Maia Read online

  A younger girl, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, came running down the track, her bare feet sending up little clouds of dust. In one hand she was clutching a hunk of black bread from which, as she came to a stop, she took a quick bite.

  The older girl also stopped, facing her.

  "What's up then, Kelsi?"

  "Mother's that cross with you, Maia, for bein' away so long."

  "I don't care," replied the girl. "Let her be!"

  "I saw you was coming: I come to let you know. She told me to go and get the cows in, 'cos Tharrin's not come home yet either. I'll have to go back now, 'fore she starts wonderin' where I got to."

  "Give me a bit of that bread," said the girl.

  "Oh, Maia, it's all she give me!"

  "Just a bite, Kelsi, come on: I'm starving! She'll give me mine: then I'll give it back to you."

  "I know your bites," said Kelsi. She broke off a small piece between a dirty finger and thumb. Maia took it, chewing slowly before swallowing.

  "She'd better not try to do anything to me," she said at

  length. "Supper-she'd just better give me some, that's all."

  "She don't like you, does she?" said Kelsi, with childish candor. "Oh, not for a while now. What you done?"

  Maia shrugged. "Dunno; I don't like her much, either."

  "She was sayin' this evening as you was big enough to do half the work, but you left it all to her. She said-"

  "I don't care what she said. Tharrin wasn't there, was he?"

  "No, he's been out all day. I'll have to go now," said Kelsi, swallowing the last of the bread. She set off up the track, running.

  Maia followed with the idling pace of reluctance. Before approaching the door of the cabin she stopped and, on impulse, scrambled up the bank and tugged down a branch of orange-flowering sanchel. Plucking a bloom, she stuck it behind her left ear, pulling back her hair to make sure that it was not hidden among the wet tresses.

  Just as she entered, a chubby little girl, no more than three years old, came running through the doorway and full-tilt against her knee. Maia, stooping, snatched her up and kissed her before she could begin to cry.

  "Where were you running to, Lirrit, m'm? Running away, little banzi! Going to run all the way to Thettit, were you?" The little girl laughed and Maia began tossing her in her arms, singing as she did so.

  "Bring me my dagger and bring me my sword. Lirht's the lady to go by the side. I'm off to Bekla. to meet the great lord-"

  "Are you going to stand there all night squalling your head off, you lazy, good-for-nothing slut?"

  The woman who spoke was looking backwards over her shoulder as she stirred a pot hanging over the fire. She was thin and sharp-eyed, with a lean, shrewd face retaining traces of youth and beauty much as the sky outside retained the last light of day. Her eyes were red-rimmed with smoke and a powder of wood-ash discolored her black hair.

  The fire and the twilight together gave enough light to show the squalor of the room. The earth floor was littered with rubbish-fish-bones, fruit rinds and vegetable peelings, a broken pail, a dirty fragment of blanket, some sticks that Lirrit, playing, had dragged out of the wood-pile and left lying where they fell. An odor of rancid fat mingled

  with the faint, sweet-sour smell of infant's urine. A long oar, cracked a foot above the blade, was standing upright against the farther wall and in the firelight its shadow danced back and forth with irregular monotony.

  Before Maia could answer, the woman, dropping her iron ladle into the pot, turned round and faced her, hands on hips. She stood leaning backwards, for she was pregnant. One of her front teeth was broken short, giving her voice a sibilant, hissing sound.

  "Kelsi's driving in the cows, and a fine time she's taking over it, too. Nala's supposed to be bringing the clothes in off the hedge-that's if no one's pinched them. Where your step-father's got to nobody knows-"

  "I'm done bringing in the clothes," said a cheerful, dirty-faced nine-year-old, sprawled on a pile of wattle hurdles in the shadows. "Can I have some bread now, mum?"

  "Oh, there you are!" replied the woman. "Well, you can just make yourself a bit more useful first, my girl. You can pick all this muck up off the floor and put it on the fire, and after that you can go out and bring in some water. We'll see about bread when you're done." She came over to Maia, who had not moved and was still dandling the little girl in her arms.

  "And where in Cran's name have you been, miss, eh? Leaving us all to break our backs until you choose to come traipsing back half out of your clothes, like a Beklan shearna looking for a night's work!" Her voice cracked with rage. "What's that behind your ear, you trollop?"

