"Why, at that rate she'll have none left!" cried the leader, also falling on his knees. But Otavis, smilingly raising them to their feet and returning the knife, merely strolled across to the table, called to a slave to bring some warm water and stood rinsing her hands while the Belishbans, one after another, put down their money.
"You've lost her, Shend-Lador," said Elvair-ka-Virrion. "They'll never let her go now!" The shearna, however, shook her head and, having beckoned to Shend-Lador to come and pick up the money for her, kissed her hand to the Belishbans and led him out of the hall at a run.
"Good lass! She knows what she wants after that little lark!" said Ta-Kominion approvingly.
Ged-la-Dan grunted and drained his goblet. "So do I." Reaching out a hand, he grasped Maia's ankle where she sat curled up on the couch. "Listen, my girl, I don't know how mudi--"
Before he could say more, however, Elvair-ka-Virrion was beside them, cooling his flushed face with a painted fan and bowing to Bel-ka-Trazet.
"I've come to borrow Maia, my lord. It won't be a real barrarz, you know, unless she dances for us."
Maia, glad of the opportunity to be elsewhere, got up readily enough, excused herself to the Ortelgans and went across to where Fordil and his men were sitting cross-legged among their outspread battery of leks, zhuas and plangent strings. As the master-musician rose to meet her, smiling with obviously sincere pleasure, she found herself thinking that she could have lived happily enough as a professional dancer, devoted from dawn till dusk to the service of the gods, falling asleep each night tired out with the worship of holy movement; wind and stream, fire and cloud; Lespa's contented slave. Might her aunt Nokomis even now, perhaps, be pausing a moment, in some celestial dance among the stars, to look down on her niece and bless her?
"Not the senguela tonight, U-Fordil," she said, stooping to kiss his brown, wrinkled hands and gray-stubbled cheeks. "It's got to be something simpler and shorter, that they can afi follow. I'm sure most of them know precious little about dancing."
"But they know about beautiful girls, don't they, saiyett?" he answered. "What was that old Tonildan tale you danced for me in your house, the day I came up to play to you? I could follow that easily enough, even though I'd never seen it before. Didn't you tell me you made it up yourself?"
"Oh, Tiva'? Yes, I made that up, U-Fordil. That's to say, I heard the story when I was little from an old woman at home, and I just made up the dance for fun."
"Well, anyone could enjoy that, saiyett, the way you did it for me. And if we just keep one of those Tonildan dance-rhythms going on the drums and I follow you with the hinnari, this lot aren't going to find fault, are they?--not in this mood and not with someone like you to look at."
She had first begun to devise the dance in Sencho's house during Melekril last year, at the time when Occula had been encouraging and teaching her. It had been rudimentary enough then, but the idea had stayed with her and grown in her imagination, so that since returning from Suba she had rounded it out and turned it into something at least approaching a finished dance. It was old Drigga's tale of Tiva, the fisher-girl of Serrelind; how, at his desperate plea, she had spared the life of a great fish she had caught one day in her nets; and of what had ensued. Certainly, she thought, anyone ought to be able to follow it, and it should go down well enough. Smiling and nodding to Fordil, she walked back to the middle of the hall, where at Elvair-ka-Virrion's order the slaves were already beginning to move the tables for her.
She waved them away. She had already decided how she was going to present this, and it wouldn't need all that much space.
As soon as she had received the frissoor from Elvair-ka-Virrion, she took up her position standing on a couch on the dais and picked up the embroidered coverlet in which Otavis had been tossed--for it had been left lying on the floor. She tried its weight. It was a shade heavy, certainly, but not more than she could manage gracefully. The lamps would do as they were. She signaled to Fordil, and as the zhuas began their rolling imitation of a long swell on Lake Serrelind the hinnari took up again, very quietly, "The Island of Kisses."
Maia stood aloft on the couch, one hand shading her eyes, the other behind her on the tiller. She was Tiva, the girl from Meerzat who, when her fisherman father died, had rejected all suitors, determined to carry on his business on her own account. Again and again she flung out the coverlet into the surrounding water, and each time she hauled it in, the pattering leks reflected her excitement in the catch, which she sorted and slung either overboard or into the well of the boat. As she worked she swayed, feet apart to keep her balance on the tilting planks, and constantly flung back her hair in the sharp wind.
