Mara and Dann

"I don't know. Perhaps he began by a joke and then. It would be very easy to keep him under a little too long." "Why did he want to kill Da

"Little boys grow up. And so do little girls, Mara. Be careful all the time. Not that you have to keep in the house. I'm going to teach you how to milk the animal, and how to let the milk go sour and make cheese. And how to find the roots too — and that is very important. You have to be out and about and do your share. I might die, Mara. I'm an old woman. You have to know everything I know. I'll show you where the money is. But remember: it is easy to slip a scorpion into a fold of cloth or throw a stone from behind a wall so that it looks as if it has come off a roof, or put a child in a cistern and pull the rock lid over. A child did die like that once. One of theirs, though. No one could hear it cry out because the lid was a fit."

"That means someone meant to kill it."

"Yes, I think so."

"That means that they fight each other — the Rock People."

"Yes, they do. There are families who won't speak to each other."

Suddenly Mara giggled, and Daima seemed surprised. Mara quickly said, "We haven't enough water. We only have a little food. But they quarrel." And looked at Daima to see if she had understood.

Daima said, very dry, but smiling, "I see you are growing up fast. But that is the point. The harder things are the more people fight. You'd think it was the other way about."

Next morning Daima said to Da

"What's the matter with the child?" asked Daima. "Stop him."

"I know what's wrong," said Mara, and she did, though at first she hadn't. The faces of the two were so alike you could hardly tell them apart: two angry faces looking down at the child, their lips thin and tight with dislike of him. Mara ran out and grabbed Da

"You keep those brats of yours to yourself," one man said loudly into the doorway to Daima.

And they went off, the two men, as similar from the back as from the front: heavy and slow, both with the same way of poking their heads forward.

Mara held the child as he sobbed, limp against her shoulder; and she said to Daima, past his head, that there had been two men with similar faces, and one had threatened to beat them and kept them without water, and the other was kind and gave them water — and now they seemed to Da

Daima said, "Those two out there grew up with my two. I know them. They are bullies and they are sly. Da

And now Mara began explaining to Da

While Mara talked, Da

"Let's play the game," she tried, at last. "What did you see? — " then, at home, with the bad people? "What did you see? — " later, with the man who gave us water? Slowly Da

He stuck his thumb in his mouth and the loud sucking began, and then he slept, while Mara sat rocking him and Daima went off to the river with her containers.

When she came back she washed them both again, while they stood in the shallow basin; and this time she washed their hair too, though it would not stay nice and shiny for long, with the dust swirling about everywhere.

Then Daima took the children out to where she said the milk beast was waiting — she had told Rabat she would milk it. Da

Daima had two cans of milk, one full and one partly full. They went to Rabat's house and gave her the part-full can. She looked sharply into the can to see if she had her promised share, then smiled in the way Mara hated and said, "Thank you."

Now it was the hot part of the day, and they sat in the cool half dark of the big room. Da

Mara saw that Daima's eyes were full of tears, and then that tears were ru