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The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5
Doris Lessing
From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the second instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.This is the story of the kindly Queen of Zone Three, who rules a land free of all harshness, and her forced marriage with the soldier-king of Zone Four, which is hierarchic, disciplined, inflexible, dutiful. This apparently difficult marriage, unwanted by both, requires a compromise between impulse and reason, between instinct and logic.Ben Ata learns to accept and then to love the ruler of Zone Three and her alien ways; and she learns to love and to need him. But when the Queen is commanded by the Providers to return to her own realm, she must obey, shattering though it is to leave her husband and child. Ben Ata, in turn, is ordered to marry the savage beauty who rules Zone Five, a land that both unites and reverses the other two Zones.In ‘The Marriages …’ Doris Lessing uses science-fiction brilliantly to investigate the conflict between men and women. Once again, invented planets allow her to deploy her unillusioned knowledge of the real world of the reader.


DORIS LESSING
CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES
THE MARRIAGES BETWEEN ZONES THREE, FOUR AND FIVE
(As narrated by the Chroniclers of Zone Three)




Copyright (#uadd51b90-05af-5f16-ad92-2cff0a74b60e)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1981 Reprinted 6 times
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1980
Copyright © Doris Lessing 1980
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006547204
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN:9780007404223
Version: 2017-04-27
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five is the second in a series of novels with the overall title ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’; the first is Shikasta (1979); the third The Sirian Experiments (1981); the fourth The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982); and the fifth The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983).

Contents
Cover (#uda07fdd1-fa9b-513c-8a2f-043dcf02d293)
Title Page (#u6812939b-27c6-559d-90fe-db80b98d6eaa)
Copyright (#u6940cda8-a1cf-5b98-8b30-ab6c94f092cf)
THE MARRIAGES BETWEEN ZONES THREE, FOUR AND FIVE (#u02495f3b-be3b-5266-aa39-fdbf6e61c3e8)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
The Grass is Singing (#litres_trial_promo)
The Golden Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)
The Good Terrorist (#litres_trial_promo)
Love, Again (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fifth Child (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES THE MARRIAGES BETWEEN ZONES THREE, FOUR AND FIVE (#uadd51b90-05af-5f16-ad92-2cff0a74b60e)
Rumours are the begetters of gossip. Even more are they the begetters of song. We, the Chroniclers and song-makers of our Zone, aver that before the partners in this exemplary marriage were awake to what the new directives meant for both of them, the songs were with us, and were being amplified and developed from one end of Zone Three to the other. And of course this was so in Zone Four.
Great to Small High to Low Four into Three Cannot go.
This was a children’s counting game. I was watching them at it from my windows the day after I heard the news. And one of them rushed up to me in the street with a ‘riddle’ he had heard from his parents: If you mate a swan and a gander, who will ride?
What was being said and sung in the camps and barracks of Zone Four we do not choose to record. It is not that we are mealy-mouthed. Rather that every chronicle has its appropriate tone.
I am saying that each despised the other? No, we are not permitted actively to criticize the dispensations of the Providers, but let us say that we in Zone Three did not forget — as the doggerel chanted during those days insisted:
Three comes before Four. Our ways are peace and plenty. Their ways — war!
It was days before anything happened.
While this famous marriage was being celebrated in the imaginations of both realms, the two most concerned remained where they were. They did not know what was wanted of them.
No one had expected the marriage. It had not reached even popular speculation. Zones Three and Four were doing very well, with Al·Ith for us, Ben Ata for them. Or so we thought.
Quite apart from the marriage, there were plenty of secondary questions. What could it mean that our Al·Ith was ordered to travel to the territory of Ben Ata, so that the wedding could be accomplished on his land? This was one of the things we asked ourselves.
What, in this context, was a wedding?
What, even, a marriage?
When Al·Ith first heard of the Order, she believed it to be a joke. She and her sister laughed. All of Zone Three heard how they laughed. Then arrived a message that could only be regarded as a rebuke, and people came together in conferences and councils all over the Zone. They sent for us — the Chroniclers and the poets and the song-makers and the Memories. For weeks nothing was talked of but weddings and marriages, and every old tale and ballad that could be dug up was examined for information.
Messengers were even sent to Zone Five, where we believed weddings of a primitive kind did take place. But there was war all along their frontiers with Zone Four and it was not possible to get in.
We wondered, if this marriage was intended to follow ancient patterns, whether Zones Three and Four should join in a festival? But the Zones could not mingle, were inimical by nature. We were not even sure where the frontier was. Our side was not guarded. The inhabitants of Zone Three, straying near the frontier, or approaching it from curiosity as children or young people sometimes did, found themselves afflicted with repugnance, or at the least by an antipathy to foreign airs and atmospheres that showed itself in a cold lethargy, like boredom. It cannot be said that Zone Four had for us the secret attractions and fascinations of the forbidden: the most accurate thing I can say is that we forgot about it.
Ought there perhaps to be two festivals, simultaneously, and each would celebrate that our two lands, so different, could nevertheless mirror something, at least in this way? But what would be the point of that? After all, festivals and celebrations were not exactly pleasures we had to do without.
Should there then be small wedding parties among us, to mark the occasion?
New clothes? Decorations in our public places? Gifts and presents? All these were sanctioned by the old songs and stories.
More time passed. We knew that Al·Ith was low in spirits, and was keeping to her quarters. She had never done this before, had always been available and open to us. The women everywhere were out of temper and despondent.
The children began to suffer.
Then came the first visible and evident manifestation of the new time. Ben Ata sent a message that his men would come to escort her to him. This curtness was exactly what we expected from his Zone. A realm at war did not need the courtesies. Here was proof of the rightness of our reluctance to be brought low by Zone Four.
Al·Ith was resentful, rebellious. She would not go, she announced.
Again there was an Order, and it said, simply, that she must go.
Al·Ith put on her dark blue mourning clothes, since this was the only expression of her inner feelings she felt she still had the latitude to use. She gave out no instructions for a Grief, but that was what was being felt by us all.
Felt confusingly and — we suspected — wrongly. Emotions of this kind are not valued by us. Have not been for so long we have no records of anything different. As individuals we do not expect — it is not expected of us — to weep, wail, suffer. What can happen to any one of us that does not happen at some time to everyone? Sorrow at bereavement, at personal loss, has become formalized, ritualized, in public occasions seen by us all as channels and vehicles for our little personal feelings. It is not that we don’t feel! — but that feelings are meant always to be directed outwards and used to strengthen a general conception of ourselves and our realm. But with this new dispensation of Al·Ith the opposite seemed to be happening.
Never had our Zone known so many tears, accusations, irrational ill-feelings.
Al·Ith had all her children brought to her and when they wept she did not check them.
She insisted that this much must be allowed her without it being considered active rebellion.
There were those — many of us — who were perturbed; many who began to be critical of her.
We could not remember anything like this; and soon we were talking of how long it had been since there had been any kind of Order from the Providers. Of how previous changes of the Need — always referred to by us simply, and without further definition, in this one word — had been received by us. Of why, now, there should be such a reversal. We asked ourselves if we had grown into the habit of seeing ourselves falsely. But how could it be wrong to approve our own harmonies, the wealths and pleasantness of our land? We believed our Zone to be the equal at least of any other for prosperity and absence of discord. Had it then been a fault to be proud of it?
And we saw how long it had been since we had thought at all of what lay beyond our borders. That Zone Three was only one of the realms administered generally from Above, we knew. We did think, when we thought on these lines at all, of ourselves in interaction with these other realms, but it was in an abstract way. We had perhaps grown insular? Self-sufficing?
Al·Ith sat in her rooms and waited.
And then they appeared, a troop of twenty horsemen, in light armour. They carried shields that protected them against our higher finer air which would otherwise have made them ill, and these they had to have. But why head protection, and the famous reflecting singlets of Zone Four that could repel any weapon? Those of us who were near the route chosen by our unwelcome guests stood sullen and critical. We were determined not to give any indications of pleasure. Nor did the horsemen greet us. In silence the troops made their way to the palace, and came to a standstill outside Al·Ith’s windows. They had with them a saddled and bridled horse without a rider. Al·Ith saw them from her windows. There was a long wait. Then she emerged on the long flight of white steps, a sombre figure in her dark robes. She stood silent, observing the soldiers whose appearance in this manner, in her country, could only have the effect of a capture. She allowed plenty of time for them to observe her, her beauty, her strength, the self-sufficiency of her bearing. She then descended the steps slowly, and alone. She went straight to the horse that had been brought for her, looked into his eyes, and put her hand on his cheek. This horse was Yori, who became celebrated from this moment. He was a black horse, and a fine one, but perhaps no more remarkable than the others the soldiers were riding. Having greeted him, she lifted off the heavy saddle. She stood with this in her arms, looking into the faces of the men one after another until at last a soldier saw what it was she wanted. She threw the saddle to him, and his horse shifted its legs to adjust the weight as he caught it. He gave a comical little grimace, glancing at his fellows, while she stood, arms folded, watching them. It was the grimace one offers to a clever child trying something beyond its powers, yet succeeding. This was of course not lost on Al·Ith, and she now showed they had missed her real point, by the slow deliberation with which she removed the bridle and tossed that, too, to a soldier.
Then she shook back her head, so that the black hair that was bound lightly around it cascaded down her back. Our women wear their hair in many ways, but if it is up, in braids or in another fashion, and a woman shakes her hair loose, in a particular manner, then this means grief. But the soldiers had not understood, and were admiring her foolishly; perhaps the gesture had been meant for the onlookers who were by now crowding the little square. Al·Ith’s lips were curling in contempt of the soldiers, and with impatience. I must record here that this kind of arrogance — yes, I have to call it that — was not something we expected from her. When we talked over the incident, it was agreed that Al·Ith’s bitterness over the marriage was perhaps doing her harm.
Standing with loosened hair and burning eyes, she slowly wound a fine black veil around her head and shoulders. Mourning — again. Through the transparent black glowed her eyes. A soldier was fumbling to get down off his horse to lift her on to hers, but she had leapt up before he could reach the ground. She then wheeled and galloped off through the gardens in an easterly direction, towards the borders with Zone Four. The soldiers followed. To those of us watching, it looked as if they were in pursuit.
Outside our city she pulled in her horse and walked it. They followed. The people along the roads greeted her, and stared at the soldiers, and it did not look like a pursuit now, because the soldiers were embarrassed and smiling foolishly, and she was the Al·Ith they had always known.
There is a descent off the high plateau of our central land through passes and gorges, and it was not possible to ride fast, apart from the fact that Al·Ith stopped whenever someone wanted to talk to her. For when she observed this was so, she always pulled up her horse and waited for them to approach her.
Now the grimaces among the soldiers were of a different kind, and they were grumbling, for they had expected to be across their own frontier by nightfall. At last, as another group of her people waved and called to her, and she heard the voices of the soldiers rising behind her, she turned her horse and rode back to them, stopping a few paces before the front line of horsemen, so that they had to rein in quickly.
‘What is your trouble?’ she enquired. ‘Would it not be better if you told me openly, instead of complaining to each other like small children?’
They did not like this, and a small storm of anger rose, which their commander quelled.
‘We have our orders,’ he said.
‘While I am in our country,’ said she, ‘I will behave according to custom.’
She saw they did not understand, and she had to explain. ‘I am in the position I hold because of the will of the people. It is not for me to ride past arrogantly, if they indicate they want to say something.’
Again they looked at each other. The commander’s face showed open impatience.
‘You cannot expect me to overturn our customs for yours in this way,’ she said.
‘We have emergency rations for one light meal,’ he said.
She gave a little incredulous shake of her head, as if she could not believe what she was hearing.
She had not meant it as contempt, but this was what transmitted itself to them. The commander of the horsemen reddened, and blurted out: ‘Any one of us is capable of fasting on a campaign for days at a time if necessary.’
‘I hadn’t asked as much,’ she said gravely, and this time, what they heard was humour. They gratefully laughed, and she was able to give a brief smile, then sighed, and said, ‘I know that you are not here by your own will, but because of the Providers.’
But this, inexplicably to her, they felt as insult and challenge, and their horses shifted and sidled as the emotions of their riders came into them.
She gave a little shrug, and turned and went to the group of young men who stood waiting for her at the road’s edge. Below them now lay a wide plain, behind them were the mountains. The plains still lay yellowed by the evening sun, and the high peaks of the mountains sun-glittered, but where they were it was cold and in dusk. The young men crowded around her horse as they talked, showing no fear or awe, and the watching horsemen’s faces showed a crude disbelief. When a youth put up his hand to pat the horse’s cheek briefly, the men let out, all together, a long breath of condemnation. But they were in doubt, and in conflict. It was not possible for them to despise this great kingdom or the rulers of it: they knew better. Yet what they saw at every moment contradicted their own ideas of what was right.
She held up her hand in farewell to the young men, and the men behind her put their horses forward at this signal which had not been to them. She rode on, before them, until they were all on the level of the plain, and then turned again.
‘I suggest that you make a camp here, with the mountains at your back.’
‘In the first place,’ said the commander, very curt — because he had been annoyed his soldiers had instinctively answered her gesture by starting again, instead of waiting for him — ‘in the first place, I had not thought of stopping at all till we reached the frontier. And in the second …’ But his anger silenced him.
‘I am only making the suggestion,’ she said. ‘It will take nine or ten hours to reach the frontier.’
‘At this pace it will.’
‘At any pace. Most nights a strong wind blows over the plain from the east.’
‘Madam! What do you take these men for? What do you take us for?’
‘I see that you are soldiers,’ said she. ‘But I was thinking of the beasts. They are tired.’
‘They will do as they are ordered. As we do.’
Our Chroniclers and artists have made a great thing of this exchange between Al·Ith and the soldiers. Some of the tales begin at this point. She is erect before them, on her horse, who hangs his head, because of the long difficult ride. She is soothing it with her white hand, which glitters with jewels … but Al·Ith was known for her simple dress, her absence of jewels and splendour! They show her long black hair streaming, the veil streaming with it and held on her forehead with a brilliant clasp. They show the angry commander, his face distorted, and the jeering soldiers. The bitter wind is indicated by flying tinted clouds, and the grasses of the plain lie almost flat under it.
All kinds of little animals have crept into this picture. Birds hover around her head. A small deer, a great favourite with our children, has stepped on to the dust of the road, and is holding up its nose to the drooping nose of Al·Ith’s horse, to comfort it, or to give it messages from other animals. Often these pictures are titled ‘Al·Ith’s Animals.’ Some tales tell how the soldiers try to catch the birds and the deer, and are rebuked by Al·Ith.
I take the liberty of doubting whether the actual occasion impressed itself so dramatically on the soldiers, or even on Al·Ith. The soldiers wanted to ride on, and get away from this land they did not understand, and which continually discomfited them. The commander did not want to be put into the position of taking her advice, but nor did he want to ride for hours into a cold wind.
Which in fact was already making itself felt.
Al·Ith was more herself now than she had been for many weeks. She was seeing that while she mourned in her rooms, there had been other things she should have done! Duties had been neglected. She remembered that messages had come in to her from all over the country, which she had been too absorbed in her fierce thoughts to respond to.
She was seeing in herself disobedience, and the results of it. This made her, now, more gentle with this troop of barbarians, and its small-boy commander.
‘You did not tell me your name,’ she asked.
He hesitated. Then: ‘It is Jarnti.’
‘You command the king’s horses?’
‘I am commander of all his forces. Under the king.’
‘My apologies.’ She sighed, and they all heard it. They thought it weakness. Throughout these experiences with her, they could not help feeling in themselves the triumph that barbarian natures show when faced with weakness; and the need to cringe and crowd together when facing strength.
‘I want to leave you for some hours,’ she said.
At this they all, on a single impulse, and without any indication from their leader, crowded around her. She was inside a ring of captors.
‘I cannot allow it,’ said Jarnti.
‘What were your orders from the king?’ she enquired. She was quiet and patient but they heard subservience.
And a great roar of laughter went up from them all. Long tension exploded in them. They laughed and shouted, and the crags behind them echoed. Birds that had already settled themselves for the night wheeled up into the skies. From the long grasses by the road, animals that had been lying hidden broke away noisily.
What Ben Ata had finally shouted at his commander of all the forces, was: ‘Go and get that — — — and bring her here. I’m for it if I don’t — — ’ For while Al·Ith had been weeping and rebellious in her quarters, he had been raging and cursing up and down the camps of his armies. There was not a soldier who had not heard what his king thought of this enforced marriage, while the camps commiserated with him, drinking, laughing, making up ribald toasts which were repeated from one end of Zone Four to the other.
This scene is another favourite of our storytellers and artists. Al·Ith, on her tired horse, is ringed by the brutal laughing men. The cold wind of the plains is pressing her robe close around her. The commander is leaning over her, his face all animal. She is in danger.
And it is true that she was. Perhaps for the only time.
Now night had fallen. Only in the skies behind them was there any light. The sunset sent up flares high towards the crown of the heavens, and made the snow peaks shine. In front of them lay the now black plain, and scattered over it at vast distances were the lights of villages and settlements. On the plateau behind them that they had travelled over, our villages and towns were crowded: it was a populous and busy land. But now they seemed to stand on the verge of nothingness, the dark. The soldiers’ own country was low and mostly flat, and their towns were never built on hills and ridges. They did not like heights. More: as we shall see, they had been taught to fear them. They had been longing for the moment when they could get off that appalling plateau lifted so high among its towering peaks. They had descended from it and, associating flat lands with habitation, saw only emptiness. Their laughter had panic in it. Terror. It seemed they could not stop themselves laughing. And among them was the small silent figure of Al·Ith, who sat quietly while they rolled about in their saddles, making sounds, as she thought, like frightened animals.
Their laughing had to stop at some point. And when it did nothing had changed. She was still there. They had not impressed her with their noise. The illimitable blackness lay ahead.
‘What was Ben Ata’s order?’ she asked again.
An explosion of sniggers, but the commander directed a glance of reproof towards the offenders, although he had been laughing as hard as any of them.
‘His orders?’ she insisted.
A silence.
‘That you should bring me to him, that was it, I think.’
A silence.
‘You will bring me to him no later than tomorrow.’
She remained where she was. The wind was now howling across the plains so that the horses could hardly keep their footing.
The commander gave a brief order which sounded shamefaced. The posse broke up, riding about on the edge of the plain, to find a camping place. She and the commander sat on their tired horses, watching. But normally he would have been with his men who, used to orders and direction, were at a loss. At length he called out that such a place would do, and they all leapt off their horses.
The beasts, used to the low relaxed air of Zone Four, were exhausted from the high altitudes of this place, and were trembling as they stood.
‘There is water around that spur,’ said Al·Ith. He did not argue, but shouted to the soldiers to lead the horses around the spur to drink. He got off his horse, and so did she. A soldier came to lead both animals with the others to the water. A fire was blazing in a glade between deep rocks. Saddles lay about on the grass at intervals: they would be the men’s pillows.
Jarnti was still beside Al·Ith. He did not know what to do with her.
The men were already pulling out their rations from their packs, and eating. The sour powdery smell of dried meat. The reek of spirits.
Jarnti said, with a resentful laugh, ‘Madam, our soldiers seem very interesting to you! Are they so different from your own?’
‘We have no soldiers,’ she said.
This scene, too, is much celebrated among us. The soldiers, illuminated by a blazing fire, are seated on their saddles among the grasses, eating their dried meat and drinking from their flasks. Others are leading back the horses, who have drunk at a stream out of sight behind rocks. Al·Ith stands by Jarnti at the entrance to this little natural fortress. They are watching the horses being closed into a corral that is formed by high rocks. They are hungry, and there is no food for them that night. Al·Ith is gazing at them with pity. Jarnti, towering over the small indomitable figure of our queen, is swaggering and full of bravado.
‘No soldiers?’ said Jarnti, disbelieving. Though of course there had always been rumours to this effect.
‘We have no enemies,’ she remarked. And then added, smiling straight at him, ‘Have you?’
This dumbfounded him.
He could not believe the thoughts her question aroused.
While she was still smiling at him, a soldier came out from the entrance of the little camp and stood at ease close to them.
‘What is he standing there for?’
‘Have you never heard of a sentry?’ he enquired, full of sarcasm.
‘Yes. But no one is going to attack you.’
‘We always post sentries,’ he said.
She shrugged.
Some soldiers were already asleep. The horses drooped and rested behind their rocky barriers.
‘Jarnti, I am going to leave you for some hours,’ she said.
‘I cannot allow you.’
‘If you forbid me, you would be going beyond your orders.’
He was silent.
Here again, a favourite scene. The fire roaring up, showing the sleeping soldiers, the poor horses, and Jarnti, tugging at his beard with both hands in frustrated amazement at Al·Ith, who is smiling at him.
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘you have not eaten.’
She enquired good-humouredly: ‘Do your orders include your forcing me to eat?’
And now he said, confronting her, all trouble and dogged insistence, because of the way he was being turned inside out and upside down by her, and by the situation, ‘Yes, the way I see it, by implication my orders say I should make you eat. And perhaps even sleep, if it comes to that.’
‘Look, Jarnti,’ said she, and went to a low bush that grew not ten paces away. She took some of its fruit. They were lumpy fruits sheathed in papery leaves. She pulled off the leaves. In each were four segments of a white substance. She ate several. The tightness of her mouth showed she was not enjoying them.
‘Don’t eat them unless you want to stay awake,’ she said, but of course he could not resist. He blundered off to the bush, and gathered some for himself, and his mouth twisted up as he tasted the tart crumbly stuff.
‘Jarnti,’ she said, ‘you cannot leave this camp, since you are the commander. Am I correct?’
‘Correct,’ he said, in a clumsy familiarity, which was the only way he knew how to match her friendliness.
‘Well, I am going to walk some miles from here. Since in any case you intend to keep that poor man awake all night for nothing, I suggest you send him with me to make sure I will come back again.’
Jarnti was already feeling the effects of the fruit. He was alert and knew he could not fall off to sleep now.
‘I will leave him on guard and come with you myself,’ he said.
And went to give orders accordingly.
While he did this, Al·Ith walked past the sleeping soldiers to the horses, and gave each one of them, from her palm, a few of the acrid fruits from the bush. Before she had left their little prison they were lifting their heads and their eyes had brightened.
She and Jarnti set off across the blackness of the plain towards the first of the glittering lights.
This scene is always depicted thus: there is a star-crowded sky, a slice of bright moon, and the soldier striding forward made visible and prominent because his chest armour and headpiece and his shield are shining. Beside him Al·Ith is visible only as a dark shadow, but her eyes gleam softly out from her veil.
It could not have been anything like this. The wind was straight in their faces, strong and cold. She wrapped her head completely in her veil, and he had his cloak tight about him and over the lower part of his face; and the shield was held to protect them both from the wind. He had chosen to accompany this queen on no pleasant excursion, and he must have regretted it.
It took three hours to reach the settlement. It was of tents and huts: the herdsmen’s headquarters. They walked through many hundreds of beasts who lifted their heads as they went past, but did not come nearer or move away. The wind was quite enough for them to withstand, and left them no energy for anything else. But as the two came to within calling distance of the first tents, where there was shelter from low scrubby trees, some beasts came nosing towards Al·Ith in the dark, and she spoke to them and held out her hands for them to smell, in greeting.
There were men and women sitting around a small fire outside a tent.
They had lifted their heads, too, sensing the approach of strangers, and Al·Ith called out to them, ‘It is Al·Ith,’ and they called back to her to approach.
All this was astonishing to Jarnti, who went with Al·Ith into the firelight, but several paces behind.
At the sight of him, the faces of the fire-watchers showed wonderment.
‘This is Jarnti, from Zone Four,’ said Al·Ith, as if what she was saying was an ordinary thing. ‘He has come to take me to their king.’
