“Much better. He’s been talking to your friend this whole time. He really likes your little pet, too. They’ve been playing in there.”
“Playing?” Asha frowned. “He’s supposed to be resting. But I guess it’s all right.”
“What did you find in the village? Besides the bear, of course.”
“Not much. Just some old houses and some yellow flowers.”
The man’s face fell. “Then you didn’t find a cure.”
“I told you. Naveen isn’t sick.” Asha held up her mortar and the steel needle resting in the dark pool of syrup. “But I did find a cure. Sort of.”
They went inside. Naveen was sitting up, the two iron rods still bound to the sides of his face, but now there was a chittering mongoose in his lap and a laughing nun at his side. They both looked up and Priya said, “I was beginning to wonder if I needed to come fetch you.”
Asha raised an eyebrow. “And I thought nuns were patient.” She knelt down next to the boy and touched his forehead. He was burning up and the sound of his little heart rattling his rib cage echoed in her right ear. “Naveen, I need you to take a little nap right now, and when you wake up you’re going to be all better. All right?”
He nodded and handed Jagdish back to Priya. The little mongoose raced up the nun’s arm and crept into the dense veil of black hair and white lotus blossoms covering her head. Naveen lay back on the blankets and Asha took his hand.
Chandra squatted beside her. “What are you going to do?”
“The souls of the villagers are clinging to him because they still want to live, and because they’re angry at you both for surviving when they did not. But ghosts are pretty fragile things. We just need to shake them loose.” Asha held up the boy’s palm. “Naveen, close your eyes.”
He did. He tried to jerk his hand away when she pricked him with the needle, but it was already done. She set his hand on his chest as he closed his eyes and his breathing slowed. She held his wrist and listened to the boy’s heart slowing, and slowing, and slowing.
“What’s happening?” Chandra asked.
“He’s going to sleep.” She tugged her iron rods away from the boy’s head and instantly he was shuddering and sweating and mumbling to himself, just as he had been when she first found him. But as they sat watching him, Naveen quieted and stilled. His chest stopped fluttering, the throbbing vein in his neck subsided, and the last incoherent mutter died on his thin lips.
“Is it working?” the father asked.
“We’ll know in a minute.” Asha listened to the babble of souls huddled in the little boy. As his heartbeat stuttered and slowed, the voices fell away and she could feel the heat in his skin fading. “It’s working. They’re leaving. But here comes the tricky part.”
“What’s that?” Priya asked.
“When his heart stops.”
A last dry exhalation seeped out of the boy’s mouth and a tiny wisp of white vapor slithered out of the corner of his mouth.
“There.” Asha grabbed Naveen by the arms and flipped him over onto his chest. She placed both hands on his shoulder blades and began pressing down in quick, sharp thrusts.
“What are you doing?” Chandra grabbed her arm.
Asha shook him off. “He inhaled the aether when he was down in the village. It’s still in his lungs.”
“Aether?”
“Yes, aether. The mist.” Asha eased off, massaging the boy’s back in longer, slower pushes to compress his chest.
“But you told me that aether needs to be cold or else it breaks up,” Priya said. “His fever is the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“Aether needs to be cold to collect and become visible. It doesn’t matter how hot or cold it is if it’s trapped in your lungs.” Asha kept her eyes on Naveen’s mouth. The trickle of mist was so faint and thin that she could barely see it, and it vanished utterly an instant after escaping his lips. “Normally, if you inhale aether, you just exhale it like regular air. But aether is the one thing that the souls of the dead can control, and they’ve been holding the aether inside Naveen’s lungs to give themselves an anchor in his body. We need to get it all out.”
“What about his heart?” Chandra hovered over her. “You said it might stop.”
Asha wiped the sweat from her eyes. “It already did.”
8
Chandra was yelling and wailing, Priya was asking urgent questions, and even Jagdish was squeaking shrilly.
