Maia (Beklan Empire 1)

As they came on down the Sheldad, with its multi-col-ored shops and ornate, stylish buildings, the crowd on either side broke into jeering and brutal laughter. A trades-man, lifting the pole which he used for raising and lowering the pent-shutter of his shop, jabbed with it, over the shoulders of the soldiers, at the man who was trying to sing. Missiles showered upon the prisoners--garbage, broken pieces of wood, a stone or two, an old shoe, a dead rat. One who tripped and fell was pelted until the nearest soldier, with a kind of rough sympathy, pulled him to his feet and supported him for a few yards, so that his tormentors were obliged to desist. Over all the hubbub carried the sharp, intermittent voice of the tryzatt, looking over his shoulder and continually urging his men to keep the prisoners closed up and moving.

Maia, cowering in the jekzha, felt as though trapped in a nightmare. It was all she could do not to get out and run away. This kind of cruelty was entirely foreign to anything in her nature. The whipping of Meris had been altogether different--for one thing, those whom she considered her superiors had been in deliberate control of it--from this unforeseen, frenetic, all-enveloping savagery.

Intuitively she knew that these people were going to die. One had only to look at them: they could never come back from the place where they were. Some might well be close to death now: they looked it.

Animals could not have suffered like this, for their owners, if only out of consideration for their own gain, would never have allowed animals to be treated half so badly.

And then, suddenly, she caught her breath; mouth open, hands pressed either side of her chin, rigid with incredulous, unspeakable horror; with a shock even beyond screaming. For it was Tharrin out there in the road: Tharrin lurching, tottering, wild-eyed, a long streak of blood down one side of his face, dragging his feet in broken sandals, suddenly flinging up one arm and ducking away from nothing, from an anticipated missile that he had only imagined. For one long moment--as though to put her in no doubt--he turned his head and stared full at her, but with no more recognition than a crazed cat looking down from a burning roof. Never in her life had she seen so appalling a look on any human face. Even if it had not been Tharrin's, it would have been enough to put her beside herself.

After a white--how long?--they were gone, followed by a rag-tag of urchins running behind, shouting with glee. The crowd broke up, the jekzha moved on. They were turning into the Caravan Market before the jekzha-man realized that Maia was sobbing hysterically.

"Yes, nasty business, saiyett, ain't it?" he remarked paternally over his shoulder. "I don't go a lot on it meself. But you've no need to take on that way, y'know. They're all villains, the 'ole lot of 'em, else they wouldn't be there."

"Where--where are they going?" she faltered, digging her nails into her palm and forcing herself to speak with something approaching self-control.

"Oh, it'll be the Old Jail," he answered. "The one down in the Shilth."

"Where's that?"

"The Shilth? That's the butchers' quarter, saiyett, about halfway between here and the Sel-Dolad Tower. Roughish kind of neighb'r'ood, that is, 'specially at night."

"Take me there, please."

"What's that, saiyett? Did you say take you there?"

"Yes, please."

He stopped, looking back at her puzzled.

"Now, you mean?"

"Yes, please."

He hesitated. "Saiyett, it's none of my business, but--"

"Please do as I ask: or if you prefer, get me someone else. I realize I've kept you rather a long time already."

She passed him down ten meld, at which he nodded, shrugged and turned back into the Sheldad.

During the next twenty minutes the facade which presented to the city the buoyant, resourceful and heroic Serrelinda crumbled, exposing a shocked and panic-stricken girl of sixteen, as devoid of worldly-wisdom as of dissimulation. Yet though she sat trembling and weeping in the jekzha, never for a moment did it occur to Maia to go home and concern herself no further with the condemned wreck who had once been her lover. On the contrary, by the time they had turned off the Sheldad and begun picking their way uphill through the fetid, fly-buzzing lanes of the Shilth, Maia had in effect been stripped of every coherent thought save her determination first to see Tharrin and then to do everything in her power to save him.

