"Kept a roof over our heads," he muttered, his eyes on the floor.
"Well, just you see as you go on doing that, else I'll know the reason why."
At that he looked up at her, straight and serious.
"Maia, I can't see why you should be bothering yourself so much about Morca; that I can't. She sold you into slavery, didn't she? A real dirty trick that was."
The picture this called into Maia's mind-namely, of Morca as she had last seen her-prompted her next question.
"Is she all right? What was the baby-a boy?"
"No, another girl. Yes, she's all right as far as I know. Was when I left for Thettit, anyway. I was arrested in Thettit, you know. All the same, it's bound to have been rough on them with me gone. I dare say Kelsi and Nala-"
"Oh, I blame myself, that I do! I'll give you some money to take back, Tharrin. And just you mind it gets there, too, d'you see? Well, I know mum sold me, and that was cruel, I don't deny; but I can't say as she hadn't had that to make her, in a manner of speaking; and besides, her condition at the time and all. She was that upset, she did a lot more to me than what she need have; but all the same, look where it's got me-and when all's said and done she is my mother."
Tharrin, getting up, walked across to the bright glare of the window and stood dark against the light. After a pause he said, "I don't know what she'd say, Maia, but I reckon it's high time you were told."
"Told? Told what?"
"That she's not your mother. You didn't know that, did you?"
"Not my mother?" Maia was at a complete loss. Had his sufferings turned his wits, or what? Tharrin said na more, and at length she asked, "Whatever do you mean?"
"I'll tell you." He came back and sat down. "I'll tell you all about it, just as she told it to me. Listen, Maia. Do you know how long ago your-well, your father and mother; I'll call them that for now-were married?"
" 'Bout twenty year now, isn't it? But Tharrin, I want to know, what d'you mean-"
"Listen! Yes, your father and Morca were married about twenty years ago. And there were no children. A fanner needs children, doesn't he? He needs labor. A farmer without children's an unfortunate mail. But there were no children; and two years went by, three years, four and never a sign. Morca felt bad, even though your father never spoke a harsh word. It was a bad time-bad as could be, she said. It got to prey on her mind. No children-that's a bitter misfortune to bear, by all accounts.
"But I'll go on. One night in the rains it was pitch-dark and nothing but mud everywhere-well, you know how it is along Serrelind. The two of them had had supper and were just going to bed when suddenly they heard a noise outside-something quite big, stumbling about. They thought it must be a beast got loose.
"Your father went out with a lamp, but he couldn't see what it was and then the rain put the lamp out. And at that moment, in the dark, someone clutched his legs and there was a woman on the ground, crying and begging for help. He just picked her up and carried her indoors, all wet through as she was and all her clothes and her hair just one mass of mud, Morca said. They pulled the sodden clothes off her and washed her and put her into bed.
"She was only a young lass. I don't know how old- Morca didn't say-but not much older than you are now, I suppose. It was much as ever they could understand her, 'cos she was a Suban-a marsh-frog. Ah, but she was a regular pretty girl for all that, Morca said. Or she would have been, only she was in such a state; and she was pregnant. She was more than that; she was going to drop it any minute, she was going into labor. Oh, they were in a right taking, I'll tell you.
"Morca said she never asked her to account for herself. It was no time for that. But then the girl began talking of her own accord. She said her elder sister had been murdered in Suba-murdered by the wife of the High Baron of Urtah, she said: house burned in the night with her in it and her young son too. She said her sister had been some famous dancer and the High Baron had been her lover. That was why the wife had murdered her. And she herself had only learned of this that very morning, while she was out of her own house, gone down the village-I don't know, gone to buy salt or something, I think Morca said. She and her husband were living in eastern Urtah, not far from the highway between Gelt and Bekla. She never said where she first met him or how they came to be living there. Anyway, the girl had no sooner heard this than someone else came running up and told her her own husband was dead-can you imagine it? They'd come upon him-some more of the High Baron's wife's men had-in his own home and killed him, just because he was the husband of the younger sister of this What's-her-name, this dancer in Suba. And now the men were going through the village, looking for her.
