"You killed Sencho? You yourself?"
"You lie down, now!" said Zirek sharply. "You've been very ill, sir, and if you don't keep quiet you may be ill again, and that won't help anybody. These questions'll keep. I can't tell you everything all at once. Anyway, either Clystis or Maia'll be bringing your supper in a minute."
For a few moments Zen-Kurel made no reply. Then, in a tone of puzzled uncertainty, he asked, "Maia? Who's Maia?"
Zirek did not answer at once and he went on more urgently, "You don't mean--not the girl who swam the Valderra?"
"Yes, she's here with us," said Zirek.
"Maia? But--but why don't you kill her, then?"
"Kill her? What you talking about? Why, it was her as got you and your friend out of prison in Bekla. Near as a touch got killed herself doing it."
Maia, holding her breath behind the door, stood still as moss.
"Then," said Zen-Kurel, "it can only have been for some vile, mean purpose. That bitch--" She heard Zirek try to answer, but he ran on, his voice rising, "She's the most treacherous, rotten whore in the world! Oh, yes, she fooled me all right! She betrayed us all and she'll betray you, too, if you don't kill her! I know what I'm talking about! Go and kill her now, before it's too late! Tell Anda-Nokomis I want to see him--get him in here--"
Maia heard no more. Still clutching the bowl of broth, she stumbled back up the passage and into the kitchen. Clystis, busy at the table, looked up in surprise.
"Wouldn't he have it, then?"
Maia, not answering and almost upsetting the bowl in putting it down, went across to the door that led into the yard.
"Maia, you all right?"
"Yes; I'll--I'll be back in a minute."
Out she ran, across the yard to the belt of trees. He wasn't there and she pushed through them, down the slopes beyond to the bank of the stream.
"Anda-Nokomis?" she called.
He stood up. He had been sitting in a kind of little arbor about a hundred yards downstream, where a tangle of scarlet trepsis trailed over the bushes. She ran along the bank, but just as she reached him tripped and measured her length at his feet. He bent to help her up, but she only lay sobbing, face down, her head on her arms.
He knelt beside her. "What's happened, Maia? What's the matter?"
"Zenka! Zen-Kurel, Anda-Nokomis--"
"O gods! Has he taken a turn for the worse?"
"No no! He's able to talk now. He told Zirek--I heard him, I was in the passage--he said I was the rottenest-- woman in the world; he said why didn't you kill me--" Her weeping became passionate and uncontrollable.
Bayub-Otal waited in silence. At length, in a cold, expressionless tone, he asked, "Are you so very much surprised?"
"What,Anda-Nokomis?" She knelt up and looked at him, her face swollen and tear-wet. After a moment, like a child driven to desperation by someone else's inexplicable failure to understand the obvious, she shouted, "Well, 'course I am! What d'you think--"
He took her hand and she allowed him to lead her the few steps into the arbor. Here there was a big log, from which a segment had been cut, making a flat seat. They sat side by side. The stream below was a mere trickle, almost lost among clumps of water-plants and dried beds of weed. A pair of green dragonflies were hovering and darting here and there.
"There's a lot I'm extremely puzzled about," he said, "and obviously if we're to go on at all it's got to be sorted out. Do you want to talk, or shall I?"
She was still weeping, but he made no attempt to check or comfort her. After a little he went on, "One thing's plain: you evidently don't see what's happened in the same light as I do or as Zen-Kurel does. If you did, you wouldn't be here."
She did not answer, but he had caught her attention and she was waiting to hear what he was going to say next.
"I'll start from the beginning. Last Melekril, in Bekla, I--well, I thought that perhaps I'd found a friend; a young slave-girl. I never made friends easily in Bekla, of course, being a suspect and dispossessed man with no prospects. But I liked this girl and felt sorry for her. Anyone with the least decency would have felt sorry for her. She was very young and inexperienced and she belonged to the most evil, disgusting brute in the upper city. She was being sent from one bed to another for money and even seemed to be taking to it. It was obvious that in a year or two she'd be corrupted and that in a few years after that she'd probably be on the scrap-heap--that's if she hadn't been brought to some horrible end first. I thought she deserved better.
"One night, soon after the murder of her master, I received a warning to leave Bekla at once. Within the same hour the girl came to my lodgings in terror--or so you'd have thought. She said she'd escaped from the temple-- from torture--and implored me to help her.
"I got her out of Bekla and took her with me to Suba. I told both Lenkrit and King Karnat that she was a girl to be trusted. I pointed out that she'd be valuable to us because of her extraordinary resemblance to my mother, Nokomis. She was treated honorably and gave the most convincing appearance of being entirely on our side."
For a moment Bayub-Otal's voice quavered. He bent down, picked up a stick and began breaking it into pieces and tossing them into the stream.
"That same night, however, she quite deliberately seduced one of Karnat's staff officers, a young man who knew--and she must have known that he knew--the plan of attack. He told it to her. He was much to blame, of course, but then he trusted her, you see; just as I did. She'd been very cunning in convincing him that she'd fallen in love with him.
"In fact, she achieved all that the Leopards could possibly have hoped for. She made her fortune that night. She became a demi-goddess, almost; her fame spread throughout the empire and beyond. It spread to Suba; and to Katria and Terekenalt. It even spread to Dari-Paltesh, where some of the men she'd betrayed--the ones who weren't dead, I mean, or who hadn't managed to get back to Suba--were shut up in squalor and misery. I remember one man actually cursing her with his last breath."
The light was fading. The dragonflies had vanished. In an isolated pool a little way downstream, some tiny fish suddenly skittered across the surface, here and gone, like the margets in Suba. A flock of starlings flickered over on their way to roost.
"But then, quite suddenly, when this same y
oung staff officer's at death's door himself, after suffering the most revolting cruelty and degradation at the hands of Queen Fornis, he's taken out of prison in Bekla and carried away delirious. Some days later he recovers his senses and almost the first thing he hears is that among those with him is this same girl--the girl he trusted, the girl who betrayed him. This makes him feel angry and perplexed--afraid, even, perhaps."
As though he were now going back to the farmhouse, Bayub-Otal stood up and stepped out onto the bank. Then, without looking round, he said, "He's not the only one. Perhaps that girl might, in fact, be better out of the way. There's no telling what she might get up to next, you see."
He had gone some yards when he found Maia beside him.
"Anda-Nokomis!"
As though at any rate unwilling to fail in propriety he halted, but did not look at her.
"Here's one thing there's no catch in it, and you'd better just know it! I'm your cousin! My mother was Nokomis's sister."
The tone in which she spoke carried immediate conviction. He looked at her, startled. After some moments he said, "We'd better sit down again, and you can tell me what makes you think that."
Thereupon he himself returned and sat down, but she was so much agitated that she could not keep still, pacing back and forth on the bank as she talked.
"Earlier this summer, while you was still in that prison, the Leopards arrested a bunch of heldro agents in Tonilda. One of them was my stepfather, Tharrin; the man as took up with my mother--or her I always thought was my mother. He'd been a secret messenger for Erketlis. Tharrin was the first man as I ever went with. That's how I come to be sold for a slave; only Morca, her I thought was my mother, she found out, see? And she tricked me and sold me while Tharrin was away."