The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5

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.