As Al·Ith swung there, lightly, and delightfully, on her pillar, smiling, and waiting, he understood that he was now to start again. There was no help for it. He could not refuse, for his month as apprentice, and a willing one, had already said yes to what was to come.
As he challenged and antagonized, an equal — at the same time his look at Al·Ith told her all this. And so she left her pillar, and came to him, and began to teach him how to be equal and ready in love.
It was quite shocking for him, because it laid him open to pleasures he had certainly not imagined with Elys. There was no possible comparison between the heavy sensualities of that, and the changes and answerings of these rhythms. He was laid open not only to physical responses he had not imagined, but worse, to emotions he had no desire at all to feel. He was engulfed in tenderness, in passion, in the wildest intensities that he did not know whether to call pain or delight … and this on and on, while she, completely at ease, at home in her country, took him further and further every moment, a determined, but disquieted companion.
He could not of course sustain it for long. Equality is not learned in a lesson, or even two. He was heavy and slow in response by nature: he could never be anything else. Impossible to him would always be the quicksilver pleasures. But even as far as he could stand it, he had been introduced to his potentialities beyond anything he had believed possible. And when they desisted, and he was half relieved and half sorry that the intensities were over, she did not allow him to sink back again away from the plane of sensitivity they had both achieved. They made love all that night, and all the following day, and they did not stop at all for food, though they did ask for a little wine, and when they had been entirely and thoroughly wedded, so that they could no longer tell through touch where one began and the other ended, and had to look, with their eyes, to find out, they fell into a deep sleep, where they lay becalmed for another twenty-four hours. And when they woke, at the same moment, at the beginning of a nightfall, they heard a drum beat, beat, from the end of the garden, and this rhythm they knew at once was signalling to the whole land, and beyond it to her land, that the marriage was properly accomplished. And the drum was to beat, from that time on, from when they met, until they parted, so that everyone could know they were together, and share in the marriage, in thought, and in sympathetic support — and, of course, in emulation.
They lay in each other’s arms as if in the shallows of a sea they had drowned in. But now began the slow and tactful withdrawals of the flesh, thigh from thigh, knee from knee … it was partly dark and while each felt their commonplace selves to be at odds with the marvels of the days and nights just ended, luckily any dissonances could not be seen. For already they were quick to disbelieve what they had accomplished. He, with an apologetic and almost tender movement, pulled his warm forearm from under her neck, sat up, then stood up, stretching. Relief was in every stretch of those sturdy muscles, and she smiled in the dark. As for her, she was becoming herself again the same way. But it was clear he felt it was ungallant to leave her at once, for he pulled around himself his soldier’s cloak and sat at the foot of the couch.
‘If we tidied up a little bit,’ said he, ‘we could meet for supper.’
‘What a very good idea!’ And her voice came from the door to her apartments, for she had crept there without his seeing her. And she had gone.
Nothing had changed in the weeks since she was here, except that the length of a wall was exposed to show row after row of dresses, robes, furs, cloaks. She had never seen anything like it, and muttering that this was clearly some kind of storehouse for a whole houseload of whores—for the word had already been learned from him — she pulled out one after the other. The materials were fine enough, and she examined silks, satins, woollens, with a professional eye for their quality — certainly this country knew how to manufacture these goods. But she could only marvel at the awfulness of their making-up. She could not find one that wasn’t exaggerated in some way or another, that didn’t emphasize buttocks or breasts, or expose them, or confine them uncomfortably, or if not, the material or the colour was wrong for the conception. There was nowhere here the instinctive feel for the rightness of a match of style and cloth, and no subtleties. But, thinking that instant seduction was hardly so soon to be the order of the day, she found a commonsensical green dressing robe that amazed her for its infallible wrongness in everything, but was better than most. She bathed, arranged her hair something as she had seen Dabeeb do hers — womanly was probably the word for it — and put on the green robe. Then she returned to the centre room, where Ben Ata was moodily awaiting her at the small table by the window. Seeing her attire he brightened, then was disappointed.
‘Is that one of ours?’ he enquired doubtfully, and she replied, ‘Indeed it is, great king,’ and they exchanged the comradely, knowledgeable smiles of the thoroughly mated. For looking at each other now, returned to their absolute separateness, their otherness, these two denizens of their different realms could not believe what they had won together during their hours of submersion in each other. She was to him, again, a foreign woman, everything about her alien, though dear now in a way that estranged him more than bound him, for he feared, most deeply, where she might lead him. And she, looking at this great ox of a soldier, with his hair plastered to his head after the bath, thought that she was much to be congratulated in leading him as far as she had.
