When the sky lightened again, and the searing winds dropped suddenly, she rose, brushing off the grass seeds and dust the wind had left on her sunny yellow dress, which contrasted so much with her wan face, and thanked him for riding out to meet her.
But she had to go on up into the plateau whether she liked it or not.
They parted, she riding back towards the road that would take her west. Her horse was happy to go, and trotted along, alert and full of energy, but she knew the pressure of her knees on him was telling him of her mood, and she tried, so as not to dim his pleasure, to be as willing as he.
As they climbed up the long pass onto the plateau, she was thinking that when they reached there her land would take her into itself again. And then, when it didn’t happen, that it would when she passed some people who would know her and greet her — but she saw a group of young men on the roadside, walking to a town on a hill, and she slowed so that they could see her and call to her, as always happened, but it seemed that they did not notice her at all. They were coming towards her, and she waited, but they looked everywhere else, and did not stop their talking and laughing. She called out to them: ‘Greetings! Is everything going well with you?’ And they did call back: ‘Greetings, thank you, and we trust with you …’ and she realized she was not recognized as Al·Ith. Never had this happened before, and in the deeps of the thought that now took her, she was not conscious of how she and Yori crossed the distance to Andaroun. She was vaguely aware that they were passing people who did not recognize her, and that the horse was slowing, and becoming depressed, because of her. And she entered our capital as slowly as if she were expecting to be ill-treated there, or even punished. And still she felt as if she were not part of her beloved realm, she felt like a stone on the top of her horse, like a sack of ill-fated heaviness, with nothing to give out in response to the friendly charm of our streets and avenues and gardens. Her land did not know her. She had become filled with a substance foreign to it — even hostile, but how, she did not know! And when she thought that she must stable her companion, poor Yori, who now seemed like her only friend, and climb up the wide steps and meet her sister and then the children, whom normally she spent hours of every day with, if she were not travelling around her realm, then she could not believe that she could go through with it. She was an impostor. That was what she felt. And between her and Ben Ata the bond lay heavy and strong, and it was as if she could feel his thoughts thrumming and vibrating. He was waiting for her to come back to him, and at the same time felt a helpless despairing anguish at the knowledge that she would. He was in their pavilion, not with his soldiers. He was sitting there, alone, thinking. Or striding up and down. He was trying to understand, trying to come at what they should both be understanding. And she should be there, with him. But the drum was not beating. She knew that. She could hear the soft splashing of the fountains. She could hear the cries and the clash of the soldiers at their exercises on the plain. But the drum was silent, though Ben Ata was listening for it and longing for it as much as she listened for it and longed for it. And dreaded it.
The nature of Zone Four — it was conflict and battle and warring. In everything. A tension and a fighting in its very substance: so that every feeling, every thought held in it its own opposite.
When she reached the palace, which filled two sides of our central square, she dismounted, and looked, as always, to see who would be waiting for her on the wide white stone steps. No one and nothing was there. She walked to the trees in the square where there were always attendants ready to take horses off people who had come from the regions, and one took over the responsibility of Yori — but did not greet her as Al·Ith. He was polite, but almost perfunctory. She walked back to the great steps, and mounted them slowly, feeling her yellow skirts swing out around her ankles. She had never, ever, approached this entrance to the palace without people running to meet her from everywhere, not only the building itself, but from the gardens behind, and other parts of the square. ‘Al·Ith,’ they would shout, ‘Al·Ith is here.’ In a profound silence, deepened by the doves’ contented crooning from the trees, she went up into the apartments and chambers of the ground floor, walking swiftly through them to see who was at work there, what was happening: in one a Council was in process, and her sister sat there with twenty or so people. No one looked up as she stood in the doorway. They were discussing a mysterious ailment that afflicted the cattle in the western ranges — so things had not improved, were not yet improving. Though of course they were going to. Her sister sat with her back to her, but usually this would not have prevented her from sensing her presence and turning to greet her. A young girl Al·Ith knew well, one of the orphans she had mothered, did at last look up and see her, but her eyes at once moved away, as if Al·Ith were not there at all.
So Al·Ith left and went up into her own rooms. They were flooded with a heavy yellow light from the westering sun, and Al·Ith sat at the window, immersed in yellow, strong and sustaining, but did not feel anything but a shadow and a ghost. Into these rooms, so simple and light and pleasant, with nothing in them she had not chosen because of her affinity with shape or colour, she came always as if into her own self, her self expanded and displayed there, smiling … but now its very refinement of tone and texture, its subtlety, refused to admit her: she had become heavy, and unfit for it. She should not have come at all, very probably.
Up she went on to the many levels of the roofs and walked there watching the sun sink down and set the mountains alight. All our capital was spread out below, with its familiar streets and gardens. There was not a house, or a square, or a public place that she did not know — often from inside and very intimately, out of friendship with its inhabitants, but at least in appearance, its frontage, roof, pattern of windows — all part of the habits of her own mind. But she was not welcome there now.
