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They ended some hours of this kind of obdurate interchange unfriendly to each other, and inwardly depressed.
When they rose to bathe and dress and arrange themselves, the lovely airy room seemed denuded of its sparkle, and the drum had stopped beating.
This time, all was efficient and considered. She wrapped herself in a cloak, she remembered her shield, and stepped out into the gardens from the opposite door Dabeeb had run down into the rain from. There the fountains played coldly under a cold low blue sky.
Ben Ata came after her, similarly cloaked and ready. She called, and the two horses, black and white, came cantering up, and they leapt onto their backs and rode off, soberly, down towards the road west. They used the time of the journey to discuss what was seen along the road — the crops, the canals, the fields.
Nothing more sensible and connubial could be imagined. But Al·Ith was so far inwardly from Ben Ata that he could get from her not one little moment of real recognition. It was clear to him that she did not want anything from him — only to be rid of him. He knew perfectly well he was to blame.
At the frontier, they reined in their two horses, and Al·Ith was about to shoot forward into the sunny immensities of that plain below the mountains when he called to her hoarsely, ‘Al·Ith, wait.’
She turned and gave him the coolest of mocking smiles.
‘I suppose now you are going to Kunzor,’ he shouted, enraged.
‘And others,’ she called back, and rode off.
He muttered to himself that he would order Dabeeb back, but in fact, knew he would not. He was thinking. He had realized that while jealousy and resentment and suspicion worked in him, poisoning everything, there were other things he could be understanding. And he was determined that he would.
The people on the roads who saw him returning to the camps, remarked to each other that the king seemed subdued. That foreign one was not cheering him up, not much, that was for certain, whatever else she might be doing!
Exactly as had happened before, both Al·Ith and Ben Ata, separated from each other, one riding on into Zone Three, one riding back into Zone Four, felt that the burden of their emotions for one another was not lightened, as they had wanted, but was heavier. Together, they provoked each other into unwanted feelings, apart, thoughts of the other tormented and stung. Ben Ata felt that he was carrying around with him a curse, or a demon, who prevented him from being with Al·Ith in a way that would lead to an incredible happiness. Al·Ith felt a most painful bond with her husband — a word she was examining, turning over and over, as if it were a new ring of a complicated design or a new metal made in the workshops of the northern regions where the mines were. Ben Ata was a weight in her side, no, in her belly, where the new child was, but that was still no more than a speck or a dab of new flesh, so it could not be that which made her so heavy. Riding forward, she was in mind with Ben Ata, whose face was set towards the low, damp fields … She could have asked him this, found out that … if she had done this instead of that … for, away from him, she could not truly believe that her behaviour had been as she remembered it was. When she had come back into the tall light central room she was vibrant and strong because of the exchange with Dabeeb, which had made her alive and confident, so that she had felt far from the gloomy moods of Ben Ata. Her yellow dress had fitted her like happiness. And yet nothing had come of it but the punishments Ben Ata called love.
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