Now there was not a soul in our land who did not know how she felt about this marriage, and there were many curious glances into her face and eyes. But she was showing them that this was not her concern now. She stood waiting while rugs were brought from a tent, and when they were spread, she sat down on one and indicated to Jarnti that he should do the same. She told them that Jarnti had not eaten, and he was brought bread and porridge. She indicated that she did not want food. But she accepted a cup of wine, and Jarnti drank off jugs of the stuff. It was mild in taste, but potent. He was showing signs of discomfort if not of illness: the altitude of our plateau had affected him, he had taken too many of the stimulant berries, and he had not eaten. He was cut through and through by the winds that swept over their heads where they all leaned low over their little fire.
This scene, too, is one much depicted.
It always shows Al·Ith, alert and smiling, surrounded by the men and women of the settlement, with her cup of wine in her hand, and beside her Jarnti, drowsy and drugged. Above them the wind has scoured the sky clean and glittering. The little trees are leaning almost to the ground. The herds surround the fireside scene, looking in and wondering, waiting for a glance from their queen.
She said at once: ‘As I rode out from the capital today, and down through the passes, I was stopped by many of you. What is this that they are saying about the animals?’
The spokesman was an old man.
‘What have they told you, Al·Ith?’
‘That there is something wrong.’
‘Al·Ith, we have ourselves sent in messengers to the capital, with information.’
Al·Ith was silent, and then said, ‘I’m very much to blame. Messages came, and I was too much preoccupied with my own trouble to attend.’
Jarnti was sitting with a bent head, half asleep, but at this his head jerked up, and he let out a gruff triumphant laugh, and muttered, ‘Punish her, beat her, you hear? She admits it!’ before his head dropped again. His mouth hung open, and the cup was loose in his hand. One of the girls took it from him gently. He snatched at it, thrust forward his bottom lip and lifted his chin belligerently at her, saw she was pretty, and a female — and would have put his arms around her, but she swiftly moved back as he submerged again in drunkenness.
Al·Ith’s eyes were full of tears. The women first, then the men, seeing this oaf and his ways, saw too what was in store for her — and they were about to raise their voices in lament, keening, but she lifted her hand and stopped them.
‘There is no help for it,’ she said, in a low voice, her lips trembling. ‘We have our orders. And it is clear down in Zone Four they don’t like it any more than we do.’
They looked enquiringly at her and she nodded. ‘Yes. Ben Ata is very angry. So I understood today from something that was said.’
‘Ben Ata … Ben Ata …’ muttered the soldier, his head rolling. ‘He will have the clothes off you before you can get at him with your magic berries and your tricks.’
At this, one of the men rose to his feet and would have dragged Jarnti off, with two hands under his armpits, but Al·Ith raised her hand to stop him.
‘I am more concerned with the animals,’ she said. ‘What was in the messages you sent me?’
‘Nothing definite, Al·Ith. It is only that our animals are disturbed in their minds. They are sorrowful.’
‘This is true everywhere on the plains?’
‘It is true everywhere in our Zone, or so we hear. Were you not told of it up on the plateau?’
‘I have already said that I am much to blame. I was not attending to my duties.’
A silence. The wind was shrieking over them, but not as loud.
Jarnti was slumped, his cup leaning in his hand, blinking at the fire. Really he was listening, since the berries have the effect of preserving attention even while the muscles are slack and disobedient. This conversation was to be retold everywhere through the camps of Zone Four, and not inaccurately, though to them the emphasis must be that the queen of all the land was sitting ‘like a serf’ by the fire. And, of course, that ‘up there’ they spoke of animals as if they were people.
Al·Ith said to the old man, ‘You have asked the animals?’
‘I have been among the herds since it was noticed. Day after day I have been with them. Not one says anything different. They do not know why, but they are sad enough to die. They have lost the zest for living, Al·Ith.’
‘They are conceiving? Giving birth?’
‘They are still giving birth. But you are right to ask if they are conceiving … ’
At this Jarnti let out a muttering, ‘They tell their queen she is right! They dare! Drag them off! Beat them … ’
They ignored him. With compassion now. He was sitting loose and rolling there, his face aflame, and they saw him as worse than their beasts. More than one of the women was weeping, silently, at the fate of their sister, as they watched him.
‘We believe they are not conceiving.’
A silence. The wind was not shrieking now. It was a low wail. The animals that were making a circle all around lifted their muzzles to sniff the air: soon the wind would be gone, and their nightly ordeal over.
‘And you, the people?’
They all nodded, slowly. ‘We believe that we are the same.’
‘You mean, that you begin to feel in yourselves what the animals feel?’
‘Yes, Al·Ith.’
And now they sat quiet for a long time. They looked into each other’s faces, questioning, confirming, allowing their eyes to meet, and to part, letting what each felt pass from one to another, until they all were feeling and understanding as one.
While this went on, the soldier was motionless. Later, in the camps, he was to say that ‘up there’ they had vicious drugs and used them unscrupulously.
The wind had dropped. It was silent. In a swept sky the stars glittered cold. But wisps of cloud were forming in the east, over the borders with Zone Four.
One of the girls spoke up at last. ‘Al·Ith, some of us have been wondering if this new Order from the Providers has something to do with this sadness of ours.’
Al·Ith nodded.
‘None of us remember anything like it,’ said the old man.
Al·Ith said, ‘The Memories speak of such a time. But it was so long ago the historians knew nothing about it.’
‘And what happened?’ asked Jarnti, suddenly finding his tongue.
‘We were invaded,’ said Al·Ith. ‘By Zone Four. Is there nothing in your history? Your tales?’
At this Jarnti wagged his pointed beard at them, grinning — triumphant.
‘Is there nothing you can tell us?’ asked Al·Ith.
He smirked at the women, one after another, and then his head fell forward.
‘Al·Ith,’ said a girl who had been sitting, letting her tears run, ‘Al·Ith, what are you going to do with such men?’
‘Perhaps Ben Ata won’t be so bad,’ said another.
‘This man is the commander of all the armies,’ said Al·Ith, and could not prevent herself shuddering.
‘This man? This?’
Their horror and shock made itself felt in Jarnti, and he would have punished them if he could. He did manage to raise his head and glare, but he was shaking and weak.
‘He is going to have to get back to the camp at the foothills,’ said Al·Ith.
Two of the young men glanced at each other, and then rose. They grasped Jarnti under the armpits, hauled him to his feet, and began walking him up and down. He staggered and protested, but complied, in the end, for his brain, clear all this time, told him it was necessary.
This scene is known as ‘Jarnti’s Walk,’ and gives much opportunity for humour to our artists and tellers.
‘I don’t see that there is anything we can do?’ asked Al·Ith of the others. ‘If this is an old disease, nothing is known of it in our medicine. If it is a new disease, our doctors will shortly come to terms with it. But if it is a malady of the heart, then the Providers will know what to do.’
A silence.
‘Have already known what to do,’ she said, smiling, though not pleasantly. ‘Please tell everyone on the plain that I came here tonight and we talked, and what we thought together.’
We will, they said. Then they all rose to their feet, and went with her through the herds. A young girl called three horses, who came and stood willingly, waiting, while the young man put Jarnti on one, and Al·Ith mounted another, and the girl herself got on a third. The animals crowded around Al·Ith on her horse, and called to her as the three rode past.
Out on the plain, headed back towards the camp, the grasses were now standing up grey in a dim light, and the eastern sky was aflame.
Jarnti had come awake, and was sitting straight and soldierly on his horse.
‘Madam,’ he asked, ‘how do you people talk to your animals?’
‘Do you not talk to yours?’
‘No.’
‘You stay with them. You watch them. You put your hands on them and feel how they feel. You look into their eyes. You listen to the tones of their cries and their calling to each other. You make sure that when they begin to understand that you understand them, you do not miss the first tones of what they say to you. For if you do not hear, then they will not trouble to try again. Soon you will feel what they are feeling, and you will know what they are thinking, even if they do not tell you themselves.’
Jarnti said nothing for a while. They had now left the herds behind.
‘Of course we watch them and take notice of how they look, if they are ill or something like that.’
‘There are none among you who know how to feel with your animals?’
‘Some of us are good with animals, yes.’
Al·Ith did not seem inclined to say any more.
‘Perhaps we are too impatient,’ said Jarnti.
Neither Al·Ith nor the girl said anything to this. They trotted on towards the foothills. Now the great peaks of the high lands were pink and shining from the wild morning sky.
‘Madam,’ he said, blustering, because he did not know how to be on an equality with her, or with anyone, ‘when you are with us, can you teach some of the soldiers who are in charge of the horses this way of yours?’
She was silent. Then: ‘Do you know that I am never called anything but Al·Ith? Do you understand that I have never been called Madam, or anything like it before?’
Now he was silent.
‘Well, will you?’ he asked gruffly.
‘I will if I can,’ she said at last.
He was struggling with himself to express gratitude, pleasure. Nothing came out.
They were more than halfway between the herds and the camp.
Jarnti put his heels into his horse suddenly, and it neighed and bucked. Then it stood still.
The two women stopped too.
‘Did you want to go on ahead?’ asked the girl.
He was sullen.
‘He won’t carry you now,’ she said, and slid off her horse. Jarnti got down from his. ‘Now get on mine.’ He did so. She soothed the bewildered horse he had kicked, and mounted it.
‘Think that you want to go on in front of us,’ said the girl.
He had an ashamed, embarrassed look. He went red.
‘I’m afraid you will have to put up with us,’ said Al·Ith at last.
When they were in sight of the camp, she jumped down from her horse. It at once turned and began cantering back towards the herds. Jarnti got off his. And this one too cantered back. He was standing looking in admiration at the lovely girl on her horse, who was turning around to go.
‘If you ever come to Zone Four,’ he shouted at her, ‘let me know.’
She gave a long look of commiseration at Al·Ith, and remarked, ‘Luckily for me I am not a queen.’ And she sped off across the plain with the two other horses neighing and tossing up their heels on either side of her.
Al·Ith and Jarnti walked towards the camp with the sunrise at their backs.
Long before they reached the camp, the smell of burning meat was strong on the air.
Al·Ith did not say anything, but her face spoke.
‘Do you not kill animals?’ he asked, unwillingly but forced to by his curiosity.
‘Only if it is essential. There are plenty of other foods.’
‘Like those horrible berries of yours,’ he said, trying to be good-humoured.
In the camp they had killed a deer. Jarnti did not eat any of it.
As soon as the meal was over, the horses were saddled, all but Al·Ith’s. She stood watching the beasts adjust their mouths and their teeth uncomfortably as the bit went in.
She vaulted onto her horse, and whispered to it. Jarnti watched her, uneasy.
‘What did you say to it?’ he asked.
‘That I am his friend.’
And again she led the way forward, into the east, back across the plain.
They rode to one side of the herds they had been with in the night, but far enough off to see them as a darkness on the plain.
Jarnti was riding just behind Al·Ith.
Now he was remembering the conversation around the fire last night, the tone of it, the ease of it. He yearned for it — or something in it, for he had never known that quality of easy intimacy. Except, he was saying to himself, with a girl, sometimes, after a good screw.
He said, almost wistfully, to Al·Ith, ‘Can you feel that the animals out there are sad?’ For she was looking continually towards them, and her face was concerned.
‘Can’t you?’ she asked.
He saw she was weeping, steadily, as she rode.
He was furious. He was irritated. He felt altogether excluded from something he had a right to.
Behind them clattered the company of soldiers.
A long way in front was the frontier. Suddenly she leaned down to whisper to the horse and it sped forward. Jarnti and the company broke into speed after her. They were shouting at her. She did not have the shield that would protect her from the — to her — deadly atmosphere of Zone Four. She rode like the wild winds that scoured the plains every night until early dawn, and her long hair swept out behind her, and tears ran steadily down her face.
It was not for miles that Jarnti came up with her — one of the soldiers had thrown the shield to him, and he had caught it, and was now riding almost neck and neck with her.
‘Al·Ith,’ he was shouting, ‘you must have this.’ And held up the shield. It was a long time before she heard him. At last she turned her face towards him, not halting her mad pace in the slightest, and he wilted at the sight of her blanched, agonized face. He held up the shield. She raised her hand to catch it. He hesitated, because it was not a light thing. He remembered how she had thrown the heavy saddle the day before, and he heaved the shield towards her. She caught it with one hand and did not abate her pace at all. They were approaching the frontier. They watched her to see how she would be affected by the sudden change in the density of the air, for they had all been ill to some extent, the day before. She went through the invisible barrier without faltering, though she was pale, and did not seem well. Inside the frontier line were the observation towers, rising up at half-mile distances from each other, bristling with soldiers and armaments. She did not stop. Jarnti and the others fled after her, shouting to the soldiers in the towers not to shoot. She went between the towers without looking at them.
Again they were on the edge of a descent through hills and rocks above a wide plain. When she reached the edge of this escarpment she at last stopped.
They all came to a standstill behind her. She was looking down into a land crowded with forts and encampments.
She jumped down from her horse. Soldiers were running to them from the forts, holding the bridles of fresh horses. The jaded horses of the company were being herded off to recover. But Al·Ith’s did not want to leave her. He shivered and whinnied and wheeled all about Al·Ith, and when the soldiers came to catch him, would not go.
‘Would you like him as a present, Al·Ith?’ asked Jarnti, and she was pleased and smiled a little, which was all she could manage.
Again she removed the saddle from this fresh horse, and the bridle, and tossed them to the amazed soldiers. And she rode forward and down into Zone Four, with Yori trotting beside her and continually putting up his nose to nuzzle her as they went.
And so Al·Ith made the passage into the Zone we had all heard so much of, speculated about, and had never been in.
Not even with the shield could she feel anything like herself. The air was flat, dispiriting. The landscape seemed to confine and oppress. Everywhere you look, in our own realm, a wild vigour is expressed in the contours of uplands, mountains, a variegated ruggedness. The central plateau where so many of our towns are situated is by no means regular, but is ringed by mountains and broken by ravines and deep river channels. With us the eye is enticed into continual movement, and then is drawn back always to the great snowy peaks that are shaped by the winds and the colours of our skies. And the air tingles in the blood, cold and sharp. But here she looked down into a uniform dull flat, cut by canals and tamed streams that were marked by lines of straight pollarded trees, and dotted regularly by the ordered camps of the military way of life. Towns and villages did not seem any larger than these camps. The sky was a greyish blue and there was a dull shine from the lines of water. A wide low hill near the centre of the scene where there seemed to be something like a park or gardens was all the consolation she could find.
Meanwhile, they were still descending the escarpment.
A turn in the road showed an enormous circular building of grey stone, squatting heavily between canals. It seemed recent, for rocks and earth near it were raw, broken. Her dismay that this might be where she was bound for brought her horse to a faltering stop. The company halted behind her, and she looked back to see a furtive triumph on every face. Jarnti was suppressing a smile as a leader does when he wishes to indicate he would like to join with his juniors in a show of emotion. Then as they remained there, with no sound but the horses shifting their hooves for relief, on the stony road, she saw that she had been mistaken: what she feared was not matched by the particular variety of triumph these captors of hers were showing.
‘When may we expect to reach the king?’ she asked, and Jarnti at once interpreted this as a reminder from her of higher authority. He rebuked his company with a strong look and adjusted his own face to obedience.
All this she watched, understood — and it came to her what a barbarous land this was.
They had imagined she had been intimidated by the sight of the rumoured ‘round fortress of the deadly rays’ as one of our songs described it.
She told herself, not for the first time, or the tenth, that she was not likely to adjust herself quickly to these people with their slavish minds, and to make a test of them, moved her horse on and towards the road that led to the building. At once Jarnti was beside her, and his hand was reaching out for her horse’s head. She stopped. ‘I would like to see into one of the famed round fortresses of your Zone,’ she said.
‘Oh, no, no, you must not, it is forbidden,’ said he, still full of importance.
‘But why? Your weapons are not directed against us, surely?’
‘It is dangerous … ’ but at this moment, around the side of the building came some children running, and in scattering for some game, two of them darted into an open doorway.
‘So I see,’ she said, and rode on, without looking again at Jarnti or at the soldiers.
When nearly at the level of the plain, there were grazing cattle near the road, and a half-grown boy attending them.
Jarnti shouted at the boy to come forward, and the boy was already running towards them, before Jarnti said, ‘You could teach him your ways with the animals,’ and as the boy arrived at the roadside, pale and startled, Jarnti was shouting, ‘Down on your face! Can’t you see who this is we are taking to the king?’
The lad was face down, full length on the grass, and this was no more than a half-minute since he had first been hailed.
Jarnti was giving her half-pleading, half-commanding looks, and his horse was dancing under him, because of his master’s eagerness to learn her lore.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t think we are likely to learn or teach anything in this way.’
But he had seen himself that he had mishandled the occasion and because of it was red and angry. He shouted, ‘The lady here would like to know if your beasts are well.’
No reply, then a whimper which sounded like, ‘Very well, yes, well, sir.’
Al·Ith slid down from her horse, walked over to the boy, and said, ‘Stand up.’ She made her voice a command, since commands were what he understood. He slowly shivered his way to his feet, and stood, almost collapsing, before her. She waited until she knew he had seen, from his furtive glances, that she was not so frightening, and said, ‘I am from Zone Three. Our animals have not been well. Can you say if you have noticed anything unusual with yours?’
His hands were clenched at his chest, and he was breathing as if he had run several miles. Finally he brought out: ‘Yes, yes, that is, I think so.’
From behind them Jarnti’s voice, jocular and loud: ‘Are they having sorrowful thoughts?’ And the entire company sniggered.
She saw there was nothing that could be done, and said to the boy, ‘Don’t be frightened. Go back to your beasts.’ She waited until he sped off, and she returned to her horse. Again, Jarnti knew he had behaved clumsily, and yet it had been necessary to him, for the sight of her, small, unarmed, standing rather below them near the defenceless and frightened boy, had roused in him a need to show strength, dominance.
She swung herself onto her horse and at once rode on, not looking at them. She felt very low, our poor Al·Ith. This was the worst time of all. Everything in her was hurt by the way the poor boy had been treated: yet these were the ways of this land, and she could not believe then, in that bad hour, that there could be any way of communicating with these louts. And of course she was thinking of what she was going to find when she was led to Ben Ata.
They rode on, through the middle of the day, across the plain, with the ditches and the lines of dull bunchy trees accompanying them all the way. She went first. Yori, the riderless horse, was just behind, with Jarnti, and behind them the company. They were all silent. She had not said anything about the incident of the boy, but they were thinking now that she would be soon with the king, and were not expecting she would give a good report of them. So they were sullen, sulky. There were few people on the roadside, or in the flat boats of the canals, but those who saw the little company go past reported that there was not a smile to be seen: this wedding party was fit for a funeral. And the riderless horse caused rumours to spread that Al·Ith had fallen and was dead, for the slight figure on the leading horse that they did see, had nothing about her to command their attention. She seemed to them a serving woman, or an attendant, in her plain dark blue, with her head in its black veils.
There was a ballad about how the horse of the dead Al·Ith had gone with the troop of soldiers to the king to tell him that there could be no marriage. The horse stood on the threshold of the wedding chamber and neighed three times, Ben Ata, Ben Ata, Ben Ata — and when he came out, said to him:
Cold and dark your wedding bed,
O King, your willing bride is dead.
The realm she rules is cold and dark.
And this was popular, and sung when everyone knew that Al·Ith was not dead, and that the marriage was a fact. That it was not the smoothest of marriages was of course known from the beginning. How? But how do these things get themselves known? The song was always being added to. Here is a verse that came from the married quarters of the army camps:
Brave King, your realm is strong and fine.
Where beasts may mate, then women pine.
I will be your slave, brave King.
Not anywhere with us, or at any time, have such verses as these been possible, though there were plenty of compassionate and tender ballads made up about Al·Ith. There are some who say that where there is rulership, there has to be criticism of this ribald kind, because no matter the level of the ruler, it is in the nature of the ruled to crave identification of the lowest sort. We say this is not so, and Zone Three proves it. To recognize and celebrate the ordinary, the day-to-day levels of an authority, is not to denigrate it.
Such Zone Four ballads, travelling upwards to us, found themselves transformed as they crossed the frontier. For one thing, there was no need of the inversions, the ambiguities, that are always bred by fear of an arbitrary authority.
We may almost say that a certain type of ballad is impossible with us: the kind that has as its ground or base lamentation, the celebration of loss.
In their Zone the riderless horse gave birth to songs of death and sorrow; in ours to songs about loving friendship.
The road, which cut straight across the plain, and was intersected at about the middle by one running equally straight, began to lift a little to reach the small hill that Al·Ith had seen with relief from the top of the escarpment. The canals were left behind, with their weight of dead water. There were a few ordinary trees, which had not been hacked into lumps and wands. At the top of the hill were gardens, and here the water had been forced into movement, for they rode now beside channels where it ran swiftly, fell from several levels to others, and broke into fountains. The air was lively and cool, and when she saw ahead of her a light pavilion, with coloured springing pillars and arches, she was encouraged. But there was no one to be seen. She was contrasting this empty garden and the apparently deserted pavilion with the friendly amplitude of her own courts, when Jarnti called an order, and the whole company came to a stop. The soldiers jumped off their horses, and surrounded Al·Ith, who, when she got down from her horse, found herself being marched forward in their midst, like a captive of war — and she saw that this was not the first time they had done this, from the ease of their arrangements.
But as they had enclosed her, Jarnti in front, she put out her hand to hold the horse she had been given, Yori, by the neck.
And this was how she arrived at the steps of the pavilion, when Ben Ata came out to stand in the doorway, arms folded, legs apart, bearded soldier, dressed in no way different from Jarnti or the others. He was large, blond, muscular from continual campaigning, and burned a ruddy brown on the face and arms. His eyes were grey. He was not looking at Al·Ith but at the horse, for his first thought too was that his bride had been killed.
Al·Ith went quickly through the soldiers, suspecting that there were precedents here she might not want followed, and arrived in front of him, still holding the horse.
And now he looked at her, startled and frowning.
‘I am Al·Ith,’ said she, ‘and this horse has been kindly given to me by Jarnti. Please, will you give orders for him to be well treated?’
He found himself speechless. He nodded. Jarnti then grasped the horse’s neck and attempted to lead him away. But he reared and tried to free himself. Before he would allow himself to be taken away, Al·Ith had to comfort him and promise she would visit him very soon. ‘Today, I swear it.’ And, turning to Jarnti, ‘So you must not take him too far away. And please see he is well fed and looked after.’
Jarnti was sheepish, the soldiers grinning, only just hiding it, because Ben Ata’s face gave them no guidance. Normally, on such occasions, the girl would have been bundled across a threshold, or pushed forward roughly, according to the convention, but now no one knew how to behave.
Al·Ith said, ‘Ben Ata, I take it you have some sort of place I can retire to for a time? I have been riding all day.’
Ben Ata was recovering. His face was hard, and even bitter. He had not known what to expect, and was prepared to be flexible, but he was repelled by this woman in her sombre clothes. She had not taken off her veil, and he could not see much of her except that she had dark hair. He preferred fair women.
He shrugged, gave a look at Jarnti, and disappeared into the room behind him. It was Jarnti then who led her into another room, which was part of a set of rooms, and saw that she had what she needed. She refused food and drink, and announced that she would be ready to join the king in a few minutes.
And she did join him, emerging unceremoniously from the retiring rooms just as she had arrived, in her dark dress. But she had removed the veil, and her hair was braided and hanging down her back.
