LITMIR.BIZ

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by the other, that foreigner.

      ‘However,’ said she, as if in continuation of a conversation, ‘I am certainly pregnant.’

      ‘You are? Are you sure? Splendid!’ Feeling that an embrace of some kind was due, he made as if to approach her, but as she clearly felt no such impulse he thankfully forgot about it.

      ‘Of course I am sure.’

      ‘Why? How?’

      ‘As the women of your country, but certainly not as we know.’ And with this she laughed. She laughed, while he maintained polite looks and waited for her to finish.

      ‘Well, good, I am delighted.’

      ‘Well, so am I, since it is probably what is required of us.’

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘No, of course not. I am not sure of anything.’

      ‘What are we supposed to do next?’

      ‘How should I know? But perhaps they will tell me to go home?’

      At the look of instant relief on his face, she rolled with laughter, pointing at him, and he, realizing what she had seen, and that she was willingly confessing to the same, laughed with her. This feast of laughter having ended, they were forced to acknowledge that it was still far from midnight, and that if left to their own devices they would certainly separate.

      ‘Chess?’ he suggested.

      ‘Why not.’

      He beat her, then she beat him. They were both very good and in fact master and mistress of the game respectively, in both their two realms. This meant the games took a long time and it was dawn when they were finished.

      Both wondered (and hoping the other did not guess) if more lovemaking was yet appropriate, but decided against it.

      Walking again in the mists and splashings of the gardens, with the drum everywhere, in their blood, and in their minds, she called his attention to the files of soldiers down below, deploying among the wet hazes of the meadows. She watched his face, respecting what she saw on it: it was a complete knowledge of what he saw, and she knew he was marshalling praise and criticism and orders, for the perfection of that work of his, the army.

      ‘And who,’ she asked, in a way that would make him know she was in earnest, ‘are your enemies?’

      He tensed, and she understood he had been thinking hard on this question ever since she had first asked it of Jarnti, who had transmitted her words jeering, but inwardly disturbed, to his king.

      ‘If we have no enemies, then why do we have armies?’ he asked her, not at all in jest, but in respect for her questioning of him.

      ‘Who do you fight?’

      He was tense and silent. She knew he was remembering the pillage and the rapine of innumerable campaigns, and thinking if these had in fact been for some ghost of a mistaken idea then …

      ‘We are not your enemies — it is not even possible for one of us to cross the border without bad effects — yet you have forts all along our frontier from one end to the other, just as close as you can get to it without the soldiers being made ill by its proximity.’

      He gave an odd little shrugging movement of his shoulders.

      ‘How long is it since anyone fired so much as a single warning shot there?’

      He laughed, shortly, in acknowledgment. ‘So long that we can’t remember. Mind you, we do sometimes arrest someone as a spy … but then let him go again.’

      She laughed. ‘Then why?’

      ‘We have large, and efficient armies.’

      Down among the golden fogs that were rising straight up into the air and dissipating at about their eye level, the glittering brightly coloured soldiers wheeled and marched, and the sharp barking sounds of the orders seemed to fade at about the same level, as if the sounds and the mists were one.

      ‘And Zone Five? You have forts there? A frontier?’

      ‘And skirmishes and even battles.’

      This startled her: she had forgotten there was a war there.

      ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘but surely …’

      ‘Yes, I know.’ Awkward, embarrassed, apologetic, as if he were at fault before her and not before Them—the Providers and the Orderers — he was stammering. ‘I have been wondering since you brought the matter up. It is true … of course we are not supposed to fight … ’

      ‘Real battles?’

      ‘Yes. Well … nothing very serious …’

      ‘Wounded? Casualties?’

      ‘Wounded and dead.’

      Her breath was a long, dismayed, and even frightened sigh. He tinned on her the bleakest of faces. ‘Yes, I know. But I swear it—it grew up like that. I never thought … none of us did … it was not until you … ’ And he crashed his great fist down on a low parapet that bordered a pool.

      ‘Who starts it? The fighting? Is it possible for people from this Zone to cross into that one — and back — without damage, or danger?’

      ‘At one time I know that it was as impossible to cross from one Zone to another, as it is now for us to move back and forth between your Zone and ours, without shields. But something seems to have changed. I’m not saying that it is easy. There isn’t large-scale movement across the frontier. Nor does it happen often. But the fighting takes place along the borders, sometimes on this side, and sometimes on that — never far inside their Zone.’

      ‘You’ve been there?’

      ‘Yes. More than once.’

      ‘What is it like, Zone Five?’

      He shuddered, and rubbed his hands up and down his forearms, to warm them. He was quite pale with dislike of Zone Five.

      ‘It is as bad as that,’ she said, not without irony, for she knew that he was feeling for that place what she and all of us in Zone Three felt for this one. He caught the irony, acknowledged it, nodded, and put his arm around her, in affection. ‘Yes, it is as bad as that.’

      And, drawing her close, he put his face down into the coils of her hair and she heard him muttering, ‘But what are we to do. Al·Ith? What? Bad enough that I have only just begun to think of it.’

      ‘As I have of the deficiencies in our Zone. Do you know, Ben Ata, I have not had time to tell you, but I have ridden all around the outer regions of our Zone since I saw you last …’

      ‘Alone?’ said he, incredulous and sharp, despite himself, and was not able to laugh when she said, indulgent, ‘Of course alone, since I wanted to … but that isn’t the point, Ben Ata. When I was on a certain high point of country, below the central massif, but where I could look straight out northwest, I could see … but the point is, that none of us have done that for so long I don’t think anyone could say when we last did. You need punishment helmets to prevent your people looking there — ’ and she pulled him around so that his dazzled eyes rose to the great heights of Zone Three, now all the colours of a fire opal. ‘Your people won’t look up there, no, keep your eyes on it, Ben Ata, but our people never look beyond our borders, and this is without any punishments or forbiddings. It never occurs to us. We are too prosperous, too happy, everything is so comfortable and pleasant with us, Ben Ata … I don’t know what to say or to think …’ and she was astounded, utterly appalled, to find that again tears ran down her cheeks, while he bent over her, forgetting the beguiling colours of the great peaks, making small concerned noises at these so foreign tears. And he even brushed a tear from her lid with one large forefinger and looked at it, as if this tear could not be like any other he had seen.

      In song, in picture, and in story, this scene is known as ‘Al·Ith’s Tear.’ It is

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