"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--"