But Al·Ith felt that another baby was not what was wanted of her. Oh, no, she had done what she had had to do … and yet the drum beat, and it beat: perhaps it was intended she should have another child with Ben Ata?
Ben Ata came in late one night and saw her, and he was drawn to her all over again, as if she were quite new to him. And she certainly did not refuse him or discourage him. On the contrary. She found herself craving for him. This, too, was something she had not known: she put it down to the way she spent hours of every day on her appearance, studying dresses of this kind and that which would emphasize a line, or breasts, or legs, or arms, arranging her hair under the skilled supervision of Dabeeb, who adored helping her mistress to become beautiful again. If one devoted one’s energies to self display, to the exact disposition of parts of one’s body, and always with one idea, that one should be seen, and attract — then presumably that was enough to call forth this raging desire? Cause and result. An energy spent thus will be answered thus … so Al·Ith diagnosed her condition, but this did not stop her taking Ben Ata into herself— as if she were starving for him.
And he, enjoying it all, nevertheless said to her, ‘Do you remember how we used to make love?’
‘And how was that?’ she asked, knowing quite well.
‘Don’t you remember that time … ’ for now it seemed as if it had gone on for a long time, had been never-ending, a lost paradise. She had been not at all as she was now, but light, and delicate, and funny, too — thus shielding the grateful Ben Ata from her world which he knew was shadowed by the unknown, the difficult, the immanent, the threatening — she had known how to be subtle and to dance, as it were, from one delight to another, until their unbearable separation roared up in a fire that consumed them both, and in a way that never happened now. How could it, when the approaches to the act were so different.
‘And how were we then?’ she asked, practically. But knowing quite well.
‘Ah, you were different then.’
‘And now?’
‘Now — I plough you in. I plough you under!’
‘Ah, yes,’ she breathed, in a sort of shudder. ‘Yes, you do. I have to have it. You must. I need it.’
‘Oh, I’m not complaining,’ he said, good-natured, like a husband, looking her over with complaisance and appreciation. ‘Don’t think I am complaining.’
‘But you are!’
‘It is as if you need me to extinguish you. Put you out. You lie there groaning away, and I … plough you under.’
‘Yes. Yes. Now, Ben Ata. I get so tense, so … I could fly apart. I need you to … fill me. To … just do it. Now. You must. I need it.’
And he did. He ploughed into her, long, steady, on and on, while she groaned and died under him.
But that was not what he remembered, not what he looked back on as an experience so far above anything he had ever had with any woman, anywhere, that sometimes he doubted it had ever happened.
But it had. That was how they had been together. A marvellous subtle answering, touch for touch, glance for glance, a challenge that used chords and responses they had now, it seemed, forgotten entirely.
Could this desperate and necessitous woman be the laughing Al·Ith who had taught him delights he had never even imagined?
‘Why can’t we be like that again now?’ he asked, and asked again.
‘But that was when I was from there, Ben Ata.’
‘But you are still from there! Where else are you from?’
‘Oh, no, Ben Ata, I am not. I assure you no, I am not.’
And she held him as if she were drowning and could only be saved by his driving body.
She felt as if he did not do this, extinguish her, knock her out, sink her deep, drive out of her all the tensions and the electricity, that she would go crazy, explode. Why? she had no idea. This was Zone Four! This was how it was.
And yet, always, she listened to the drum, and wondered when it would stop and she could ride up again to her own country and be her own real self.
One day, it would stop and she would be free.
She even imagined how, after being restored in the high cool fresh airs of her own self, she might meet Ben Ata again and they would be able again to ‘do it’ as he remembered with such admiration.
Yet, while she thought like this, it was impossible for her to believe this could be.
And then this is what happened.
Ben Ata strode up the hill from his armies one morning, and, not finding Al·Ith in the pavilion, went through into the gardens. She was with the child on the round raised white platform, or dais, at the other end of the long pool. Between him and her were jets of splashing water, and the sound of the drum filled his ears. Beyond her was the oval pool full of fountains. The spice trees shed their scents. The sun was shining, and ah the wetness and dampness and green of the gardens was glistening. Light came from everywhere. The drumming seemed to echo and sound. And there, in the middle of this golden beat of sun and sound was Al·Ith, with her son, who was lying on a spread of blue cloth on the white. Al·Ith seemed to be all light and dazzle herself. Her yellow dress showed thin brown arms, and her legs, where it was pushed up. She was leaning over the child, in intense concentration, which shut him and the world out. He was able to approach without even lightening his heavy soldier’s tread, because of the noise of the waters and the drum. He stood quite close, unseen by her. She was absorbed, lost, gone in contemplation of her son. The child lay waving his little limbs, and making soft noises, aware of his mother’s adoration — if that was the word for it! — Ben Ata’s bitter heart supplied it, in default. The baby seemed to glow with contentment and love. Al·Ith touched the small feet, enclosed them in her hands, slid her hands up and down the small legs. She looked into the child’s face, bending forward to do so, with a close, stern intentness that Ben Ata had not seen in her before. She had certainly never looked at him like that! Then, as he stood there, almost holding his breath in his determination to understand what he was seeing — for he knew he must do that, since jealousy was choking him — she slid off the baby’s garment, so that he lay naked. He was a pale child, beside his mother’s alert slim brownness, and seemed slow and heavy in comparison. Ben Ata was at once forced to acknowledge something he had not wanted to: he felt an instinctive antipathy towards the nakedness of this son of his. Perhaps not an antipathy so much as a curiosity whose source he did not understand. A curiosity about what? He felt as if something inside him said no … the boy was beautifully formed, a normal healthy child. The genitals, Ben Ata supposed, were his own, he recognized them. But they made him disturbed, and uncomfortable. Why did she expose the child thus? Al·Ith was examining every part of her child, peering close, with the same intent stern gaze.
