The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

  Ben Ata had little doubt that he could defeat her champions wrestling — and so it turned out. On an open place outside the swarming black tents, surrounded by watching women and children and the horsemen who were headed by the queen, Ben Ata wrestled with, and threw down, one after another, a dozen men who were as wily, tough, and lean as any he had seen.

  The queen had not expected this, and — as usual unable to control her facial expressions, or the attitudes of her limbs and body — sulked quite obviously while commending him.

  She was hoping, he could see, that he would be outdone in the horsemen’s race, which meant every man of the tribe starting at a certain point, and going on until either he was obviously outridden, or he had won. The only condition of this race was that no horse should be ridden to its death or to permanent weakness. Ben Ata’s horse was the best in his kingdom — he had no doubts on that score. But as he sat waiting for the signal to be given (a certain wild ululating cry from the women) he was examining the contestants and could not prevent self-doubt. Some of them were like whips or like snakes for leanness and litheness, and all had been put on horses before they could walk. Ben Ata shared the queen’s obvious expectation that he would be defeated, but in his mind he was holding on to a single thought, which was that the Providers — the way he saw it — must want him to win, and if this was the case, he would. And he did. It was a very long, wearying race, over many miles of desert, in a hot dusty late afternoon, the sun on his left hand, and it seemed to him that it was not his own will that carried him, but a high nervous energy that was being fed steadily into him. One after another he left behind the desert riders, and rode back alone into the place on the sands from where he had started off.

  The queen was not sulky now, but thoughtful, and even seemed ready to be submissive. Everything in her heredity bade her honour this man — now her husband by right of victory — while her calculation was reinforcing her instincts.

  She had not for one moment expected anything but defeat for him, and while this would not have prevented the marriage which was necessary for her plans for her people, she would have made her gift of herself to him an act of contempt.

  As the custom was, the two were accompanied to their wedding tent by bands of ululating women, and riders who raced their horses around the tent, and who jumped over it until the queen raised her voice from inside in a great yell of dismissal — part of the ritual, and was to inform her people that this man was what she had expected.

  As a matter of actual fact, Ben Ata, still insisting on his own earned rights — as he felt it, his experience with Al·Ith had earned him certain superiorities — had indicated to his bride that until these savages of hers had gone away, he had no intention of doing anything at all, and he was seated at ease on a vast pile of rugs, boring her to the point of hysteria with a blow-by-blow account of the race he had just won.

  When he at last was prepared to fulfil her expectations, he found things to be as he had had no doubt they would be: she had as little finesse in her as he when first he loved Al·Ith. To begin with she found him quite inexplicably devious, and then saw that she had in fact no need to despise Zone Four.

  And so these two were married, and the festivities and feasting and racing and wrestling went on for a month. Babies were conceived by the tentful, and Queen Vahshi announced that she, too, was pregnant, and the child would be an earnest of the eternal alliance with Zone Four. This was partly to soothe her new husband, also to hasten him back to his own home, for she could not wait to get back to the enjoyable business of draining the fat lands of Zone Five of their wealth.

  But Ben Ata did not seem in any hurry at all to leave.

  Far from being a token king, in a marriage for strategy’s sake, he showed every sign of wishing to influence policy. This was not at all what she had planned for. The way she saw it, he wished to make the lives of her people as dull and as ordered as those of his own. He did not approve of her warlike ways, he refused to support her in her plans for perpetual plunder, and he warned her day and night that if she did not change course, she would be the ruler very soon over an army of degenerates who lived only for their bellies …

  And — yes — while he argued thus with his new queen, Ben Ata was fully conscious of the ironies of his position. For with half his mind he was busy with plans for making sure his own people would be much more preoccupied with improving their lives than ever they had been. Three-quarters of his army had been sent home ‘on indefinite leave’ — with instructions to raise the level of their villages and towns. Jarnti sulked, then even pleaded and begged — he could not understand it, he, too, was convinced that the foreign witch from the high lands had put a spell on his king. And of course he saw through that ‘indefinite leave.’ Armies were not maintained in condition in this way … he suspected Ben Ata of losing any interest in the martial glories of Zone Four. He suspected a good deal — but his mind, immersed in war all his life, could not follow Ben Ata’s. He was reduced to trying to find out from Dabeeb, and everything she said only confirmed his fears.

  There was more than one irony in the mind of Ben Ata.

  Zone Four, once returned to peace and plenty, was to be no less policed and orderly, he was determined on that. No anarchy! No relaxation of the disciplines which Ben Ata respected from the bottom of his heart.