Ben Ata was lounging on a low divan or settee, in a large light airy room that had nothing very much in it. She saw that this was a bridal room, and planned for the occasion. Her bridegroom, however, sprawling on one edge of the divan, his chin on his hand, his elbow on his knee, did not move as she came in. And there was nowhere else to sit, so she sat down on the edge of the divan, at a distance from him, resting her weight on her hand in the position of one who has alighted somewhere for just a moment and has every intention of leaving again. She looked at him, without smiling. He looked at her, very far from smiling.
‘Well, how do you like this place?’ he asked, roughly. It was clear he had no idea of what to say or do.
‘It has been built specially then?’
‘Yes. Orders. Built to specification. Exactly. It was finished only this morning.’
‘It is certainly very elegant and pleasant,’ she said. ‘Quite different from anything else I’ve seen on my way here.’
‘Certainly not my style,’ he said. ‘But if it is yours, then that’s the main thing.’
This had a sort of sulky gallantry, but he was restless, and sighing continually, and it was evident all he wanted to do was to make his escape.
‘I suppose the intention was that it should be suited to us both?’ she remarked.
‘I don’t care,’ said he violently and roughly, his inner emotions breaking out of him. ‘And obviously you don’t either.’
‘We’re going to have to make the best of it,’ she said, intending consolation, but it was wild and bitter.
They looked at each other with a frank exchange of complicity: two prisoners who had nothing in common but their incarceration.
This first, and frail, moment of tolerance did not last.
He had flung himself back on this marriage couch of theirs, arms behind his head, his sandalled feet dusty on the covers, which were of fine wool, dyed in soft colours, and embroidered. Nowhere could he have seemed more out of place. She was able to construct his usual surroundings by how he slouched there, gazing at the ceiling as if she did not exist.
She examined the place. This was a very large room, opening out on two sides into gardens through a series of rounded arches. The other two sides had unobtrusive doors leading — on one — to the rooms for her use where she had already been, and on the other, presumably, to his. The ceiling was rounded and high, fluted at the edges. The whole room was painted a softly shining ivory, but there were patterns of gold, soft red, and blue, and beside each archway embroidered curtains were caught back with jewelled clasps. The fountains could be heard, and the running of the waters. This was not far from the gaiety and freshness of the public buildings of Andaroun, our capital, though her own quarters were plainer than these.
The great room was not all one empty sweep of space. A column sprang up from its centre, and curved out, and divided into several, all fluted and defined in the same gold, sky blue, and red. The floors were of sweetly smelling wood. Apart from the great low couch, there was a small table near one of the arches, with two graceful chairs on either side of it.
A horse whinnied. A moment later, Yori appeared outside one of the arches, and would have come in if she had not run across and stopped him. It was easy to guess what had happened. He had been confined somewhere, and had jumped free, and the soldiers set to guard him did not dare to follow into these private gardens with the pavilion all the country had been talking of for weeks. She put her hands up to his cheeks, pulled down his head, whispered into first one ear, and then the other, and the horse swung around and went out of sight, back to its guard.
When she turned, Ben Ata was standing just behind her, glaring.
‘I can see that it is true, what we have heard here. You are all witches in your country.’
‘It is a witchcraft easy to learn,’ she said, but as he continued to glare, her humour went, and now she crossed swiftly to the bed and, throwing down one of the big cushions, sat on it cross-legged. She had not thought that now he must do the same, or remain above her on the bed, but he was uncertain, seemed to feel challenged by her, and in his turn pulled a cushion off the bed, pushed it against a wall, and sat.
They sat opposite each other, on their two cushions.
She was at home, since this was how she usually seated herself, but he was uncomfortable, and seemed afraid to make any movement, in case the cushion slid about the polished floor.
‘Do you always wear clothes like that?’
‘I put this on especially for you,’ she countered, and he reddened again: since her arrival she had seen more angry, embarrassed men than ever in her life, and she was on the point of wondering if they had some disorder of the blood or the skin.
‘If I had known you were going to arrive like this I would have ordered dresses for you. How was I to know you’d turn up like a servant?’
‘Ben Ata, I never wear elaborate clothes.’
He was eyeing the plain looseness of her robe with annoyance and exasperation.
‘I thought you were supposed to be the queen.’
‘You cannot be distinguished from one of your own soldiers.’
Suddenly he bared his teeth in a grin, and muttered something that she understood meant: ‘Take the thing off, and I’ll show you.’
She knew he was angry, but not how much. On their campaigns, when the army reached new territory, into his tent would be thrust some girl, or she was thrown down at his feet. She would nearly always be crying. Or she might be hissing and spitting. She might bite and scratch as he entered her. She could weep throughout and not cease weeping. A few gritted their teeth, and their loathing of him did not abate. He was not a man who enjoyed inflicting suffering, so these he would order to be returned to their homes. But those who wept or who struggled in a way he recognized he did enjoy, and would tame them, slowly. These were the conventions. These he obeyed. He had penetrated, and often impregnated, women all over his realm. But he had not married, he did not plan to marry, for the present arrangement did not come within his notions of marriage, about which he had the sentimental and high-flown ideas of a man ignorant of women. This woman with whom he was to be afflicted almost indefinitely, at least at intervals, was something outside his experience.
Everything about her disturbed him. She was not un-beautiful, with her dark eyes, dark hair, and the rest of the usual appurtenances, but there was nothing in her that set out to challenge him physically, and so he was cold.
‘How long am I supposed to stay with you?’ she enquired next, in exactly the cut-and-dried way he now—dismally— expected of her.
‘They said, a few days.’
There was a long silence. The great pleasant room was full of water sounds, and watery reflections from the pools and fountains.
‘How do you do it in your country?’ he enquired, knowing this was clumsy but not able to think of anything else.
‘Do what?’
‘Well, we hear you have a lot of children, for a start.’
‘I have five of my own. But I am the mother of many. More than fifty.’
She could see that everything she said put greater distance between them.
‘It is our custom, if a child is left an orphan, that I should become its mother.’
‘Adopt it.’
‘It is not one of our words. I become its mother.’
‘I suppose you feel about them exactly as you do about your own,’ he said, and this was a mimicry. But of something she had not said.
‘No, I did not say that. Besides, fifty children are rather more than one can keep very close to.’
‘Then how are they your children?’
‘They all have the same rights. And I spend the same time with each of them, as I am able.’
‘It’s not my idea of a mother for my children.’
‘Is that what is expected of us, you think?’
This infuriated him! He had not thought very much at all about this appalling, affronting imposition, he had been too emotional. But at the least he had supposed that there would be children ‘to cement the alliance’ — or something of that sort.
‘Well, what else? What did you have in mind? Amorous dalliance once every few weeks? You!’ And he snorted out his disgust with her.
She was trying not to look at him too closely. She had seen that a close steady look — which was her way—discomfited him. And besides, he appealed to her less than she did to him. She found this great soldier gross, with his heavy overheated flesh, his hot, resentful eyes, his rough sun-bleached hair which reminded her of the fleeces of a much prized breed of sheep that flourished on a certain mountain.
‘There’s more to mating than children,’ she observed.
And the commonsensicalness of this caused him to groan out loud and strike his fists hard on the floor beside him.
‘Well, if so, one wouldn’t think you knew much about that.’
‘Indeed,’ she retorted. ‘But in fact it is one of the skills of our Zone.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no.’ And he sprang up and went striding about the room, beating the delicate walls with his fists.
She, still cross-legged on her cushion, watched him, interested, as she would have done some strange new species.
He stopped. He seemed to make an effort. Then he turned, teeth gritted, strode across to her, picked her up, and threw her on the couch. He put his hand across her mouth in the approved way, twitched up her dress, fingered himself to see if he was up to it, thrust himself into her, and accomplished his task in half a dozen swift movements.
He then straightened himself, for he had not removed his feet from the floor during this process and, already embarrassed, showed his feeling that all was not right by a gesture of concern most unusual in him: he twitched her dress down again and removed his hand from her mouth quite gently.
She was lying there looking up at him quite blank. Amazed. She was not weeping. Nor scratching. Nor calling him names. Nor showing the cold relentless repulsion that he dreaded to see in his women. Nothing. It occurred to him that she was interested in a totally unsuspected phenomenon.
‘Oh, you,’ he groaned out, between his teeth, ‘how did I get saddled with you.’
At which she suddenly let out a snort of something that was unmistakably amusement. She sat up. She swung her legs down over the couch, then she all at once burst into swift tears that shook her shoulders quite soundlessly, and then, just as suddenly, she stopped crying, and crept to her cushion, where she sat with her back to the wall, staring at him.
He noted that she was afraid of him, but not in any way that could appeal to him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s that.’ He gave her uneasy sideways glances, as if waiting for a comment.
‘Is that really what you do?’ she enquired. ‘Or is it because you don’t like me?’
At this he gave her a look which was all appeal, and he sat on the bottom of the bed, and pounded it hard, with his fists.
She saw, at last, that he was a boy, he was not much more than a small boy. She saw him as one of her own half-grown sons, and for the first time, her heart softened.
Looking at him with the tears still full in her great eyes, she said, ‘You know, I think there might be something you could learn from us.’
He gave a sort of shake of his great shaggy head, as if too much was reaching his ears all at once. But he remained leaning forward, not looking at her, but listening.
‘For one thing, have you never heard that one may choose the times to conceive children?’
He winced. But only because again she talked of children. He pounded the bed with one fist, and stopped.
‘You did not know that the nature of a child may be made by its conception?’
He shook his head and hung it. He sighed.
‘If I am pregnant now, as I could be, then this child will have nothing to thank us for.’
He suddenly flung himself down on the bed, prone, and lay there, arms outstretched.
Again, a long silence. The smell of their coupling was a small rank reminder of lust, and he looked up at her. She sat leaning against the wall, very pale, tired, and there was a bruise by her mouth, where his thumb had pressed.
He let out a groan. ‘It seems there is something I can learn from you,’ he said, and it was not in a child’s voice.
She nodded. Looking at each other, they saw only that they were unhappy, and did not know what to expect from the other.
She it was who got up, sat by him on the couch, and laid her small hands on both sides of his great neck as he still lay prone, chin on his fist.
He turned over. It was an effort for him to face her.
He took her hands, and lay there on his back, she sitting quietly close to him. She tried to smile, but her lips trembled, and tears rolled down her face. He gave an exclamation, and pulled her down beside him. He was astounded that his own eyes had tears in them.
He tried to comfort this strange woman. He felt her small hands on his shoulders, in a pressure of consolation and pity.
Thus they fell asleep together, worn out by it all.
This was the first lovemaking of these two, the event which was fusing the imaginations of two realms.
He woke, and was at once alert. His senses were anxiously at work, mapping the space that surrounded him where it should not, coming to terms with sounds that suggested whispering, danger. His tent flap had been left open … but the opening was higher than it should be: his tent had been torn away by a wind, or an attack? Water … water flowing, and rising: the canals were overflowing, would he find himself standing in water? Ready to accept the cold wet clasp of a calamitous flood around his ankles, he swung his feet over onto a dry floor, and had taken several strides forward, calling out in the hoarse shocked voice of nightmare for his orderly, when he saw that he had mistaken the high curve of the central pillar where it met the ceiling for the tent opening. At once he remembered everything. He turned around in the dark, believing that the woman Al·Ith could be mocking him. But it was too dark even to see the couch. What he wanted then was simply to stride out of that place and not come back. With the understanding it was the fountains tinkling he had been taking for floods and inundations, the panic thought overcame him that he was not himself. He was undermined, unmanned, and made a coward. Bitterness shook him; his mouth was dry with it. Quite simply he was appalled—by the situation, by himself, by her. Yet, if he knew nothing else, he knew obedience. An order had brought him here to this effeminate pavilion, and duty must take him back to that couch. Convinced that she was lying awake and somehow watching him, he nevertheless took cautious steps in the dark until his shins encountered the softness of the couch. He slid himself to a half-sitting position, and began feeling the couch for her limbs — for her. Then he was groping all over the surface for her and finding nothing. She had escaped! Relief! That could only be her fault, and not his! He did not have to do anything! But then, these thoughts were chased away by indignation, and by chase lust. If she had escaped she must be caught. The confusions and indecisions of the last minutes came together in a surge of energy. He actually began a lively whistling — then thought she might be somewhere in the room, perhaps behind the pillar, watching him. And laughing. He swung around and strode to the pillar and felt all about with his hands. Nothing. Again he was about to raise his voice to call his orderly, and remembered that there were to be no servants here, no regular attendants. He did not mind about that: this king was happiest on campaign, a soldier among soldiers, and not marked out from them except that it was his task to make decisions. What he did mind was having to be alone with her without attendants. Shut up with a woman. This woman. Who as a witch might certainly be somewhere in the room, seeing where he could not. Anger fed his decisiveness. He pulled his army cloak about him and strode to the door opening onto the fountains.
Awaking in the dark, he had not known the time. In the camps a sentry was ordered to halt outside his tent and to announce — not call out, but state — each half-hour. If he was awake, he needed to know where he was in the countries of the night. Which he did not enjoy: distrusted, in fact. He liked to put his head down soon after the evening meal and to sleep until first light, and to know nothing in between — but if awake for some reason, then he would wait for the low reassuring voice of the sentry.
Now he stood square in the archway, with the dark room behind him, looking out past the arches of the porticoes, and he knew at once that it was about an hour before dawn, although the sky had no moon or stars in it and low clouds hurried past. An irregular streak showed the long rectangle that was the pool where seven jets of water played. Irritation was remembered — almost claimed him again. The dimensions of this pavilion, its adjacent rooms, the approaches, the galleries surrounding it, the gardens, the many pools and fountains, the walks, and the steps and the levels — every one exactly specified, prescribed, measured, and all in the damnedest of measurements — everything in halves and quarters and bits and pieces, irregularities and unexpectedness. The architects, none of whom of course had built anything but army forts and towers and barracks for years, had been expected to mutiny. At any rate, this particular very long and narrow pool, or ditch, as he had muttered when he had seen the plans, had had seven jets prescribed for it. Not ten, or five, or twenty, but seven. And the long oval pool beyond it had three, of different sizes from each other … a clump of nine spice trees stood to one side of the pools, and under them he saw something shadowy and disturbing. But it was too big to be a woman. He heard movements, though. Just as he realized it was a horse — that damned horse! — his eyes had come to life enough to see that she was sitting quietly at the end of the long pool, between it and the oval pool, on a raised stone dais, or terrace, which was a circle that had a radius of exactly seven and a half feet. The masons building it had joked it would make a good bed. Oh, the jokes, the jokes, he had been sick of them, was sick to death of them, of the whole thing … he could not make out if she had seen him. But it occurred to him that if he had seen her, she could be expected to have seen him.
However, there was nothing ridiculous about his stance there, legs apart, arms folded, everything soldierly and correct.
It occurred to him that he was still alert and poised because his expectations of a chase, a pursuit, were not quieted in him: if there she sat, then he would not have to chase after her, poor draggled fugitive, across the marshes and puddles, with half the army after her, and he heading them all … so he let himself relax.
He was not going to make the first move, or greet her. He did not want to greet her. He did not feel friendly in the slightest. He did not remember the moment of tenderness they had shared, and his present self could only have repudiated it … he had been standing there for some time. Minutes. She had made no move. He could see her face glimmering whitely there. That dreary dark dress of hers was of course absorbed by the night. He believed she might be sitting there hating him. He could smell now the damp breeze that always stirred just before dawn. He loved to be awakened by that little wind, which crept so softly over the earth, setting the bushes astir, bringing the smell of grass and water. When sleeping out on marches he always woke to it, contrasting it pleasantly with the rainy winds that drove across this flat land of his sometimes for weeks at a time … he had, without knowing he was going to, taken a few steps out and along the edge of the pool. He had not taken his sandals off at all, and now he was unable to walk quietly and surprise her. But still she said nothing. He had come up to her, past the seven silly jets of water, and up to the edge of the little terrace, before she turned her head, and remarked, ‘It is pleasant sitting here, Ben Ata.’
‘You didn’t sleep well, I see!’
‘I never sleep more than two hours, or three.’
This annoyed him: of course she would be at home in the night — what else!
As there was nothing else to do, he sat down on the dais, but on the edge of it, away from her.
Now he could see that there were two horses under the spice trees, hers — the black one — and another, white: the black one he could see only because it stood very close to the other, making a black horse-shaped shadow against the white.
‘I see that in your country you have horses the way we have dogs!’
‘No, Ben Ata.’ He could hear from her voice — he could hardly see her face — that she was conciliatory, or even afraid? His blood did leap a little at the thought she was afraid, but lay subdued again. He heard himself sigh. A dismal weight seemed to press him down. All his elation had gone. He was sensing with the whole of him, his memories and his hopes too, how alien was this woman: how the strangeness of her did weigh him down, how she oppressed him. He was feverishly casting about in his memories for girls like this one, that he could match with her, to make some sort of guide for himself, for he really did intend to try and understand her. But there was nothing there remotely like her. Like his mother? Certainly not! She had been foolish — he supposed. But then he had not seen her, really, since he was seven and had been sent to the soldiers to train. His sisters? He had not seen them either since then, except for brief glimpses on trips home; and they had married far away on the outer reaches of the Zone. The wives of his officers? The point was, he could not remember being discommoded by a woman, and above all it was what this one did. She never reacted as his expectations dictated. He was as jumpy and edgy as a badly handled horse … horses again. He did not really like horses. Not that he remembered wondering before if he liked them or not, they were there.
‘Ben Ata, when I got up out of bed and came out here, I saw my horse standing here by the fountain. I thought he had not been properly looked after but it was not that. He was not hungry or thirsty …’
He, and she, both heard the breath let slowly out of his lungs, not so much in exasperation as in sheer wonder at it all, a sort of stunned imposed patience.
‘… but he was disturbed in his mind and he had jumped out of the enclosure and come to try and find me. That is why I woke, I expect. But while I have been trying to find out exactly what’s wrong, it isn’t easy. I told him to go and fetch one of his friends from the enclosure …’
He had let out his breath again: it was a cautious sigh.
‘I am surprised,’ said he, in a soft, tentative voice, as if trying out this new key in sarcasm, ‘that you didn’t go down to the stables and fetch the horse yourself.’
‘But, Ben Ata, you know that I cannot leave this place. Not without my shield. I am confined to the pavilions and the gardens. Otherwise the air of your Zone would make me very ill.’
‘All right, all right, I had forgotten. No, I hadn’t … but … oh, for goodness’ sake, do …’
Oaths and expletives of all kinds were dying on his tongue, and he heard what he had said as if some foreigner had spoken.
‘He went off. It took some time, but he has brought this white horse with him. Do you know this horse?’
‘No.’
‘They came up the hill just before you came to stand in the door there. Now look, Ben Ata.’
He could in fact see now that the two beasts stood quietly side by side, their heads hanging. They were the picture of despondency.
‘I shall go to them.’ And she was off down through the fountains on bare feet. He could see her easily now against the eastern sky. A vast greyness covered the land. Shreds of cloud sped past low overhead. He followed her, not at all willingly, and the two beasts, seeing her there, came together up from the trees and stood before her, their heads drooping. He watched her caress her black horse, and the white one; bend to speak to the white horse and the black one. He saw how she laid her hands on their damp slow flesh, and put her arms around their necks as she stood between them. Then she came away, and clapped her hands, once, and they turned and cantered off down the hill, both rising at the same moment in a great jump that took them over the stone walls of their corral.
She turned to face him. He could now see her clearly. Her small face was very pale, and worried. Her hair was loose and damp down her shoulders, with a fine mist on it. By her mouth was the bruise. As he saw it the wildest need seized him to crush her to him — but not in lust or in love, far from it. A wave of brutality almost conquered him. But he felt her small hand in his, and he was utterly stupefied by it. Perhaps as a small child another had put a confiding friendly hand in his, and not since.
He could not believe it! While he had been holding in impulses of pure disliking hostility, she put her hand in his, as if it was a natural thing to do. His own hand remained stiff and rejecting.
She then hastened her pace and went on in front of him, past flowers, past the many jetting fountains, till she reached the raised round place where she sat, tucking her bare feet in under her skirt.
His thoughts were all a riot of amazed expostulation. This great queen, this conquest — for he could not help feeling her being here as one — was more poor and plain than the girls who herded the deer.
She looked straight up at him, insistent, troubled. ‘Ben Ata, there is something very wrong.’
Again the heavy sigh from him. ‘If you say so.’
‘Yes. Yes, there is. Tell me, your herds, your animals, have there been reports of illness?’
He now looked straight at her, serious, in thought. ‘Yes, there were reports. Wait though — no one seemed to know what was wrong.’
‘And the birth rate among them?’
‘It’s down. Yes, it is.’ Even as he confirmed her, he could not resist the jeer: ‘And what did the two nags have to tell you?’
‘They don’t know what is wrong. But they are low in spirits, all of them. They have lost the will to mate … ’ As the obligatory jest became imminent, she pressed on, dismissing it — and him, he felt, in wild rebellion at her — with, ‘No, do listen, Ben Ata. It is all the animals. All. And the birds. And as we know, that means the plant kingdom, too, or if not now, soon …’
‘Do we know?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Despite the feeble attempt at a jeer, in fact his eyes most seriously engaged hers, in responsible enquiry. He believed her. He was alerted, and ready to do what he could. This seriousness brought him down beside her, closer than before, but not as if he felt any likelihood of comfort or reassurance from her touch.
‘Are as many children being born?’
‘No, there are not. There has been a long steady decrease.’
‘Yes, and with us, too.’
‘Outlying parts of our Zone are lying derelict.’
‘Yes, and with us, too.’
They were silent a long while. Through the drenched air of the eastern sky, light struggled from the rising sun. The clouds were a pale wet gold, and a yellowish haze lay everywhere. The spice trees were spangled with rainbows and shafts of opaline light pierced the banks of fog rising from the marshes. The fountains splashed on water, and their noise seemed subdued by the general damp.
‘I suppose it is quite pretty,’ she said in the smallest of dismayed voices, and suddenly he let out a bellow of a laugh, but it was not unfriendly, far from it. ‘Oh, come now, it isn’t as bad as that,’ he said. ‘You’ll see, when the sun is up, and things have dried off. We have some very pleasant days down here, you know.’
‘I hope so! Feel my dress, Ben Ata!’
But this invitation put them back again. It was certainly not coquetry, and to be invited to feel her dress for any other reason affronted him. He took a fold of the dark blue stuff between thumb and finger, and pronounced it damp.
‘Ben Ata, we have gone wrong somewhere. Both our Zones. Badly. What are we going to do?’
His hand dropped away. He frowned. ‘Why don’t they tell us what is wrong, quite simply, and be done with it. And then we could put it right.’ He observed her very small wry smile. ‘Well, and what is wrong with that?’
‘I think we are supposed to think it out for ourselves.’
‘But why! What for! What is the sense of it! It wastes time.’
‘That’s not how things work — I think that must be it,’ she almost whispered.
‘How do you know?’ But as he asked, he observed himself that his question was already answered. ‘How long is it since you had an Order?’
‘So long that no one can remember. But there are old stories. And songs,’ she said.
‘Well, I certainly can’t remember anything. When I became king nothing of the sort was told me. When the Order arrived I remembered that they have to be obeyed. That I did know. But that was all.’
‘In my lifetime there has been nothing. Nor in my mother’s.’
‘And hers?’
‘Not for generations of the Mothers.’
‘Ah,’ he said, brisk and noncommittal.
‘You know, I think that things are very serious. Very bad. Dangerous. They must be!’
‘You think they are?’
‘Well, for us to be together like this. Ordered to be. Don’t you see?’
Now he was silent again. He was frowning. He sighed, without knowing he did, and it was from the effort of unaccustomed thought — he was not used to speculation on these lines. As for her, she watched him: this Ben Ata, the man who sat quiet, thinking, trying to puzzle out the meaning of their dilemma — this man she felt she could like. Respect. Again her hand went out and into his, in an impulse of friendliness, and his great hand closed over hers like a bird trap. It opened at once and she saw him look down at their two hands in incredulity. Then he gave her the most helpless, unhappy glance.