Every little part, every crease and fold … and she touched, and stroked and slid the limbs up and down inside her hands. Ben Ata was aching, and it was with loneliness … was she going to handle the boy’s genitals? He watched, frightened. But she did not, though in this inspection — as if she were looking for evidence, Ben Ata found himself thinking and not without surprise at himself — she buried her face in the child’s body and laughed, and he grabbed at her hair and kicked vigorously and laughed too. It was a love scene Ben Ata was witnessing, and he told himself that she did not handle him with such delight, did not bury her face in his own belly … he could imagine the touch of her lashes on his skin, and a forlorn rage began to drum in him. But she had made love to him like that — once. Oh, a long time ago. Yes, she had, but did not now. Now she would clutch only and cling as if begging to be saved. She turned the little boy over onto his front, where he strove to raise himself onto his knees, though could not, and Al·Ith continued with her long, loving ritual of inspection or devotion. Or was it passion? She laid a forefinger gently on the backs of the knees, as if searching for a pulse, or at least some announcement of the flesh there. She cupped her palm over the little buttocks. She kissed the back of the child’s neck. She stroke
d the small shoulders with the sides of her palms. And she seemed to be enclosing the child entirely, possessing him, as she leaned over him, a lithe tawny girl in her sunny dress, her hair iridescent in the sun. This pale long child seemed not hers, but an impostor’s — and to Ben Ata there was something wrong, even perverse in her owning and having him as she was doing … and still she did not hear himself. Though he was standing over her now and his shadow stretched almost to the edge of the round white platform. On which, it now seemed to him, he and Al·Ith had made love a hundred times. It was the plinth or setting for their love, theirs, the two of them …
And suddenly Arusi, striving to get his knees under him to take his weight, succeeded — instead of slipping away under him, they held, and he was on all fours, like a little white dog, thought Ben Ata. He was choked and crowded with emotions. He was so vulnerable that baby! Why, he could kill him by picking him up and dropping him head down on the white marble. As he thought this, the baby clutched Al·Ith’s hair and pulled himself up — he was standing. Ben Ata’s eyes were full of red anger. He held on to himself, steadied, and as his sight cleared saw that Al·Ith was looking up at him, smiling.
The smile seemed to him brazen. There was no guilt in it at all! Yet she had just betrayed him, a thousand times over.
She was still smiling, a warm close smile that surely was for the baby, not him, Ben Ata! She held out her hand, and laid her palm on the side of his knee, just as she had done with the baby. Shameless, thought Ben Ata, feeling the shock of that touch go up him in flame. She smiled. She wanted him to sit down by her and the child and share in their love rite. There was not an atom of remorse or guilt in her, he saw, with amazement … Ignoring the child, he picked her up and began to carry her into the pavilion.
‘Ben Ata,’ she shrieked, ‘the baby, the baby, we can’t leave him there.’
But the shriek had summoned Dabeeb, who was already approaching through the pillars of the pavilion, and had seen that she must fetch the baby and guard it. Her face was all knowing smiles and shrewd guesses, as if, thought Ben Ata, averting his eyes from hers in an instinctive need to shield their privacy, his and Al·Ith’s, she had at some point in her life been issued with instructions for reactions suitable for every occasion. When the master carries off the lady to their marriage bed, then the faithful servant has to put on a certain face. In the pavilion, he set Al·Ith down. She was laughing. So was he. By now his anger had all gone, charmed away by the light warm strength of Al·Ith’s body in his arms as he carried her. They stood on either side of the great couch, on guard, watching each other like fencers, in an amused, laughing antagonism. Equals. A balance … their lovemaking now was set to be a different thing from what he had been thinking of recently as ‘married’ love. A lightness, an impulsiveness … a grace.
And so it was, just as it had been ‘all that time ago’ — as Ben Ata had been thinking.
And they woke together in the dusk, close, healed as if of some frightful and unnatural separation that had afflicted them, unforeseen and unforeseeably, and now had vanished away, leaving them breathing together lightly and at peace.
And in silence.
They could hear the water splashing outside.
What a silence … it seemed to fill them, slide along and around their limbs, submerge them in itself.
A silence.
The drum had stopped beating. And, suddenly, at the same moment, they sat up, looking at "each" other, and both let out a sighing breath like a groan.
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he muttered, clutching her to him. And she had her two hands in his hair, half pushing his head against her body, to keep it there, but partly to hold it away … her whole body was shaking with sobs.
