I said, “My love, I’m not the Warlord, but in a sense I am a hundred years older than he was. I hope that in a hundred years that we’re wiser than we are today.”
She sighed again, “Mark, if there were a world to rule, I’m confident that you would rule it. If all men were sane, you would teach them to be wise.”
As I watched the sun move toward the horizon I said, “I don’t want to rule a world.”
She said, “Only a man who wants no part of it is worthy of ruling a nation. Nonetheless, it will make things… easier to accept.”
We both laughed and I hugged her to my side. But there was that hint of secret obligation again. I decided to pursue it.
I said, “Aeyli-ah, what is this secret? This obligation? I know that you want me to know, and that you don’t want to tell me. Are you certain that you have to carry this burden? Would it be better to just tell me and have it over with? I know that it can’t be anything that would hurt me or separate us, but it seems to trouble you. Why?”
The girl turned into my arms and kissed me on the mouth.
She said, “My Prince, I think that my secret will make you very happy. Though it will come as a great surprise, I’m sure of that now. Believe me, it makes me very, very happy. When the time comes, please don’t question it. Let it be what it is and be happy about it. It will make it much easier if you try to embrace it.”
I asked, “Easier on who? Is it for my sake or for yours?”
She smiled and said, “Yes! And since you know that my secret will be revealed only when I choose, that’s the end for now. Oh, it would be so nice to practice the swords here on the roof. Unfortunately, it’s late and we don’t want any more poor dumb beasts choosing to die today. We better go secure the… bed chamber,” and she winked at me significantly and smiled.
We went down the stairs and back to the room and sealed ourselves in for the night. Aeyli-ah explained that the new fur would still need to be tanned and prepared and that couldn’t be done until we had reached her village, so it wouldn’t be on our bed for several days yet.
She begged me to teach her more of the sword work before bed and we practiced for several hours.
After we had been practicing for quite a while, she said, “Tell me more about customs on Earth. You say that mates are often false and might abandon each other. Don’t they mate for life like we do here on Barsoom?”
I said, “Well, they vow that it will be for life, but about half the time, or maybe more, it’s not really how it works out and the vows are often broken.”
She practiced her moves and said, “What happens? What do they do? Do they live alone for the rest of their lives?”
I said, “I hate to say it because you will see it as more insanity, but often, many times, mates will be unfaithful and have sex with the mate of another person. Or, they simply grow to hate each other because of the problems caused by not knowing what the other one is saying, like I described before.”
She struck my sword in the two-man practice and asked, “So, they do have just one mate at a time, except for this insanity of ‘loving’ someone else’s mate? Does a man ever take more than one mate at a time? Under one roof?”
I said, “Um, there are a lot of nations on Earth and some will take more than one wife at a time. Three or four thousand years ago, when the population of the world was much less, it was more common. In those days, a man might take two or three brides under the same roof. In more recent days, in most parts of Earth, that’s no longer practiced.”
She continued her moves, improving by the minute, asking, “Why? What changed? Why not continue to take more than one wife? Did they find that it wouldn’t work? That the man couldn’t love more than one?”
I countered her current attack and said, “Of course, it’s almost impossible because of competition and jealousy and the fear that one would be loved more than another and it was just never possible to live happily. We have enough trouble with just one. I knew a man once who came from a country where they could have more than one wife and he told me that it just wasn’t worth the trouble.”
She said, “So it’s because of the insanity. We have our own insanity here, but not when it comes to mating. Hardly ever.”
I went on, “My understanding is that it was also in some ways a matter of difficulty over property and hardness of heart. In the older days, the mating was for life. Later, as men gathered in cities and laws were complicated, and as a man or woman wanted to separate from their mate, if a man had more than one wife, and they had built a house together, who would get the house? For some time, women on Earth couldn’t own a house by law, so the man kept the house and the woman was simply thrown out. But if the man was unjust, why should the woman be his companion for many years and then have nothing if he decided in his hardness of heart to discard her? So, over time, laws were made that when a man discarded his mate, she took half of the property that they had accumulated while they lived together.”
She said, “That is crazy and complicated. If a man had three wives, then the one he discarded, or who was unfaithful, did she get one quarter of the property even if she were the one to break the vows and could she take his possessions to another man’s house?”
I said, “Those were some of the problems. These laws were made about two thousand years ago and they settled on laws that said that a man could only have one mate at a time. In most places, anyway. If either of them wanted to dissolve their marriage, they went to a court, and a judge decided how they would split the property and they would go separate ways, and probably hate each other for the rest of their lives. It’s a bad situation and causes a great deal of pain on Earth.”
She asked, “But, in the older days, a man would take three mates and they would be bound for life and they could be happy? As long as the wives agreed and their love was such that no jealousy arose between them?”
I said, “Yes, it seemed so. Even today, there are small areas where this still happens. But the communication problems make it very difficult for people on Earth to be happy.”
We continued our practice and Aeyli-ah seemed satisfied to accept my explanations without much comment. At the end, we crawled into bed and made love, much more tenderly than the night before. My princess did not experience a thousand deaths, but she did have at least a dozen, and we slept well in each other’s arms.
Chapter 13
The Story of Babies and Brides
Aeyli-ah woke me at dawn and we packed up our things and filled our water bags. We made a pack of the large sack with the fruit and the fur trophy and tied it with leather thongs onto my back. We were on the way within 20 minutes of waking up.
Aeyli-ah ran and I matched her speed. It was cooler this early in the day, but it was still dry and at least 80 degrees. The village that we were headed for was called Tranna and it was where she had lived all of her life, when she wasn’t on duty at the shrine of John Carter’s Cave.
As we traveled, we talked.
I said, “Aeyli-ah, John Carter traveled to Earth from Barsoom and back at least once or twice and he wrote about life on Barsoom, but in some details, and maybe in the stories themselves, they were fictionalized and unreliable. I think he did that, or his relative or another author did, to hide certain facts. The location of the cave has been hidden for a hundred years.”
She said, “John Carter traveled back and forth many times. They say that his habit was to do so at least once or twice a year during times of piece.”
I said, “Once or twice a year? But I was told that the portal could only be used once every two years!”