Maia

The guard-quarters boasted a small, brick-floored bathhouse, with a piped supply from the Monju Brook-the outfall stream of the lake called the Barb. Here the girls stripped and sluiced each other down. When Zuno reappeared a quarter of an hour later they were both feeling- and looking-in much better shape; Occula in her orange metlan and Maia in the powder-blue robe, with a scarlet trepsis bloom, given her by one of the soldiers, stuck behind her ear. The guard-commander, having civilly but firmly refused a tip from Zuno, helped the girls into the hired jekzha, which thereupon set off, following the two Deelguy down Masons Street towards the Kharjiz.

Simply to be sitting down, moving effortlessly along, instead of trudging in the heat and dust, was enough to fill Maia with a delightful sense of luxury. The pleasure- which she had very seldom known before-of being carried on wheels, and the swift succession of sights and sounds pressing from all directions upon her fatigued senses, were bemusing, and imparted to her surroundings a rather dreamlike quality. She had never seen so many, and such different kinds of people, all intent upon their various affairs. She watched two men-evidently, from their uniform clothes, some kind of public servants-laying the dust in the street by sprinkling water from a metal tank on wheels; a hawker selling eggs and bread; an old woman haggling with a stall-keeper over a scale-full of brillions; two lads who were having difficulty in carrying a rolled-up carpet through the crowds; a man whose shop was itself a huge cage, full of brilliant-plumaged birds; a hard-faced, painted girl, little older than herself, standing watchfully on a corner with a studied air of being at a loose end; and a leather-aproned harness-maker at his bench, surrounded by his wares as he plied his heavy needle. The air was full of all manner of smells, some familiar, others entirely unknown to her-incense drifting through an open door at the top of a flight of stone steps; a medley of spicy odors from an open-fronted cookshop, inside which charcoal braziers were glowing in a shady, welcoming gloom; and, again and again, the languorous, citrous fragrances of flowers and blossoming shrubs-big, glowing blooms of kinds she had never seen-thriving in well-watered beds beside the street and allaying with their greenery the oppression of summer's

end. All about her-so that she had to raise her voice even to talk to Occula beside her-rang the multifoliate clamor of the city; the crying of wares, the shouting of children at play, the gabbling of bargainers and quarrellers, the tappings and hammerings peculiar to tinkers, carpenters, smiths, cobblers, masons, wheelwrights. Once, as the jek-zha went by, she caught for a few moments the voice of someone singing a Tonildan ballad she recognized. At a crossing, a scarlet-liveried slave strode across their front, staff in hand, crying "Make way! Make way!", followed by a curtained litter adorned, behind and before, with the cognizance of a crowned leopard. Across the roof-tops sounded from the upper city the wavering, gong-like notes of copper bells.

Most of all, Maia was amazed by the size and grandeur of the buildings. Bekla, growing up upon a natural site for a city, with a virtually impregnable hilltop citadel, watered by a lake and standing at the convergence of five roads traversing a wide plain, had been built almost entirely from the stone quarries of Mount Crandor. Time out of mind it had been renowned for its builders, masons and stone-carvers. Almost every house, from the Palace of the Barons to the lodgings for the itinerant herdsmen, was of stone. The market-colonnades, the temples, the graceful towers and other public buildings were of a beauty and magnificence unparalleled in any other city throughout the empire. The very fact that the old ceremonial name, Bekla-lo-Senguel-Cerith ("The Garden of Dancing Stone"), was still commonly used in poems, songs and ballads testified to the universal pride and veneration felt for the capital.

All this Maia, like everyone else, had heard from infancy. But there is a world of difference between hearing tell and seeing for oneself. Staring up at rows of decorated corbels supporting overhanging upper stories, at innumerable foliate chamfers and casement moldings, at delicate interpenetrations of stone executed with almost incredible craftsmanship and skill, the spontaneous Maia, hitherto entirely ignorant of such things, was entranced by what seemed to her little short of a miracle-of hundreds of miracles. How could stone be made to float like lilies, curl like waves, drift like clouds? Who had raised these stones, piling them up to stand firm, one upon another, far above the heads of mortals walking safe and unconcerned below; and then, not content with that, carved them

into flowers and foliage, snarling beasts, armed men, naked girls?