The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5

Seeing him there, the bonds in her flesh and being with the men who sustained her in Zone Three snapped and left her vulnerable.

Ben Ata waited till she had crossed into his Zone, and handed her a shield — he was right in thinking that she was likely again to have forgotten hers. Then he put out his hand to grasp her bridle — but she did not have one — and put his horse forward so that he was side by side with her, she facing into Zone Four, he into Zone Three. His eyes searched her face as if for a hidden crime.

‘What is the matter?’ she asked, irritated.

‘The matter is that I’ve understood something.’

‘And what is that?’ She rode forward, sighing, meaning him to hear it, and he came after her, and rode so close her foot had to be curled in on poor Yori’s side to avoid being crushed.

‘You don’t love me,’ he announced.

Al·Ith did not respond at all.

The words had simply gone past her. She had seen that Ben Ata was in a fine old state about something, and that there was no point at all in expecting any comfort or sustaining from him. She was engaged in strengthening her inner self.

He rode close, casting dramatic looks into her face, and trying to lean forward so that he could see into her eyes.

It was early morning. They were riding down the escarpment, looking into fields where as usual mists were rising, admittedly very pretty in the weak sunlight.

‘You do not love me. Not really,’ he was shouting.

This time Al·Ith heard the word love. She was making a note that the two Zones used it differently.

What had happened to Ben Ata was this.

When she had left him on the frontier, he had been shaken by emotions he had not known existed. If Elys had indicated to him that in the physical realm there were facts that perhaps he might have missed, he now saw that there was a world of emotions that had been kept from him until now. He visited the madam of the whorehouse with this problem who, after a brisk diagnostic exchange, said that it wasn’t Elys he needed — she in fact had gone back to her own town, much congratulated and very pleased with herself — but a serious affair.

He had of course been aware that affairs were what some people had, but not, surely, soldiers!

Seeing Dabeeb brushing down her husband’s uniform, where it hung on a line behind the married officers’ quarters, he speculated on her possibilities. At once appropriate emotions invaded him in swarms, quite amazing him, for he could not imagine where he had got them from.

Dabeeb was disconcerted, of course, and enjoined caution, common sense, and then secrecy. It goes without saying that she was frightened of her husband. Affairs she had had, but not for the purpose of stimulating Jarnti. She was even more afraid of Ben Ata. She had no intention of yielding him her person, but kept him off with a variety of kisses and touches of the hand, all nicely adjusted to holding the situation while she could think what best to do.

Jarnti found his king in a compromising situation with his wife.

Violent scenes. Jealousy. Reproaches. The men fought, decided that the friendship of men outweighed the love of women, clasped hands, drank together for the whole of a night, fell together into a canal at dawn … all according to the book.

Ben Ata was now violently in love with Al·Ith.

Riding together through the golden mists, he ground his teeth and yearned towards her, while she murmured, ‘Is there a dictionary in the pavilion?’

‘What?’

‘It is the word love. We use it differently.’

‘Cold. Cold and heartless.’

‘Cold, I certainly am. I am frozen through.’

Compunction touched him but was inappropriate to the moment.

‘Very well then, how do you use the word love?’

‘I don’t think we do. What it means is being with someone. Taking the responsibility for everything that happens between you. Between the two people in question and of course all the other people involved or who might be involved.’

It occurred to him that during these tumultuous six days he had forgotten what Al·Ith was like.

His elation drained away. He rode apart from her, and with a good distance between them the two horses cantered together up the hill to the gardened pavilions where the drum had been beating since the evening before.

