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We laughed, and the proceedings halted while Al·Ith explained to her the gestation time for sheep.
Meanwhile, we were wondering if there had in fact been any change in the last five days? Discussion began. Al·Ith was listening carefully. And then she jumped up and went fast from one window to another, returning to the west window where she leaned, gazing out and up. This was not what any one of us had observed in her before. After a time I, as the only one of her parents present, went to the window and looked where she did. I could see only the massed piles of the western ranges.
She was reminded by my being there of her duty, and sat down again.
The little girl who had spoken about her sheep was humming.
It was one of our children’s games.
Find the way
And find the way
And follow on and through.
Through the pass There we must pass And gather in the blue …
Al·Ith was leaning forward, listening. There was not one of us who had not heard it a thousand times. The children made patterns of stones and hopped through them in certain definite rhythms which kept varying according to the rules of the rhyme.
We believed Al·Ith was as usual paying especial attention to children and waited.
But she was still leaning there, intent on the little girl, who was quite oblivious of Al·Ith, but sat swaying a little, humming, and even softly clapping her hands. She was a child typical of the eastern regions: a sandy little thing, with bright blue eyes and pale hair. These scraggy chickens tended to grow up into the wildest beauties, oddly enough, and the men, too, were handsome. When we had our festivals, hearts tended to beat faster when the companies from the east came riding in, smiling charmers all of them, conscious of their power over us, ready with their songs of a much harder fiercer past …
‘What is your name?’ asked Al·Ith.
‘Greena.’
‘Well, my little green one, come here.’
The child skipped forward and sat at Al·Ith’s knee. She took her hand.
‘What is the rest of that song?’
‘What song, Al·Ith?’
‘You were singing. What comes after “And gather in the blue”?’
The child tried to think. She glanced around at her sister for help.
By now we all understood that something important was happening.
As for me, I had been present at certain heightened moments in that room, but nothing like this. The air was snapping with excitement, and Al·Ith’s lassitude had gone. She was as she normally was: alert, lively, all attention.
‘Is there any more of that song?’ Again the child looked for help at her sister, another little wisp of a girl, but she shook her head. Then, she scrambled to her feet. ‘Yes, yes, there is … I think … ‘ and sank back to the floor.
‘Listen,’ said Al·Ith, ‘what I want you to do is this. Go down to the square there — where the animals are. Forget about us up here for a time. Play that game. Just play it as if you were at home with your herds and your families. And try to remember what comes after “And gather in the blue”.’
The two little girls sprang up, and ran together out of the Council Chamber, hand in hand. We were smiling and we all knew it was because every one of us was seeing them as they would be in such a short time.
‘What is all this about, Al·Ith?’ asked a young man from the north. He was in fact her son by adoption, and had grown up near her. He even looked like her, as adopted children so often did.
‘I’m on the verge of it,’ she said, looking fast and close into all our faces. ‘Can’t you feel it? There’s something! What!’ And in her urgency she was up again and pacing all around the room, this time standing at the windows without seeing out. ‘What is it?’ We said nothing, but waited. We all know that when one of us is on the edge of an understanding that we help by thinking with her, him, and waiting. ‘I just don’t know, don’t know … ‘ and then she whirled round to the west window and leaned over. As many of us who could, crowded there and looked down. The two children had laid out their pattern of pebbles and were skipping and singing.
We could not hear the words.
Feeling our eyes on them they stopped, and looked up. We drew back out of sight.
‘We must wait,’ said Al·Ith.
We sat down. Of course we hoped to know more about her visits to the other Zone, but did not want to say anything that would bring the shadow down over her again.
She knew what we were thinking, and with a sigh, met us.
‘It is very hard to describe it,’ she said courageously, and we saw the animation had left her. ‘It is easy to describe it outwardly. Everything in it is for war. Fighting. It is a poor place. We have nothing in our realm to compare with it. As for the spirit of the people …’ She was faltering, with pauses between words. Again we recognized that she was in the grip of something. ‘War. Fighting. Men … every man in the whole realm is in the army …’ She tailed off, silent. She had virtually stopped breathing. ‘Every man in uniform …’ She stopped again, and her eyes lost all their lustre while she went deep inside herself. As for us we sat absolutely still.
‘An economy entirely geared to war … but there is not much war … hardly any fighting … yet every man a soldier from birth till death …’
Again the tight silence, and she sitting there, straight and tense, eyes blank. She was rocking back and forth, on her cushion.
‘A country for war … but no war … they are bound by a hard, strict Law … their Law is hard indeed … war. Men … all men for fighting … but no war, no wars to fight … what is it, what does it mean …’
The tension in her was frightening to see. An elderly woman who had been watching her keenly now went forward, sat by her, and began to soothe her, stroking her arms and shoulders. ‘That’s enough, Al·Ith. Enough. Do you hear me?’ Al·Ith shuddered and came to herself.
‘What is it?’ she said to us, in a whisper.
The woman who held her said, ‘It will come to you. Quieten yourself.’
Al·Ith smiled and nodded at the woman, who went back to her place and said, ‘The best thing we can do is to keep the thought whole in our minds and let it grow.’ Al·Ith nodded again.
That was the end of the hard part of the Council. Murti· brought in a tray of jugs with fruit juices, and went out to bring in some light food. She then joined us, sitting by her sister.
And then the little girls came in. They seemed disappointed.
