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
