But the barrier between them was absolute, and this barrier was the thick clumsy substance of Al·Ith.
What shapes did she not see there, that night! Some seemed to her as familiar as Murti·, or her own children. Some came straight out of old tales, and songs, and stories: the storytellers, too, described these as if they had known them intimately themselves! And perhaps they had, thought Al·Ith, sitting there, rocking herself back and forth under the stars, because of the sting of the cold that was creeping into her through her bones. When storytellers say: And then there appeared a dwarf with a hump or an exquisite girl made of the wind — well, their audience always thinks that this is a manner-of-speaking but perhaps after all these storytellers, or their ancestors, did see little gnarled strong men and women who live deep in mountains, or a race of people so rare and fine they could pass through walls and who were at home in flames or in the wind … or at least such beings were part of the consciousness of the lower Zones, to an extent that the thoughts of these minds or the words, of the storytellers, could bring them to life — there they were now, vivid, alive, moving in Al·Ith’s mind’s eye, perfect and created, yet so far away, yet she could see them, and yet she might not touch them. And there were the strange beasts of the realm of the storytellers, and the familiar beasts, too. Who knew that when at last she, Al·Ith, returned to Zone Two, but properly and soberly prepared, she would find her Yori there, but a transformed and translated version of him … so dreamed Al·Ith through that frigid night, while she sat hunched and huddled among the frosty grasses.
And here I must raise my voice, say something—not on my own behalf of course, for there is no ‘I’ here, can only be the ‘we’ of equals and colleagues. Al·Ith sat dreaming of us, the song-makers, the taletellers, wondered if we see what we tell … and what are we to say to that?
Suppose that Al·Ith, at that moment, shivering with arms around her knees, and her head full of fiery beings not herself, was in fact — and no less than any one of us who are supposed to be different and gifted and specialized—herself a storyteller, ballad-maker, Chronicler: herself and on her own account? What are any of us when we call ourselves Chronicler or song-maker, queen or farmer, lover, tender of children, the friend of animals? We are the visible and evident aspects of a whole we all share, that we all go to form. Al·Ith was, for most of her life, queen … the substance of Zone Three expressed itself in her in that shape … queen. Or at other times mother, friend, animal-knower. And when she went down to Zone Four how may we assess the way Zone Three squeezed and forced itself in there, as Ben Ata’s wife, queen of that place with him, Yori’s protector, Dabeeb’s friend … yes, but what are all these guises, aspects, presentations? Only manifestations of what we all are at different times, according to how these needs are pulled out of us. I write in these bald words the deepest lessons of my life, the truest substance of what I have learned. I am not only a Chronicler of Zone Three, or only partially, for I also share in Al·Ith’s condition of being ruler insofar as I can write of her, describe her. I am woman with her (though I am man) as I write of her femaleness — and Dabeeb’s. I am Ben Ata when I summon him into my mind and try to make him real. I am … what I am at the moment I am that …
We Chroniclers do well to be afraid when we approach those parts of our histories (our natures) that deal with evil, the depraved, the benighted. Describing, we become. We even — and I’ve seen it and have shuddered — summon. The most innocent of poets can write of ugliness and forces he has done no more than speculate about — and bring them into his life. I tell you, I’ve seen it, watched it … no, it doesn’t do to take these things lightly. Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without this sting of otherness, of — even — the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness — what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent — these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered. I have not written here, for example, much of those facets of Ben Ata’s realm that made it a place of terror not only for the regions along its eastern borders, but also for places and people within itself. I have not done so because I am reluctant. I rely on us all knowing what the extremes of poverty and deprivation breed: always meanness and spitefulness and cruelty and threadbareness of spirit … except for the few in whom poverty flowers in giving and compassion. Ben Ata’s people’s poverty bred monsters — as it had to do.
