But as they had enclosed her, Jarnti in front, she put out her hand to hold the horse she had been given, Yori, by the neck.
And this was how she arrived at the steps of the pavilion, when Ben Ata came out to stand in the doorway, arms folded, legs apart, bearded soldier, dressed in no way different from Jarnti or the others. He was large, blond, muscular from continual campaigning, and burned a ruddy brown on the face and arms. His eyes were grey. He was not looking at Al·Ith but at the horse, for his first thought too was that his bride had been killed.
Al·Ith went quickly through the soldiers, suspecting that there were precedents here she might not want followed, and arrived in front of him, still holding the horse.
And now he looked at her, startled and frowning.
‘I am Al·Ith,’ said she, ‘and this horse has been kindly given to me by Jarnti. Please, will you give orders for him to be well treated?’
He found himself speechless. He nodded. Jarnti then grasped the horse’s neck and attempted to lead him away. But he reared and tried to free himself. Before he would allow himself to be taken away, Al·Ith had to comfort him and promise she would visit him very soon. ‘Today, I swear it.’ And, turning to Jarnti, ‘So you must not take him too far away. And please see he is well fed and looked after.’
Jarnti was sheepish, the soldiers grinning, only just hiding it, because Ben Ata’s face gave them no guidance. Normally, on such occasions, the girl would have been bundled across a threshold, or pushed forward roughly, according to the convention, but now no one knew how to behave.
Al·Ith said, ‘Ben Ata, I take it you have some sort of place I can retire to for a time? I have been riding all day.’
Ben Ata was recovering. His face was hard, and even bitter. He had not known what to expect, and was prepared to be flexible, but he was repelled by this woman in her sombre clothes. She had not taken off her veil, and he could not see much of her except that she had dark hair. He preferred fair women.
He shrugged, gave a look at Jarnti, and disappeared into the room behind him. It was Jarnti then who led her into another room, which was part of a set of rooms, and saw that she had what she needed. She refused food and drink, and announced that she would be ready to join the king in a few minutes.
And she did join him, emerging unceremoniously from the retiring rooms just as she had arrived, in her dark dress. But she had removed the veil, and her hair was braided and hanging down her back.
Ben Ata was lounging on a low divan or settee, in a large light airy room that had nothing very much in it. She saw that this was a bridal room, and planned for the occasion. Her bridegroom, however, sprawling on one edge of the divan, his chin on his hand, his elbow on his knee, did not move as she came in. And there was nowhere else to sit, so she sat down on the edge of the divan, at a distance from him, resting her weight on her hand in the position of one who has alighted somewhere for just a moment and has every intention of leaving again. She looked at him, without smiling. He looked at her, very far from smiling.
‘Well, how do you like this place?’ he asked, roughly. It was clear he had no idea of what to say or do.
‘It has been built specially then?’
‘Yes. Orders. Built to specification. Exactly. It was finished only this morning.’
‘It is certainly very elegant and pleasant,’ she said. ‘Quite different from anything else I’ve seen on my way here.’
‘Certainly not my style,’ he said. ‘But if it is yours, then that’s the main thing.’
This had a sort of sulky gallantry, but he was restless, and sighing continually, and it was evident all he wanted to do was to make his escape.
‘I suppose the intention was that it should be suited to us both?’ she remarked.
‘I don’t care,’ said he violently and roughly, his inner emotions breaking out of him. ‘And obviously you don’t either.’
‘We’re going to have to make the best of it,’ she said, intending consolation, but it was wild and bitter.
They looked at each other with a frank exchange of complicity: two prisoners who had nothing in common but their incarceration.
This first, and frail, moment of tolerance did not last.
He had flung himself back on this marriage couch of theirs, arms behind his head, his sandalled feet dusty on the covers, which were of fine wool, dyed in soft colours, and embroidered. Nowhere could he have seemed more out of place. She was able to construct his usual surroundings by how he slouched there, gazing at the ceiling as if she did not exist.
She examined the place. This was a very large room, opening out on two sides into gardens through a series of rounded arches. The other two sides had unobtrusive doors leading — on one — to the rooms for her use where she had already been, and on the other, presumably, to his. The ceiling was rounded and high, fluted at the edges. The whole room was painted a softly shining ivory, but there were patterns of gold, soft red, and blue, and beside each archway embroidered curtains were caught back with jewelled clasps. The fountains could be heard, and the running of the waters. This was not far from the gaiety and freshness of the public buildings of Andaroun, our capital, though her own quarters were plainer than these.
The great room was not all one empty sweep of space. A column sprang up from its centre, and curved out, and divided into several, all fluted and defined in the same gold, sky blue, and red. The floors were of sweetly smelling wood. Apart from the great low couch, there was a small table near one of the arches, with two graceful chairs on either side of it.
A horse whinnied. A moment later, Yori appeared outside one of the arches, and would have come in if she had not run across and stopped him. It was easy to guess what had happened. He had been confined somewhere, and had jumped free, and the soldiers set to guard him did not dare to follow into these private gardens with the pavilion all the country had been talking of for weeks. She put her hands up to his cheeks, pulled down his head, whispered into first one ear, and then the other, and the horse swung around and went out of sight, back to its guard.
