The nun nodded. The sounds of dripping water echoed all around them.
“One day, a strange little man came to visit my father. He said he was a doctor from the Ming Empire who had come to pay his respects to the king of Yen and to see our kingdom. He claimed to speak a hundred languages, to know the secrets of the dead and the living, and to possess a cure for leprosy. My father, of course, was not interested in the man’s stories. My father was an artist who cared only for his tools and his work and his reputation. Eventually, the doctor came to the point. He commissioned my father to create a ring made of gold, silver, and iron, three bands intertwined with a strange design carved into its face, almost like a signet. My father was not happy about having to work with silver and iron, but the doctor offered to pay any price and that overcame my father’s objections. By the end of the month, the ring was ready.”
“Did you see it? Was it beautiful?”
“No, it was hideous,” Asha said. “But it was exactly what the doctor wanted. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want such a thing, so I followed my father when he delivered it to the doctor, and after my father left, I stayed to watch through a window. And that’s when I first saw it.”
“What?”
“A dragon. A real dragon.” Asha gazed out over the black waters. “The doctor had a chest, and in the chest was a cage, and in the cage was a golden dragon no larger than a songbird. At first I thought it was a snake, but then I saw the tiny claws, the tall scales on its spine, and the long curling white whiskers around its mouth. The doctor slipped my father’s ring around the dragon’s neck and twisted the rings to tighten it about its throat. It was a collar to keep the dragon from eating too much and growing too large.”
“How terrible.” Priya lowered her head.
“I suppose it was,” Asha said. “At the time, though, I just stared at the dragon through the window and wondered what else was out there in the world. I went to the doctor’s door and asked to the see the dragon. He refused at first. But when I described it to him, he knew that I already knew his secret and he let me in. He placed the cage on the table and let me stand there and stare at it. After a while, I began asking him questions. Where did he get it? Why did he have it? How old was it? Were there more? Could I have one?” She smiled in the dark. “How arrogant was I then? To own a dragon?”
“You were a child.”
“I suppose.” Asha sighed. “I stayed at the doctor’s house all evening looking at the relics and creatures in his jars and boxes, but they were all common enough animals and plants. I came back to the dragon again and again to watch it pace around its cage. When it looked at me, I could swear it was about to speak, but it never did. The doctor practically had to throw me out that night, and I came back every day after that to stare at the dragon and hear the doctor’s stories about his travels all over the world.
“For a month, I spent my evenings in the doctor’s house, pestering him with questions and learning what you can do with a tiger’s whiskers and the bones of an eagle, the bark of the birch tree, or the skin of an eel. And all the while I stared at the dragon, pacing and pacing in its little cage on the table.”
Asha paused to stare down into the face of a white lotus blossom by her knee. “And then, one night, when the doctor stepped out of the room to get the tea, I opened the dragon’s cage. I wanted to touch it. I had always wanted to touch it. At first, the dragon did nothing. It only stared at me through the open door as I held out my hand to it. I thought it might sniff me like a cat or lick me like a lizard. It huddled down in the center of the cage, twitching its long white whiskers and wrapping its golden tail around its legs. And then it sprang at me. It happened so fast, I couldn’t even move. The dragon dashed up my arm, racing over and under, its tiny claws slicing long tears in my skin until it reached my shoulder, and then it struck. It sank its fangs into my earlobe, and it suddenly felt like my head was on fire. Its teeth were like needles, dozens of them, and all envenomed.”
“How did you survive?”
“I nearly didn’t. I collapsed. When I awoke, the doctor was sitting beside me, but everything else had changed. Instead of a house in Yen, we were in a temple in the Ming Empire and eight years had passed.”
“Eight years!”
“Yes. To save my life, the doctor was forced to carry me with his luggage all the way back to his homeland to a temple where the monks and other doctors could care for me. They said it was a miracle that I awoke at all. But I wasn’t the same. Not quite. The dragon’s poison had left behind a shred of its soul in my ear. Even tiny dragons hunt very large prey, and by leaving a drop of its soul in its victim, the dragon can track it anywhere it goes and then devour it, bit by bit, when the animal eventually dies from the venom.
“I spent the next few years in the temple with the doctors and the monks learning their craft, studying herbs, and making medicines. Eventually I returned home to Yen, but when I arrived I found that my father had died and my mother and brothers had all left the city. No one could tell me where they’d gone.”
“Did you search for them?”
“No. I didn’t feel any great need to see them again, and I wouldn’t have known where to look anyway. Instead, I carried on looking for new creatures and plants to make my own medicines and trying to help the people I met along the way.”
“I see.” Priya reached out one hand to touch Asha’s knee. “You said that you awoke changed. That you had a piece of the dragon’s soul inside you?”
Asha pulled back her hair, knowing what the nun would see. Her entire right ear was flecked with shining gold scales, her skin there smooth and hard, and very warm to the touch. But the nun did not open her eyes to look. Asha dropped her hair and said, “The dragon’s soul is still in my ear. Through it, I can hear the souls of other living creatures. People, mostly. Their souls are the most active and noisy, even after death. But I can also hear the souls of animals and plants if I listen carefully enough. Their souls are sleepy and childish, only thinking or feeling one thing at a time.”