Thinking that high in the belltower she might reach to the heights of herself from which she had so far sunk away, she climbed up and up and up the winding stairs and stood dizzyingly high, mountains and clouds and snow fields her peers, and the birds swinging past at eye level, and looked up and out towards the gap in the peaks where the blue fields lay waiting, but she was muttering: Far. Too far … and she could not believe that it was so recently she had stood there feeling she had only to allow herself to be drawn into that cerulean to be translated into something other than anything she had known or imagined, feeling even that she had only to step out of the tower and run across the sparkling skies, lighter than air, to vanish into blue as the clouds do when the sun’s heat dissipates them. Now she was encumbered and clogged and felt that she was wrong to stand here, unwelcome.
And she went down rapidly to her rooms to find her sister there. Murti· was startled. She had not expected her. This astonished and dismayed both. Never before had either been unaware of what the other did or was at any time, even if they were at opposite ends of the regions.
Al·Ith sat down in the window and so did Murti· but at a distance. The two women examined each other, with pain, and like strangers. Al·Ith saw Murti· as ethereal, all fire and brilliance, like a fountain renewing itself at every moment from springs quite unimaginable to Al·Ith now, in her dragging state, who, to Murti· seemed as if a light had gone out of her.
‘Have the children been asking for me?’ enquired Al·Ith humbly, pleading.
And Murti·, wincing at this new suppliant’s tone, said with difficulty, ‘No.’
‘They have not missed me?’
‘They talk as if you are dead, Al·Ith.’ And she leaned forward and took Al·Ith’s hand, from old habit, to renew the currents that had always played there between them. And slowly let the hand fall, with a sigh. ‘Do you tell them I am not dead, but will come back again?’
After a while Murti·’s bright kind eyes fell before Al·Ith’s, and she said, ‘It is different. I don’t know why, Al·Ith, it is hard to remember you. Do you understand that?’
Al·Ith’s anguish held her pain
contained, so she did not weep. And she contained her anguish, this sensation that was no part of her lovely realm, where pain and suffering were signs of illness, to be treated with patience, compassion, and determination that this foreignness would not infect others.
Al·Ith stood up. The flaring light from the sun was sinking again, and the streets and alleys lay in shadow, while light warmed the rooftops. The cries and voices of the town rose up to them: warmth, living, vitality.
Al·Ith clasped her two hands close into her waist as if she should keep them safe and their touch must not contaminate others.
‘Are things any better with us? Are the animals still sorrowing? Are they still lonely?’
‘Are they lonely, Al·Ith?’ The two sisters stood close, but not as they had always been in the past, their hands and arms together, sometimes cheeks touching, so that each could feel the rhythms and life of the other, like her own. They were close but not touching, and their eyes talked, but with reticences.
‘Yes, they are sad and they are lonely,’ Al·Ith was whispering. Both whispered, yet they were alone and no one could have heard them. ‘A mare in a herd of horses will be overcome with loneliness, but not know what it is, but stand shivering, believing there must be a word she could hear, or a voice, but there is nothing but silence. A stallion will surge from one end of a prairie to the other, driven by emptiness. A whole herd of cattle will lift their heads all at once and cry out that they are suffering …’
‘I’ve heard them, Al·Ith, I’ve heard them,’ whispered Murti·.
‘Suddenly on a hill a thousand sheep will move away, running, the shepherds after them, calling and soothing.
They feel some terrible loss, Murti· … but is it getting better, is this pain being lifted from our beasts?’
Murti· shook her head, and sighed. ‘I do not think so.’
‘And is there still a lack of hope with us all? Are the children not being born?’
‘Things are as they were. Al·Ith, it is a very short time since you first were taken to the other Zone. Does it seem to you a long time?’
‘A very long time. Oh, such a long, long time.’ And tears fell from Al·Ith’s eyes in floods.
‘Are we going to have to accept tears and grief as part of the normal functioning of our Zone?’ demanded Murti·, fierce.
‘No, no, you are right.’
‘If it is your part, in this series of events, to go down into that other place and know tears and grief and … ’
‘You do not know, Murti·, you cannot imagine!’
‘No. But it is not I who have been ordered to make this marriage, Al·Ith! I am sure that this duty is something very high, much finer than anything we can imagine — but you must not poison us with your grief.’
She was hard and fierce and angry. Al·Ith could see that her beautiful sister, her other self, was as firm in her protection of the realm as she herself had ever been. It was Murti· now who was this land, this realm. It was she who embodied and contained it.
Al·Ith whispered, ‘Our beasts were grieving and low and restless before I ever went to Zone Four.’
‘That is true. But now when you come back from there, you come in a cloud of black. If you could see it, my sister! No. You must not come again until —’
‘Until what? And I am not obeying my will, but theirs.’
Murti· nodded. ‘That is not my business. But I can tell you that you are bringing with you a contagion. It is not your fault. Nothing is your fault. Al·Ith. How can it be? But you have been given a part to play. For the sake of all of us.’