When she turned, Ben Ata was standing just behind her, glaring.
‘I can see that it is true, what we have heard here. You are all witches in your country.’
‘It is a witchcraft easy to learn,’ she said, but as he continued to glare, her humour went, and now she crossed swiftly to the bed and, throwing down one of the big cushions, sat on it cross-legged. She had not thought that now he must do the same, or remain above her on the bed, but he was uncertain, seemed to feel challenged by her, and in his turn pulled a cushion off the bed, pushed it against a wall, and sat.
They sat opposite each other, on their two cushions.
She was at home, since this was how she usually seated herself, but he was uncomfortable, and seemed afraid to make any movement, in case the cushion slid about the polished floor.
‘Do you always wear clothes like that?’
‘I put this on especially for you,’ she countered, and he reddened again: since her arrival she had seen more angry, embarrassed men than ever in her life, and she was on the point of wondering if they had some disorder of the blood or the skin.
‘If I had known you were going to arrive like this I would have ordered dresses for you. How was I to know you’d turn up like a servant?’
‘Ben Ata, I never wear elaborate clothes.’
He was eyeing the plain looseness of her robe with annoyance and exasperation.
‘I thought you were supposed to be the queen.’
‘You cannot be distinguished from one of your own soldiers.’
Suddenly he bared his teeth in a grin, and muttered something that she understood meant: ‘Take the thing off, and I’ll show you.’
She knew he was angry, but not how much. On their campaigns, when the army reached new territory, into his tent would be thrust some girl, or she was thrown down at his feet. She would nearly always be crying. Or she might be hissing and spitting. She might bite and scratch as he
entered her. She could weep throughout and not cease weeping. A few gritted their teeth, and their loathing of him did not abate. He was not a man who enjoyed inflicting suffering, so these he would order to be returned to their homes. But those who wept or who struggled in a way he recognized he did enjoy, and would tame them, slowly. These were the conventions. These he obeyed. He had penetrated, and often impregnated, women all over his realm. But he had not married, he did not plan to marry, for the present arrangement did not come within his notions of marriage, about which he had the sentimental and high-flown ideas of a man ignorant of women. This woman with whom he was to be afflicted almost indefinitely, at least at intervals, was something outside his experience.
Everything about her disturbed him. She was not un-beautiful, with her dark eyes, dark hair, and the rest of the usual appurtenances, but there was nothing in her that set out to challenge him physically, and so he was cold.
‘How long am I supposed to stay with you?’ she enquired next, in exactly the cut-and-dried way he now—dismally— expected of her.
‘They said, a few days.’
There was a long silence. The great pleasant room was full of water sounds, and watery reflections from the pools and fountains.
‘How do you do it in your country?’ he enquired, knowing this was clumsy but not able to think of anything else.
‘Do what?’
‘Well, we hear you have a lot of children, for a start.’
‘I have five of my own. But I am the mother of many. More than fifty.’
She could see that everything she said put greater distance between them.
‘It is our custom, if a child is left an orphan, that I should become its mother.’
‘Adopt it.’
‘It is not one of our words. I become its mother.’
‘I suppose you feel about them exactly as you do about your own,’ he said, and this was a mimicry. But of something she had not said.
‘No, I did not say that. Besides, fifty children are rather more than one can keep very close to.’
‘Then how are they your children?’
‘They all have the same rights. And I spend the same time with each of them, as I am able.’
‘It’s not my idea of a mother for my children.’
‘Is that what is expected of us, you think?’
This infuriated him! He had not thought very much at all about this appalling, affronting imposition, he had been too emotional. But at the least he had supposed that there would be children ‘to cement the alliance’ — or something of that sort.
‘Well, what else? What did you have in mind? Amorous dalliance once every few weeks? You!’ And he snorted out his disgust with her.
She was trying not to look at him too closely. She had seen that a close steady look — which was her way—discomfited him. And besides, he appealed to her less than she did to him. She found this great soldier gross, with his heavy overheated flesh, his hot, resentful eyes, his rough sun-bleached hair which reminded her of the fleeces of a much prized breed of sheep that flourished on a certain mountain.
‘There’s more to mating than children,’ she observed.
And the commonsensicalness of this caused him to groan out loud and strike his fists hard on the floor beside him.
‘Well, if so, one wouldn’t think you knew much about that.’
‘Indeed,’ she retorted. ‘But in fact it is one of the skills of our Zone.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no.’ And he sprang up and went striding about the room, beating the delicate walls with his fists.
She, still cross-legged on her cushion, watched him, interested, as she would have done some strange new species.
He stopped. He seemed to make an effort. Then he turned, teeth gritted, strode across to her, picked her up, and threw her on the couch. He put his hand across her mouth in the approved way, twitched up her dress, fingered himself to see if he was up to it, thrust himself into her, and accomplished his task in half a dozen swift movements.
He then straightened himself, for he had not removed his feet from the floor during this process and, already embarrassed, showed his feeling that all was not right by a gesture of concern most unusual in him: he twitched her dress down again and removed his hand from her mouth quite gently.