“Animals and plants have souls, and you know it beyond faith?” The nun squeezed Asha’s hand. ”Can you hear the turning of the wheel of reincarnation?”
Asha smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far. I’m not even sure they’re the same as human souls, but they sound very similar.”
“What do they sound like?”
“Like humming, or singing, or rain falling, or the wind in the leaves. A hundred different things. Only I don’t hear it out there in the world. I hear it inside.” Asha tapped her right ear. “And I can tell them apart. It helps me to find the herbs I need for my medicines, and to avoid certain dangers.”
“So if this lotus has a soul, then the ghost of girl must be twisting that soul with her own anger and fear.”
“And love.” Asha gestured to the vines and blossoms embracing the nun.
Priya nodded. “And love, too. It’s astonishing. So many great scholars have spent their lives searching for a revelation like this. To hear the souls of animals and plants.”
Asha shrugged. “Does that change how you feel about being here, like this?”
“No. But what you’ve told me about the souls of all living things…” The nun trailed off as a faint wrinkle of thought creased her forehead. “This knowledge carries us beyond faith into a new age of possibilities and revelations. You must tell the world about this. Everyone must know what you’ve told me.”
Asha laughed. “Sorry, but I’m not much of a teacher. I’m just trying to find a better cure for dry elbows and snoring, not to set people on the path to enlightenment.”
“Ah. No, you’re right. It was wrong of me to ask. That task should be mine.”
Asha raised an eyebrow. “Really? You mean you want to leave the cave? Can you even do that?”
“I think I can, if you will help me.”
7
Asha knelt over the nun and inspected the lotus roots and vines again. The green shoots slipped under the wom
an’s skin in dozens of places on her arms, shoulders, and head. “Does this hurt?”
“It did at first, but now it feels like a part of my body.”
Ashe frowned as she tugged at the tendrils in the nun’s arm. “I can probably remove these, but it will take some time and I’ll need more light. I’ll have to cut away the vines right here, and then when we’re outside in the sunlight, I can try removing the rest.” She glanced around the dark expanse of the cave on every side of them. “I can’t hear anyone else in here with us. Is the ghost still with you, or did she move on?”
Priya frowned. “I don’t know. I haven’t felt her presence in a very long time. And I haven’t seen her since that first day when I arrived.”
“All right. Then maybe we’re alone here after all.” Asha produced a steel scalpel from her shoulder bag. “Hopefully, this won’t hurt you. I’ll try to be quick.” She lifted one of the green stalks away from the nun’s arm and sliced through the tender lotus flesh.
The nun shivered. “It doesn’t hurt, but it does feel strange. I feel colder.”
Asha nodded and continued peeling back the vines and cutting them away from Priya’s body. She left at least half a foot of each stalk where they were embedded so she would be able to see them and grasp them easily later when she removed them fully. Within a few minutes, she had trimmed all of the vines from the nun’s bare arms, which now wore a thin coat of slender green shoots. Priya slumped forward, placing her hands on the stone to hold herself up. “It’s so much colder now. I feel weak. Tired.”
“Here, chew this.” Asha pressed a piece of dried fruit to the nun’s lips. “You’ll feel better as soon as we get outside in the sunlight.”
She then began paring away the lotus roots and stalks around the woman’s head, working faster than before. She left several feet of the lotus including leaves and white blossoms still attached to Priya, not daring to cut any closer in the dark.
When the last of the plant had been cut away, Priya sat shivering on the stone, her arms wrapped around her belly, her breathing shallow and rapid. Asha put away her scalpel, gathered the frail woman in her arms, and lifted her off the altar.
A single deep boom echoed through the cave like the beat of an enormous drum.
Asha waded through the waist-deep water, straining to hurry as fast as the cold pool would allow. The woman in her arms felt so light, like a bundle of sticks in a silk bag. The leaves and blossoms clinging to Priya’s head bobbed and shuddered with each step.
Another deep boom echoed through the cave and Asha paused to listen. The water shushed quietly around her, the surface rippling, tiny waves slapping at the sides of the vast chamber. But there was another sound, a subtle sound underneath all the others. It was the sound of roots waking up and beginning to stretch and reach out through the silt.
Asha plunged ahead, willing her legs to run through the cold, sluggish water. But soon the sandy bottom angled up and the pool became shallower, making each step lighter and easier. She jogged to the edge of the tunnel where she could see a tiny disc of pale blue light in the center of the darkness ahead.
The tunnel walls groaned with the crumbling of old stone and dried earth. Dust trickled from the ceiling in steady streams, and larger clods and chunks of dirt began falling to the floor. The light at the mouth of the cave was much larger now, but the view was already partly obscured by tumbled stones and hanging roots.
Behind her, the entire the cavern hissed and slithered as the chamber amplified and echoed the sounds of the roots moving beneath the pool. The water shivered and the stone shook. Asha dashed down the tunnel, her bare feet sliding in the soft mud around the stream in the center of the floor. Something cold and wet snaked past her ankle. Then she stepped on a root that curled up sharply around her toes.
