Beklan Empire #02 - Maia by Richard Adams

Author:Richard Adams [Adams, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Erotica, Epic, Fiction, General, Non-Classifiable
ISBN: 9780394528571
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1984-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

54: HIGH LIFE

The soldiers always began by declining the money which Maia offered them, and always she insisted that they should accept it—a fraction of what she herself could have come by in far less time and without exertion. Among the many privileges conferred upon her together with her beautiful little house beside the northern shore of the Barb, was that of calling upon soldiers to draw her jekzha whenever she had occasion to fare abroad. Otherwise she could certainly never have visited the lower city at all, to go on foot being out of the question, while no jekzha-man or attendant slave could possibly have protected her from the adulation of the common people.

It was seldom that she passed the Peacock Gate, however. The crowds and their devotion half-frightened her, and although she always responded as she knew they wished, yet upon coming home she would find herself exhausted, consumed with a sense of the precarious and unnatural, as though looking vertiginously down from some dizzy pinnacle upon that real world to which she could never descend.

For three weeks and more after the Terekenalt army had been thrown back across the Valderra she had lain gravely ill, scarcely able to tell night from morning, let alone to understand the full import of what she had achieved or of the news which had been proclaimed throughout the army and the city. A frailer girl would have bled to death, they had told her, or else died from shock and exhaustion. As it was, she had often been in worse pain than she had imagined possible, at times being afraid even to stir, for every least movement seemed to bring agony spurting from an injured limb. What had really carried her through—as on the river bank with the soldiers—had been the knowledge that she had succeeded—had not Sendekar himself told her so?—had prevented the bloodshed and saved the lives of the Tonildans stationed down the river. Their commander had come on tiptoe to visit her, a gruff, taciturn man standing almost inarticulate beside her bed, trying as best he could to convey their thanks: but she no less than he had found few words, slipping back into half-oblivion even before he was gone. The clamps with which they had fastened her gashed thigh caused her continual discomfort, and she had had to be scolded for worrying at them like an animal.

Her litter-borne return to the city had been secret and nocturnal, for although she was sufficiently recovered to leave fortified Rallur—no place for a convalescent—Sendekar had been advised that she must at all costs be spared the crowding and ovations inseparable from a daylight en-try into Bekla. Also, as he—a Yeldashay professional soldier, not on close personal terms with the foremost members of the Leopard regime—had come to realize, there were those in the upper city who would in any case have sought to prevent it.

Arriving tired out after the trying, five-day journey, Maia had been touched and comforted to find

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