And he now held her close, rocking her. They rocked each other. They were kneeling beside each other on the couch, consoling and holding, in a terrible grief. They held each other’s faces in their palms and looked into each other’s eyes as if there would be an explanation there for this sentence passed on them.
To be separated now … no, it was not possible.
And it was at this moment that Dabeeb came in from the hill entrance, holding the child, and having cleared her throat gently said, ‘I have to give you both a message.’
And at this the two, Ben Ata and Al·Ith, sank away from each other, to either side of the couch, already apart, and knowing that what Dabeeb was going to say would be some final thing that they would not be able to bear … the pounding of their hearts told them.
And Dabeeb’s face showed she was stricken. Hurt on their behalf. And at the same time, uplifted.
‘Who gave you the message, Dabeeb?’ he asked.
‘It was a child.’
‘You did not know whose child?’
‘Never seen him before, and it is dark, I couldn’t have seen him, and he went off down the hill at once.’
A silence. They heard each other’s breathing, coming broken and fearful.
Then Dabeeb said, ‘I beg for your forgiveness first — for what I am to tell you.’
‘You are forgiven, Dabeeb.’
‘My lady, you are to return to your own land … but you know that already, since the drum has stopped.’
‘Yes, we know that.’
‘And you, my lord Ben Ata, are to … are to … you are to marry the lady who rules that country to the east. You are to marry Zone Five, my lord.’
Al·Ith had slid from the couch, and was sitting with her head in her arms, making herself breathe evenly.
She asked, ‘Is that the whole message?’
‘No. The child is to stay here. With us. But you will spend time with him. Six months in every year.’
At this Al·Ith wailed and flung herself face down on the couch and drummed with her fists on either side of her head.
Ben Ata stared at this bringer of — what could only be seen, at this time — bad tidings, and seemed to want to speak. But at last he shook his head, helpless, and Dabeeb, in tears, went out.
And so these two were left.
They clung together through the night, weeping, trying to comfort each other.
And in the morning both listened straining for the drum — for perhaps it might start again with the light. But there was silence, only the sounds of the water.
And soon Dabeeb came in with the child, and gave him to Al·Ith. Who sat with him for a moment or two, gazing at him, and handling his limbs, but briefly; and with her touch and gaze already — not indifferent — as it were averted. She did not kiss the child, but handed him back to Dabeeb who of course was weeping bitterly.
Ben Ata was standing with his back to the room, gazing down into the camps.
‘Goodbye, Ben Ata,’ said Al·Ith, sternly, and dry, and almost cold — and she went out into the gardens where her horse was waiting.
And so did Al·Ith ride away from her child, her adopted home, and her husband, Ben Ata.
Al·Ith, riding on her beloved horse towards the heights of Zone Three, was a very different person to the one who had ridden that road the last time she left Ben Ata. She could hardly remember herself. She knew she had been glad to leave. Was that possible? Yes. She had left this watery place as if set free.
She had returned to her own land like a returned exile. And now she was thinking only that her body was so heavy a lump with grief it could not absorb, that she could have slid off the horse, and into the canal and drowned there, without complaint. Raising her eyes to the moonlit mountains, where the snows glimmered, she felt she could never, ever, have the strength to climb up there again. And what was she returning to? She seemed to remember that last time she was there she was no loved and welcomed inhabitant; on the contrary, she had felt herself not to be part of the place — more, it was as if she had been invisible. How could she now just ride back into that life, as if nothing had happened?
Even though in half a year she would ride back along this road — to find her husband married to this unknown queen from the east.
&nbs
p; But that was impossible. Neither she nor Ben Ata could take it in … how could he marry that girl, whoever she was? Why, they two, she, Al·Ith, and he, Ben Ata, were so married now that they made one person.
And yet, he would now marry someone else, and the child Arusi would be brought up part-orphaned. No, how could that be? How was it allowed? The Providers, surely, had erred, been wrong in judgement … so Al·Ith, as she steps her horse soberly towards the frontier. She had at least remembered the shield. She would not be able to enter her own country without it. Why, she was so much an inhabitant of this Zone now, that she literally could not remember the Al·Ith of Zone Three. But she had to. She must try …
Through the long dark night goes Al·Ith, seeing the gleam of the canals beside her, the white shimmer of the peaks of Zone Three ahead. Her horse is slow and careful under her. And all night the tears run down her face.
So she is pictured. And so she was.
She had been for some time inside her own land before she realized it. She seemed to remember sudden and indeed even painful effects at the crossing point, but the shield was dangling unregarded from the saddle, but why was there a saddle? She got off, flung the saddle and the shield away, talked a little to Yori, who was lifting his head and sniffing and letting out little whinnies of welcome to this remembered place. She was not feeling any ill-effects at all. In the dawn light, the great peaks seemed close, and not difficult and harassing as they had yesterday.
Al·Ith stood quietly there, watched the sky lighten, watching thoughts she had not had for a long time creep back into her mind. She was greeting and recognizing them: Why, you there! I had forgotten about you! Welcome! What a lot of herself had been put aside while she had been down there, in Ben Ata’s land — and yet she still ached for him.