When Ben Ata again arrived at the frontier, it was in front of soldiers who were wearing fighting gear, weapons all over them, helmets glittering, lances at the ready, and the famous reflecting jerkins. A drum beat and pipes flourished.
The bands of young people with their stones and sticks made a show of standing their ground, but their amazement undid them, for they had not really understood that an army could be so inexorable and unrelenting. And they had not known that three hundred men could become one — that individual wills could cease to be entirely, absorbed in this larger, terrifying will.
And Ben Ata himself, the husband of their Al·Ith, was a large and appalling figure, with his great legs bare from above the knee down, his arms like blocks of wood. His leather jerkin, tightly belted, seemed to them so hideous that it must have a punitive or sadistic reason. And his metal helmet was a sign of inner brutality.
Thus it was that all the way from the frontier, up the pass, and across the plateau to the capital, these marching companies of soldiers caused all movement along the roads to cease, and they passed group after group of people who had believed themselves to be martial and indeed even cruel figures, but who stood limp, staring, disarmed by their innocence.
They camped for one night. In the middle of the next day Ben Ata’s army arrived in the little square. Ben Ata did not dismount, but rode his horse to the foot of the flight of steps up to Al·Ith’s palace, and sat there, waiting. Faces appeared at windows, people came from everywhere and stood about, looking, whispering, staring.
At last Murti· came down the steps, as she had for Dabeeb, alone.
Ben Ata was nearly undone at the sight of her. For she seemed to be Al·Ith over again, all her slender charm and enchantment, but translated into the blondeness of the savagely magnificent Vahshi, who so delighted and exasperated him.
‘I see you have come with all your armies, Ben Ata,’ said she.
‘Hardly all, Murti·.’
‘But armies. Armed.’
‘Like your young people at the frontier.’
‘They were doing their best.’
‘And I am doing what I am ordered.’
He looked straight at her. She, at him, but her eyes fell away and she sighed.
‘Are you no longer obedient, Murti·?’
‘When I am sure of what I am supposed to do.’
His horse was shifting about, tossing its head, trying to free itself of the metal piece in its mouth.
Murti· watched this, and smiled, a small scornful smile.
‘Yes, I know,’ said he. ‘We have different ways. But in one we must be alike.’
‘Ben Ata, this realm of ours was once at peace. Content. No one had thoughts of change and destruction.’
‘Murti·, content is not the highest good.’
Again their eyes encountered, held — and held. She did not look away.
He was smiling — ruefully.
‘I do not find anything to smile at.’
‘I was thinking of the combats between me and Vahshi, of Zone Five. But she argues for unrestrained freedom in all things, licence — anarchy. As I see it. To her I represent the law. Self-satisfaction. Contentment. Not to say — smugness.’
She allowed herself a brief smile, and was sober again.
‘And what is this great new queen of yours like, Ben Ata?’
‘The great queen in Zone Five is the tribal leader of several hundred people, who because she is skilled, and very brave, was able to dominate fifty other poor tribes, and they all live in a narrow desert strip that borders Zone Five where it joins our country. Zone Five is a rich trading country that grows as many different crops and trees and fruits as you do. But this girl was able to make them all pay tribute to her because they were lazy and self-satisfied. And she was able to rob them and plunder as she liked.’
‘You certainly like variety in your wives.’
‘But Vahshi no longer terrorizes all the rest of the Zone, because I won’t let her. Because I am stronger than she is.’
‘A salutary story, Ben Ata.’
‘I take it you are trying to prevent me from seeing Al·Ith?’
She said stubbornly, ‘It is more that I am trying to prevent Al·Ith from — well, it is not so easy to explain.’
‘Creating disorder?’
‘Yes.’
‘It would appear to me, Murti·, that whatever the effects really are of this marriage of ours, it is now too late to alter anything.’
‘We can prevent worse—as for instance when those stupid women came making fools of themselves.’
‘Yes. That was a mistake. That was disobedience.’
Murti· did sigh now. She stood silent for a long moment.
‘I can’t stop you from going to Al·Ith,’ said she. ‘You are stronger than we are. I had no idea! Until I saw this army of yours today I simply did not know. And I don’t admire it, Ben Ata.’
With which she turned and went indoors.
Ben Ata and his troops rode on towards the northeast.
What had happened was this.
Soon after Dabeeb went home, a woman arrived at Al·Ith’s village, asked for her, was directed to the stables. She pleaded to be allowed to stay and work. She wanted to be with Al·Ith, she said. Work was found for her. Soon came another — a young boy. By the end of the winter a dozen people had come. There was really not room for any more. But the spring brought others. It was being talked about in the near villages, then farther afield — until one day Murti· arrived, by herself, and sat in the orchard with Al·Ith. It was painful for these two to meet — so estranged were they now, when once their thoughts had run side by side, and they knew what the other was doing, or meaning to do, even when apart.