  Yet he was exhorting Vahshi not to abandon all wild and desert ways entirely but only to stop thieving and grabbing from others. But if she were to return to the traditional life of her people, this meant — to Ben Ata’s way of thinking — an ordered anarchy. Each tribe, or even group of aligned tribes, owed to the members of it a fanatical and fantastic loyalty, even to death. A man claiming protection from a fellow tribesman might ask for that man’s life, if necessary, and was bound for always to return the same if asked. There was an absolute honour, trust, giving, between members of these tribes and groups — but between groups, tribes, no limits to deception, treachery, guile, dishonour. The tribes preyed on each other’s herds and flocks, stole each other’s women, whom they nevertheless thereafter treated as well as they did their own: and these were free, proud women, with rights and privileges. They slit each other’s throats for the matter of a stolen sheep, or slaughtered men lying asleep in the sand wrapped in their ragged cloaks for the sake of the water they carried. This was the state of affairs which Ben Ata was recommending to his consort as one preferable to the new one, which had armies of fighters joyously rampaging from one end of Zone Five to the other, taking everything they could find.

  It was only relative, Ben Ata comforted himself, unable quite to believe in this new role of his. And continued amazed as he returned again and again to the same argument: that the healthy desert way of life was doomed unless the tribes were kept to frugality, hard living, hard riding, discomfort.

  There were moments when he longed for Al·Ith to share astonishment with him — share, surely, amusement? How had he got into this position? Was he doing as he ought, as he had been expected to? What were the Providers thinking of him — were they pleased with him?

  Ben Ata would sit, while Vahshi was out ordering her realm, alone among the sand dunes, or in his tent, thinking. Had he gone wrong somewhere? Yet everything had seemed to happen as if following some invisible but powerful plan. Was there something more expected of him that he had not seen? For he was prepared to believe that he was being blind to evident and obvious potentialities. So he brooded, so he pondered, while Vahshi, catching him at it, might in her turn sit quietly and allow the beginnings of thought to live in her mind. She had never imagined before Ben Ata that one could respect a man like this one, and yet she did: he was beyond her, she could acknowledge that, even if only secretly and to herself.

  His cautions about the degeneration of her people, yes, he was right in the fact, if not in the reasons for it. She could see it herself: there was a slackness and a loosening among them and she did not like it.

  She was thinking that when he went back to
his own land, she would miss his counsels. He was stolid. He was slow. But he was not stupid. They were a balance for each other, yes, that was it. Well, perhaps she would visit him — after all, there was this child coming. They had no doubt at all it would be a girl: she because the strength of her wild femaleness could only give birth to itself, he because he felt the same fitness and appropriateness as when he and Al·Ith expected a son. He had told her this girl child would be as much queen of Zone Four as of Zone Five, but in partnership with an already born son — about whom he was somewhat vague. Vagueness was not his style, and so here she suspected him. If there was treachery then it was to do with raids and looting — so her mind could nor help but work; and Visions of herself as mother of a ruler of that profitable Zone to the west mingled with those of plunder. Besides, she had been informed by her tribes along the frontier that Ben Ata’s garrisons were still there from one end to the other, and this made her wonder if he had some means of seeing into people’s minds, for she had been considering how she might contrive raids into Zone Four — only sometimes, of course, not often, and more in the way of reminding herself of alas forbidden pleasures. She had intended to make amends by saying that the frontier people had been raiding there so long they could not be expected to change overnight.

  Ben Ata left her suddenly. He woke one morning from a dream of the pavilion and the drum beating. Propped up on his elbow beside her, gazing out of the tent door where nothing could be seen but blowing sands made yellow by a dusty sun, the drum still sounded in his ears — and through his whole body, in a pulse of grief and loss. He leapt up, embraced her, summoned his soldiers, and was off before she had properly understood he was going.

  And when he had left she sat alone in her tent for many days, admitting thoughts that were not dissimilar to his when Al·Ith had been ordered away from him. There was nothing in this marriage that she had wanted, or expected — she certainly could not say she had enjoyed it, for there had been too much uncomfortable newness in it for that. And yet everything in her was changed, and she felt set apart from the life of her people, and responsible in a way she did not understand. For what she did, the choices she made, she would have to give an account but to whom, though? Ben Ata spoke of those he called the Providers. Who were they? How did he know they existed? It made her uncomfortable to feel she was overlooked and watched, and even, so he suggested, directed. Ben Ata had told her that Zone Four was not the end of it — there was Zone Three, and one of his women had even come from there. And beyond that, too, other realms, of which he knew only the names.

  Her people said, and sang, that the queen was grieving. She let them. Oh, no, she was not sorry that Ben Ata had gone. She was glad — he had been a weight, a heaviness, something she could not push away so as to be herself. She longed for one thing: that she could go back to being as she had been before that night she was thrown into the tent where the soldierly Ben Ata sat—thinking. She had not known that one could think. She did not want to! She had been perfectly content before he had introduced her to these awkward, slow, brooding ways …

  Ben Ata rode up to the pavilion, and found his son with his nurses, supervised by Dabeeb. The boy was walking. Ben Ata’s immediate thought was that he would like to put the child in front of him on a horse and then ride up and down before his armies — but there were no armies to speak of.

  Dabeeb seemed to have everything well in hand. Jarnti was busy with keeping up the hearts of the remaining troops.

  Ben Ata thought that he would go on an inspection of his kingdom to watch life and strength flowing into it, with the return of the men.