As they let the horses go to find their own way to attendants, they were in a welter of wet, and ran through it to the pavilion, where she fled shaking water everywhere to her rooms. The cupboards were empty again of the dresses from the town, and she dried herself and looked through those she had brought for one that would be right for this dejected mood she found in herself. The bright gold of yesterday was like a bird’s plumage in a wrong season. A brown was too lowering, but she raised that note a little with a tawny-orange, which seemed something she could aspire to, if things went well. Having put her hair up into Zone Four’s matronly braids, she took herself to the central room as Ben Ata came in from the other side. There was not a suggestion of armour about him. His under-tunic looked as if it had been put on with a view as to how it would look to her, and his hair had been brushed close to his handsome head. All this, together with his needy and hostile looks, made her sink down as far away from him as she could get, which was at the table. He, having had no other idea in his head for the last twenty-four hours at least, strode over, and was about to haul her to the couch when it occurred to him that this was exactly what had set off all the turmoil of the last few days which, matched against the appraising reality of Al·Ith, seemed now, to put it mildly, inappropriate.

Swearing vigorously, he sat down opposite her, looking as ever on his side of the little table as if an incautious movement might collapse not only it, but the whole pavilion. He leaned back, sighed, and seemed to return partly to himself.

They were both considering, with fortitude, the uncertain term that they faced during which they would have to sustain their incompatibility.

‘I would like to know,’ said he, ‘all about your arrangements for this sort of thing — in your country.’

Now Al·Ith had already given thought to this problem. She could not imagine that he would accept the proprieties of Zone Three, not on any terms. She tackled the immediate point of his disquiet with: ‘There is absolutely no doubt at all — there can be no doubt — that this child is yours.’

‘I said nothing about that,’ he protested, while his pleased face showed she had been right.

He waited.

Having discovered she needed food, she had thought her requirements, and what had arrived before her was a delicacy of her country made of honey and nuts. She began to crumble bits off it. Without ceremony, he put his finger out, scooped up a fragment, tasted it, rolled up his eyes, and was resigned.

‘It is very good for pregnant women,’ she said.

‘I hope that you are taking proper care of yourself! After all, this child will be the ruler of Zone Four.’

This thought, too, had not been overlooked by her. She contented herself with: ‘If the Providers so decide.’

His checked gesture of rebellion told her what his thoughts were — what his actions might be.

‘I take it,’ said he, positively radiant with sarcasm, ‘that I am only one of your lovers.’

At this she leaned back, held up her two hands, and began counting on her fingers, with a look of pretty self-satisfaction, hesitating on the third finger with a little moue, returning to the second, going back to the third with a nod, then on to the fourth, the fifth — changing hands, with deliberation, six, seven, eight — allowing her counting forefinger to dwell lovingly with a reminiscent smile on the ninth; heard his indrawn and outraged breath, wondered if she dared to count back again, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and did so, rather perfunctorily, fourteen, fifteen, and ended on nineteen with a competent little nod, like a steward who hasn’t forgotten anything.

She looked at him, inviting him to laugh— at her, himself, but he was quite yellow with disastrous thoughts.

‘You know,’ she began, but he finished for her, savagely, ‘“Things are not the same with you as they are with us!” I give thanks for it. Decadent, spoiled, immoral …’

‘It is true I can’t imagine you making much of our ways.’

‘Very well, how many lovers have you had?’

She winced at the word and he noted it. Not without interest, a dispassionate interest. This encouraged her to try and explain, openly — though she had previously decided against any such attempt — with a real intention to persuade him out of his barbarity of perception.

‘First of all, that word means nothing to me. It would mean nothing at all, to any woman in our Zone. Even the worst of us, and of course we have our failures as you do …’ She noted him noting that word as being different in emphasis from any Zone Four might use. ‘Even the worst of us would be incapable of using a word that described a man as some kind of a toy.’

This earned a glance of appreciation. Finding she liked him enough, she continued, and explained the sexual arrangements of Zone Three to him. As she went on, his pose, his fists, tightened until she was almost brought to a stop; then he became absorbed, and listened carefully, missing — she could see — nothing.

There were moments when she was afraid that all his self-pride was going to mount to his head and explode in fresh violence against her, but he contained it. By the time she had finished, aggression had left him, and there remained only the philosopher.

She thought herself some wine, and at a gesture from him, some for him as well, but stronger. He took the glass from her, with a nod of thanks.

