Maia

Sencho, having rinsed his mouth with the wine, spat it back into the goblet, which Maia put down on the floor. As she once more bent over him, he put a groping arm round her neck and sucked one of her breasts, and at the same time drawing her hand down to his loins. Clearly he was still not fully woken from his stupor, for after a few moments his lips released her nipple and his head sank back upon the cushions. Yet what he wanted was plain enough: if it had been Tharrin, she would have known very well what to do. She paused, uncertain. At this moment the High Counselor, without opening his eyes, belched and then panted urgently, "Meris! Meris!" As Maia, now at a complete loss, remained unmoving beside the couch, he repeated, more forcefully and with a kind of snarling impatience, "Meris!"

In panic Maia turned and plunged down into the crowded hall, calling "Meris! Meris!" She tripped in a heap of yellow lilies and almost fell as her sandaled feet crushed the stems into a slippery pulp. Racing on towards the pool, she measured her length over a girl's buttocks and, picking herself up, heard behind her an oath and a male cry of anger. "Meris!" she called. "Meris!"

Suddenly, in the flickering half-light, there was Meris, lying in a scatter of cushions on the floor. It was as though Maia herself had conjured her up from some subterranean obscurity. Her shadow-dappled body was half-covered by a man's, round which her raised legs were locked, clutching and pressing. Her mouth was open, her eyes half-closed, her breath coming hard as though she were climbing a hill.

"Meris!" cried Maia, bending over her. "Meris!"

"What the hell?" murmured the Belishban girl dazedly. "Oh, Cran, Maia, it's you! Let us alone, damn you!"

Maia, reaching across the man's heaving shoulders, shook her roughly.

"Meris! He's awake! He's calling for you! For you, Meris! D'you hear me?"

"Sod off!" hissed Meris, baring her teeth like a cat. "Baste the High Counselor! Baste everything!" Seizing the lobe of her partner's ear between her teeth, she bit it so that he cried out. "Oh, you're marvelous!" she babbled, her biting turning to frantic kisses. "Go on! Go on! I'll kill you if you stop!"

For a moment Maia stood irresolute in the throbbing gloom around her, alone in the tumult as though under the waterfall of Lake Serrelind. Then she turned and ran back towards the dais.

During the past few days Sencho's thoughts had reverted several times to the young Tonildan-whose name he had forgotten, if he had ever known it. Buying her from Lalloc had been an impulsive extravagance about which he was now rather in two minds. The sight of the lovely girl, naked and frightened before his couch, had reminded him of his young manhood, reviving that delicious, brutal rapacity which in those days he had now and then had a chance to gratify. She had, in fact, put him in mind of a certain lass, more than twenty years before, in Kabin, whither he had gone on business for Fravak. He had never known her name, either. A servant in the inn where he was staying, she was, he had suddenly realized at the time, entirely innocent and inexperienced, having left her parents' home only a few days before. That evening he had settled up with the landlord, over-paying him a little, and then unobtrusively carried his baggage-roll to one of the outhouses. Twenty minutes later, calling the girl out on some pretext, he had thrown her down, raped her and then simply walked away and put up elsewhere, trusting-successfully, as it turned out-to the unlikelihood of the landlord going to undue trouble over a simple and very yotmg woman's unsubstantiated word against an open-handed customer who was now nowhere to be found. He could still hear, and relish in memory, the girl's shuddering sobs as he spent himself in her.

Similarly to have ravished this Tonildan child would have been delightful; but unfortunately he was no longer capable of forcing himself upon any girl. Perhaps, after all, he had better ask Lalloc to take her back and refund the money, for an innocent like her would take far too much training; and nowadays the hesitancy and clumsiness of an inept, nervous girl, however pretty, was more than he could endure.

He had consulted the sleek, self-possessed Terebinthia as she fanned him, lying in the vine-shaded verandah one afternoon of still, thundery heat before the rains. Her advice was to keep the girl, at all events for the time being.