Vishnumitra draws himself up, remembers his dharma. He brings deliberately to memory the imprisonments and murders that have befallen his dear companions, the practitioners of the art. He remains standing, ignoring Upamanyu’s invitation to sit down.
“I need answers, Upamanyu, not pretty speeches. Tell me, why did you ban the prana vidya? Why have your spies pursued and killed the practitioners these many years?”
“Come, my friend, can I afford to have every fool in the empire learn and use what is the most arcane of arts? Why do you think I look so young, although I am older than you in years? Ah, I can see from your face that you know, or suspect. I am the best practitioner of the art in the empire, and it is that which has kept me young. It is that which allows me to defend myself from my enemies. Do you blame me for making sure that nobody else can be an adept in the art?”
“I am also an adept,” Vishnumitra says softly. “And I might look twenty years younger, but I have aged, Upamanyu. What you are doing is against cosmic order. The prana vidya is not to be misused to confer immortality.”
“Cosmic order will survive, my friend! Do you not recall the old stories about the sages who lived for thousands of years? Here I thought you’d congratulate me upon my great discovery! I have wandered far, from mountain to desert, read countless ancient tomes, studied under the most learned of teachers to teach myself what nobody else would, or could. The manipulation of the mahaprana itself!”
Looking at him, Vishnumitra is struck by how young Upamanyu is, not only in appearance but in mind. It is as though the companion of his boyhood is back, with his lively intelligence, his curiosity, his unending propensity for play. The playful look is in those bright eyes.
“I wish to choose my weapon.”
“What if I refuse your challenge?”
“You will not refuse, Upamanyu.”
An unreadable expression in Upamanyu’s eyes. The shoulders drop, and when he speaks it is the same light tone, but resigned. Regretful.
“Choose, then.”
“I choose combat by prana vidya.”
Vishnumitra has done this before, used manipulation of prana to kill. When someone is dying in great pain, it is a mercy to let the individual prana flow cease, to draw life out gently, as one draws the last of thread from a spindle. He has never used this skill to murder. But his way is clear.
Upamanyu is shaking his head as though Vishnumitra has just proposed something quite absurd, but he comes up to Vishnumitra, and their hands meet. Fingertip to fingertip, then clasping lightly, as though they might be about to draw each other into an embrace. Vishnumitra can sense the prana flow in the other’s body—thick and strong. He senses the other finding his own prana flow as a bird on the wing might sense the landscape below. The duel begins.
Vishnumitra attempts to still the flow, to draw life and breath and consciousness from Upamanyu, and in the beginning Upamanyu simply resists. He is smiling a little, but Vishnumitra hardly notices. He is intent upon the task, looking for weaknesses in the chakras, turbulence in the nadis. The thing is to take Upamanyu by surprise, to strike without warning, as he scans his friend’s subtle body with that gentle inner gaze. Then he’s hit.
It feels as though the world has suddenly grown dark. Controlling his breath, Vishnumitra finds his balance; the light returns. He fights back. They are going back and forth, sending great waves of weakness, invisible sword cuts that might stop the heart or constrict a blood vessel. Every few minutes Vishnumitra is aware of that gaze, so light, contemplative even. He is aware that deep within him there is a great resistance to kill the man he loves. Surely there is another way! In his pain and love he cries out:
“In the name of the art, which you betrayed, in the names of those whom you had imprisoned and killed, for Shankara, who was innocent in her fierceness and courage, I beg you, Upamanyu, to repent by choosing death! Do not make me kill you!”
Upamanyu’s face is intent, sweat has broken out over his brow.
“Nobody can kill me....”