Now she sighed, briskly withdrew her hand, and stood up.
She turned her back on the yellow and gold skies of the east, and stared up past him into the sky. She was looking up at the peaks and heights of her own realm. ‘Ohhhh,’ she sighed out, ‘look … I had no idea … I did not have any idea …‘
The mountains of Zone Three climbed more than a third of the way to the zenith. She stood with her head bent back, gazing up at the towering lit heights there. The rising sun was making them blaze and glitter, and the sharp points of the uttermost peaks seemed to be heaped with clouds that shone pink and red and gold—but they were not clouds, these were the piled snows of a thousand years. And low down against this mass lay the dark edge, rock-fringed, fort-fringed, which was the edge of the escarpment she had ridden down only the day before. The vast plain that lay between the escarpment and the foothills of the plateau, which was itself the low base for the innumerable mountain masses of our land—this was not visible at all. One would not know it was there. The inhabitants of this low watery Zone could never imagine, gazing up at that scene of a hundred mountain ranges, the infinite variations of a landscape and country that were not to be seen by them at all. Al·Ith was standing there, her hands cradling her bent back head, gazing up, up, and she was smiling with delight and longing, and weeping with happiness as she gazed.
Ben Ata gazed at her. He was uncomfortable.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said gruffly.
Reluctantly, she returned her gaze downward, and saw him disapproving. ‘But why not?’
‘It is not right.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘We do not encourage it.’
‘What?’
‘Cloud gathering, we call it.’
‘You mean, people don’t look up at all that … that glory?’
‘It is weakening.’
‘But I don’t believe it, Ben Ata!’
‘It is so. Those are the laws.’
‘If I had to live down here I don’t think I would be able to take my eyes away. Look, look … ’ and she flung her arms wide and exulted at the vast panoramas of light, of colour, that filled all the western skies. “Clouds!” she sang out. ‘Those are not clouds, that’s our country, it is what we are.’
‘We have times for looking up there. Definite times. Festivals. Once every ten years. Otherwise people caught spending too much time looking up there are punished.’
‘And how do you punish them?’
‘We put heavy weights on their heads so that they cannot look up.’
‘Ben Ata, that is wicked.’
‘I did not make the law. It has always been our law.’
‘Always, always, always … how do you know?’
‘I do not think that any one of us has ever questioned it. You are the first.’
She sank down beside him. Close. Again there was the small shrinking from her that he could not control. This exultation of hers, this rapture, was abhorrent to him. He could hardly bear to see her enhanced smiling face. Though on the other hand he did feel the beginnings of relief that she was not always so pale and serious. Her face, now illumined by the rosy light from those far peaks, was as pretty a pink as any girl’s he could remember, and her heavy hair, still pearled from the mists, was in wisps around her face.
But: ‘You must not stare like that. It is against our laws. While you are here, you must obey our laws.’
‘Yes, that is proper,’ she whispered, and turned her eyes away.
‘When you are in your own country, you can of course do as you like.’ He sounded to her like her brother, who had been steward of her household for many years before he had asked to be transferred to the post of Keeper of the Memories.
‘But in our country that is what we are, Ben Ata.’
Suddenly, and like light striking into her brain, she was dazzled. ‘Ben Ata, I’ve just had a … ’ but it had gone. She put her hands over her face and rocked back and forth, trying to remember what had just fled past her.
‘Are you ill?’
‘No, I am not. But I almost understood something.’
‘Well, let me know when you have.’
At this the soldier got to his feet, and — just for a moment — took a glance at the glories of the mountainous paradise in the skies. Muttering to himself, ‘Quite right, of course people shouldn’t waste their time on that —’ he resolutely turned his head and marched off towards the pavilions. Al·Ith came behind, slowly, along the narrow pool, passing the jets, one, two, three — she, too, took one last look at her own country, and as resolutely averted her eyes, and looked instead at how the seven jets blurred the gleaming surface of the pool which was trying to reflect the heavy grey skies.
Inside the pavilion, everything awaited them. The large, silent, airy, white-gleaming room, with its delicate embroideries, and its bright paint patterns. The deep couch, hardly rumpled from their encounter. Through the arches at the other side could be seen nothing but grey. It was raining, and the gardened hillside that sloped to the camps was blotted out.
Ben Ata stood in the middle of the room by the pillar, looking at her, in the most comically disconcerted way in the world. And she stood similarly looking at him.
They felt for each other at that moment friendship. Comradeship. If they were nothing else, these two, they were representatives and embodiments of their respective countries. Concern for their realms was what they were. This concern, in him, took the shape of obedience. Duty. In her these tight compulsions were lightened to responsiveness to events, situations, but they were of the same kind, nevertheless. Their people were what they were, their thoughts were. Their lives could be nothing else, or less … yet now both were aware, and deeply, so that they were shocked and stirred to their depths, that all this concern and this duty of theirs had not prevented them from going very wrong… . They were looking at each other, not shrinking from each other’s gaze at all, but both trying to enter in behind the sober, thoughtfulness of his grey eyes, the soft gleam of her black eyes, so that they could reach something deeper, and other.
‘What are we going to do, Ben Ata?’ she whispered.
This time it was he who extended his hand, just a little, and she went to him, and took it in both of hers. ‘We have to think,’ she said. ‘We must try and find out …’
Now he put his great arms lightly about her, almost as if afraid the size and weight of him might crush her, and as if he were attempting, or trying out, entirely new and not altogether welcome sensations and, avoiding the bruise beside her mouth, he gazed into that face of hers which seemed to him as if it were made of a substance or a light that he could never hope to, or even want to, encompass. He kissed her, as clumsily as a boy. He felt that her mouth was coming alive and responding in ways that could still only alarm him. Quick light kisses, the subtle tastes and touches of a smiling and easy companionship, the teasing and the response on response on response — all this was too much of an imposition, and after a few moments, he again carried her to the couch. He did not miss that, as he held her still so that he could enter her, she shrank from him and tightened as if everything in her and of her repudiated him. He felt this and contrasted it with the beginnings of the sensuous exchange which he had cut short. Her ways seemed too difficult for him, or at least unfamiliar, or out of his reach just then. And his were striking him as crude … he could only complete the entry and the possession by taking a furtive glance at the bruise he had inflicted, and this itself now shamed him so that as he spurted he groaned and then lay still. He was filled, amazingly, with grief.
She was quite still, and a look at her face showed her eyes open and desolate.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I know you think I am a boor.’
‘You have very bad habits in your country,’ she remarked at last, and it was cold. Though he believed there was at least the possibility of a revival of her friendliness.
He jumped up, pulling the cloak all around him, and covering her legs with the blue dress.
‘You know what I’m going to do,’ he positively hissed at her, ‘I’m going to order you up some dresses from the town.’
At this she began to laugh. Weakly, her head turned to one side, and her hand at her mouth, but she laughed. He smiled, in relief, though he knew this laugh of hers might just as well be weeping.
‘It’s time we both ate, anyway,’ he said. And he sounded even more like her brother the steward, so that now she laughed harder, and then turned over, put her head under her arms and called out to him, ‘Get out of here, get out, and leave me alone.’
He went, marching briskly, into the rooms set aside for him, on the right of this central pavilion.
There he bathed, and changed his garments. He put on a tunic used for ceremonies and special occasions, because there was nothing else in his cupboards that seemed suitable for this tryst, or wedding breakfast.
Then he went back into the central room. She was in her rooms. He sat at the little table in the window against the arches where grey rain was sweeping in front of a pouring wind, and almost at once put his chin in his hand and fell to thinking of their dilemmas as rulers. There she found him later, so deep in thought he did not hear her.
She had found in her cupboards a light white linen wrapper that had been left there by one of the maids who had swept and tidied the pavilion. She had left her dark blue garment behind and had come in to him dressed in what he recognized as a maid’s overall — so he saw when at last he did realize she was there.
He said nothing, however. He thought that the fresh white became her. He thought that she was quite pretty, he could suppose, if only she was able to make her face more ready to meet his needs. But she was serious again, and this matched his real mood.
Between their two chairs was a small square table, inlaid with coloured woods and carved. This, too, had been exactly specified by the Order.
Now he said, ‘What do you want to eat?’
As she seemed about to answer, he clapped his hands, and there appeared before her fruit, bread, a hot aromatic drink.
‘Very frugal,’ said he, and clapped his hands again. Before him appeared cold meats and the hard biscuit they used on their campaigns.
‘Very frugal,’ said she.
‘You aren’t impressed at my little trick?’ he enquired, brisk and as it were brotherly-sarcastic.
‘Very, but I suppose it is part of the furnishings of the Order.’
‘Yes, it is. Do you have anything like it?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, we just think of it and it arrives.’ And she could see from the boyish pleasure he was showing that he was about to cause something else to materialize.
‘No, don’t,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t abuse it.’
‘You are right. Naturally.’ And he began eating, in efficient and large mouthfuls.
This meal of theirs was prolonged deliberately by them. Both liked each other best when in their roles of sovereign responsibility — thoughtful, serious. He told himself that he longed for her to behave like the girls he was used to, but the truth was, he was already used to her, and had begun to rely on her. As for her, her natural antipathy to his physical type and kind could only be set aside when she was able to watch him thinking, and trying to approach her to share what she knew faced them both.
They talked more than they ate, and sat watching the interminable rain sweeping past the arches and enclosing them in steady hush.
Towards midafternoon it stopped and, with bare feet, they walked around and between and among the faithful fountains, still plashing into the pools that had overflowed everywhere, so that they walked through inches of warm water. Ben Ata was kicking and dragging his feet through the shallows like a child. He had the look of someone let off a long leash: it was a foolish look, and Al·Ith was repelled by it. This was a man who did not know how to play without self-consciousness. He felt guilty, he had even the air of someone who needed punishment. Soon she suggested they should go indoors and then he put on stiffness and a correct manner like a child rebuked too harshly. She took a quick glance at the peaks of her own country, already slightly tinted by the sun going down behind them in a crystalline blue, and saw him tighten his lips and shake his head. With him there was no midway — licence or prohibition, one or the other! But inside they were able to regain a balance, and to talk again.
They had reached no conclusions about what was wrong in their two realms, or where they had taken false decisions — for it was clear to them both that this must be the case. But it seemed to them that they were all the time on the edge of some understanding that nevertheless continually eluded them.
The evening shadows enclosed the pavilions, and lights sprang up in the fluted edges of the ceilings. The two were walking about their — prison. For both knew that this was how the other felt. But they were not able to put themselves enough into each other’s place so as to understand why. Ben Ata, with every particle of himself, felt a need to throw off these surroundings, and to push away her whose very presence seemed to set up an irritable resistance in him as she moved to and fro, passing him, so that as she came near all the flesh on that side was protesting and shrinking. He had not experienced anything like this in his life. But then he had never spent such a long time alone with any woman, let alone one who talked to him, and behaved ‘like a man,’ as he kept telling himself. These waves of emotion were so strong that as they lessened, he felt astonished at himself, and wondered if he were not ill. Thoughts of her possible accomplishments in the dark arts returned. As for her, she was sorrowful, grief-struck, she wanted to weep. These emotions were foreign to her. She could not remember ever feeling a low, luxurious need to weep, to succumb, to put her head on a shoulder — not anyone’s, let alone Ben Ata’s. And yet she caught herself wishing more than once that he would carry her to that couch again, not to ‘make love’ — certainly not, for he was a barbarian — but to enclose her in his arms. This need could only amaze and disquiet her. She believed herself afflicted by the airs of this Zone, so enervating and dismal. Despite her shield, despite the special dimensions of this place, she must have become perverted in some way. With all her being she longed to be free and back in her own realm where an easy friendly lightheartedness was what everyone expected to feel, and where tears were a sign of physical illness.
Their pacings back and forth and up and down became such a frenzy that both even laughed, and tried to joke about it — but suddenly he let out a muffled shout, which she recognized easily as the sign of an organism reaching breaking point, and he said, ‘I must go and see about something …’ with which he disappeared into the dark down the hill.
She knew he had gone to the encampments — they were his home.
As for her, his going left her breathing more easily. But as she still paced to and fro, the words came into mind as clearly as if they had been spoken into her inner ear: ‘It is time for you to go home now, Al·Ith. You will have to come back later, but now go home.’
She could not doubt that this was the Order. Her spirits rose in a swoop. Not even stopping to put on her dark dress, but staying as she was in her white maid’s wrapper, she ran out in the other direction from that taken by her husband, Ben Ata, and standing among the fountains called to her horse. Which she did by thinking him to her. Soon she heard him cantering up the hill, and then picking his way through the flowers and the pools. She was on his back and off down the hill and on the road westwards before Ben Ata could have reached his soldiers.
She was not afraid of being stopped. It was dark. She had only to follow a straight road that ran without branching or even curving, straight on, and on, with the straight line of trees on one side looking like bunches of leafy twigs in the dark, and the canal lying on the other. Very few people went out at night here. In fact Ben Ata was quite shocked that in her realm the night was valued for visiting, feasts, and all kinds of enjoyments. He allowed that with them the air might be less dangerous, which he assured her it was down here. Al·Ith did not find it more than unpleasantly heavy and damp, and long before dawn the road rose steadily before her, to where the escarpment’s sharp lift began. It was necessary for her not to be stopped by the soldiers and on this side of the frontier. She ripped the sleeves out of her wrapper, tore each in half, and bound these around the hooves of her faithful horse. Then she rode on, making no sound.
She did not see the flocks and herds as she passed them, but she heard them, and thought of the poor subdued boy she had seen face down before her. She did not see the great pile of the ‘dangerous’ place, and told herself that on her next visit, which alas was inescapable, she must ask Ben Ata about it. She saw no one on the road. She heard soldiers singing and carousing not far from the frontier, but went past them without hindrance.
As the dawn lightened the sky far behind her, and she was lifting her eyes to wonder and marvel at the snow lands of her mountains, she heard a horse racing behind her, and thought it must be Ben Ata. She pulled in her horse and waited patiently for him to come up. It was Jarnti. He was without his armour, but had his shield, and was covered by the regulation cape.
‘Where are you going, madam?’
‘Home. As I have been ordered.’
‘Ben Ata does not know it. He is in the mess tent with the officers.’
‘I am sure he is,’ she said, but he did not respond to her humour. He was not looking at her, but rather to one side. He had the furtive shamefaced look she remembered as being peculiarly his. But he seemed to be straining to move his eyes further to one side … then with the same difficult movement, he was turning his head to the other side. And then he seemed to be attempting to lift his head, and failing.
She suddenly felt on the verge of an understanding.
‘Jarnti, do you ever look at the mountains?’
‘No,’ he said, making his black horse wheel about, in protest.
‘Why not?’
‘We are forbidden.’
‘It seems there is a great deal you are forbidden. Look now, look, how beautiful it is.’
Again his horse wheeled and swerved all about the road, and she could see that he was trying to force his eyes up. But while they kept flickering to one side and then another, he did not raise his head. Could not.
‘Did you cloud gather when you were a child?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were punished with the heavy helmet. For how long?’
‘For a very long time,’ he blurted, with sudden reminiscent anger. And the obedience took over again.
‘Do a lot of children disobey, and watch the mountains?’
‘Yes, a great many. And sometimes young people.’
‘And they all wear the punishment helmet and thereafter are obedient?’
‘That is so.’
‘How did you know I had gone?’
‘This horse was left alone, and he jumped over the wall and was cantering after you. I knew you had gone, and so I got on him.’
‘Well, I shall now ride on, Jarnti, and I daresay I shall see you again. But tell Ben Ata that if it is he who gets the Order that we must meet again, and here in your Zone, then he doesn’t have to send a company of soldiers.’
‘We do what we think is correct.’
‘How many soldiers did the Order specify were necessary to fetch me? None, I think.’
‘It is not safe for you to ride alone.’
‘I have ridden safely to this point, and once over the border and into my country I can assure you I have no need to fear.’
‘That I know,’ he said softly, and in admiration and with a longing in his voice that told her that he would dream of his visit to her Zone for all his life. Even though he might not know why he did.
Al·Ith examined this man while he kept his eyes averted.
He was built like Ben Ata, strong, brown-skinned, though his hair was black and so were his eyes. But she knew him, intimately, because of Ben Ata. He would be the same with his woman or women — blustering, and a boor. Yet for one moment, astounding her by its strength, she wished she were inside those arms like pillars, ‘safe,’ ‘sheltered.’ She called, ‘Goodbye, Jarnti, and tell Ben Ata I will see him when I have to.’ The grimace on Jarnti’s face was quite enough reward for her brief flare of spite, and she at once felt remorse. ‘Tell him … tell him … ’ but she could not think of anything softening and sweet. ‘Say I left because I was told to go,’ she brought out at last and sped up the road between the cliffs of the escarpment. Turning her head, she saw him trying to lift his on its stiff neck to gaze up into the forbidden mountains. But he could not: he forced it up a little way, and then his face fell forward again.
She rode over the frontier with her shield held before her, and then when she was in the fresh high singing airs of her own country, she threw down the shield, flung herself off the horse, and danced around him, shieldless, laughing so that she could nor stop. And on the peaks that stretched halfway up the sky now, the sunrise was scarlet and purple.
She wanted more than anything to be on the plateau, close under the mountains, but first she wished to make sure of certain facts. So when she had sung and danced herself back to her usual frame of mind, she got back on the horse, and turned off the road that ran to the plateau so that she would make a circle around it from right to left, through the outlying regions of the Zone. These were mostly pastoral, and farming, and she always enjoyed travelling there … but it was some time since she had made such a tour … how long? Prickling at the back of her mind was the knowledge that it had been a very long time. What had happened? How was it she had got slack like this? For she had. Irresponsible. There was no worse word. She was being stung, whipped along by it. Normally, after such a delight of dancing and retrieval of her self to the point where every atom sang and rejoiced, she would have expected to ride, or walk, or run through the long scented grasses of the steppe with nothing at her heels but the pleasures of the day, sunlight, crisp aromatic winds, the lights changing, always changing, on the peaks … but no, it was not so. She had been very wrong. Why? She even jumped down off her horse and stood with her arms around his neck and her face pressed into the slippery heat there, as if the horse’s strength could feed understanding into her. She had been particularly busy? No, she could not believe so. Life had been as it always was, delightful, with the children, her friends, her lovers, the amiable pace of this realm setting the rhythms of the body and the mind into good humour, kindliness … thinking of the smiling, contented faces of her life, she rebelled that there might be something wrong — how could there be!
A man’s voice said, ‘Are you in need of help?’ She turned and saw he was an agriculturalist from one of the communal farms. Young, healthy, with that particular glistening warmth to him that was the mark of well-being and good humour, and which was so singularly lacking in Ben Ata’s realm.
‘No, I am well,’ she said. But he was examining her in doubt. She remembered she still wore the brief white wrapper, now sleeveless and ragged, and that the horse’s hooves were bound in cloth. She pulled the rags off his hooves, and as she did so, he asked, ‘Ah, I see who you are. And how is marriage in Zone Four?’ This was the sort of friendly enquiry that she would normally have expected, but she gave him a quick suspicious glance, which she was categorizing as ‘a Zone Four look.’ But no, of course he meant nothing ‘impertinent’ — a Zone Four word! Oh, she had been very much changed by her day and a half in that low place.
‘You are right, I am Al·Ith. And I had forgotten I was wearing this thing. Tell me, would one of the women of your household lend me a dress of some kind?’
‘Of course. I’ll go now.’
And he ran off to where she could see a group of farmsteads surrounded by flocks and herds.
Meanwhile, she found a small tree, set the horse free to graze, and sat down.
When he came running back, with a garment in his hand, he saw her there, and the horse cropping, but close enough that he could lift his nose often to nuzzle and caress her.
‘What is your horse’s name, Al·Ith?’
‘I haven’t thought of a name good enough for him.’
‘Ah, then, he is a special friend!’
‘Yes, he chose me as a friend almost from the first moment.’
‘Yori,’ he said. ‘Your companion, your friend.’
‘Yes, that is very good!’ And she stroked the horse’s nose and whispered his name, Yori, into his ears.
‘And I, too,’ said the man. Of course I have always known you, but when I saw you, I felt at once that you were of me. My name is Yori, too.’ And he sat down on the grass opposite to her, and rested his arms on his knees, and leaned forward smiling.
And now Al·Ith was altogether thrown into doubt. She smiled, and nodded, but kept silent. If things had been normal, these words were of the sort she would have responded to at once. This man was her kind, and her flesh and his flesh communicated easily, and had from first glance. Sitting there with him among the warm drily scented grasses, the shade from the little tree sifting gently over them, it would have been the easiest thing to put out her hand, to his, and start a delicious hour or two of play. But voices seemed to ring through her, saying No. No! Why? Was she then already pregnant? Oh, she hoped not, for it was not in such a way that she had chosen children in the past. And if she were pregnant, then it was in the order of things and, indeed, required, and prescribed, to allow herself to be bathed and sustained by this man’s particular and individual being, so that the child would be fed by his essences and so that it would hear his words and be nourished. When she had been pregnant — and after what care, and thought, and long careful choices—in the past, she had, as soon as she had been sure, chosen as beneficial influences for her child, several men who, knowing why they were chosen, and for what purpose, co-operated with her in this act of blessing and gracing the foetus. These men had a special place in her heart and in the annals of her Zone. They were Fathers of the children just as much as the Gene-Fathers were. Every child in the Zone had such exactly chosen Mind-Fathers, who were as responsible for it as were the Gene-Fathers. These men formed a group who, with the Gene-Mother, and the women who cared for the child, considered themselves joint-parents, forever available to her, or him, any time they were needed, collectively and individually. If she were indeed pregnant, then she could not begin too soon to choose her child’s good influences.
‘Yori … ’ and the horse pricked up his ears and moved forward, so that the two people both smiled and touched him gently to soothe him, ‘do you think I am pregnant?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Would you know, in the normal run of things?’
‘Yes, I have always done until now.’
‘Are you many times a father?’
‘Twice a Gene-Father — and I expect to be one again in five years’ time when my turn comes around. And seven times a Mind-Father.’
‘Have you always known?’
‘Yes, from the first.’
They looked at each other reflectively, in the way that would have led to play, but there was a barrier between them.
‘If I were myself, it is you I would choose above any man, and I would choose you, too, for a Gene-Father, if a Gene-Child were required of me, but …’
Shadows came racing across the great steppe, the grasses rippled and hummed, the tree above them rustled, Yori the horse lifted his head and whinnied as if letting out into the air thoughts too painful to keep in, and she sat there with tears running down her face.
‘Al·Ith! You are weeping,’ he said, in a low, appalled voice.
‘I know! I have done nothing else these last days. Why? I don’t understand myself! I understand nothing!’ And she put her face in her hands and wept, while Yori the man caressed her hands, and Yori the horse snuffled at her arm.
Waves of understanding passed between her and the man through their hands, their severed flesh mourned because their two bodies knew they should be together, and she said, ‘That is a terrible place down there. Have I been poisoned by it?’
‘Why is it? What is its nature?’
‘How should I know?’ She sounded peevish, and this shocked her. She sprang up. ‘I am irritable! I am angry! I feel the need to fling myself into strong arms, and weep — yours … oh, don’t be shocked, don’t be afraid. I shall of course not do any such thing. I have become suspicious of words and looks — now you tell me what the nature of Zone Four is!’
‘Sit down, Al·Ith.’ This command, which was as she heard it, brought her to sit down: and she sat thinking that he had not meant an order, a command, but it was the sort of suggestion a friend made, yet she had heard an order.
