Mara and Dann

"And then?"

"The pits have black rings, with bits of chain on the rings."

"And then?"

"The rings are made of some metal we don't have."

"And so?"

"All the same, Daima, I think those pits are quite recent — I mean hundreds of years, not thousands."

When Mara said hundreds, she meant a long time; and when thousands, it meant her mind had given up, confessed failure: thousands meant an unimaginable, endless past.

Up on those hills — for behind the one near the village were piled others — forcing herself between bushes and saplings, squeezing through gaps in boulders, sliding down shaly descents in showers of stones, climbing trees to look over places she could not penetrate because of thick undergrowth, what Mara had slowly understood — and it had been slow, years — was that this was not just, as Daima had told her, a ruined city thousands of years old, or hundreds, or what the villagers saw it as — a place to get stones for building — but layers of habitations, peoples, time. She had been standing between walls still mostly intact, though roots had brought down part of one into a slope of blocks where little lizards su

And on top of and between the half destroyed houses and halls another city had been built, much more beautiful and finely decorated. And that, too, had been tumbled by a quake, but this time the people had not bothered to rebuild. Why hadn't they? What had happened to them? Where were they? Up here by herself, and even at night, though Daima hated her coming at night, Mara stood with these layers of the past all around her; and sometimes felt herself go cold and frightened, thinking of how they had lived here, all those people, building their houses when the earth shook and everything fell down. And living there again, decorating walls with such care, mixing colours, putting pictures of birds and beasts and feasts, as well as fighting and soldiers, on their walls. And then they had disappeared. People just like herself, she supposed: they had vanished, and no one knew about them. A little girl, overwhelmed by time, the weight of it, thoughts that crammed her brain and made it want to burst, she had climbed up on Daima and shivered and clung. "They've just gone, gone, gone, Daima, and they were here for so long. And we don't know their names or anything."

But these days she did not cling or cuddle up to Daima, for Mara was as tall as she was, and much stronger. Now when she held Daima she felt as if the old woman were the child and she the mother, and she marvelled that this huddle of thin bones held together at all.

Down below the little boys were fighting, a real fight. Often a play fight became that, the Rock People ganging up on Da

Da

This milk was all that Daima could eat now. If it didn't rain soon there would be no more milk.

There was only a little of the white flour left, because a trader had come but he had said he thought it wasn't worth his while if all they could give him was the yellow roots.

Mara had been making experiments. She found grasses that had small, lumpy seeds. She beat the thin, fragile heads of the grass on a stone, got out some grain and beat that on a stone. But for a whole day's work there was only a cup of flour. She had a stroke of luck when she found, while digging for the yellow roots, a big round root the size of a baby's head, which was filled with a dense white stuff. She cooked it and, risking that it was poison, ate, while Daima watched, ready with an emetic. But it was not poisonous and made a filling porridge. There were very few green leaves anywhere. They ate, though sparingly, the white flour, in case this was the last they'd see, the yellow roots, and this new white root. They ate sour milk and a little cheese. They were always hungry. Daima said that neither of them had had a square meal in five years and yet were shooting up like reeds after rain. They must be feeding on air, she said. "Or dust," they joked.