The supper hour found Asha sitting by her patient’s bed, staring out the open windows at the sun setting across the lake, and muttering to herself about pollen and fleas. One of the guards knocked and politely invited her to join the prince at dinner, but Asha declined, insisting that she needed to remain with the princess. But Priya was more than happy to play the proper house guest and she followed the guard to the dining room.
The maid came with another bowl of colorless mash, which Asha laced with another mixture of herbs and spices. The maid cleaned her mistress’s hands and face with a damp cloth, and left.
Every half hour, Asha inspected her patient, carefully measuring out the shallow breaths and faint heartbeats, but she couldn’t tell if there was any change from that morning. Priya returned from dinner in a very good mood, but Asha ignored her recitation of the evening’s culinary and conversational delights. Eventually Priya fell asleep.
And eventually, so did Asha.
The click of the door woke the herbalist and she sat up slowly, wiping the saliva from the side of her face as the timid young maid entered with her small tray bearing the familiar bowl of mash for breakfast. But when the maid knelt by the princess, Asha saw a hint of yellow in the dish.
“Something new today?” Asha nodded at the bowl.
“New?” The maid blinked. “Oh no, nothing new. Just her eggs. She loved them so much. I thought I would keep adding them to her breakfast. I thought she would like that.”
“What sort of eggs?”
The maid hesitated, her eyes blank.
Asha sighed. “Don’t bother lying. Just tell me the truth. Where are the eggs from? If it’s not important to her condition, I won’t tell anyone.”
The maid swallowed and nodded. “Peacock. They’re peacock eggs. The prince bought the peacock last year for my lady. She loves that bird. Loves to look at it. She said it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. And she…”
“She wanted to eat the eggs to make herself more beautiful.” Asha rolled her eyes.
“It’s not the eggs, is it?” The maid’s hands trembled. “Did the eggs make her ill?”
“No. At least, probably not. I’ll take a look at the bird to make sure it’s healthy, but no, cooked peacock eggs are perfectly safe. If not silly. Still, it’s better than what they do to tigers in the east.”
“What do they do to tigers?”
Asha shook her head. “Never mind. After you finish up here, you can show me the peacock so I can make sure it’s healthy.”
It only took a few minutes for the maid to feed and wash her mistress and Asha followed her out to the kitchen. The maid set the tray and bowl aside and then led Asha back out to the walled garden in the central courtyard.
“It’s in there,” the girl whispered, pointing into the ferns. “I don’t see it often, but its nest is back here in the corner.” She parted the emerald fronds to reveal a small circle of twigs and leaves on the ground. “Every morning there is a single egg, which I collect for my lady’s breakfast.”
Asha frowned. She’d seen more than a few peacocks, and heard their calls, and heard their souls, too. She couldn’t hear one now. “Peacocks are pretty large birds. I’m surprised that one can hide in a garden this small.”
“Oh, it’s a very small peacock. Some sort of pet breed, I think.”
“A hybrid?” Asha frowned a little deeper. “Thank you for your help. If my friend asks for me, tell her I’m out working on the case.”
The maid bowed and scurried away.
Asha glanced around the courtyard at the four guards by the far doors. None of them were looking in her direction, so she leaned down and slipped over the low wall into the garden and lay down flat beneath the thick ferns where no one was likely to see her or her yellow sari. She backed away and arranged herself on the lumpy earth so she still had a clear view of the peacock’s nest, and settled down to wait.
She fell asleep four times. Each time she jerked awake to see that the nest was still empty and the sun had crossed a bit farther overhead. She tried chewing on a sliver of ginger, and then on a few old tea leaves, and she was wondering what else she had to spare when she fell asleep again.
Asha awoke in the dark. The stars winked down through the ferns, the cicadas creaked, and the palace was shadowed and silent. A foul odor hung in the sultry night air, clinging to her nostrils.
Did I really sleep all day? How late is it now?
She blinked and stretched, and froze. The nest was no longer empty.
A small plump bird sat there, prim and unconcerned with her new human companion. The bird blinked, turned its head, blinked, shivered, and blinked again. The starlight shone dimly off the bird’s blue and green feathers. A long folded fan of tail feathers rested on the ground behind it.
“Well, a miniature peacock,” Asha whispered. “That’s new.”
