Maia Read online

  "Understand this once and for all: only ten-meld tarts steal from men. A girl who steals from men is a fool. I'm not talkin' about good and bad, or right and wrong, or any rubbish like that. I know it's a hard, unfair world full of rich, selfish bastards. But there are far cleverer and safer ways to take their money off them than stealin' it."

  "Can't see that," answered Maia sulkily. "Strikes me as you-"

  "Doan' speak to me like that!" blazed Occula, slapping her hard across the face. "Now that's for your own good! I've saved your fartin' little life and now I'm talkin' to you seriously, so you damn' well listen! Everybody's certain sure that all bed-girls are liars and thieves. So they are. We tell men the lies they pay to be told, and we steal men's

  great stiff zards off their wives for money. That's business! But suppose you steal a man's money, or his rings, or his silver knives, or any damn' thing he's got when you're with him, you're just diggin' your own grave. A stupid girl says to herself, 'Oh, I wasn't caught, and what's more he daren' accuse me: his wife might get to hear, or he wouldn' like So-and-so to know where he'd been.' But none of that matters a baste. He'll know when he misses it, and so will the next fellow she steals from, andthe next. They woan' come back-and worse than that, she'll get a reputation, and likely enough a knife in her back one night. I knew a real, live girl it happened to! Stealin' becomes a habit, you see, and then one day you go too far. Every time's a big success until the last one. Believe me, a good girl can get far, far more out of a man's pocket without pickin' it. And they're so surprised to find you're what they call honest that you get one hell of a reputation-'Coo, an honest shearna!'-as if you were a god-damn' talkin' monkey or somethin'. So then you can take even more off them. And you doan' have to be afraid all the time, or wonder when you're goin' to be caught."

  Maia digested this straight-from-the-shoulder advice in silence. At length she said, "When you gave it to him just now-the bear, I mean-weren't you afraid he'd think you might have stolen it?"

  " 'Course not!" said Occula contemptuously. "He'd know perfectly well I'd never try and do anythin' so bastin' stupid."

  "And why did you tell him that we wouldn't do what the man-"

  "Did you want to do it?"

  "Well, I don't know, really. I-I can't tell. But three hundred meld! I can't hardly believe it! We never saw that much in three months at home! I-"

  "Well, to start with he wouldn' have paid you; he'd have paid Zuno, and I wouldn' mind bettin' the reason Zuno came here was because he'd been talkin' to the man after we'd gone, and quite likely been offered even more than three hundred. Some men go crazy when they can' get somethin' they want-you, in this case. But how much of it d'you think we'd have seen? Not a lot, if I'm any judge. And then, an Ortelgan-those squitterin' Telthearna turds! He might have wanted you to-oh, I doan' know-some beastly thing or other would have made you sick. And he

  might easily be diseased-though I admit he didn' look it. I wasn' goin' to see you packed off to a man like that, just to put dishonest money in Zuno's pocket. Besides, just think! We'd have had a guilty secret from Lalloc. A nice way to start! And you'd never know when Zuno might not come out with it some other time, just to put the squeeze on us for some reason or other. Whereas now, we've got somethin' on him. He knows damned well Lalloc would have been dead against it. If you were some little drover's drab, 'twould have been different; but a girl like you, banzi? Oh dear, no! You're set for the top, my lass, and now U-Pussy knows we know it. With any luck you'll be in a position to piss on him one day."

  "But won't he take it out on us tomorrow?"

  "I doan' reckon so. In fact, we can use it a little bit on him, as long as we take care not to rub his nose in it. He wouldn' like us to mention it to Lalloc, you see. He couldn' possibly deny it; there's two of us, and we know the Or-telgan's name as well. But we doan' want to make an enemy of him. Jus' let him think about what we know, and that he tried to do wrong and we didn'."

  She smiled. "That's tomorrow. But tonight, let's jus' forget the damned lot of them and have a bit of a nice time! Come here, banzi, so that I can forgive you! Oh, aren't you jus' the prettiest thing this side of a rainbow? How couldn' I be good to you? You make me feel like a nice girl again. I can stop cheatin' with you. Isn' it lovely to be able to give somethin' for nothin'?"

