Every year or so, some staggering, wild-eyed stranger would come gasping to the foot of the tower in the hidden desert. It was Privya’s task to descend the narrow staircase and open the tall door at the foot. She was never entirely sure whether the person pounding on the other side would be tall or short, woman or man or someone else, whether she would be met with exhaustion or bemusement or once, memorably, anger. She knew to step to the side, lest the stranger fall in and on top of her. She knew to wait for the pause while they blinked, surprised at the small girl with the bare feet and the neatly bound hair.
They would hand her bags of lentils or rice, sometimes a bit of sweet fruit, then follow her up the stairs, their eyes growing large as eggs, and though it was not a terribly tall tower, sweat would bead on their faces. The wanderers, who had come a very long way to see her father, often quailed at the first landing. Once there was a woman who marched behind Privya all the way up, so quickly that Privya herself almost tripped to stay ahead. Mostly, however, Privya knew to stop and wait until the visitor decided to follow, or (uncommonly, but occasionally) simply opted to turn and descend again, walking back to the desert with request unspoken.
Privya was not allowed to be in the room when her father talked to these strangers. She would go outside instead, and see if there was a horse or a mule she could water and pet. She liked the mules best. They were better company than the visitors.
The years passed mostly unmarked. Privya liked it when she grew old enough that her moon-blood came, and she could simply walk around the tower some mornings while warmth ran down her legs but her arm remained whole and the stone crescent hung untouched by the door. The sand drank that crimson as easily as the other. Her father would ask, “Have you driven the jungle back today?” and she would smile, and they would drink tea.
By then, the visitors were no longer surprised to see her at the door. “You’re the daughter,” they would say, and she would bow and show them upstairs. They never stayed long. Only some of them were happy when they left. One woman, who had laughed all the way up the stairs, cursed all the way down and kicked at Privya as she passed.
“Turn left at the scorpion,” Privya called after, as she told them all. “Or you will walk, and keep on walking. The desert keeps what it likes.”
The woman didn’t answer. Privya never knew if she made it away, or what she had come for.
“The world wants things,” her father told her. “Lead turned to gold, or water to wine, or the dead to the living. The world is also stupid and selfish. Tell me again of the five humours of metal.”
She did. Then she washed the tea mugs and built up the fire for a stew.
It seemed as though her life had always been this way, and might always be, but outside the tower Privya could see the desert changing. The changes were small: the pebbles that had shone brightest in the moonlight lost their glow over time. One morning, she went to fetch water and saw that a strange moss had grown across the ground. She plucked a moist handful and took it to her father; seeing it, he shook his head.
“There is only so much of you to bleed. The jungle is getting bold; ignore it. Otherwise, it will only be encouraged.”
Privya nodded. Resolute, then, she ignored the subsequent peppering of small creeping vines across the tower’s base. A week later, she let the distant shrieking calls of some odd bird go unremarked—but every morning she bled herself, and she walked, and she let the crimson wardings splatter on the ground. The desert sands rolled hotter under her tough-soled feet.
Perhaps a month after that, when Privya was strolling around the tower’s perimeter, her bleeding wrists downturned and her head tilted back to catch the brightness of the sun on her face, something sharp and wholly unexpected stung her ankle. She looked down to see a glossy black and red serpent writhing in the dust. She said, “Hello,” but her breath caught at the fire running up through her veins. She took a step and her leg folded beneath her. She fell to the ground and the snake bit her again, just beneath her left eye.
She lay there for what seemed a long time, with her nerves burning and her lungs too small for her chest. She lost track of the snake. She wanted to cry out, but the only sound that escaped her was a sob. Her breath was no louder than the wind, and she knew her father would not hear her, would never come down from his vials and books and pots of ink.
A single bloom of yellow was growing on a vine just in front of her. She would have touched it—the petals looked soft—but her fingers felt fat and stiff, and her arm wouldn’t move. Agony twisted her muscles, curling her body, but she smelled the desert heat and watched the flower until her tongue grew too large in her mouth and she couldn’t breathe. That didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. The flower blurred and glowed, until Privya slept.
She was surprised to wake.
She found herself in her bed in the tower, with her familiar soft blanket pulled over her and a fire crackling against the morning chill. Her father was reading at his desk.
“It’s late,” she said, confused. “I’m sorry.”
Her father didn’t look up, but he gestured toward the table, where two cups of tea stood waiting. Privya shed her blanket and stood, adjusting the fit of her robe before she padded across the room to fetch the cups. They were lukewarm. She stared down at them in puzzlement, then carried them across to the cluttered desk, taking one for herself. She was thirsty.
“We will begin with reptiles.” Her father touched his cup lightly, with two fingers. “And the six uses for the venom of a crimson-striped viper.”
Privya hesitated—had there been something? She touched the skin beneath her left eye, but her fingertips encountered only the smooth warmth of her face. So she said only, “Yes,” and knelt on the floor and sipped at her tea, which tasted bitter and unpleasant, but perhaps that was to be expected; her father did not often work at kitchen chores. She gave rote responses to his questions, but she felt as if she hadn’t slept enough, and as though all the colours of the tower room were running together like candle wax. Everything was familiar: the wooden screen that shielded her father’s bed, her own cot at the side, the well-kept hearth and the circular shelved walls full of glass and bone and books, scrolls piled high. The light that streamed through the arrow-slit windows was too bright, though, and her head hurt.
