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‘I don’t think I know what you mean.’ But as she saw the humorous patience on Dabeeb’s face, she understood.
‘Have you ever thought of rebelling?’
Dabeeb lowered her voice and said, ‘But it is the Order … is it not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I find there is a great deal I don’t know that I thought I did. For instance, can you tell when a woman is pregnant?’
‘Yes, of course, can’t you?’
‘Always until now. But not now. Not here.’
Dabeeb instantly understood this, for she nodded, and said, ‘I see. Well, you are not pregnant, I can assure you.’
‘Well, that is something.’
‘You plan not to get pregnant?’ And again her voice was lowered and she gave furtive glances all about her, though they were now at the foot of the escarpment and on the point of starting their ride across the watery fields and there was not a soul in sight.
‘I think we use the word plan differently.’
‘Will you teach me?’ came the whisper just audible over the horses’ thud-thudding on the dirt road.
‘I’ll teach you what I can. What is permitted.’
‘Ah, yes … I know.’ And the sigh she let out then held in it everything Al·Ith needed to know about women in this Zone.
Resignation. Acceptance. Humour. And always a pull and a tug from within these armours of watchfulness, patience, humour, of a terrible need.
Al·Ith pulled up Yori. Dabeeb did the same. Al·Ith put out her hand. After a struggle with her cautions and resistances, Dabeeb did the same. Al·Ith whispered across the space between them: ‘I will tell you everything I can. Help you as I can. I’ll be your friend. As far as I can. I promise you.’ For she had seen that words were necessary. This kind of speech. She had never used them in her own land, had never imagined the need to use them. But now she saw tears fill the handsome black eyes of Dabeeb, and trickle down her ruddy cheeks. The words had been right, and necessary.
‘Thank you. Al·Ith,’ she whispered, her voice broken.
When they reached the place in the road where they could easily see the pavilions on the eminence, Al·Ith said, ‘I would like you to lend me one of your dresses. Ben Ata thinks I am unsuitably dressed.’
Dabeeb looked longingly at the dark red, embroidered dress of Al·Ith and said, ‘That is more beautiful than anything I have ever seen with us. But they would never understand that in a thousand years!’ She spoke with the affectionate indulgence Al·Ith could not imagine offering to anyone other than a small child. And there was, as well, a dreadful contempt in it.
‘You are elegant. Al·Ith, I wish I could know how to be as elegant …’
And she looked in dismissal at her own dress, which was a patterned material, pretty enough, but without the rightness and flair that stamped the garments of Zone Three.
‘You needn’t worry about what you are to wear. Everyone is talking about the clothes Ben Ata has ordered up for you from the town. There are cupboards full of them … though I don’t know what you will make of them, I am sure.’
She rode with Al·Ith up the rise of the hill, to where the gardens and fountains began, then leaned forward and suddenly and emotionally embraced Al·Ith. ‘I will be thinking of you, my lady. We all will, all the women, we are with you, and don’t forget it!’ And she rode off down the hill, and her tears scattered back on the wind like rain.
Al·Ith rode gently across the end of the gardens, dismounted, told Yori to find his way to the corrals, and walked back through the gardens, looking at the pavilion and waiting for the moment Ben Ata would show himself. She noted in herself the most remarkable constellation of unfamiliar emotions, which, regarded as a whole, amounted to a sort of antagonism that was quite unfamiliar. There was a sort of mocking, amused, intention there: ‘I’m going to show you!’ and, ‘You think you are going to get the better of me!’
It went not with dislike of Ben Ata, but a quite pleasant challenge and combativeness.
She even looked forward to seeing him, so that this new exchange could begin. There were no tears on this horizon, certainly not!
She was full of confidence, and calm, all her powers reined in and held.
There was also in her an inner core of unassailability which she recognized because she had been sensing and assessing just this quality in Dabeeb, all across the plain.
It was in this state of mind that she waited for the encounter with Ben Ata.
