Maia (88 page)

She got up and stood beside him, pretending to be weighing her words, letting her body's scent steal over him and slowly drawing through her fingers the sijk kerchief she carried at her wrist. After a little she murmured, "Well, I suppose-I suppose no one need know, U-Pokada. I mean, only you and me; I shan't tell anyone."

He hesitated. "Well, saiyett-"

In, a few minutes he had talked himself into promising that he would see what he could do tomorrow.

"No, it must be now, U-Pokada: I want to see him now, and then I'll go away and no one else will know at all."

It was getting dark in the room. He went to the door and called for lamps, continuing to look down the passage until they were brought by a disheveled old woman whose head jerked with a continual tic. When she had gone he came back and laid a hand on Maia's wrist, slightly clenching his fingers as he did so.

"Saiyett, it's risky. I oughtn't to do this; but you know- well, 'Beauty's a key to unlock every door'. " He hummed a moment, delighted with himself for having hit on so apt a phrase. The line came from a popular tavern song of the day.

"Is it a man?" She nodded. "His name?"

"Tharrin. From near Meerzat, in Tonilda."

"Your
friend? A lucky-oh, well" (he laughed) "he
would
be a lucky man if only he wasn't here, eh? But you've made
me
a lucky man, saiyett. Oh, yes, indeed!"

At the door he stopped. "I have to ask: you haven't brought him poison?"

She looked up in amazement, wondering whether she had heard aright. "Poison?"

He nodded.

"Brought him
poison?
Why ever should you think that?"

"Well, sometimes, you know, saiyett, prisoners-especially political prisoners-want to die quickly, and their friends want to help them. I have to see that doesn't happen."

She had heard tell of such things, but to find herself dealing with them in all earnest made her feel still more strange and bemused. She tried to collect her thoughts. The man needed convincing: the most convincing thing, it seemed to her, would be the truth.

"U-Pokada, I mean to get this man released. I have influence. That won't harm you, will it?"

"Harm me? Oh-no, saiyett, not in the least." He paused, apparently searching for something more emphatic. "No, no, I should be
gladl
Whatever would please
you
would please me. Wait here, I beg you, and be patient. I don't know the man, you understand, but I'll find him."

Alone, she waited in the empty room for what seemed a long time. It grew quite dark outside. She thought of Luma, sitting lethargic for hour after hour on the kilyett as it drifted down the Nordesh. She herself could not sit still, now pacing up and down, now opening the window and leaning out to pick fragments off the grimy creeper below the sill. Surely by now the man had had long enough to find anyone in the prison? Could he have betrayed her- sent a messenger, perhaps, to the chief priest? Should she go now, quickly? Yet if he had in fact betrayed her, to run away would avail her nothing.

The door opened behind her and she turned, but could not see clearly across the bright patch of light from the two lamps standing on the table between. As she came back to the bench the door closed and then she heard the lock click. Tharrin was standing before her, shivering in the stuffy room, not raising his eyes from the floor.

She had forethought that he was bound to look bad at close quarters; but not that he would smell worse than any animal (animals groom themselves), that the rims of his eyes would be crusted, his beard matted with old crumbs and dried spittle and that he would mutter and shake ceaselessly, cringing and wringing his hands like an old beggar.

"Tharrin," she said timidly-for it seemed almost as though she were interrupting some horrible dialogue between unseen beings-"Tharrin, it's Maia."

He made no answer and she put a hand on his wrist. "It's Maia, Tharrin."

Now he looked up, peering with half-closed eyes, as though through some kind of haze or distance between them.

"Maia? Oil-I remember." He seemed about to say more, but then suddenly began to cry, or rather to whimper, dry-eyed and cowering, shaking his head and hunching his shoulders as though standing out in heavy rain.

"Tharrin-oh, poor Tharrin-listen to me! You
must
listen to me, you
must
trust me! I'm going to help you; believe me, I'm going to get you out of here, Tharrin. But I can't do it unless you'll talk to me. There's things I've got to know. Come on, sit down here and talk to me."