‘It’s no good pretending that I can go along with any of that,’ he pronounced at last.

‘It seems to me,’ said she humorously, ‘that you are going to have to.’ But, as a threat of trouble reappeared, she told him that since their first association, claims (she was not going to say ‘higher’ ones) had made their appearance, and it looked as if absolute fidelity to Zone Four was going to be the order of her day. ‘It seems,’ said she, ‘that there is some sort of prohibition laid down in my flesh — laid down somewhere — and that it is not merely the touch of another man I cannot allow, but the touch of anybody.’ He was smiling, and she said, ‘And that is not good, oh great king, it is not. I regard it as pernicious, and unfriendly, but we are both stuck with ways not our own and we have got to get on with it.’

On the tip of his tongue hovered words such as ‘then you must love me after all,’ but this calmly explanatory mode seemed to forbid it. Melancholy settled on him. It had enclosed her. The reason was, simply, that whenever a natural spring of vitality flourished in either of them, it was instantly suppressed by the natural disposition of the other.

Melancholy took them to the couch in fellow-feeling, made them love each other with many whispers of condolence for their unfortunate linking, caused sympathy to flow from one to the other, made their sexual play — if that could possibly be the word for such sorrowful exchanges — so unlike their previous encounters that neither could recognize the other in them, and culminated in groans and cries from both of them that were nothing less than expostulations at the mismanagement of absolutely everything.

But Al·Ith had noted in herself, and with dismay, the sharp — as if with an ambiguous wound — pleasures she felt in being ground and pounded into these ecstasies of submission to fate. She had not known anything like it before, and could not believe that she could ever want them again.

Meanwhile, it rained. They lay in each other’s arms listening to squelches and wallows of rain, and both marvelled at the infinite possibilities of variation there were that neither had expected of themselves.

Still under heavy rain they rose and bathed, and dressed, and returned themselves — she this time using the bright orange dress in a quite desperate attempt to bring some sunlight into this marriage of theirs — to the central room.

They were as close and connubial as any Order could have wished.

But there was also the edge of asperity in both voices that goes so ineluctably with this marriage mood.

She wished to get at the truth of this martial Zone of his.

Do you mean to say — her questions began, while he sat with his chin in his hand, elbow on the table, with the air of one admitting to everything because he was forced to, but nevertheless preserving inner independence.

‘Do you mean to say that those singlets of yours you make such a great thing about are all a fake? They don’t do anything at all? They can’t repel weapons?’

‘They are very good at keeping off the rain.’

‘Do you actually mean to say that these hideous grey round buildings you’ve got all over Zone Four don’t make death rays? That’s a fake, too?’

‘Everyone believes we’ve got them. It comes to the same thing.’

‘Ben Ata, sometimes I can’t believe my ears!’

‘Why are you in such a fuss about it? For one thing, building one of those death ray fortresses is a major undertaking. We have so little stone. It has to be carted right across Zone Four, sometimes. I don’t know how often I’ve had the army pestering for a campaign, and I’ve got them building a couple of death ray fortresses instead. They were the best idea I’ve ever had!’

‘Do you mean to say it was your idea?’

‘Well … I heard about something of the sort.’

‘Who from? When?’

‘A man came through here once, and he mentioned them. All sorts of ideas like that.’

‘What man? From Zone Five?’

‘Zone Five! They didn’t so much as know about spears till they saw ours. Even so they like catapults best. No. A man came through. That was in my father’s time. I was a boy. I listened. He said he had come from — where was it? Not Zone Five. Was it Zone Six perhaps?’

‘I know a little about Zone Six. It can’t have been from there.’

‘A long way, I am sure of that. He talked of a place where they had weapons we hadn’t even imagined. They can use the air itself to make weapons of.’

‘But if they can use air to make weapons, they can use it to make things that are useful?’

‘He said nothing about that. It is a place somewhere. A planet. It is an evil race. They kill and torture each other all the time, for the sake of it … no, Al·Ith, I’m not taking that look from you! We are not like that in Zone Four — not anywhere near it. But I thought it all over, and that is when we spread the rumours about our invulnerable vests and our deadly rays.’