  "Flower," said Maia. Her mother snatched the bloom and threw it on the floor.

  "I know it's a flower, miss! And p'raps you're going to tell me you don't know what it means to go about wearing a sanchel behind your left ear?"

  "I know what it means," said Maia, smiling sidelong at the floor.

  "So you stroll about like that while I'm slaving here- a great, dirty baggage, strong as an ox-"

  "I'm not dirty," said Maia. "I've been swimming in the lake. You're dirty. You smell."

  Her mother struck at her face, but as her arm swung forward Maia, still holding the child on one arm, caught and twisted it sideways, so that she stumbled and half-fell, cursing. The little girl began to scream and Maia, hushing

  her as she went, walked across to the fire and began ladling soup from the pot into a bowl standing on the hearth.

  "You just let that alone!" shouted her mother. "That's for your stepfather when he gets back. And if there's any left it'll go to your sisters, as have done some honest work. Do you hear me?" she went on as Maia, taking no notice, put down the little girl, carried the bowl over to the table and seated herself on a rickety bench. She snatched up a stick from behind the door. "You do as I say or I'll have the skin off that fat back of yours, you see if I don't!"

  Maia, gulping soup, looked up at her over the rim of the bowl.

  "You'd best let me alone. Might get hurt else."

  Her mother paused a second, glaring. Then, holding the stick out in front of her, stiff-armed and striking clumsily from side to side, she rushed at Maia. The girl, springing to her feet and overturning the bench on the floor, threw the bowl at her. It struck her on the neck and fell to the ground, covering her with the spilt soup. At the same time the point of the stick caught and scratched Maia's forearm, drawing blood. Kelsi, coming in from the cowshed, found her mother and sister grappling across the table, panting as they tugged at each other's hair and aimed slapping blows at heads and shoulders. At this moment the pale sky of nightfall in the open doorway was darkened by a man's figure stooping under the lintel.

  "Cran and Airtha!" and the man. "What the devil's going on, eh? D'you want them to hear you down the other end of the lane? Here, leave off, now, will you?"

  The woman happening to be the nearest, he took her by the forearms and pulled her back against him. She stood panting, still clutching the stick. He took it from her and then, glancing slowly round as his eyes became accustomed to the smoky half-light, took in the overturned bench, the spilt soup and the blood along Maia's arm.

  "Having a bit of a row, were you?" he said, as though not unused to such things or inclined to attach much weight to them. "Well, you can stop it now, both of you, and get me some supper-that's if there's any left. I'd have been here sooner, only for carrying in the nets. What were you doing, Maia? Come on, pick up that bowl and get me something to eat in it, there's a good lass."

  In the scuffle Maia's worn, flimsy smock had been torn

  across the bodice. As she bent to pick up the bowl one of her breasts fell out.

  Her step-father laughed. "Going to give us all a treat, eh? Better leave it till I'm not so damned hungry. Come on, Morca my lass, what was all the row about, eh?"

  Morca, silent, dipped a rag in the water-jar to wipe her sweating face.

  Maia, straightening up with the bow
l in one hand, held the ripped cloth in place with the other as she answered her step-father.

  "I come in from swimming. I. wanted something to eat. Mother said as I wasn't to have any, that's all."

  At this Morca broke in shrilly, bringing up one thing after another, emptying the whole pail of grievance and resentment in a deluge about the man's ears. "House-full of good-for-nothing brats-soon be another and whose fault's that?-never enough to go round-tell us you're going to market-drinking half the day in Meerzat-some Deelguy drab-oh, yes, don't think I don't know-daughters growing up as lazy as you-Maia never does a hand's turn, takes no notice of me or anyone else-she'll end in Zeray, mark my words-place'll fall round our ears one of these days-don't know why I ever took up with you-"

  Tharrin, apparently quite untroubled by this tirade, sat at the table eating bread, soup and fish as Maia brought them to him. He had something of the look of a man who has been caught out in a heavy shower-a slight air of bravado, mingled with resignation and the hope that the rain will not last much longer.

