Maia

"Would you really?" replied Occula. "Like to bet two hundred meld on it?"

"Have you got two hundred meld?" asked the young man contemptuously.

Both Eud-Ecachlon and Bayub-Otal seemed to have

abandoned any further notion of controlling the conversation, though they were listening intently. Occula's manner had compelled everyone's attention.

"Yes, I have," answered Occula. "You accept, then, do you?"

"Certainly, if you're such a fool as to want to throw your money away," said the young man. "I don't know what you've got in mind, but I warn you-"

Occula laid a hand on his shoulder. "Well, doan' run away, then, will you?"

Thereupon she stood up and made her way across the hall to where Elvair-ka-Virrion was sitting. Maia could see them in conversation, Occula smiling and gesturing, Elvair-ka-Virrion evidently asking several questions and nodding at her replies. At length he beckoned to a slave, gave some instructions and then, as the latter accompanied Occula out of the hall, resumed his conversation with the man beside him.

A minute or two later the slave returned and, helped by two others, began putting out several of the lamps.

Throughout supper the hall had been bright with lamplight-brighter, indeed, than was customary at the High Counselor's. Now, as the lamps went out by ones and twos until only about a quarter of those in the hall were left burning, Maia felt a tremor of apprehension; half exciting, as though someone were about to begin a tale of ghosts or demons; but half disturbingly real-an onset of anxiety and foreboding. What had Occula arranged with Elvair-ka-Virrion? The young Urtan had angered her; and Maia knew her well enough to feel trepidation. She remembered the previous occasions when she had seen Occula angry- at Puhra, and in Lalloc's depot on the night when they had arrived in Bekla. Yet what possible scope for violence could she have here, a slave-girl among the aristocracy of the upper city? That Occula could be both impulsive and tempestuous she had seen: so far she had always got away with it; had always just skirted the brink of self-destructive rashness. Part of the admiration and affection which Maia felt for her stemmed from the knowledge that she had always been ready to run real risks whenever she felt herself to have been slighted; and from the fear that one day, doing it once too often, she might herself be swept away in the fury welling up like blood from the wound still

unhealed in the daughter of Silver Tedzhek enslaved among barbarians.

She felt herself on the point of getting up to go and beg Elvair-ka-Virrion to call Occula back, to tell her not to go on with it-whatever it might be. Yet she did not. Even now, in her absence, Occula's ascendancy prevailed. It wasn't for the likes of her to interfere with Occula. If Occula was about to destroy them botli-for what would become of herself without her?-then it must be so. She remained seated among the Urtans, saying nothing, yet full of uneasy misgiving.

She looked up quickly as Nennaunir appeared beside them; Nennaunir came, as it seemed, to take Occula's place. Probably Elvair-ka-Virrion had sent her. "I asked her to promise Eud-Ecachlon she'd be nice to him." Eud-Ecachlon, hands spread wide and mouth open with delight, made as though to draw her, too, down upon his knee; but Nennaunir, smiling graciously, seated herself on his left, opposite Maia, the two younger men sliding down the bench to make room for her. She seemed about to speak, but before she could do so the knock and boom of drums began to sound from the corridor on the other side of the colonnade.

Conversation ceased. Everyone became attentive, waiting. From the dimmed light and the mounting throb of the drums it was plain that some kind of show was about to begin. Most of the central floor was now in shadow, tracts of near-darkness or dappled gloom separating small islands of brighter light. The pool, too, lay dark, for the lamps below its floor were all out.

From the colonnade, however, light still showed, and here the drummer now appeared, a black silhouette between two pillars, his hands, the fingers tipped with bronze thimbles, rising and falling as they beat here and there upon the long, curved drums hung at his waist.

At this time in Bekla's history, five or six different styles of drumming were practiced in various parts of the empire, as accompaniments to as many kinds of dance. The drummer was using lembas-+a pair of drums usually played by a single musician; one, the zhua, made of skin stretched over a deep bronze bowl; the other, the lek, a hollow cylinder of bola wood, thin in some parts, thicker in others, capable, in skilled hands, of producing many different tones-hollow knockings, rattlings, sharp tappings, quick,