Sometimes she called Yori to her, and stood by his head, gazing into his mild and intelligent eyes. ‘Yori, Yori, am I wicked, then? Do you know what it is I have done?’
But he looked his love for her, and his kindness, and soon, as a horse has to, lowered his head to graze.
He was lonely here with her. One day a herd of wild horses, their manes flying, came chasing across the savannah, and Yori called to them and galloped off, his hooves making the hard ground ring. For all of a long happy day Yori ran races with them, and rolled over and over the earth among the warm-smelling grasses, and once raced away with them quite out of sight, so that she thought he would not come back at all. But he did come back, alone, at dusk, and she saw that he was sad and would have liked to stay with his companions. But he put his soft nose into her neck in greeting, and patiently lay down again, because the gales had already started from the east, and it was time to shelter her.
Days passed.
One evening as the light was going, she saw, on the other side of the stream, but far off, a man who seemed to resemble Ben Ata. She crossed the stream on stepping-stones, and ran up the bank and towards this man, who was on the other side of the frontier line. She stopped when she had to, as the densities of the air changed, and saw that this could not be Ben Ata, for it was a lean desperate man with none of the stolid oxlike quality of the king of that low Zone. Yet she longed to rush towards him, and understood by this that it was Ben Ata. Separated by impossibility, they stood, gazing, and then she called out, ‘Ben Ata!’ And he, after a wait, called gruffly back, ‘Al·Ith!’
Their voices were strange to each other, reminded both of their differences, and how abrasive was their actual contact. Yet they remained there, while the dark came down, and they could see nothing but shadows.
She did not call again, and nor did he, but later they found that both had stayed staring and leaning into the dark, for many hours. She returned to her stream and her horse’s sheltering side when the wind grew too bitter to bear. That night she felt in her lower abdomen the creeping flutter that announced to her the child was more than a bundle of accumulating cells. She put her hand to cup the place, in greeting, but was divided and in conflict.
As for Ben Ata, who had been in torments of wanting and notwanting ever since he had left her at the frontier, when he had seen her there, in the half-dark, a little burned-out fragment of a woman in her flame of a yellow dress, he had suffered an overturning of himself, and had ridden back to the camps, bypassing the pavilions, where he had been all these days, as little conscious of their passing as Al·Ith was, and feeling again she had stolen his good senses away. But back in his own camp, his own tent, with Jarnti and the other officers tactfully welcoming, he was possessed no less than in the pavilions … but by what? He could not sleep. He did not eat. He could not keep still. Dabeeb, washing the family’s clothes in a great tub at her back door, saw Ben Ata jump the little fence, and stride towards her as if he was going to overturn her, the tub of water, and the wet wrung clothes in their basin. He stopped in front of her and, taking her chin in his hand, lifted it and gazed into her eyes, and at every bit of her face. He was frowning with the immensities of the comparisons he was making. Dabeeb could see this, and grudged him not at all. Poor old king, he’s certainly got it bad, she was thinking, while maintaining a smiling but decorous pair of smooth dusky cheeks and eyelids that shuttered her real thoughts. Hmmmm. Not done him any harm at all, thought she, as Ben Ata, without apology, turned and strode off again. And she smiled to herself, congratulating Al·Ith, imagining how she would use the man’s desperations and his anger.
But Ben Ata quite simply could not stand this turmoil another moment. It was time for another campaign. In a fever, he called for the latest reports from all his frontiers, and found — hardly to his surprise of course — that there had been skirmishings on the border with Zone Five. ‘Time they were taught a lesson,’ he muttered, together with other ritual and routine incantations, and went out into the officers’ mess to share these around and raise the temperature a little. As usual all were delighted at his announcement of a new campaign. Meanwhile, he was sitting in his tent, thinking of Al·Ith, and her scorn of him, his wars, his campaigns. He was thinking of the last campaign, and for the first time since he could remember, of the dead and the wounded, for until now he had not been ever prompted to do so.
He could not cancel this campaign, for this would make him seem soft and vacillating, but neither could he face riding out, in front of his army, ‘going through all that palaver,’ he was muttering, dismally, and then ‘putting up with it all for days and weeks on end.’ These thoughts struck him as quite treasonable, and he let out a sort of muffled roar of anger, which was heard by his orderlies, who looked at each other, silently sharing comments that it would have been too risky even to whisper.
Ben Ata rushed out of his tent, bounded on to the first horse he could see in the corrals, and rode off towards the eastern border, which lay adjacent to Zone Five. He had not left any of his unhappiness behind!
‘What am I going to do?’ he kept muttering, as he alternately switched his horse to make it go faster, and then checked it, and patted it briefly … the horse’s mouth was lathered, the bit was uncomfortable there … Ben Ata thought that Al·Ith, and everyone in her country rode without bridles, without saddles, without beatings, without everything that here, with them, was found necessary. He lessened the grip of the bit on his horse’s mouth, and even muttered a few words of pity for the beast — but as he did so, felt himself to be a traitor again. And what was he doing going towards Zone Five at all? He loathed the place and always had. Long before the actual frontier, the heavy deep soil, the good rich fields, the canals, and the ditches and the ponds and the interminable flat perspectives of Zone Four, which he had always — or had until recently — felt was the proper way for a country to be, gave way to scrub and sand and a thin high air that tasted always of dust. He had never penetrated far into the hateful place, but the captives and girls his soldiers paraded before him, or flung into his tent, were thin scraggy things and the dust always powdered their limbs and faces and hair a dingy yellow. He supposed that this dust, this dryness, was general for them, but did not know. He had not asked. Now he came to think of it, he had not ever offered more than words of command to girl or to prisoner, had never questioned them, only punished or used.
