The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5. Doris Lessing

table, where Dabeeb had been. He was tapping out rhythms on the table. He had not been fooled. He did not know what was going on, though he knew something was. He would get it all out of Dabeeb. If he had not got it out of Al·Ith by then.

      The two women returned to find him sitting and smiling, the picture of good nature.

      He was stung into admiration by both of them. Dabeeb’s swarthy and energetic beauty was well accommodated by the tawny silky dress Al·Ith had just taken off. Al·Ith had on her bright yellow dress that seemed to take in all the light there was in the great softly lit room — and to give it out again. Her loose black hair shone, her eyes shone, she was full of mischief and gaiety. Ben Ata was thinking, frankly, to himself, of the pleasures there would be in having them both at once — a possibility that had not entered his head until recent instructions with Elys. He remembered Al·Ith’s scorn of the word have. He sat head slightly lowered, looking up from under his brows at the two — and his mind was full of a painful struggle suddenly, as if it were trying to enlarge beyond its boundaries. He was having a flash of understanding —into the way Al·Ith scorned him for using the language he did. But it did not last. A gloomy suspicion came back, while he watched Al·Ith go with Dabeeb to the arch, and Dabeeb wrap herself tightly in the old dark cloak, and then with a smile at him and something intimate and quick with Al·Ith, run off to be enclosed in the pelting grey of the rain.

      Al·Ith watched her go, and smiled. And turned to him, and smiled. In her sunny yellow, she was lovelier than he believed — at that moment—he deserved. He could see that she was a quick, volatile, flamelike thing, and understood how he subdued and dimmed her. But jealousy was undoing him.

      She was inviting him. Everything about her, as she stood smiling, enticed him. He got up clumsily and heavily and rushed at her. She evaded him, not out of coquetry, but from real dismay. ‘No, no, Ben Ata, don’t spoil it …’ And she was trying to meet him lightly, and gaily, as they had not long ago, during hours which now to Ben Ata seemed so far above anything he had thought and been since that he would not believe in them, any more than he was able easily to lift his gaze to the vast mountainous region that filled all the western skies. He grabbed her, and she withheld him. ‘Wait, wait, Ben Ata. Don’t you want to be as we were then?’ Oh, yes, he did, he did very much, desperately, he was all inflamed with wanting just that and nothing else — but he could not help it, or himself, or her — he had to be, just then, all grab and grind, and he extinguished all the possibilities of sweetness and the playfulness, and the slow mounting of the exchanges. He had her. And then, all the light gone out of her, she had him. It was not a new experience for him, since Elys, but all the time he was remembering that other time and he made this one obstinate and heavy because, simply, that other time had gone and was not here. This time Al·Ith did not weep, or allow herself to be pulverized into submission. She gave as good as she got, words which she chose, carefully, out of many, and handed to him, with a smiling air of indifference, scorn even.

      They ended some hours of this kind of obdurate interchange unfriendly to each other, and inwardly depressed.

      When they rose to bathe and dress and arrange themselves, the lovely airy room seemed denuded of its sparkle, and the drum had stopped beating.

      This time, all was efficient and considered. She wrapped herself in a cloak, she remembered her shield, and stepped out into the gardens from the opposite door Dabeeb had run down into the rain from. There the fountains played coldly under a cold low blue sky.

      Ben Ata came after her, similarly cloaked and ready. She called, and the two horses, black and white, came cantering up, and they leapt onto their backs and rode off, soberly, down towards the road west. They used the time of the journey to discuss what was seen along the road — the crops, the canals, the fields.

      Nothing more sensible and connubial could be imagined. But Al·Ith was so far inwardly from Ben Ata that he could get from her not one little moment of real recognition. It was clear to him that she did not want anything from him — only to be rid of him. He knew perfectly well he was to blame.

      At the frontier, they reined in their two horses, and Al·Ith was about to shoot forward into the sunny immensities of that plain below the mountains when he called to her hoarsely, ‘Al·Ith, wait.’

      She turned and gave him the coolest of mocking smiles.

      ‘I suppose now you are going to Kunzor,’ he shouted, enraged.

      ‘And others,’ she called back, and rode off.

      He muttered to himself that he would order Dabeeb back, but in fact, knew he would not. He was thinking. He had realized that while jealousy and resentment and suspicion worked in him, poisoning everything, there were other things he could be understanding. And he was determined that he would.

      The people on the roads who saw him returning to the camps, remarked to each other that the king seemed subdued. That foreign one was not cheering him up, not much, that was for certain, whatever else she might be doing!

      Exactly as had happened before, both Al·Ith and Ben Ata, separated from each other, one riding on into Zone Three, one riding back into Zone Four, felt that the burden of their emotions for one another was not lightened, as they had wanted, but was heavier. Together, they provoked each other into unwanted feelings, apart, thoughts of the other tormented and stung. Ben Ata felt that he was carrying around with him a curse, or a demon, who prevented him from being with Al·Ith in a way that would lead to an incredible happiness. Al·Ith felt a most painful bond with her husband — a word she was examining, turning over and over, as if it were a new ring of a complicated design or a new metal made in the workshops of the northern regions where the mines were. Ben Ata was a weight in her side, no, in her belly, where the new child was, but that was still no more than a speck or a dab of new flesh, so it could not be that which made her so heavy. Riding forward, she was in mind with Ben Ata, whose face was set towards the low, damp fields … She could have asked him this, found out that … if she had done this instead of that … for, away from him, she could not truly believe that her behaviour had been as she remembered it was. When she had come back into the tall light central room she was vibrant and strong because of the exchange with Dabeeb, which had made her alive and confident, so that she had felt far from the gloomy moods of Ben Ata. Her yellow dress had fitted her like happiness. And yet nothing had come of it but the punishments Ben Ata called love.