We do not know what aspects the dark forces wear in our own Zone Three. In lethargy perhaps? The stagnation that afflicted us until Al·Ith freed us from it? And what of Zone Two — no, that we cannot even begin to imagine. Yet we may be sure that in those high places there is a dark side, and who knows but that it may be very dark and frightful, worse than anything we, with our limited experience of the lower Zones, may imagine. The very high must be matched by the very low … and even fed by it … but that is not a thought I can easily accommodate or that I wish to write much of. It is too difficult for me. I see myself as a describer, only that; a writer-down of the events which pass … and so I record here only that when Al·Ith sat and dreamed of Zone Two, she was Zone Two, even if in the most faint and distant way, and her imaginings of its immaculate fire-born beings brought her near them, and when she thought of us, the Chroniclers, she was us … and so now, in this footnote to Al·Ith’s thoughts on that occasion I simply make my cause and rest it: Al·Ith am I, and I Al·Ith, and every one of us anywhere is what we think and imagine. No more and no less. We are the dull blue base to the wildest subtlest flames. Al·Ith dreamed all night of people known and unknown, creatures real and imagined, saw and did not see events and phenomena she had not experienced herself.
And in the morning, alone, all one vast hungry ache for her Yori, and for her husband — but she had to keep suppressing that ache, and putting it from her, thinking it unbecoming to hunger and ache after a man who was after all not likely to be thinking of her—she got herself up, and walked the stiffness from her limbs and set herself off to find a village or some place where she would be fed.
And as she went she was muttering: A song. What I want to find is — a song. There must be one. Songs and tales, yes, they tell. They talk. They sing. Instruct …
Oh, if only she had her Yori to …
I shall ride my heart thundering across the plains, she was muttering. Yes. My heart shall ride thundering … yes. That’s it. My heart …
When she came to a village, and asked if there was an inn, expecting to be invited into the house whose gate she stood at, as Al·Ith, she was not known, but taken as a mendicant — a shocking and untoward thing, for this country does not understand the extremely poor. She was given a loaf of stale bread and it was suggested that if she wanted work, there was a place in the manufactory where stones were set and polished. Or in the storehouses where fruits and nuts were prepared and were kept through the winter. Or she could work, if she felt up to it—for the woman was giving this thin and ill-clothed beggar at her gate doubtful glances as she considered her in the light of a field worker — if she felt strong enough, she could find work with the horses or the cows.
And so it was that Al·Ith came to work with the beasts of this village, caring for them, feeding them, exercising them along the lanes and the fields.
What she was waiting for — and not with any hopefulness or pleasure — was the summons to return to Zone Four. For it was six months since she had left it.
She knew that in some way or another she would be told, instructed, and there was no need for her to do anything but wait, alertly, and on her guard.
And now we must go back half a year to the moment when Ben Ata found himself alone in the pavilions of his love with Al·Ith, she having ridden off without looking back — and yet with the tears streaming down her face.
He was not alone, as she was, for he had Da
beeb there, and he had his little son.
Dabeeb did bring in the baby to him, and Ben Ata laid him on the couch, and played with him for a little, even quite consciously trying to copy, if not able to feel, the relish and knowledgeableness he had seen in Al·Ith with the child. But all he could feel was pity, a need to protect and guard. But luckily here was Dabeeb, who was really a kind of mother. Arusi was not going to be deprived, not really … so Ben Ata’s thoughts went, while he held a small foot in his great palm, feeling it tug and pull in efforts towards freedom and self-definition. He bent to look into the baby’s face, into the eyes which, Al·Ith had said, were ‘Zone Three eyes.’ It was true they were Al·Ith’s eyes that looked back at him from the baby’s small face, but they did not have Al·Ith’s soul in them … and as he thought this, Ben Ata was struck through and through with a cold longing. Bereaved in every part of him, in every cell, he knew that half of himself had been torn away with Al·Ith. And that what he had to do now was something he had no heart for, no, nor ability for either.