"Well, of course she was terrified out of her life, this poor girl. And she was all the more terrified because there wasn't anyone she felt she could trust. Well, I mean, a Suban girl, a marsh-frog come to eastern Urtah; you can just picture it, can't you? She'd be a real fish out of water, wouldn't she? Anyway, she panicked. She ran out of the village just as she was and went east across the Plain. She wasn't making for anywhere in particular. Once she got to the highway, of course, she ought to have tried to get to Bekla, but she didn't. I suppose she must have thought these men might follow down the highway looking for her. She just kept on east across the Tonildan Waste.
"Well, I've reckoned it since as she must have done twenty-five miles across the Waste, poor girl, and her in that state! Anyway, at last, in the dark and the rain, she collapsed outside your father's door.
"They went and got Drigga from up the lane and she and Morca did everything they could. And at one point they thought they'd pulled her through, Morca said. You'd been born-"
"Me?"
"Yes, you'd been born and everything seemed all right:
but then she just bled and bled until she died, Morca said. But you were as bonny as could be."
Maia was crying.
"Well, your father-I'll go on calling him that-he thought that after what the girl had told them, the less got out the better, or there might be some more of these Urtan men- these murderers-coming to look for you, d'you see? That queen-baroness-whatever she was-she meant business, that was clear enough. And old Drigga, she agreed. So what happened was, they buried the poor girl and no one the wiser-she's down by that big ash-tree beside the lake-"
"Oh, Tharrin! That ash-tree? My tree?"
"Yes, she is. And they gave it out-and old Drigga backed them up, said as she'd been in the know all along- that the baby was Morca's. Well, quite believable; I mean, it doesn't always show all that much with the first baby, does it? And Morca was ready with some story about having sworn a vow to Shakkarn that if only he'd take away her trouble, she wouldn't tell a soul until everything had gone off all right.
"So the long and short of it was they brought you up as their own daughter. But they never told you, because you'd have let on, wouldn't you?-children always talk-and they were still afraid of this woman and what might happen. But apparently she died herself quite soon after you were born, so they needn't have worried; but they never knew that, you see. You don't get to hear all that much in country places, do you? and I suppose it never occurred to them to make inquiries. Anyway, that's the truth for you at last. Morca's not your mother."
Maia was weeping so intensely that for a little while she could not speak. At last she said, "I always wo-wondered why Drigga was so good to me. She was always-well, sort of specially kind. Oh dear, oh dear!"
Tharrin made no reply and she, at length getting her feelings a little more under control, went on, "So-at that rate, then-I'm sister's daughter to this famous No-this famous Suban dancer?"
"Yes. Whoever she may have been: for it's all a long time ago now, isn't it? Anyway, you did Morca some good, didn't you? Four children she's borne since then and healthy as anybody's, even if they are all girls."
Maia stood up. She must be alone to think.
"Thank you for telling me. Have you got everything you need, Tharrin? Are they good to you? Here's a hundred meld. Is t
here anything else you want? Tell me."
"No, nothing. I'll be fine till you come back. Cran bless you, Maia! How can I ever thank you?"
"Well, I'll be back before noon tomorrow, and then you'll be free! You can count on that, so sleep well." She kissed him warmly, feeling her tears wet against his face. "Good-bye for now."
On the way out, neither Pokada nor anyone else remarked on her weeping. This was a place where people often wept and after all, she had not told any of them that Tharrin was going to be released.
63: THEBARRARZ
What-even though it may involve neither pain nor danger-is more bewildering and agitating than to learn something of the greatest importance about oneself-something entirely unsuspected and highly extraordinary; verging on the unique: fo find oneself in a situation which very few indeed (and none available to talk to) can have been called upon to face? Some there be who have found themselves heirs to kingdoms; others the sudden possessors of some hitherto undreamt-of knowledge or truth. Others again have stumbled, all unawares, upon some huge discovery, daunting, of incalculable import. Visions have been vouchsafed to simpletons, landfalls made by the lost and desperate, revelations bestowed upon purblind stumblers in the dark. My very self is changed for ever; I am not and can never again be the person I was. Why me, God, why me? My dazzled, peering eyes cannot make out the import, the perspective: a fly on the window-pane or a far-off mountain? But first and foremost, God, am I beneficiary or victim?