Ben Ata did not go as far as the actual frontier, but only where he could see slopes of rippling sand, ridges of stone and low bitter brush. He sat on his horse, caressing its neck without knowing that he did, and thinking of the poor creature’s torn mouth, and remembered the feel of the captured girls, the gritty acridness of their bodies as he held them, their tears and their anger.
Ben Ata wept. He knew perfectly well that he was not going to order any war on this luckless place: he would countermand his instructions as soon as he got back to camp.
He knew that his soldiers would say that he was a woman’s victim and was not fit to be a soldier. He thought they were right. He did not want to go back into his own land, where it seemed any thought he was likely to have was bound to be discordant or seditious.
He decided to stay where he was. He dismounted, relieved his horse of saddle and bridle, and with his face turned inwards to his own land, and his back to Zone Five, he sat in his cape, in a vigil. And so it was that Ben Ata, king of the terrible Zone Four, was sitting far from his armies and his camps, all by himself, when the drum began beating again. He did not hear it.
After a night of solitude, and sleeplessness, he rode back in again. He heard the drum from the camp, as he arrived, and was going to ride straight on to meet Al·Ith when it occurred to him that it might be too late. He strode up the hill to the pavilions just as she rode up from the other side.
The two entered their room from opposite arches, and stood examining each other. As usual it was their difference that had to strike them first: both, matching the long days of questioning a
nd wanting and longing, with the reality of this stubbornly self-contained individual, felt only a sort of exhaustion.
Both were manifestly and at first glance, worn out. Both were burned dry and brown and lean. Both raged inwardly with need and restlessness. The eyes of both burned in new hollows. They were consumed as they stood there by hungers neither in the least understood.
And, together at last, they sank down, side by side on the couch, and looked close into the other’s eyes, face, and ran their hands up and down each other’s arms, and limbs. And, being assured that he, she, was there, truly and absolutely there, the long tension snapped. They sighed, yawned, and fell back and slept in each other’s arms. They slept for a day and a night and hardly moved.
How long were the days that followed, every thought and movement slowed and heavied with self-awareness, and questioning. For this place, this phase, was being experienced for the first time by both, so that everything said and done had to surprise them.
For one thing, they were alone together and suspected that this would be so for a long time, because for both of them then ordinary — their former and now lost? — lives seemed forbidden to them. They had become exiled, and the realms that were excluding them were created and sustained by the companionship, the bonds and needs, of others. Neither had ever been alone with one other person for days … and days … and days. And nights.
They were making love as neither had before: serious and prolonged, as if coming to an end must mean the end of a possibility in understanding, as if this were a task they had been set in self-exploration, as if their being joined in this way made a strength, an unassailable place that was withholding doubt and worse — hostility of some kind and from some source — calamities, even chaos. And as they wrestled, or clung, or sheltered, each cast upon this scene, much more often than either would have wanted the other to know, a cool dispassionate eye which concurred completely in any judgments that anyone — who? that hostile unknown? — might be pronouncing on them. Yet against these judgments they rebelled, and protected the other, in thought and in action, too, for what did it mean, this need — and an increasingly frequent one—to hold Al·Ith, to hold Ben Ata, inside strong arms felt as, perhaps, the barricades built up outside a cave where some small and infinitely vulnerable and brave thing had taken cover.
But from outside there came not one word, and no sign. The drum beat steadily, on and on. And they knew it must continue to beat. For a time at least.
Al·Ith would lie on the couch, on piled cushions, quite naked, her hand lightly held over the place where this hybrid of a child of theirs was hatching its way out of the realm of possibilities, and she felt that the infant was pulsing there in response to the drum. And Ben Ata, quite naked, would come over to her, having seen from the frowning concentration of that face that was now close and beloved to him, so that he would not have been surprised to see it when he looked in a mirror, that she was in communication with the future lord of this Zone, and gently pushing aside her hand, substitute his, listening through his palm and fingers. Or he would press his ear there, shutting out all the other sounds from this dear and familiar house of flesh, so that he could hear only the drum, the drum, beating into his ears and setting the tides of his own blood.
Now they were naked most of the time, for their being bare there together was like being clothed, so various and speaking had these two bodies become. He would look at the damp light from the fountained garden moulding her shoulders and think how well it suited her to stand just there, this slight Al·Ith of his, as slender and taut as the springing arch of a pillar she leaned against; and she would watch the fine moulding of his back and loins and believe she could watch the play and the tension of those muscles without tiring for all the rest of her life. And he put his hands into the black fall of her hair and marvelled at his past and dead life, when he had not even noticed — or so it seemed to him now — the infinite complexities of one small woman’s head, with its world of differences his fingers explored, tress by tress; and she let her arm lie across his strong brown shoulders and knew that the languages and messages of two skin surfaces, lightly touching or sliding on the other, would suffice her for ever.