Murti· was changed. She was sterner, older, more judging.
Al·Ith was a wisp of a woman, burnt out.
‘You must move from here, Al·Ith,’ said Murti·, sounding abrupt and harsh, because of the difficulty of it. ‘And you must not come back into this realm.’
‘Then where am I to live?’
‘Where you do now — it seems. I hear you are closer to there than you are to us.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I can understand what I see.’
‘That isn’t much, Murti·.’ Al·Ith said this softly, but stubbornly, and Murti· was silent for a time.
Then: ‘I have to ask you something, Al·Ith. And I know you will answer honestly. Suppose, before your marriage with Ben Ata, when we were all untroubled and things were as they ought to be …’
‘But, Murti·,’ said Al·Ith reproachfully, ‘you know perfectly well …’
‘No! You must listen to me. Listen! Once you were our Al·Ith and we were yours. Suppose then that you had come to know that there was a wild restless troubling spirit in our Zone, that people were talking of all kinds of change and challenges that none of us had ever heard of, so that everything was different, and even the animals were perturbed, would you then have taken steps to put an end to it?’
‘Of course,’ said Al·Ith. ‘But … ’
‘Then that’s all,’ said Murti·.
Murti· had already begun to run away, quite desperate she was, as if Al·Ith were hunting her and even meaning harm. She had reached her horse when Al·Ith called, ‘Murti· !’
Murti·, in the same dreadful haste, was jumping on her horse.
‘Murti·,’ said Al·Ith, but in a soft commanding voice.
And she checked her horse and turned towards her sister and listened.
‘You have forgotten, Murti·! Things were very bad before I was sent down to Ben Ata. We were sorrowful and despondent and ailing. We were not giving birth as we had, and the animals were in the same state …’
‘Oh, I don’t know anything about that,’ said Murti· in a hasty, angry voice. But she was still there, listening, compelled by Al·Ith’s strength over her.
‘But it was so. And now, instead of lethargy, and listlessness, and sorrow, ins
tead of a falling birth rate and animals who will not mate, we have the opposite. The opposite, Murti·!’
But this was as much as Murti· could take, and she turned her, horse and raced off as if Al·Ith had sent hostile and vicious animals after her.
And here I am going to interpose an observation on a phenomenon which is not exactly unknown to us all:
When two people have been very close, as Al·Ith and her sister had been, and then one of them moves away into a different experience that seems to be very different from, or even destructive of, past balances and understandings, then the surviving partner will often seem to close up, or perhaps even go retrograde, as if protecting a wound, or an exposed and vulnerable place … yes, but this was Zone Three, and this particular reaction was not undergone by us in this form: not so crudely, in a word. We who were watching thought that while Murti· had not been subjected to Zone Four, she was nevertheless being exposed to it through her sister, who was after all her other self: Murti· had not escaped from the ‘going down,’ though it might seem as if she had. Simply, this level of unreflective, cut-and-dried, even revengeful behaviour, was not what any of us expected from Murti·.
We have pictures of Murti·, showing her with a harsh and bitter face, sitting on her horse gazing down from that height at poor Al·Ith, the outcaste among her humble beasts.
Well, it certainly happened, and is honestly recorded as far as it goes. But I for one have brooded often enough on the scene, and I am sorrier for Murti· than I am for Al·Ith. This is not Murti·’s story. There is no time here to tell it. But it is enough to suggest that if she suffered in an indirect and difficult way from Al·Ith’s sojourn in the watery Zone Four, she was bound to experience, too, at a remove, something of what Al·Ith did — and would — feel in her slow osmosis with Zone Two. Murti· was our lovely and loving and entirely delightful ruler for a very long time — she still is, in fact, though old now, and has long ago retired into the background to give place to others, Arusi among them. But there has always been something enigmatic and distant and above all, solitary, about her, since her separation from Al·Ith — and I believe that if we were able to know what she undergoes, we would find that she is not very distant from Al·Ith now, in her own way.
