Maia полностью

Now! she thought. Now! And she ran, ran, bounding through the grass to the water, her deldas leaping, her hair flying behind her. Splash! Splash! Hopping ankle-deep, wading knee-deep, deeper, two or three agonizingly slow, pushing, thigh-deep steps. Then she had plunged forward and struck out into the Barb. Behind her she could hear Randronoth calling "Maia, come back!" And then, "Maia, this will cost you your life! I warn you, come back!"

On she swam, never once looking round. The water was smooth-far smoother than Serrelind as she had known it many a time. Yet in her haste and desperation, she realized, she was swimming too fast: at this rate she would be exhausted before ever she could reach the western end of the Barb. Besides, there was a slight but steady current against her, for she was in the line of flow between the infall and outfall of the Monju brook. She must settle down, for she had more than half a mile to go. Would Randronoth try to follow her round by the bank? No, almost certainly not, for he would realize that if she saw him waiting for her on the bank she would simply stay in the water, while he would be bound to draw attention to himself and disclose his presence in the upper city.

Maia's swim down the Barb took her over half an hour. Although, naturally, the thought of Milvushina was never entirely absent from her mind, the necessity of swimming distracted her, eased her tension and afforded her the comfort of exercising a familiar skill at which she was adept. It was satisfying, too, to think that this skill had enabled her to get the better of Randronoth.

Once she scattered a flock of black swans, the great birds, with their red beaks, all rising together from the water, circling wide to her left and re-alighting near the infall of the Monju behind her. As she rounded the peninsula, swimming more slowly now and from time to time turning on her back to rest, there came into sight the gardens where Sencho had died, the tree from which she had dived and the inshore pool where she had saved Shend-Lador. They looked different now, she thought, and in a way unfamiliar. The difference, she realized after a few moments, lay in herself-in the eyes with which she saw. They were the same, but she was no longer the slave-girl who had accompanied Occula and the High Counselor on that fatal evening. There returned to her mind the unsolved mystery of Zirek and Meris. What could have happened to them after they had fulfilled their task? Were they dead? But if so, where were their unfound bodies? Might they, after all, have escaped? Did Occula know? Herself and Occula-were they the only people left in the city who knew who had killed Sencho?

Before her rose the grassy terraces of the Leopard Hill, and above them the Palace, its twenty round towers clustering darkly, like a bed of gigantic reed-maces, against the sunset sky. At this sheltered, western end the water, reflecting the reddened clouds, was glass-still; so still that her approach sent long, undulant ripples shorewards. She could see no one-no sentry by the waterside, not a soul looking down from the verdant slopes. It might have been the enchanted castle in one of old Drigga's tales-the stronghold of Canathron, who returned to it each night. And if, she thought, Canathron were even now to come flying home out of the flames of the sunset, would he spread his healing wings and save Milvushina? But she had never prayed to Canathron; and this seemed no time to

start, when she had just hood-winked and outwitted the governor of Lapan.

About a hundred yards out, she found herself in her depth; but being still far from spent, swam gently on-it was easier than wading-until, coming to rest at length on the gravelly sand inshore, she stood up, sluicing her body with cupped handfuls of water.

Milva, she thought: Milva. What could she do to help her? Although she could recall the birth of each of the girls she had once believed to be her sisters, none had involved any complication or danger: Morca had always given birth almost as easily as slipping off her pattens. Whatever was wrong, it would be beyond any knowledge or experience which she possessed. She knew Lokris for a sensible, level-headed woman: it would be most unlike Lokris to say that Milvushina was in a bad way unless it were true. Deep-atavistically, indeed-in every woman lies the fear of this occupational danger, just as in every man there lies the fear of death by conflict or violence. As she stepped onto the bank Maia had no thought for anything else. She had even forgotten her own nakedness; or rather-as with the wounded or the grievously ill-in her present circumstances nakedness was a matter of no particular consequence. She hadn't time now to be bothering about such trivialities, the unimportance of which must surely be as plain to anyone else as to herself.