into the inner rooms.
Mara lifted water to Daima’s lips but the old woman was past swallowing.
Dann came back. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
‘I’m not going while she is alive.’
He sat down with his arms folded at the rocky table, put his head on his arms – and was at once asleep. His breathing was steady, healthy, loud.
Mara sat by the old woman, wiping her face with a wet cloth, then her arms and her hands. She kept taking gulps of water herself, each one a delicious surprise, since it had been so long since she could simply lift a cup and take a mouthful without thinking, I must only take a few drops. Mara thought, If I don’t eat soon I will simply fall over and die myself. She left Daima and went to the storeroom. There were still some roots. She sliced one, licking the juice off her fingers. Then she reached up out of the dry cistern a can that had some of the white flour in it, which she had saved so that one day she would have the strength to leave. It had been three seasons since anyone had come with flour to barter. It smelled a bit stale, but it was still good. She mixed it with water, patted it flat, and put it out on the cistern top, where she knew it would cook in that flaming heat in a few minutes. When she went back to Daima, the old woman was dead.
Dann still slept.
Mara put her hand out towards his shoulder, but before she touched him he was on his feet, and a knife was in his hand. He saw her, took her in, nodded, sat down and at once drew towards him the plate of sliced root, and began eating. He ate it all.
‘That was for both of us.’
‘You didn’t say.’
She got another root, sliced that, and ate it while he watched. Then she brought in the flat bread from the cistern top, broke it in two and gave him half.
‘This is almost the last of the flour,’ she said.
‘I have a little with me.’
When he had finished eating he went to bend over Daima, staring. She probably hadn’t changed very much since he left, except that her long hair was white.
‘Do you remember her?’ she asked.
‘She looked after us.’
‘Do you remember our home?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember the night Gorda rescued us and arranged for us to be brought here to Daima?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember the two people who brought us?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember Mishka? And her baby, Dann? You called him Dann?’
He frowned. ‘I think I do. A little.’
‘You cried when you had to say goodbye to Mishkita.’
And now he sighed, and looked long and hard at her. He was trying to remember? He didn’t want to remember? He did not like it, her trying to make him remember?
It was painful for Mara: her body, her arms – her arms particularly – knew how they had sheltered Dann, how he had clung and hugged her, but now he seemed to remember nothing at all. Yet those memories were the strongest she had, and looking after Dann had been the first and most important thing in her life. It was as if all that early time together had become nothing.
But she thought, If I did let my arms reach out now it wouldn’t be Dann, but only this strange young man with the dangerous thing between his legs. I could not just hug him or kiss him now.
Then just as the sense of herself, Mara, was fading away, and she was feeling like a shadow or a little ghost, he said unexpectedly, ‘You sang to me. You used to sing to me when I went to sleep.’ And he smiled. It was the sweetest smile – not a jeer, or a sneer – and yet what she felt was, the smile was for the songs, and not for her, who had sung them to him.
‘I looked after you,’ she said.
He really was trying to remember, she could see. ‘We’ll tell each other things,’ he said, ‘but now we should go.’
‘Where?’
‘Well, we can’t stay here.’
She was thinking, But I’ve been here, and Daima too … She wanted to give him something good out of those long years and said, ‘Up in those hills there are the old cities. You never really saw them. I could show you, when the fire has died out.’
‘There are old ruins everywhere. You’ll see.’
Mara and Dann stood on either side of the tall stack of rocks that was a table and looked at each other as strangers do who want to please each other, but thinking, I can’t read that face … that look … those eyes. And both sighed, at the same moment.
Dann turned away from the strain of it. He began looking around the room, with sharp, clever eyes: he was planning, Mara could see. What was going into those plans she could not even guess at. For she had been here, all this time, knowing nothing but this village, while he …
‘Water, first,’ he said. He took two of the cans that had the wooden handles set across the tops, put loops of rope into the handles, tested the loops, slung the cans on a thick stick. Then he took them inside to the cistern. He did not have to tell her why: the mud in that water would have had time to settle.
He brought the cans back. ‘A pity we can’t take all the cans.’
‘Don’t they have them – where we are going?’
‘Hardly any. Not of this metal. All these would keep us fed for a year. But never mind. Now, food.’ He put on the table a leather bag and showed her the flour in it. Enough for a few pieces of bread. Mara brought ten yellow roots from next door and a bag of the white flour traders had once brought.
‘Is that all we’ve got?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Get some of these things.’ He indicated Mara’s brown garment.
She grimaced, but went into the storeroom and fetched back an armful.
‘We can get food for these,’ he said. He bundled them, three and three.
She went back in, and fetched some of the delicate old garments from the chest full of them, and spread them out. He picked up one, frowning: his hands were unused to such fragile cloth.
‘Better leave these,’ he said. ‘If people see them they’ll think we’re … we’re…’
‘What? But we are. We wore these, at home. I don’t want to leave them.’
‘You can’t take them all.’
‘I’ll take these two.’