Outside the walls of the jail--a dirty, ill-repaired but nonetheless very solid group of buildings, once a shambles, enlarged and converted some years before to meet the Leopards' need for another prison--she paid off the jekzha-man and told the gatekeeper that she wished to see the governor. The gatekeeper, an aging man with con-junctive, mucous eyes, did not trouble himself to look directly at her while telling her that it was out of the question. She repeated her request peremptorily.

"Come on, now, lovey, run away," he said, scratching himself and breathing garlic over her. "It's no good, you know--you'd never be able to pin it on him, anyway. Do you know how many girls have come here trying, eh?"

Maia lowered her veil and threw back the hood of her cloak.

"I've no time to waste, and I'll be damned if I'm going to bribe you a meld! I'm Maia Serrelinda, from the upper city, and if you don't take me to the governor at once, I'll see to it that the Lord General himself learns that you refused to do as I asked."

He stared at her, a stupid man taken aback, resentful but slow to react.

"You say you're the Serrelinda--her as swum the river?"

"Yes, I am. And don't have the impertinence to ask me why I'm here: that's no business of yours. Are you going to do as I say, or not?"

"Well," he muttered. "Well. Just that it's awkward, that's all." He seemed to be trying to weigh up which would be worse for him--to refuse her or to risk the governor's displeasure. At all events this was what his next question suggested.

"You can't--well--tell me what it's about, saiyett?"

"Certainly. I wish to see a prisoner."

His face cleared. "Oh, you didn't say. If it's n'more'n that--" She waited. "Only he's busy with the prisoners himself, saiyett, y'see. Don't know what he'll say. Still, I'll take you--"He turned away and she, following, stepped through the postern door to one side of the barred gate, which was promptly closed behind her.

He was striding ahead across the yard, swinging a stick in one hand, but she--to some extent brought to herself by her annoyance--retained enough self-possession not to hurry after him, so that after a little he was obliged to wait until she came up with him at her own pace.

The governor was a big, fleshy man with silver earrings and a beard dyed chestnut. He, too, evidently supposed at first that her errand must lie at his own door, for he began "Well, my dear, but you shouldn't have come here, you know." He drew up a rickety bench for her beside the table in a little, bare room looking out on an equally bare and dismal courtyard. It was twilight now and turning slightly chilly. Seeing him grope and fumble once or twice to close the window, she realized that his sight must be poor. Yet really so poor, she wondered, that he could not tell whether or not he had ever seen her before?

"We have never met," she said coldly. "I am Maia Serrelinda, a personal friend of the Lord General Kembri B'sai."

Instantly he had taken his cue, bowing and leering.

"Friend of the Lord General? Oh, friend of the city, saiyett, friend of the empire! And let me assure you, you have a friend in me, too, if I'm not presuming. To what-- er--to what do I owe the honor of this visit?"

Maia, not unnaturally, could tell a lecher when she saw one, and realized with a touch of relief that this part of her task at least was going to be relatively easy.

"Sir, I want to see--"

"Ob--Pokada, saiyett, Pokada's my name; that's if you care to use it, of course."

"U-Pokada, I need to talk to one of the prisoners who were brought in from Tonilda a little while ago."

His face fell. "Oh. I see. Well, naturally, saiyett, I'd always prefer to oblige a beautiful lady like yourself if I could. If only it had been someone

who's here for theft or frauds--that sort of thing, you know. But political prisoners: no one's ever allowed to see political prisoners. That's a strict rule."

She got up and stood beside him, pretending to be weighing her words, letting her body's scent steal over him and slowly drawing through her fingers the silk kerchief she carried at her wrist. After a little she murmured, "Well, I suppose--I suppose no one need know, U-Pokada. I mean, only you and me; I shan't tell anyone."

He hesitated. "Well, saiyett--"

In, a few minutes he had talked himself into promising that he would see what he could do tomorrow.

"No, it must be now, U-Pokada: I want to see him now, and then I'll go away and no one else will know at all."

It was getting dark in the room. He went to the door and called for lamps, continuing to look down the passage until they were brought by a disheveled old woman whose head jerked with a continual tic.

When she had gone he came back and laid a hand on Maia's wrist, slightly clenching his fingers as he did so.