"Well, never mind!" cried Occula impatiently, as though Zuno had uttered something completely trivial.
"That's enough about that green-eyed cow. You listen to me, banzi. First of all, what have you done with Chia?"
Maia told her.
Occula nodded. "I hoped you might. That's why I asked Zuno to send her. H'm! Northern Urtah; that might prove quite useful, I doan' know."
"How d'you mean?" asked Maia.
"Well, by all accounts they're a very funny lot up there, where she comes from," answered Occula enigmatically. "And of course she'll tell them what she owes Fomis, woan' she? And that might--Well, never mind. There's somethin' else I want to hear about. What's all this about you gettin' up on the Scales and talkin' about the star, as if you were Lespa or somethin'?"
"The star? Well, it just come into my head to see 'f I couldn't go down there and cheer a few of 'em up. I never meant to go on the Scales at all--'twas the armourers an' the rest as done that."
"You and that Ogma, you're not safe, the two of you left alone together," said Occula. "She might have thought to stop you goin' out, even if you couldn' see it for yourself. That girl's a fool an' so are you, banzi. Far as I can make out, you did the very thing everyone's .been warnin' you not to do. It never crossed your mind, I suppose, that Kembri'd think you were puttin' yourself forward for Sacred Queen?"
"No, it never," retorted Maia hotly, "and n'more I was, an' so I told Kembri to his face when he come round yesterday."
"The thing you must never forget, banzi, about Kembri, is that he's every bit as much a conspirator and a murderer as Sencho and Fornis. He was in on this Leopard business from the very beginnin', like them. He's completely ruthless. He's decided that Milva's the girl the Leopards need for Sacred Queen. That's why he didn' stop Elvair goin' round and takin' her the very day after Sencho was done in, even though he knew it'd make Fornis his enemy from that moment. Do you realize that if good old Sendekar hadn't made it impossible, by tellin' the whole army about you swimmin' the river before Kembri could stop him, Kembri'd almost certainly have had "you killed by now, just to get you out of the way as a rival to Milva?"
"Ah, he told me as much yesterday," said Maia.
"Cran, I'd almost rather be back at Piggy's," said Occula, "wouldn' you? Three nice bed-girls from the High Counselor's, and here we are up to the neck in what's goin' to be the biggest shine for a thousand years, you mark my words. And there's no gett'n' out of it that I can see. Doesn' it frighten you?"
"Yes, it frightens me sick," answered Maia. Yet still she said nothing of Randronoth's forty thousand meld.
"What really makes me sure these damn' Leopards are bound to go down in the end," said Occula, "is the filthy, blasphemous use they've made of this whole Sacred Queen business. Come right down to it and they've spat in the gods' faces, that's what. They're not my gods, but never mind 'bout that. The whole point of the Sacred Queen always used to be that she was the gods' choice and not men's. She was supposed to be the gods' makeweight for man's imperfection. Men in power made the rulers--the generals and councilors and so on--but the Sacred Queen was honestly acclaimed by the people, and no hanky-panky. That's to say, the gods put it into the people's hearts whom to acclaim, and that was their own choice; not the rulers'. But Fornis, Sencho, Kembri--they changed all that, and Durakkon was the fool who went along with it. The gods'll have their blood for that in the long run, you see if they doan'."
"You're the lucky one, aren't you?" said Milvushina to Zuno. "You'll be all right."
"I may and I may not, saiyett; it all depends. I have no wish to stand or fall with the Sacred Queen, yet what else can I do? In practice I'm not free to leave her, and in any case I have no particular prospects elsewhere."
"No, you're the lucky one, Milva, that's the truth of it," said Occula. "At least you've got Kembri and Elvair to protect you, and even if the city were to fall, they'd probably get you out alive. You've got no enemies, unless you call Santil an enemy. No, banzi, you're the one I'm worried about: there can' be any goin' back for you, you see. And yet you can' go on as you are. Kembri may not be prepared to go the length of killin' you, but Fornis will be when she comes back--as I'm sure she means to. And even if you were to cut and run, where could you go? Suba--Katria-- Terekenalt--they'd tear you to pieces, after what you've done! And I can' see you in sanctuary on Quiso for the rest of your life. No; there's only two things you can possibly do, and I reckon I know which one'd be best."