“Shut up! All of you!” Asha couldn’t see any more aether oozing from Naveen’s mouth or nostrils, and she could no longer hear the whirlwind murmurs of the countless lost and angry souls around him. She rolled him over onto his back.
“He’s dead!” Chandra collapsed around his son’s head, cradling it in his lap.
“Not yet, he isn’t.” Asha pulled one of the copper tubes from her bag, opened the end, and slid a small golden needle out into her hand. There were three faint scratches on the needle. She placed her left hand on Naveen’s chest, feeling the ridges of his ribs under his thin flesh.
There.
She plunged the needle into his chest up to the first thin scratch on its side. The boy’s eyes snapped open and he sat up straight, his shoulder clipping his father’s chin and sending Chandra tumbling backward. Naveen gasped and blinked at Asha, and then at Priya, and then at the golden needle still protruding from his chest.
“Breathe. Just breathe. Close your eyes and focus on breathing for me.” Asha plucked the needle from his skin and then she held his wrist to count the beats of his heart. She listened to his lungs and nodded slowly. “It’s over now.”
An hour later, Naveen sat outside in the grass drinking tea from a chipped cup and playing with Jagdish.
“It’s a miracle. It’s like nothing even happened,” Chandra said.
“Don’t fool yourself. Your son suffered an intense physical agony for weeks with his mind trapped in a nightmare that none of us could ever understand. And he very nearly died.” Asha slipped her bag over her shoulder. “You made a mistake once and a lot of innocent people died because of it. The least you can do now is learn from what’s happened here today. Pack your things, burn this house, and take your son somewhere else, somewhere where he’ll have friends and a normal life.”
Chandra nodded. “I will. Soon. When he’s stronger.”
“If you’re smart, you’ll do it today. Priya, we’re leaving.” Asha called to Jagdish and the mongoose leapt from the boy’s lap and scampered up Priya’s outstretched hand to her shoulder. Asha frowned. “Traitor.”
Priya smiled. “Oh stop. He likes you. He just likes me more.”
They set out on the path through the bamboo forest again, traveling through the deep shadows and the deep silence of the misty wood.
The nun cleared her throat. “I thought we were going to rest there and get something to eat. Are you going to tell me what happened in the village?”
“Nothing to tell,” said Asha. “I found some flowers and made some medicine.”
“And?”
Asha glanced at her traveling companion. “And I gave some career advice to a dead man.”
“Oh.” A moment later, Priya said, “Why does it bother it you when people call you a doctor? Why do you always correct them?”
“Because I’m not a doctor. Doctors pretend to understand more than they do. They expect people to bow and scrape before them, and to pay them. And they fail as often as anyone else, the difference being that people tend to die in a doctor’s care.”
“Are you talking about the doctor who trained you?”
“I’m just talking.” Asha quickened her step, trying not to think about an untended garden of dark pink peonies at the top of a gravel path on a cold mountainside, a brown spotted viper hunting rats among the rocks, and two small graves lying side by side in the shadow of a little maple tree.
As the sun came to rest on the western edge of the world out beyond the bamboo leaves, painting the sky in dark shades of crimson and violet, th
ey came to a crossroads and Asha paused. Priya stood beside her, the bamboo wand in her hand, the milky lotus blooms glowing softly in her hair. “Which way now?”
“Chandra said there was fighting somewhere to the west. The Persians may be in Rajasthan. And as far east as this valley, apparently. I’m not eager to stumble onto a battlefield any time soon.”
“Neither am I. But where there is a battlefield, there are usually people in need of help. Perhaps in need of medicine,” Priya said, petting the small mongoose. “After all, what’s the point of traveling across the country, of seeing all these places and learning about medicines, if not to help people?”
“I don’t know. It’s never as simple as just handing someone a cup of tea, is it?” Asha said. “We’ll go south for a while. Maybe we can find some place warm where people need help, at least for a season or two.” Asha started walking. “I’m tired of these mountains and ghosts. They’re depressing.”