  Maia shivered deliciously as the black girl's hands caressed her from her forgiven shoulders to her pardoned thighs. Blowing out the candle, she drew Occula down on the bed.

  13: THE GIBBET

  Next day they travelled fourteen miles and spent the night uneventfully at Naksh. Zuno having determined on a late start to cover the last seven miles of their journey, they set off an hour before noon in a blinding glare.

  The white, dusty road across the plain lay empty in the mid-day heat. Zuno dozed where he sat. Soon the Deelguy

  had slackened their pace to a mere dawdle, now and then surreptitiously passing a flask between them.

  "They're not going to offer us any, the lice," whispered Occula.

  "It's enough to make anyone take on bad," panted Maia, for the twentieth time wiping the sweat from the back of her neck. Her body, under her clothes, felt covered with a kind of paste of sweat and road-dust. Her hair was full of dust and every now and then she spat a mouthful of gritty saliva into the road.

  "Doan' keep doin' that," said Occula. "Just throwin' away moisture: you need it."

  "Well, I'm blest if I'm going to swallow it," replied Maia.

  "Gettin' particular?" panted the black girl. "I wouldn' say no to a pint of cold piss, myself. Never mind, banzi. We'll soon be there now-less than two hours, I'd say."

  The girls had gradually edged away from behind the jekzha and were now trudging a little in front of it, on the opposite side of the road. Here, although there was no shade-for the baked, cracked plain, covered with sun-dried grass and withered flowers, was treeless for miles- they were at least out of the dust raised by the slaves and the wheels.

  "Am I dreamin'," said Occula, "or is this soddin' road goin' uphill again?"

  "Ah, that it is," answered Maia. "Funny, isn't it? You don't notice the slopes till you come to them. It looks flat in front, but then you find-oh, I say, Occula, what's that, look, up there on the top?"

  "Jus' doan' talk to me, banzi, while I finish meltin'," grunted the black girl, lowering her head like a straining bullock as the slope grew steeper.

  Maia, tottering and closing her eyes against the dust, felt ready to fling herself down by the roadside and be hanged to what might follow. She watched a grasshopper leap out of the weeds and travel twenty feet, gliding on brown-edged, rosy wings. "Wish I could do that," she thought. "S'pose they don't need to drink, else they couldn't live here."

  Reaching at length the top of the long rise, the Deelguy halted, supporting the shafts on their backs as they leaned forward, drawing deep breaths. There was still no shade, but the,girls, past waiting for permission, flung themselves

  down on the verge. Occula's face looked as though it had been chalked in long, uneven smears.

  Maia grinned. "You look like you was got up for the mumming."

  Suddenly she broke off, staring in speechless horror at the rising ground on the opposite side of the road.

  About fifty yards away, in front of a clump of sage bushes, stood a narrow, wooden platform, from which rose two stout posts, about ten feet high and as far apart. The top of the square was completed by a crossbar, deeply notched in four places. From each notch hung a short length of chain ending in a fetter.

  The fetters were secured round the ankles of what had once been two men. The dried bodies, hanging motionless in the still heat, were indescribably ghastly, so dreadful as to seem unreal, like spectres encountered in nightmare or some drug-induced trance. The expressions of agony and despair in their crumbled, lip-retracted faces were no less appalling for being inverted, eyeless and half-flayed by insects and birds. Their lank hair was bleached almost white by the sun. The three arms still hanging
below the heads were nothing but bundles of gray sticks, to which, here and there, adhered rags and fragments of flesh. One still ended in a fist of tight-clutched fingers: below the others, small, white bones lay scattered on the turf.

  Maia, with an inarticulate cry, buried her face in her hands. At this moment, as though the abomination had power to pursue her and pierce whatever feeble barrier she could raise against it, the ghost of a breeze stole down the slope, bringing with it a vile, carrion odor.

  Occula, after one brief glance, turned back to Maia, shaking her gently by the shoulder.

  "Never seen a crows' picnic before, banzi? Come on, they woan' bite you, poor bastards. They might have once."