The world was a little strange to Privya after that, though her days continued in the same ceaseless, peaceful heat as before. She got up and blooded the tower and made the tea, sat through her lesson and swept the floor and made savoury hot stews, but nothing tasted quite right. She woke with copper in her mouth, and she could not remember her dreams. Odd thoughts came to her; she dabbled her fingers at the entrance of a spider den and wondered whether its furred legs would make a crunching sound between her teeth.
“My moon-blood has stopped,” she said one day, in sudden realization. She was puzzled, counting backward through obsidian nights and days that had grown somehow grey.
She caught herself staring idly at the pulse beating below and behind her father’s ear. When he glanced over and met her eyes, she thought his lined features paled. He said only, “We will have a guest tomorrow.”
She didn’t ask how he knew—he always knew. She only bowed her head, then went to chop a few more potatoes for the stew.
The stranger arrived midway through the morning. He had a long scarf wrapped around his head, matted with sweat and dust, but in the slits of the fabric, his eyes were kind. He bowed to Privya and handed her a small sack of dried fruits. “I have come to see the Alchemist,” he told her. Privately, she thought that last was a little unnecessary, but still, she accepted the fruit. On a whim, she gestured the man ahead of her rather than leading him up the stairs; she found she could study the line of his back as he ascended, and the little curl of hair against his neck, pleasantly vulnerable.
The stranger greeted her father, who clasped the other man’s hand in both of his own. When Privya made to retire below, she was startled to see her father
shake his head. “Stay,” he told her. “I am performing an experiment. You will assist.”
Obediently, she clasped her hands and stood still. The stranger coughed dust. “Sir,” he said, “I have come very far. My brother is very ill, of a wasting sickness that steals his breath in the night. I beg you—”
“Sit,” said the Alchemist, gesturing to the floor in front of the fire. “We will see what we can do to help. My daughter will join you, across the rug. I wish you to think of your brother’s symptoms—keep them as an image in your head. Privya, you will set your hands upon his skull; you know the pressure points that best foment the transfer of thought? Attend.”
Privya frowned, puzzled—why should she need pressure points to obtain a list the man was likely perfectly capable of reciting for himself? Her father’s expression was implacable, though; he smoothed his moustache with one finger, then folded his hands within his ink-stained sleeves. So she knelt in front of the stranger, who was much taller. He bowed his head obligingly as she reached up; his lips were moving silently, doubtless as he recited his careful list of words. His eyes were narrowed in concentration, but he looked at her with tattered, vagabond hope.
The humours of human thought had never been her strongest area, but she caught the words swollen and vomit as she settled her fingertips into place. She saw a flashing image of a young man, scraggle-haired, strain etched deep in his narrow face, crooked teeth bared in pain. Then a rushing overtook her, as brutal and unexpected as a sandstorm; she gasped. She would have held the stranger’s need like a weaving between her fingers, but the storm rose up and she lost it.
When she came back to herself, her fingers were still resting in the dry tangles of the stranger’s hair. One of his eyes rolled a little, blankly, toward the right. His mouth was slack.
She drew a breath rich with life, and didn’t have to ask her father why she felt suddenly strong, or why the room was so vivid. Horror was voiceless in her gut.
“Yes,” said her father, with begrudging approval, as though she had precisely recited the twenty-six variations of turmeric love potion. “Exactly like that, from now on. You must pace yourself, though, or they will stop coming entirely.”
She swallowed hard, and set her hands on the stranger’s shoulders, shaking him as his head rocked loosely back and forth. He made no change in expression.
Privya dropped her hands to her lap and continued to kneel in front of the fire. The air was sweet in her lungs; the cramped room around her was brilliant with life, though she knew now that it was stolen. She imagined the stranger’s accusing eyes had fallen on her, but when she looked, he was only drooling at the wall.
After a few minutes, her father went to sit at his desk. The quill of his pen scratched against parchment.
Finally she said, “There was a snake.”
The pen stopped scratching.
In the ensuing silence, she shook her head. “You said it was stupid and selfish, when the outsiders asked you to—to bring back the dead.” Her tongue tripped over the words. She couldn’t help herself. She wished the stranger would smile at her again.
There was a long pause, then her father answered, “Take him into the desert and leave him. It is the kindest thing.” His tone had an odd, diffident sort of gentleness, then he cleared his throat and the pen resumed its whispering calligraphy.
Privya studied her hands against her knees; she turned her palms upward, looking for some sign, seeing only neatly trimmed nails, the pale lines of gold-marked scars, and the furrows left by the hot sun. “Let me give it back. The essence of him. How do I—?”
She knew what he would answer. Still, she waited until he said, “It isn’t possible. Outside, now.”
Obedience was ingrained. She rose and took the stranger’s hand, his skin warm and clammy in hers. He came when she tugged at him, though his gait was shambling and he wouldn’t look at her. The stairs were difficult.