As she pulled him gently by the arm he suddenly screamed, but so weak and puny a sound that it would scarcely have startled a bird. Drawing him down beside her on the bench, she could feel his ribs and backbone under his tattered robe. She recognized the robe. It was the one he had been wearing when they parted on the quay at Meerzat.

"Tharrin, dear, listen to me. I know just how you feel, because I've been through it, too. But I
can
help you: I've got money and influence: I'm a friend of powerful people; I'll save you. But to do that, I've got to know what's happened. Tell me what they say you've done."

"Sencho," he muttered after some moments. "Sencho was too clever for us, wasn't he?"

"Sencho's dead, dear: weeks and weeks ago." She wondered whether Pokada might be eavesdropping.

"Yes, of course," he said. He looked up at her piteously. "They're going to torture us, Maia: you can't know what it's like to wake and sleep day after day with the thought of that. People-people went mad coming up from Thettit. Made no difference: they're here just the same. Every day you wake up you remember-" He rocked himself backwards and forwards on the bench. She could see the lice crawling in his hair.

"Listen, Tharrin. Do you realize that I've become famous and rich? If I ask to talk to the Lord General, he'll see me; very likely the High Baron himself would see me. Do you know that?"

He nodded listlessly. "Oh, yes, I'd-I'd heard. 'Maia swam the river.' I knew it must be you." Then, with no change of tone, "The bread's all green and moldy, you know."

She realized that after many days of ill-treatment and

fear he had in all actuality become incapable of sustained thought-that his mind must spend all its waking time in virtually ceaseless flight from what it could not endure to apprehend. She wondered what his dreams could be like. Yet she would not allow herself to weep: this was no time for weeping.

"You were working secretly for the heldril in Tonilda, weren't you? Isn't that right?"

A nod. She took his hand in hers.

"That's where all that money used to come from? The money you used to give Morca? The money you spent on me?"

Another nod. "I never thought-" he whispered.

"You took messages to Thettit? And to Enka-Mordet and people like that? And you brought messages back, did you?"

"Money for us at home. More money than I could have got any other way." He paused. Then, "Can't you kill me, Maia? Haven't you got a knife or something?"

"No, dear, no such thing. I'm going to get you out of here safe, I promise you." She forced herself to kiss his cheek. "Ipromise! Now listen to me, Tharrin, because this is very important. I'm going to speak to some of my powerful friends, and p'raps they'll want to see you; I don't know. If we're going to save you-and we are-you've got to pull yourself together and get ready to put on a good appearance. Now I'm going to call in that head jailer or whatever he calls himself, and pay him to see you get everything you need. A bath and some clean clothes and proper food, and a comfortable bed. I'll bet he can fix all that if he wants to, and I'm going to see to it as he
does
want to. But you've got to
trust
me, Tharrin. You've got to be your own best friend. Come on, now, it's not too late to pull yourself together. This is Maia, your golden fish in the net; remember?"

"Yes, I remember. But I-I let you go. The slave-traders; I never even tried-"

"Never mind, dear. No need to talk about that now. You just stand up and try to look as manly and strong as you can, because I'm going to call him in and tell him what we need. You cheer up, now. Everything's going to be all right."

She had about three hundred meld with her. It was not a very great deal, but it would do for a start and she could

promise more. She went to the door, rapped firmly on it and called "U-Pokada!"

It was not easy, even for the Serrelinda, to get hold of the Lord General at so busy and troublous a time. He was not at his house the following morning, though she arrived there so early that the steward-as she could perceive- was embarrassed, his slaves being still at work in the reception rooms and the place not yet ready to receive callers and petitioners. Both the Lord General, he told her, and the young Lord Elvair-ka-Virrion were already gone to the Barons' Palace; he understood that later in the morning they meant to go down to the lower city to review the troops leaving for Thettit tomorrow. The lady Milvushina, however, was upstairs in Lord Elvair-ka-Virrion's rooms. Should he tell her the saiyett had come?

It had not previously crossed Maia's mind to tell Milvushina of her trouble. Thinking quickly-the man in his scarlet uniform standing deferentially before her-she realized that she had no great wish to do so. No great wish? She hesitated. What did she mean in thus replying to herself?

