LITMIR.BIZ

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six persons, woman, four men, and the girl, had often been together thus. And Al·Ith had very often been with the men, all together or singly. These men were among the closest people to her, not even excepting her sister. It was not possible for her now to shut them out, even for her own protection. She was quite open to them, just as she was at the same time open to the demands of Ben Ata, which were claiming her fiercely. She was trembling.

      The men all embraced her, and sat close. They congratulated her on the new pregnancy. All the time she was looking, and feeling, worse.

      ‘You are ill,’ said the girl’s real father, Kunzor, and Al·Ith said she was, she could not help it, she was sorry. And she fainted clean away.

      They called Murti·, who explained that Al·Ith’s state of mind was beyond anything they were likely to understand. Murti· undertook to stand in for Al·Ith on this occasion and set herself to be kind to the poor girl, who was astounding them all by wringing her hands and saying that ‘it was her fault’ her mother was ill. This struck them as a sort of lunacy: they had never heard anything like it.

      When Al·Ith came to herself, she was attended only by Kunzor, who was trying to understand her. He had known her in many complex ways, but this was entirely beyond him. Al·Ith weeping and distraught was something he had never imagined possible.

      She said she had to get on her horse and go, and he took her down the steps to the square, called for Yori, and saw her ride off.

      It did not help that it was early night when she reached the plain, and had to ride in the face of the cold wind from the east all the way to the frontier.

      She hoped that it would be Ben Ata at the frontier to meet her, and it was. He sat cold and silent, in his black army cloak, waiting, gazing up the road, pale, intent, fixed.

      At the first sight of him, her spirits sank. What had happened within her was that riding across the plain in the bitter wind, comforted only by the warmth of her horse, she had been thinking of the long friendship she had known with Kunzor, and the men whom she had been close to—she was already wondering about these words that people used. She had, in the past, not used words, not even in her mind. She had felt her closeness to them, as part of the fabric of her life. Meeting one of them again, by plan or by chance, they would at once move together as they had always, according to the intuitions of the moment. She had not said they were this and that, beyond friends. Now, she wondered, were they husbands? Certainly not if Ben Ata was one! But, during that cold ride, she had been thinking of Ben Ata, whom she was so soon to be with, as a friend — with all the simplicity of good sense and responsibility that word meant to her.

      Seeing him there, the bonds in her flesh and being with the men who sustained her in Zone Three snapped and left her vulnerable.

      Ben Ata waited till she had crossed into his Zone, and handed her a shield — he was right in thinking that she was likely again to have forgotten hers. Then he put out his hand to grasp her bridle — but she did not have one — and put his horse forward so that he was side by side with her, she facing into Zone Four, he into Zone Three. His eyes searched her face as if for a hidden crime.

      ‘What is the matter?’ she asked, irritated.

      ‘The matter is that I’ve understood something.’

      ‘And what is that?’ She rode forward, sighing, meaning him to hear it, and he came after her, and rode so close her foot had to be curled in on poor Yori’s side to avoid being crushed.

      ‘You don’t love me,’ he announced.

      Al·Ith did not respond at all.

      The words had simply gone past her. She had seen that Ben Ata was in a fine old state about something, and that there was no point at all in expecting any comfort or sustaining from him. She was engaged in strengthening her inner self.

      He rode close, casting dramatic looks into her face, and trying to lean forward so that he could see into her eyes.

      It was early morning. They were riding down the escarpment, looking into fields where as usual mists were rising, admittedly very pretty in the weak sunlight.

      ‘You do not love me. Not really,’ he was shouting.

      This time Al·Ith heard the word love. She was making a note that the two Zones used it differently.

      What had happened to Ben Ata was this.

      When she had left him on the frontier, he had been shaken by emotions he had not known existed. If Elys had indicated to him that in the physical realm there were facts that perhaps he might have missed, he now saw that there was a world of emotions that had been kept from him until now. He visited the madam of the whorehouse with this problem who, after a brisk diagnostic exchange, said that it wasn’t Elys he needed — she in fact had gone back to her own town, much congratulated and very pleased with herself — but a serious affair.

      He had of course been aware that affairs were what some people had, but not, surely, soldiers!

      Seeing Dabeeb brushing down her husband’s uniform, where it hung on a line behind the married officers’ quarters, he speculated on her possibilities. At once appropriate emotions invaded him in swarms, quite amazing him, for he could not imagine where he had got them from.

      Dabeeb was disconcerted, of course, and enjoined caution, common sense, and then secrecy. It goes without saying that she was frightened of her husband. Affairs she had had, but not for the purpose of stimulating Jarnti. She was even more afraid of Ben Ata. She had no intention of yielding him her person, but kept him off with a variety of kisses and touches of the hand, all nicely adjusted to holding the situation while she could think what best to do.

      Jarnti found his king in a compromising situation with his wife.

      Violent scenes. Jealousy. Reproaches. The men fought, decided that the friendship of men outweighed the love of women, clasped hands, drank together for the whole of a night, fell together into a canal at dawn … all according to the book.

      Ben Ata was now violently in love with Al·Ith.

      Riding together through the golden mists, he ground his teeth and yearned towards her, while she murmured, ‘Is there a dictionary in the pavilion?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘It is the word love. We use it differently.’

      ‘Cold. Cold and heartless.’

      ‘Cold, I certainly am. I am frozen through.’

      Compunction touched him but was inappropriate to the moment.

      ‘Very well then, how do you use the word love?’

      ‘I don’t think we do. What it means is being with someone. Taking the responsibility for everything that happens between you. Between the two people in question and of course all the other people involved or who might be involved.’

      It occurred to him that during these tumultuous six days he had forgotten what Al·Ith was like.

      His elation drained away. He rode apart from her, and with a good distance between them the two horses cantered together up the hill to the gardened pavilions where the drum had been beating since the evening before.

      As they let the horses go to find their own way to attendants, they were in a welter of wet, and ran through it to the pavilion, where she fled shaking water everywhere to her rooms. The cupboards were empty again of the dresses from the town, and she dried herself and looked through those she had brought for one that would be right for this dejected mood she found in herself. The bright gold of yesterday was like a bird’s plumage in a wrong season. A brown was too lowering, but she raised that note a little with a tawny-orange, which seemed something she could aspire to, if things went well. Having put her hair up into Zone Four’s matronly braids, she took herself to the central room as Ben Ata came in from the other side. There was not a suggestion of armour about him. His under-tunic looked as if it had been put on with a view as to how it would look to her, and his hair had been brushed close to

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