Maia

by Richard Adams

  "Will you be needing an escort?" went on the captain. "You and your friends-where are you going?"

  "I just want to get them out of Bekla," she answered. "Anywhere'll do for now."

  He frowned, puzzled. "Were you going to return to Lord Randronoth alone, then, across the city?"

  "There was a man with me before I was arrested by the Palteshis-a man and another girl-only in all the confusion we got separated, see?"

  "So you came in here by yourself? That must have taken some courage."

  "She's the Serrelinda, sir, ain't she?" said one of the men.

  "We'll escort you as far as the Blue Gate," said the captain. "I've got to go back there, anyway."

  Before she could reply the door opened and two of the three soldiers returned. With them were Bayub-Otal and- and-O Cran!-her heart missed a beat and she actually staggered, clutching at the captain's arm for support. Yes, it was indeed Zen-Kurel.

  If the sight of Zirek had caught her unprepared, the sight of Zen-Kurel utterly overwhelmed her. She stood crushed and shattered by the recognition, tears streaming from her eyes.

  Not infrequently it happens that a person-or even a place-deeply loved and lost, becomes in memory more an idea in the heart than a precise visual recollection. It is as though what has been clung to and valued were not the outward semblance, the visible form-that is only the shell of a nut-but rather what it signifies. Thus, the memory of home is less the actual look of the place than the recollection of security and of being cherished. To a girl, the memory of her lover may well transcend his bodily and facial appearance-left far below, as it were-to signify rather the delight of love-making and of being understood and esteemed more deeply than she had ever believed possible. Actually to set eyes on him once more in the flesh often has an unexpected impact, for in absence the

  mind had retained only vaguely the details of features; yet now these, which during separation were confined in some shadowy kennel of the memory, come bounding forth, pell mell, like released dogs jumping on a homecoming master and stopping him in his tracks.

  Yet Maia's case, though of this nature, was in addition grievous and horrifying beyond expression. What she felt was like the infliction of a wound. Her first, spontaneous association was of a ballad that old Drigga used to sing- a ballad which, when she had been a little girl, had more than once frightened her to tears. It was the chilling tale of Terembro, the dead lad who returned to visit his former love by night. The very words came back to her; she could hear them, sung in old Drigga's quavering voice.

  "O my dear heart, my dearest lover, Where's that color you'd some time ago?"

  "O the grave has worn me and the clay has torn me; I'm but the ghost of your Terembro."

  Bayub-Otal, tall and raw-boned as he had always been, looked more or less as she remembered, though plainly suffering from cruel privation. But Zen-Kurel; her beautiful Zenka, the handsome, light-hearted, devil-may-care young officer who had made her laugh for joy at nothing, had teased her out of absurdity and then teased her back into it, in whose secure arms she had lain in tears of happiness! Ah! gods! nothing in her life had ever remotely approached what she underwent in the moment that she recognized this groping, helpless wreck of her former lover. It was not possible, she thought, to suffer like this. It was beyond the frame of the world and the order of things appointed: the gods must surely intervene to stop it. Yet they did not.

  Zen-Kurel was hollow-faced and very pale, skeletal in appearance, breathing in gasps and shivering continually. His eyes were half-closed, his cracked lips dry and his mouth fallen open. The soldiers had each drawn one of his arms round their necks and were gripping his wrists; otherwise he would have fallen. His knees were bent and his head hung forward on his chest. He did not look up as he was brought into the room, and seemed unaware of his surroundings.

  The sight shocked everyone present. One soldier uttered an exclamation of horror, cut quickly short. After a few

  moments Mendel-el-Ekna said to Maia, "You say you mean to take them out of the city-both these men?"

  With a great effort she controlled herself. "Yes; I must."

  "Well, it's for you to say, saiyett: I'm at your orders. But that man-he's a Katrian, isn't he?-do you think he can do it? He's very bad indeed: anyone can see that."

  "If only we can get them both away-just a few miles, captain-I'll be able to look after them. I'd be more than glad of your help."

  "Very well; you shall have it." He turned to one of his men. "That damned swine of a governor-go and make him give you a stretcher. We'll get them as far as the Blue Gate for a start."