And Vishnumitra sees with his inner eye what Upamanyu has done, how he can kill an adept in the art, how he must have killed Shankara. The columns of mahaprana that rain down from the sky are joining and coalescing, coming down at him, filling every part of his being with the life-force, a fullness that his body cannot take. For a moment Upamanyu is Indra himself, wielding the thunderbolt. Vishnumitra knows for a split second the beauty of the cosmic prana, the vastness of the mystery that they have barely begun to comprehend, and he knows that he has done wrong, just as Upamanyu has, to use the prana vidya for murder. As he accepts his death, welcomes it as a man guided by dharma must, he senses the capillaries on his skin bursting. A pain in his chest, his lungs, and he is losing consciousness, falling to the floor. Then blessed darkness and he knows nothing at all.
When Vishnumitra came to, the first thing he noticed was the smell. It was a rotten odor, sickly sweet, like spoiled fruit. He hurt all over. Gradually, through the pain, he realized he was alive. He was lying on a great pile of refuse, above which he could see the silhouette of the fort wall, a dark wave against the starlit sky. He tried to sit up and groaned as the pain hit him anew. Lying back in the filth, he tasted his defeat, and the struggles that still lay ahead, and the bitterness of knowing that he—greatest of the practitioners of the art (or so he’d thought), defender of the prana vidya—had ultimately betrayed it and failed all the ones he loved. He shuddered in the cold air.
Why had Upamanyu left him alive?
He should be dead!
He must have lain there for many hours before he noticed the horse. There was a faint radiance in the eastern sky, although the darkness was still profound. Against that sky stood the King’s stallion, black, strong, unmistakable. There was no rider.
Vishnumitra dragged his broken body off the pile of trash and crawled to where the stallion stood. The horse bent its great head, snorting softly, blowing twin puffs of breath from the enormous nostrils. Vishnumitra saw the pale shape of a rolled scroll hanging from the saddle and reached for it. He lay gasping on the hard ground, waiting for the light. The horse waited too.
Dear brother, [Upamanyu wrote]
I regret the pain I have caused you, but perhaps it is better this way. As I said I have awaited your coming these many years. Kingship has been very interesting but I grow weary of it. You recall that your father’s explanation of the mahaprana when I was just a boy launched me on a journey of discovery. My kingdom was but a stop on the way to greater adventures, one that enabled me to consolidate my knowledge and distracted me pleasantly with interesting dilemmas. I have as yet no answer to the question I once posed your father: from whence does the cosmic prana arise? What is the origin of the life-force beyond this earth? Some invoke gods but I seek no such convenient answers. My dabbling with the knowledge of the mechanical forces convinces me that one will lead me to the other. The Chinese have been experimenting with propulsion power for eons, and in my own small laboratory I have found enough evidence that a carefully designed craft might bear the weight of a man to the endless skies. There I will fly as the Vidyadharas are said to do, and seek the adventures that have constantly beckoned my soul.
Meanwhile, I leave you my horse (with great regret as he, strengthened by my knowledge of prana vidya, has been my dear companion these many years). And I leave you my kingdom. I have talked all night with my chief queen, the peerless Jahanara, who has known for some time that I have a brother in spirit. She is to be trusted, as is Noori, her slave and my best spy, who is an expert archer and fighter. My minister, Sukhwant Singh, will guide you as well. Your name, my friend, is Ambar Khan, and you are born of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother (this small reversal of the truth I deemed necessary in order to explain away any Hindu traits that you, the next Mughal king, might display). Do not fear that such a thing would betray you, for I have attempted to recreate as much as possible the vibrant hybrid culture that I so enjoyed in your father’s ashram. I have prepared
the ground, you see, for the past few years, in the hope that you might come, although what it took to draw you out was the girl Shankara’s death. It might comfort you to know that she fought bravely to the end, and that I spared her pain at the passing. So I bid you, dear brother, to save and keep what I have built—the most prosperous kingdom in the hemisphere, if not the world. This morning at dawn one of my proxies will appear at the jharokha as usual, for the people of the city must see their king daily. I will be well on my way by then, on the north road out of Dilli, once more a traveler on a quest, unhampered by the burdens of the settled life. My heart will be as light as my pack, which contains little besides a device or two of my invention, a few books—and a bagful of rice from the one place that felt like home to me.