  "Oh-" Maia lay retching and shuddering in the grass. "I never-"

  "Gives you a turn the first time, doan' it?" said the black girl. "That's why they do it, of course. 'Come all you jolly highway rogues, this warnin' take by me. The crows have pecked my bollocks off, as you can plainly see. But once when I was young and gay, I used to-' "

  "Oh, Occula, can't we go away from here?" Maia was weeping. "Whatever can they have done?"

  "How the hell d'you expect me to know?" replied Oc-

  cula. "Dropped a plate on a Leopard's toe, I expect, or made Queen Fornis's bath too hot."

  "Or possibly even made indiscreet jokes about the Sacred Queen," cut in Zuno from the jekzha. "But," he resumed after a few moments, "if all of us were to repeat everything we heard, it would give rise to too much awkwardness altogether, wouldn't it?"

  Occula, who, as soon as he spoke, had stood up and turned toward him, made no reply, merely standing acquiescently as though awaiting an order. Unexpectedly, it was one of the Deelguy who next spoke, jerking his thumb towards the gallows.

  "Make-onnemies. No good. Too monny, finish."

  "Certainly there is seldom anything to be gained by making enemies," said Zuno. "We'll stop here for a few minutes," he added, extending a hand to show that he wished to be helped down from the jekzha. "Since there is no shade for miles, this place will do as well as anywhere else."

  Having alighted, he sauntered away in the opposite direction from the gallows, while the Deelguy crawled under the wheels and began playing some game with tossed sticks in the dust.

  "They're a nasty, cruel lot, these Leopards, by all I ever heard," said Occula, as soon as she was sure that Zuno was out of hearing. "Never mind, banzi; we'll take bastin' good care they never hang us up, woan' we?"

  None the less, despite her indifferent manner and air of flippancy, she appeared by no means unaffected by the spectacle on the slope. Her smile, as Maia pulled her to her feet, seemed forced and unnatural, as did the four or five little dancing steps she took across the grass by way of beginning their stroll. When Maia caught up with her she was biting her lip and staring pensively at the ground.

  "Yes, a nasty lot," she repeated. "And if you go to bed with a murderer, banzi, how sound can you sleep?"

  "What?" asked Maia, frowning. "I don't understand."

  "No; I'm the one who understands; may all the gods help me!" But thereupon she broke off and, drawing Maia round, pointed towards the purple-rimmed horizon.

  "Look, banzi! Take a damn' good look! We've come far enough to see it, doan' you reckon?"

  Half-closing her eyes against the glare, Maia gazed westward across the plain. Four miles away, a high, irregular

  mass cutting the skyline, stood the solitary peak of Mount Crandor, the mid-day brilliance throwing its ridges and gullies into sharp contrasts of sunlight and purple shadow. Encircling it, she could just make out a thin, darker streak- the line of the city walls, broken at intervals by the points of the watch-turrets.

  To Crandor's right, immediately below the heat-hazed slopes, lay Bekla itself. Maia, who had never seen even Kabin or Thettit-Tonilda, stared incredulously at the mile-wide drift of smoke above the tilted roofs, through which rose the slender columns of towers taller than any trees; clustered together, as it seemed from this distance, like reeds in a pool. Above the city, between it and the lower slopes of Crandor itself, the Palace of the Barons crowned the Leopard Hill, its ranges of polished marble balconies catching the noon-day sun and flashing gleams of light across the intervening plain. Even at this distance-or so, at all events, she thought-Maia's ears could catch, far-off and faint, a hum and murmur like that of bees about a hive.

  "Turn Bekla upside-down?" she breathed at last. "Why, we'll just be goin' in there like-like coal to the blacksmith's, no danger!"

  "Now stop it, banzi!" said the black girl quickly. "All right, I admit it's enough to poke your eyes out, sure enough; but stands to reason, doan' it, it's got to be like anywhere else-bung-full of randy sods with standin' rods? Get that into your head and keep on rememberin' it. You're not like a confectioner or a silk-merchant-someone people can do without at a pinch. You're like a baker or a midwife: life just can't go on without the likes of us. Whoever they are, they've got to be born, they've got to eat, they've got to baste and they've got to die."

  "But I never imagined; it's so big!" Maia stared once more at the distant city with its array of tapering spires.