At first there had been a certain amount of chatter and inattention among the audience, many of whom were still full of Otavis. But as Fordil, most skilled and responsive of accompanists, gradually began to play louder, and the beat of the zhuas, becoming slower and heavier, suggested Tiva's arrival above deep water, the interruptions gradually died away. While she was throwing out the anchors fore and aft and then setting her weighted ledger-lines on either side of the boat, Maia could sense that she had them entirely with her.
Then followed the sudden running out of the line, the startled realization that she had hooked something really big (the drummers' efforts here were masterly), the prolonged struggle of playing the fish and finally her incredulous, staring wonder as at last it broke surface some distance from the boat.
At this point one of Shend-Lador's friends, who had clearly had a good deal to drink and was equally clearly longing to be caught by the Serrelinda, jumped up and took it upon himself to become the fish.
Maia, secretly irritated--for he was a clumsy lad, without presence or grace--nevertheless went along with this, playing the big fish as it ran among the couches and dived headlong for refuge beneath the great rock of a table. At last, bringing it gasping alongside, she whispered to the young man to be so good as to leave it at that; and covered his departure by a convincing struggle to get the real, imaginary fish into the coverlet-net and haul it aboard.
Then followed the fish's agonized plea for his life, Tiva's pity for him and her final agreement to spare him and plunge with him to his palace in the depths of the lake to receive her reward. Maia simulated the struggles of the fish by jerking movements of her own arm as she held him down, and convincingly suggested his difficult speech by bending her head, ear close to the table-top, frowning as she tried to comprehend the sibilant, fishy whispering.
The plunge overside in a pellucid, splashing glissando from the hinnari, the slow, groping descent into the green depths and the arrival at the bottom of the lake--these Maia executed with the style of a swimmer as well as of a dancer. Then she was weaving among the weedy couches and rocky benches, in and out, following the great fish through the underwater twilight. She had been half-ex-pecting one or other of the young men to grab at her or otherwise to intrude on and spoil what she was trying to express, but on the contrary the hall was now completely silent, save for the deep beat of a single zhua and a sudden patter from the leks as a shoal of little, silver fishes darted past her in the gloom.
The fish king's gift of the magic, restorative stone, the regaining of her boat and its return to land--all this Maia enacted more simply and directly than she would have done if she had been dancing merely for her own pleasure, for she knew that this audience would become restive if she were to make it too long.
Then Fordil himself, having realized that there was no other way, spontaneously came forward to enact the king's herald, crying silently through cupped hands to this side of the hall and that, proclaiming with mounting anxiety and desperation the news of the king's mortal illness. He was just about to depart in despair when Maia came forward, humbly offering to do all in her power to cure the king. The herald at first rejected her, but she persisted with gentle confidence, and at last was escorted to the royal palace.
The lack of a king defeated even Maia's ingenuity. However, it matte
red little. Holding the unseen magic stone aloft before her in her cupped hands and thereby contriving to suggest that it was both heavy and a thing of awe-inspiring and miraculous power, she vanished slowly, step by step, into the twilight beyond the lamps--the shadowy recesses of what she hoped her audience would perceive to be the royal bed-chamber. Then, after a pregnant pause, during which the zhuas, first suggesting the slow, labored breathing of the sick king, gradually quickened to become his restored, healthy heart-beat, Fordil's men, at a cry of triumph from Tiva off-stage, burst into cries of joy. Thereupon Maia reappeared, crowned with flowers, to perform a whirling dance of elation and triumph, which she brought to an end by kneeling in tranquil adoration over the dark waters of the lake, head bent and arms outstretched in homage and thanks to the great Lord Fish.
The music ceased and Elvair-ka-Virrion came forward to take her hand and lead her back to her couch.
Everyone was applauding, everyone seemed eager to touch her for luck and to call out praise and congratulations. Yet suddenly she found herself, with a quick flutter of dread, remembering Tharrin, hunched in his cell in the lower city, awaiting her return and placing all his hopes on her. The night's real venture was still to come. "Forgive me, Zenka," she whispered. "And great Shakkarn, blow your divine breath into their loins: make them burn for me!"
