"It's a strange place, and the people are strange, too. It's like nowhere else in the empire-half land and half water. You travel everywhere by boat, down the water-channels; like corridors of water they are, between one village and the next, and the reeds and trees standing high all round you. You hear bitterns booming in the swamps and I've seen black turtles-oh, big as a soldier's shield-lying out on branches above the water.
"After about ten days poor old uncle was tired out, so Miss Fornis went out alone with me and four men-two Subans and our own two Dari huntsmen. We came to an island in the swamps and in the middle was a heronry. We could see the big, ramshackle nests, high up in the tops of the trees. You know the way they build?"
Maia nodded.
"Well, we'd no sooner got to this island than Miss Fornis looks up at the trees and says 'Ah, herons! I've always fancied young herons would be good in a pie; better than pigeons. Phorbas,' she says to one of the Suban lads, 'just
climb up and bring me down half a dozen, will you?' 'No, saiyett,' says the boy, 'that I won't! I value my life and that's the truth. There's no living man could reach those nests, and even if he did the herons would be at him like dragons.' 'Why, you damned, cowardly, Suban marsh-frog!' she said to him. 'I don't know why ever I hired the likes of you! Go on, then, Khumba,' she said to one of our huntsmen, 'you'd better just show him how to do it, hadn't you?' 'I'm very sorry, saiyett,' says Khumba, 'but I reckon yon Suban fellow's in the right of it. I'm no more going up there than he is. My wife wouldn't fancy me with a broken neck, that's about the size of it.'
" 'Cran and Airtha! Well, here goes then!' says Miss Fornis, as if she was stepping out of doors into the rain. 'And since you're not a man,' she said to the Suban, 'you can just give me those breeches of yours to keep my legs from getting scratched. Come on, hurry up!' And she made him take them off. They still thought it must be some joke she was up to. She was only just seventeen then, you see, and in those days her ways weren't so well-known.
"She put on the breeches and stuck a short spear in her belt and then she was up the tree like a squirrel. She'd gone something like thirty feet before any of them really understood she meant to do it. After that they just stood and watched like folk round a burning house. Khumba kept saying 'O Lespa, make her come down! O Shakkarn, what am I going to say to her uncles when she's dead? They'll hang me upside-down!' I admit I was praying myself. It would have frightened anyone to see her.
"She got up to the nest she'd had her eye on-must have been all of eighty feet, and the upper, branches swaying under her like grass in the wind. Both the herons went for her. She killed them with her spear, and after that she wrung the necks of five young ones and carried them down- she couldn't throw them down, you see, what with all the twigs and brush below her. 'There!' she says to the Suban boy. 'And I've a good mind to make you eat one raw. The next time I tell you to do something, you damned well do it, d'you see?' He never answered a word; and he never came out with us again. But there were plenty more who were only too glad to, for the story got around, you see; and she always paid well. I don't believe there was anyone else in the empire, man or woman, who'd have climbed
that tree. Bat that was nothing at all, if only we'd known what was to come."
"And you say she's got a use for me?" asked Maia, with considerable apprehension. "Only if it's along of the swimming-"
Ashaktis burst out laughing. "The swimming? Are you ready to come out now? I'll rub you down."
Maia did so, dried her face and stretched out on the couch while Ashaktis toweled her.
"What's the Sacred Queen's vocation?" asked Ashaktis after a little. "Do you know?"
"Why, she's the bride of Cran," said Maia. "She's Air-tha in human form, isn't she, as makes the crops grow and the babies come?"
"Yes, that's quite right. The Sacred Queen doesn't have to be a virgin-there's never been any fixed law about that. Occasionally in the past she's been a married woman or even a shearna. It's entirely a matter of popular acclaim-or it's supposed to be. But all the same, Miss Fornis has always taken good care that in spite of all her wild ways, no one's ever been able to link any man's name with hers. That adds very much to her real power, of course."
"I see," said Maia, shuddering deliciously as Ashaktis's strong fingers massaged the muscles along her shoulders.
"But she's still flesh and blood, for all that, isn't she?"
"Flesh and blood? Well, yes, I s'pose so, kind of."
"She gets to learn a lot about almost everyone in the upper city," went on Ashaktis. "She knew a lot about Sencho, for instance. You were quite a favorite with him, weren't you? You were very good at doing what he liked- you used to put your heart into it?"
Maia felt nattered. She did not know that she had acquired so wide a reputation.
