Maia by Richard Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

it across to her. She caught it and, turning it one way and the other, examined the stylized design of leopards and the obverse image of Frella-Tiltheh the Inscrutable, hand outstretched above the sprouting
tamarrik
seed. After a minute she made to give it back, but he shook his head.
    "It's yours, goldfish."
    "Oh, Tharrin, I can't take that! 'Sides, anyone I was to give it to'd reckon I must 'a pinched it-a girl like me."
    He chuckled. "Or earned it, perhaps; such a pretty girl. And haven't you?"
    She colored. "That's worse, anyone go thinkin' that. Oh, Tharrin, don't tease
that way.
I don't like it. I'd never,
never
do it for money!"
    Seeing that she was on the verge of serious vexation, he hurriedly pulled the subject back on course.
    "You can have five twenty-meld pieces if you'd rather. Here they are, look."
    "Tharrin! However much you got, then?"
    He jingled the coins, tossing them up and down before her eyes.
    "That and more."
    "But how?" Then, sharply, "You never stole it, did you? Oh, Tharrin-"
    He laid a quick hand on her wrist. "No, fish, no; you can think better of me than that."
    She, carefree and pretty as a butterfly in the sunshine, waited silently before at length asking, "Well?"
    "I'm a patriot."
    "What's that, then?"
    "Well, you see, I'm the sort of man who's not afraid to take risks, so I'm rewarded accordingly. They don't take on just anyone to do the kind of work I do, I'll tell you."
    She knew that he was serious, yet she felt no alarm on his account; her half-childish thoughts ran all on excitement, not on danger.
    "Oh, Tharrin! Risks? Who for? Does mother know?"
    "Ah! That'd be telling. No, 'course she doesn't: only you. And you just keep it quiet, too. I don't want to be sorry I told you."
    " 'Course I will. But what's it all about, then?"
    "And
that'd
be telling, too. But I'm a secret messenger; and I'm paid what I'm worth."
    "But darling, surely you'll need the money for this trip, won't you?"
    "What's a hundred meld to a man like me? Come on, you just put them away safe now, else they'll get scattered all over 'fore we're done."
    Obediently Maia put them away before returning to more immediate things.
    She left him in high spirits on the jetty at Meerzat, chatting with an acquaintance who was taking his boat out as soon as he had got the cargo aboard; and strolled home at her leisure, stopping more than once to pick flowers or chase butterlies; for it was Maia's way to pursue pleasure quite spontaneously in anything that might happen to take her fancy.
    It was a little after noon when she came up the lane towards the cabin. The sanchel on the bank had almost finished flowering, its orange blossoms turned to soft, fluffy seeds like long sprays of thistledown, which the first winds of autumn would send floating across the waste. There were three blooms left at the end of a long, out-thrust branch. Maia climbed up the bank to reach them, clutching the branch and almost overbalancing as she leant outwards.
    Suddenly she stopped trying to reach the blooms and released the bent branch, staring towards the cabin and the patch of rough grass where the chopping-block stood beside the hen-coops.
    Under a clump of sycamores on the edge of the patch, a cart was standing in the shade. Two bullocks, side by side, were in the shafts, shaking and tossing their heads under a cloud of flies. It was not they, however, which arrested her attention, but the cart itself. She had never seen one like it. It was unusually solid, rectangular, narrow and entirely covered not by any sort of tilt or hood, but by a timber roof as stout as its sides. It was unpainted and bound about with four iron hoops bolted to the timber. Unless there was some window or opening at the front (which from where she was standing she could not see) it had none; but near the top of the one side half-facing her was a long, narrow slit. At the back was a door, closed and fitted with a hasp and staple, in which a heavy padlock was hanging open.
    Maia