‘They don’t seem to impress Zone Five much.’

‘Anyway, that isn’t the point. I’ve told you it keeps a lot of men busy.’

‘Weil,’ she summed up, ‘this is how it seems to me. Nine-tenths of your country’s wealth goes into the the preparations for war. Apart from the actual growers of food, and the merchants for food and household goods, everyone is in the employ of the army, in some capacity. Yet you have not in living memory had a war. When you do have a war, I have only to make a list of the supposed reasons for it, and you admit to their inadequacy. Even these wars were in previous generations. Your skirmishes on the borders of Zone Five are because if you have two fighting forces in close connection both will, by their nature, attack, and will similarly accuse the other. The standard of living of your people is very low —’ here he groaned, admitting it — ‘but, Ben Ata, all this goes on under the Law. Under the Providers. All for each and each for all. So what has gone wrong?’ She noted that in this somewhat hectoring analysis, she felt not an inkling of the rush of nearness to understanding she had felt yesterday. You put one person with another person, call it love, she was thinking, and then make do with the lowest common denominator.

He yawned.

‘It’s much too early to go to bed, you know,’ she said. ‘It can’t be even late afternoon yet—if we were able to see where the day had reached in this downpour.’ For it was still pelting down.

‘Very well. Al·Ith, I want you to picture your affairs to me, just as you have ours to me.’

She was hesitating because it occurred to her to wonder why she had not actually made such an analysis — for while such a way of thinking did not conduce to intimations of a higher kind, they were certainly useful for clearing the mind.

‘Now come on. Al·Ith, you are ready enough to criticize me.’

‘Yes, I was just … very well. The economy of our country does not rely on any single commodity. We produce many varieties of grains, vegetables, and fruits …’

‘But so do we,’ he said.

‘Not to anything like the same extent.’

‘Go on.’

‘We have many different kinds of animals, and use their milk and meat and their hides and their wool …’ And, as he was going to interrupt her again, said, ‘It is a question of degree, Ben Ata. A half of our population produces these things. A quarter are artisans, using gold, silver, iron, copper, brass, and many precious stones. A quarter are merchants, suppliers, traders, and tellers of stories, keepers of Memory, makers of pictures and statues, and travelling singers. None of our wealth goes into war. There are no weapons in our country. You will not find anything beyond a knife or an axe for household use or the use of a herdsman, in any home in our country.’

‘And what if you are attacked by a wild animal? If an eagle takes a lamb?’

‘The animals are our friends,’ she said, and saw the incredulity on his face. Also, he found her account lacking in any drama.

‘And where has all this got you? Except where we are, in trouble … or so you say we are —’

‘Is your birth rate falling or is it not?’

‘It is. All right, things are unhealthy. I admit it. And now Al·Ith, in this paradise of yours, I want to know what are the men doing?’

‘They are not making war!’

‘What do they do with themselves all day?’

‘Exactly what every one of us does — whatever it is their work is.’

‘It seems to me that with women ruling there is nothing a man can do but—’

‘Make love, you were going to say.’

‘Something of the sort.’

‘And bake, and farm, and herd, grow, and trade and mine and smelt and make artefacts and everything there is to do with the different ways of feeding children, mentally and emotionally, and the keeping of archives and maintaining Memory and making songs and tales and … Ben Ata, you look as if I had insulted you.’

‘All that is women’s work.’

‘How is it possible that They expect us to understand each other? If you were set down in the middle of our land you would not understand anything that was going on. Do you know that as soon as I cross into your land I cease to be my real self? Everything I say comes out distorted and different. Or if I manage to be as I am, then it is so hard, that in itself makes everything different. Sometimes I sit here, with you and I think of how I am, at home, with Kunzor, say, and I can’t—’

‘Kunzor being your husband?’

She was silent, helpless at the utter impossibility of saying anything that could keep in it the substance of truth.

