Maia полностью

It had not previously crossed Maia's mind to tell Milvushina of her trouble. Thinking quickly-the man in his scarlet uniform standing deferentially before her-she realized that she had no great wish to do so. No great wish? She hesitated. What did she mean in thus replying to herself?

Milvushina had gone out of her way to show herself a friend; to speak of herself and her situation without reserve; to make common cause with Maia, warn her, talk of her own anxieties and expectations. If Maia were to tell her now of Tharrin she would-oh, yes, certainly she would-show every sympathy and probably even promise to put in a word. She would be all benevolence. Yet in her mind would arise, unexpressed, a picture of the grubby little peasant girl tumbled on the shore by her mother's fancy man. In a word, it wasn't what Milvushina would say, but what she wouldn't say, which made Maia reluctant to tell her her trouble or ask for her advice. Often, although we may not be ashamed in our own hearts-may even be proud or glad-of something we have done, because by our own standards it was genuinely good-good, if you like, to ourselves and to the gods, who understand everything-yet nevertheless we still feel troubled by the idea of it becoming known to someone else whom we feel

to be inflexibly different in outlook from ourselves. "Oh- she just wouldn't understand." "So you're ashamed?" asks an inward voice. No, no, inward voice; don't be so simplistic. Do you think there is only one color in the spectrum; or that some animal is universally "unclean" because one out of the world's countless religions has always maintained so? It is, rather, just that her values are not ours; that's all.

Maia, somewhat to her own surprise, heard herself asking to see Sessendris. The man raised his eyebrows slightly, bowed and requested her to be so good as to accompany him.

Sessendris was dressed in a long white apron, making bread, her beautiful arms covered with flour to the elbow.

"Maia!" she said, looking up with a smile and tossing back her hair. "How nice! You must wonder what in Cran's name the Lord General's saiyett thinks she's doing in the bakery. The truth is I enjoy it, and no one else in this whole house can make bread as well as I do. So you've caught me out, my dear. Now don't you go telling the whole upper city that the Lord General's saiyett's a baker, or you'll probably have me hanging upside-down!"

This unintentionally grisly pleasantry brought the tears to poor Maia's eyes. Apart from her initial collapse in the jekzha the previous afternoon, she had until now stood up pretty well to the shock and strain of the past fifteen hours; perhaps the better because the squalor, vulgarity and sordid ugliness, which to someone like Milvushina would have been almost the worst of it, were things she had grown up with. Now, however, she wept, standing unreplying in front of Sessendris with the tears running down her cheeks. Sessendris, nodding to the kitchen-maid to leave them, sat down beside her on the flour-sprinkled table.

"It's nasty," said the saiyett, when she had heard it all. "The truth is, the world's nasty, Maia Serrelinda. Haven't you learned that yet? You ought to, I should have thought, after a few months with Sencho."

"I'm-I'm getting to know, I reckon."

"And you want to try to alter it, do you?"

"But Sessendris, surely they'll pardon him, won't they? I mean, if I ask them? They're always saying as I saved the city, and if-"

"Why d'you want him pardoned?" interrupted Sessendris. "Do you still love him?"

"No," replied Maia, so instantly and emphatically that the saiyett, nodding, was drawn to say, "I see: you love someone else, do you? Well, never mind about that for now. But in that case why do you want him pardoned? From what you've told me, he's as guilty as he can be, and he never lifted a finger to try to help you when you'd been sold as a slave: and he could have, couldn't he?"

"How could he?" asked Maia.

"Why, at the very least he could have gone to one of his heldro masters and asked him to follow you up. That's what happened with Missy upstairs, as I dare say you know; but by that time she didn't want it. Anyway, suppose you were to get him handed over to you, what would you do with him?"

"I haven't thought yet. Send him home, I suppose."

"To get into more trouble? He's been in and out of scrapes all his life, by what you've told me. He'll never change. You must know that, Maia, if you're honest. I just can't understand-well, what your idea is."

"To save him from suffering," said Maia.