Doing her damnedest to look as though she didn't find the pails heavy, Maia carried them across the yard, through the stone-flagged kitchen and into the little, narrow dairy beyond. Here she set them down, ducked out of the yoke and then, lifting first one pail and then the other, emptied them into the big clay vessels on the shelf above the churn.

Even the dairy was not properly cool this weather. The milk would have to be used quickly. A little would be sold round about, but most would go to themselves-drunk fresh or made into butter, cheese or whey. This was hardly more than a subsistence farm, a bit better than Morca's patch on the Tonildan Waste, but still a long way behind the kind of place where Maia had met Gehta. The farmer, Kerkol, his wife Clystis and her fourteen-year-old brother lived almost entirely on what they produced. Still, at least there was plenty of black bread, cheese, brillions and ten-drionas. The strangers weren't eating them out of house and home and Kerkol was glad enough of their money, to say nothing of the extra help.

Coming back into the kitchen, Maia stepped out of her pattens and rinsed her hands in the wooden tub opposite the door. The water was getting greasy, she noticed: she'd

tip it out after supper and refill the tub from the brook. She gave her face a quick rub with her wet hands and was just drying it on a bit of sacking when Clystis came in.

Clystis was a big, healthy girl, happy in her youth and strength!-in being equal to life-and in her first baby, a boy not quite a year old. She had a quick mind and from the first had struck them all as more forthcoming and go-ahead than her husband, a slow, rather taciturn fellow who always seemed happiest out working. It was undoubtedly Clystis who had convinced Kerkol that they stood to gain from letting the strangers stay. He himself, like most peasants, tended to be dubious of anything unfamiliar.

Clystis smiled at Maia, showing a row of sound, white teeth. "Cows done, then?"

"Ah," Maia smiled back. "Gettin' a bit quicker now, see?"

"Didn't take you long, did it? How many days is it you been here now?"

"Ten." Maia looked round towards the passage. "How is he this evening?"

"The poor lad? I reckon he's a lot better. The young chap's with him."

They had never been asked where they came from, nor their names; and Clystis never used any except Maia's. Bayub-Otal was "the gentleman," Zen-Kurel "the poor lad," Zirek "the young chap," while Meris was "your friend" or "the other girl." They were fugitives from the fighting beyond; a "beyond" known only vaguely to Kerkol and Clystis, neither of whom had ever been to Bekla.

During the night of her flight from the city and all the following morning, Maia had been in a state of almost trance-like shock. If she had not been young and in perfect health she would have collapsed. Zirek and Meris, after their months of hiding, were weak and not rightly themselves: nervous, unsteady, starting at everything and incapable-or so it seemed-of normal talk or thought. Only Bayub-Otal, though clearly almost at the end of his tether from fatigue and lack of sleep, had remained comparatively self-possessed, limping on beside Zen-Kurel's stretcher, leaning on a long stick cut with Maia's knife and now and then exchanging a word with the soldiers. Long afterwards, Maia still remembered that night as the worst of her life.

Some time after moonset they stopped in a thicket. Maia,

who alone knew how large a sum of money she was carrying, and remembering the footpads on the way up from Puhra the year before, was so much afraid that she could not bring herself to rest. At the near-by call of an owl she leapt up and would have run if Bayub-Otal had not restrained her. They had been there no more than five minutes before she asked him whether they could not go on.

"But where to, Maia?" he replied in a dry whisper. "We may just as likely be going into danger as away from it."

"Where you making for, then, sir?" asked one of the soldiers who had been carrying the stretcher. "Only we didn't reckon to come this far: the captain's expecting us back."

Maia gave them twenty meld apiece. "I'll write something to your captain," said Bayub-Otal. "It won't be much further, but if we don't get this young man into shelter he's going to die."

The second soldier nodded. "Looks bad enough now. Should I try to give him some water, do you think, sai-yett?"

She shook her head. "He couldn't swallow it."

She herself now believed that Zen-Kurel would die. Since she had first seen him in Pokada's room he had not spoken a word, though once or twice he had muttered unintelligibly and moaned as though in pain. To add to her misery and the nightmare-like nature of all she was feeling, it now seemed to her that she would have done better to leave him in the care of the Lapanese. But-Fornis? She doubted whether, with Randronoth dead, the Lapanese could hold the city. Before long either Kembri or Fornis would recapture it. So in that respect they had been right to escape; yet if only they had stayed, Zen-Kurel would have had a chance of recovery.

She was kneeling beside him when Bayub-Otal, taking her hand, drew her to one side.

"Maia," he said, "I'm too exhausted to think clearly, but can I ask you this? Have you any destination-any plan?"

She shook her head. "No, Anda-Nokomis. All I ever had in mind was to get the four of you out of Bekla."

"You?" He looked at her in perplexity, apparently wondering whether his hardships might not have brought about some breakdown in his rational powers. "But-er-why?"

She shrugged. "Well, I did, anyway. What d'you reckon we ought to do now?"

"You aren't counting on help from anyone else?"

"No."

"Have you got any money?"

She gave a wry little laugh. "Much as you like."

"Then we ought to try to find some sort of shelter: a farm; somewhere like that. The lonelier the better: pay them to take us in. Otherwise Zenka'll die. These soldiers, too-we can't keep them. They're impatient now: they want to be back with their friends, looting Bekla."

"I'll pay them to go on, Anda-Nokomis, until we find somewhere."

So in the morning, an hour or two after sunrise, they had come, a hobbling, staggering little bunch of exhausted vagrants, to Kerkol's farmstead-a house and some acres of rough fields about three miles west of the Ikat road. Kerkol and the lad, Blarda, were in the fields, getting in the last of harvest, and Maia had gone in alone and spoken with Clystis in the dairy. They had taken to each other. Besides, the sight of Zen-Kurel would have wrung pity from anyone with the least spark of humanity, and Maia was offering good money. She had assured the girl that his illness was no pestilence. They were fugitives, victims of the hated Leopards. They wanted to stay only until Zen-Kurel was better, and would move on as soon as they could. Kerkol, when he came in at mid-day, had found three of them sound asleep on straw in the barn, with Maia watching by Zen-Kurel, whom Clystis had told the soldiers to put into Blarda's bed. Inclined to be surly at first, he had gradually warmed to the pretty girl so obviously in distress; and being (as they later came to perceive) a man who secretly knew his wife sharper than himself, he was finally persuaded that there was more to be gained from letting them stay than from sending them packing. In any case, with the soldiers already gone, to compel them to leave would certainly have meant Zen-Kurel's death.

By the following day everyone except Zen-Kurel was in better shape. Zirek and Meris, naturally, were only too glad to get out of doors and try to give some help about the place. Zirek made fun of his own ignorance and clumsiness, and sometimes made even Kerkol laugh with his clowning. Maia had forgotten the stormy streak in Meris; or perhaps, she thought, their former circumstances had