Two porters opened the double gates and her soldiers drew the Serrelinda's jekzha into the garden court of the Sacred Queen's house. Dew was still lying on the lawn, the western side of which sparkled in the sun now well risen above the opposite rooftop. A green-and-white-plu-maged
Maia walked in the garden while her soldier Brero went to make inquiries. After a little she paused in the shade, leaning against a blossoming cherry tree. Looking up at the side of the palace facing her, she could recognize the gallery, with its trellised arcading, where she had embraced the Sacred Queen in the moonlight. Suddenly, as she stood gazing, a girl's scream sounded from above. It seemed like
a cry of pain rather than of fear, and was quickly cut short, as though whoever uttered it had either been silenced in some way or had controlled herself. Maia wondered whether the girl-whoever she might be-had burned herself or dropped something heavy on her foot. At any rate it wasn't Occula-she could tell that. She fingered her diamonds nervously; chewed a blade of grass and picked at the cherry bark. Then, hearing the sound of a footstep on the path, she turned to see Brero coming towards her.
Somewhat to her surprise, the man told her that he had been given to understand that the queen would see her immediately. She followed him round the lawn and past the monkeys' grove to a stone doorway above which, in a recess, a little statue of Frella-Tiltheh the Inscrutable stood pointing downward at the sprouting tamarrik seed. Inside was a long, cool hall, elegantly tiled in red and white, where slim, fluted columns rose to a coffered ceiling. Scented shrubs were standing here and there in leaden troughs, and at the far end rose a staircase.
Zuno, waiting at the foot of these stairs, bowed to Maia without speaking and motioned to her to ascend. Arrived at the stairhead, she at once recognized the corridor where Form's had tackled the guard-hound with her bare hands. Passing the actual spot, she noticed several scratches still remaining on the polished boards. Then they were climbing to the second story.
Zuno stopped outside the queen's bedroom and knocked. After a few moments the door was opened by a woman- an obvious Palteshi-whom Maia had not seen before. She gave her name and the woman nodded to her to enter.
Fornis, half-naked in a pale-green dressing-robe embroidered with waves and fishes in silver, was seated at a dressing-table of inlaid sestuaga-wood. Open before her was a kind of cabinet full of jars of ointment, boxes of creams and unguents and bottles of lotion and perfume. Her shoulders and bosom were lightly sprinkled with an adhesive, golden powder which guttered where it caught the light. In one hand she held the heavy, carved comb with which she had combed Maia's hair in the bathroom, while with the fingertips of the other she was lightly rubbing an orange-tinted rouge into the skin round her cheekbones. As Maia raised her palm to her forehead, the queen turned her head and looked up at her over her shoulder.
Once again Maia saw, with that tremor which often comes
upon us in the moment that we realize that we had forgotten the precise appearance of someone remembered with deep emotion-love, hatred or fear-the blazing hair, the ice-green eyes, the creamy skin, the buxom body at one and the same time opulent yet lithe and agile as an athlete's. Again she sensed the latent energy like a coiled spring, and the domineering, rapacious vitality which, striking upward through the leaves like a physical force, had literally thrown her off balance as she stood poised above the Barb.
