Maia (Beklan Empire 1)

"Well, hardly, I should say," replied Occula, smiling. "Why doan' we--"

"You should say!" interrupted Ka-Roton. "A black girl! Cran preserve us!"

As he spoke he swirled the wine in his goblet, and by mischance a few drops spattered over Occula's bare arm. Eud-Ecachlon, bending forward, grasped him by the wrist, but Ka-Roton jerked it away.

"How d'you keep her in order, this black leopard?" he asked Maia. He had, she now noticed, a gap between his top front teeth, in which a shred of meat had remained stuck.

"I don't," answered Maia. "She keeps me in order."

"You look much less of a savage. You're the one I fancy." He picked his teeth for a moment, then leant forward and squeezed one of her breasts.

"You're right: I'm the savage one," said Occula suddenly and sharply. "If I wanted to I could make you stab yourself to the heart!"

Ka-Roton slapped his thigh and roared with laughter. "I'd like to see you try!"

"Would you really?" replied Occula. "Like to bet two hundred meld on it?"

"Have you got two hundred meld?" asked the young man contemptuously.

Both Eud-Ecachlon and Bayub-Otal seemed to have abandoned any further notion of controlling the conversation, though they were listening intently.

Occula's manner had compelled everyone's attention.

"Yes, I have," answered Occula. "You accept, then, do you?"

"Certainly, if you're such a fool as to want to throw your money away," said the young man. "I don't know what you've got in mind, but I warn you--"

Occula laid a hand on his shoulder. "Well, doan' run away, then, will you?"

Thereupon she stood up and made her way across the hall to where Elvair-ka-Virrion was sitting. Maia could see them in conversation, Occula smiling and gesturing, Elvair-ka-Virrion evidently asking several questions and nodding at her replies. At length he beckoned to a slave, gave some instructions and then, as the latter accompanied Occula out of the hall, resumed his conversation with the man beside him.

A minute or two later the slave returned and, helped by two others, began putting out several of the lamps.

Throughout supper the hall had been bright with lamplight--brighter, indeed, than was customary at the High Counselor's. Now, as the lamps went out by ones and twos until only about a quarter of those in the hall were left burning, Maia felt a tremor of apprehension; half exciting, as though someone were about to begin a tale of ghosts or demons; but half disturbingly real--an onset of anxiety and foreboding. What had Occula arranged with Elvair-ka-Virrion? The young Urtan had angered her; and Maia knew her well enough to feel trepidation. She remembered the previous occasions when she had seen Occula angry--at Puhra, and in Lalloc's depot on the night when they had arrived in Bekla. Yet what possible scope for violence could she have here, a slave-girl among the aristocracy of the upper city? That Occula could be both impulsive and tempestuous she had seen: so far she had always got away with it; had always just skirted the brink of self-destructive rashness. Part of the admiration and affection which Maia felt for her stemmed from the knowledge that she had always been ready to run real risks whenever she felt herself to have been slighted; and from the fear that one day, doing it once too often, she might herself be swept away in the fury welling up like blood from the wound still unhealed in the daughter of Silver Tedzhek enslaved among barbarians.

She felt herself on the point of getting up to go and beg Elvair-ka-Virrion to call Occula back, to tell her not to go on with it--whatever it might be. Yet she did not. Even now, in her absence, Occula's ascendancy prevailed. It wasn't for the likes of her to interfere with Occula. If Occula was about to destroy them both--for what would become of herself without her?--then it must be so. She remained seated among the Urtans, saying nothing, yet full of uneasy misgiving.

She looked up quickly as Nennaunir appeared beside them; Nennaunir came, as it seemed, to take Occula's place. Probably Elvair-ka-Virrion had sent her. "I asked her to promise Eud-Ecachlon she'd be nice to him." Eud-Ecachlon, hands spread wide and mouth open with delight, made as though to draw her, too, down upon his knee; but Nennaunir, smiling graciously, seated herself on his left, opposite Maia, the two younger men sliding down the bench to make room for her. She seemed about to speak, but before she could do so the knock and boom of drums began to sound from the corridor on the other side of the colonnade.

