“And the village?”
He shook his head and covered his eyes again, his shoulders shaking, his voice cracking as he said, “An hour later, everyone was dead.”
Asha looked away to the north, to the edge of the bamboo forest where the aether mist was seeping out into the sunlight. “And Naveen doesn’t remember what happened?”
“No. And I couldn’t tell him. I just couldn’t. I can’t.”
“I believe you love your son,” she said. “So I won’t tell him the truth, and I won’t tell you to tell him the truth either. But it would be better for you both to leave this place and find a new home.”
Chandra nodded. “You’re right. But I can’t move him like this. He’s too sick.”
“He’s not sick,” Asha said. “He’s possessed.”
The man stared at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not and he is. His high temperature, the racing pulse, the sensitivity to light and sound, and the strange things he’s saying. I’ve seen this before. He’s possessed.”
“By a ghost?” Chandra looked back at the house. “By a ghost of someone who died in the village?”
“No. By the ghosts of everyone who died in the village. All of them.” Asha sniffed. “I’ve never seen a heart rate like his, beating so fast you can barely hear the individual beats at all. If we don’t stop it soon, his heart will fail completely and he’ll die.”
“You have to help him! Isn’t there something you can do?”
Asha slipped another long sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth. “Maybe. How do I find the village?”
4
It was a long hour’s walk along a seldom-used path through the forest down to the bottom of the valley. As Asha descended the trail she felt the air grow steadily cooler and the white mist swirling around her feet brushed her skin with a sharp chilling caress. The path itself was carpeted in brown bamboo leaves. Here and there a long slender branch lay across her way, and from time to time she found a young bamboo shoot in the center of the trail, some of them as high as her shoulder.
She walked softly, pausing every few steps to listen to the vast stillness around her.
Still nothing.
Still no birds, no crickets, no anything.
Eventually the trees thinned and parted. Asha stepped out onto the edge of a grassy field dotted with large gray stones and ancient cracked stumps. Fifty paces away she saw the brown line of a dry stream bed running from east to north along the valley floor. And everywhere she looked stood the broken remains of bamboo homes.
The houses closest to her still bore the black marks from the aborted fire, but the wind and rain had torn off most of the roofs long ago and the wooden slats and poles of the walls were cracking, sliding, and hanging away from the buildings on their slow journey into decay and oblivion.
As she moved through the village, she saw through the doorways the irregular mounds of earth that she took to be the graves that Chandra had mentioned.
After a few minutes in the village, a sound seeped into her right ear that wasn’t the whisper of the wind or the rustle of the bamboo leaves. It was a deep, soft rumbling like distant thunder, only it had the regular ebb and flow of a tide, like breathing. Asha recognized it and she felt her own pulse quicken. She gripped the strap of her bag tightly in her sweating hands.
She eased around the corner of another collapsing house and found the bear sitting on the roof of a small shack chewing on a thin branch bearing a handful of pale yellow flowers.
“A sloth bear.” She grimaced. “Perfect.”
The animal was tall but thin, its long fur standing up at wild angles, its long slender muzzle licking and chewing on its stick. Against the pale blue sky, the bear’s black fur created a sharp silhouette high on the shack’s roof and the narrowness of the bright white chevron across its chest showed her all the more clearly how starved the animal was.
Asha stood very still and very quiet. The bear was facing her but she couldn’t be certain it had seen her yet, though it would only be a matter of moments before it smelled her. She knew that sloth bears ate fruit and insects and they hunted at night, normally. But she also knew that on rare occasion they were known to fight tigers, and to fight packs of dholes, and even to attack armed men. And sometimes they won.
When the bear dipped its head to bite a fresh part of its branch, Asha stepped back smoothly into the shadow of the house behind her, backing away faster and faster to put more distance between them. With two crumbling buildings between her and the bear and still no sign that she had been seen, she slowed down and breathed a long deep breath. Then she turned to circle back to the trail through the forest and stumbled over a pole that had fallen from a nearby wall. She fell to all fours with the pole snapping and cracking beneath her knees.
Behind her, the sloth bear snorted, grunted, and roared.
5
Asha ran. She didn’t dare make for the trail now. In the narrow corridor between the bamboo walls there would be no place to hide and she couldn’t hope to outrun the bear. Instead she bolted down the hillside, following the dry stream bed north along the edge of the village and down across a wide grassy field strewn with large round stones.
The bear grunted and growled from the top of the slope behind her.
At the bottom she found a second creek that merged with the first in a small depression, but this one held a meager thread of silver water running over the brown earth. The grass gave way to bare dirt and small stones, the result of some ancient landslide or perhaps a more recent monsoon that had carried only the smallest and lightest bits of the valley walls down through the thick bamboo forest.
Glancing over her shoulder, Asha saw the sloth bear loping down the hill straight toward her, its long jaws hanging open to reveal yellow teeth veined with dark brown rot.
She ran. She ran with every fiber of muscle in her legs, with every shred of strength in her feet. There was no pain, no weariness, nothing but the cold clear knowledge that she wouldn’t survive more than a few seconds if the bear caught her.