  But meanwhile he found himself with his son, in the garden among the fountains. He sat with the child on the raised white marble plinth and lifted his face so that he could see the mountains of Al·Ith his mother, and he spoke to him of Zone Three and of how one day he would go there, and learn all its ways.

  Through a window Dabeeb was watching, and in no time all of Zone Four knew that the king was teaching his son to look upwards. The punishments for people who watched the snows ceased, and everywhere they openly gazed up at the forbidden realm that was out of their reach no longer. And the women’s ceremonies were wild and victorious, and for the first time men joined them. This new spirit flowing through and around the Zone gladdened Ben Ata, and made the child confident and strong. But he was waiting for the drum he had heard in his dreams, and it remained silent.

  Ben Ata began talking of a visit to Zone Three, with his son, to visit Al·Ith. But this was not what had been ordered — as the silences of Dabeeb reminded him. Was it then that he, Ben Ata, was forbidden Zone Three? And yet it seemed that his son would visit there …

  He observed that Dabeeb and a band of women were making preparations for a journey, and he knew before he asked where they were going. He, the king, who would not long ago have had the lot of them in prison, or with punishment helmets on their heads, heard that the women were going to visit his wife, in her own country, and they were going to take Arusi.

  And how did they know that this was what was needed and intended? he demanded of Dabeeb.

  She replied that it seemed to all of them — meaning the women — that it was their place and their right to go, since it was they who had kept the old knowledge alive for so long.

  But had they been told? Ordered? Been sent a messenger?

  At this, Dabeeb bridled, with an air of being in the right, and right in a way he ought not to challenge. His inner purposes having been so thoroughly overthrown and redirected, he did not stand against her.

  The child was two years old when he left with the women. Their send-off from the watery plains that had once been the scene of such military proficiency was an occasion, though not an official one. Mixed crowds shouted and sang the women’s songs that had now become adapted everywhere for general use, and showed how proud they were of these gratified women who seemed to express even in their appearance the new Zone Four, where so much was changing.

  There were twenty women, mostly in their early middle years. They wore dresses they had copied from Al·Ith’s, for her stay with them had inspired new materials, new and subtle colours, and ways of fit and cut never even imagined before. They wore their hair flowing loose, in proud and self-conscious defiance, looking their not entirely happy men firmly in the eyes, and laughing from the strength of their being together. And they were all on horses that they refused to saddle or bridle. Skilled as Al·Ith was they were not, and their handling of the beasts earned doubting comment as they rode off, but they did well enough. Such was their confidence in their welcome by Zone Three that at first they refused to take shields, or even protective brooches and clasps, but when they began the climb up to the frontier Dabeeb had to set up her shield in front of her, and the others followed suit.

  They were a handsome, strong, good-looking company, with the little child there in front of Dabeeb, and there were other small children there, too, for the women claimed that these ‘should take the opportunity of learning the new ways.’

  They passed up into the high sparkling airs of Zone Three without feeling other than exhilarated, and crossed the great plain before nightfall and the start of the punishing wind.

  Halfway up the pass to the plateau they stopped at a large inn, and asked for hospitality, in the name of Al·Ith. People pressed out to look at them, and stood about watching as they were admitted, and their horses led away.

  They had been sure of an especial reception because of Al·Ith, but they saw that it was not because of this name — which in fact seemed not to impress their hosts — but because it was the way of this realm to give hospitality to strangers, that they were treated with such courtesy.

  It seemed to them, though, a cold, or at least indifferent politeness.

  They were set around a very long broad table in the main room, and were served attentively, while the ordinary users of the place watched them, though not impolitely, from where they sat separate. The women began to t
alk and laugh rather too loudly, and to shake their hair back, and make a great thing of their liking for each other, while their inner confidence ebbed. What had they been expecting? Of course, to be welcomed home. From an exile. That is how they had been feeling all these long months of preparation. But it was easy to come to terms with this in themselves, and to say: Wait, when we actually see Al·Ith it will be different—what was really undermining them was their understanding of what rough figures they cut here. The best, the finest, the most daring of their land were clumsy here. Well, that they could suffer and withstand, for after all it is what they had been doing for generations, knowing always that they were cut off from the best and from their own potentiality.

  Their surroundings afflicted them, made them begin to realize their deprivation.

  Of course, in their own land were inns and hotels of various kinds. And some did not look, at first glance, so very different from this one. It was when they were at ease, sitting, able to look and touch, that they began to see.

  There was no inn with them that did not have a large main room, a fire of some kind, seats, or tables … ah, but what a difference … yet, had they entered this room, there, they would not, not at once, have noticed — what? Detail. It was the variety, the loving inventiveness of everything.

  The fireplace’s great mantel was carved cunningly, and amusingly, too — there alone was enough to keep them absorbed for half an evening. There were not merely benches, but chairs, and forms and settles, and stools, and the chairs had cushions and they were embroidered and the embroideries, like the mantelpiece, were as good as an evening full of stories and songs. The plates they were served on were china, which they hardly knew existed, and these were beautiful in an unfamiliar way. There was no end to it all — and this without the foodstuffs, which every one of these skilled housewives knew to be far above anything that even the king was served.