Conversation ceased. Everyone became attentive, waiting. From the dimmed light and the mounting throb of the drums it was plain that some kind of show was about to begin. Most of the central floor was now in shadow, tracts of near-darkness or dappled gloom separating small islands of brighter light. The pool, too, lay dark, for the lamps below its floor were all out.

From the colonnade, however, light still showed, and here the drummer now appeared, a black silhouette between two pillars, his hands, the fingers tipped with bronze thimbles, rising and falling as they beat here and there upon the long, curved drums hung at his waist.

At this time in Bekla's history, five or six different styles of drumming were practiced in various parts of the empire, as accompaniments to as many kinds of dance. The drummer was using lembas-a pair of drums usually played by a single musician; one, the zhua, made of skin stretched over a deep bronze bowl; the other, the lek, a hollow cylinder of bola wood, thin in some parts, thicker in others, capable, in skilled hands, of producing many different tones--hollow knockings, rattlings, sharp tappings, quick, pattering sounds, wooden susurrations and light scrapings like those of branches in the wind. A skilled player could lull his hearers like a stream in summer, or fill them with the frenzy of men eager to storm and loot a burning town.

The drummer, his lembas swinging slightly on his heavy belt as the upper part of his body swayed between one and the other, was beating out a deep, unvarying rhythm on the zhua, while from the lek came abrupt, intermittent sounds, like pecking or the snapping of sticks. The effect, in the darkened hall, was as though the quiet of some shadowy place--a ravine or forest--was being broken, at irregular intervals, by creatures moving unseen; concealed perhaps, yet not far away.

Slowly the drummer descended the steps and, keeping among the shadows, moved away into a recess of the hall, where he remained invisible, the sound of his lembas continuing to act like a spell upon his audience. Nennaunir leant across the table towards Maia.

"What is it--a kura? No one said anything to me about a kura."

"I don't know," answered Maia. The wine, the half-darkness and the unrelenting, rhythmic drumming were combining to intensify her disquiet. She found that unconsciously she had taken hold of something unnaturally cold and limp, and then realized that it was Bayub-Otal's withered hand. However, he did not remove it, and to spare him possible embarrassment she let it remain lightly in her own for some moments before gently relinquishing it and resting her chin on her fingers.

And now Occula was among them: Occula, a dark, lithe shape against the light at the top of the steps, the feathery tunic devoid of color, its outline like a shaggy cape, like a pelt stripped from a beast. As Maia stared up at her she turned quickly to one side, glanced down and gave it a little twist and tug, as though releasing it from invisible briars. Surrounded by the all-enveloping shadows and the throbbing beat of the zhua she came limping slowly, wearily down into the forest glade of the hall, picking her way between clumps of tall weeds, ducking under low branches, momentarily shading her eyes from a quick dazzle of last light falling between the trees. She was tired out--exhausted: they could all see that. She must have come miles: and the spear she seemed to be carrying, though only a light, throwing javelin, would weigh heavy after so many hours afoot.

The light was fading. The drums said so. Yet as the day-time forest sank to sleep, another forest began to stir, rousing itself to people the falling night. The girl, it was clear, was unsure of her way. She hesitated, listening and gazing, once or twice retracing her steps to seek another track. The rustlings and whisperings about her were growing more numerou

s; yes, and more purposeful--sounds of night and active movement, no longer sounds of evening. Yet she herself stole among the trees without a sound, in and out of the last light; pausing to rest, raising one forearm to lean upon a tree-trunk, round which she peered fearfully into the dark, empty stillness beyond.

The rhythm of the zhua was changing--slower, more ponderous as the light ebbed. In the darkness, some larger creature was moving. The girl could hear it. Noiselessly she vanished between the hanging creepers, laying down her spear to part them with both hands and drawing it after her into the recesses of the undergrowth. Not a soul present but could feel, now, her dread as the unknown beast came nearer.

