She was quiet and patient but they heard subservience.
And a great roar of laughter went up from them all. Long tension exploded in them. They laughed and shouted, and the crags behind them echoed. Birds that had already settled themselves for the night wheeled up into the skies. From the long grasses by the road, animals that had been lying hidden broke away noisily.
What Ben Ata had finally shouted at his commander of all the forces, was: ‘Go and get that — — — and bring her here. I’m for it if I don’t — — ’ For while Al·Ith had been weeping and rebellious in her quarters, he had been raging and cursing up and down the camps of his armies. There was not a soldier who had not heard what his king thought of this enforced marriage, while the camps commiserated with him, drinking, laughing, making up ribald toasts which were repeated from one end of Zone Four to the other.
This scene is another favourite of our storytellers and artists. Al·Ith, on her tired horse, is ringed by the brutal laughing men. The cold wind of the plains is pressing her robe close around her. The commander is leaning over her, his face all animal. She is in danger.
And it is true that she was. Perhaps for the only time.
Now night had fallen. Only in the skies behind them was there any light. The sunset sent up flares high towards the crown of the heavens, and made the snow peaks shine. In front of them lay the now black plain, and scattered over it at vast distances were the lights of villages and settlements. On the plateau behind them that they had travelled over, our villages and towns were crowded: it was a populous and busy land. But now they seemed to stand on the verge of nothingness, the dark. The soldiers’ own country was low and mostly flat, and their towns were never built on hills and ridges. They did not like heights. More: as we shall see, they had been taught to fear them. They had been longing for the moment when they could get off that appalling plateau lifted so high among its towering peaks. They had descended from it and, associating flat lands with habitation, saw only emptiness. Their laughter had panic in it. Terror. It seemed they could not stop themselves laughing. And among them was the small silent figure of Al·Ith, who sat quietly while they rolled about in their saddles, making sounds, as she thought, like frightened animals.
Their laughing had to stop at some point. And when it did nothing had changed. She was still there. They had not impressed her with their noise. The illimitable blackness lay ahead.
‘What was Ben Ata’s order?’ she asked again.
An explosion of sniggers, but the commander directed a glance of reproof towards the offenders, although he had been laughing as hard as any of them.
‘His orders?’ she insisted.
A silence.
‘That you should bring me to him, that was it, I think.’
A silence.
‘You will bring me to him no later than tomorrow.’
She remained where she was. The wind was now howling across the plains so that the horses could hardly keep their footing.
The commander gave a brief order which sounded shamefaced. The posse broke up, riding about on the edge of the plain, to find a camping place. She and the commander sat on their tired horses, watching. But normally he would have been with his men who, used to orders and direction, were at a loss. At length he called out that such a place would do, and they all leapt off their horses.
The beasts, used to the low relaxed air of Zone Four, were exhausted from the high altitudes of this place, and were trembling as they stood.
‘There is water around that spur,’ said Al·Ith. He did not argue, but shouted to the soldiers to lead the horses around the spur to drink. He got off his horse, and so did she. A soldier came to lead both animals with the others to the water. A fire was blazing in a glade between deep rocks. Saddles lay about on the grass at intervals: they would be the men’s pillows.
Jarnti was still beside Al·Ith. He did not know what to do with her.
The men were already pulling out their rations from their packs, and eating. The sour powdery smell of dried meat. The reek of spirits.
Jarnti said, with a resentful laugh, ‘Madam, our soldiers seem very interesting to you! Are they so different from your own?’
‘We have no soldiers,’ she said.
This scene, too, is much celebrated among us. The soldiers, illuminated by a blazing fire, are seated on their saddles among the grasses, eating their dried meat and drinking from their flasks. Others are leading back the horses, who have drunk at a stream out of sight behind rocks. Al·Ith stands by Jarnti at the entrance to this little natural fortress. They are watching the horses being closed into a corral that is formed by high rocks. They are hungry, and there is no food for them that night. Al·Ith is gazing at them with pity. Jarnti, towering over the small indomitable figure of our queen, is swaggering and full of bravado.
‘No soldiers?’ said Jarnti, disbelieving. Though of course there had always been rumours to this effect.
‘We have no enemies,’ she remarked. And then added, smiling straight at him, ‘Have you?’
This dumbfounded him.
He could not believe the thoughts her question aroused.
While she was still smiling at him, a soldier came out from the entrance of the little camp and stood at ease close to them.
‘What is he standing there for?’
‘Have you never heard of a sentry?’ he enquired, full of sarcasm.
‘Yes. But no one is going to attack you.’
‘We always post sentries,’ he said.
She shrugged.
Some soldiers were already asleep. The horses drooped and rested behind their rocky barriers.
‘Jarnti, I am going to leave you for some hours,’ she said.
‘I cannot allow you.’
‘If you forbid me, you would be going beyond your orders.’
He was silent.
Here again, a favourite scene. The fire roaring up, showing the sleeping soldiers, the poor horses, and Jarnti, tugging at his beard with both hands in frustrated amazement at Al·Ith, who is smiling at him.
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘you have not eaten.’
She enquired good-humouredly: ‘Do your orders include your forcing me to eat?’
And now he said, confronting her, all trouble and dogged insistence, because of the way he was being turned inside out and upside down by her, and by the situation, ‘Yes, the way I see it, by implication my orders say I should make you eat. And perhaps even sleep, if it comes to that.’
‘Look, Jarnti,’ said she, and went to a low bush that grew not ten paces away. She took some of its fruit. They were lumpy fruits sheathed in papery leaves. She pulled off the leaves. In each were four segments of a white substance. She ate several. The tightness of her mouth showed she was not enjoying them.
‘Don’t
