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