They stood before Al·Ith and Murti· and Greena said, ‘We played it. Over and over. We could not remember. But there are words that come after. We have remembered that.’
Al·Ith nodded. ‘Never mind.’
‘Shall we play the game when we get home again and see if we remember then?’
‘Please do … and I have had an idea … ‘ All of us were alert, thinking she had achieved the understanding that had eluded her, but she smiled and said, ‘No. I am afraid not. But I have had a good idea. We shall have a festival. Soon. And it will be for songs, and stories — no, not the way we always have them. This one will be for songs and stories we have forgotten. Or half forgotten. All the regions will send in their storytellers and singers, and their Memories … ‘ Here she smiled at me, to soften it, and said, ‘Lusik, it seems to me that you have all been remiss. How is it that children can play games and know that verses have been forgotten?’
I accepted it. Of course it was true.
Shortly after, we all went home.
Now I take up the tale again, not from firsthand, as is my remembrance of the events of the Council Chamber, but pieced together the best way I can, as Chronicler.
The sisters went up to Al·Ith’s apartments, where Al·Ith said she was tired: this pregnancy was already proving more taxing than her others. She had set in train the events that were necessary, and now she wanted to retire for a few days and rest.
Murti· was concerned for her.
The two beautiful women sat hand in hand in the window that overlooked the western mountains. Al·Ith said she wanted to go up to the spire again, but Murti· asked her not to go. Al·Ith submitted. Usually, at such moments of relaxation the women would have petted each other, done each other’s hair, tried on each other’s dresses, planned new ones, discussed what innovations and developments they had noticed in the clothes of the girls and women who had been present that day, in case any might be useful to clothing generally. These were true sisters, with the same Mother, the same Gene-Father, and even sharing the same Mind-Fathers. There had never been secrets between them. Now Al·Ith said, ‘You are right to feel hurt. I can’t help it.’ Murti· kissed her and went away.
Al·Ith had not been home a full day when she knew she had to return to Ben Ata. The words came into her mind: The drum is beating. She even heard the drum, faint, but there. She put her hand to cup her lower belly, thinking she heard that small heart but it was the drum.
She went through her cupboards, this time trying to find clothes that would soothe and please Ben Ata. She put together some of these and ran down to the first floor where she would leave a message for Murti·.
There were five persons coming up the great stairs, to see her: a girl just out of childhood, her Gene-Father, and three of her Mind-Fathers. Al·Ith was her mother.
There was a problem to do with this girl, but it is not of concern here. This event is being related because just at the time when Al·Ith was in mind already on her way to Ben Ata, with all the disturbance and adjustment this meant, she had to go aside to a quiet room, with a man with whom she had had, and for years, a close friendship, the child’s real father, and three men who had been as close, but whom she had not seen for some time, as it happened, because they had been in distant parts of the country.
The room was off the main Council room, and had the usual cushions and low tables. Al·Ith embraced the girl, and held her close, and then kept her beside her when they sat down. But almost at once she felt her own churning emotions communicate themselves to the girl, and this she could not allow: she quickly got up and sat apart from her, and the girl felt she was being disliked, and sat with an unhappy face turned away from her mother. This disturbed Al·Ith even more.
These six persons, woman, four men, and the girl, had often been together thus. And Al·Ith had very often been with the men, all together or singly. These men were among the closest people to her, not even excepting her sister. It was not possible for her now to shut them out, even for her own protection. She was quite open to them, just as she was at the same time open to the demands of Ben Ata, which were claiming her fiercely. She was trembling.
The men all embraced her, and sat close. They congratulated her on the new pregnancy. All the time she was looking, and feeling, worse.
‘You are ill,’ said the girl’s real father, Kunzor, and Al·Ith said she was, she could not help it, she was sorry. And she fainted clean away.
They called Murti·, who explained that Al·Ith’s state of mind was beyond anything they were likely to understand. Murti· undertook to stand in for Al·Ith on this occasion and set herself to be kind to the poor girl, who was astounding them all by wringing her hands and saying that ‘it was her fault’ her mother was ill. This struck them as a sort of lunacy: they had never heard anything like it.
When Al·Ith came to herself, she was attended only by Kunzor, who was trying to understand her. He had known her in many complex ways, but this was entirely beyond him. Al·Ith weeping and distraught was something he had never imagined possible.
She said she had to get on her horse and go, and he took her down the steps to the square, called for Yori, and saw her ride off.
It did not help that it was early night when she reached the plain, and had to ride in the face of the cold wind from the east all the way to the frontier.
She hoped that it would be Ben Ata at the frontier to meet her, and it was. He sat cold and silent, in his black army cloak, waiting, gazing up the road, pale, intent, fixed.
At the first sight of him, her spirits sank. What had happened within her was that riding across the plain in the bitter wind, comforted only by the warmth of her horse, she had been thinking of the long friendship she had known with Kunzor, and the men whom she had been close to—she was already wondering about these words that people used. She had, in the past, not used words, not even in her mind. She had felt her closeness to them, as part of the fabric of her life. Meeting one of them again, by plan or by chance, they would at once move together as they had always, according to the intuitions of the moment. She had not said they were this and that, beyond friends. Now, she wondered, were they husbands? Certainly not if Ben Ata was one! But, during that cold ride, she had been thinking of Ben Ata, whom she was so soon to be with, as a friend — with all the simplicity of good sense and responsibility that word meant to her.
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.’
