It was after midnight. Maia, who had been awake-how long? she wondered; well over an hour-was looking out from the temple of Cran over the still, moonlit city. The room where they had told her to sleep until it was time to set out was high up, under the cornice, and from its window she could see, across the roofs of the lower city and the great square of the Caravan Market, the dark shape of the Peacock Gate and the walls extending on either side of it.
To the right and beyond, a mile away on the Leopard Hill, rose the Barons' Palace, its slender towers soaring, in the moonlight, above the deep-shadowed outline of its north front. Remote and far-off it looked now; nothing to do with her anymore, the girl who had danced the senguela to the acclamation of Sarget's guests.
There was not a breath of wind. She looked down on the flat roofs tilting this way and that below her. The shadows of their parapets cast hard, slanting lines and the moonlight picked out, here and there, a medley of objects; brick cisterns, pear-shaped water-jars, shrubs growing in pots, here a coil of rope, there a pallet-bed for use in the heat of summer. The moon, now risen high over Crandor, had dimmed Lespa's stars with a light, almost as bright as day.
Somewhere a dog was howling and from another direction, so far off that her ear caught it only intermittently, came a sound of music. Here and there a few lamps still burned in windows, but since she had begun her pensive, melancholy watch they had grown fewer and fewer, until now only two or three remained: watchers by the sick, perhaps, she thought; or lovers abed who preferred a dim light to darkness. It seemed much longer than an hour since the lamp-shutters of the clock towers, both of which she could see, had swung open to signal midnight. Surely they must be due to open again any moment now. There was not a soul in the streets below; the Kharjiz, Storks Hill and Masons Street all empty. Only in the distant Caravan Market a few figures-porters or sweepers, perhaps-were moving slowly here and there; like autumn flies on a window-sill, she thought. How long now till someone came for her?
Her shoulder was hurting, as it had for hours past, and she could not bear to think what she must look like. Kem-bri and the chief priest, who had seen her again that morning to give her her detailed instructions, had assured her that she would not have to suffer a great deal to make it look as though she had been questioned. The temple guards, however, told off to see to the actual business, had taken a rather different view. They had not been as brutal as if she were a real prisoner, but Maia in all her life before had never been really knocked about or ill-used, and the fear and shock had been almost worse than the pain. She had a black eye and a badly swollen lip, a four-inch burn across her right shoulder and livid bruises across her thighs and buttocks. The soiled white tunic-which Bayub-Otal might remember her to have been wearing in the gardens-had been brought down from the queen's house and she had had to put it on again. Hair, finger-nails, knees, feet- all were filthy. Probably, she thought, the tracks of her tears showed plain down her grimy face.
The chief priest, cold and reserved (disappointed, perhaps, in his hopes), had refused to let her see Occula. Maia had half-expected as much, and on the way from the queen's house to the temple had begged Ashaktis to look after her friend and give her all the help she could. This Ashaktis had promised, though rather casually.
"That's if the queen likes her, of course," she had added; and Maia had judged it best to say no more.
What she now felt above all, leaning on the sill and looking out over the checkered, sleeping city-more than her injuries and dirt, more even than the danger into which she was going-was for loneliness. For the first time since the day when she had been carted by the slave-traders to Puhra, she had no friend to whom she could turn, no one to comfort or help her. The exploit on which they were sending her, she knew, was a pure gamble on Kembri's part. She was being thrown down like a die on a gamingtable. If the throw proved a loser, they would merely shrug their shoulders: she would be no great loss. If she won for them they would pocket the winnings, and for what they might award her in return she had nothing but Kembri's word, given as an inducement. Yet what else could she do but try to succeed? She could not hope to escape. Where to, anyway? She had no money and knew next to nothing of the empire, its various provinces and towns; while as
for trying to get out of it on her own, she would not know how to begin. She could only go through with the adventure. If she succeeded she must, surely, end up better off.-Yet if only there had been a mate, a friend, someone to share the frightening, hazardous future!