‘It is a place of compulsion,’ she said. ‘There are pressures we do not have here, and know nothing about. They can respond only if ordered, compelled.’
‘Ordered?’
‘No, not the Order, not Order. But do this. Do that. They have no inner listening to the Law.’
‘Have they always been like that?’ he asked, with a sudden illumination which she felt at once, so that she sat up and leaned forward, searching his face.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That may be it. I think you are right.’
‘Al·Ith, things are very bad with us here.’
‘Yes, I know it. I know it now. I should have known it before. If I had not been remiss.’
‘Yes, we are saying now that you must have been remiss. Only now. For it is only now that these different events have come together to make the understanding.’
‘Why was it no one came to tell me … ’ and she remembered that they had, and she had not been listening. ‘Oh, it is right that I am being punished … ’ she cried out, and the amazingness of the words caused her to say in a low bitter voice, ‘Did you hear that? That’s what I mean.’
‘I heard.’
Again, they were quiet, sitting close, enclosed in harmonies.
‘Perhaps if we came together you might be cured?’ he suggested.
She said, ‘As you said that my first thought was suspicion — no, wait, listen. “He is saying that for self-interest.” No, you must not be shocked at me. I am trying to explain … that is how it is with them down there and I am infected by it… . I believe that perhaps, if we joined, completely, I might be cured, improved at least. But there is some other obligation on me, an imposition I have to obey… . I feel it would not be honourable.’
‘Honourable?’ And his smile was quizzical.
‘Yes. Honourable.’
‘You do not belong to Ben Ata and his kingdom.’
‘Who knows!’ And she got to her feet again. The thin white wrapper left her almost naked. She might as well have been. He wore the comfortable loose clothes of his calling, loose trousers, and singlet. They stood close together, hands joined. The black horse Yori stretched out his nose to them from a few paces away. This is a very favourite scene among Chroniclers and artists of our realm. It is called ‘The Parting.’ Or, for the subtler minds, ‘Al·Ith’s Descent Into the Dark.’
‘I would ask you to travel with me,’ she said. ‘But I am not going to. I do not know myself. I do not trust myself. I must go alone. Meanwhile, tell me quickly how things are with you in this part of the steppe.’
Holding her hands, he talked for a while about the sadness of the animals, the poor crops, the falling-off of the weather, the lessening in conception among animals and people.
‘Thank you. And now I shall put on this dress. Tell me to whom I shall return it.’
‘It is my sister’s. She sends it with her friendship.’
‘I shall send one to her in gratitude when I get back to my home.’
He saluted her with a smile, and a gentle kiss on her cheek, and went off. She took off the white wrapper, standing naked, for comfort, among the sunny plants, and then put on the sister’s robe, which was a dark red, shaped as she liked best, close-fitting in the bodice and sleeves, loose in the skirt.
She got back on Yori and rode on towards the northern parts of her kingdom.
Everywhere she stopped her horse, and went to homestead or farm or herdsman’s shelter, to talk and make enquiries, she heard the same news. Either things were worsening fast everywhere, or they were worse here, in the north, where already the chills of an early autumn thickened the air.
She spent only the time she needed to everywhere. She was welcomed with a kindness that had not lessened, though there was not one woman or man or even child who did not speak in the understanding that she had been at fault, and that this new marriage, or mingling, with Zone Four, was to do with this fault or falling-off.
And as she rode through the wilder country of the nothern regions, hilly, many-watered, often precipitous, she remembered — only remembered — the easy, slow-pacing times of the past, for now Ben Ata, Ben Ata, Ben Ata rang in her blood, she could not forget him, and yet every reminder of him was painful and brought a bitter load with it: she knew, she knew better every day and every hour, that she was on the verge of a descent into possibilities of herself she had not believed open to her. And there was nothing she could do to avert it.
Leaving the north, she swung around, with the central massif always at her left, and entered the west. Here it was late summer again, and the sun warm and still. She rode among scenes of plenty and fullness, yet the information was the same, and woman, man, and child greeted her: Al·Ith, Al·Ith, what is wrong? Where have we gone wrong, where have you gone wrong?
The weight of discomfort on her was guilt. Although she did not know it, for she had not known of the possibility of such a state. Recognizing, among the many calamitous and heavy emotions that moved in her, taking so many different shades and weights and colours, this one that returned, and returned, seeming at last to become the ground or inner substance of all the others, she learned its taste and texture. Guilt, she named it. I, Al·Ith, am at fault. Yet whenever this thought came, she started to back away from it in dislike and mistrust. How could she, Al·Ith, be at fault, how could she, only she, be in the wrong … she might be in bondage to Zone Four, but she had not lost the knowledge, which was the base of all knowledges, that everything was entwined and mixed and mingled, all was one, that there was no such thing as an individual in the wrong, nor could there be. If there was a wrong, then this must be the property of everyone, and everybody in every one of the Zones — and doubtless beyond them, too. This thought struck Al·Ith sharply, like a reminder. She had not thought, not for very long, about what went on beyond the Zones … for that matter, she thought very little now about Zones One and Two — and Two lay just there, to the north-west, beyond a horizon that seemed to fold and unfold in blue or purple … She had not looked there for … for … she could not remember. She was on a slight eminence, in the centre of the western regions. She got off the noble Yori, and with her arm flung across his neck for comfort, allowed herself to gaze northwest, into Zone Two. What lay there? She had no idea! She had not thought! She had not wondered! Or had she, a long time ago? She could not remember ever standing as she did now, gazing there, wondering, allowing her eyes to be drawn into those long, blue, deceiving distances … her eyes seemed to be drawn and follow, and become dissolved in blue, blue, blue … a mingling, changing, rippling blue … Al·Ith came to herself after a lapse into the deepest regions of herself, with a knowledge born that she knew would hatch out. Not yet, but soon… . ‘It’s there,’ she was whispering to herself. ‘There … if I could only grasp it … ’ She got back on her horse and rode on always in her wide curve, bending to the left hand, and passed out of the western regions into the south. Her favourite, always her favourite, yes, she had made excuses to come here more often than the other regions … she had been here quite recently, with all her children, and her court and, it seemed, half the population of the plateau. And what a time they had had — festivities, singing — it seemed looking back that they had sung and danced and feasted for all the summer months. And never standing for long pauses in her busy life to rest her eyes in the blue reaches of the Zone which was as much higher than Zone Three as this one was to Zone Four … This idea shook her, shook her as strongly as a conception did—should, if it were a properly designed and orchestrated conception — here was some very strong and urgent need, that she should be attending to, reaching out towards …
And yet as she rode among the farms and ranches of the south, greeted by everyone with such kindness and recognition for the good times they had all enjoyed, it was there again, and more than ever — ‘You are at fault. Al·Ith, at fault …’
And she rode on, saying to herself, I am not, I am not, how can I be, if I am queen here, it is because you have chosen me, and you have chosen me because I am you, and you recognize it — I am the best part of you, my people, and I call you mine, as you call me ours, our Al·Ith, and therefore I cannot be at fault any more than you can — the fault is somewhere else, somewhere deeper, somewhere higher? And she kept riding up onto hills covered with the rich vineyards of the south so that she could stand and gaze towards the northwest, into the azure ranges of that other land — or she did until she rounded the central massif and could no longer gaze there, nor could she expect to until she climbed up into the plateau where she intended to ride fast straight across it, only briefly stopping in the capital to greet her children and us all, so as to stand on the very edge there, overlooking the west and the northwest to gaze into the blue hazes, until what she had to remember — and she knew that this was it — came into her mind.
All through the southern Zones she rode up and down and back and forth. Several times she encountered the men who, if things were right, she would have approached to irradiate her with their various and many qualities for the sake of the child which she might have conceived — but had she? And here again was a source of utter self-reproach and self-lack — for it was now nearly a month since she had been with Ben Ata, and she had no idea if she was pregnant or not. For of course one knew it, understood such a fact, through the responses and heightened intuitions of one’s entire being, not because of any purely physical thing. Guilty, oh, guilty … yet she was not, such a thought was in itself a reason for guilt — it was so foolish and self-fixated and self-bounded. And so rode Al·Ith, all seethe and conflict. Her mind was calm, clear, and in balance, while below rioted and writhed and moaned and gibbered emotions she judged as ludicrous.
And as for the rest of her, the higher regions in which she normally dwelt, and on which she relied — those distances in her which she knew to be her own real being — well, they seemed far enough these days. She was a fallen creature, poor Al·Ith, and she knew it.
Meanwhile, Ben Ata, Ben Ata rang in her blood and in the pounding of her horse’s hooves.
When she again reached the road that ran from the borders of Zone Four straight across the plain to the central plateau and its mountains, she turned her horse to her left hand, so as to ride on and up home. But the unmistakable voice spoke suddenly and clearly into her mind: ‘Turn round and go back to Ben Ata … ’ and, as she hesitated, ‘Go now. Al·Ith.’
And she turned her horse and went east. On emerging from Zone Four, in her dance of relief and triumph, she had flung down her shield and been pleased to forget it. She could not ride into Zone Four now without protection. Not knowing what to do, she did nothing: they would know of her predicament and provide.
As she rode she turned around continually to look back at the vast mass of the core of her land with its brilliances, its lights, its shadows … and now there was a thought that had not been there before … she was thinking at the same time of the blue distances beyond. So that this beautiful realm of hers was held in her mind extended, or lengthened: it had been finite, bounded, known utterly and in every detail, self-enclosed … but now it lapped and rippled out and upwards beyond there into hinterlands that were like unknown possibilities in her own mind.
As often as she turned to gaze back, she resolutely made herself look forward and confront what waited for her. Behind, all heights, distances, perspectives: before, Zone Four.
And Ben Ata. She found the thought in her mind that this great lump of a man so newly introduced in her life must balance in some way those far blue heights of Zone Two — but she did not smile. She did not seem now a creature who could laugh. What she did observe in herself, though, was a most unfamiliar impulse towards silliness. Never before in her whole life had she met any being, woman, man, or child, without an opening of her self to them, for the flow of intimacy to start at once — and now arts and tricks she had known nothing of were working in her without her volition, or so she believed. She would meet Ben Ata so, and so, and so — and she was imagining little glances, smiles, evasions, offers of herself. And she was revolted.
At the frontier she saw, as she had expected, a figure on a horse, and it was not Ben Ata, nor was it Jarnti. On a fine chestnut mare was a strong dark-haired powerful woman, with her hair done up in braids like a coronet round her head. Her eyes were straight and honest. But they were wary, and her whole being expressed a need for acceptance that was being kept well in check. Before her, on the heavy saddle that was Zone Four’s indispensable horse furniture, were set two glittering metal oblongs: she had brought a shield for Al·Ith.
‘I am Dabeeb, Jarnti’s wife,’ she said. ‘Ben Ata sent me.’
The two women sat on their horses facing each other, in open and friendly examination.
Dabeeb saw a beautiful slender woman, her hair flowing down her back, with eyes so warm and kind she could have wept.
Al·Ith saw this handsome female who in her own Zone would have been put, at first sight, in positions of the most responsible and taxing kind — and yet here she had on her every mark of the slave.
Her eyes never left Al·Ith’s face, for she was watching for signs of rebuke, or dismissal. Even punishment … yet she was, as it were, tripping over herself in eagerness and liking.
‘Are you wondering why I am here, my lady?’
‘No … oh, please don’t! My name is Al·Ith …’ and this reminder of the ways of this Zone made her whole self sink and shrink.
‘It is hard for us,’ remarked Dabeeb. But she spoke in a small stubborn self-respecting way that made Al·Ith take note of it.
‘I have not heard the name Dabeeb before.’
‘It means something that has been made soft by beating.’
Al·Ith laughed.
‘Yes, that is it.’
‘And who chose that name for you?’
‘It was my mother.’
‘Ah — I understand.’
‘Yes, she liked her little joke, my mother did.’
‘You miss her!’ exclaimed Al·Ith, seeing the tears in Dabeeb’s eyes.
‘Yes. I do. She understood things the way they are, that’s what she was like.’
‘And she made you very strong—the one-who-has-been-made-soft by beating.’
‘Yes. As she was. Always give way and never give in. That’s what she said.’
‘How is it you are here alone? Isn’t it unusual for a woman to travel alone?’
‘It is impossible,’ said Dabeeb. ‘It never happens. But I think Ben Ata wanted to please you … and there is something else. Jarnti had already got ready to come and fetch you … ‘
‘That was kind of him.’
A shrewd flash of a smile. ‘Ben Ata was jealous — ’ with the swiftest of glances to see how this was being taken. And she sat, head slightly lowered, biting her lip.
‘Jealous?’ said Al·Ith. She did not know the word, but then remembered she had read it in old chronicles. Trying to work out what it could mean in this context, she saw that Dabeeb had gone red, and was looking insulted: Dabeeb believed that Al·Ith meant Jarnti was not on her level.
‘I don’t think I have ever been jealous. We do not expect to feel that emotion.’
‘Then you are very different from us, my lady.’
The two women rode together down the pass. They were assessing each other with every sense, visible and invisible, they had.
What Dabeeb felt made her exclaim, after a short distance, ‘Oh, I wish I were like you, if only I could be like you! You are free! Will you let me come with you when you go home again?’
‘If it is permitted.’ And they both sighed, feeling the weight of the Order.
And Al·Ith was thinking that this woman had in her a core of strength, something obdurate, enduring: sufferings and pains that she, Al·Ith, had never imagined, had made her thus. And so she was curious, and eager to learn more. But she did not know how to ask questions, or what to ask.
‘If you, a woman, can ride to meet me, and with Ben Ata’s permission, does that mean that women now will be more at liberty?’
‘Ben Ata permitted it. My husband did not.’ And she gave a short shrewd laugh that Al·Ith already knew was characteristic.
‘So what will he do about it?’
‘Well. I am sure he will find a way to make himself felt.’ And she waited for Al·Ith to join her in a certain kind of laugh.
‘I don’t think I know what you mean.’ But as she saw the humorous patience on Dabeeb’s face, she understood.
‘Have you ever thought of rebelling?’
Dabeeb lowered her voice and said, ‘But it is the Order … is it not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I find there is a great deal I don’t know that I thought I did. For instance, can you tell when a woman is pregnant?’
‘Yes, of course, can’t you?’
‘Always until now. But not now. Not here.’
Dabeeb instantly understood this, for she nodded, and said, ‘I see. Well, you are not pregnant, I can assure you.’
‘Well, that is something.’
‘You plan not to get pregnant?’ And again her voice was lowered and she gave furtive glances all about her, though they were now at the foot of the escarpment and on the point of starting their ride across the watery fields and there was not a soul in sight.
‘I think we use the word plan differently.’
‘Will you teach me?’ came the whisper just audible over the horses’ thud-thudding on the dirt road.
‘I’ll teach you what I can. What is permitted.’
‘Ah, yes … I know.’ And the sigh she let out then held in it everything Al·Ith needed to know about women in this Zone.
Resignation. Acceptance. Humour. And always a pull and a tug from within these armours of watchfulness, patience, humour, of a terrible need.
Al·Ith pulled up Yori. Dabeeb did the same. Al·Ith put out her hand. After a struggle with her cautions and resistances, Dabeeb did the same. Al·Ith whispered across the space between them: ‘I will tell you everything I can. Help you as I can. I’ll be your friend. As far as I can. I promise you.’ For she had seen that words were necessary. This kind of speech. She had never used them in her own land, had never imagined the need to use them. But now she saw tears fill the handsome black eyes of Dabeeb, and trickle down her ruddy cheeks. The words had been right, and necessary.
‘Thank you. Al·Ith,’ she whispered, her voice broken.
When they reached the place in the road where they could easily see the pavilions on the eminence, Al·Ith said, ‘I would like you to lend me one of your dresses. Ben Ata thinks I am unsuitably dressed.’
Dabeeb looked longingly at the dark red, embroidered dress of Al·Ith and said, ‘That is more beautiful than anything I have ever seen with us. But they would never understand that in a thousand years!’ She spoke with the affectionate indulgence Al·Ith could not imagine offering to anyone other than a small child. And there was, as well, a dreadful contempt in it.
‘You are elegant. Al·Ith, I wish I could know how to be as elegant …’
And she looked in dismissal at her own dress, which was a patterned material, pretty enough, but without the rightness and flair that stamped the garments of Zone Three.
‘You needn’t worry about what you are to wear. Everyone is talking about the clothes Ben Ata has ordered up for you from the town. There are cupboards full of them … though I don’t know what you will make of them, I am sure.’
She rode with Al·Ith up the rise of the hill, to where the gardens and fountains began, then leaned forward and suddenly and emotionally embraced Al·Ith. ‘I will be thinking of you, my lady. We all will, all the women, we are with you, and don’t forget it!’ And she rode off down the hill, and her tears scattered back on the wind like rain.
Al·Ith rode gently across the end of the gardens, dismounted, told Yori to find his way to the corrals, and walked back through the gardens, looking at the pavilion and waiting for the moment Ben Ata would show himself. She noted in herself the most remarkable constellation of unfamiliar emotions, which, regarded as a whole, amounted to a sort of antagonism that was quite unfamiliar. There was a sort of mocking, amused, intention there: ‘I’m going to show you!’ and, ‘You think you are going to get the better of me!’
It went not with dislike of Ben Ata, but a quite pleasant challenge and combativeness.
She even looked forward to seeing him, so that this new exchange could begin. There were no tears on this horizon, certainly not!
She was full of confidence, and calm, all her powers reined in and held.
There was also in her an inner core of unassailability which she recognized because she had been sensing and assessing just this quality in Dabeeb, all across the plain.
It was in this state of mind that she waited for the encounter with Ben Ata.
Who was lounging against the central pillar, arms folded, in a pose that mirrored her own mood. He smiled, hard and mocking.
‘Did you like your escort?’ he enquired, reminding her he was supposed to be jealous.
‘Very much. Not as much of course as I would have enjoyed the handsome Jarnti!’
With which he came forward fast, eyes momentarily aglitter, and she saw that he could easily have struck her. But instead he smiled in a way which told her she would pay for it later, and held out his two hands. She took them and swung on them lightly, from side to side, smiling and mocking.
‘That is a pretty dress,’ said he, for he had determined to be complimentary about it.
‘You like red then?’
‘I think I like you,’ said he, in spite of himself grabbing at her — for he did not, he liked her even less than before, for while his senses in fact were informing him that this girl in a red, provokingly fitted dress could easily be to his taste, he had in fact forgotten the independence of her, which informed every smile, look, gesture.
She evaded him and slid away into the room, with a mocking backward look over her shoulder which quite astounded her — she did not know she had it in her! And he, to tease, did not follow, but stood his ground, a pillar of a man, in his short green belted tunic, and bare head, arms folded. She, then, smiling ‘enigmatically’ — though feeling this smile on her lips she was amazed at it — put two hands around the slender central pillar and swung there lightly, in a way that was bound to set him all aflame. And it did, but he was not going to budge.
He stood grinning, while she swung and smiled …
When Al·Ith had left him that evening all those weeks ago, he had returned, reluctant, at midnight, having refreshed himself among his soldiers, and found her gone. Furious, he understood there must have been a summons she had obeyed, and then he felt in all of himself a lack and a need and a disability that he in no way knew how to diagnose or to feed. It was not Al·Ith he was missing, he was sure of that.
He was nothing if not a painstaking man.
He had understood that in certain practices he was quite lacking in understanding and indeed in any sort of knowledge.
He despised men who went into the stews of the town, as self-indulgent. But that is where he went now. Having made methodical enquiries of Jarnti and others of his officers, he went to a certain establishment, and demanded an interview with its madam. She understood exactly what he wanted and had done so from the moment the rumours entered her house that he was about to visit them. But she sat smiling through his rather clumsy, but determined explanations.
She sent him into a room that was already furnished with a girl who had been given all kinds of detailed instructions. For the capacities and lacks of Ben Ata had of course been discussed up and down the land from woman to woman. After all, so many campaigns, so many army exercises, so many sacks and rapes and loots had given plenty of opportunity for ravished or disappointed girls to spread their news.
Ben Ata found himself bedded with an expert young woman, who had quite surprised him. It could not be said that he found such prolonged dedication to pleasure entirely to his tastes, for he persisted in regarding all this as hardly the occupation for a real man.
But the fact was that Ben Ata had been pleasured, the only word for it, during the month that Al·Ith had been riding around her realm making investigations. He had been taught, as in a school, a large variety of lessons, to do with the anatomy, the capacities, the potentialities of the body, male and female. He was not a particularly apt pupil. But on the other hand he was certainly not a sluggard, for once he had decided on a certain course of duty, nothing much was likely to deflect him.
This courtesan, for she was no common whore, having been chosen among very many by the most expert madam of the whorehouse, and even brought here from another town because of her reputation, had taught him everything she could.
What Elys had achieved in a month of pretty hard work was to adjust Ben Ata’s mind to the notion that pleasure could be multi-functional. This was at least a basis.
He had believed that he now knew everything there was to know.
But the moment Al·Ith had sauntered so charmingly and mockingly into the pavilion, he had remembered something entirely blotted from his mind during that enervating month. The light, glancing, inflaming kisses that he had not known how to answer, had gone from his mind. The invitation, the answer and question, the mutual response and counter-response — none of this had been within the provision of the courtesan Elys, since she had never in her life enjoyed an equal relation with anyone, man or woman.
As Al·Ith swung there, lightly, and delightfully, on her pillar, smiling, and waiting, he understood that he was now to start again. There was no help for it. He could not refuse, for his month as apprentice, and a willing one, had already said yes to what was to come.
As he challenged and antagonized, an equal — at the same time his look at Al·Ith told her all this. And so she left her pillar, and came to him, and began to teach him how to be equal and ready in love.
It was quite shocking for him, because it laid him open to pleasures he had certainly not imagined with Elys. There was no possible comparison between the heavy sensualities of that, and the changes and answerings of these rhythms. He was laid open not only to physical responses he had not imagined, but worse, to emotions he had no desire at all to feel. He was engulfed in tenderness, in passion, in the wildest intensities that he did not know whether to call pain or delight … and this on and on, while she, completely at ease, at home in her country, took him further and further every moment, a determined, but disquieted companion.
He could not of course sustain it for long. Equality is not learned in a lesson, or even two. He was heavy and slow in response by nature: he could never be anything else. Impossible to him would always be the quicksilver pleasures. But even as far as he could stand it, he had been introduced to his potentialities beyond anything he had believed possible. And when they desisted, and he was half relieved and half sorry that the intensities were over, she did not allow him to sink back again away from the plane of sensitivity they had both achieved. They made love all that night, and all the following day, and they did not stop at all for food, though they did ask for a little wine, and when they had been entirely and thoroughly wedded, so that they could no longer tell through touch where one began and the other ended, and had to look, with their eyes, to find out, they fell into a deep sleep, where they lay becalmed for another twenty-four hours. And when they woke, at the same moment, at the beginning of a nightfall, they heard a drum beat, beat, from the end of the garden, and this rhythm they knew at once was signalling to the whole land, and beyond it to her land, that the marriage was properly accomplished. And the drum was to beat, from that time on, from when they met, until they parted, so that everyone could know they were together, and share in the marriage, in thought, and in sympathetic support — and, of course, in emulation.
They lay in each other’s arms as if in the shallows of a sea they had drowned in. But now began the slow and tactful withdrawals of the flesh, thigh from thigh, knee from knee … it was partly dark and while each felt their commonplace selves to be at odds with the marvels of the days and nights just ended, luckily any dissonances could not be seen. For already they were quick to disbelieve what they had accomplished. He, with an apologetic and almost tender movement, pulled his warm forearm from under her neck, sat up, then stood up, stretching. Relief was in every stretch of those sturdy muscles, and she smiled in the dark. As for her, she was becoming herself again the same way. But it was clear he felt it was ungallant to leave her at once, for he pulled around himself his soldier’s cloak and sat at the foot of the couch.