If she put on a dress from some whim or need for coquetry then soon the dress was off again, for coquetry seemed quite insulting to this serious state they were both exploring for the first time; and if he pulled his dark soldier’s cape around him, when the wind blew in cold from the hillside that sloped to the camp, then he felt uncomfortable in it, almost as if he had no right to it. And instead they sprang back together again under the covers of their great couch, back into their world, their time … which did not change, could not change … but did change, nevertheless, and soon, for one day sitting at their little table under the arch from which they could look down the hill into the bustle of the camps, they summoned food with their thoughts and nothing at all happened. But even as they sat there, wondering, they saw Dabeeb come climbing the hillside, bent forward because of a cold wind that tugged at the old cape she had wrapped around her, and she was carrying covered dishes and jugs. Which she laid down quickly and carefully on the edge of the portico under the outermost arches, and ran off again quickly, without even glancing in towards them.
They wrapped up their nakedness, and went out into the portico to retrieve this food, which was from the officers’ mess, as Ben Ata was able at once to see, and which consisted of stewed beans and bread.
He noted, as he himself began to eat, and with relish, that Al·Ith was eating it hungrily, as if she did not miss her rose-scented confections, and her fruit and her syrups.
This pavilion of theirs, this magical building, had become quite prosaic to both. Once it had seemed to Al·Ith like a rather inadequate representation and reminder of the elegances and subtleties of her own land. Not long ago, to Ben Ata, it had been a charming — certainly — but irritating place, effeminate, which he had no alternative but to put up with. But now there was nothing in it that he even thought about much. The airy room with its springing fountain of a central pillar, its shadows, its high spaces and shapes under the moulded ceilings — the rooms he used for bathing, or changing, and through which she wandered as freely as he did, the rooms that were her quarters, and where he went in and out just as she did — all this was, simply, his home now: his and Al·Ith’s home. He had once lived in tents and not wanted anything finer. He supposed he would again … reminded of these distant obligations, he retired to his room and, seated stark naked at the simple table he had ordered to be brought up for this kind of use, he wrote an order that the armies must engage themselves in manoeuvres and some mock war or other, because he had remembered that he had promised them a war, and had failed them. This would ‘take up the slack’ a little, he muttered, and was wondering as he sat there, head in his hand, which part of this country of his would be best, at this time of the year, for a mock war, and whether … but his staff could deal with all that perfectly well, he decided at last, with the oddest mixture of regret at this relinquishing of his own participation in this war, and relief that he would not have to go through weeks and weeks of tediousness, pretending that inventions and masquerades were real, with a real purpose … and, thinking thus, he remembered that Al·Ith did not believe that any of this occupation of his had any purpose at all … yet when he thought of this son of his, being incubated at this moment in Al·Ith’s delicious body, it was always as on a horse, with him, at the head of the armies.
It was a son of course. Al·Ith knew it, and so did he. Because it was necessary and consistent that this union should bring forth a son. The marriage of Zone Three and Four needed to bring forth a son: that was evident.
He returned to find Al·Ith dressed, and for the first time in many days.
The cupboards in her apartments were filled again with dresses that were the product of this country and not hers. She did not disdain them now. This was partly because the women were producing more apt and simpler clothes, as a
result of pulling to pieces and studying every stitch and fold of the dresses she had given Dabeeb. And partly because Al·Ith had changed, and no longer considered the products of this land as impossible to her. She was wearing now a rose-coloured robe that fitted her well, and outlined the soft slope of her pregnancy.
She was sitting at the table, head in hand, in thought.
‘Ben Ata,’ said she, as he had known she was going to say, ‘there are surely things that we ought to be attending to!’
Before answering, he sat down opposite her. He did not intend to agree too quickly. Looking back at that time—and it seemed long ago—when her visits to this country had been so short and irregular, he remembered most that they had quarrelled. It had been his fault for not standing up to her. She was bossy. He liked the state they were in now. Married. That was how he put it to himself. We’re married now, and she can’t have her way as she did.
As for her, she remained silent, because she, too, was remembering how things had been. Oh, not as they were now … not as she was now … Between Al·Ith now and her own high realm, there seemed a curtain of cloud. She could remember that things had been very different. This difference was felt by her, as an ease, a lightness, a sweetness, above all a marvellous friendliness in everything. She remembered all her children, and the sense and competence of their being together. She remembered she had a sister, the beautiful one, and they had been used to sit together in the evenings watching the evening sky as the light faded, or to walk on the roofs … recalling delightful wanderings on those roofs was painful to Al·Ith. She could not do that now — it seemed to her that she was afraid of high places and of being on the level of birds and mountains … and there had been something else, a tower, and from there—but at the memory a pain of longing attacked her and with it, a feeling of such urgency that she sprang up, wringing her hands. She sat here, she was loitering here, but meanwhile, this was not at all what she should be doing …