Ta-Kominion received her rapturously and insisted on accompanying her back across the hall to thank Fordil and give him his lygol. When he saw Maia hand over four hundred meld the young Ortelgan's eyes widened, yet he said nothing. Maia, for her part, felt that she had never given away anything with a gladder heart. Her gratitude to Fordil knew no bounds.
A sudden thought struck her. "U-Fordil, did you ever see Nokomis?"
"Nokomis?" He nodded. "Once, saiyett. It's--oh, nearly thirty years ago now: I was still an apprentice. My master and I spent ten days in Kendron-Urtah."
"What was she like?"
He shrugged, spreading his hands. "What can I say? I suppose since then not a single day's gone by without my remembering her. At least it's freed me from the miseries other people seem to carry about with them."
"Funny old fellow, isn't he?" said Ta-Kominion as they returned. "He may look like an old beggar who's been tidied up and made presentable, but I'll bet he's got plenty salted away from all that twangling he does."
Nennaunir would have let it go: the Serrelinda was young enough to feel indignant.
"He's a great artist, my lord! He's in the service of the gods!"
"Ah! And you too?" Ta-Kominion's smile was friendly but mischievous.
"Well, of course I'm not in the Thlela, no. I never had the chance, and anyhow I'm not that good. But I'd like to dance for the gods--"
"Whatgods?" It was Berialtis who had spoken, and Maia, turning towards her, saw her dark eyes, wide and unsmiling, fixed on her with an expression somewhere between condescension and contempt.
"What sort of a question's that, then?" flared Maia. "Am I s'posed to answer it?"
"Yourgods!" cried Berialtis. "Your gods don't exist! Their worship's nonsense! And as for your Sacred Queen--"
"Berialtis!" The file-like rasp of Bel-ka-Trazet's voice frightened Maia. It had no effect, however, upon the Ortelgan girl, who seemed not even to have heard the High Baron as she continued to speak in an utterance almost trance-like and no longer directed specifically at Maia.
"God's truth flows from the Ledges of Quiso. There's healing there for the sick, comfort and wisdom for the wretched and lost. Bekla possessed that wisdom once, until greed and corruption destroyed it. A Sacred Queen whose business is whoring with a brazen image--"
The girl's voice had risen. People near-by were turning to stare.
"Berialtis," said Bel-ka-Trazet, "if you want to go home alive, be quiet!"
"But Lord Shardik will return to his faithful people," continued Berialtis, speaking now in a kind of sibylline monotone, "on that good night the children are taught to pray for. The Power of God will shatter the idolatrous baubles of the Tamarrik Gate, and once again his priest-king will walk through the streets of Bekla. God will re-veal his truth through Lord Shardik and the Chosen Vessels--"
"Ta-Kominion!" said Bel-ka-Trazet, in a tone as minatory and unnerving as anything Maia had heard in her life, "you brought this girl with you. If you value your life and hers, get her out of here before I have to speak again!"
Ta-Kominion had been staring at Berialtis with a kind of rapt attention, apparently oblivious to all else and hanging on her every word. Even Maia, though she had only the vaguest idea what the girl was talking about, could not help thinking that this divinatory passion--or whatever it was--was very becoming to her dark, intense style of beauty. Might that, perhaps, be the real reason behind this carry-on? The High Baron's voice, however, would have penetrated the trance of a sleep-walker.
"My lord," muttered Ta-Kominion as though against his will, "the girl's only speaking the trutli--"
"And this is no time for it!" hissed Bel-ka-Trazet, rising to his feet and standing over Ta-Kominion like some ghoul of nightmare. "If you do not--"
What might have happened next Maia was never to know, for at this moment Elvair-ka-Virrion appeared once more beside them. She had not felt so much relieved to see anyone since the night when she had recovered consciousness among the soldiers on the bank of the Valderra.
"Maia," said Elvair-ka-Virrion, smoothly ignoring the altercation, of which he could hardly have failed to be aware, "I think I'd be inclined not to wait any longer before starting our little venture. Otherwise they'll all be too drunk and a lot of them may have made--well, other arrangements, you know. What do you say?"