  "Well, that's what the priestess said to the drover, but she found she could manage it all right after a bit. Look, there's old Puss-arse coming, see? Let's get back down before he starts calling us. And for Cran's sake doan' let him think you've got the wind-up about the mighty city of Bekla. You've got to learn to shrug- your shoulders and spit, banzi. Go on, do it now."

  Smiling in spite of herself, Maia obeyed; whereupon Occula took her hand and ran with her down the slope.

  Maia noticed, however, that she still kept her eyes averted from the opposite rise.

  14: BEKLA

  A little less than two hours later they found themselves on the northeastern outskirts of Bekla and approaching the Blue Gate. The mid-day heat was beginning to lessen. Behind its walls the city, stirring like some great, prostrate animal, was awakening from its sun-drenched torpor. Yawning shopkeepers with poles were pushing up the heavy, top-hung shutters they had let fall at noon. A few street cries could be heard, and here and there women, with baskets on their arms, were venturing forth from doors and passage-ways. The cripples and beggars sleeping along the alleys woke, brushed the flies from their suppurating eyelids and once more set about the task of keeping alive. As the Deelguy slaves joined other carts and wayfarers jostling between the walls of the outer precinct leading to the gate itself, the city's two water-clocks struck the third hour of the afternoon, first one and then the other releasing an iron ball to fall into a resonant copper basin. The nearer clock tower stood a bare two hundred yards from the Blue Gate and at the sudden, reverberant clang Maia started, looking up quickly towards the gold-painted grilles below the tapering spire.

  Although their journey had been only half as long as those of the two previous days, both girls were spent with the heat. Maia's left ankle was swollen and she winced at every step. As they followed the jekzha under the arch of the gate she suddenly stumbled and clutched at Occula's arm, leaning her head against the wall and panting.

  Five or six passers-by, attracted by the sight of such a pretty girl in obvious distress, formed a small crowd, chattering to one another and proffering advice, until a respectable-looking, elderly woman, attended by a slave carrying her basket, stepped forward and helped Maia to a stone bench recessed in the wall.

  Whether Zuno felt some slight twinge of conscience; whether he thought that it might look better if the girls did not arrive at Lalloc's in a state of sweating and bedraggled exhaustion; or whether he simply wished to avoid

  a street-row (for some of the crowd were beginning to mutter and point at him), there can be no telling. At all events he got down from the jekzha, went across to one of the soldiers on guard-duty and asked to see the tryzatt in the guard-room (which was also situated in the thickness of the wall). Here, having shown Lalloc's token (which was stamped with the Leopard seal), he obtained leave to bring his property into th
e guard-room. Then he dispatched one of the Deelguy to hire a second jekzha, while he himself, having told the other to come and let him know as soon as it arrived, went across the street to the nearest wine-shop.

  The soldiers off-duty were sympathetic to the girls, as most common people, themselves all-too-familiar with hardship and adversity, usually are towards anyone whom they perceive to be in genuine distress. When Occula had explained the reason for Maia's exhaustion there was a good deal of indignation.

  "Made 'em walk from Naksh, tryze, since this morning," said one of the soldiers to the guard-commander, who had just returned from a quick and illicit drink with Zuno across the road. "And that fancy bastard of Lalloc's riding along in the shade."

  "Rotten sod!" replied the tryzatt, his eyes taking in Maia from head to foot as she lay on a bench against the further wall. "Mean 'e never give 'em no water nor nothing? Well, Cran knows a soldier's life's nothing to shout about, but I'd rather that than yours, y' poor lass," he said to Occula.

  "Oh, you jus' wait a bit," replied Occula, grinning up at him through her mask of dust. "Give it a year and we might both be on our backs-you on a battlefield and me in a Leopard's bed."

  There was a general laugh, but the tryzatt, unhooking the wine-skin from the wall and tilting it to her mouth, put a fatherly hand on her shoulder.

  "Well, just you be careful how you do go jumping into Leopards' beds, my girl-that's if you ever get that far. There's plenty don't come so well out of that game as they reckon they're going to."

  "Ah, that's right," said another soldier. "You don't have to shake the melikon for the berries to fall."

  "Oh, bugger the melikon!" said Occula. "This banzi's not sixteen and you start talkin' about berries fallin'! As you're all bein' so kind," she went on, "I wonder whether