‘Well then, out with it! He is, isn’t he? Oh, you can’t fool me.’

‘But didn’t I tell you myself that Kunzor is the name of one of the men I am with?’

But he kept on his face the look of a man who has with penetration discerned the truth. His stance, arms folded, knees set apart, feet planted, announced that he was not in the least undermined or intimidated.

Yet she could see that he was in fact really trying to understand: she would be wrong to allow herself to be held off from him by his automatic defensiveness. Something she could respect, and from the most real part of her, was at work in him.

Again, automatically, he jeered: ‘And this Kunzor of yours, of course he is a finer fellow than me in every way possible …’

She did not respond to this, but said, ‘If we were not meant to understand each other, what are we doing here at all?’

From within deep thought, thought that was being protected, in fact, by his derisiveness, the stances of what he had always considered ‘strength’, he said, or breathed out, slowly, ‘But what is it … I must understand … what? We have to understand … what …’ He lapsed into silence, eyes fixed on a cup on the table. And she realized, with what delight and relief, that he was in fact operating from within that part of him which meant that he was open and ready for understandings to come into him — as she had been, in the Council Chamber. She sat absolutely still, subduing her breathing, and not allowing her eyes to rest too long on his face for fear of disturbing him.

His own breathing was slower, slower, he was stilled, his eyes fixed on the cup had no sight in them — he was deep within himself. ‘What …’ he breathed. ‘There is something … we have to … they want us to … here we are soldiers … soldiers with no war … you are … you are … what are you? What are we … what are we for … that’s it, that’s it …’

Like someone in sleep, he brought out these words, slow, toneless, each one only a summary, a brief note or abstract, as it were of long processes of inner thought.

The slow rain soaked down, they were inside a bright shell drowned in water, they were inside a hush of wet sound. Neither moved. He breathed now hardly at all. She waited. A long time later he came to himself, saw her there, seemed surprised, glanced around at the cool spaces of this meeting place of theirs, remembered everything, and at once restored face, eyes, and body to alert disbelief.

He did not know what had just happened. Yet she could see on his face a maturity that spoke for the deep processes that had been accomplished in him.

She did not now feel helpless in the face of a diminishing of herself she could not control or direct: she was sustained and comforted, knowing that despite everything, they were in fact achieving what they should … and, speaking from the highest of intentions, from out of her best understanding of what was needed, she now destroyed this precious mood of mutual benefiting.

What she said was this: ‘Ben Ata, I wonder if it would be possible for me to see Dabeeb — you know, Jarnti’s wife.’

He stiffened and stared. This was so violent a reaction that all she could do was to acknowledge that she was back on that level where she could not expect to understand him.

‘You see, we — I mean, in our Zone — we are going to have a festival of songs and tales …’

His face was working with suspicion. His eyes were red, and glared.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Oh, you are a witch all right. Don’t pretend you are anything else.’

‘But, Ben Ata, it seems to me that we may find out what we want to know — or at any rate get some inkling, by listening to old songs. Stories. Not the ones that everyone sings all the time. Ones that have … fallen out of … use … and —’ But he had got up violently, and was leaning over her, gripping her shoulders, his face six inches from hers.

‘So you want to interview Dabeeb!’

‘Any of the women. But I’ve met Dabeeb.’

‘I can tell you this, I’m not going to share one of those orgies of yours, everyone having each other.’

‘Ben Ata, I don’t know what has happened, but you are off again on some wrong track …’

‘So I am! What happens when a group of you and your Fathers get together? I can imagine!’

‘You are imagining something you’ve experienced yourself, Ben Ata, something like what happens when your soldiers invade some wretched village and …’ but she saw there was no point in going on. She shrugged. Stung by her contempt, for it was that, he straightened himself, and strode to the arched door which led out to the hill at the foot of which lay the army camp. He shouted into the rain, again, again, again … an answering shout, the sounds of feet running through water, then Ben Ata shouting, ‘Tell Dabeeb to come here. At once.’