The day after Murti·’s visit to Al·Ith there appeared a band of our young people, armed in their amateurish but certainly painstaking way, and they insisted on Al·Ith going with them. They were not embarrassed at what they were doing. Al·Ith could hardly believe that these were the same people among whom, so recently, she had moved like their sister, or like some invisible part of them known and acknowledged by both sides — everything she thought transparent to them, their thoughts open to her. There was a barrier between them and herself now: they saw her, but she was not being seen …
They took her to the foot of the pass that led up to the blue mists. There was a little shack or shed. She had room to grow herself some vegetables, and there was a cow in a small field. They had put in the shed, on Murti·’s instructions, some ordinary comforts. They retreated a little way and took up positions. There a guard was maintained, from then on. It was not a terrible or an ugly guard, far from it — merely a line of young people, always different ones, for they were not expected to spend their lives at it. But a guard nevertheless, who prevented her from going back into her own Zone, and — too — prevented those friends who had wanted to be near her from coming close.
She watched her friends gathering on the other side of the line of young people. There were about fifty of them. They gazed up towards her little shed, and she waved at them. They talked to the guards — and were refused. Having discussed matters among themselves, they dispersed. What happened then, though Al·Ith did not know it, was that they all found places in the farms and villages close to, and as more and more of such people, those who were similar to Al·Ith and felt a pull towards her, came to find her, they too settled in the northwestern parts of our Zone. So very soon all the farms and villages for a long way around were occupied almost entirely by them.
When Ben Ata came riding towards her, he learned all this at the place where she had been. And he stopped to talk with the many people who had come to be near her. All had the same characteristic — not visible at all at first, but then, as you got to know them, it was like a brand. Each one suffered from an inability to live in Zone Three as if it was, or could be, enough for them. Where others of us flourished unreflecting in this best of all worlds, they could see only hollowness. Fed on husks and expecting only emptiness, they were candidates for Zone Two before they knew it, and long before the road there had been opened up for them by Al·Ith’s long vigil.
Ben Ata dispersed his soldiers among these friendly souls, left his horse with them, and walked up along the pass to the little shed where his wife was.
She was sitting on a stool at her doorway, and as he came near, jumped up, looking hungrily for — as he could see at once — her son.
‘I’m sorry, Al·Ith, but they said nothing about Arusi.’
She nodded, smiled, and stayed waiting for him. He came close, and took her hands, and sighed, and then they sat beside each other on the doorstep very close, smiling.
‘Oh, Al·Ith,’ said he, ‘it is just as well I have come to look after you.’
At this she laughed irrepressibly, in the old way, so that they were both at once laughing together.
‘But you are a prisoner!’
‘I used to mind — I minded terribly. But now I don’t.’
‘Well, you aren’t going to be a prisoner any longer. It seems to me that Murti· was pleased that I am stronger than she is — in this, at least.’
And he told her everything, shared with her the news of years, explained all that had happened.
He did not mention Vahshi, until she asked. And then he laughed, in a way that combined pleasure and amazement and anger and told her everything — so that for a moment she had tears in her eyes. Which she firmly wiped away.
‘She’s like a child,’ he said. ‘You have no idea. She thinks that if she wants anything, she’s got to have it! But she’s better than she was — I think. And she has fits of temper — you’ve never seen anything like it! But she’s better in that too — well, a little …’
He kissed her, seeing her face.
‘Well, Al·Ith, I had to love her — after knowing you!’
This she took as it was meant, and smiled.
They sat within each other’s arms, cheeks laid together, and looked up the pass at the hanging blue mists, and thought that they were still married, for all that they were so finally separated.
Ben Ata stayed some days on that visit. He dismissed the guards, who were ready enough to go, since they were finding their task tedious, and indeed, harder every day to believe in. He was ready to set Al·Ith comfortably in some house or suitable place in a near village, but she said she loved her little shed now and did not want to go. Her friends — for they thought of themselves like this — were able to come and talk to her, and she visited them.
Later in the same year Ben Ata came again, without soldiers, and bringing her son, and also Dabeeb. When the time came to go home, Arusi was left with Murti· to learn the ways of Zone Three.
This state of affairs continued, but not for too long. One day when Al·Ith climbed the road to visit the other Zone, she did not come back. Others of her friends disappeared in the same way — just as, not often, there were always some — people from Zone Four came to our Zone after being attracted to it, sometimes for all their lives, and found a place with us, and stayed. Dabeeb was one.
There was a continuous movement now, from Zone Five to Zone Four. And from Zone Four to Zone Three — and from us, up the pass. There was a lightness, a freshness, and an enquiry and a remaking and an inspiration where there had been only stagnation. And closed frontiers.
For this is how we all see it now.
The movement is not all one way — not by any means.
For in
stance, our songs and tales are not only known in the watery realm ‘down there’ — just as theirs are to us — but are told and sung in the sandy camps and around the desert fires of Zone Five.
About the Author
DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.
By the same author
NOVELS
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
Memoirs of a Survivor
Diary of a Good Neighbour
If the Old Could …
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
The Fifth Child
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
The Cleft
‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City