  The stretcher, made of poles and sacking, was stained with what looked like dried blood. Maia recoiled from the thought of its probable use in the routine of the prison.

  Zen-Kurel had shown ho sign of recognizing her, but for the matter of that she doubted whether he had any idea at all of where he was or of anyone around him. Bayub-Otal, however, took her hand, looking at her gravely.

  "We owe this release to you, Maia?"

  "Yes, Anda-Nokomis."

  "Strange! You say you're going to take us out of Bekla?"

  "Ah, that's if we can; only it's risky, see?"

  "I believe you. Who are these men?"

  "Lapanese."

  "Lapanese? Where's Kembri, then?"

  "Gone south to fight Erketlis. The Lapanese are in revolt-they mean to take the city before Fornis can."

  "Then I suppose we may-But Zen-Kurel's in a very bad way, Maia: I only hope he can survive."

  "We must get him out of here," she answered. "Away from Fornis, that's the first thing. Look, they're ready to

  go."

  Mendel-el-Ekna himself accompanied them, with eight men. It was not until they came out from the Shilth into the western end of the Sheldad that Maia grasped the full extent of the chaos. Far and near, the entire city was full of flame and clamor. Frighteningly close, in the half-darkness, a running fight was going on between two bands of soldiers; yet she was quite unable to tell which side was which. All around them rose shouting and the clash of arms. Dead bodies sprawled in the road and wounded men

  were crying out and cursing. The captain remained entirely unmoved.

  "Nothing to worry about, saiyett: our people have got things well in hand. Whatever you do, just keep going."

  As they stumbled on, it became clear that the whole length of the Sheldad was taken up with the fighting. Soon they were forced to a halt. Gangs of rogues and beggars, more dangerous than wild animals, were dodging among the soldiers, robbing whom they could and looting booths and shops. In doorways Maia could see grim-faced men with cudgels in their hands, plainly ready to defend their premises against all comers. From upper windows screaming women were pelting raiders trying to break in below. In several places fires had started, and above the all-pervading din rose sounds of crackling flames, falling beams and the intermittent crash of collapsing roofs. A lurid glow blotted out the stars.

  "Do you know your way through this damned place?" shouted the captain in her ear.

  "Best go down to the Slave Market, I reckon," she answered, "and then try to get up the Kharjiz and past the temple."

  Once out of the Sheldad they met with less trouble. What isolated fighting they came upon they were able to avoid, while almost all the looters and footpads who saw them sidled off, daunted by the sight of their breastplates and weapons. They had one brief skirmish, however, with an armed gang too drunk to realize they had met their match. Mendel-el-Ekna went for them with grim relish, dropping two in the gutter before the rest took to their heels. Twenty hectic minutes later they reached the Blue Gate.

  Here a noisy, milling crowd were being held in check by a line of Lapanese soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, spears extended and swords stuck ready to hand into the timbers at their backs. The captain's men, with some difficulty, forced a way through for Zen-KurePs stretcher. The tryzatt in command of the spearmen, sweating and helmetless, saluted Mendel-el-Ekna wi
th a look of relief.

  "Any chance you can give us a hand, sir? Count Seek-ron's orders, to let no one through the gate, but they're all in a panic to get out of the city and I don't know how much longer we can hold them."

  "Where «Count Seekron?" asked Mendel-el-Ekna.

  "Gone to the upper city, sir, to find Lord Randronoth. No one knows where he can have got to."

  A stone from somewhere in the crowd splintered the woodwork of the gate, narrowly missing Maia where she stood beside the stretcher. "Give the men bows, tryzatt," said the captain. "Order these bastards to disperse and threaten to shoot if they don't. Be quick, too!"

  Suddenly, from near the front of the crowd, a voice shouted, "Maia! Maia!" Turning, she saw Zirek and Meris trying to push their way towards her. She gripped Mendel-el-Ekna's arm, pointing.

  "Captain, that's the man and the girl I told you about; the ones who were with me. Please get them over here if you can!"