Maia sat in her garden above the Barb. From time to time she beat with the flat of her hand upon the seat-slats beside her, staring out unseeingly across the water. Again, she sprang up and began pacing back and forth over the grass; then gripped the rail of the fence with both hands and rocked herself backwards and forwards. To Ogma, peeping from an upstairs window, it was plain that her
mistress must have learned something to upset her: no doubt an affair of the heart, she thought with sluggish, lukewarm envy (for such things lay so far beyond Ogma's horizon that she had little real idea of them), yet for the life of her she could not imagine who it might be. Well, she knew that Maia was to attend Elvair-ka-Virrion's bar-rarz that night. No doubt more would become clear later, for to give her her due Miss Maia had never been one to make herself out better than anybody else, to act standoffish or keep secrets.
In Maia's heart there was a kind of fighting. Part was inflamed with excitement by what Tharrurhad told her, part full of trepidation, exposed and fearful as a fledgling just flown from the nest. She was, in fact, in a state of shock. Again and again she called before her mind's eye that grim, long-ago night which Tharrin had described to her-the exhausted girl, in mortal terror, stumbling on through the mud and rain she knew not whither, her belly big with-with herself! She, too, had taken part in that dreadful journey towards death-and life! She saw her dear father-Ah, no! Now her father no longer-striding in out of the darkness with the lass in his arms: Morca staring in bewilderment and consternation: the dim-lit vigil over the sweating, babbling girl: Drigga heating water, making up the fire, comforting, reassuring. Then her thoughts leapt to the ash-tree by the lake-her own tree, from which she had so often dropped blissfully down into the water, to swim away, to escape from her drudgery and chores. Where exactly could the grave be? She called the surrounding ground before her mind's eye. There was nothing to see, no mound-well, no, they'd have made sure of that. Could it be that bit over by-But then she began to cry again and couldn't think straight any more.
Her father was not her father. And Kelsi and Nala and little Lirrit-oh, she'd been so fond of Lirrit, she'd been the one she really loved best-they weren't her sisters at all! And Morca? Well, at least that made what she'd done a bit more understandable. They mustn't be left alone, they mustn't go in want. She'd send them money. And Tharrin-she'd need to keep an eye on Tharrin: send one of her soldiers back to Serrelind with him: ah, make sure he got there and all, and the money too.
And she herself? She was a Suban-a marsh-frog! Well, half, for sure, anyway. But her real father-had he been-
a Suban? No, not if they'd been living in eastern Urtah: he'd have been an Urtan. Where exactly was the village? It shouldn't be difficult to find out-they'd not have forgotten the murder after as little as sixteen and a half years. There'd be people there who'd known her father and mother.
Nokomis! She was sister's daughter, then, to the fabulous, legendary Nokomis! Well, that explained a whole basting lot, as Occula would no doubt have remarked. And more than that, she and Bayub-Qtal were cousins! And before the implications of this, poor Maia fetched up literally at a standstill and all of a shake, like a boat in the eye of the wind. "Oh, it's all too much at one go, that it is!" she said aloud, as though declaring to the gods that she was just not going to play any more. She sat down on the grass and began chewing daisies; and a few minutes later Ogma came to tell her that dinner was ready.
Today she could eat all right. Both horror and uncertainty had left her. She knew what she meant to do, and her confidence was only slightly less than her determination. After the meal, telling Jarvil to admit no one, she lay down on her bed, escaping into sleep with the relief of a slave pitching a heavy load off his back and not caring which way up it landed, either.
