"How couldn't I?" Maia was all bewilderment.
Occula embraced her more closely, kissing her neck and shoulders. Her lips, in the dark, felt thick, pliant and soft.
"You had some nice times with Tharrin, then?" she asked.
"Oh, yes, it was lovely." Maia, accustomed to having someone else in bed with her and comforted by the warmth and quiet, felt her misery abating. Youth and health possess almost unbelievable resilience.
"Did he do it nicely?"
"M'mm." She felt drowsy again now, at ease in the soft bed. It might almost have been Nala lying beside her.
"What sort of things did he do? Did he ever do this?"
"Ah! Oh, Occula!"
A moment later the black girl's lips were pressed to her own, the tip of her tongue slipping between them into Maia's mouth. One hand gently stroked her thigh beneath her shift.
"But he let you down, didn' he, banzi?" whispered Occula. "Men--who wants men? Liars, cowards, baste-and-run, the lot of them. We'll make our fortune out of those fools, you wait and see! But I woan' let you down, banzi. I need you: I need you to be good to. Kiss me! Come on, kiss me like I kissed you!"
For a long moment Maia hesitated. The fascination of this extraordinary, exotic girl, her apparent omniscience, her domination and self-sufficiency seemed extending all about her, enveloping her like a protective cloak. Here was a refuge from loneliness and from dread of the future. One need only surrender everything to Occula to be shielded, defended. Just as the lake had once been her own place, just as she had felt safe in its deep water, which everyone else thought dangerous because it was not dry land, so Occula--cunning and violent; black devotee of some appalling goddess of vengeance and sorcery--must have been vouchsafed to her for a retreat and refuge in the terrible misfortune which had befallen her. Occula was her own and no one else's. Clipping her about, running her fingers through her crisp, amazing hair, she kissed her passionately--her mouth, her cheeks, her eyelids--kissed her until she lay back, laughing and breathless.
"Take off your shift," whispered the black girl, her hands already busy. "No, wait: let me. There, that's nice, isn't it? And is that nice? D'you fancy me, banzi--really?"
10: NIGHT TALK
They lay together under a single blanket, perspiring, relaxed and easy.
"Occula! Oh, I wouldn't never have thought--"
"Sh!"
"I don't want to go to sleep now."
"I didn' say go to sleep. I said sh!"
"Well, so I will. You talk, then. Tell me who you are--where you come from. Are they all black, there, like you? Where is it?"
"Head on my shoulder, then; that's right. Well, where shall I start?"
"Where you were born."
"Where I was born? Ah! do you want to make me cry like you? I've buried that under a great rock, banzi, like Deparioth in the ballad--oh, years past--since I was a lot younger than you are now. Yes, buried--except in dreams. I remember some man tellin' me once that he knew all shearnas had one thing in common; they came from bad homes. But this one didn'." She paused. "Well, what lies out beyond Belishba, banzi, do you know?"
"Belishba? Where's that, then?"
"Where's Belishba? Oh, banzi, my pretty little net-mender, didn' anyone ever teach you pig's arse is pork? Belishba lies out beyond Sarkid--far away. Herl-Belishba must be more than a hundred miles from here; south-- oh, yes, a long way south--from Dari-Platesh. But it's not Herl-Belishba I come from, nor nowhere near."
"Where, then?"
"On the furthest southwestern edge of Belishba, far out, the country gets dry and stony, until in the end you come to the desert--the desert the Belishbans call the Harridan. But when I was a little girl I never knew that name, 'cos I was born on the other side--yes, on the other side of the most terrible desert in the world. We called it by its right name, and I still do. It's the Govig. The Govig, banzi--five hundred miles of stony slopes and dry sand. Five hundred miles of nothing--of ghosts and the wind that talks. Five hundred miles of sky and red clouds, and never a drop of water out of them by day or night."
Maia, pleasantly intrigued and not really distinguishing in her mind between Occula's talk and one of old Drigga's tales, waited for her to go on.
"And then, beyond the Govig again--ah, that's where my home was, banzi; that's where men are men and women have hearts like the sun--honest and decent and nothin' hidden, nothin' but what you can feel shinin' warm all over you."
"What's the country like?" asked Maia.
"Fertile. Flat. The water was slow and brown--it ran in long ditches up and down the fields."
"For the beasts?"
"For rice. But we didn' use the fields--my family, I mean. My father was a merchant. We lived in Tedzhek. Silver Tedzhek, they call it, 'cos the river runs round it on three sides. The sand-spits are all silver along the water, and the women wash the clothes there, and twice a year there's a fair on the Long Spit and they act plays in honor of Kantza-Merada. I was three when Zai first took me to the Long Spit. I sat on his shoulders, right up above the crowds of people swayin' like long grass in a field. He was a fine, big man, you see, my father was.
"Zai was a jewel-merchant. And I doan' mean one of those fat, greasy old twisters with a house all bolts and bars and guards with clubs. Zai was a merchant-venturer, and Kantza-Merada only knows where he didn' get to. He'd been to the Great Sea--"
"What's that?"
"Never mind. He'd been there, anyway, and to Sellion-Rabat in the clo
uds, where the air's so thin that you can hardly breathe until you get used to it, he said; and out beyond the Usakos--that's where he nearly died of frost-bite and had to fight his way back through bandits who tried to steal his stock. That's the trouble with jewels, you see; they're so terribly easy to steal. Zai used to disguise himself as a crazy pilgrim, sometimes, or even a drover, complete with bullocks. Once he was a lame beggar, with the jewels hidden in his false wooden leg.
"We never knew when he was goin' to get home again. Sometimes he was away for months and months. Once Ekundayo--that was mother's maid--came and said there was a pedlar at the door sellin' shells and carved toys, and did mother want to see what he'd got or should she send him away. But it was Zai come back: he hadn' let on, for a joke, and Ekundayo hadn' recognized him. But I did. I did!
"Oh, banzi, I could tell you all night, but I'd only be cryin' my eyes out. What's the good? I must have been nine--yes, it was nine--when Zai made his first crossin' of the Govig. I remember mother beggin' him not to try it. No one had ever done it, you see, and no one knew how far it was or what was on the other side. All we knew was that people had died tryin' to cross the Govig--or at any rate they'd never been heard of again.
"But Zai came back--he always came back. He'd taken sixty-two days to cross the Govig and he'd discovered the Beklan Empire. He'd sold his opals and emeralds and sapphires in Bekla for really big money--more than he'd ever made in his life--even though he'd had to give a lot of it to the High Baron in return for protection. That was Lord Senda-na-Say--him whose stables we were in last night. He had a great house in Bekla, of course, in the upper city, and that was where Zai put himself under his protection. A foreigner on his own's not safe, you see, offerin' jewels for sale. How Zai learned Beklan to begin with I never knew. Our tongue's quite different--well, you've heard me speak it, haven' you? So you know.
"Zai hadn' been back long before he began plannin' to go again. "There's a fortune there, just waitin' to be picked up,' he told mother. 'Now I know what they want to buy and who to go to, I can come back with twice as much. Risk? Yes, of course there's risk. Life's a risk, come to that.' That was Zai all over--I believe he did it for the risk--the sport--not just the money--"