Who was lounging against the central pillar, arms folded, in a pose that mirrored her own mood. He smiled, hard and mocking.
‘Did you like your escort?’ he enquired, reminding her he was supposed to be jealous.
‘Very much. Not as much of course as I would have enjoyed the handsome Jarnti!’
With which he came forward fast, eyes momentarily aglitter, and she saw that he could easily have struck her. But instead he smiled in a way which told her she would pay for it later, and held out his two hands. She took them and swung on them lightly, from side to side, smiling and mocking.
‘That is a pretty dress,’ said he, for he had determined to be complimentary about it.
‘You like red then?’
‘I think I like you,’ said he, in spite of himself grabbing at her — for he did not, he liked her even less than before, for while his senses in fact were informing him that this girl in a red, provokingly fitted dress could easily be to his taste, he had in fact forgotten the independence of her, which informed every smile, look, gesture.
She evaded him and slid away into the room, with a mocking backward look over her shoulder which quite astounded her — she did not know she had it in her! And he, to tease, did not follow, but stood his ground, a pillar of a man, in his short green belted tunic, and bare head, arms folded. She, then, smiling ‘enigmatically’ — though feeling this smile on her lips she was amazed at it — put two hands around the slender central pillar and swung there lightly, in a way that was bound to set him all aflame. And it did, but he was not going to budge.
He stood grinning, while she swung and smiled …
When Al·Ith had left him that evening all those weeks ago, he had returned, reluctant, at midnight, having refreshed himself among his soldiers, and found her gone. Furious, he understood there must have been a summons she had obeyed, and then he felt in all of himself a lack and a need and a disability that he in no way knew how to diagnose or to feed. It was not Al·Ith he was missing, he was sure of that.
He was nothing if not a painstaking man.
He had understood that in certain practices he was quite lacking in understanding and indeed in any sort of knowledge.
He despised men who went into the stews of the town, as self-indulgent. But that is where he went now. Having made methodical enquiries of Jarnti and others of his officers, he went to a certain establishment, and demanded an interview with its madam. She understood exactly what he wanted and had done so from the moment the rumours entered her house that he was about to visit them. But she sat smiling through his rather clumsy, but determined explanations.
She sent him into a room that was already furnished with a girl who had been given all kinds of detailed instructions. For the capacities and lacks of Ben Ata had of course been discussed up and down the land from woman to woman. After all, so many campaigns, so many army exercises, so many sacks and rapes and loots had given plenty of opportunity for ravished or disappointed girls to spread their news.
Ben Ata found himself bedded with an expert young woman, who had quite surprised him. It could not be said that he found such prolonged dedication to pleasure entirely to his tastes, for he persisted in regarding all this as hardly the occupation for a real man.
But the fact was that Ben Ata had been pleasured, the only word for it, during the month that Al·Ith had been riding around her realm making investigations. He had been taught, as in a school, a large variety of lessons, to do with the anatomy, the capacities, the potentialities of the body, male and female. He was not a particularly apt pupil. But on the other hand he was certainly not a sluggard, for once he had decided on a certain course of duty, nothing much was likely to deflect him.
This courtesan, for she was no common whore, having been chosen among very many by the most expert madam of the whorehouse, and even brought here from another town because of her reputation, had taught him everything she could.
What Elys had achieved in a month of pretty hard work was to adjust Ben Ata’s mind to the notion that pleasure could be multi-functional. This was at least a basis.
He had believed that he now knew everything there was to know.
But the moment Al·Ith had sauntered so charmingly and mockingly into the pavilion, he had remembered something entirely blotted from his mind during that enervating month. The light, glancing, inflaming kisses that he had not known how to answer, had gone from his mind. The invitation, the answer and question, the mutual response and counter-response — none of this had been within the provision of the courtesan Elys, since she had never in her life enjoyed an equal relation with anyone, man or woman.
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?’