Now you must take my horse to the inn an hour’s journey from the gate, and rest and recover a while. Just before sunset I bid you ride into the city from the Eastern gate on my horse. The smallest child in the city knows that the new king will, like Akbar Khan, take the kingdom without a single weapon, riding in on this very horse, the noble Vikram. I have signed documents stating that none of my offspring will inherit the throne, which is perhaps the main reason they have not killed each other. Apparently the latter is a tradition among the Mughals.
If you do not wish to be king, simply let my horse return to the city. Sukhwant Singh will know what to do. But I am confident that you, who have always been led by your dharma, will not betray the people who await you.
Through all my life I have resisted giving my heart to another. It would only be a distraction from my quest, which is to comprehend the mysteries that surround me, and thus to comprehend myself. I have never even told anyone the name I was born with—I have worn names as another man might wear clothes. Yet you, Vishnumitra, took my heart from me without my knowledge or permission. I knew this as I stood over your body. My anger—unused to defiance all these years, and honed by the sutras of the ancient, rageful sage Durvasa, who lived five thousand years—flared up as we dueled. In that moment I would have given up my careful plans to install you in my place (a wise ruler always has other options prepared)—I would have killed you, my friend, but when I held the hand that had brought me the rice from his mother’s kitchen, I could not do it. So have I learned that my knowledge of myself is far from complete, and this humbles me.
I do not know if you will forgive me. I will not insult you or those dear to you I killed by asking it of you. But consider this: you have a vast network of practitioners of the prana vidya spread all over the country. This great instrument I have forged as much as you have, by pruning the incompetent or the rash. Use it as you will, for in the days ahead there will be much turmoil. Sher Shah in the North-West shows signs of impatience; there are rumors the Portuguese king is mad, and as the British lose their hold over the South, their envious gaze turns northward.
So, dear brother, farewell! I go north to China now, to the next adventure. Only the sky—Ambar!—is my limit! May you and yours find peace.
Your brother in spirit,
Upamanyu
Vishnumitra read this missive three times. The horse whinnied softly, and at last he put the scroll away in his shirt and staggered shakily to his feet. He leaned against the horse’s side and wept for all he had lost, and for all the losses still to come. He thought of the curve of the great river of his home, and the steps of the ghat leading down to the gray water, and the kind-eyed elephants sporting by the shore. He saw in memory the bright saris of his mother and sisters, and the golden walls of the ashram. Then, with great difficulty, he hoisted himself upon the horse, and lay for a moment against his neck, panting. He wiped his tears with his tattered sleeve and turned the horse away from the city toward the inn, to await the sunset of all he had known. Above him the last stars went out in the vast bowl of the sky.
When Shyver can’t lift it from the sand, he brings me down from the village. It lies there on the beach, entangled in the seaweed, dull metal scoured by the sea, limpets and barnacles stuck to its torso. It’s been lost a long time, just like me. It smells like rust and oil still, but only a tantalizing hint.
“It’s good salvage, at least,” Shyver says. “Maybe more.”
“Or maybe less,” I reply. Salvage is the life’s blood of the village in the off-season, when the sea’s too rough for fishing. But I know from past experience, there’s no telling what the salvagers will want and what they will discard. They come from deep in the hill country abutting the sea cliffs, their needs only a glimmer in their savage eyes.
To Shyver, maybe the thing he’d found looks like a long box with a smaller box on top. To me, in the burnishing rasp of the afternoon sun, the last of the winter winds lashing against my face, it resembles a man whose limbs have been torn off. A man made of metal. It has lamps for eyes, although I have to squint hard to imagine there ever being an ember, a spark, of understanding. No expression defiles the broad pitted expanse of metal.
As soon as I see it, I call it “Hanover,” after a character I had seen in an old movie back when the projector still worked.
“Hanover?” Shyver says with a trace of contempt.