‘If we tidied up a little bit,’ said he, ‘we could meet for supper.’
‘What a very good idea!’ And her voice came from the door to her apartments, for she had crept there without his seeing her. And she had gone.
Nothing had changed in the weeks since she was here, except that the length of a wall was exposed to show row after row of dresses, robes, furs, cloaks. She had never seen anything like it, and muttering that this was clearly some kind of storehouse for a whole houseload of whores—for the word had already been learned from him — she pulled out one after the other. The materials were fine enough, and she examined silks, satins, woollens, with a professional eye for their quality — certainly this country knew how to manufacture these goods. But she could only marvel at the awfulness of their making-up. She could not find one that wasn’t exaggerated in some way or another, that didn’t emphasize buttocks or breasts, or expose them, or confine them uncomfortably, or if not, the material or the colour was wrong for the conception. There was nowhere here the instinctive feel for the rightness of a match of style and cloth, and no subtleties. But, thinking that instant seduction was hardly so soon to be the order of the day, she found a commonsensical green dressing robe that amazed her for its infallible wrongness in everything, but was better than most. She bathed, arranged her hair something as she had seen Dabeeb do hers — womanly was probably the word for it — and put on the green robe. Then she returned to the centre room, where Ben Ata was moodily awaiting her at the small table by the window. Seeing her attire he brightened, then was disappointed.
‘Is that one of ours?’ he enquired doubtfully, and she replied, ‘Indeed it is, great king,’ and they exchanged the comradely, knowledgeable smiles of the thoroughly mated. For looking at each other now, returned to their absolute separateness, their otherness, these two denizens of their different realms could not believe what they had won together during their hours of submersion in each other. She was to him, again, a foreign woman, everything about her alien, though dear now in a way that estranged him more than bound him, for he feared, most deeply, where she might lead him. And she, looking at this great ox of a soldier, with his hair plastered to his head after the bath, thought that she was much to be congratulated in leading him as far as she had.
They mentally summoned hefty meals, which came, and they ate hungrily, for some time.
Meanwhile, the drum from the gardens beat, beat, beat.
No sooner had they ended their meal, than they sprang up and went out and wandered everywhere over the garden, from one end to the other. They could see no drummer and no drums. But the sound was there — somewhere — here? — no, there — they were always on the point of coming on the source of it, but always failed.
Realizing that they were not ever going to learn where this sound came from, they returned to the pavilion. Not hand in hand. Not even very close. Each felt sealed, whole, self-locked, absolutely impenetrable by the other, that foreigner.
‘However,’ said she, as if in continuation of a conversation, ‘I am certainly pregnant.’
‘You are? Are you sure? Splendid!’ Feeling that an embrace of some kind was due, he made as if to approach her, but as she clearly felt no such impulse he thankfully forgot about it.
‘Of course I am sure.’
‘Why? How?’
‘As the women of your country, but certainly not as we know.’ And with this she laughed. She laughed, while he maintained polite looks and waited for her to finish.
‘Well, good, I am delighted.’
‘Well, so am I, since it is probably what is required of us.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No, of course not. I am not sure of anything.’
‘What are we supposed to do next?’
‘How should I know? But perhaps they will tell me to go home?’
At the look of instant relief on his face, she rolled with laughter, pointing at him, and he, realizing what she had seen, and that she was willingly confessing to the same, laughed with her. This feast of laughter having ended, they were forced to acknowledge that it was still far from midnight, and that if left to their own devices they would certainly separate.
‘Chess?’ he suggested.
‘Why not.’
He beat her, then she beat him. They were both very good and in fact master and mistress of the game respectively, in both their two realms. This meant the games took a long time and it was dawn when they were finished.
Both wondered (and hoping the other did not guess) if more lovemaking was yet appropriate, but decided against it.
Walking again in the mists and splashings of the gardens, with the drum everywhere, in their blood, and in their minds, she called his attention to the files of soldiers down below, deploying among the wet hazes of the meadows. She watched his face, respecting what she saw on it: it was a complete knowledge of what he saw, and she knew he was marshalling praise and criticism and orders, for the perfection of that work of his, the army.
‘And who,’ she asked, in a way that would make him know she was in earnest, ‘are your enemies?’
He tensed, and she understood he had been thinking hard on this question ever since she had first asked it of Jarnti, who had transmitted her words jeering, but inwardly disturbed, to his king.
‘If we have no enemies, then why do we have armies?’ he asked her, not at all in jest, but in respect for her questioning of him.
‘Who do you fight?’
He was tense and silent. She knew he was remembering the pillage and the rapine of innumerable campaigns, and thinking if these had in fact been for some ghost of a mistaken idea then …
‘We are not your enemies — it is not even possible for one of us to cross the border without bad effects — yet you have forts all along our frontier from one end to the other, just as close as you can get to it without the soldiers being made ill by its proximity.’
He gave an odd little shrugging movement of his shoulders.
‘How long is it since anyone fired so much as a single warning shot there?’
He laughed, shortly, in acknowledgment. ‘So long that we can’t remember. Mind you, we do sometimes arrest someone as a spy … but then let him go again.’
She laughed. ‘Then why?’
‘We have large, and efficient armies.’
Down among the golden fogs that were rising straight up into the air and dissipating at about their eye level, the glittering brightly coloured soldiers wheeled and marched, and the sharp barking sounds of the orders seemed to fade at about the same level, as if the sounds and the mists were one.
‘And Zone Five? You have forts there? A frontier?’
‘And skirmishes and even battles.’
This startled her: she had forgotten there was a war there.
‘Surely,’ she said, ‘but surely …’
‘Yes, I know.’ Awkward, embarrassed, apologetic, as if he were at fault before her and not before Them—the Providers and the Orderers — he was stammering. ‘I have been wondering since you brought the matter up. It is true … of course we are not supposed to fight … ’
‘Real battles?’
‘Yes. Well … nothing very serious …’
‘Wounded? Casualties?’
‘Wounded and dead.’
Her breath was a long, dismayed, and even frightened sigh. He tinned on her the bleakest of faces. ‘Yes, I know. But I swear it—it grew up like that. I never thought … none of us did … it was not until you … ’ And he crashed his great fist down on a low parapet that bordered a pool.
‘Who starts it? The fighting? Is it possible for people from this Zone to cross into that one — and back — without damage, or danger?’
‘At one time I know that it was as impossible to cross from one Zone to another, as it is now for us to move back and forth between your Zone and ours, without shields. But something seems to have changed. I’m not saying that it is easy. There isn’t large-scale movement across the frontier. Nor does it happen often. But the fighting takes place along the borders, sometimes on this side, and sometimes on that — never far inside their Zone.’
‘You’ve been there?’
‘Yes. More than once.’
‘What is it like, Zone Five?’
He shuddered, and rubbed his hands up and down his forearms, to warm them. He was quite pale with dislike of Zone Five.
‘It is as bad as that,’ she said, not without irony, for she knew that he was feeling for that place what she and all of us in Zone Three felt for this one. He caught the irony, acknowledged it, nodded, and put his arm around her, in affection. ‘Yes, it is as bad as that.’
And, drawing her close, he put his face down into the coils of her hair and she heard him muttering, ‘But what are we to do. Al·Ith? What? Bad enough that I have only just begun to think of it.’
‘As I have of the deficiencies in our Zone. Do you know, Ben Ata, I have not had time to tell you, but I have ridden all around the outer regions of our Zone since I saw you last …’
‘Alone?’ said he, incredulous and sharp, despite himself, and was not able to laugh when she said, indulgent, ‘Of course alone, since I wanted to … but that isn’t the point, Ben Ata. When I was on a certain high point of country, below the central massif, but where I could look straight out northwest, I could see … but the point is, that none of us have done that for so long I don’t think anyone could say when we last did. You need punishment helmets to prevent your people looking there — ’ and she pulled him around so that his dazzled eyes rose to the great heights of Zone Three, now all the colours of a fire opal. ‘Your people won’t look up there, no, keep your eyes on it, Ben Ata, but our people never look beyond our borders, and this is without any punishments or forbiddings. It never occurs to us. We are too prosperous, too happy, everything is so comfortable and pleasant with us, Ben Ata … I don’t know what to say or to think …’ and she was astounded, utterly appalled, to find that again tears ran down her cheeks, while he bent over her, forgetting the beguiling colours of the great peaks, making small concerned noises at these so foreign tears. And he even brushed a tear from her lid with one large forefinger and looked at it, as if this tear could not be like any other he had seen.
In song, in picture, and in story, this scene is known as ‘Al·Ith’s Tear.’ It is popularly believed to have to do with the tender emotions of this pair when she told him she was pregnant, but the truth of the matter is as I tell it here.
There lay Al·Ith, rocked on the man’s strong breast, all cradled and comforted, sobbing away, just as she had wanted to do on so many occasions recently. That she didn’t believe in the efficacy of it, did not prevent her enjoying it, while it lasted.
As for him, he was both delighted that this dreadfully self-sufficient girl could have a good cry, just like any other, and at the same time he didn’t believe in it either. It simply wasn’t like her, and he was relieved when she stood up, sniffed, wiped the wet off her cheeks with two small hands, and again stood upright by him at the parapet.
‘And what is Zone Two like?’ he enquired.
‘You know more about our Zone than I can tell you about there. All I can say is that you stand and gaze and look, and never have enough of it. It is as if you looked at blue mists — or waters or — but it is blue, blue, you’ve never seen such a blue …’
‘Well, I don’t see the point in that,’ said he shortly, ‘it doesn’t get anything done.’
Which was so exactly what she expected of him that she went into a fit of laughter, in which he joined: and this led back to the couch. This exchange was by no means on the level of the last days, but was more of a confirmation that the thing was still possible — for their differences were so great that they were both always being overtaken by feelings of astonishment that they could be there together at all. And so they were to feel until the very end.
They were now at midday again: a steamy day, and she shocked him by jumping nude into one of the fountains. He had not seen fountains as containing any such possibility and he joined her, but not with abandon. He complained that the goldfish were tickling him, that they themselves were disturbing the fish, and that in any case, ‘if anyone were to see them …’
But who could?
‘There’s that drummer,’ he complained. ‘There must be someone there, it stands to reason,’ for the drum went on, on, on, no matter what they did or said.
‘What we have to do,’ she said, when they were dressed and again seated on either side of their little table, ‘is this. You know that there was a time when it was not possible for Zone Four and Zone Five to mingle. Now you do—and even fight. So what has happened? We must find out. And having done that, we must find out what your armies were for, originally. Why do you have armies? All the wealth of your land drains into the armies. No wonder you are so poor.’
‘We are poor? What do you mean!’
‘Ben Ata, you are poor! You don’t know it, but you are pathetic! The poorest of our herdsmen lives better than you do, the king. As for the clothes in those cupboards! Oh, I’m not saying that they aren’t solid and well-sewn — or not adequate. For their purpose. But if those are the clothes thought fit for a queen, according to your ideas — for with you of course a queen would have to wear one richness of garment and the wife of a soldier another —’
‘But of course. There have to be ranks.’
‘Of course — according to you. But I tell you it is not necessary. Why do you have to have ranks, and a hierarchy? It is because you are so poor. Why do you have to wear that great brooch holding your cloak that says you are Ben Ata? With us, everyone knows I am Al·Ith. And they would if I wore sacking. Don’t you see? You are poor, poor people, Ben Ata. Everything I see as I ride here — oh, I’m not talking of this pavilion here, which has been created for just this time and this place and will probably vanish when we part —’
‘Are we going to part again?’
‘But of course! What do you imagine? That we are together for ever, Ben Ata? We are here for a purpose — to heal our two countries and to discover where it is we have gone wrong, and what it is that we should be doing, really doing …’
She was leaning forward, her eyes all persuasion and passion.
He was leaning back, watching her satirically. He was offended. He had never, not ever, imagined his country could be described as poor and strike foreigners as backward and lacking. He did not mind that this woman found him — as she clearly did — rough and unsubtle. He was a soldier! Soldiers were — soldiers. But he had believed his realm a model of what it should be. He was cold against her. Cold and furious. He was looking at her shining eyes and illumined face, from a distance — one of total repudiation.
He suddenly got up, and strode furiously around the chamber.
‘You think luxury is what matters, you said so yourself. Comfort. Ease. All that — you said it, you said it … ’
‘Yes, I did.’ And of course he pounced on it, an admission being weakness, and he was standing rocking with derisive laughter and pointing.
‘You are like a half-grown boy, Ben Ata,’ said she, and got to her feet. ‘If we are rich and have everything it is bad only insofar as it has made us forget our proper purposes. But if you are poor and barbaric, it is because all your wealth goes into war — a needless, stupid, senseless war …’ She stood there, confronting him.
His loathing for her culminated in lifting his hand to hit her. The great fist that looked the size of her small head was poised to crash down — she stood her ground and looked at him.
‘Ben Ata, I am very much less strong than you, and you can do what you like in the way of violence. I can’t stop you. And nor, in this awful country of yours, can I use any of the real strengths to stop you …’
He of course now had to carry her to the bed and to treat her as he had treated the most weakly girls of his looting nights.
She did not resist for she could not, but turned her head away and closed her eyes and was quite absent from him, as if she were dead.
He was raping a dead woman, or so he felt it. And he was loathing himself. And her — for forcing him into this act. And then he remembered that she was pregnant and that he might be damaging the foetus. All this prevented him from doing it twice, which he would otherwise have done. He rolled off her and, shaking with his dislike of her, he said, ‘and that’s that. That’s that.’
In the silence, both heard that the drum was silent.
She painfully pulled herself up, went into her rooms, and came out almost at once in her own dark red dress. She did not look at him.
‘You can’t go unless they tell you,’ he said, stupid and threatening.
‘The drum has stopped, can’t you hear?’ she said in a voice that was drained of any life.
She went out and stood calling for her horse. At once he could hear the beast coming, clip-clop among the fountains.
‘Then don’t come back,’ he said, broken. He could not believe what had happened. He could not make the early part of their being together match what he had just done.
It seemed to him that he had been standing on the verge of some landscape that he had never even imagined and that it had vanished.
‘You can go back to your damned whores,’ she said, swinging herself up onto Yori. And added, almost at once, hearing these words that certainly were not hers but were Zone Four words, ‘Oh, I must get out of this dreadful place,’ cutting him absolutely to the heart because of the sincerity of them.
She cantered away. He ran down to get his horse, and rode like fury after her, not catching her up till she was a good way along the west road. The two horses, white and black, fled along side by side, and it being early evening, and still daylight, there were people on the roads and on the boats in the canals. They saw the queen of Zone Three riding ‘like a she-demon’ out of their country, with their king in pursuit, ‘as pale as death, the poor man.’
That was only on the first part of the road, for she had forgotten to take the shield, and near the frontier she leaned forward, senseless, clinging to Yori’s mane, knowing what was happening and that if she did not hold fast she would be killed as she fainted. Yori, feeling her slacken there on his back, slowed, and walked carefully on, while Ben Ata, seeing his wife lolling senseless, picked her up off Yori’s back, and carried her. The people on the second part of the road told how the queen was ill, because of her grief at leaving the Zone, and the king cradled her ‘like a baby’ and was weeping as they rode.
Yori came along behind the king. At the frontier, he set her on the ground, just on the other side — but not too far, for he could no more travel unguarded in her realm than she could in his, and as soon as she showed signs of coming to herself, stood back, with just one hand on her shoulder to steady her. What she found, when she opened her eyes, was a wild dark night, and the sharp wind that always swept up from the east into her country already strong enough to push her along. She saw Ben Ata, white and grim, and believed him angry, not seeing his concern for her.
Her horse was beside her, she climbed onto it and fled into the dark, she and Yori both vanishing like straw in a storm. And Ben Ata rode back to his camps wondering when she would be ordered to come again.
She had not gone far along the road when she understood, by thinking hard, and with sympathy, what had happened. Now she felt sorrow because she knew that Ben Ata did, and she wished she could reassure him by even a word that she knew he had carried her to her frontier and put her across it and that he could no more believe now he had crushed her down and punished her than she could like in herself the hard accusations and criticisms of his country.
How could she! She, Al·Ith, who was not capable of a cruel or even careless word to anyone at all in her own realm, yet, with this man who was neither more nor less culpable than she, who was — for no fault of his own — king of that sad and sodden and poverty-struck land, she had let venom rule her tongue.
He back with his army, she riding to her capital, thought of each other, and with compassion.
When she reached the top of the pass that led from the plain to the plateau, she reined in Yori, and looked up at the heaped mountains all around. Her life had been lived among these mountains; and watching how they changed and deployed inside their moulding atmospheres had been her recreation and her mind’s nourishment. Now, as she gently turned her horse about and about she saw them as she always had — but saw them, too, as she had from far down in the lowlands, looking up with Ben Ata. She knew that at this moment, now, he would be gazing at those peaks, forbidden or not: he would not be able to help himself. And seeing him stand there, momentarily lost to himself among the tents and picket lines of the camps, his officers, first glancing at each other, with raised eyebrows, would one after another themselves look upwards — and then, following them, the soldiers. Al·Ith was wondering about the women, whom she suspected of being custodians of all kinds of private beliefs. Probably they, or many of them, had never ceased, when no one could see them, to watch the skies westwards, where the mountain snows jay so high in the heavens it was hard to tell them from clouds.
Now she remembered a song — yes, hearing it as she lay in Ben Ata’s arms, not taking it in then, but retaining enough to hear it again now. The song had been part of the mounting delights of their two astonished bodies:
How shall we reach where the light is, Come where delight is?
High on the peaks light changes, Hope ranges.
Clouds? — no, Snow …
Rain here, Snow there:
Freeze-fire white. Flake light.
How may we go there Climb in the air there
Up, up, up from this flat land, Into the high land
That is our way That is our way …
A woman’s high sweet voice had rung through their lovemaking, and these words would now always be melded with their memories of each other.
And yet she knew that the words actually heard by any casual person listening, soldier or uninitiated soldier’s wife, would not have been these — the initiated women would hear them, and she with Ben Ata had heard them — but had he? Well, she would ask when they met next!
She rode forward again and now all along the roads groups of people called out to her, welcoming her back. And she stopped to talk, to listen to their messages, and to tell them, too, that she was pregnant by Ben Ata. The news flew across the plateau as they called to each other, and when she rode into the streets of our capital, the crowds were lining the way and singing and calling out a welcome to the new child, and by the time she had reached her home, she was back in the high easy friendliness which is the common mood of Zone Three.
On the wide steps were waiting her sister Murti· and all the children who called her Mother. She was enclosed by them in love and welcome, and was with them all for a day and night, to hear their tales of what had happened while she was gone. Meanwhile, the bells were ringing out from our information tower, so that no one in all of our Zone could fail to know that she was home and safe and that there would be a new child.
Then, retiring with her sister, leaving the children to their Mind-Fathers and their lessons and games, she went right to the very top of the palace, where the roofs stretched everywhere, level on level, and where it was possible to climb up even farther to a spire higher than any other in the capital. Right at the top of this tower she stood with Murti and she said to Murti, who was wondering at this exertion to visit a place she could not remember ever having tried to reach before, ‘Look, look there …’ and she pointed northwest between a deep gap in the mountains there. The blue of Zone Two gleamed like sapphires. Murti· could see nothing at first but a gap in the mountains with a haze in it.
Al·Ith gazed, letting her eyes fill with the blue, and thought fondly of how Ben Ata had said it was a waste of time, so that she was smiling, and Murti·, glancing at her, knew that she was thinking of her husband, for that smile could mean nothing else. She laughed, and was about to turn to her sister and tease her, begging for facts and bits of news of this famous Ben Ata, the great soldier, but Al·Ith said, ‘No, no, just stand and look …’ For all of her life, she. Al·Ith, had had the possibility of climbing up to this high place and finding Zone Two with her eyes. No one had said she should not! But no one had ever mentioned Zone Two! And yet — yes, as a child she had come here. Now she remembered. She had been a very young girl, before menarche. She had been impelled to climb up and up, first to the immensities of the roofs spreading all over the tops of the many palaces so that she could, if she had wanted to, have jumped from one to another, and around and about for weeks of days. But instead she saw the tall spire, and the little door at its foot and she had crept up and up. And up. And at last had reached the end of the interminably swirling stairs and stood breathless and giddy on the little platform they stood on now, enclosed by the lights of the evening sky. Birds sped past, and called to them. High over the mountains the eagles swung and swerved. She had clung here and looked up and out and it had been as if her whole self had filled with a need to leave here and let herself be absorbed by that endless blue — the blue, the blue, the blue! And it was hours before she had crept down again, her head filled with blue air, and — then, what? She could not remember! She had told someone and been warned? She had not told, but had simply forgotten?
Did it matter? The fact was, all her life the possibility had been here for no more effort than the climb up flights of difficult stairs. And yet it had been as if her own mind had closed itself off to what it could do. Should do. Wanted to do …
Her sister was clinging to the rail with both hands, her fine clear profile lifted, her eyes shining. She seemed to shine everywhere; the strong evening light polished her soft gold hair, and the embroideries on her yellow dress glowed. She had seen!
When she turned to Al·Ith all she said was, ‘Why did we forget it?’
And Al·Ith had no reply.
Next, Al·Ith ordered the bells to peal out an invitation for all the regions to send in messengers, and as quickly as was comfortably possible. Then she took supper with her sister, who wanted to know about this new husband, and while normally she would have told Murti· everything, without any feeling of disloyalty, or betrayal, she found her tongue weighted. Why? Only partly because news about Zone Four must be so foreign to Murti· that it would be necessary to say everything again and again from a dozen different angles before she could begin to understand it, but also because she could feel Ben Ata thinking of her. She did not like this connection with him. She could not remember ever before, with any man, whether for parenthood or for play, feeling this yearning, heavy, disquiet. She judged it unhealthy — a projection of that Zone where all the emotions were so heavy and so strong. But this is what she did feel, and it was no use behaving as if she did not. Murti· felt the resistance in her, did not blame her, but was excluded, and she went away early to her rooms where her own children awaited her.
Surely a relation with one person that narrowed others must be wrong? How could it not be wrong?
But Al·Ith knew the real questions that faced her now were more urgent than these disquiets about that husband of hers, to whom she would certainly be ordered to return in due time — and she could not say whether she abhorred the thought or longed for him.
And she put herself to sleep so as to be fresh for the day ahead, which she hoped would bring her the insights she so badly needed.

The main Council Chamber of our Zone is not very large, for there is no necessity for it to contain more than twenty or thirty of us at a time, since this number adequately represents us: of course the representatives are different, according to their function. It is a square room, its ceiling not very high, situated where windows show sky, clouds, mountains, on three sides.
The floor has on it very large flat cushions, where we sit according to no order except of preference, and Al·Ith may sit anywhere: there is no need for her to be elevated or on a prominence with such a small number of people.
On this day she was in the Chamber before anyone else, and moved from window to window, looking down at our streets, and up at the mountains, and then for a long time at a certain spot towards the northwest. I was there that day, and found her when I entered — the second to arrive. I was struck at once by her restlessness, her anxiety. This was not the contained woman I had known since she was a baby: I am one of Al·Ith’s Mind-Fathers.
I stood by her at the window, and she gave me the wildest saddest look, and then sank her head on my shoulder, snuggling like a small child. But as a small girl she had been too independent and striving for such an action and I was disturbed more than I can say.
She soon pulled herself away. ‘Lusik, I don’t know myself.’
‘Yes, I can see that.’
Down below in the main square was a commotion, and we both leaned forward to watch, thankful to be taken out of our anxieties.