Maia would have liked Occula to take her in her arms and whisper in her ear, as in the old days in bed at Sen-cho's.The talk of killing had frightened her badly. Yet she did her best to make a joke of it.
"Well, come on, then! Reckon Terebinthia won't be eavesdropping just now."
Occula, sitting down beside her, took her hand in her own. "You could put your trust in the gods, banzi, and believe that they mean you to be Sacred Queen. That's one thing you could do; for there's hardly a doubt that if you're still alive and in Bekla at the end of this year, the people will acclaim you, Kembri or no Kembri. But it's my belief that if you stay here just as you are now, either Kembri or Fornis will get rid of you somehow."
She paused. "And the other?" asked Maia.
"The other," said Occula deliberately, "is to marry the richest and most powerful man you can find; preferably one with an estate in the provinces, where you can go and live in safety. You're not cut for a life of high intrigue, banzi. You're too nice. A girl like you needs a protector--someone to belong to. And the long and short of it is, you can either choose the gods' protection, or a man's. I know damn' well which I'd choose--and if I doan' love you no one does."
A silence fell. It was as though all four of them, sitting in the elegant, luxurious hall high above the teeming city, felt themselves isolated as though besieged; or surrounded by a flood lapping the base of their precarious tower with invisible waters of malevolence and peril. Suddenly Maia had the horrible fancy that the sunken rectangle of the central floor, enclosed within its honey-colored walls and broad step of banded slate, was like a well down which her dead body could be pitched and vanish untraced. Setting down her goblet, she jumped up and almost ran across to the north-facing window.
The comet was low, its drooping tail partly obscured behind the jagged, barely-discernible line of the mountain peaks. The comet, she knew, had been sent by Lespa-- Lespa who had saved her again and again. Yet why had she sent it? What did it mean? It was like the danger she was in, she thought. It made no sound, uttered no threat. It simply abode; whenever you looked up, there it was, undeviant and unchanged.
"Oh, Lespa," she prayed silently, "help me! I'm more afraid than ever I've been!"
For now, with Occula's words, her very real and immediate danger had at last become plain to her; the danger which, though in all conscience told clearly enough, had not been brought fully home by Sessendris, by Nennaunir, by Milvushina or even entirely by Kembri. It now seemed to her that she--she who had knelt beside the dying Sphelthon, who had swum the Valderra by night--had in fact never, in all her life, possessed any real power to distinguish between semblance and reality.
The sudden recognition of a lack in oneself of normal perception, of the ability to see in its true colors what has been plain as day to everyone else; the realization that in some important respect one has hitherto been like a child, not clearly differentiating actuality from fantasy, security from peril, truth from fallacy, can take place at any time in life, even to outwardly-seeming experienced people, and when it does is always mortifying. When it involves the apprehension of danger, the shock often comes with a kind of freezing effect, dreamlike, momentarily cutting off awareness of companions and surroundings.
Still no one spoke. Maia stood still, supporting herself with one hand on the embrasure. Her hope of finding Zen-Kurel, of fulfilling their mutual promise to marry and live in Katria; it was as though a glaring, hard light had suddenly been turned upon this secret room in her heart, revealing--what? Flims
y walls, frail beams, a brittle door that any ruffian could kick in. True, it was also revealed as no less beautiful than she had always known it to be-- but utterly insecure. In this room, whatever its beauty, there lay no safety. Her love for Zen-Kurel would not save her, and she had been deceiving herself in thinking that it would. Yet if safety was what she must have, if safety was what she valued above all else, then no doubt about it, she must quit this beautiful, forlorn, memory-filled room for some stronger one. Her love for Zenka--her.love of one night, which she nevertheless knew in her own heart to be entire and sincere--how much, in cold, sober fact, was that love worth to her? That, though Occula did not know it, had been the implication of her words to the hearer. Was she, Maia, ready to risk death--no fancy, no game, but the real, bowel-clutching prospect of being murdered--not in return for the certainty of finding and marrying her Zenka in the end, but in return for the mere chance that she might?
I must wait for Sednil, she thought. At the very least I must wait for Sednil and whatever news he brings.