What did it mean, to marry the woman ruler of Zone Five — that barbarous and backward place? What was he supposed to do? How was he to locate her? Would she simply arrive here? Or would he have to send soldiers again to escort an unwilling and angry woman to share his life. His bed, at least. As if the struggle to adjust to the great queen of Zone Three had not been enough! Why, it had practically done for him, that struggle! And just as he and Al·Ith had seemed to reach some plateau or plane of balance, in an understanding that was neither his savagery with her, for now he recognized it had been that, nor her awful and avid need of him — for he was quite simply unable to recognize that use of him (so he saw it) with decency, order, and proper feeling — no sooner had everything come into balance between them, all based on the lovemaking that was a marvel of lightness, gaiety, wit, and fire, than she was off. Gone.
It seemed to Ben Ata now that what he wanted, what he wanted now and for ever, was simply to sit by Al·Ith, and to hold her face between his palms, and to look into eyes which held in them everything he could possibly want to learn … eyes that had taught him everything, not these baby eyes looking at him so happily and so emptily.
Dabeeb, hovering as usual to catch what was needed from her, came and lifted the baby away. Her look at him was sober and comradely, and told him that he could rely on her absolutely.
For she loved him, Dabeeb did. He knew it. In a sense, she was his wife.
Was she Jarnti’s wife as well? Did he and his great general then share a wife? Such thoughts would not have been possible to him before the advent of Al·Ith. He would not have sat, empty-handed, for hours, on the edge of a rumpled couch that smelled tantalizingly with the skin and the flesh of the lost Al·Ith, wondering what a wife was, a husband was … what did it mean? What made the difference between him when he was a young soldier, barbarous with casual lusts — so he described himself now — grabbing some poor girl and having her and then never thinking of her again, and being married, as he had been with Al·Ith? And as he was with Jarnti’s wife, Dabeeb, who loved him and who was now guarding and loving his child, just as, of course, she did with her own children — Jarnti’s. What did it mean that he should marry Zone Five? There was something in all this that was a mystery, too much, his brain did not take it in. Where was Al·Ith, of whom he could ask the question, and then she would laugh and scorn him, and then explain, or if not in words then with her eyes and her flesh?
Oh, Ben Ata was low and lost and empty, he bent his great handsome soldier’s head, and he grieved and he sorrowed, and when Dabeeb had put the baby to sleep and had fetched food from the camp kitchens, she set it before him and stood by his chair, hands folded, and he was ashamed to weep in front of her.
‘But what am I to do, Dabeeb?’ he asked her, and she replied, ‘They’ — meaning the Providers — ‘showed you with Al·Ith, and they will this time. Wait, and watch.’
She stayed with the baby, that night in Al·Ith’s quarters, while he paced and grieved, and so it went on, for several days. In his mind he was with his wife, wondering how she was finding her own land — and thinking, too, of her ‘men’ and her ‘husbands’ who doubtless would be claiming her again. And yet he did not make approaches to Dabeeb. The three of them remained quietly in the pavilion, waiting. For instructions. Which did not come.
But the impetus of already unfolding events carried him forward, for a message came from Jarnti that the war on the frontiers with Zone Five needed him.
Since he didn’t seem to be good for anything else, so he was muttering, Ben Ata strapped on all his soldier’s gear, and he rode off to the frontiers.
His heart was not in it at all. All the way he was looking at the poor villages and sullen towns and wondering how to change things for the better.
When he arrived where the army was camped all along the frontier, he reviewed some troops, as he supposed he had to, and then retired to his tent. It was a fine tent, of a dazzling white, embroidered with gold; it had two rooms in it, one a bedroom; and in the living part of it were his working table, a good strong chair, which had been with him on a thousand campaigns, and a chest for his accoutrements. There were no guards on the door: Ben Ata prided himself that he did not need them.
