Maia

"And you walked here with us-the night after that?" "To save my life, yes. What was the alternative?" "You could have stayed with the Lapanese in Bekla." "They'll never be able to hold the city. Eud-Ecachlon's got the citadel, you told me, and once the rest of Han-Glat's troops reach Bekla the Lapanese'll have no chance. Besides, you say Randronoth's dead?"

She nodded. Their talk had tired him-he was still very weak-and after a little she left him to rest while she went to milk the cows. Alone in the shed, she wept to think of her own part in all this misery. "But what else could I have done?" she whispered aloud. "Dear Lespa, what else could I have done? I never wished Karnat's men any harm." She had as yet told Bayub-Otal nothing of Tharrin's story or of whom she had discovered herself to be. Intuitively, she felt that the time had not yet come.

Yet this was not the only cause for weeping which afflicted her during these days. Indeed, she was thankful for the relief and distraction of working on the place, for whenever she was unoccupied, and always when she lay down to sleep, her thoughts were so wretched that in all reality she would rather have had to endure again the pain and illness she had suffered after swimming the Valderra. Worst -obsessive, indeed-was the memory of Milvushina; that futile death which made nonsense of any notion of the gods as kindly patrons of mankind. Many times, recalling the cruelty which Milvushina had endured, the dignity and courage she had maintained in the face of it, her brief span of happiness as the lover of Elvair-ka-Vir-rion and the selfless generosity she had shown at her pitiful end, Maia would begin sobbing, and steal away to some

lonely place where no one could see her. How poignantly, now, did she recall Occula's reproof for her childish, unimaginative resentment of Milvushina's aristocratic reserve and brave show of detachment in Sencho's house!

In actual fact, of course, Maia had finally achieved a deep affinity and friendship with Milvushina, and had come both to love and respect her. Yet that only served, now, to heighten her sorrow, and she mourned for her friend with an intensity which, while it was upon her, blotted out all else. This was poor Maia's first experience of true, grievous bereavement. The death of Sphelthon, a stranger, had frightened and horrified her. The death.of Tharrin had angered and humiliated more than it had actually afflicted her-except with pity. But the death of Milvushina, a girl of her own age, whom she had comforted in affliction, her companion both in misery and good fortune, she many times wished, and wished sincerely, that she could have taken upon herself. Whatever the future might hold, never again would she see the world through the eyes with which she had seen it before Milvushina died. This was her real loss of innocence; far sharper and deeper than that conventionally-termed "loss" which she had so gaily experienced in the fishing-net.

Coupled with this grief was a bitter sense of reappraisal and disillusion, flowing from the memory of her last sight of Elvair-ka-Virrion and of what he had said. To her, he now stood for the whole upper city and almost everyone in it.

At other times she was troubled by the fear of pursuit and murder. They had heard no news, either of Bekla, or of Kembri and Erketlis to the east; and Kerkol-never talkative anyway-seemed oddly reluctant to try to get hold of any. Seekron must have discovered, of course- perhaps even before she had left Bekla-that Randronoth had died by violence. Might she herself be suspected of his death? (It did not occur to her that Ogma, given the chance, could testify to the contrary.) But perhaps Fornis and Han-Glat had already overcome the Lapanese? If Fornis were now mistress of Bekla, one of the first things she would certainly apply herself to was hunting down the Serrelinda: and one man unlikely to put any obstacle in her way was Eud-Ecachlon. But again, was it possible that Santil-ke-Erketlis might have defeated Kembri? This, she realized bitterly, was the best hope for herself-for all five

of them. In other words Bekla, the Leopards and the whole upper city-not entirely excluding that happy, golden innocent known as the Serrelinda-stood revealed as so much glittering dross, internecine and treacherous, as Nasada had said. For it seemed to her now that she could not excuse herself from the general indictment. She, Maia, had done with them; but had they done with her?