They mentally summoned hefty meals, which came, and they ate hungrily, for some time.
Meanwhile, the drum from the gardens beat, beat, beat.
No sooner had they ended their meal, than they sprang up and went out and wandered everywhere over the garden, from one end to the other. They could see no drummer and no drums. But the sound was there — somewhere — here? — no, there — they were always on the point of coming on the source of it, but always failed.
Realizing that they were not ever going to learn where this sound came from, they returned to the pavilion. Not hand in hand. Not even very close. Each felt sealed, whole, self-locked, absolutely impenetrable by the other, that foreigner.
‘However,’ said she, as if in continuation of a conversation, ‘I am certainly pregnant.’
‘You are? Are you sure? Splendid!’ Feeling that an embrace of some kind was due, he made as if to approach her, but as she clearly felt no such impulse he thankfully forgot about it.
‘Of course I am sure.’
‘Why? How?’
‘As the women of your country, but certainly not as we know.’ And with this she laughed. She laughed, while he maintained polite looks and waited for her to finish.
‘Well, good, I am delighted.’
‘Well, so am I, since it is probably what is required of us.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘No, of course not. I am not sure of anything.’
‘What are we supposed to do next?’
‘How should I know? But perhaps they will tell me to go home?’
At the look of instant relief on his face, she rolled with laughter, pointing at him, and he, realizing what she had seen, and that she was willingly confessing to the same, laughed with her. This feast of laughter having ended, they were forced to acknowledge that it was still far from midnight, and that if left to their own devices they would certainly separate.
‘Chess?’ he suggested.
‘Why not.’
He beat her, then she beat him. They were both very good and in fact master and mistress of the game respectively, in both their two realms. This meant the games took a long time and it was dawn when they were finished.
Both wondered (and hoping the other did not guess) if more lovemaking was yet appropriate, but decided against it.
Walking again in the mists and splashings of the gardens, with the drum everywhere, in their blood, and in their minds, she called his attention to the files of soldiers down below, deploying among the wet hazes of the meadows. She watched his face, respecting what she saw on it: it was a complete knowledge of what he saw, and she knew he was marshalling praise and criticism and orders, for the perfection of that work of his, the army.
‘And who,’ she asked, in a way that would make him know she was in earnest, ‘are your enemies?’
He tensed, and she understood he had been thinking hard on this question ever since she had first asked it of Jarnti, who had transmitted her words jeering, but inwardly disturbed, to his king.
‘If we have no enemies, then why do we have armies?’ he asked her, not at all in jest, but in respect for her questioning of him.
‘Who do you fight?’
He was tense and silent. She knew he was remembering the pillage and the rapine of innumerable campaigns, and thinking if these had in fact been for some ghost of a mistaken idea then …
‘We are not your enemies — it is not even possible for one of us to cross the border without bad effects — yet you have forts all along our frontier from one end to the other, just as close as you can get to it without the soldiers being made ill by its proximity.’
He gave an odd little shrugging movement of his shoulders.
‘How long is it since anyone fired so much as a single warning shot there?’
He laughed, shortly, in acknowledgment. ‘So long that we can’t remember. Mind you, we do sometimes arrest someone as a spy … but then let him go again.’
She laughed. ‘Then why?’
‘We have large, and efficient armies.’
Down among the golden fogs that were rising straight up into the air and dissipating at about their eye level, the glittering brightly coloured soldiers wheeled and marched, and the sharp barking sounds of the orders seemed to fade at about the same level, as if the sounds and the mists were one.
‘And Zone Five? You have forts there? A frontier?’
‘And skirmishes and even battles.’
This startled her: she had forgotten there was a war there.
‘Surely,’ she said, ‘but surely …’
‘Yes, I know.’ Awkward, embarrassed, apologetic, as if he were at fault before her and not before Them—the Providers and the Orderers — he was stammering. ‘I have been wondering since you brought the matter up. It is true … of course we are not supposed to fight … ’
‘Real battles?’
‘Yes. Well … nothing very serious …’
‘Wounded? Casualties?’