Asha tripped and fell. She crashed into the floor face-first, dropping the nun in front of her. A thick bundle of lotus tendrils whipped around her leg and yanked her back toward the pool. As she struggled to untwist the roots from her leg, Asha listened for something else behind the moaning, keening, crying of the roots. The lotus was frightened and confused, but beyond that she could hear a buzzing like the swarming of angry hornets. The sound of the ghost’s fury raced round and round the cavern, rising and falling, lashing out at everything and nothing in a whirlwind of terrified rage.
As a second and a third lotus tentacle tried to grip her arms, Asha felt the tiny claws of a young mongoose running down the length of her body and in the shadows she saw Jagdish gnaw at the roots around her leg. The roots snapped back into the darkness and Asha snatched up the little mongoose as she ran for the exit, pausing only to grab the nun under her arms and drag her the last few steps, squeezing through the narrow opening, and spilling out onto the sun-warmed grass outside.
Gasping for breath, Asha pulled the unconscious Priya to the wide stones by the water’s edge where the langur had slept the night before. From the safety of the stones, she watched the pale lotus roots creep out from the tunnel, slip around the loose rocks, and pull them back to seal the opening of the cave. The heavy thumps and crashes of falling earth and stone continued to reverberate through the ground long after the opening had been blocked and Asha sat listening to the wailing of the dead girl deep inside the mountain.
Then the voice in the cave fell silent and Asha frowned, straining to hear. For a time, there was nothing but the wind in the giant trees overhead. But then, softly, in the distant depths of the mountain, a gentle sighing rose from the stones. And then the earth wept.
It was like nothing Asha had ever heard before. It was the falling of winter snow, and the tumbling of a single leaf on an autumn breeze, and the sinking of an old stone into the soft mud. It was gentle and soft, the sound of something slowly dying unseen and unloved. It was so quiet that Asha could barely hear it, and so terrible that she felt guilty for hearing it at all.
And it went on for hours.
8
In her sleep, Priya’s breathing grew stronger as they rested in the warm afternoon sun. Asha inspected the thin green shoots in the nun’s arms and one by one she plucked them out. The gray woman shuddered and murmured softly. But when Asha began to tug on the longer lotus blooms on her head, Priya stiffened and gasped. Asha let go and held the woman’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” Priya sat up. “Are we still in the cave?”
Asha shook her head. “No. Open your eyes and you’ll see the setting sun.”
The nun touched her face and gently massaged her eyes open until she could blink them normally. She swept her colorless irises across the ledge. “I can’t see anything.”
Asha touched her hand. “Your eyes. I’m sorry. They’re dead.”
Priya nodded slowly. “I suppose that’s the price of living for two centuries in the dark.”
“Maybe if I remove the rest of the lotus, it will help.” Asha moved behind her and carefully grasped one of the long tendrils.
Priya cried out, “Please, stop!”
Asha let go, frowning. She parted the nun’s hair to examine her scalp and saw that the lotus roots snaked under her skin in long white lines. “It’s in deep. I’m not sure how to remove it without hurting you, or even killing you.”
“It’s all right.” Priya reached up to stroke the leaves and blossoms in her hair. “It’s a small sacrifice for the freedom to go back out into the world and tell people the things I’ve learned.”
“I could cut away the plant above your skin at least.”
“No, thank you. I want to keep them as a memento of my time here.”
They spent the night on the grassy ledge sleeping back to back under Asha’s wool blanket. When morning came, she saw that the stream had dried up completely and only a little water still shimmered in the deep pools farther down the mountainside.
“She did it again. That poor girl,” Priya said. Tears fell from her sightless eyes. “I had hoped I had given her the peace she needed. I thought, after all this ti
me, she had learned to accept herself and her place in the world.”
Slowly, hand in hand, they descended the steep path beside the dry river bed. The giant trees stood in silent watch over them, the heavy vines creaking quietly in the morning breeze. At the bottom of the mountain they found only a muddy track where the river had been.
It took three long days of slow walking to return to the village where they found the people sitting along the banks of what used to be the source of their livelihoods. Asha introduced Priya to them and let them marvel at the youthful nun crowned in flowing black hair festooned with white lotus blossoms.
“When will the river come back?” Kishan asked.
“It may not,” Asha said. “Priya’s sacrifice gave your village two hundred years of life here, but that’s over now. You’ll have to find new homes somewhere else, or learn a new way to live here if you choose to stay.”
For two weeks, Asha and Priya remained in the village. Priya slowly recovered her strength while learning to walk, dress, and feed herself without the aid of her eyes, and day by day the color returned to her ageless skin. Asha took the villagers deep into the forest to help them find edible plants and to teach them how to transplant the herbs to their gardens in the village.
Then one morning Asha awoke to a familiar shushing sound, the constant white noise of water rushing over stones and down gullies, pouring through channels and crashing into pools. She stood up, her blanket still wrapped around her shoulders against the pre-dawn chill in the air, and she walked down to the river running clear and deep through the middle of the village. Small brown birds bathed in the shallows and large silver fish floated serenely in the deep shadowed pockets at the bottom. Jagdish chittered under her hair, and her dragon’s ear heard two deer grazing downstream and a pack of dogs loping through the trees far to the east.
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