Chapter 3
The Shining Scales
1
Asha gazed out over the still surface of the vast blue waters. The lake stretched out to the horizon where only a thin black line marked the far bank. A warm breeze rushed across the wide open fields behind her, rippling through the endless rows of jute and beans and the distant mango orchards to gently push her toward the lake where the wind sent a thousand tiny wavelets to wrinkle out across the water.
“You like it here,” Priya said. The nun plucked the little mongoose from her shoulder and set him on the ground. “Jagdish likes it too.”
“Jagdish likes it wherever you are. I think he’s addicted to the smell of lotuses in bloom.”
Priya smiled. The dozen white lotus blossom nestled in her thick black hair were always in full bloom, always open and exhaling their unmistakable scent. The nun insisted that the roots in her scalp did not hurt her at all.
Enormous white clouds drifted serenely across the sky, riding the wind wherever it took them and casting enormous shadows on the face of the earth. Wide-winged and long-legged birds sailed overhead in the thousands, flocking in every direction at every height. They swooped down by the dozen to flutter and splash into the lake where they swept back their wings to float and bathe and fish.
To her left, Asha watched a crested grebe strut regally along the bank. It paused to consider her, displaying its proud white mask and black crown, and then it slipped into the water to join its companions. Asha stepped back onto the dirt road that followed the lake’s winding shore line and said, “There are worse places in the world. Much worse.”
For the next hour they strolled along the water’s edge and Asha described for Priya the birds gliding across the lake, the tall flowers on the shore, and the expanse of farmland to their right. Hundreds of tiny figures stooped in the fields, poking and weeding and prodding and snipping. Priya tapped the road lightly with her long bamboo rod, tracing the edge of the grass and nudging little pebbles out of her path.
In the distance, Asha saw a dark shape towering above the hills. The ancient temple rose sharp and sheer to a level roof, a rectilinear silhouette of black on sky blue. She wondered idly how many hundreds of statues, how many countless painted gods stood posed along the tiers of the temple walls, and which one presided over the region. Shiva, probably. She didn’t wonder very long. It never mattered unless there was a festival, and then it only barely mattered. At least, not to her.
She chewed on the sliver of ginger in the corner of her mouth. “There’s a town up ahead. We’ll probably get there by supper time if we keep up the pace.”
“But you don’t want to keep going this way, do you?”
Asha sniffed. “It’s a nice lake. I’d like to stay here a day or two and look at the frogs, and snails, and maybe the lilies. You never know when you might find something new.”
Priya sighed. “You know, I’ve been hoping to stay somewhere larger than a village, at least for a little while. I have so much to teach people. So much to tell them about the things we’ve seen and done. How big do you think this town is?”
Asha squinted at the massive temple rising high above the trees. “I’m guessing it’s pretty big.”
“All right then. We’ll stay by the lake for a few days and you can play in the mud, but when you’re done we are going to that town and we are going to talk to people. Real people. Lots of people. Deal?”
Asha rolled her eyes. “Deal.”
They continued along the edge of the lake and passed the turn in the road that led south toward the temple. As the sun blazed small and white overhead, Asha spotted a handful of houses nestled in a grove of slender trees crowned with fiery orange flowers. Asha smiled. “Palash.”
“What’s palash?”
“A tree. A beautiful tree. It’s called the flame of the forest.”
“Why is it called that?” asked the nun.
“You’d know if you saw it.”
“Is it good for anything?”
“Skin cream,” Asha said. “But mostly I just like to look at it. I think I found a place for us to stay for the next few days.”
There were four houses together at the water’s edge and each one had a small floating dock jutting out into the shallows where fragile canoes bobbed on the waves. Two jute-string fishing nets hung from the trees.
Asha knocked at the first house and a smiling woman stepped out to welcome them. She introduced herself as Nisha and when they asked about staying with them, she regretfully admitted that three of the houses were quite full of the fishermen’s families. But there was room in the fourth house. Nisha winced and wrung her hands, and fell silent.