"I'd be glad to, my lord."
For the second time she jumped up, smoothing down the skirt of the cherry-colored robe. Ta-Kominion and the High Baron seemed too much preoccupied with each other to notice her, and she was about to leave without more ado when suddenly Ged-la-Dan grabbed her by the wrist.
"Where are you going this time, girl?"
She gave him her most dazzling smile. "You'll see in a moment, my lord."
"I want you here. You just understand, now, I'm not a poor man. I can--"
Elvair-ka-Virrion interrupted him.
"Well, Ged-la-Dan, if you've taken such a fancy to Maia, that may turn out to be very fortunate for you, as you'll see in a minute. But first of all I've got to take her with me--for the best of reasons. Sorry!"
Thereupon he took her arm and led her back towards the center of the room, leaving Ged-la-Dan with some spluttering protest dying on his lips.
The barrarz was momently becoming more disorderly and rowdy. A group of Palteshi officers, linked arm-in-arm and swaying back and forth, were singing a bawdy song in chorus, with Nennaunir and the little, dark-eyed shearna in their midst. One of them grabbed at Maia as she passed.
"A girl of renown, from the top of the town:
Dari town, Dari town, that's where we laid her down--"
Elvair-ka-Virrion, seizing his arm, bent it back to make him let go and whisked Maia away, passing Shend-Lador and his friends, one of whom was doing his best to drink a goblet of wine standing on his head.
Elvair-ka-Virrion leaped onto a table, kicked a space among the knives and dishes and then, beckoning to the chief steward, took his staff of office and hammered on the table for silence. As soon as the babble and clamor had partly subsided he shouted, "Listen! I've just this mo-ment been told of a magnificent surprise for all of you! Something you weren't expecting! This is really going to make you glad you came!"
"We're glad now!" bawled Shend-Lador; at which there were shouts of assent.
"Well, then, you listen to me!" repeated Elvair-ka-Virrion, once again pounding with the staff. "There are going to be a lot of surprises in the next month or so--but they're all going to be unpleasant ones for Santil-ke-Erketlis. This is a pleasant one--for all of you!"
He had their attention now. He's clever, thought Maia, putting it as he's only just heard of a surprise
: say that, always makes anyone want to know what it is.
"We've had one victory this year already," went on Elvair-ka-Virrion, "when we saw Karnat off at Rallur. He got his feet wet in the Valderra and had to go back to Suba to dry them." (Laughter and cheers.) "And we all know, don't we, who we owe that to? Sendekar!"
At this there was more cheering, broken after a few moments by a shout from the far end of the hall.
"What the hell d'you mean--Sendekar? He didn't swim the Valderra!"
"Maia'svictory!" cried a girl's voice. (That's Otavis, thought Maia: good for her!)
"Yes! Maia's victory!" replied Elvair-ka-Virrion. "Of course it was Maia's victory! Sendekar's not here tonight, more's the pity, but Maia is, and she's got something for Bekla that even Sendekar hasn't!"
At this there was more laughter. Someone called out "Whatever can that be?" while someone else miaowed like a cat.
"Expeditions like this cost money, believe it or not!" went on Elvair-ka-Virrion. "All your arrows and shields and spears have to be paid for, and we can't squeeze all the money out of the wretched peasants."
"You've got all old Sencho's money, haven't you?" shouted Ta-Kominion.
"Yes, but not his belly," replied Elvair-ka-Virrion. "It burst, and made a mess from here to Chalcon: that's what we've got to go and clear up. Now will you all listen? As you know, we've none of us been able to see a great deal-- not nearly as much as we'd like--of Maia Serrelinda since she came back from the Valderra. She's been recovering from her honorable wounds and enjoying a well-earned rest. But as you've all seen, she's here tonight. And she's come on purpose to help Bekla! Maia, come up here, beside me!" He stretched out his hands. "Here she is! The bravest and most beautiful girl in the empire!"
Maia, having taken his hands, was jumped up onto the table. Elvair-ka-Virrion stood her in the brightest patch of lamplight.
"Maia isn't a shearna, although there must be hundreds of people who wish she was. She doesn't need to be a shearna, because the Council have voted her the income she deserves for saving us all!"