Along the bottom of the valley she dashed between and around larger and larger rocks. Some were boulders that had tumbled down from above, but many were jagged spears thrust up from the ground and she began to spy deep, dark cracks in and among the rocks. She looked for one that was narrow enough and deep enough.
A gnarled tree leaned across her path and she spotted the same yellow flowers that the bear had been stripping from its branch when she first found it. Reaching out, she snapped off a branch of her own and ran on.
The bear roared, the sound echoing down the valley through the rocky corridor of the stream bed, and the sounds of clattering pebbles and heavy paws splashing in the meager waters followed close behind the running woman.
Finally Asha spotted an opening in the rocks to her left and she veered inside. It was a narrow crack but also a low one and she had to dive on her side to squeeze through. As she squirmed and wriggled her body forward, she heard the sloth bear huffing and shambling close by her feet and she grabbed the stones around her head to haul her legs farther into the shadows. But she soon found it was far from dark in her little cave. A long thin crack ran the length of the space just above her head where the two rock walls did not quite meet, leaving a jagged white scar of daylight across the ceiling.
A little farther in she found enough space to sit up properly and she leaned against the wall to catch her breath and listen to the bear grunting and sniffing outside. The rock wall pressing against her back was dry but cold and soon a shiver ran through her arms and legs. She pulled her bag off her shoulder and gently tugged out her wool blanket to wrap around her shoulders.
The sounds of the bear faded, but Asha knew it was still nearby. She couldn’t hear it moving or breathing, but her right ear could still catch the beating of its heart, quick and desperate and angry. The bear was starving. It wasn’t going to leave any time soon.
Asha pulled her flowery tree branch clos
er into the light. She saw rough brown bark like dry cracked skin, green leaves the size and shape of her flattened hand, and pale yellow flowers. “Mahua. Well, that figures.”
“What figures?”
Asha spun to see a faint white figure crouched in the back of the cave behind her. It looked like an elderly man with rounded shoulders, a hollowed out chest, and a hairless head, but it was a figure of shadows drawn in white misty lines. Out of the corner of her eye, he seemed almost human, almost solid. She felt certain he had a careworn face with sagging cheeks and a large nose. But when she turned to study him properly, all the details vanished behind the wavering, smoky lines of the aether. Had it been colder and darker, the man might have appeared more clearly. But given the circumstances, Asha was content that he didn’t.
She blinked. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“What figures? About the mahua?” The ghost nodded at the little branch in her hand.
“Oh. It’s just the bear. I thought that it was strange that the bear was staying here where there’s no food for it. But this explains it. The bear is eating the mahua flowers.”
“Yes.” The frail image of the man hunched down even smaller in the darkness. “When the bear came last year, I thought it was a gift from the gods sent to punish Chandra. But it never went up the trail. It just stays here, eating the flowers. Season after season. It never leaves.”
“To punish Chandra? So you know what he did?”
“What he did?” The man’s reedy voice shook with rage. “He did nothing! He stood up there, looking down on us, listening to us dying, watching the village burn. You think it was luck that he took his boy hunting on the same day the Persians came? He knew. He knew they were coming. Perhaps he heard of them from some travelers, or perhaps he saw them on the road. But instead of warning us, he took his boy into the forest and left us all here to die. He let the Persians butcher us just so he could get his boy back from his wife.”
Asha opened her bag again and carefully removed her old mortar and cracked pestle and then several thin copper tubes with cork stoppers in each end. “I don’t think you have the whole story. I think Chandra still loved his wife, even though they were apart, and I doubt he wanted her to die, let alone the whole village. But what do I know?” She began plucking the mahua flowers from the branch, gently tearing them apart, and placing them neatly in the bottom of her mortar.
“You know nothing.” The old ghost bared his hazy teeth.
“I know the ghosts of the villagers are clinging to that little boy right now. Dozens of them at least.”
“Why not? They still want to live. They want to feel and breathe and see and taste. It’s all so dim now. Living beyond death. Cold and dark and still. So little color, so little light. Everything that was rich and wonderful is lost to us now. So they’re angry.”
“You seem pretty angry yourself,” Asha said. “Why aren’t you with them?” She picked up her pestle and began to grind the mahua flowers, slowly turning and crushing them over and over in the mortar.
The man turned aside. “I lived my life. I’m done with this world.”
“If that were true, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.” As the mahua powder and oil began to collect in the mortar, Asha lifted the mashed petals away.
The ghost shivered as a light breeze rippled through the cave, troubling the thin lines of aether around his face. “Where else can I go?”
Asha frowned up from her work. “You don’t need to go anywhere. You’re dead.”
“What would you know about it?”
“More than you, evidently.”
6
Asha sniffed the amber paste in her mortar. “I studied plants and medicines at a temple for several years. It was a very different place from the city where I was raised. Quieter, smaller, and cleaner. But it was also much colder. It felt like winter year round, even in the summer when the forests were green and the flowers were in bloom.