Milvushina had gone out of her way to show herself a friend; to speak of herself and her situation without reserve; to make common cause with Maia, warn her, talk of her own anxieties and expectations. If Maia were to tell her now of Tharrin she would-oh, yes, certainly she would-show every sympathy and probably even promise to put in a word. She would be all benevolence. Yet in her mind would arise, unexpressed, a picture of the grubby little peasant girl tumbled on the shore by her mother's fancy man. In a word, it wasn't what Milvushina would say, but what she
wouldn't
say, which made Maia reluctant to tell her her trouble or ask for her advice. Often, although we may not be ashamed in our own hearts-may even be proud or glad-of something we have done, because by our own standards it was genuinely good-good, if you like, to ourselves and to the gods, who understand everything-yet nevertheless we still feel troubled by the idea of it becoming known to someone else whom we feel

to be inflexibly different in outlook from ourselves. "Oh-
she
just wouldn't understand." "So you're ashamed?" asks an inward voice. No, no, inward voice; don't be so simplistic. Do you think there is only one color in the spectrum; or that some animal is universally "unclean" because one out of the world's countless religions has always maintained so? It is, rather, just that her values are not ours; that's all.

Maia, somewhat to her own surprise, heard herself asking to see Sessendris. The man raised his eyebrows slightly, bowed and requested her to be so good as to accompany him.

Sessendris was dressed in a long white apron, making bread, her beautiful arms covered with flour to the elbow.

"Maia!" she said, looking up with a smile and tossing back her hair. "How nice! You must wonder what in Cran's name the Lord General's saiyett thinks she's doing in the bakery. The truth is I enjoy it, and no one else in this whole house can make bread as well as I do. So you've caught me out, my dear. Now don't you go telling the whole upper city that the Lord General's saiyett's a baker, or you'll probably have me hanging upside-down!"

This unintentionally grisly pleasantry brought the tears to poor Maia's eyes. Apart from her initial collapse in the jekzha the previous afternoon, she had until now stood up pretty well to the shock and strain of the past fifteen hours; perhaps the better because the squalor, vulgarity and sordid ugliness, which to someone like Milvushina would have been almost the worst of it, were things she had grown up with. Now, however, she wept, standing unreplying in front of Sessendris with the tears running down her cheeks. Sessendris, nodding to the kitchen-maid to leave them, sat down beside her on the flour-sprinkled table.

"It's nasty," said the saiyett, when she had heard it all. "The truth is, the
world's
nasty, Maia Serrelinda. Haven't you learned that yet? You ought to, I should have thought, after a few months with Sencho."

"I'm-I'm getting to know, I reckon."

"And you want to try to alter it, do you?"

"But Sessendris, surely they'll pardon him, won't they? I mean, if
I
ask them? They're always saying as I saved the city, and if-"

"Why d'you want him pardoned?" interrupted Sessendris. "Do you still love him?"

"No," replied Maia, so instantly and emphatically that the saiyett, nodding, was drawn to say, "I see: you love someone else, do you? Well, never mind about that for now. But in that case why
do
you want him pardoned? From what you've told me, he's as guilty as he can be, and he never lifted a finger to try to help you when you'd been sold as a slave: and he
could
have, couldn't he?"

"How could he?" asked Maia.

"Why, at the very least he could have gone to one of his heldro masters and asked him to follow you up. That's what happened with Missy upstairs, as I dare say you know; but by that time she didn't want it. Anyway, suppose you
were
to get him handed over to you, what would you do with him?"

"I haven't thought yet. Send him home, I suppose."

"To get into more trouble? He's been in and out of scrapes all his life, by what you've told me. He'll never change. You must know that, Maia, if you're honest. I just can't understand-well, what your idea is."

"To save him from suffering," said Maia.