And that's a matter of time. But how much time will I have?
And now, suddenly, she knew the meaning of the great star: not the city's meaning--for the star, like a dream or an old tale, no doubt had many different meanings im-planted in it by Lespa, for comprehension by various peo-ple--but her own meaning, the individual meaning Lespa had intended her to perceive. It was plain: there couldn't be a doubt of it! She herself was the star! This newcome presence, this gentle brilliance in the sky, with its streaming, golden hair, was the equivalent of herself in Bekla. It followed clearly that as long as it lasted, she would re-main immune, the protected of the goddess. But when it departed she, too, if she had not by then found what she was seeking, would be fated to depart, either to death or to that dreary, marital refuge--death in life, as it appeared to her young heart--of which Occula had spoken. So much time, then, she had: so much time and opportunity the goddess was vouchsafing her.
She had the message. She longed, now for some relief from her tension and anxiety; for some respite, however brief and illusory, from the strain of dwelling on love and danger. It's strange, she thought: all your life you hear the tales of the great deeds, the dangers and sufferings of the heroes and the gods and goddesses, but you never understand what they must really have felt until it's brought home to you through your own experience and your own heart.
She turned, came back from the window, put her arms round Occula and kissed her as they had been used to kiss in their first days of slavery, the days of her innocence and her wretchedness.
"I've taken in all you say," she said, smiling. "Don't worry, dearest, I'll survive. We all shall--all four of us; I know it."
"Then you know a damn' sight more than I do, banzi."
"Never mind for now. Occula, tell us one of your stories--like you used to. Like you did at Lalloc's that night-- remember?"
"I remember: that was about Lespa, wasn't it?"
"Yes, tell us another about Lespa! The one about Shakkarn and how Lespa became a goddess: the story of the senguela."
Occula looked round at the others. Milvushina smiled and nodded. Zuno refilled the goblets. Occula took another long pull, settled herself in the cushions and began.
73: THE APOTHEOSIS OF LESPA
"After young Baltis the smith had first made love to Lespa in the temple of Shakkarn--that day before the autumn festival, you remember, when she was supposed to be mending the altar cloth--they became lovers as dear to each other as good deeds are to the gods. They thought of nothin' else. Each of them used to lie awake at night, wishin' to be in another bed. For things were still no easier for them, you see, just because they'd succeeded for once in gettin' what they both wanted. Lespa's father still reckoned the family was a good cut above young Baltis, a mere smith's apprentice with nothin' beyond his pay and perks. And worse than that, realizin' he had such a pretty daughter--for Lespa was the talk of the place for miles around, so that people on journeys used to make a point of stoppin' by on some excuse or other, jus' to see her goin' to the well in the evenin' along o' the other girls-- he'd begun gettin' grand ideas of marryin' her to some wealthy lord or maybe even a baron. I dare say there might have been three or four of that sort who passed that way not so very seldom, what with boats and so on goin' by on the Zhairgen or the Valderra. For as you know, I've always held out for it that sweet Lespa came from lower Suba. But I dare say you two want to have it that she came from somewhere in Chalcon or Tonilda, doan' you?"
"Suba!" said Maia instantly. " 'Course it was Suba!"
"Oh, was it, now?" replied Occula, looking at her quizzically over the rim of her goblet. "Travel broadens the mind, eh? Well, I expect Suba's a wonderful place for-- er--"
"Frogs?" asked Maia, smiling. She had already slipped off her sandals: now she stretched out her legs, parted her toes and wriggled them, looking down at them and shaking her head.
"Webbed feet? Neither had Lespa," said Occula. "Her feet were so pretty the boys used to kiss the grass where she'd walked by. But I'll get on. Sometimes she and Baltis were able to steal a meetin'--it might be in the woods when she was gatherin' sticks, or p'raps it might be that young Baltis would be comin' back from some job he'd been sent out to do on a bull's stall or some bolts for a door, and he'd stop by at the back of the wood-pile and whistle like a bluefinch, and then Lespa would suddenly remember she had to go down the garden for parsley or some such little thing. But you know how it is, makin' love in a hurry--for a girl, anyway, and even for a few men, though not half enough of them--a bit of this and that and not long enough, as the stag-hound bitch said when the lapdog tried to mount her.
