The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5

She was quite still, and a look at her face showed her eyes open and desolate.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I know you think I am a boor.’

‘You have very bad habits in your country,’ she remarked at last, and it was cold. Though he believed there was at least the possibility of a revival of her friendliness.

He jumped up, pulling the cloak all around him, and covering her legs with the blue dress.

‘You know what I’m going to do,’ he positively hissed at her, ‘I’m going to order you up some dresses from the town.’

At this she began to laugh. Weakly, her head turned to one side, and her hand at her mouth, but she laughed. He smiled, in relief, though he knew this laugh of hers might just as well be weeping.

‘It’s time we both ate, anyway,’ he said. And he sounded even more like her brother the steward, so that now she laughed harder, and then turned over, put her head under her arms and called out to him, ‘Get out of here, get out, and leave me alone.’

He went, marching briskly, into the rooms set aside for him, on the right of this central pavilion.

There he bathed, and changed his garments. He put on a tunic used for ceremonies and special occasions, because there was nothing else in his cupboards that seemed suitable for this tryst, or wedding breakfast.

Then he went back into the central room. She was in her rooms. He sat at the little table in the window against the arches where grey rain was sweeping in front of a pouring wind, and almost at once put his chin in his hand and fell to thinking of their dilemmas as rulers. There she found him later, so deep in thought he did not hear her.

She had found in her cupboards a light white linen wrapper that had been left there by one of the maids who had swept and tidied the pavilion. She had left her dark blue garment behind and had come in to him dressed in what he recognized as a maid’s overall — so he saw when at last he did realize she was there.

He said nothing, however. He thought that the fresh white became her. He thought that she was quite pretty, he could suppose, if only she was able to make her face more ready to meet his needs. But she was serious again, and this matched his real mood.

Between their two chairs was a small square table, inlaid with coloured woods and carved. This, too, had been exactly specified by the Order.

Now he said, ‘What do you want to eat?’

As she seemed about to answer, he clapped his hands, and there appeared before her fruit, bread, a hot aromatic drink.

‘Very frugal,’ said he, and clapped his hands again. Before him appeared cold meats and the hard biscuit they used on their campaigns.

‘Very frugal,’ said she.

‘You aren’t impressed at my little trick?’ he enquired, brisk and as it were brotherly-sarcastic.

‘Very, but I suppose it is part of the furnishings of the Order.’

‘Yes, it is. Do you have anything like it?’

‘Never.’

‘Well, we just think of it and it arrives.’ And she could see from the boyish pleasure he was showing that he was about to cause something else to materialize.

‘No, don’t,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t abuse it.’

‘You are right. Naturally.’ And he began eating, in efficient and large mouthfuls.

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.

‘What is your horse’s name, Al·Ith?’

‘I haven’t thought of a name good enough for him.’

‘Ah, then, he is a special friend!’

‘Yes, he chose me as a friend almost from the first moment.’

‘Yori,’ he said. ‘Your companion, your friend.’

‘Yes, that is very good!’ And she stroked the horse’s nose and whispered his name, Yori, into his ears.

‘And I, too,’ said the man. Of course I have always known you, but when I saw you, I felt at once that you were of me. My name is Yori, too.’ And he sat down on the grass opposite to her, and rested his arms on his knees, and leaned forward smiling.

And now Al·Ith was altogether thrown into doubt. She smiled, and nodded, but kept silent. If things had been normal, these words were of the sort she would have responded to at once. This man was her kind, and her flesh and his flesh communicated easily, and had from first glance. Sitting there with him among the warm drily scented grasses, the shade from the little tree sifting gently over them, it would have been the easiest thing to put out her hand, to his, and start a delicious hour or two of play. But voices seemed to ring through her, saying No. No! Why? Was she then already pregnant? Oh, she hoped not, for it was not in such a way that she had chosen children in the past. And if she were pregnant, then it was in the order of things and, indeed, required, and prescribed, to allow herself to be bathed and sustained by this man’s particular and individual being, so that the child would be fed by his essences and so that it would hear his words and be nourished. When she had been pregnant — and after what care, and thought, and long careful choices—in the past, she had, as soon as she had been sure, chosen as beneficial influences for her child, several men who, knowing why they were chosen, and for what purpose, co-operated with her in this act of blessing and gracing the foetus. These men had a special place in her heart and in the annals of her Zone. They were Fathers of the children just as much as the Gene-Fathers were. Every child in the Zone had such exactly chosen Mind-Fathers, who were as responsible for it as were the Gene-Fathers. These men formed a group who, with the Gene-Mother, and the women who cared for the child, considered themselves joint-parents, forever available to her, or him, any time they were needed, collectively and individually. If she were indeed pregnant, then she could not begin too soon to choose her child’s good influences.