"You're such a sweet, kind girl," said Sessendris. "D'you know, I used to be like you, believe it or not? You haven't grasped as much as I thought you had. Now you listen to me. You've gone up in the world. I've gone up in the world too: not like you-
you've
had a shower of stars poured into your lap-but still, I'm a long way above where I started. And when that sort of thing happens to you, you simply can't afford to be the person you once were. You can't be
two
people. You've become a new person and you've got to
be
her. To the upper city you're as good as a princess. Suppose you start begging for the life of this five-meld wastrel, the Leopards aren't going to think any the better of you, are they? They'll just think you can't tell shit from pudding."

"I'll go down into the lower city! I'll appeal to the people-" Maia was angry now as well as tearful.

"My dear, the people-they'd like it even less. Surely you can see that? The very
last
thing they want to think is that you're one of themselves. You're the magic Ser-relinda, the girl who fooled King Karnat and swam the river.
No
one's good enough for you! And there you'd be, pleading for a-well, never mind. But you're living in the real world, Maia-the only one there is-and the world's been good to you. You've got to learn to accept it as it

is." Sessendris stood up and once more began tossing the flour. "I'm sorry my advice is nasty medicine. But drink it! It'll do you good. The other won't, believe you me."

At the Barons' Palace she was obliged to wait for some time. Officers-some of whom she knew, others she had never seen before-were coming and going and there was an atmosphere of males intent upon male matters, in which she felt unhappily intrusive and out of place. She was touched when the Tonildan captain-the very one who had come to thank her in Rallur-catching sight of her alone and obviously ill-at-ease, excused himself to three or four companions with‹ whom he was about to leave and kept her in countenance by sitting down and conversing with her-as best he could, for he was none too ready of tongue-until a smooth and courtly Beklan equerry not much older than herself came up and begged her to accompany him to the Lord General.

In the Beklan Empire, maps-insofar as the term is appropriate-took-the form of rough models, more-or-less to scale, built up, from local knowledge and eye-witness reports, either on trestles and boards or simply on the ground, with clay, twigs, pebbles and the like. Kembri and Elvair-ka-Virrion were standing at a plank table laid out to represent Chalcon, the Lord General pointing here and there as he talked. Elvair-ka-Virrion, dressed in a Gelt breastplate over a purple leather jerkin, looked up and smiled at Maia as warmly and gallantly as on that far-off afternoon when he had seen her for the first time in the Khalkoornil.

"Maia! Are you here to join up? Come to Chalcon and help us beat Erketlis! Then we'll make you queen of Ton-ilda and give you a crown of leopards' teeth. How about it?"

She smiled, raising a palm to her forehead. "Happen I'd be less help than hindrance, my lord. All the same, there
is
something you can give me; cost you a lot less trouble an' all." Seeing Kembri also smiling, she added, "Reckon you must know as I've come to ask for something. Hadn't, I wouldn't be here."

This was the first time that Maia had met with the Lord General since the day when she had been released from arrest by the intervention of the Sacred Queen. He looked

strained and tired, but his manner, as he put down the stick he had been using as a pointer and took her hands in greeting, at first seemed friendly and well-wishing enough. She could not help thinking that Nennaunir had been rather hard on him. While it would certainly have been nice if he had come to visit her together with the High Baron, he must have had lots more important things to do. (Maia was of course vague about military matters, but tended to think of them as necessarily occupying soldiers from morning till night and often longer than that.)

"I haven't had any chance before, Maia," said Kembri, "to thank you for what you did in Suba. I thank you now. You'll remember I always told you that you might very well become free sooner than you could imagine."

Somehow, as women can, she could tell that his words lacked real warmth and sincerity. For some reason, her success and fame were
not
particularly congenial to him. She felt mortified. There was no time to bother about that now, however. "If you really are grateful, my lord," she said, "please do something for me. It's not a lot to ask. There's a prisoner among those as came in last night-"

She had had opportunity, since leaving Sessendris, to take thought and prepare her story along less ingenuous lines. Tharrin was her dear stepfather. He had been the family's sole prop and mainstay in their poverty on the Tonildan Waste. She owed so much to him. When she had been enslaved he had sought her in vain-she had learned as much last night-and for her part she believed him innocent. If only his life were spared, she would see to it that he went home to those who desperately needed him and never fell foul of authority again.

