a spoilsport! You don't think I'm afraid, do you? What's the bounty?" she called down to one of the Belishbans.

"What bounty, sweetheart?"

"When you join up as a Belishban officer, of course! How much d'you get?"

"Oh, I see. Five hundred meld we get when we join."

"Right!" said the beauty, taking off her earrings and necklace and passing them down to him. "Just look after those for me, then. Five hundred meld, and don't forget it, any of you!"

After a few more unavailing protests from the young Leopards, two slaves were sent out and returned with a woven coverlet taken from some bedroom near-by. The Belishbans spread it on the floor and Otavis, as lightly and readily as though she were going to make love, lay down on her back, folding her arms under her breasts.

As eight of the Belishbans, four on each side, stooped to grasp the edges of the coverlet, hiding Otavis from view, Maia turned to Ta-Kominion.

"It's crazy! She'll be hurt for certain! Can't you go and ask Elvair to stop it?"

He shook his head. "If she'd said she didn't want to do it, I would; but she's a clever girl. She's after her five hundred meld, isn't she? And a bit more than that, if I know anything about it."

Before Maia could answer there broke out among the Belishbans a quick, chantey-like chanting. As it culminated, Otavis suddenly appeared flying upward, her gauzy Deelguy breeches billowing, one of her plaits come adrift to expose the breast beneath. She seemed entirely in command of herself and showed no least sign of fear as she went up about ten feet and then, her body tilting a little to one side, fell back into the taut coverlet among yells of delight.

"Higher this time!" shouted one of the Belishbans. "Come on, get some zip into it, boys!"

Again Otavis shot up, this time with so much force that she actually half-vanished for a moment into the vaulted dimness above the lamplight. As, flushed and dishevelled, she fell back into the coverlet without having uttered a sound, cheers and applause broke out all over the hall, and Elvair-ka-Virrion called "That'll do!"

"No, no!" shouted the big Belishban leader, holding up his hand as though exercising the authority of the frissoor

(which he never asked forethought Maia). "Three times! Three times it's got to be, before she's an officer! Let her go, boys!"

"The beam! Mind the beam, you fools!" yelled Elvair-ka-Virrion suddenly. But Otavis had already been heaved out of the coverlet, this time in a kind of half-crouching posture which suggested that she had not been entirely ready.

The vault of the hall was spanned, at a height of about fifteen feet, by tie-beams, and straight towards one of these the shearna (Cran, she must weigh next to nothing! thought Maia) was sailing up as lightly as a squirrel. At Elvair-ka-Virrion's cry she turned her head, instantly saw her danger and flung out her hands. Then, as deftly as if she had intended it from the outset, she caught the beam, let her body swing down until she was hanging vertically, paused a second and then dropped back into the outspread coverlet. A moment later she had climbed out and was standing among the Belishbans, smiling as she deliberately wiped her grimy hands on the leader's cheeks.

A perfect tumult of acclaim broke out, lasting for almost,.a minute. Elvair-ka-Virrion, striding forward, embraced Otavis and kissed her.

"Right, that's it! Now-where's her lygol?" he shouted, turning to the surrounding Belishbans. "This is going to cost you all forty meld apiece, and I never saw it better earned in my life!"

"Ay, it damned well was, too!" answered one of them, slamming down four ten-meld pieces on the table. Drawing his knife, he offered it hilt-first to Otavis and knelt at her feet. "Give me a ringlet, saiyett! Gut me off a curl to take to Chalcon and I'll wear it every day till I come back!"

"Why, at that rate she'll have none left!" cried the leader, also falling on his knees. But Otavis, smilingly raising them to their feet and returning the knife, merely strolled across to the table, called to a slave to bring some warm water and stood rinsing her hands while the Belishbans, one after another, put down their money.

"You've lost her, Shend-Lador," said Elvair-ka-Virrion. "They'll never let her go now!" The shearna, however, shook her head and, having beckoned to Shend-Lador to come and pick up the money for her, kissed her hand to the Belishbans and led him out of the hall at a run.

"Good lass! She knows what she wants after that little lark!" said Ta-Kominion approvingly.

Ged-la-Dan grunted and drained his goblet. "So do I." Reaching out a hand, he grasped Maia's ankle where she sat curled up on the couch. "Listen, my girl, I don't know how mudi-"

Before he could say more, however, Elvair-ka-Virrion was beside them, cooling his flushed face with a painted fan and bowing to Bel-ka-Trazet.

"I've come to borrow Maia, my lord. It won't be a real barrarz, you know, unless she dances for us."

Maia, glad of the opportunity to be elsewhere, got up readily enough, excused herself to the Ortelgans and went across to where Fordil and his men were sitting cross-legged among their outspread battery of leks, zhuas and plangent strings. As the master-musician rose to meet her, smiling with obviously sincere pleasure, she found herself thinking that she could have lived happily enough as a professional dancer, devoted from dawn till dusk to the service of the gods, falling asleep each night tired out with the worship of holy movement; wind and stream, fire and cloud; Lespa's contented slave. Might her aunt Nokomis even now, perhaps, be pausing a moment, in some celestial dance among the stars, to look down on her niece and bless her?

"Not the senguela tonight, U-Fordil," she said, stooping to kiss his brown, wrinkled hands and gray-stubbled cheeks. "It's got to be something simpler and shorter, that they can afi follow. I'm sure most of them know precious little about dancing."

"But they know about beautiful girls, don't they, sai-yett?" he answered. "What was that old Tonildan tale you danced for me in your house, the day I came up to play to you? I could follow that easily enough, even though I'd never seen it before. Didn't you tell me you made it up yourself?"

"Oh, Tiva'? Yes, I made that up, U-Fordil. That's to say, I heard the story when I was little from an old woman at home, and I just made up the dance for fun."

"Well, anyone could enjoy that, saiyett, the way you did it for me. And if we just keep one of those Tonildan dance-rhythms going on the drums and I follow you with the hinnari, this lot aren't going to find fault, are they?-

not in this mood and not with someone like you to look at."

She had first begun to devise the dance in Sencho's house during Melekril last year, at the time when Occula had been encouraging and teaching her. It had been rudimentary enough then, but the idea had stayed with her and grown in her imagination, so that since returning from Suba she had rounded it out and turned it into something at least approaching a finished dance. It was old Drigga's tale of Tiva, the fisher-girl of Serrelind; how, at his desperate plea, she had spared the life of a great fish she had caught one day in her nets; and of what had ensued. Certainly, she thought, anyone ought to be able to follow it, and it should go down well enough. Smiling and nodding to Fordil, she walked back to the middle of the hall, where at Elvair-ka-Virrion's order the slaves were already beginning to move the tables for her. She waved them away. She had already decided how she was going to present this, and it wouldn't need all that much space.

As soon as she had received the frissoor from Elvair-ka-Virrion, she took up her position standing on a couch on the dais and picked up the embroidered coverlet in which Otavis had been tossed-for it had been left lying on the floor. She tried its weight. It was a shade heavy, certainly, but not more than she could manage gracefully. The lamps would do as they were. She signaled to Fordil, and as the zhuas began their rolling imitation of a long swell on Lake Serrelind the hinnari took up again, very quietly, "The Island of Kisses."