She took the man into the desert and let go of his hand. Then, standing beside him, she turned to look back at the improbable tower. The sun was still high overhead.
“He was wrong to do it,” she told the stranger, who swayed loose-jawed and uncaring. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” Still, she sighed. “I will not take another,” she told him. “What do I do? Stay here and eat my father? Or let him watch me starve and die again?” She waited, but the shell of a man before her offered no answers.
“Could I leave? If I do not feed the sand, the jungle will come.”
Privya stood for a long time, gazing at the tall stone and the paths she had worn in the low dunes around it. She could see pale leaves encroaching. She rubbed a hand along the other arm and felt the slow pulse in her veins.
She looked at the slack-lipped stranger and thought of the moon-blood that wouldn’t come.
She sighed again. “I can’t leave you,” she said to the drooling man. “The desert is not kind. I am sorry. I’m sorry for your brother, too.” Leaning down, she scooped up a rock of medium size, with some heft, but not too large for her hand. Then, stretching up—for the man was very tall—she gripped the back of his neck with one hand, and bashed the side of his skull with the rock. The impact made a crunching sound.
He blinked once.
She was not strong enough, the first time, so she cracked him across the skull again.
A drop of brightest crimson ran down his left temple. His eyes were blank and drifting, and he never flinched, but he staggered forward and fell to his knees. She raised the rock two-handed, and hit him again, and then once more, until her hands were marked with blood and grey mush and bits of bone and the stranger lay in the sand, his face a pulp.
She could barely see the tower this time, through the water in her eyes, but she dropped the rock and turned to look at the sandy stone once more. Though the window slits were black, she fancied she could see her father’s shadow.
She knelt to wipe her hands dry in the sand. Then, brushing granular gore from her fingers, she lifted her chin and walked away into the desert. The sun burned on her robed shoulders.
She walked, and kept walking. She didn’t turn again, though she imagined the tower receding small and insignificant behind her. She passed a sprig of misplaced ivy, growing, and saw it stretch to cover her tracks. There was no end to the sand.
She knew the way out of the desert; she had told enough travellers before her, though she had never trod the steps herself. She walked until she found a brown scorpion squirming in the dust; she stood looking down at it, knowing that this was where the pilgrims turned. Then she continued straight on, toward the setting sun.
She walked through the night, her breath frosting in the air and her hands rubbing uselessly at her arms. In the morning, the sun rose behind her and a tiny cloud of sand rose before her, like a miniature storm; she looked down and saw the scorpion again, waving more furiously this time. Its tail flexed in agitation. “Thank you,” she told it, “but no. I do not belong out there.” She walked through the day, blisters rising on her skin. Her lips grew chapped, then cracked, then bled and dried to scabs.
She was staggering the third time the scorpion appeared, its barbed stinger almost frantically pointing left. “You are a kinder desert than I expected,” she said, or tried to—her throat felt as though she had swallowed fire ants. She looked toward the sand to the left, and she hesitated. Then she wiped her palms against her thighs, remembering, and shook her head. She walked forward again.
The scorpion did not come to her a fourth time. She walked through another day, another night, another day after that. She recited to herself the fifty-six purposes for cardamom and the thirty-eight constellations. She wondered at her own reserves and the stolen strength that kept her marching, one foot in front of the other.
She had died once, she thought. She knew what to expect. She waited for the numbing dark.
But when she fell, finally, face in the sand, without the strength to blink the grains from her eyes, she felt only the conflagration in her thr
oat, the cracking gorges of her lips, and the withering of her skin. A rushing overcame her; she would have screamed. She thought of her father, and cursed him, and called for him, and would have wept but knew her tears would be charcoal ruin.
She dreamed of the snake.
She woke with blood moistening her lips and broad leaves shading her face. Birds were calling in the distance and she was staring into the face of a boy no older than she. There was a hole in his throat and his eyes were empty, already filming over. Her hands were tight to his skull.
Somewhere in her head, his memories were flashing; she thought he has a sister and he liked butterflies and then the last of him was gone, slipping away from her as she drew stolen breath and stared down at the red on her hands. “No.” She didn’t know to whom she spoke—to herself, her father, the boy. “No. It was going to end in the desert.”
Her robes were shredded rags; she wore a bloodstain across the curve of her stomach. She hesitated, but she took the boy’s tunic and left him. She walked through verdant land, recognizing a flower here, a vine there—the bits and pieces of the world that had crept to the foot of her lonely tower thrived everywhere here. She found a river and washed her hands.
She followed the running water, marvelling at the way the mud sucked at her bare toes, but she took no joy in it. The boy’s life coursed through her, and she was weeping.
When the river gave way to a rushing waterfall, its cascade falling a hundred feet of jagged cliff, Privya stood at the top and spread her arms before jumping.
A wet black boulder leapt to meet her.
Again there came the rushing, and a shrieking pain that crackled through her. She felt each bone break. She felt the water enter her lungs and bubble.
She waited desperately for nothingness.
She was terribly cold for a long time.
Then she was vaguely aware of screaming. It wasn’t hers.
In Veritas Page 13