“The doctor who trained me often took me with him to visit patients. I think he wanted me to be a doctor like him, but I really didn’t have the talent for it. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t try very hard because I didn’t want to be like him. I don’t really remember now. I just liked picking the flowers and mixing the oils. I liked how they smelled,” Asha said.
“And?” The ghost scowled.
Asha resumed her work. She opened one of her copper vials and tapped out a few pale grains into the mahua extract. “One day I went with the doctor to visit an old man who lived on a mountain near the temple. His wife had died the year before and his children had moved away a long time ago, so it was just him alone in the house. He had a cough, I think. Or maybe a tremor or chest pains. I don’t remember. The doctor went inside to examine the old man while I wandered around outside looking for flowers.
“I followed an old path up the hill behind the house to a small garden where I found the wife’s grave. There were peonies there. Beautiful peonies. Huge dark pink blossoms, petals strewn across the ground, petals drifting on the wind around me. I sat there for a long time, just staring at the flowers and playing with the petals. I didn’t see or hear the snake until it was just a few paces away from me. It was very long, with a light brown body and dark brown spots down its back. And a wide triangular head.”
“A viper,” the old ghost whispered. “A very deadly one.”
Asha nodded. “I didn’t know what to do. Do you stay still? Do you run away? As I sat there, the viper crept toward me and curled its body into a handful of swirling loops, tighter and tighter. It hissed at me. It was so loud, louder than any snake I had ever heard before. I was staring straight at it when it struck. I saw its jaws open. I saw its fangs reaching out toward me, already gleaming with drops of venom, its tiny black eyes gazing up at me. And then it froze.
“It hung there in the air for a moment, mouth open, fangs dripping on the grass by my knee. Then it closed its jaws, lowered its head, and slithered away into the rocks.” Asha paused her grinding to pull out a large steel needle from her bag. She spat on the tip of the needle and began gently rolling its point through the mixture in the mortar. The dark coppery syrup clung to the cool metal, and when she lifted the needle up the liquid slid ever so slowly down toward her fingers. She tilted the needle back to keep the fluid from touching her. “After a moment, I stopped panicking and realized that I wasn’t going to die. So I stood up and turned to leave, and that’s when I saw the ghost. It wasn’t my first, but it still surprised me. It was hard to see her clearly. At first I thought there was smoke rising from the old woman’s grave, but then I saw her face, or the shape of a face in the aether.”
“It was the old man’s dead wife? Did she speak to you?”
“Yes.” Asha watched the syrup curing on her needle. The bright golden gleams in the fluid faded to blood red. “She pointed at the rocks where the viper had gone and said, ‘I never liked that snake, but it keeps the rats away from my peonies.’ Then she told me to take care going down the path and she disappeared.”
“She stopped a snake from biting you. That’s your story. Is that all?” The old man sighed.
“She saved my life. That seems like enough.” Asha shrugged. “What have you done since you died?”
“Done? Nothing! I’m dead.” The ghost scowled. “What about paradise? What about the next world? Or rebirth? What about me?”
“Can’t say. Never been there.” Asha sniffed the dark oil on her needle. “All I’m saying is that you have the choice to rest here, quietly, without a care in the world. Or you could watch over this place and help it to heal. And maybe you could even help someone passing through.”
The ghost laughed. “You want me to save you from the bear?”
Asha slipped her mortar and pestle into her bag, along with her copper vials and her wool blanket. “No, I’ve got this.” She held up the needle.
“What good is that against a raging sloth bear?”
The words were barely out of his mouth
before the bear’s roar drowned them out completely and the splash of light at the mouth of the cave vanished in a blur of dirty black fur. Asha’s hand flashed through the shadows and a faint hiss followed the needle through the cold air. The bear snorted and stumbled back from the rocks, and the sunlight glanced off the hint of steel in his nose.
Snuffling and grunting, the huge animal shambled away out of sight. A moment later, Asha heard the heavy thud of the bear collapsing on the dry earth.
“It’s just a tranquilizer. He’ll wake up in a day or so,” Asha said. She rolled over and began crawling back out through the narrow gap in the rocks.
“What about the boy? What about Naveen?” the ghost called.
“Don’t worry. I have enough for him too.”
7
Asha carefully took her needle from the bear’s nose, lingering only long enough to feel the bear’s hot stinking breath on her hand and to hear the steady thundering of its heart, and then she left. The sun was sinking through the pale blue sky and the still air grew steadily warmer in the bamboo forest as she started up the narrow path, walled in between the leaning shoots and poles and branches.
At the top of the slope she crossed the sunny meadow, circled the fenced garden, and found Chandra sitting just outside the house, his eyes closed. She touched his shoulder and he jerked upright, blinking rapidly. “You’re back.”
“I’m back. You didn’t tell me about the bear.”
“The bear?” His frown snapped into wide-eyed shock. “The bear! I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I should have told you. You saw it? Did it hurt you?”
“No, it just gave me a little exercise. How’s Naveen?”
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