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.
