there are not. There has been a long steady decrease.’
‘Yes, and with us, too.’
‘Outlying parts of our Zone are lying derelict.’
‘Yes, and with us, too.’
They were silent a long while. Through the drenched air of the eastern sky, light struggled from the rising sun. The clouds were a pale wet gold, and a yellowish haze lay everywhere. The spice trees were spangled with rainbows and shafts of opaline light pierced the banks of fog rising from the marshes. The fountains splashed on water, and their noise seemed subdued by the general damp.
‘I suppose it is quite pretty,’ she said in the smallest of dismayed voices, and suddenly he let out a bellow of a laugh, but it was not unfriendly, far from it. ‘Oh, come now, it isn’t as bad as that,’ he said. ‘You’ll see, when the sun is up, and things have dried off. We have some very pleasant days down here, you know.’
‘I hope so! Feel my dress, Ben Ata!’
But this invitation put them back again. It was certainly not coquetry, and to be invited to feel her dress for any other reason affronted him. He took a fold of the dark blue stuff between thumb and finger, and pronounced it damp.
‘Ben Ata, we have gone wrong somewhere. Both our Zones. Badly. What are we going to do?’
His hand dropped away. He frowned. ‘Why don’t they tell us what is wrong, quite simply, and be done with it. And then we could put it right.’ He observed her very small wry smile. ‘Well, and what is wrong with that?’
‘I think we are supposed to think it out for ourselves.’
‘But why! What for! What is the sense of it! It wastes time.’
‘That’s not how things work — I think that must be it,’ she almost whispered.
‘How do you know?’ But as he asked, he observed himself that his question was already answered. ‘How long is it since you had an Order?’
‘So long that no one can remember. But there are old stories. And songs,’ she said.
‘Well, I certainly can’t remember anything. When I became king nothing of the sort was told me. When the Order arrived I remembered that they have to be obeyed. That I did know. But that was all.’
‘In my lifetime there has been nothing. Nor in my mother’s.’
‘And hers?’
‘Not for generations of the Mothers.’
‘Ah,’ he said, brisk and noncommittal.
‘You know, I think that things are very serious. Very bad. Dangerous. They must be!’
‘You think they are?’
‘Well, for us to be together like this. Ordered to be. Don’t you see?’
Now he was silent again. He was frowning. He sighed, without knowing he did, and it was from the effort of unaccustomed thought — he was not used to speculation on these lines. As for her, she watched him: this Ben Ata, the man who sat quiet, thinking, trying to puzzle out the meaning of their dilemma — this man she felt she could like. Respect. Again her hand went out and into his, in an impulse of friendliness, and his great hand closed over hers like a bird trap. It opened at once and she saw him look down at their two hands in incredulity. Then he gave her the most helpless, unhappy glance.
Now she sighed, briskly withdrew her hand, and stood up.
She turned her back on the yellow and gold skies of the east, and stared up past him into the sky. She was looking up at the peaks and heights of her own realm. ‘Ohhhh,’ she sighed out, ‘look … I had no idea … I did not have any idea …‘
The mountains of Zone Three climbed more than a third of the way to the zenith. She stood with her head bent back, gazing up at the towering lit heights there. The rising sun was making them blaze and glitter, and the sharp points of the uttermost peaks seemed to be heaped with clouds that shone pink and red and gold—but they were not clouds, these were the piled snows of a thousand years. And low down against this mass lay the dark edge, rock-fringed, fort-fringed, which was the edge of the escarpment she had ridden down only the day before. The vast plain that lay between the escarpment and the foothills of the plateau, which was itself the low base for the innumerable mountain masses of our land—this was not visible at all. One would not know it was there. The inhabitants of this low watery Zone could never imagine, gazing up at that scene of a hundred mountain ranges, the infinite variations of a landscape and country that were not to be seen by them at all. Al·Ith was standing there, her hands cradling her bent back head, gazing up, up, and she was smiling with delight and longing, and weeping with happiness as she gazed.
Ben Ata gazed at her. He was uncomfortable.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said gruffly.
Reluctantly, she returned her gaze downward, and saw him disapproving. ‘But why not?’
‘It is not right.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘We do not encourage it.’
‘What?’
‘Cloud gathering, we call it.’
‘You mean, people don’t look up at all that … that glory?’
‘It is weakening.’
‘But I don’t believe it, Ben Ata!’
‘It is so. Those are the laws.’
‘If I had to live down here I don’t think I would be able to take my eyes away. Look, look … ’ and she flung her arms wide and exulted at the vast panoramas of light, of colour, that filled all the western skies. “Clouds!” she sang out. ‘Those are not clouds, that’s our country, it is what we are.’
‘We have times for looking up there. Definite times. Festivals. Once every ten years. Otherwise people caught spending too much time looking up there are punished.’
‘And how do you punish them?’
‘We put heavy weights on their heads so that they cannot look up.’
‘Ben Ata, that is wicked.’
‘I did not make the law. It has always been our law.’
‘Always, always, always … how do you know?’
‘I do not think that any one of us has ever questioned it. You are the first.’
She sank down beside him. Close. Again there was the small shrinking from her that he could not control. This exultation of hers, this rapture, was abhorrent to him. He could hardly bear to see her enhanced smiling face. Though on the other hand he did feel the beginnings of relief that she was not always so pale and serious. Her face, now illumined by the rosy light from those far peaks, was as pretty a pink as any girl’s he could remember, and her heavy hair, still pearled from the mists, was in wisps around her face.
But: ‘You must not stare like that. It is against our laws. While you are here, you must obey our laws.’
‘Yes, that is proper,’ she whispered, and turned her eyes away.
‘When you are in your own country, you can of course do as you like.’ He sounded to her like her brother, who had been steward of her household for many years before he had asked to be transferred to the post of Keeper of the Memories.
‘But in our country that is what we are, Ben Ata.’
Suddenly, and like light striking into her brain, she was dazzled. ‘Ben Ata, I’ve just had a … ’ but it had gone. She put her hands over her face and rocked back and forth, trying to remember what had just fled past her.
‘Are you ill?’
‘No, I am not. But I almost understood something.’