  He was not himself a Tonildan, having been born, some thirty-nine years before, the fourth son of a miller in Yelda. He had grown up footloose and happy-go-lucky, seldom much concerned about work as long as he had the price of a meal and a drink, yet able, when driven by need, to buckle down well enough; so that he soon acquired the reputation of a decent enough casual worker. He was a pleasant companion, largely because he never troubled about the morrow, never argued and had no principles to defend. If ever there was a man who took life entirely as it came it was Tharrin. Once, having joined an iron-trading expedition to the Gelt mountains, he had shown himself exceptionally useful and energetic. Yet when news of his capacities came to the ears of a Beklan officer, who offered him the rank of tryzatt at higher pay than he had ever

  earned or was ever likely to earn in any other way, he unhesitatingly declined between one drink and the next; and a month later took an ill-paid job helping to build huts at a farm in Tonilda, his fancy having been taken by a girl in the near-by village.

  For girls also he took as they came; and since he was a presentable young fellow and open-handed whenever he happened to have any money, they came easily enough. He had never been known to ill-use or even to lose his temper with a girl. However the girls, in the long run, customarily lost theirs, for Tharrin, good-humored as always, would laugh and shrug his shoulders at outraged accusations of absence or proven infidelity, merely waiting for anger to give way to tears and reconciliation. If it did not, he would simply transfer his favors with no hard feelings whatever.

  Since the only provocation he ever gave was by what he did not do rather than by anything he did; and since almost the only retaliation to which he ever resorted was his own departure, he was largely successful, at all events during his youth and early manhood, in persuading the world to take him on his own terms, or at any rate to grin indulgently and acquiesce. He got away with a great deal.

  Such accomplishments, however, are very much a gift of the prime, and tend to wane with it. There came a time when people began to feel unconsciously and then, after a few more years, to say in so many words that Tharrin's ways were hardly fitting for a fellow of his age. The part of the roving blade no longer suited him. It was time he learnt some sense and settled down.

  Such remarks, however, did nothing to change Tharrin, who had no enemies and always seemed as content with empty pockets as full ones. He was about thirty when, having taken service for a year in the household of Ploron, head forester to the Ban of Sarkid, he met his daughter Keremnis at the spring festival and, without the least thought of bettering himself but simply in the course of his own pleasure, got her with child.

  Had Tharrin's motive been deliberate Ploron, himself a shrewd, calculating man who had risen step by step through keeping a continual eye on the main chance and marrying to his advantage, would almost certainly have accepted the situation with grudging respect for a kindred spirit. In short, he would have put a good face on it and given him the girl

  and her dowry. That Tharrin had been nothing but impulsive was bad enough: but that he should then make it plain that he did not particularly want the girl and all that would go with her was unforgivable, a deadly insult to hard-won rank and standing. For Tharrin to remain anywhere in the southern provinces of the empire was no longer healthy or practicable. He disappeared north for three years, scratching a living first by rope-making on Ortelga, the remote, despised island in the Telthearna, and then as a drover in Terekenalt.

  And indeed he might well have remained in Terekenalt for the rest of his life, had it not been for the so-called Leopard revolution which took place in Bekla during the third year after his flight from Sarkid. This, which culminated in the murder of the High Baron Senda-na-Say, the accession of Durakkon and of the notorious Sacred Queen Fornis, had been to some extent abetted for his own gain by Karnat, King of Terekenalt-Karnat the Tall, as he was called. Since Terekenalt was in a state of more or less permanent hostility to the Beklan Empire, it contained a number of exiles and fugitives from Senda-na-Say's regime, several of whom now felt it safe to return. Tharrin, too, also felt that it might be safe to return; though he judged it prudent to remain in the north of the empire.

  For a time he settled in Kabin of the Waters but then, having travelled one spring the fifty miles south to Thettit as drover to a Deelguy cattle trader, left him there and wandered as far as the shores of Lake Serrelind. It was here that he met with Morca, not long widowed and desperate to know what to do for herself and her three fatherless girls; and took up with her as easily as he had taken up with eight or nine other women during the past twenty years.