"Well, but sweet Lespa was a fine, spirited girl with a heart and mind of her own, and one way and another she managed to see to it that she and Baltis did sometimes meet together at night and no one else the wiser in the mornin'. And besides that, she managed to contrive that her father's ideas didn' get much further than his own head. If you're unlucky enough to be a girl--"
"I'm not unlucky," interrupted Mirvushina, smiling.
"Wouldn' change that belly of yours for old Sencho's, eh?" returned Occula. "Well, you can stuff 'em from one end or you can stuff 'em from the other, I suppose: they seem to get bigger just the same. But I'll oblige you, Milva, and alter what I said. If you're lucky enough to be a girl, all the same you can' refuse to see guests who come to the house: but how much you say to them when they're there-- that's quite another matter. I suppose Lespa's father could have ordered her to do this, that or the other, but somehow he didn'. I dare say she'd already got, even then, some of those qualities which people have been worshippin' these hundreds of years.
"Well, she loved Baltis as girls have always loved the first man who takes them. And for a mortal girl she could have done worse, no doubt, if only the immortal gods-- whatever names we give them up and down the world-- hadn' had other plans for her destiny. For he was a right enough young lad, and a servant of the gods himself in a manner of speakin', 'cos he was a smith; and as you know, the skill of forgin' metal's a gift from the gods, a divine secret which men could never have thought up on their own account, any more than they could have thought up music. Anyway, now Baltis and Lespa had this other divine gift between them as well, and that sort of pleasure's a plant that thrives on hoein' and waterin', so they say. They practiced their music and they got pretty good at it.
"But then came the cruel wars. What wars they were I doan' know, and maybe it doan' matter all that much. All wars are the same to women, aren' they? You lie in a cold bed and weep for what's gone, and those that doan' have to weep for ever are the lucky ones. No, doan' you go takin' on, Milva: he's the commander-in-chief, isn' he? He'll be back, you see if he woan'.
"Whatever wars they were, it seems that after a time the baron of those parts found himself hard-pressed for soldiers, and the need was so desperate that in the end all the village elders up and down the province agreed to a levy; and so in due time the baron's men came to Les
pa's village to take their quota from among the young men. All the grown lads of the village--hunters, smiths, fishermen, farm-hands; no matter what they were, didn' make no difference--they had to stand forth, as the sayin' goes, to be looked over, and some right old weepin' and wailin' there was among the mothers and sweethearts and wives, I dare say.
"I doan' know how many they took from Lespa's village. But if the blasted quota had been no more than two, Baltis would have been one of them all right, for he had a pair of shoulders like barn doors: he must have been the likeliest-lookin' young chap they'd come upon in weeks. So, poor lad, he had to pack up his bits in a bag and belt on his sword (which he'd forged for himself, to make sure it was a good one, from a nice piece of Gelt iron he'd had marked down for a ploughshare) and away he went for a soldier, with Lespa hangin' on his arm two miles up the lane, cryin' her eyes out and not carin' now who saw her, either.
"After Baltis had gone, she felt just about as lonely and discarded as an old bucket thrown in a hedge. It wasn' even so much that he wasn' actually with her, for of course she'd already had to put up with a deal of that: it was the havin' nothin' to look forward to, nothin' to liven up the day with plannin' a bit of funny business: no more hope of slippin' down the garden for a handful of--er--parsley. And after a bit it got to downright, blasted starvation. 'Cos you know how it is: once you've had it and taken pleasure in it--well, you miss it, doan' you, just for itself? Anyway, Lespa did." Suddenly Occula raised her voice.
"And she's not the only one, either!" She bit her finger for a moment and was silent.
At length she continued. "And the attentions of the lads left behind didn' afford her any consolation, either. I dare say they seemed a poor lot after Baltis, and anyway Lespa wasn' a girl to throw away her self-respect and have people winkin' behind her back and sayin' she was the kind of lass who thought half a loaf was better than no bread. She wanted to think that wherever the wars had carried Baltis, he was stayin' true to her, and she reckoned the best way to be sure of that was to be true to him. She used to-- banzi, what on earth's the matter? You're never cryin', are you? What the hell for? I haven't said anythin' funny yet."