When she woke, Ogma was rattling pails in the bathroom and a beaker of milk, its top covered with muslin, was standing on the table beside her bed. The sun was setting and the swifts were darting and screaming high up in the cooling air. A passer-by called to someone in the quiet road outside. A scent of planella drifted in from the garden. Suddenly it seemed to Maia that some god was revealing to her a truth-that the world was not, in fact, transfixed upon a few sharp, pyramidal points of great matters. Rather, it was supported easily upon countless passing moments, a myriad diurnal trivia, like the host of befriending butterflies in old Drigga's story, who carried the wandering princess up and over the ice mountain.
She drank the milk and stretched luxuriously, smelling the planella, admiring again the workmanship of the onyx rabbit and listening to the sound of water pouring into the bath. "I'm not cold or hungry or ill," she thought, "and I've got me." Somewhere outside, the blue-finch sang his little phrase, "Never never never never let-you-fear." It
was the only one he knew. She laughed, sat up and swung her feet to the floor. She'd show them!
She would wear the cherry-colored robe with the bodice of crystals-one of four or five which they had given her on her return to the city (for the authorities, having taken over Sencho's great mass of possessions and effects, had been weeks in disposing of them, and she had returned in time to be offered her pick of the wardrobe). The cherry dress had been lucky on the night of the senguela: it would be lucky now. For the rest, her diamonds and a spray of planella in her hair (which she would comb out loose over her shoulders) would do very well. Sixteen-year-old Maia had no need to wonder what Fornis might keep in her cabinet of unguents.
Coming downstairs in the rose-and-saffron half-light reflected from the Barb, over which the bats were already flittering, she found her two soldiers-summoned by Ogma-waiting to take her to the Lord General's house. She gave them ten meld apiece and told them to go and drink it. "Half a mile up the Trepsis Avenue, on an evening like this? I'm walking!" At this their eyes opened wide, for in the upper city the only women who walked in public were slaves. But the Serrelinda-well, for the matter of that she might have been going to swim it (oh, yes, they'd heard that story all right) and no one would have had a word to say.
"But when shall we come to the Lord General's to bring you home, then, saiyett?" asked Brero. "You needn't," she said. "I'll send you a message tomorrow morning." At which he clapped his hand over his mouth to suppress an appreciative guffaw. She didn't mess about, did she, the little saiyett? Someone or other wasn't half going to be lucky.
The avenue seemed as full of scents as a flowerbed of summer bees, stirring and mingling, here and gone. Roses, lake water and planella, wood-smoke and dew, clipped grass and a sharp, resi
nous smell from where someone was sawing logs. She, the Serrelinda, was floating to her destination on the fragrance of the world, like the butterfly princess on her magic quest. She was on her way to save poor old Tharrin from the Sacred Queen. Ah, and after that she'd have to start thinking about Bayub-Otal and all. Shakkarn alive! He, the rightful Ban of Suba, was not only her liege lord but her own kith and kin! And anyway, even
setting all that aside, she'd begun to think rather differently of him since Suba and since Nasada. Funny, she thought, how you get to altering your ideas about people as you.find out a bit more about them. Like Milvushina.
Am I beautiful, Zenka? Zenka, am I the girl you can feel proud of? You never had the chance to show me off, Zenka, did you; to feel proud of your sweetheart in public, among other Katrians? "You're the most beautiful girl in the world," he answered. "I'm always with you, all the time: I'll never leave you." She broke off a spray of yellow Claris trailing over a wall beside her. "Take this, my darling," he said, "and wear it for me: if I knew of anything more beautiful to give you, I would. Well, we're on active service now, you know. Have to grab what we can get." Oh, thank you, Zenka! I love you so much! Oh, do you remember how we chose a dagger? And you said-
From behind her sounded the soft flit-flat, flit-flat of a jekzha-man's feet in the dust and then a girl's voice, "Maia! What in the world are you doing here?"
It was Nennaunir, wrapped in a gossamer-thin, azure cloak, a crystal-and-gold ring on one finger of the hand that held the rail as she leant towards Maia, her high-piled hair set now not with one but apparently about five garnet combs.
Maia laughed. "Walking to Elvair's party."
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