“Hanover never gave away what he thought,” I reply, as we drag it up the gravel track toward the village. Sandhaven, they call it, simply, and it’s carved into the side of cliffs that are sliding into the sea. I’ve lived there for almost six years, taking on odd jobs, assisting with salvage. They still know next to nothing about me, not really. They like me not for what I say or who I am, but for what I do: anything mechanical I can fix, or build something new from poor parts. Someone reliable in an isolated place where a faulty water pump can be devastating. That means something real. That means you don’t have to explain much.
“Hanover, whoever or whatever it is, has given up on more than thoughts,” Shyver says, showing surprising intuition. It means he’s already put a face on Hanover, too. “I think it’s from the Old Empire. I think it washed up from the Sunken City at the bottom of the sea.”
Everyone knows what Shyver thinks, about everything. Brown-haired, green-eyed, gawky, He’s lived in Sandhaven his whole life. He’s good with a boat, could navigate a cockleshell through a typhoon. He’ll never leave the village, but why should he? As far as he knows, everything he needs is here.
Beyond doubt, the remains of Hanover are heavy. I have difficulty keeping my grip on him, despite the rust. By the time we’ve made it to the courtyard at the center of Sandhaven, Shyver and I are breathing as hard as old men. We drop our burden with a combination of relief and self-conscious theatrics. By now, a crowd has gathered, and not just stray dogs and bored children.
First law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community. Is it scrap? Should it be discarded? Can it be restored?
John Blake, council leader, all unkempt black beard, wide shoulders, and watery turquoise eyes, stands there. So does Sarah, who leads the weavers, and the blacksmith Growder, and the ethereal captain of the fishing fleet: Lady Salt as she is called—she of the impossibly pale, soft skin, the blonde hair in a land that only sees the sun five months out of the year. Her eyes, ever-shifting, never settling—one is light blue and one is fierce green, as if to balance the sea between calm and roiling. She has tiny wrinkles in the corners of those eyes, and a wry smile beneath. If I remember little else, fault the eyes. We’ve been lovers the past three years, and if I ever fully understand her, I wonder if my love for her will vanish like the mist over the water at dawn.
With the fishing boats not launching for another week, a host of broad-faced fisher folk, joined by lesser lights and gossips, has gathered behind us. Even as the light fades: shadows of albatross and gull cutting across the horizon and the roofs of the low houses, huddled and glowing a deep gold-and-orange around the edges, framed by the graying sky.
Blake says, “Where?” He’s a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.
“What is it?”
This time, Blake looks at me, with a glare. I’m the fixer who solved their well problems the season before, who gets the most value for the village from what’s sold to the hill scavengers. But I’m also Lady Salt’s lover, who used to be his, and depending on the vagaries of his mood, I suffer more or less for it.
I see no harm in telling the truth as I know it, when I can. So much remains unsaid that extra lies exhaust me.
“It is part of a metal man,” I say.
A gasp from the more ignorant among the crowd. My Lady Salt just stares right through me. I know what she’s thinking: in scant days she’ll be on the open sea. Her vessel is as sleek and quick and buoyant as the water, and she likes to call it Seeker, or sometimes Mist, or even just Cleave. Salvage holds little interest for her.
But I can see the gears turning in Blake’s head. He thinks awhile before he says more. Even the blacksmith and the weaver, more for ceremony and obligation than their insight, seem to contemplate the rusted bucket before them.
A refurbished water pump keeps delivering from the aquifers; parts bartered to the hill people mean only milk and smoked meat for half a season. Still, Blake knows that the fishing has been less dependable the past few years, and that if we do not give the hill people something, they will not keep coming back.
“Fix it,” he says.
It’s not a question, although I try to treat it like one.
Later that night, I am with the Lady Salt, whose whispered name in these moments is Rebecca. “Not a name men would follow,” she said to me once. “A land-ish name.”
In bed, she’s as shifting as the tides, beside me, on top, and beneath. Her mouth is soft but firm, her tongue curling like a question mark across my body. She makes little cries that are so different from the orders she barks out ship-board that she might as well be a different person. We’re all different people, depending.
Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution Page 21