Maia

So in the morning, an hour or two after sunrise, they had come, a hobbling, staggering little bunch of exhausted vagrants, to Kerkol's farmstead-a house and some acres of rough fields about three miles west of the Ikat road. Kerkol and the lad, Blarda, were in the fields, getting in the last of harvest, and Maia had gone in alone and spoken with Clystis in the dairy. They had taken to each other. Besides, the sight of Zen-Kurel would have wrung pity from anyone with the least spark of humanity, and Maia was offering good money. She had assured the girl that his illness was no pestilence. They were fugitives, victims of the hated Leopards. They wanted to stay only until Zen-Kurel was better, and would move on as soon as they could. Kerkol, when he came in at mid-day, had found three of them sound asleep on straw in the barn, with Maia watching by Zen-Kurel, whom Clystis had told the soldiers to put into Blarda's bed. Inclined to be surly at first, he had gradually warmed to the pretty girl so obviously in distress; and being (as they later came to perceive) a man who secretly knew his wife sharper than himself, he was finally persuaded that there was more to be gained from letting them stay than from sending them packing. In any case, with the soldiers already gone, to compel them to leave would certainly have meant Zen-Kurel's death.

By the following day everyone except Zen-Kurel was in better shape. Zirek and Meris, naturally, were only too glad to get out of doors and try to give some help about the place. Zirek made fun of his own ignorance and clumsiness, and sometimes made even Kerkol laugh with his clowning. Maia had forgotten the stormy streak in Meris; or perhaps, she thought, their former circumstances had

prevented her from seeing it in its true colors. In Sencho's house, where they had all been slaves and all afraid of Terebinthia, her continual foul language and swiftness to anger might almost be said to have expressed a common feeling. Now, seeing her tense, glittering-eyed manner among ordinary, decent folk and blushing before Clystis to hear her cursing over the butter-churn, she began to understand why Terebinthia had been so anxious to get rid of her. Meris might be all very well for a concubine, but she was precious little use for anything else. She was a natural trouble-maker, not really capable of steady work, short-tempered as a bear and as prone to outburst. One evening, tripping over Blarda's whip in the dusky passage, she snatched it up, swearing, and snapped it across her knee. Maia, apologizing to Clystis, did her best to make out that Meris had had a very bad time and was not herself.

This sort of thing was worrying enough, but in addition Maia had once or twice seen Meris glancing at the fourteen-year-old Blarda with a look which she herself understood if no one else did. A baste in the barn, she thought, even with an innocent, might be neither here nor there, but she doubted whether Meris would rest content with that. Before she was satisfied, someone would have to suffer. She was a girl getting her own back on the world, and the innocuous and simple were her natural prey. Even with nothing else to worry about, Meris would have been a nuisance, but with Zenka on her hands Maia simply had no energy or attention to spare.

Next to Zen-Kurel, Bayub-Otal was the worst affected. There could be no question, for the time being, of him helping on the farm. He was worn out and half-starved, and for several days could eat only whey, eggs in milk and such other slops as the kindly Clystis prepared. His feet were in such a terrible state that Maia could not imagine how he had walked from Bekla. She had learned, of course, on the journey to Suba, that he was an exceptionally unflinching, determined man, but she had not hitherto realized how much he was capable of enduring.

Resting by day in the shade of the sestuaga trees on one side of the yard, he told her, at odd times and little by little, all that had befallen him since the fight near Rallur. The prisoners, as she knew, had been sent to the fortress at Dari-Paltesh. Here they had been in the charge of Dur-akkon's younger son, a humane but very ineffectual young

man who, it was generally known, had been promoted out of harm's way before he could discredit himself further in the field. Plotho ("the rabbit"), as he was nick-named, had done what little he could to make their lives bearable, forbidding the soldiers to ill-treat them and ensuring that their wounds received attention. Despite his kindness, however, several had died.

"You were locked up all that time, then?" asked Maia, trying to imagine it.