‘Yori … ’ and the horse pricked up his ears and moved forward, so that the two people both smiled and touched him gently to soothe him, ‘do you think I am pregnant?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Would you know, in the normal run of things?’

‘Yes, I have always done until now.’

‘Are you many times a father?’

‘Twice a Gene-Father — and I expect to be one again in five years’ time when my turn comes around. And seven times a Mind-Father.’

‘Have you always known?’

‘Yes, from the first.’

They looked at each other reflectively, in the way that would have led to play, but there was a barrier between them.

‘If I were myself, it is you I would choose above any man, and I would choose you, too, for a Gene-Father, if a Gene-Child were required of me, but …’

Shadows came racing across the great steppe, the grasses rippled and hummed, the tree above them rustled, Yori the horse lifted his head and whinnied as if letting out into the air thoughts too painful to keep in, and she sat there with tears running down her face.

‘Al·Ith! You are weeping,’ he said, in a low, appalled voice.

‘I know! I have done nothing else these last days. Why? I don’t understand myself! I understand nothing!’ And she put her face in her hands and wept, while Yori the man caressed her hands, and Yori the horse snuffled at her arm.

Waves of understanding passed between her and the man through their hands, their severed flesh mourned because their two bodies knew they should be together, and she said, ‘That is a terrible place down there. Have I been poisoned by it?’

‘Why is it? What is its nature?’

‘How should I know?’ She sounded peevish, and this shocked her. She sprang up. ‘I am irritable! I am angry! I feel the need to fling myself into strong arms, and weep — yours … oh, don’t be shocked, don’t be afraid. I shall of course not do any such thing. I have become suspicious of words and looks — now you tell me what the nature of Zone Four is!’

‘Sit down, Al·Ith.’ This command, which was as she heard it, brought her to sit down: and she sat thinking that he had not meant an order, a command, but it was the sort of suggestion a friend made, yet she had heard an order.

‘It is a place of compulsion,’ she said. ‘There are pressures we do not have here, and know nothing about. They can respond only if ordered, compelled.’

‘Ordered?’

‘No, not the Order, not Order. But do this. Do that. They have no inner listening to the Law.’

‘Have they always been like that?’ he asked, with a sudden illumination which she felt at once, so that she sat up and leaned forward, searching his face.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That may be it. I think you are right.’

‘Al·Ith, things are very bad with us here.’

‘Yes, I know it. I know it now. I should have known it before. If I had not been remiss.’

‘Yes, we are saying now that you must have been remiss. Only now. For it is only now that these different events have come together to make the understanding.’

‘Why was it no one came to tell me … ’ and she remembered that they had, and she had not been listening. ‘Oh, it is right that I am being punished … ’ she cried out, and the amazingness of the words caused her to say in a low bitter voice, ‘Did you hear that? That’s what I mean.’

‘I heard.’

Again, they were quiet, sitting close, enclosed in harmonies.

‘Perhaps if we came together you might be cured?’ he suggested.

She said, ‘As you said that my first thought was suspicion — no, wait, listen. “He is saying that for self-interest.” No, you must not be shocked at me. I am trying to explain … that is how it is with them down there and I am infected by it… . I believe that perhaps, if we joined, completely, I might be cured, improved at least. But there is some other obligation on me, an imposition I have to obey… . I feel it would not be honourable.’

‘Honourable?’ And his smile was quizzical.

‘Yes. Honourable.’

‘You do not belong to Ben Ata and his kingdom.’

‘Who knows!’ And she got to her feet again. The thin white wrapper left her almost naked. She might as well have been. He wore the comfortable loose clothes of his calling, loose trousers, and singlet. They stood close together, hands joined. The black horse Yori stretched out his nose to them from a few paces away. This is a very favourite scene among Chroniclers and artists of our realm. It is called ‘The Parting.’ Or, for the subtler minds, ‘Al·Ith’s Descent Into the Dark.’

‘I would ask you to travel with me,’ she said. ‘But I am not going to. I do not know myself. I do not trust myself. I must go alone. Meanwhile, tell me quickly how things are with you in this part of the steppe.’