Late at night, he wrapped himself in a black cloak that everyone knew as the king’s garment — he even joked with Jarnti that when they saluted, it was the cloak they paid homage to, not him — and he went wandering by himself through the camp. The tents of his soldiers seemed to stretch endlessly: they covered a long high ridge that overlooked the frontiers with the enemy Zone. Sentry after sentry stiffened and peered, and then, recognizing the king, presented arms and remained motionless, watching him pass. There was no end to this camp … how many men lay sleeping here, ready for the battle which, presumably, though Ben Ata could not remember why, was going to take place tomorrow.
What was this particular war about? Oh, yes, of course, there was the disputed territory, which stretched from this ridge here, to that ridge there, on which he could see a sort of dark clustering and thickening like flies. The soldiers of Zone Five did not lie snugly in tents, but wrapped themselves in their cloaks — which were of animal skins. They were not supplied with proper soldierly meals, from the mess tents: they carried with them pouches of dried fruits, and dried meats. Ben Ata found himself envying the leaders who did not have to think of supply waggons and mess tents and all the palaver and annoyance of striking camp and dismantling it, and the Unes of soldiers with their mess tins three times a day … but that was nonsense, the armies of Zone Five were barbarians, it was no army at all, and there were even women fighting with the men, and sometimes they were worse than the men …
So Ben Ata, strolling among the innumerable tents in a soft half-moonlight, a sombre figure … and sombre-minded he was, reviewing all the thoughts he had ever had about Zone Five, so that he could make up some picture of this woman he was supposed to marry.
Meanwhile, the sheer weight and mass and presence of those thousands of tents was subduing him … yes, he had often done this before, the midnight stroll among his soldiers, but he had not recently … he was thinking of the men there. And of various conversations he had had with Al·Ith. And, too, with Dabeeb.
‘There is no need to send an embassy to our country. It isn’t that you don’t have all the arts and crafts in Zone Four — but you don’t practise them. You don’t develop them. How can you when all your men from eighteen to sixty are away playing war?’ Al·Ith, of course.
‘But Ben Ata, can’t you see? In the villages and towns there are no men. There are old men and women and the sick and the children. The boys are brought up by women. Then when they are ten or eleven they are put into the boys’ companies, and turn against their mothers and sisters. Surely you can see that, Ben Ata? Boys have to turn against women when they have known nothing but women, in order to become men at all — there is too much of women in them … to be brought up by women is to bring up
a nation of soldiers. Men without softness for women, only contempt for them, and hardness.’ That was Dabeeb.
‘But, Ben Ata, of course your country is rich. It has everything ours has — certainly as much water! But wealth isn’t wealth until it has been through the hands of people.’
‘Well, obviously, Al·Ith.’
‘Not obviously at all, Ben Ata. Because you don’t practise it. Your women can’t do everything while your men play games. And so your wealth stays in the earth and the rocks and in the thoughts of the people, who know perfectly well how things should be. Why don’t you ask them? A man who can cut a strip of leather for a helmet’s chin strap from a badly cured hide is already one who can make a saddle — if you insist on using saddles — that will last a hundred years or more. A woman who brews some rough beer for the camp feasts has it in her hands and her instincts how to make fine wines and liqueurs. Yes, it is true, Ben Ata — in your realm it is all potential.’
‘And in yours it is all ease and comfort and fat nothing’ — so that quarrel had gone.
Suppose he sent home — let’s say — half these men? All over his poor meagre land would flow strength, locked up now in the armies. Strength would flow into the arts and crafts of Zone Four. Roofs would be mended, ditches dug, fields properly ploughed. Harvests would fill barns and women would make preserves and pickles … and there would no longer be pinched unhappy faces to see when he rode through his country. Yes, tomorrow he would discuss with Jarnti how it should be done … not that he could expect that great general who had been a soldier since he was six years old, to agree with him. No, it would have to be wrapped up, in some way. Presented. Made to look as if dismissing half the army’s soldiers would in some way and in the long run benefit the army … so Ben Ata was thinking as he strode back to his tent that glimmered there so beautifully on a slight eminence.