Delegates were arriving from all our regions, on horses and donkeys, and there were children on goats. These animals were being taken into the care of some young people whose task this was, and led under trees that shaded the square’s southern side. I had come in by camel, since I live in the extreme south of our lovely southern region. This beast, who did not often have the chance to make the acquaintance of animals other than her own kind, since camels thrive so well with us they are our main transport, was standing nose to nose with a fine black mare from the eastern herds.
It was such a pleasant and familiar scene that we were both cheered, but she said, ‘All the same, we are in bad trouble and I don’t know at all what it is.’
The room filled with our people, men, women, and two small girls who had already shown a proclivity for the arts of management and were being given opportunities to learn them.
There were twenty-five of us that day. Al·Ith sat down at once, under the west window, spread her yellow skirts around her, for she knew we liked to see her beautiful and well presented, and began.
‘We all know the situation. I take full responsibility.’ She waited, then, and looked around at us. Everyone had nodded, not in animosity, but saluting a fact. She smiled, slightly, and it was a bleak little smile.
‘What we have to know is this. In the last thirty-nine days, has there been any change in our situation?’
She paused again, looked carefully from face to face, and making sure to smile at the two little girls, who of course smiled back in adoration and total submission to their desire to be like her, and better.
‘In every region it has been the same. Animals have ailed, and lost their fertility. And we, too, have not been as we were. This I know. This we all know. And I might have known it before I did had I taken as much notice as I should of your reports.’
We all nodded again: it was the truth.
‘It is clear that everyone believes that my marriage with Ben Ata is in some way connected with this decline. We do not know why or how, but we may expect to see an improvement among us. As has already been announced to everyone, I am pregnant. This presumably is part of the prescription for our recovery.’
After every statement she paused and looked around, for signs of disagreement, or that anyone wanted to add to what she had said.
‘Well, then, it is thirty-nine days since I was taken to Ben Ata.’ The was taken came out of her with a bitter emphasis, and she at once regretted it, offering us a quick apologetic smile. By now there was no one present who had not seen her inner distress. There was an atmosphere in the Council room I had not experienced before. More than anything could have done, Al·Ith’s state told us how things were in our realm.
She waited quietly. ‘There has been no change at all in that time? No? Now, I have been pregnant for five days. Has there been any change in that time?’
At this one of the little girls said, ‘My sheep had twins yesterday.’
We laughed, and the proceedings halted while Al·Ith explained to her the gestation time for sheep.
Meanwhile, we were wondering if there had in fact been any change in the last five days? Discussion began. Al·Ith was listening carefully. And then she jumped up and went fast from one window to another, returning to the west window where she leaned, gazing out and up. This was not what any one of us had observed in her before. After a time I, as the only one of her parents present, went to the window and looked where she did. I could see only the massed piles of the western ranges.
She was reminded by my being there of her duty, and sat down again.
The little girl who had spoken about her sheep was humming.
It was one of our children’s games.
Find the way
And find the way
And follow on and through.
Through the pass There we must pass And gather in the blue …
Al·Ith was leaning forward, listening. There was not one of us who had not heard it a thousand times. The children made patterns of stones and hopped through them in certain definite rhythms which kept varying according to the rules of the rhyme.
We believed Al·Ith was as usual paying especial attention to children and waited.
But she was still leaning there, intent on the little girl, who was quite oblivious of Al·Ith, but sat swaying a little, humming, and even softly clapping her hands. She was a child typical of the eastern regions: a sandy little thing, with bright blue eyes and pale hair. These scraggy chickens tended to grow up into the wildest beauties, oddly enough, and the men, too, were handsome. When we had our festivals, hearts tended to beat faster when the companies from the east came riding in, smiling charmers all of them, conscious of their power over us, ready with their songs of a much harder fiercer past …
‘What is your name?’ asked Al·Ith.
‘Greena.’
‘Well, my little green one, come here.’
The child skipped forward and sat at Al·Ith’s knee. She took her hand.
‘What is the rest of that song?’
‘What song, Al·Ith?’
‘You were singing. What comes after “And gather in the blue”?’
The child tried to think. She glanced around at her sister for help.
By now we all understood that something important was happening.
As for me, I had been present at certain heightened moments in that room, but nothing like this. The air was snapping with excitement, and Al·Ith’s lassitude had gone. She was as she normally was: alert, lively, all attention.
‘Is there any more of that song?’ Again the child looked for help at her sister, another little wisp of a girl, but she shook her head. Then, she scrambled to her feet. ‘Yes, yes, there is … I think … ‘ and sank back to the floor.
‘Listen,’ said Al·Ith, ‘what I want you to do is this. Go down to the square there — where the animals are. Forget about us up here for a time. Play that game. Just play it as if you were at home with your herds and your families. And try to remember what comes after “And gather in the blue”.’
The two little girls sprang up, and ran together out of the Council Chamber, hand in hand. We were smiling and we all knew it was because every one of us was seeing them as they would be in such a short time.
‘What is all this about, Al·Ith?’ asked a young man from the north. He was in fact her son by adoption, and had grown up near her. He even looked like her, as adopted children so often did.
‘I’m on the verge of it,’ she said, looking fast and close into all our faces. ‘Can’t you feel it? There’s something! What!’ And in her urgency she was up again and pacing all around the room, this time standing at the windows without seeing out. ‘What is it?’ We said nothing, but waited. We all know that when one of us is on the edge of an understanding that we help by thinking with her, him, and waiting. ‘I just don’t know, don’t know … ‘ and then she whirled round to the west window and leaned over. As many of us who could, crowded there and looked down. The two children had laid out their pattern of pebbles and were skipping and singing.
We could not hear the words.
Feeling our eyes on them they stopped, and looked up. We drew back out of sight.
‘We must wait,’ said Al·Ith.
We sat down. Of course we hoped to know more about her visits to the other Zone, but did not want to say anything that would bring the shadow down over her again.
She knew what we were thinking, and with a sigh, met us.
‘It is very hard to describe it,’ she said courageously, and we saw the animation had left her. ‘It is easy to describe it outwardly. Everything in it is for war. Fighting. It is a poor place. We have nothing in our realm to compare with it. As for the spirit of the people …’ She was faltering, with pauses between words. Again we recognized that she was in the grip of something. ‘War. Fighting. Men … every man in the whole realm is in the army …’ She tailed off, silent. She had virtually stopped breathing. ‘Every man in uniform …’ She stopped again, and her eyes lost all their lustre while she went deep inside herself. As for us we sat absolutely still.
‘An economy entirely geared to war … but there is not much war … hardly any fighting … yet every man a soldier from birth till death …’
Again the tight silence, and she sitting there, straight and tense, eyes blank. She was rocking back and forth, on her cushion.
‘A country for war … but no war … they are bound by a hard, strict Law … their Law is hard indeed … war. Men … all men for fighting … but no war, no wars to fight … what is it, what does it mean …’
The tension in her was frightening to see. An elderly woman who had been watching her keenly now went forward, sat by her, and began to soothe her, stroking her arms and shoulders. ‘That’s enough, Al·Ith. Enough. Do you hear me?’ Al·Ith shuddered and came to herself.
‘What is it?’ she said to us, in a whisper.
The woman who held her said, ‘It will come to you. Quieten yourself.’
Al·Ith smiled and nodded at the woman, who went back to her place and said, ‘The best thing we can do is to keep the thought whole in our minds and let it grow.’ Al·Ith nodded again.
That was the end of the hard part of the Council. Murti· brought in a tray of jugs with fruit juices, and went out to bring in some light food. She then joined us, sitting by her sister.
And then the little girls came in. They seemed disappointed.
They stood before Al·Ith and Murti· and Greena said, ‘We played it. Over and over. We could not remember. But there are words that come after. We have remembered that.’
Al·Ith nodded. ‘Never mind.’
‘Shall we play the game when we get home again and see if we remember then?’
‘Please do … and I have had an idea … ‘ All of us were alert, thinking she had achieved the understanding that had eluded her, but she smiled and said, ‘No. I am afraid not. But I have had a good idea. We shall have a festival. Soon. And it will be for songs, and stories — no, not the way we always have them. This one will be for songs and stories we have forgotten. Or half forgotten. All the regions will send in their storytellers and singers, and their Memories … ‘ Here she smiled at me, to soften it, and said, ‘Lusik, it seems to me that you have all been remiss. How is it that children can play games and know that verses have been forgotten?’
I accepted it. Of course it was true.
Shortly after, we all went home.
Now I take up the tale again, not from firsthand, as is my remembrance of the events of the Council Chamber, but pieced together the best way I can, as Chronicler.
The sisters went up to Al·Ith’s apartments, where Al·Ith said she was tired: this pregnancy was already proving more taxing than her others. She had set in train the events that were necessary, and now she wanted to retire for a few days and rest.
Murti· was concerned for her.
The two beautiful women sat hand in hand in the window that overlooked the western mountains. Al·Ith said she wanted to go up to the spire again, but Murti· asked her not to go. Al·Ith submitted. Usually, at such moments of relaxation the women would have petted each other, done each other’s hair, tried on each other’s dresses, planned new ones, discussed what innovations and developments they had noticed in the clothes of the girls and women who had been present that day, in case any might be useful to clothing generally. These were true sisters, with the same Mother, the same Gene-Father, and even sharing the same Mind-Fathers. There had never been secrets between them. Now Al·Ith said, ‘You are right to feel hurt. I can’t help it.’ Murti· kissed her and went away.
Al·Ith had not been home a full day when she knew she had to return to Ben Ata. The words came into her mind: The drum is beating. She even heard the drum, faint, but there. She put her hand to cup her lower belly, thinking she heard that small heart but it was the drum.
She went through her cupboards, this time trying to find clothes that would soothe and please Ben Ata. She put together some of these and ran down to the first floor where she would leave a message for Murti·.
There were five persons coming up the great stairs, to see her: a girl just out of childhood, her Gene-Father, and three of her Mind-Fathers. Al·Ith was her mother.
There was a problem to do with this girl, but it is not of concern here. This event is being related because just at the time when Al·Ith was in mind already on her way to Ben Ata, with all the disturbance and adjustment this meant, she had to go aside to a quiet room, with a man with whom she had had, and for years, a close friendship, the child’s real father, and three men who had been as close, but whom she had not seen for some time, as it happened, because they had been in distant parts of the country.
The room was off the main Council room, and had the usual cushions and low tables. Al·Ith embraced the girl, and held her close, and then kept her beside her when they sat down. But almost at once she felt her own churning emotions communicate themselves to the girl, and this she could not allow: she quickly got up and sat apart from her, and the girl felt she was being disliked, and sat with an unhappy face turned away from her mother. This disturbed Al·Ith even more.
These six persons, woman, four men, and the girl, had often been together thus. And Al·Ith had very often been with the men, all together or singly. These men were among the closest people to her, not even excepting her sister. It was not possible for her now to shut them out, even for her own protection. She was quite open to them, just as she was at the same time open to the demands of Ben Ata, which were claiming her fiercely. She was trembling.
The men all embraced her, and sat close. They congratulated her on the new pregnancy. All the time she was looking, and feeling, worse.
‘You are ill,’ said the girl’s real father, Kunzor, and Al·Ith said she was, she could not help it, she was sorry. And she fainted clean away.
They called Murti·, who explained that Al·Ith’s state of mind was beyond anything they were likely to understand. Murti· undertook to stand in for Al·Ith on this occasion and set herself to be kind to the poor girl, who was astounding them all by wringing her hands and saying that ‘it was her fault’ her mother was ill. This struck them as a sort of lunacy: they had never heard anything like it.
When Al·Ith came to herself, she was attended only by Kunzor, who was trying to understand her. He had known her in many complex ways, but this was entirely beyond him. Al·Ith weeping and distraught was something he had never imagined possible.
She said she had to get on her horse and go, and he took her down the steps to the square, called for Yori, and saw her ride off.
It did not help that it was early night when she reached the plain, and had to ride in the face of the cold wind from the east all the way to the frontier.
She hoped that it would be Ben Ata at the frontier to meet her, and it was. He sat cold and silent, in his black army cloak, waiting, gazing up the road, pale, intent, fixed.
At the first sight of him, her spirits sank. What had happened within her was that riding across the plain in the bitter wind, comforted only by the warmth of her horse, she had been thinking of the long friendship she had known with Kunzor, and the men whom she had been close to—she was already wondering about these words that people used. She had, in the past, not used words, not even in her mind. She had felt her closeness to them, as part of the fabric of her life. Meeting one of them again, by plan or by chance, they would at once move together as they had always, according to the intuitions of the moment. She had not said they were this and that, beyond friends. Now, she wondered, were they husbands? Certainly not if Ben Ata was one! But, during that cold ride, she had been thinking of Ben Ata, whom she was so soon to be with, as a friend — with all the simplicity of good sense and responsibility that word meant to her.
Seeing him there, the bonds in her flesh and being with the men who sustained her in Zone Three snapped and left her vulnerable.
Ben Ata waited till she had crossed into his Zone, and handed her a shield — he was right in thinking that she was likely again to have forgotten hers. Then he put out his hand to grasp her bridle — but she did not have one — and put his horse forward so that he was side by side with her, she facing into Zone Four, he into Zone Three. His eyes searched her face as if for a hidden crime.
‘What is the matter?’ she asked, irritated.
‘The matter is that I’ve understood something.’
‘And what is that?’ She rode forward, sighing, meaning him to hear it, and he came after her, and rode so close her foot had to be curled in on poor Yori’s side to avoid being crushed.
‘You don’t love me,’ he announced.
Al·Ith did not respond at all.
The words had simply gone past her. She had seen that Ben Ata was in a fine old state about something, and that there was no point at all in expecting any comfort or sustaining from him. She was engaged in strengthening her inner self.
He rode close, casting dramatic looks into her face, and trying to lean forward so that he could see into her eyes.
It was early morning. They were riding down the escarpment, looking into fields where as usual mists were rising, admittedly very pretty in the weak sunlight.
‘You do not love me. Not really,’ he was shouting.
This time Al·Ith heard the word love. She was making a note that the two Zones used it differently.
What had happened to Ben Ata was this.
When she had left him on the frontier, he had been shaken by emotions he had not known existed. If Elys had indicated to him that in the physical realm there were facts that perhaps he might have missed, he now saw that there was a world of emotions that had been kept from him until now. He visited the madam of the whorehouse with this problem who, after a brisk diagnostic exchange, said that it wasn’t Elys he needed — she in fact had gone back to her own town, much congratulated and very pleased with herself — but a serious affair.
He had of course been aware that affairs were what some people had, but not, surely, soldiers!
Seeing Dabeeb brushing down her husband’s uniform, where it hung on a line behind the married officers’ quarters, he speculated on her possibilities. At once appropriate emotions invaded him in swarms, quite amazing him, for he could not imagine where he had got them from.
Dabeeb was disconcerted, of course, and enjoined caution, common sense, and then secrecy. It goes without saying that she was frightened of her husband. Affairs she had had, but not for the purpose of stimulating Jarnti. She was even more afraid of Ben Ata. She had no intention of yielding him her person, but kept him off with a variety of kisses and touches of the hand, all nicely adjusted to holding the situation while she could think what best to do.
Jarnti found his king in a compromising situation with his wife.
Violent scenes. Jealousy. Reproaches. The men fought, decided that the friendship of men outweighed the love of women, clasped hands, drank together for the whole of a night, fell together into a canal at dawn … all according to the book.
Ben Ata was now violently in love with Al·Ith.
Riding together through the golden mists, he ground his teeth and yearned towards her, while she murmured, ‘Is there a dictionary in the pavilion?’
‘What?’
‘It is the word love. We use it differently.’
‘Cold. Cold and heartless.’
‘Cold, I certainly am. I am frozen through.’
Compunction touched him but was inappropriate to the moment.
‘Very well then, how do you use the word love?’
‘I don’t think we do. What it means is being with someone. Taking the responsibility for everything that happens between you. Between the two people in question and of course all the other people involved or who might be involved.’
It occurred to him that during these tumultuous six days he had forgotten what Al·Ith was like.
His elation drained away. He rode apart from her, and with a good distance between them the two horses cantered together up the hill to the gardened pavilions where the drum had been beating since the evening before.
As they let the horses go to find their own way to attendants, they were in a welter of wet, and ran through it to the pavilion, where she fled shaking water everywhere to her rooms. The cupboards were empty again of the dresses from the town, and she dried herself and looked through those she had brought for one that would be right for this dejected mood she found in herself. The bright gold of yesterday was like a bird’s plumage in a wrong season. A brown was too lowering, but she raised that note a little with a tawny-orange, which seemed something she could aspire to, if things went well. Having put her hair up into Zone Four’s matronly braids, she took herself to the central room as Ben Ata came in from the other side. There was not a suggestion of armour about him. His under-tunic looked as if it had been put on with a view as to how it would look to her, and his hair had been brushed close to his handsome head. All this, together with his needy and hostile looks, made her sink down as far away from him as she could get, which was at the table. He, having had no other idea in his head for the last twenty-four hours at least, strode over, and was about to haul her to the couch when it occurred to him that this was exactly what had set off all the turmoil of the last few days which, matched against the appraising reality of Al·Ith, seemed now, to put it mildly, inappropriate.
Swearing vigorously, he sat down opposite her, looking as ever on his side of the little table as if an incautious movement might collapse not only it, but the whole pavilion. He leaned back, sighed, and seemed to return partly to himself.
They were both considering, with fortitude, the uncertain term that they faced during which they would have to sustain their incompatibility.
‘I would like to know,’ said he, ‘all about your arrangements for this sort of thing — in your country.’
Now Al·Ith had already given thought to this problem. She could not imagine that he would accept the proprieties of Zone Three, not on any terms. She tackled the immediate point of his disquiet with: ‘There is absolutely no doubt at all — there can be no doubt — that this child is yours.’
‘I said nothing about that,’ he protested, while his pleased face showed she had been right.
He waited.
Having discovered she needed food, she had thought her requirements, and what had arrived before her was a delicacy of her country made of honey and nuts. She began to crumble bits off it. Without ceremony, he put his finger out, scooped up a fragment, tasted it, rolled up his eyes, and was resigned.
‘It is very good for pregnant women,’ she said.
‘I hope that you are taking proper care of yourself! After all, this child will be the ruler of Zone Four.’
This thought, too, had not been overlooked by her. She contented herself with: ‘If the Providers so decide.’
His checked gesture of rebellion told her what his thoughts were — what his actions might be.
‘I take it,’ said he, positively radiant with sarcasm, ‘that I am only one of your lovers.’
At this she leaned back, held up her two hands, and began counting on her fingers, with a look of pretty self-satisfaction, hesitating on the third finger with a little moue, returning to the second, going back to the third with a nod, then on to the fourth, the fifth — changing hands, with deliberation, six, seven, eight — allowing her counting forefinger to dwell lovingly with a reminiscent smile on the ninth; heard his indrawn and outraged breath, wondered if she dared to count back again, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and did so, rather perfunctorily, fourteen, fifteen, and ended on nineteen with a competent little nod, like a steward who hasn’t forgotten anything.
She looked at him, inviting him to laugh— at her, himself, but he was quite yellow with disastrous thoughts.
‘You know,’ she began, but he finished for her, savagely, ‘“Things are not the same with you as they are with us!” I give thanks for it. Decadent, spoiled, immoral …’
‘It is true I can’t imagine you making much of our ways.’
‘Very well, how many lovers have you had?’
She winced at the word and he noted it. Not without interest, a dispassionate interest. This encouraged her to try and explain, openly — though she had previously decided against any such attempt — with a real intention to persuade him out of his barbarity of perception.
‘First of all, that word means nothing to me. It would mean nothing at all, to any woman in our Zone. Even the worst of us, and of course we have our failures as you do …’ She noted him noting that word as being different in emphasis from any Zone Four might use. ‘Even the worst of us would be incapable of using a word that described a man as some kind of a toy.’
This earned a glance of appreciation. Finding she liked him enough, she continued, and explained the sexual arrangements of Zone Three to him. As she went on, his pose, his fists, tightened until she was almost brought to a stop; then he became absorbed, and listened carefully, missing — she could see — nothing.
There were moments when she was afraid that all his self-pride was going to mount to his head and explode in fresh violence against her, but he contained it. By the time she had finished, aggression had left him, and there remained only the philosopher.
She thought herself some wine, and at a gesture from him, some for him as well, but stronger. He took the glass from her, with a nod of thanks.
‘It’s no good pretending that I can go along with any of that,’ he pronounced at last.
‘It seems to me,’ said she humorously, ‘that you are going to have to.’ But, as a threat of trouble reappeared, she told him that since their first association, claims (she was not going to say ‘higher’ ones) had made their appearance, and it looked as if absolute fidelity to Zone Four was going to be the order of her day. ‘It seems,’ said she, ‘that there is some sort of prohibition laid down in my flesh — laid down somewhere — and that it is not merely the touch of another man I cannot allow, but the touch of anybody.’ He was smiling, and she said, ‘And that is not good, oh great king, it is not. I regard it as pernicious, and unfriendly, but we are both stuck with ways not our own and we have got to get on with it.’
On the tip of his tongue hovered words such as ‘then you must love me after all,’ but this calmly explanatory mode seemed to forbid it. Melancholy settled on him. It had enclosed her. The reason was, simply, that whenever a natural spring of vitality flourished in either of them, it was instantly suppressed by the natural disposition of the other.
Melancholy took them to the couch in fellow-feeling, made them love each other with many whispers of condolence for their unfortunate linking, caused sympathy to flow from one to the other, made their sexual play — if that could possibly be the word for such sorrowful exchanges — so unlike their previous encounters that neither could recognize the other in them, and culminated in groans and cries from both of them that were nothing less than expostulations at the mismanagement of absolutely everything.
But Al·Ith had noted in herself, and with dismay, the sharp — as if with an ambiguous wound — pleasures she felt in being ground and pounded into these ecstasies of submission to fate. She had not known anything like it before, and could not believe that she could ever want them again.
Meanwhile, it rained. They lay in each other’s arms listening to squelches and wallows of rain, and both marvelled at the infinite possibilities of variation there were that neither had expected of themselves.
Still under heavy rain they rose and bathed, and dressed, and returned themselves — she this time using the bright orange dress in a quite desperate attempt to bring some sunlight into this marriage of theirs — to the central room.
They were as close and connubial as any Order could have wished.
But there was also the edge of asperity in both voices that goes so ineluctably with this marriage mood.
She wished to get at the truth of this martial Zone of his.
Do you mean to say — her questions began, while he sat with his chin in his hand, elbow on the table, with the air of one admitting to everything because he was forced to, but nevertheless preserving inner independence.
‘Do you mean to say that those singlets of yours you make such a great thing about are all a fake? They don’t do anything at all? They can’t repel weapons?’
‘They are very good at keeping off the rain.’
‘Do you actually mean to say that these hideous grey round buildings you’ve got all over Zone Four don’t make death rays? That’s a fake, too?’
‘Everyone believes we’ve got them. It comes to the same thing.’
‘Ben Ata, sometimes I can’t believe my ears!’
‘Why are you in such a fuss about it? For one thing, building one of those death ray fortresses is a major undertaking. We have so little stone. It has to be carted right across Zone Four, sometimes. I don’t know how often I’ve had the army pestering for a campaign, and I’ve got them building a couple of death ray fortresses instead. They were the best idea I’ve ever had!’
‘Do you mean to say it was your idea?’
‘Well … I heard about something of the sort.’
‘Who from? When?’
‘A man came through here once, and he mentioned them. All sorts of ideas like that.’
‘What man? From Zone Five?’
‘Zone Five! They didn’t so much as know about spears till they saw ours. Even so they like catapults best. No. A man came through. That was in my father’s time. I was a boy. I listened. He said he had come from — where was it? Not Zone Five. Was it Zone Six perhaps?’