Al·Ith nodded. Without looking again at her sister, she went into her cupboards, and began cramming necessities and clothes of all kinds into saddle bags.
‘And is the song and story festival being taken care of?’
‘Is it important?’
Al·Ith turned swiftly, and faced her with emphasis. ‘Yes, indeed it is. Very.’
‘Then I shall see to it. Do you know why?’
‘That you must understand for yourself,’ said Al·Ith, on precisely the humble pleading note that had distressed Murti· before. ‘There is something there we can grasp. Murti·, I know this, I know this absolutely …’ And she came close to her sister, forgetting their new distance from each other. But it was dusk in the apartment now. The tall oblong of the window showed a fading inky light, and the stars were there.
Murti· took one step back, away from this presence she felt as contaminating. But then stood fast. ‘What is it?’
‘There is something we should have been doing. But we have not done it.’
The two could hardly see each other’s faces now. They leaned forward to gaze.
‘You don’t know what?’
‘Yes. It is to do with the blue realm beyond the peaks in the northwest. But what, Murti·? What? That is the point. And that is what we must find out. We must find out what we are for.
And Al·Ith turned and ran out of the rooms, and down the stairs to the lower floors and the Council Chamber and down again till she reached the wide white steps and she fled down these and then, in the square, around the edge of the palace into the alley that led to the stables, where she found her horse. And she leapt onto his back and was off through the town and rode all night, reaching the top of the pass by dawn, and then rode across the plain through the morning, and reached the frontier by early evening. But the drum was not beating. She knew that. So she dismounted, and found a stream and grazing for her Yori, and sat there alone through the dark hours, watching the stars move. She could not go forward into Zone Four: it was not time for her. And she was not wanted in her own land.
And that was how our queen. Al·Ith, wandered in the between places, unknown, ignorant of what was needed from her or what her future was to be, hungry, cold, quite alone, except for her kind horse. And before morning Yori lay down in a patch of grass, and Al·Ith curled up against his warm side, and waited for the sun to rise.
She was singing to herself.
‘Sorrow, what is your name!
If I knew your name I could feed you —
Fill you, still you, and leave you!
Grief, if I knew your nature,
I would lead you to pasture.
What is the path I should lead you?
Which is the food I should feed you?’
When Al·Ith woke in the early sun she was lying bundled in the grasses of the riverside like a leveret whose mother has abandoned it: her horse was feeding nearby. She pulled the thin seeds from the grass heads and ate them for her food, and drank water from the stream and sat watching the mountains of her realm. She dreamed of her journeys around and through her country, to the north and the west and the south, where the vineyards and the oil grew, and to the east again, where she now loitered. How various and rich and wonderful was this land of hers, from which she was now banished, where she was now unwelcome. For how long had she roamed in it, summing up and accomplishing in herself all its potentials. She, Al·Ith, the beautiful, now a fugitive, unwanted anywhere, sat by the river, trying to remember for how long she had enjoyed all that richness. But she could not remember for how long.
All day she waited, her face lifted towards the high ranges of her peaks, and at night her horse lay down again, and she close to it, for shelter from the searing wind that started at sundown from the low places of the east. She laid her head to Yori’s side, and listened to the strong heart beating there, and imagined that she heard the drums beating from the pavilions of Ben Ata. But she did not. Ben Ata was alone, striding through those empty rooms and around and through the fountains, waiting, as she did, for the drum to begin.
But it did not.
Days passed.
During the hours of light she wandered by the stream, watched the birds splashing and skimming, or sat gazing at her mountains. Sometimes the light massed them strong and lowering and with every ravine and rocky spur defined and clear. But sometimes they seemed to float there, shining or shadowy, and the
ir tops and outlines merged with the blues of the sky. At night she sheltered near her horse, and did not sleep, but sang her plaints of exile, and listened for the drum.
And still she could hear nothing from the pavilions of Ben Ata.
Now she lost her sense of how much time had passed, was passing. She wondered if perhaps she was mistaken about her path and direction. Perhaps her sojourn in the realms of Ben Ata was completed, and she had failed, and had been thrown out to linger here until she died. But then she remembered that there was to be a child, who was still no more than an act of belief for her, since the new life had not made itself felt. If she was not important or necessary to the Providers or the Necessity, then the child was.
Or perhaps she was being punished … When this thought came battering at her mind, she pushed it away, for she was still able to remember that in her land, if some little person allowed such ideas to enter the mind, then it was a sign of mental illness, of a monstrous and shocking egotism.
But the compulsion to believe she was most fatally in the wrong kept pressing in on her. After all, it was in Zone Three that such ideas were mistaken, not at all in Zone Four—and that was, or so it seemed, where she belonged! If she did belong anywhere now — but how could she know? If she was guilty, then of what was she guilty, and why was this punishment the fit one for her? These thoughts — or were they emotions? — ground around in her head — or was it in her heart they seethed and simmered?