She’d been trying to stay awake because it was her turn to help Striclan wash his cooking pots at the well. He insisted on doing most of that himself as he had a strange superstition about something he called bacteria, which he said lived in the tiniest scrap of rotten food and made you ill if you ate them. No one else came up to his standards of what counted as clean, but it still seemed unfair to leave it all to him. Then he’d go off to his booth to work on his notes and repair his kit and do his exercises and prepare for next day’s travel. At least, that was the reason he gave, but Ribek said it was mainly to leave them alone for a bit, in case they wanted to talk privately.
She woke with a start and pushed herself up, filled with guilt at having slept at all. How long? Somebody must have tucked her into her bedroll. The fire was mostly embers. By their faint light she could see Ribek and Benayu getting ready for bed.
“Wh…? Where…?” she mumbled.
“Saranja helped Striclan with his pots, and she’s staying on to help him with some stuff he’s writing about the desert magicians.”
“But it was my turn!”
“You’re too far gone to be any use. You’d have dropped things down the well.”
“Oh. All right. Tell her thank you.”
She flopped back down, but as she was about to plunge back into sleep a strangeness struck her. Almost before she’d woken she’d been aware that Striclan had left because she’d had no sense of his presence. But Saranja…Surely she’d felt her, still quite near…No, only part of her. Zald. Saranja wore the great jewel both night and day, and the quiet pulse of its many sleeping magics registered more strongly on Maja’s consciousness than Saranja’s own natural magic. For Maja, Zald had come to mean Saranja, and Zald was still near by, but Saranja wasn’t. She concentrated. The saddlebags. Zald was in the back of the booth, in one of Rocky’s saddlebags.
“She’s left Zald behind!”
Benayu chuckled.
“Has she, now? Has she, now?” said Ribek, sounding both surprised and amused.
“What are you laughing about?”
“Think it out. Or go to sleep. Anyway, it’s none of our business.”
She did her best, but sleep took her while she was sorting through as many as she could remember of Zald’s various jewels, trying to imagine which of them could possibly possess properties that prevented Saranja washing the pots right. The answer came to her in her sleep. She and Ribek were riding Levanter. She had her arms round Ribek’s waist and was leaning against his back. He seemed unusually hard and bony. She wriggled, trying to make herself more comfortable. Ribek glanced round, and it wasn’t Ribek at all. It was the imp from inside the demon-binder. The imp winked, as if sharing the joke that had amused Ribek and Benayu. And then she was standing in an empty street clutching Zald to her chest, still very hard and knobbly, and wondering hopelessly why Ribek had left her alone in a place like this.
Her unhappiness broke the dream and she woke knowing the answer. However useful Zald might be in other ways, you don’t want something like that in between you and the person you’re hugging. Yes, and the fire had been embers. It didn’t take that long to wash the pots and talk about a few magicians.
She lay in the dark listening to the rip and rattle of the wind and thinking, How strange. Saranja, of all people. Never in a million years would she have guessed that was going to happen. But Ribek knew already, and so did Benayu. And yet Ribek had been surprised that Saranja had left Zald behind. Had she done that before? No. Maja would have noticed, surely. So this was the first time they’d…That’s why Saranja had been in such a foul temper all day. Maja could understand that, though it wasn’t anything like what she felt about Ribek. But she’d always been a yielder and hider—that was how she’d survived—and for her, among other things, Ribek and his mill meant safety, protection, a place where she could stop hiding and be herself. Saranja wasn’t like that at all. She’d always been a battler, fighting her rough brothers as often as they’d fought each other, giving as good as she got.
That was why Zald suited her so, belonged with her as if it had been a suit of armor made for her, and now she’d made up her mind to take it off for Striclan. She said she hated men, and no wonder, seeing what had been done to her, but she’d put her hatred aside too, and was trusting herself to him, unarmored. So she’d been scared, and furious with herself for being scared.
And why hadn’t Maja felt that, for heaven’s sake? You’d have thought something like that…Or perhaps they weren’t actually in love, but were just taking the chance to give each other a good time, like Ribek and the jewel seller at Mord.
No. She’d have known about that, surely. It was the sort of thing she couldn’t help feeling, even if she didn’t want to pry. And it would have been part of Striclan’s outer self, which she could reach easily enough. But what he felt about Saranja took place in his hidden, inner self—the real Striclan. Yes, he loved her, and she loved him. How strange. How wonderful.
But…
But what did it mean for the rest of them, Ribek, Benayu, herself and Jex, and for their whole purpose in being here at all? Was Striclan one of them now? Could they trust him as much as they trusted Saranja?
Had trusted Saranja, was it now? What had she told him? Was it even possible (horrible thought!) Maja had been wrong about Striclan, and what he was hiding in his secret inner world wasn’t his love for Saranja at all, but that he was still really a spy who’d somehow tricked Saranja into falling in love with him so deeply that he could coax out of her everything she knew, all about the Ropemaker and the ring and Zara and Larg and Jex, and then betray them all to his Sheep-face masters?
She couldn’t believe it. But she wouldn’t have been able to believe that Saranja might fall in love with Striclan. And here, in the pit of the night, where it wasn’t only moon-shadows that took strange and frightening shapes, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Worrying whether it was true kept her awake for the rest of the night, or so it seemed, but in the end she was woken by sunlight full in her face, and immediately knew the whole thing was nonsense.
Nevertheless she asked Ribek about it later that morning, when they were riding well out of earshot behind the others. To her surprise he didn’t laugh at her.
“Yes, I’ve been wondering about it too,” he said. “Saranja? I don’t believe it. She’s got too much sense of her personal honor. She’s touchy enough about it for a whole fellowship of noble knights. She’d feel utterly guilty and ashamed if she’d been telling him anything. I know you try not to pry, but you’d be picking that up, surely.”
“I suppose so. I can tell she’s hiding something, but I don’t think she’s ashamed about it. Not that sort of ashamed, anyway. More like shy. Does she know we know?”
“I doubt it. He probably does. He’s very sharp about that sort of thing. Of course we can’t tell how much he’s picking up from her that she doesn’t realize she’s telling him, but however much in love she is she isn’t a fool. If she thought he was simply using her she’d be outraged.
“No, it isn’t really that I’ve been worrying about. It’s more what we’re going to do about him when we get to Barda. It’s only another few days now. Assuming that what we’re looking for—the Ropemaker’s physical being in some form or other—is actually there, and we don’t know that for sure, we’ve still got to find it, or do you think you’ll simply be able to sense where it is when you’re near enough?”
“I don’t know. He’s got to have hidden it so carefully. We’re going to have to use his hair again, like we did by the sheep-fold after we’d left Tarshu.”