She suddenly felt on the verge of an understanding.
‘Jarnti, do you ever look at the mountains?’
‘No,’ he said, making his black horse wheel about, in protest.
‘Why not?’
‘We are forbidden.’
‘It seems there is a great deal you are forbidden. Look now, look, how beautiful it is.’
Again his horse wheeled and swerved all about the road, and she could see that he was trying to force his eyes up. But while they kept flickering to one side and then another, he did not raise his head. Could not.
‘Did you cloud gather when you were a child?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were punished with the heavy helmet. For how long?’
‘For a very long time,’ he blurted, with sudden reminiscent anger. And the obedience took over again.
‘Do a lot of children disobey, and watch the mountains?’
‘Yes, a great many. And sometimes young people.’
‘And they all wear the punishment helmet and thereafter are obedient?’
‘That is so.’
‘How did you know I had gone?’
‘This horse was left alone, and he jumped over the wall and was cantering after you. I knew you had gone, and so I got on him.’
‘Well, I shall now ride on, Jarnti, and I daresay I shall see you again. But tell Ben Ata that if it is he who gets the Order that we must meet again, and here in your Zone, then he doesn’t have to send a company of soldiers.’
‘We do what we think is correct.’
‘How many soldiers did the Order specify were necessary to fetch me? None, I think.’
‘It is not safe for you to ride alone.’
‘I have ridden safely to this point, and once over the border and into my country I can assure you I have no need to fear.’
‘That I know,’ he said softly, and in admiration and with a longing in his voice that told her that he would dream of his visit to her Zone for all his life. Even though he might not know why he did.
Al·Ith examined this man while he kept his eyes averted.
He was built like Ben Ata, strong, brown-skinned, though his hair was black and so were his eyes. But she knew him, intimately, because of Ben Ata. He would be the same with his woman or women — blustering, and a boor. Yet for one moment, astounding her by its strength, she wished she were inside those arms like pillars, ‘safe,’ ‘sheltered.’ She called, ‘Goodbye, Jarnti, and tell Ben Ata I will see him when I have to.’ The grimace on Jarnti’s face was quite enough reward for her brief flare of spite, and she at once felt remorse. ‘Tell him … tell him … ’ but she could not think of anything softening and sweet. ‘Say I left because I was told to go,’ she brought out at last and sped up the road between the cliffs of the escarpment. Turning her head, she saw him trying to lift his on its stiff neck to gaze up into the forbidden mountains. But he could not: he forced it up a little way, and then his face fell forward again.
She rode over the frontier with her shield held before her, and then when she was in the fresh high singing airs of her own country, she threw down the shield, flung herself off the horse, and danced around him, shieldless, laughing so that she could nor stop. And on the peaks that stretched halfway up the sky now, the sunrise was scarlet and purple.
She wanted more than anything to be on the plateau, close under the mountains, but first she wished to make sure of certain facts. So when she had sung and danced herself back to her usual frame of mind, she got back on the horse, and turned off the road that ran to the plateau so that she would make a circle around it from right to left, through the outlying regions of the Zone. These were mostly pastoral, and farming, and she always enjoyed travelling there … but it was some time since she had made such a tour … how long? Prickling at the back of her mind was the knowledge that it had been a very long time. What had happened? How was it she had got slack like this? For she had. Irresponsible. There was no worse word. She was being stung, whipped along by it. Normally, after such a delight of dancing and retrieval of her self to the point where every atom sang and rejoiced, she would have expected to ride, or walk, or run through the long scented grasses of the steppe with nothing at her heels but the pleasures of the day, sunlight, crisp aromatic winds, the lights changing, always changing, on the peaks … but no, it was not so. She had been very wrong. Why? She even jumped down off her horse and stood with her arms around his neck and her face pressed into the slippery heat there, as if the horse’s strength could feed understanding into her. She had been particularly busy? No, she could not believe so. Life had been as it always was, delightful, with the children, her friends, her lovers, the amiable pace of this realm setting the rhythms of the body and the mind into good humour, kindliness … thinking of the smiling, contented faces of her life, she rebelled that there might be something wrong — how could there be!
A man’s voice said, ‘Are you in need of help?’ She turned and saw he was an agriculturalist from one of the communal farms. Young, healthy, with that particular glistening warmth to him that was the mark of well-being and good humour, and which was so singularly lacking in Ben Ata’s realm.
‘No, I am well,’ she said. But he was examining her in doubt. She remembered she still wore the brief white wrapper, now sleeveless and ragged, and that the horse’s hooves were bound in cloth. She pulled the rags off his hooves, and as she did so, he asked, ‘Ah, I see who you are. And how is marriage in Zone Four?’ This was the sort of friendly enquiry that she would normally have expected, but she gave him a quick suspicious glance, which she was categorizing as ‘a Zone Four look.’ But no, of course he meant nothing ‘impertinent’ — a Zone Four word! Oh, she had been very much changed by her day and a half in that low place.
‘You are right, I am Al·Ith. And I had forgotten I was wearing this thing. Tell me, would one of the women of your household lend me a dress of some kind?’
‘Of course. I’ll go now.’
And he ran off to where she could see a group of farmsteads surrounded by flocks and herds.
Meanwhile, she found a small tree, set the horse free to graze, and sat down.
When he came running back, with a garment in his hand, he saw her there, and the horse cropping, but close enough that he could lift his nose often to nuzzle and caress her.
‘What is your horse’s name, Al·Ith?’
‘I haven’t thought of a name good enough for him.’
‘Ah, then, he is a special friend!’
‘Yes, he chose me as a friend almost from the first moment.’
‘Yori,’ he said. ‘Your companion, your friend.’
‘Yes, that is very good!’ And she stroked the horse’s nose and whispered his name, Yori, into his ears.
‘And I,
