Maia

Formerly, the High Counselor had not been in the regular habit of requiring a girl to spend the whole night with him; but now, more often than not Occula would remain with him all night and herself perform those menial tasks, such as bringing water, cushions or fresh towels, which would normally have been the duty of Ogma. Maia, herself puzzled, was secretly amused by the greater bewilderment of Terebinthia. Plainly, the saiyett did not know whether to feel vexed or relieved, for on the one hand Occula had to a considerable extent assumed her functions, while on the other the black girl seemed the only person able to soothe and relieve the malaise of the High Counselor. Under her ministrations he would pass each day in a kind of lethargy, occasionally rousing himself to eat, but for the most part drowsing in the bath, sleeping, or simply listening to Occula, whose whisperings and occasional chuckling laughter-about what? Maia wondered-clearly possessed some odd power. She herself had never had much occasion to converse when she was with the High Counselor.

These long absences of Occula from the women's quarters left Maia a good deal together with Milvushina, about whom Sencho seemed for the moment to have forgotten. She herself was, she now knew, jealous of Occula's pity

for the wretched girl, but of this she did not feel particularly ashamed. Family disaster, violent death and enslavement, though certainly out of the ordinary, were nevertheless recognized hazards throughout the half-barbaric empire, and Milvushina's luck was no different from that of the daughters of many a ruined man. The last people from whom those who have come down in the world can expect pity are those who have never been up in it. Milvushina had scarcely anything in common with Maia. Paradoxically, however, this proved a source of strength to her. A more sympathetic and understanding girl might well have increased Milvushina's grief beyond endurance, simply by feeling and reciprocating it more fully. Maia, by her ability to feel only a limited sympathy, blunted-a little, at least- the fearful edge of Milvushina's misery.

Yet, peasant lass as she was, she was not lacking in a peasant's homely kindness to someone in trouble. If nice cups of tea had been known in Bekla, Maia would have made a nice cup of tea. The unspeakable horror which had been inflicted on Milvushina might be as much beyond her powers of empathy as was the Chalcon girl's aristocratic sense of her degradation and shame. (Maia had never felt in the least ashamed of becoming a concubine.) Yet it was not beyond her to persuade Milvushina to eat, to send Ogma out to buy her a brush and comb, or to hold her in her arms and soothe her when she woke screaming in the night. If the girl had not been plainly on the verge of collapse-even of madness-Maia might very well have given way to her natural feelings of resentment, for there were times when Milvushina unconsciously revealed that she regarded her in much the same way as she had once regarded her dead mother's servants; not, indeed, by ordering her about or saying anything contemptuous (her careful good manners, in fact, rather added to Maia's annoyance, since to her they seemed affected beyond anything she had ever been used to), but by her maintenance of a kind of reserve and distance, even when she was doing her best to be friendly, and by her inadvertent way of showing that she saw the world from a higher standpoint. "But that was long ago," she said once, recalling some memory of childhood, "before we had even fifty men on the place." And again, "My mother didn't possess a great many jewels, really." Maia made no rejoinder, for the tears were standing in Milvushina's eyes as she spoke, and after all it

was she herself who had led her on to ease her mind by talking.

To Milvushina the company of Maia, as pretty and about as cultivated as a gazelle, often seemed rather like that of the fire on the hearth. Creatures and elements have their fixed properties, which cannot alter, and in deep misery it is often easier to whistle to a bird or tend a fire than to make the effort to talk to an educated person. All the priests of Cran could not have influenced Milvushina to try to preserve her self-respect so effectively as did Maia by her mere presence. The educated person will indulge, excuse and make allowances for you; but you have to feed the bird and you have to tend the fire-or else do without them. Milvushina could hardly do without Maia, for Dyphna, polite but withdrawn, was bound up in her own professionalism and imminent prospect of freedom, while Terebinthia, relishing cruelty cat-like and sensing that Milvushina found it well-nigh intolerable to be at the orders of a woman like herself, seldom spoke to her without exercising her authority or going about to abase her in one way or another.