  "Bring them into the guard-room!" shouted the captain to two of his men. "And you'd better get in there, too, before you get hurt," he added to Maia. "Go on; I'll see to your friends!"

  Thus, after the lapse of a year-and hardly in better case-Maia entered once more the guard-room where she and Occula had been befriended by the soldiers on that sweltering afternoon when they had trudged into Bekla behind Zuno's jekzha.

  Two minutes later she was joined by Zirek and Meris. Meris had a swollen lip and a cut on one arm.

  "Right; now we've got to get you out," said Mendel-el-Ekna. "Can you walk?" he asked Bayub-Otal.

  The Ban of Suba shrugged. "When I can't, I'll stop."

  "Then the quicker you're all gone the better. Serrelinda, I can spare you two men to carry the stretcher. But get him to some sort of shelter as soon as you can, do you see? Otherwise he'll die. And then send my men straight back; I need them."

  She kissed his hands and thanked him with tears in her eyes, but he made light of it.

  "Oh, I'd do more than that for you, Serrelinda. Don't worry, I'll tell Lord Randronoth we got you and your friends away all right. See you when you get back."

  The tryzatt opened the postern and in the flickering darkness they slipped through behind the line of spearmen. Immediately the door shut to behind them. In front, on either side, stretched the high, backward-tilting walls of the outer precinct, leading down to the caravan roads below.

  "Which way?" asked Bayub-Otal as they reached it. He spoke gaspingly, through clenched teeth.

  "That's for you to say, my lord," she replied.

  "I'd say south, my lord," said Zirek. "But it might be best to get off the road soon. I reckon the less we're seen thebetter."

  "Then south it is," said Bayub-Otal.

  Ten minutes later Maia looked back. The eastern walls of the city showed as a black line, beyond which the glow of flames shone luridly on the base of a canopy of smoke. The hubbub, diminished by distance, had become an ugly, throbbing din, like that of some swarm of gigantic insects roused to anger.

  "A devils' playground," she whispered, gazing.

  "What?" asked Zirek, ahead of her. "What did you say, lass?"

  "Nothing," she answered, turning to catch up with him. "Only something as somebody once said to me. Still got the bread and cheese all right, have you?"

  She never saw Bekla again.

  PART IV THE SUBAN

  87: WHAT MAIA OVERHEARD

  Maia had been milking the cows. She had not lost the knack-or at all events jt had come back quickly enough- but her soft, white fingers and pampered, upper city wrists were aching, and now the yoke seemed pressing hard on her shoulders. All the same it was reassuring-the feel of wooden pattens on bare feet and the well-remembered sensation of treading on cracked, summer-baked mud and powdery dust. The dark cowshed was heartening, too, with bright spots of light showing through the knotholes of its planks; likewise the stamping and kloofing of the cows and the smells of cow-dung and of evening water from the brook outside. Her mind might prompt her as often as it liked that she was not out of danger, but in her heart these familiar things spoke of security. It is always satisfying to show oneself unexpectedly capable in some chance-encountered situation where one's companions are all at sixes and sevens. Meris was a shocking bad hand about the place, and even Zirek, though willing enough, knew next to nothing and was continually having to be instructed.

  Doing her damnedest to look as though she didn't find the pails heavy, Maia carried them across the yard, through the stone-flagged kitchen and into the little, narrow dairy beyond. Here she set them down, ducked out of the yoke and then, lifting first one pail and then the other, emptied them into the big clay vessels on the shelf above the churn.

  Even the dairy was not properly cool this weather. The milk would have to be used quickly. A little would be sold round about, but most would go to themselves-drunk fresh or made into butter, cheese or whey. This was hardly more than a subsistence farm, a bit better than Morca's patch on the Tonildan Waste, but still a long way behind the kind of place where Maia had met Gehta. The farmer, Kerkol, his wife Clystis and her fourteen-year-old brother lived almost entirely on what they produced. Still, at least there was plenty of black bread, cheese, brillions and ten-drionas. The strangers weren't eating them out of house and home and Kerkol was glad enough of their money, to say nothing of the extra help.

