‘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.