She was lying there looking up at him quite blank. Amazed. She was not weeping. Nor scratching. Nor calling him names. Nor showing the cold relentless repulsion that he dreaded to see in his women. Nothing. It occurred to him that she was interested in a totally unsuspected phenomenon.
‘Oh, you,’ he groaned out, between his teeth, ‘how did I get saddled with you.’
At which she suddenly let out a snort of something that was unmistakably amusement. She sat up. She swung her legs down over the couch, then she all at once burst into swift tears that shook her shoulders quite soundlessly, and then, just as suddenly, she stopped crying, and crept to her cushion, where she sat with her back to the wall, staring at him.
He noted that she was afraid of him, but not in any way that could appeal to him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s that.’ He gave her uneasy sideways glances, as if waiting for a comment.
‘Is that really what you do?’ she enquired. ‘Or is it because you don’t like me?’
At this he gave her a look which was all appeal, and he sat on the bottom of the bed, and pounded it hard, with his fists.
She saw, at last, that he was a boy, he was not much more than a small boy. She saw him as one of her own half-grown sons, and for the first time, her heart softened.
Looking at him with the tears still full in her great eyes, she said, ‘You know, I think there might be something you could learn from us.’
He gave a sort of shake of his great shaggy head, as if too much was reaching his ears all at once. But he remained leaning forward, not looking at her, but listening.
‘For one thing, have you never heard that one may choose the times to conceive children?’
He winced. But only because again she talked of children. He pounded the bed with one fist, and stopped.
‘You did not know that the nature of a child may be made by its conception?’
He shook his head and hung it. He sighed.
‘If I am pregnant now, as I could be, then this child will have nothing to thank us for.’
He suddenly flung himself down on the bed, prone, and lay there, arms outstretched.
Again, a long silence. The smell of their coupling was a small rank reminder of lust, and he looked up at her. She sat leaning against the wall, very pale, tired, and there was a bruise by her mouth, where his thumb had pressed.
He let out a groan. ‘It seems there is something I can learn from you,’ he said, and it was not in a child’s voice.
She nodded. Looking at each other, they saw only that they were unhappy, and did not know what to expect from the other.
She it was who got up, sat by him on the couch, and laid her small hands on both sides of his great neck as he still lay prone, chin on his fist.
He turned over. It was an effort for him to face her.
He took her hands, and lay there on his back, she sitting quietly close to him. She tried to smile, but her lips trembled, and tears rolled down her face. He gave an exclamation, and pulled her down beside him. He was astounded that his own eyes had tears in them.
He tried to comfort this strange woman. He felt her small hands on his shoulders, in a pressure of consolation and pity.
Thus they fell asleep together, worn out by it all.
This was the first lovemaking of these two, the event which was fusing the imaginations of two realms.
He woke, and was at once alert. His senses were anxiously at work, mapping the space that surrounded him where it should not, coming to terms with sounds that suggested whispering, danger. His tent flap had been left open … but the opening was higher than it should be: his tent had been torn away by a wind, or an attack? Water
… water flowing, and rising: the canals were overflowing, would he find himself standing in water? Ready to accept the cold wet clasp of a calamitous flood around his ankles, he swung his feet over onto a dry floor, and had taken several strides forward, calling out in the hoarse shocked voice of nightmare for his orderly, when he saw that he had mistaken the high curve of the central pillar where it met the ceiling for the tent opening. At once he remembered everything. He turned around in the dark, believing that the woman Al·Ith could be mocking him. But it was too dark even to see the couch. What he wanted then was simply to stride out of that place and not come back. With the understanding it was the fountains tinkling he had been taking for floods and inundations, the panic thought overcame him that he was not himself. He was undermined, unmanned, and made a coward. Bitterness shook him; his mouth was dry with it. Quite simply he was appalled—by the situation, by himself, by her. Yet, if he knew nothing else, he knew obedience. An order had brought him here to this effeminate pavilion, and duty must take him back to that couch. Convinced that she was lying awake and somehow watching him, he nevertheless took cautious steps in the dark until his shins encountered the softness of the couch. He slid himself to a half-sitting position, and began feeling the couch for her limbs — for her. Then he was groping all over the surface for her and finding nothing. She had escaped! Relief! That could only be her fault, and not his! He did not have to do anything! But then, these thoughts were chased away by indignation, and by chase lust. If she had escaped she must be caught. The confusions and indecisions of the last minutes came together in a surge of energy. He actually began a lively whistling — then thought she might be somewhere in the room, perhaps behind the pillar, watching him. And laughing. He swung around and strode to the pillar and felt all about with his hands. Nothing. Again he was about to raise his voice to call his orderly, and remembered that there were to be no servants here, no regular attendants. He did not mind about that: this king was happiest on campaign, a soldier among soldiers, and not marked out from them except that it was his task to make decisions. What he did mind was having to be alone with her without attendants. Shut up with a woman. This woman. Who as a witch might certainly be somewhere in the room, seeing where he could not. Anger fed his decisiveness. He pulled his army cloak about him and strode to the door opening onto the fountains.