When at length she had finished there was a pause. "But if this man was such a good father to you all, Maia," asked Elvair-ka-Virrion at length, "how was it that you came to be enslaved?"

" 'Twas poverty,, my lord-sheer hard times," answered Maia. "We was nigh on starving, see-"

"So he made ready money by acting as a rebels' courier," broke in Kembri. "Well,
you
may believe him innocent, Maia, but I can tell you that we
know
-Sencho knew-that every one of those prisoners is guilty twenty times over."

Maia said nothing, and after a few moments he went on, "Do you remember the day when we first talked about

Bayub-Otal; the day you told me about the High Counselor and Milvushina?"

"Yes, my lord; I remember very well."

"So you won't have forgotten our talking about adventurers and their need to see clearly and not deceive themselves into thinking that just because they happen to have struck lucky, they can get away with anything."

"I'm not deceiving myself, my lord. It's only that I can't bear the thought of my stepfather being-being tortured and put to death."

"Tortured? Put to death?" said Elvair-ka-Virrion. "Whatever do you mean?";

"Why, he told me himself, my lord-I saw him in the jail last night-as he knew he was to be tortured-"

"The man's a fool, then," said Kembri shortly, "or more likely the soldiers have been amusing themselves by telling him tales." He picked up his stick and turned back to the map.

"Oh, don't be sharp with her, father," said Elvair-ka-Virrion. "A girl like her deserves better. Maia, let me explain. You ought to know-who better?-that human bodies are worth money. We only execute people if they're worth nothing-or if they've become so infamous that they have to be made a public example. These prisoners-they've got value as slaves. Provided these people answer our questions and tell us everything we need to know, they've got nothing to fear beyond being sold as slaves. You can probably buy your step-father if you want to. In fact, I think the prisoners have already been apportioned. There's a roll somewhere, father, isn't there?"

"Over there." Kembri nodded towards another table.

"Apportioned?" asked Maia. "What's that, then?"

"Why, when a batch of prisoners like this comes in," said Elvair-ka-Virrion, "strictly speaking their lives are all forfeit. But any Leopard who wants can put in a bid for so many at a price, and then they belong to him and he has the disposal of them. They can be sold, or given away, or just kept as slaves in his household-whatever he decides. Ah, yes, here's the roll. What did you say your stepfather's name was?"

"Tharrin, of Meerzat."

"I see. Yes, here he is. Oh!" Elvair-ka-Virrion, whose manner had seemed full of reassurance, suddenly stopped short and put the roll back on the table. After a few mo-

ments he said, "Well, if I were you, Maia, I should try to forget about this."

"Why, what do you mean, my lord? Who-who's got Tharrin, then?"

"The Sacred Queen," replied Elvair-ka-Virrion. "He's one of eight prisoners marked for her personal disposal. I'm sorry, Maia. When the Sacred Queen has the disposal of prisoners, you see, that's usually-well, rather different, I'm afraid."

"But-but I could still buy Tharrin, my lord, couldn't I? From the queen?"

"You could try, certainly," said Kembri, "but if I were you I shouldn't." He went to the door and summoned the young staff officer. "Bahrat, the Serrelinda's leaving now. Show her to the door, will you? and then come back yourself."

Two porters opened the double gates and her soldiers drew the Serrelinda's jekzha into the garden court of the Sacred Queen's house. Dew was still lying on the lawn, the western side of which sparkled in the sun now well risen above the opposite rooftop. A green-and-white-plu-maged
memmezah,
red-billed and red-legged, was running here and there, foraging over the grass and now and then breaking into short, low flights. In one corner stood a little grove of purple-flowering
lam
bushes-somewhere between shrubs and trees-and among these four or five small, gray-green monkeys were leaping here and there, suddenly chasing one another and as suddenly breaking off. Bees droned among the flowerbeds. A peacock, trailing its tail, wandered pausingly across a narrow, stone-paved path and disappeared behind a low wall on its further side. There was a scent of lilies and of moist greenery and from time to time, from somewhere beyond the light pattering of the fountain, a blue-finch repeated its little, falling song.