and averted her eyes when she saw him.

At the inn Dann heard again about the men who had been asking for him. He thought, When I get to the Centre I’ll be safe. In the morning, he sat in the boat as he had come, in the bows, like a passenger, Durk rowing from the middle, his back to Dann, like a boatman.

Dann watched the great cliffs of the southern shore loom up, until Durk exclaimed, ‘Look!’ and rested his oars, and Dann stood to see better.

Down the crevices and cracks and gulleys poured white, a smoking white … had ‘up there’ been flooded, had the marshes overflowed? And then they saw; it was mist that was seeping down the dark faces of the cliff. And Durk said he had never seen anything like that in all his time as a boatman and Dann slumped back on his seat, so relieved he could only say, ‘That’s all right, then.’ He had had such a vision of disaster, as if all the world of ‘up there’ had gone into water.