“What’s wrong?” Priya asked. “Who lives in the fourth house?”
2
Nisha led them closer to the water. They could see a handful of little boats far out on the lake and off to their left Asha saw more than a dozen small children wading and splashing and running through the shallows as they chased frogs and hunted for snails. Nisha pointed to the right around the edge of the last house and Asha saw a pair of legs dangling off the porch into the water, back in the shadows.
“Who is that?”
“Rama.” Nisha sat down on the grassy bank and motioned for them to join her. “Poor Rama.”
Asha tugged Priya’s sleeve and they sat down beside her. “Why poor?”
“He was just such a nice young man with a lovely young wife. He built that house himself. He wouldn’t let anyone help him.” Nisha smiled. “He has such a nice smile.”
Asha nodded. “But?”
“But she died.” Nisha sighed. “Vina, his wife. She took ill during the rainy season a few months after they built the house. Rama was devastated. He just sat there in his house and stared at the lake. He barely fed himself. I was so worried, we all were. And then he began taking off at strange hours. He would disappear for days and later we learned that he was going into town to sit in the temple and stare at the images of Lakshmi. Poor boy.”
“So he’s in mourning?” Priya asked. “Would our company be more helpful or harmful, do you think?”
“Oh, he’s not in mourning,” Nisha said. “Not anymore. About seven or eight months after Vina died, Rama was out on the lake fishing by himself. We heard him cry out. It was a strange cry. A bit of surprise, a bit of pain. It only lasted a moment, but after that he stayed out there all afternoon, just sitting there. Eventually my husband paddled out to check on him and found that Rama was blind.”
Priya leaned her head to one side. “How?”
“We don’t know. He says he was just sitting in his boat, working his nets, when suddenly everything went white and he couldn’t see anymore.” Nisha nodded over at the last house again. “But that’s when everything changed for him. Rama stopped spending all his time alone. He eats with us in the evenings, laughs, and tells stories from his home village to the east of here. And he still fishes by himself. He ties his boat to the dock with a long line so he can pull himself back again when he’s done.”
Asha frown
ed. “He was mourning his dead wife, but then he suddenly went blind and now he’s happy?”
Nisha shrugged. “It seems so.”
Priya touched Asha’s arm. “Is that bad?”
“I don’t know if it’s bad, but it is strange.” Asha picked up a pebble and slowly turned it over in her hands.
“Maybe there’s something you can do for him,” the nun urged. “I’m sure you know of something that could restore his vision at least.”
Nisha cleared her throat and raised an eyebrow. “If you can cure the blind, then why…?”
Priya smiled and touched the cloth covering her lifeless eyes. “I’m a bit of a special case. But Asha can do amazing things with a few twigs and leaves and seeds.”
“You’re a doctor?” Nisha asked. “Can you help him?”
Asha scowled and threw her pebble into the lake where it splashed down with a deep plop. “I’m an herbalist. But I’ll see what I can do.”
3
Asha approached the last house slowly, taking heavy steps in the thick grass to announce her presence to the man sitting with his feet in the water. He was tying knots in an old fishing net, weaving fresh jute strings among the old. His fingers paused in their little dance as he leaned his head toward her, just for a moment, and then he resumed his work. “Hello there. Nisha?”
“Hello yourself. I’m Asha. Nisha said to remind you that she’s baking catfish tonight.”
“I can smell the pepper already,” he said.
Asha smelled it too, though she suspected the pepper wind was blowing from the town to the south from some vast storehouse where soft hills of peppercorns and pepper grounds waited to be carted off to other cities. Though some small trace of the scent might have come from the sand ovens of the neighboring houses. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Please.” He slid over to make more room on the narrow walkway at the water’s edge. Asha waded into the shallows and sat down on the warm wooden seat. The lake sparkled brightly as the westering sun glanced off the tiny waves, shining in brilliant silver and gold.
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