Was it only by chance that it approached, or had it scented what it was seeking?

When the girl reappeared it was unexpectedly; from a different place, to which she must have crept, smooth as a serpent, through the close cover. She had shed her cloak now and stood naked, a black shadow in the forest agile and wary as a hunting cat. Her spear was raised, balanced in one hand. This was kill or be killed; and she, perforce, must become savage as her pursuer. She sniffed at the dark air, teeth bared, sweat gleaming on her bare shoulders. As she stole on through the gloom, the onlookers felt themselves brushed by the wing of fear--that fear which springs from the knowledge that sight and hearing are bewitched and playing false. Eud-Ecachlon, staring fascinated at the padding, prowling girl, suddenly started and turned, clapping one hand to his shoulder as though he felt the prick of thorns or the bite of an insect. A warm air seemed moving, foetid with the odor of swamp-mud and decaying leaves.

The rapid, tremolo chattering of the lek had become the croaking of frogs.

But was this the huntress or the beast that came forth at length from the blackness at the foot of the steps? Its savage eyes, in a brief glimmer of lamplight, were bloodshot, its wide nostrils dilated, lips parted and speckled with beads of foam. It slunk on and disappeared.

Then, not ten seconds after, out of the same shadow emerged a different being--the huntress, wild with terror, tripping and falling, clambering up again, dropping her spear as she staggered and rocked on the brink of the dark pool. The drums closed in upon her as in desperation she slid into the water, slipping under without a sound, reappearing on the further side as a glistening shape which dragged itself through the reeds and was gone once more between the trees.

Now there were only the drums in the dark--the ripple of the water, the heavy, squelching tread of the pursuing beast in the swamp-shallows. Maia felt ready to scream with terror. If only this dread had been disclosed in a picture, or at a distance--if only it had not been spread like a net round one's feet, if the very walls had not been dissolved, in the gloom, by the ceaseless booming and knocking of the drums--if only the drums would stop! From behind her came the quick, frightened sob of some other girl.

Nennaunir was sitting still as stone, her knuckles white against the table.

Yet it was no beast or huntress who finally reappeared, but a third being, neither brute nor human; one the very sight of whom was enough to wither the hearts of any encountering her in that solitude. Like a snake she rose up from the forest floor, swaying and ghastly. Blood dribbled from her mouth. Her unblinking eyes, fixed and staring like those of a corpse, yet held in them a malevolent intelligence more dreadful than any human hatred. The rolling of the drums poured from her outstretched hands, from her shuddering loins and thighs. She quivered, exultant with the power of evil. As she slowly raised one black arm they saw--they all saw--in her hand the gleam of a knife, reflective yet transparent; a horrible, spectral knife, which she tossed and caught, plunged into her arm and left hanging there as she bobbed and nodded grotesquely, bent-kneed and grinning. She drew it out bloodless and it disappeared in her hand; yet an instant later, as she stretched out her arm, it seemed to leap towards her out of the dark, out of the stench and blackness of the swamp.

And now she was advancing, step by silent step across the floor, and as she did so the young Urtan Ka-Roton, powerless to resist, stood up to meet her; the bridegroom of death, his lips smiling, his arms outstretched towards her arms. Onward he moved in a trance, pace by pace, never taking his eyes from hers. Coming to the edge of the pool, he received the knife from her hand. Yet in the very moment that he plunged it into his breast, it once more vanished and he fell forward, prone on the ground as the drums at last faded and ceased.

Eud-Ecachlon, leaping to his feet, ran forward, knelt and lifted Ka-Roton's head on one arm. All across the hall men and girls were crying out and starting from their places. The slayer had disappeared in the tumult, by the very act of her departure dissolving her own spell. The drums were a quenched fire. By the pool there was no one to be seen but Eud-Ecachlon, dashing water into his friend's face as he repeated his name again and again.