Maia

Maia heard no more. Still clutching the bowl of broth, she stumbled back up the passage and into the kitchen. Clystis, busy at the table, looked up in surprise.

"Wouldn't he have it, then?"

Maia, not answering and almost upsetting the bowl in putting it down, went across to the door that led into the yard.

"Maia, you all right?"

"Yes; I'll-I'll be back in a minute."

Out she ran, across the yard to the belt of trees. He wasn't there and she pushed through them, down the slopes beyond to the bank of the stream.

"Anda-Nokomis?" she called.

He stood up. He had been sitting in a kind of little arbor about a hundred yards downstream, where a tangle of scarlet trepsis trailed over the bushes. She ran along the bank, but just as she reached him tripped and measured

her length at his feet. He bent to help her up, but she only lay sobbing, face down, her head on her arms.

He knelt beside her. "What's happened, Maia? What's the matter?"

"Zenka! Zen-Kurel, Anda-Nokomis-"

"O gods! Has he taken a turn for the worse?"

"No no! He's able to talk now. He told Zirek-I heard him, I was in the passage-he said I was the rottenest- woman in the world; he said why didn't you kill me-" Her weeping became passionate and uncontrollable.

Bayub-Otal waited in silence. At length, in a cold, expressionless tone, he asked, "Are you so very much surprised?"

"What, Anda-Nokomis?" She knelt up and looked at him, her face swollen and tear-wet. After a moment, like a child driven to desperation by someone else's inexplicable failure to understand the obvious, she shouted, "Well, 'course I am! What d'you think-"

He took her hand and she allowed him to lead her the few steps into the arbor. Here there was a big log, from which a segment had been cut, making a flat seat. They sat side by side. The stream below was a mere trickle, almost lost among clumps of water-plants and dried beds of weed. A pair of green dragonflies were hovering and darting here and there.

"There's a lot I'm extremely puzzled about," he said, "and obviously if we're to go on at all it's got to be sorted out. Do you want to talk, or shall I?"

She was still weeping, but he made no attempt to check or comfort her. After a little he went on, "One thing's plain: you evidently don't see what's happened in the same light as I do or as Zen-Kurel does. If you did, you wouldn't be here."

She did not answer, but he had caught her attention and she was waiting to hear what he was going to say next.

"I'll start from the beginning. Last Melekril, in Bekla, I-well, I thought that perhaps I'd found a friend; a young slave-girl. I never made friends easily in Bekla, of course, being a suspect and dispossessed man with no prospects. But I liked this girl and felt sorry for her. Anyone with the least decency would have felt sorry for her. She was very young and inexperienced and she belonged to the most evil, disgusting brute in the upper city. She was being sent from one bed to another for money and even seemed

to be taking to it. It was obvious that in a year or two she'd be corrupted and that in a few years after that she'd probably be on the scrap-heap-that's if she hadn't been brought to some horrible end first. I thought she deserved better.

"One night, soon after the murder of her master, I received a warning to leave Bekla at once. Within the same hour the girl came to my lodgings in terror-or so you'd have thought. She said she'd escaped from the temple- from torture-and implored me to help her.

"I got her out of Bekla and took her with me to Suba. I told both Lenkrit and King Karnat that she was a girl to be trusted. I pointed out that she'd be valuable to us because of her extraordinary resemblance to my mother, Nokomis. She was treated honorably and gave the most convincing appearance of being entirely on our side."

For a moment Bayub-Otal's voice quavered. He bent down, picked up a stick and began breaking it into pieces and tossing them into the stream.

"That same night, however, she quite deliberately seduced one of Karnat's staff officers, a young man who knew-and she must have known that he knew-the plan of attack. He told it to her. He was much to blame, of course, but then he trusted her, you see; just as I did. She'd been very cunning in convincing him that she'd fallen in love with him.

"In fact, she achieved all that the Leopards could possibly have hoped for. She made her fortune that night. She became a demi-goddess, almost; her fame spread throughout the empire and beyond. It spread to Suba; and to Katria and Terekenalt. It even spread to Dari-Paltesh, where some of the men she'd betrayed-the ones who weren't dead, I mean, or who hadn't managed to get back to Suba-were shut up in squalor and misery. I remember one man actually cursing her with his last breath."