Maia (Beklan Empire 1)

"Oh, yes, yes, Maia, of course! Oh yes, naturally. Have to look after them, yes; oh, always do that."

"You see," she said, smiling and stroking his hand, "you'll be sort of on parole, Tharrin. If you--well, you know, if you was to get into any more trouble--I know you won't-- but they'd take you in again, and I wouldn't be able to help you a second time. You do understand, don't you?"

He understood all right: she was pretty sure of that. What an extraordinary fellow he was, she thought.

Talk about volatile! Just escaped from death by torture and in a wink he was almost sprightly, and then within the minute he was disappointed at being foiled in a little dodge to go off on the loose. Ah, to the rebels in Chalcon, very like. She'd bet anything that that had already occurred to him. Yet for the life of her she couldn't entirely dislike him. He'd got--well, humanity, kind of.

"Dearest," she said, still holding his hand "--and I must call you that, even though we're not lovers any more-- you've got to realize I've got a fair old bit of influence now."

He laughed. He even slapped his thigh--at which his threadbare breeches gave off a puff of dust.

"I know! 'Maia swam the river: Maia saved the city.' I wonder what they said down at 'The Safe Moorings,' don't you? I haven't been there for weeks, so I can't tell." He paused. "In some ways it's a pity you did save the city, golden Maia. If you hadn't, Karnat would have been in Bekla by now."

"Don't you give me that!" she flashed at him. "If I hadn't, three hundred Tonildan boys'd be laying dead and done in Paltesh, and that'd have been just for a start! Anyway, Tharrin, don't you try and act up to me as you've got political principles about heldril and Leopards, nor none of that old moonshine. What you did was done for money, and you basting well know it. Not but what you weren't always generous with it," she added, relenting a little. "I'll give you that."

"Kept a roof over our heads," he muttered, his eyes on the floor.

"Well, just you see as you go on doing that, else I'll know the reason why."

At that he looked up at her, straight and serious.

"Maia, I can't see why you should be bothering yourself so much about Morca; that I can't. She sold you into slavery, didn't she? A real dirty trick that was."

The picture this called into Maia's mind--namely, of Morca as she had last seen her--prompted her next question.

"Is she all right? What was the baby--a boy?"

"No, another girl. Yes, she's all right as far as I know. Was when I left for Thettit, anyway. I was arrested in Thettit, you know. All the same, it's bound to have been rough on them with me gone. I dare say Kelsi and Nala--"

"Oh, I blame myself, that I do! I'll give you some money to take back, Tharrin. And just you mind it gets there, too, d'you see? Well, I know mum sold me, and that was cruel, I don't deny; but I can't say as she hadn't had that to make her, in a manner of speaking; and besides, her condition at the time and all. She was that upset, she did a lot more to me than what she need have; but all the same, look where it's got me--and when all's said and done she is my mother."

Tharrin, getting up, walked across to the bright glare of the window and stood dark against the light.

After a pause he said, "I don't know what she'd say, Maia, but I reckon it's high time you were told."

"Told? Told what?"

"That she's not your mother. You didn't know that, did you?"

"Not my mother?" Maia was at a complete loss. Had his sufferings turned his wits, or what? Tharrin said no more, and at length she asked, "Whatever do you mean?"

"I'll tell you." He came back and sat down. "I'll tell you all about it, just as she told it to me. Listen, Maia. Do you know how long ago your--well, your father and mother; I'll call them that for now--were married?"

" 'Bout twenty year now, isn't it? But Tharrin, I want to know, what d'you mean--"

"Listen! Yes, your father and Morca were married about twenty years ago. And there were no children. A farmer needs children, doesn't he? He needs labor. A farmer without children's an unfortunate mail. But there were no children; and two years went by, three years, four and never a sign. Morca felt bad, even though your father never spoke a harsh word. It was a bad time--bad as could be, she said. It got to prey on her mind. No children--that's a bitter misfortune to bear, by all accounts.

"But I'll go on. One night in the rains it was pitch-dark and nothing but mud everywhere--well, you know how it is along Serrelind. The two of them had had supper and were just going to bed when suddenly they heard a noise outside--something quite big, stumbling about. They thought it must be a beast got loose.

"Your father went out with a lamp, but he couldn't see what it was and then the rain put the lamp out. And at that moment, in the dark, someone clutched his legs and there was a woman on the ground, crying and begging for help. He just picked her up and carried her indoors, all wet through as she was and all her clothes and her hair just one mass of mud, Morca said. They pulled the sodden clothes off her and washed her and put her into bed.

"She was only a young lass. I don't know how old-- Morca didn't say--but not much older than you are now, I suppose. It was much as ever they could understand her, 'cos she was a Suban--a marsh-frog. Ah, but she was a regular pretty girl for all that, Morca said. Or she would have been, only she was in such a state; and she was pregnant. She was more than that; she was going to drop it any minute, she was going into labor. Oh, they were in a right taking, I'll tell you.

"Morca said she never asked her to account for herself. It was no time for that. But then the girl began talking of her own accord. She said her elder sister had been murdered in Suba--murdered by the wife of the High Baron of Urtah, she said: house burned in the night with her in it and her young son too. She said her sister had been some famous dancer and the High Baron had been her lover. That was why the wife had murdered her. And she herself had only learned of this that very morning, while she was out of her own house, gone down the village--I don't know, gone to buy salt or something, I think Morca said. She and her husband were living in eastern Urtah, not far from the highway between Gelt and Bekla. She never said where she first met him or how they came to be living there. Anyway, the girl had no sooner heard this than someone else came running up and told her her own husband was dead--can you imagine it? They'd come upon him--some more of the High Baron's wife's men had--in his own home and killed him, just because he was the husband of the younger sister of this What's-her-name, this dancer in Suba. And now the men were going through the village, look

ing for her.

"Well, of course she was terrified out of her life, this poor girl. And she was all the more terrified because there wasn't anyone she felt she could trust. Well, I mean, a Suban girl, a marsh-frog come to eastern Urtah; you can just picture it, can't you? She'd be a real fish out of water, wouldn't she? Anyway, she panicked. She ran out of the village just as she was and went east across the Plain. She wasn't making for anywhere in particular. Once she got to the highway, of course, she ought to have tried to get to Bekla, but she didn't. I suppose she must have thought these men might follow down the highway looking for her. She just kept on east across the Tonildan Waste.

"Well, I've reckoned it since as she must have done twenty-five miles across the Waste, poor girl, and her in that state! Anyway, at last, in the dark and the rain, she collapsed outside your father's door.

"They went and got Drigga from up the lane and she and Morca did everything they could. And at one point they thought they'd pulled her through, Morca said. You'd been born--"

"Me?"

"Yes, you'd been born and everything seemed all right, but then she just bled and bled until she died, Morca said. But you were as bonny as could be."

Maia was crying.

"Well, your father--I'll go on calling him that--he thought that after what the girl had told them, the less got out the better, or there might be some more of these Urtan men-- these murderers--coming to look for you, d'you see? That queen--baroness--whatever she was--she meant business, that was clear enough. And old Drigga, she agreed. So what happened was, they buried the poor girl and no one the wiser--she's down by that big ash-tree beside the lake--"

"Oh, Tharrin! That ash-tree? My tree?"

"Yes, she is. And they gave it out--and old Drigga backed them up, said as she'd been in the know all along-- that the baby was Morca's. Well, quite believable; I mean, it doesn't always show all that much with the first baby, does it? And Morca was ready with some story about hav-ing sworn a vow to Shakkarn that if only he'd take away her trouble, she wouldn't tell a soul until everything had gone off all right.