  Her husband's death had not left Morca a beggar. She had the cabin, a fishing boat and nets and a few cows. Yet in a lonely, country place; and in such times, with the Leopard regime exploiting the peasantry and virtually encouraging gangs of itinerant slave-traders, there could be little peace of mind for a widow living alone with a young family. For Morca Tharrin, improvident and loose-living though he might be, meant the difference between some sort of security and a life of continual fear and anxiety on the edge of the Tonildan Waste. She was content to take

  him for bed-mate and protector and when, three years later, Lirrit was born, she was not ill-pleased.

  Tharrin, for his part, found himself, as first the months and then the years went by, settling into the life of a Tonildan small-holder much as a chance-flung stone settles into mud. He fished the lake and taught the two older girls to help him in the boat; he did a certain amount of work on Morca's land but rather more (since this paid ready money) on the land of her better-off neighbors; loafed in the Meerzat taverns and from time to time disappeared to Thettit. As will be seen, he discharged some unusual commissions. Yet somehow he always drifted back. For the truth was (though he would never have admitted it) that he was beginning to need, more and more, to settle for what he could get without too much hard work and fatigue. For him it was the first breath of autumn. With little reflection (to which he had, in any case, always been a stranger) he found himself staying on with Morca and her girls. The girls made it easy for him to do so, for while their mother, soured by work and worry, was often shrewish, Tharrin was uncritical, kindly and good-natured, and on this account they liked him and usually banded together to take his part after news of one or another of his escapades had filtered back to the cabin. In return he allowed them to pamper him with what meager luxuries were to be had, let them do much as they pleased and filled their heads with half-understood bawdy jokes and tall stories of former drinking-bouts and girls in Sarkid and Terekenalt. Like many another seedy adventurer drifting into middle age, he had come down to representing himself as a devil of a fellow to youngsters not yet possessed of sufficient experience to see him with eyes other than his own.

  His unspoken, but probably strongest, reason for remaining was Maia. Tharrin followed whims and inclinations, not trains of thought. Any notion of fatherly responsibility to
wards Maia was the last thing that ever entered his head, let alone any consideration of her future or her best interests. He simply enjoyed seeing her about the place, finding her there when he got home, smacking her buttocks and telling her to bring his supper. He liked to tease her and sit laughing as she stared out of her great blue eyes when he had told her some indecent anecdote beyond her comprehension. Girls, to be sure, were-or had once been-two a meld to Tharrin, but for all that,

  his palate was not so jaded but he could still be stirred by an exceptionally pretty one. During the past six months- much as a man might begin by casually approving a good-looking colt in a neighbor's field and end with an almost obsessive longing to own it for himself-he had become more and more engrossed by the thought of delicious, ripening Maia-Maia laughing, Maia insolent and defiant to Morca, Maia picking flowers, Maia stripping herself to wash with a child's heedlessness of who might be by. Two things had so far held him back. The first was Morca's sharp, un-hoodwinked jealousy. Though nothing was said, he sensed that she knew very well what he was feeling. Probably it had even occurred to her that he might exchange mother for daughter and vanish one night down the road to Thettit-to Kabin-to anywhere. The other was the girl's own innocence. Short of rape, it is difficult to seduce someone who simply does not know what it is all about; who has not yet even begun to be aware of carnal feelings in her own body-burgeoning though it may be. So Tharrin, as he clutched Morca in the darkness behind the curtain screening their bed from the rest of the room, fixed his thoughts on Maia, imagining in his mind's eye her glowing cheeks and downcast eyes as he undressed her, hearing her begging him to be gentle, her mounting, cries at the onset of a pleasure never before known: and other delightful fancies, borrowed from memories of years before; for it was many a day since he had had the opportunity to instruct an ingenue, and hearts that he had broken long ago had long been breaking others.

  As Morca's next pregnancy advanced, she grew daily more irritable, nervous and moody; flying into tempers with the girls, taking less and less care either of her appearance or of the cleanliness of the cabin, relapsing into fits of lassitude and, increasingly, denying her body to Tharrin with a kind of bitter satisfaction, so that often even his good-nature (which in any case was composed of indolence and weakness rather than of any real charity) was strained. She, like him but more comfortlessly, had now begun, with the years, to see ahead down a long and ever-darkening slope. Sometimes, her anxiety and chagrin gnawing while she waited for Tharrin to return from the tavern-or elsewhere-the fancy would come upon her that not only her beauty, but her very capacity to contend with life was being drained away into Maia's sleek, firm