‘I know a little about Zone Six. It can’t have been from there.’
‘A long way, I am sure of that. He talked of a place where they had weapons we hadn’t even imagined. They can use the air itself to make weapons of.’
‘But if they can use air to make weapons, they can use it to make things that are useful?’
‘He said nothing about that. It is a place somewhere. A planet. It is an evil race. They kill and torture each other all the time, for the sake of it … no, Al·Ith, I’m not taking that look from you! We are not like that in Zone Four — not anywhere near it. But I thought it all over, and that is when we spread the rumours about our invulnerable vests and our deadly rays.’
‘They don’t seem to impress Zone Five much.’
‘Anyway, that isn’t the point. I’ve told you it keeps a lot of men busy.’
‘Weil,’ she summed up, ‘this is how it seems to me. Nine-tenths of your country’s wealth goes into the the preparations for war. Apart from the actual growers of food, and the merchants for food and household goods, everyone is in the employ of the army, in some capacity. Yet you have not in living memory had a war. When you do have a war, I have only to make a list of the supposed reasons for it, and you admit to their inadequacy. Even these wars were in previous generations. Your skirmishes on the borders of Zone Five are because if you have two fighting forces in close connection both will, by their nature, attack, and will similarly accuse the other. The standard of living of your people is very low —’ here he groaned, admitting it — ‘but, Ben Ata, all this goes on under the Law. Under the Providers. All for each and each for all. So what has gone wrong?’ She noted that in this somewhat hectoring analysis, she felt not an inkling of the rush of nearness to understanding she had felt yesterday. You put one person with another person, call it love, she was thinking, and then make do with the lowest common denominator.
He yawned.
‘It’s much too early to go to bed, you know,’ she said. ‘It can’t be even late afternoon yet—if we were able to see where the day had reached in this downpour.’ For it was still pelting down.
‘Very well. Al·Ith, I want you to picture your affairs to me, just as you have ours to me.’
She was hesitating because it occurred to her to wonder why she had not actually made such an analysis — for while such a way of thinking did not conduce to intimations of a higher kind, they were certainly useful for clearing the mind.
‘Now come on. Al·Ith, you are ready enough to criticize me.’
‘Yes, I was just … very well. The economy of our country does not rely on any single commodity. We produce many varieties of grains, vegetables, and fruits …’
‘But so do we,’ he said.
‘Not to anything like the same extent.’
‘Go on.’
‘We have many different kinds of animals, and use their milk and meat and their hides and their wool …’ And, as he was going to interrupt her again, said, ‘It is a question of degree, Ben Ata. A half of our population produces these things. A quarter are artisans, using gold, silver, iron, copper, brass, and many precious stones. A quarter are merchants, suppliers, traders, and tellers of stories, keepers of Memory, makers of pictures and statues, and travelling singers. None of our wealth goes into war. There are no weapons in our country. You will not find anything beyond a knife or an axe for household use or the use of a herdsman, in any home in our country.’
‘And what if you are attacked by a wild animal? If an eagle takes a lamb?’
‘The animals are our friends,’ she said, and saw the incredulity on his face. Also, he found her account lacking in any drama.
‘And where has all this got you? Except where we are, in trouble … or so you say we are —’
‘Is your birth rate falling or is it not?’
‘It is. All right, things are unhealthy. I admit it. And now Al·Ith, in this paradise of yours, I want to know what are the men doing?’
‘They are not making war!’
‘What do they do with themselves all day?’
‘Exactly what every one of us does — whatever it is their work is.’
‘It seems to me that with women ruling there is nothing a man can do but—’
‘Make love, you were going to say.’
‘Something of the sort.’
‘And bake, and farm, and herd, grow, and trade and mine and smelt and make artefacts and everything there is to do with the different ways of feeding children, mentally and emotionally, and the keeping of archives and maintaining Memory and making songs and tales and … Ben Ata, you look as if I had insulted you.’
‘All that is women’s work.’
‘How is it possible that They expect us to understand each other? If you were set down in the middle of our land you would not understand anything that was going on. Do you know that as soon as I cross into your land I cease to be my real self? Everything I say comes out distorted and different. Or if I manage to be as I am, then it is so hard, that in itself makes everything different. Sometimes I sit here, with you and I think of how I am, at home, with Kunzor, say, and I can’t—’
‘Kunzor being your husband?’
She was silent, helpless at the utter impossibility of saying anything that could keep in it the substance of truth.
‘Well then, out with it! He is, isn’t he? Oh, you can’t fool me.’
‘But didn’t I tell you myself that Kunzor is the name of one of the men I am with?’
But he kept on his face the look of a man who has with penetration discerned the truth. His stance, arms folded, knees set apart, feet planted, announced that he was not in the least undermined or intimidated.
Yet she could see that he was in fact really trying to understand: she would be wrong to allow herself to be held off from him by his automatic defensiveness. Something she could respect, and from the most real part of her, was at work in him.
Again, automatically, he jeered: ‘And this Kunzor of yours, of course he is a finer fellow than me in every way possible …’
She did not respond to this, but said, ‘If we were not meant to understand each other, what are we doing here at all?’
From within deep thought, thought that was being protected, in fact, by his derisiveness, the stances of what he had always considered ‘strength’, he said, or breathed out, slowly, ‘But what is it … I must understand … what? We have to understand … what …’ He lapsed into silence, eyes fixed on a cup on the table. And she realized, with what delight and relief, that he was in fact operating from within that part of him which meant that he was open and ready for understandings to come into him — as she had been, in the Council Chamber. She sat absolutely still, subduing her breathing, and not allowing her eyes to rest too long on his face for fear of disturbing him.
His own breathing was slower, slower, he was stilled, his eyes fixed on the cup had no sight in them — he was deep within himself. ‘What …’ he breathed. ‘There is something … we have to … they want us to … here we are soldiers … soldiers with no war … you are … you are … what are you? What are we … what are we for … that’s it, that’s it …’
Like someone in sleep, he brought out these words, slow, toneless, each one only a summary, a brief note or abstract, as it were of long processes of inner thought.
The slow rain soaked down, they were inside a bright shell drowned in water, they were inside a hush of wet sound. Neither moved. He breathed now hardly at all. She waited. A long time later he came to himself, saw her there, seemed surprised, glanced around at the cool spaces of this meeting place of theirs, remembered everything, and at once restored face, eyes, and body to alert disbelief.
He did not know what had just happened. Yet she could see on his face a maturity that spoke for the deep processes that had been accomplished in him.
She did not now feel helpless in the face of a diminishing of herself she could not control or direct: she was sustained and comforted, knowing that despite everything, they were in fact achieving what they should … and, speaking from the highest of intentions, from out of her best understanding of what was needed, she now destroyed this precious mood of mutual benefiting.
What she said was this: ‘Ben Ata, I wonder if it would be possible for me to see Dabeeb — you know, Jarnti’s wife.’
He stiffened and stared. This was so violent a reaction that all she could do was to acknowledge that she was back on that level where she could not expect to understand him.
‘You see, we — I mean, in our Zone — we are going to have a festival of songs and tales …’
His face was working with suspicion. His eyes were red, and glared.
‘What is the matter?’
‘Oh, you are a witch all right. Don’t pretend you are anything else.’
‘But, Ben Ata, it seems to me that we may find out what we want to know — or at any rate get some inkling, by listening to old songs. Stories. Not the ones that everyone sings all the time. Ones that have … fallen out of … use … and —’ But he had got up violently, and was leaning over her, gripping her shoulders, his face six inches from hers.
‘So you want to interview Dabeeb!’
‘Any of the women. But I’ve met Dabeeb.’
‘I can tell you this, I’m not going to share one of those orgies of yours, everyone having each other.’
‘Ben Ata, I don’t know what has happened, but you are off again on some wrong track …’
‘So I am! What happens when a group of you and your Fathers get together? I can imagine!’
‘You are imagining something you’ve experienced yourself, Ben Ata, something like what happens when your soldiers invade some wretched village and …’ but she saw there was no point in going on. She shrugged. Stung by her contempt, for it was that, he straightened himself, and strode to the arched door which led out to the hill at the foot of which lay the army camp. He shouted into the rain, again, again, again … an answering shout, the sounds of feet running through water, then Ben Ata shouting, ‘Tell Dabeeb to come here. At once.’
And he turned there, arms folded, leaning his weight back on the archway, smiling triumphantly at her.
‘Well, I want to speak to Dabeeb, and I am glad she is coming. But I’ve got no idea why you are behaving like this.’
‘Perhaps you fancy having Dabeeb yourself? Who knows what you and your filthy lot get up to.’
‘Having. Having. What is this word of yours, having. How can one have another person. No wonder you can’t —’ but she had been going to say, ‘No wonder you can’t make love when you think in terms of having—’ but of course had to check it.
‘You had better get the shield to protect her, or something like that,’ she said. ‘She won’t be able to stand up to the air in here.’
‘Thank you so much. It had occurred to me, you know. How do you suppose all these arrangements were made here?’
And he indicated the devices for the protection of the people who had worked, or who still worked in here from time to time — in this case, large clasps or brooches, which were for fastening at throat level.
Soon the sound of squelching feet, and Dabeeb appeared, wrapped in a vast dark cloak, one of her husband’s old army cloaks. She stood in the entrance, not looking at Ben Ata, but very closely, and shrewdly at Al·Ith, who smiled at her. She accepted from Ben Ata the brooch — which was of a yellow dull substance, very heavy — and pinned this at the opening of her dress at the throat, and stepped lightly in, dropping the wet cloak outside the arch on the floor of the portico.
She still did not look at Ben Ata, but was waiting for Al·Ith. Who had suddenly understood what was the probable cause for all the drama. Dabeeb had not looked at Ben Ata. In this awful place, with the antagonisms inseparable from being with — from sex, as they put it — this probably meant they had had each other. She had had him, or he had had her — however these barbarians saw it — but she was not disposed at this particular time even to wonder.
Seeing Dabeeb, the neat, handsome, capable matron, with her air of shrewd humour, standing there waiting for direction, Al·Ith decided to make as much as she could of the situation.
‘Please sit down, Dabeeb,’ she said, nodding at the chair Ben Ata had left empty. And now Dabeeb did glance at Ben Ata. The real danger of this situation — as she had momentarily seen it — had not been enough to allow her to raise her eyes to him, but now that she needed an order, a direction, she did look towards her lord.
But he had left it all to Al·Ith, and stood like a sentinel, watching the scene.
Dabeeb sat.
‘In our country we are going to have a great festival of songs and of stories. We have them often, but this one will be different.’
Already Dabeeb was alert and on guard: the eyes of the two women had engaged, and Dabeeb’s were warning. Al·Ith very slightly nodded, saying, ‘I understand, don’t be afraid.’ Ben Ata did not catch this minutest of nods, but he had seen that he had been mistaken. The sight of these two women, sitting opposite each other, both ready to catch from each other the best they could, did not fail to soothe him, and at the same time to disturb him. Their instant understanding made him feel left out, shut out.
He exaggerated his sarcastic look and soldierly straightness.
‘We want to try and find out if there are songs which perhaps we have forgotten or half forgotten that can tell us things.’
‘I see, my lady.’
Again the two pairs of eyes searched each other.
‘But there is no need to be afraid …’ here Al·Ith paused a moment, and then continued, ‘if you don’t remember any. That is why I asked Ben Ata if you would come up to talk to me. You really mustn’t worry …’ here Al·Ith paused again, and waited until Dabeeb had, in her turn, given the very slightest of nods, ‘about it. It is just an impulse I had. A whim!’ And she put on the look of one who was subject to whims and to having them indulged — a bit fatuous, self-congratulatory.
‘I see, my lady.’
‘I wish you would call me by my name.’
‘It is hard to remember.’ This was in an apologetic voice, almost a plea.
‘We have all kinds of songs, but for instance only the other day listening to some children some of us realized that parts of songs might have been forgotten, or changed — or something like that. And perhaps it is like that with you.’
‘Perhaps it is.’
‘There is a song I believe I heard the other day when I was here. The beat is like this —’ And Al·Ith rested the heel of her hand on the table’s edge and tapped with her fingers:
Dabeeb had caught it and nodded.
‘Perhaps it is a woman’s song?’
‘All manner of people sing it, my lady.’
‘Perhaps it has a tune that different words are set to, at different times,’ said Al·Ith casually.
‘I think that sometimes is so, with us,’ said Dabeeb.
Meanwhile, Ben Ata was as awake as he had never been in his life.
He knew quite well that this encounter between the two women was accommodating levels of understanding he did not, at the moment, in the least grasp. But he had every intention of doing so. But strongest in him, raging among thoughts and intuitions of a quite different character, was suspicion. And he was as forlorn and excluded as. a small child that has had a door shut in his face.
‘Is it something to do with light?’ suggested Al·Ith.
‘Light? Oh, I don’t think so. I haven’t heard that one.’
But her eyes had said yes, and begged and pleaded for Al·Ith not to betray them. Al·Ith was seeing that her idea about the women was not only correct — but had been far from adequate. She saw that here was something like an underground movement.
‘Shall I sing one of the versions for you? It is very popular.’
‘I wish you would.’
‘It is a very old song, my lady.’ And Dabeeb cleared her throat, and stood up behind the chair, holding on to it with one hand. She had a clear strong voice, and evidently used it often.
‘Look at me, soldier! He’s looking!
It’s at me he is looking!
Soon I shall smile, not quite at him, That’ll catch him!’
And now both women heard Ben Ata’s breathing, thick, angry.
Neither looked at him: they knew they would see a man in frenzies of jealousy. Everything was now perfectly clear to Al·Ith. She marvelled at her own clumsiness; and also at the aptness of events, which always pleased her, so inevitably and satisfyingly proceeding from one thing to another, turning facets of truth, the possibilities of development, to the light one after another.
She knew that Ben Ata had wanted to have this woman, and that she had not wanted to be had. She knew that Ben Ata’s mind was inflamed with jealousies and suspicions. There was nothing for it but to go along with whatever was happening and — and wait and see.
Dabeeb was singing:
‘Eyes shine— His, mine …
I know how to please him. Simple and tease him.
I’ll make him hunger. And languish and anger. And give me his pay, A corporal’s pay.’
Her strong voice left a strong silence, supported by the hushing rain.
‘We sing that at the women’s festivals — you know, when women are together.’
Seeing that Al·Ith was smiling and pleased, she said, obviously daring and delighted with herself — and even looking at Ben Ata and allowing herself a half-humorous shudder at the black rage on his face — ‘There is another version, but of course it isn’t fit for your ears, my lady.’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Ben Ata. ‘Don’t run away with that idea. If you knew what they get up to in that Zone of theirs …’
Dabeeb had winked at Al·Ith, then blushed at her audacity, and had begun the song.
‘Come husband! Smooth out my — cushion … ’
‘You are not to sing that,’ said Ben Ata. He was now sustained by a calm, moral loftiness.
‘Perhaps the lady Al·Ith would like to know the worst of us as well as the best, my lord,’ said Dabeeb, in a cosy comfortable voice, motherlike. As Ben Ata did not persist, but merely strode about, snorting, she began again:
‘Come husband, smooth out my — cushion. Quick, get a push-on …’
Dabeeb interrupted herself, and drummed rapidly on the table’s edge.
‘I’m hungry as — winter.
No sin to …’
She drummed again:
‘Warm me up Fill my cup …’
She drummed.
‘Now—go. Quick. Slow.’
She drummed. She winked at Al·Ith again and, animated with the song, winked at Ben Ata, too, who could not suppress a brief appreciative smile.
‘Hard as a board this Good old bed is …’
She drummed.
‘One two three four One two three four …’
She drummed, smiling, alive with challenge and invitation.
‘That’s how we do it. That’s how we do it.
That is our way. That is our way.’
A long sustained drumming, while all her white teeth showed.
‘A fine idea you’ll have of us, my lady.’
Ben Ata was standing with arms folded, feet planted, smiling. As a result of this song, the current was running strong between him and Dabeeb, whose looks at him were confident, inviting.
Al·Ith watched with interest. Rather as she would have done the mating approaches of a couple of horses.
‘There’s a song we have …’ she began casually, and Dabeeb allowed the tension between her and Ben Ata to slacken, and she became attentive to Al·Ith.
Who was thinking that this lie she was telling would not have been possible in Zone Three at all. Occasions for lies did not arise.
Now she was saying: ‘There’s a song we have …’ when they did not, nor anything like it.
‘How shall we reach where the light is. Come where delight is …’
‘Oh, no,’ Dabeeb broke in, ‘we have nothing like that. We don’t go in for that kind of thing.’ She was obviously afraid.
‘You don’t think it might be a good idea if you had a song festival here?’ said Al·Ith.
‘Oh, a very good idea. A very good idea indeed,’ said Dabeeb enthusiastically. And her eyes pleaded with Al·Ith.
‘Perhaps we’ll talk about it, Ben Ata,’ said Al·Ith, and at once went on, speaking to him. ‘Dabeeb was kind enough to agree to give me one of her dresses. I’d like to give her one of mine.’
‘But she has dozens of dresses. She had all those that weren’t good enough for you. What did you do with them, Dabeeb? Flog them?’
‘I sold some of them, my lord. They didn’t all fit me.’ And to Al·Ith, ‘I’d be so grateful. If we could — I mean, I could, have one of your dresses …’
‘Then come with me,’ said Al·Ith, on her way to her rooms.
‘My lady, if I could have the one you have on now? I’ve never seen anything like it …’
The two women went into Al·Ith’s rooms and Ben Ata bounded across and leaned to listen. He could hear the two women, talking about clothes, weaving, sewing. Al·Ith was taking off her dress and Dabeeb was exclaiming over it.
‘Oh, this is too fine for me, oh, it is so beautiful, oh, oh, what a beautiful …’
‘When you make dresses for ordinary wear, do you always make copies for special occasions?’
A brief pause.
‘Nearly always. Al·Ith.’
‘It must be nice wearing a plain dress and thinking of the one that you’ll wear on a special occasion.’
‘Yes, it is. But, of course, we don’t have all that many special occasions. We are poor people here.’
Oh, we are, are we? Ben Ata was thinking. And he returned rapidly to sit down at the table, where Dabeeb had been. He was tapping out rhythms on the table. He had not been fooled. He did not know what was going on, though he knew something was. He would get it all out of Dabeeb. If he had not got it out of Al·Ith by then.
The two women returned to find him sitting and smiling, the picture of good nature.
He was stung into admiration by both of them. Dabeeb’s swarthy and energetic beauty was well accommodated by the tawny silky dress Al·Ith had just taken off. Al·Ith had on her bright yellow dress that seemed to take in all the light there was in the great softly lit room — and to give it out again. Her loose black hair shone, her eyes shone, she was full of mischief and gaiety. Ben Ata was thinking, frankly, to himself, of the pleasures there would be in having them both at once — a possibility that had not entered his head until recent instructions with Elys. He remembered Al·Ith’s scorn of the word have. He sat head slightly lowered, looking up from under his brows at the two — and his mind was full of a painful struggle suddenly, as if it were trying to enlarge beyond its boundaries. He was having a flash of understanding —into the way Al·Ith scorned him for using the language he did. But it did not last. A gloomy suspicion came back, while he watched Al·Ith go with Dabeeb to the arch, and Dabeeb wrap herself tightly in the old dark cloak, and then with a smile at him and something intimate and quick with Al·Ith, run off to be enclosed in the pelting grey of the rain.
Al·Ith watched her go, and smiled. And turned to him, and smiled. In her sunny yellow, she was lovelier than he believed — at that moment—he deserved. He could see that she was a quick, volatile, flamelike thing, and understood how he subdued and dimmed her. But jealousy was undoing him.
She was inviting him. Everything about her, as she stood smiling, enticed him. He got up clumsily and heavily and rushed at her. She evaded him, not out of coquetry, but from real dismay. ‘No, no, Ben Ata, don’t spoil it …’ And she was trying to meet him lightly, and gaily, as they had not long ago, during hours which now to Ben Ata seemed so far above anything he had thought and been since that he would not believe in them, any more than he was able easily to lift his gaze to the vast mountainous region that filled all the western skies. He grabbed her, and she withheld him. ‘Wait, wait, Ben Ata. Don’t you want to be as we were then?’ Oh, yes, he did, he did very much, desperately, he was all inflamed with wanting just that and nothing else — but he could not help it, or himself, or her — he had to be, just then, all grab and grind, and he extinguished all the possibilities of sweetness and the playfulness, and the slow mounting of the exchanges. He had her. And then, all the light gone out of her, she had him. It was not a new experience for him, since Elys, but all the time he was remembering that other time and he made this one obstinate and heavy because, simply, that other time had gone and was not here. This time Al·Ith did not weep, or allow herself to be pulverized into submission. She gave as good as she got, words which she chose, carefully, out of many, and handed to him, with a smiling air of indifference, scorn even.
They ended some hours of this kind of obdurate interchange unfriendly to each other, and inwardly depressed.
When they rose to bathe and dress and arrange themselves, the lovely airy room seemed denuded of its sparkle, and the drum had stopped beating.
This time, all was efficient and considered. She wrapped herself in a cloak, she remembered her shield, and stepped out into the gardens from the opposite door Dabeeb had run down into the rain from. There the fountains played coldly under a cold low blue sky.
Ben Ata came after her, similarly cloaked and ready. She called, and the two horses, black and white, came cantering up, and they leapt onto their backs and rode off, soberly, down towards the road west. They used the time of the journey to discuss what was seen along the road — the crops, the canals, the fields.
Nothing more sensible and connubial could be imagined. But Al·Ith was so far inwardly from Ben Ata that he could get from her not one little moment of real recognition. It was clear to him that she did not want anything from him — only to be rid of him. He knew perfectly well he was to blame.
At the frontier, they reined in their two horses, and Al·Ith was about to shoot forward into the sunny immensities of that plain below the mountains when he called to her hoarsely, ‘Al·Ith, wait.’
She turned and gave him the coolest of mocking smiles.
‘I suppose now you are going to Kunzor,’ he shouted, enraged.
‘And others,’ she called back, and rode off.
He muttered to himself that he would order Dabeeb back, but in fact, knew he would not. He was thinking. He had realized that while jealousy and resentment and suspicion worked in him, poisoning everything, there were other things he could be understanding. And he was determined that he would.
The people on the roads who saw him returning to the camps, remarked to each other that the king seemed subdued. That foreign one was not cheering him up, not much, that was for certain, whatever else she might be doing!
Exactly as had happened before, both Al·Ith and Ben Ata, separated from each other, one riding on into Zone Three, one riding back into Zone Four, felt that the burden of their emotions for one another was not lightened, as they had wanted, but was heavier. Together, they provoked each other into unwanted feelings, apart, thoughts of the other tormented and stung. Ben Ata felt that he was carrying around with him a curse, or a demon, who prevented him from being with Al·Ith in a way that would lead to an incredible happiness. Al·Ith felt a most painful bond with her husband — a word she was examining, turning over and over, as if it were a new ring of a complicated design or a new metal made in the workshops of the northern regions where the mines were. Ben Ata was a weight in her side, no, in her belly, where the new child was, but that was still no more than a speck or a dab of new flesh, so it could not be that which made her so heavy. Riding forward, she was in mind with Ben Ata, whose face was set towards the low, damp fields … She could have asked him this, found out that … if she had done this instead of that … for, away from him, she could not truly believe that her behaviour had been as she remembered it was. When she had come back into the tall light central room she was vibrant and strong because of the exchange with Dabeeb, which had made her alive and confident, so that she had felt far from the gloomy moods of Ben Ata. Her yellow dress had fitted her like happiness. And yet nothing had come of it but the punishments Ben Ata called love.

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