  Coming back into the kitchen, Maia stepped out of her pattens and rinsed her hands in the wooden tub opposite the door. The water was getting greasy, she noticed: she'd

  tip it out after supper and refill the tub from the brook. She gave her face a quick rub with her wet hands and was just drying it on a bit of sacking when Clystis came in.

  Clystis was a big, healthy girl, happy in her youth and strength!-in being equal to life-and in her first baby, a boy not quite a year old. She had a quick mind and from the first had struck them all as more forthcoming and go-ahead than her husband, a slow, rather taciturn fellow who always seemed happiest out working. It was undoubtedly Clystis who had convinced Kerkol that they stood to gain from letting the strangers stay. He himself, like most peasants, tended to be dubious of anything unfamiliar.

  Clystis smiled at Maia, showing a row of sound, white teeth. "Cows done, then?"

  "Ah," Maia smiled back. "Gettin' a bit quicker now, see?"

  "Didn't take you long, did it? How many days is it you been here now?"

  "Ten." Maia looked round towards the passage. "How is he this evening?"

  "The poor lad? I reckon he's a lot better. The young chap's with him."

  They had never been asked where they came from, nor their names; and Clystis never used any except Maia's. Bayub-Otal was "the gentleman," Zen-Kurel "the poor lad," Zirek "the young chap," while Meris was "your friend" or "the other girl." They were fugitives from the fighting beyond; a "beyond" known only vaguely to Kerkol and Clystis, neither of whom had ever been to Bekla.

  During the night of her flight from the city and all the following morning, Maia had been in a state of almost trance-like shock. If she had not been young and in perfect health she would have collapsed. Zirek and Meris, after their months of hiding, were weak and not rightly themselves: nervous, unsteady, starting at everything and incapable-or so it seemed-of normal talk or thought. Only Bayub-Otal, though clearly almost at the end of his tether from fatigue and lack of sleep, had remained comparatively self-possessed, limping on beside Zen-Kurel's stretcher, leaning on a long stick cut with Maia's knife and now and then exchanging a word with the soldiers. Long afterwards, Maia still remembered that night as the worst of her life.

  Some time after moonset they stopped in a thicket. Maia,

  who alone knew how large a sum of money she was carrying, and remembering the footpads on the way up from Puhra the year before, was so much afraid that she could not bring herself to rest. At the near-by call of an owl she leapt up and would have run if Bayub-Otal had not restrained her. They had been there no more than five minutes before she asked him whether they could
not go on.

  "But where to, Maia?" he replied in a dry whisper. "We may just as likely be going into danger as away from it."

  "Where you making for, then, sir?" asked one of the soldiers who had been carrying the stretcher. "Only we didn't reckon to come this far: the captain's expecting us back."

  Maia gave them twenty meld apiece. "I'll write something to your captain," said Bayub-Otal. "It won't be much further, but if we don't get this young man into shelter he's going to die."

  The second soldier nodded. "Looks bad enough now. Should I try to give him some water, do you think, sai-yett?"

  She shook her head. "He couldn't swallow it."

  She herself now believed that Zen-Kurel would die. Since she had first seen him in Pokada's room he had not spoken a word, though once or twice he had muttered unintelligibly and moaned as though in pain. To add to her misery and the nightmare-like nature of all she was feeling, it now seemed to her that she would have done better to leave him in the care of the Lapanese. But-Fornis? She doubted whether, with Randronoth dead, the Lapanese could hold the city. Before long either Kembri or Fornis would recapture it. So in that respect they had been right to escape; yet if only they had stayed, Zen-Kurel would have had a chance of recovery.

  She was kneeling beside him when Bayub-Otal, taking her hand, drew her to one side.

  "Maia," he said, "I'm too exhausted to think clearly, but can I ask you this? Have you any destination-any plan?"

  She shook her head. "No, Anda-Nokomis. All I ever had in mind was to get the four of you out of Bekla."

  "You?" He looked at her in perplexity, apparently wondering whether his hardships might not have brought about some breakdown in his rational powers. "But-er-why?"

  She shrugged. "Well, I did, anyway. What d'you reckon we ought to do now?"

  "You aren't counting on help from anyone else?"

  "No."

  "Have you got any money?"