The peacock shivered again and stood up to reveal a pale little egg between its legs. With another shiver, it stepped carefully out of the nest and strutted away into the garden. Just as it passed out of view, it lifted its tail feathers to hide its body behind a green and blue screen.
Asha inhaled sharply. Beneath its tail feathers, the peacock had a second tail, a green scaled whip of a tail stretched out just above the ground.
And then the creature was gone.
4
Asha took a few stumbling steps out of the brush, waist deep in ferns, scanning for the little bird, but it was gone. Out of sight and out of hearing. And that was the most troubling part. Even when she had the tiny peacock right in front of her, Asha still had not been able to hear the animal’s soul. If anything, there had been a ripple in the background noise of the rest of the garden and palace, a warble in the sounds of vegetable, insect, and human souls singing together in accidental harmony.
When she finally stopped studying the ground and looked up, Asha saw the guards on the far side of the garden frowning at her. She smiled and retreated to the corner where she snatched up the still-warm egg and slipped over the wall onto the tiled walkway. The egg was a dark golden hue, glowing dimly with citrine blemishes like an orb of ancient amber. She considered the egg only for a minute before striding off in search of the prince.
The lone guard at the west end of the palace confirmed that she had found the prince’s bedchamber, but he refused to allow her to disturb his sleeping lord and master.
“This is important. I need to speak to him,” she insisted.
“I’m sorry, madam. I have my orders. No disturbances before dawn.”
“I don’t care about your orders.” She tried to push past him, but he blocked her way and gently but firmly pushed her back. She tried again, and again, but each time the armored man proved just a bit faster. She never came close to the prince’s door.
“All right.” Asha chewed her lip for a moment. “The moment that he comes out of there, you tell the prince to come see me. Immediately. Tell him I know what happened to his wife.” And she returned the princess’s chamber to check on her patient.
An hour later a few soft rustling sounds murmured under the door, and a few minutes later Pratap Singh burst into the princess’s room with his red sherwani jacket unbuttoned and flapping around his white silk shirt. He stared at her. “Mistress Asha, good morning. My man said you had some news for me.”
“Tell me about the peacock.” Asha held up the amber egg. She grit her teeth and glanced at the grim-faced guard behind the prince. “Please. Your Highness.”
The prince took the egg, studied it briefly, and returned it. “The peacock was a gift for my wife. I found it in the bazaar one day. A traveling menagerie. I’m sure you’ve seen such things. I certainly have. Usually just an assortment of common monkeys and snakes and beetles, but I found this little peacock among them. The seller claimed the miniature breed was quite popular in Maharashtra, and would never grow any larger, so I bought it for her. But that was over a year ago, long before she fell ill.”
“Did you know th
at your wife has been eating the peacock’s eggs?” Asha asked.
The prince frowned. “No. But such things are not unknown.”
“Don’t you find it odd that a male peacock is laying eggs at all?”
Now the prince blinked in surprise. “Male?”
“Only the male peacock has the beautiful tail feathers, for seducing his mate. The females are brown and much less impressive.”
The prince stared at the egg in her hand. “But how is that possible? How can a male peacock lay eggs at all?”
“It can’t. You don’t have a male peacock, Your Highness. You have a female cockatrice.” Asha took a clean rag from her shoulder bag and wrapped the egg in it. “Your peacock has a second tail, one that is green and scaled like a lizard’s tail. The cockatrice is an artificial cross between our native peacocks and a poisonous lizard from the far west, from a frozen land called Europa.”
“The eggs are poisonous!” The prince covered his mouth and backed away from the wrapped bundle in her hand.
“Quite poisonous, yes. The cockatrice’s venom is a powerful neurotoxin that paralyzes the victim so severely that primitive people thought the victims had actually turned to stone. These unfertilized eggs don’t contain that same venom, of course. Instead, the egg contains a powerful anti-venom to protect the unborn young, but the anti-venom is only meant for the young cockatrice. In any other creature, including a human, the effect of the anti-venom is almost identical to the venom itself, only less dramatic. It probably also helped that the eggs were cooked before your wife ate them. That further reduced their potency. Still, daily exposure over several months has left the princess almost completely paralyzed. If I can’t reverse the effect of the poison quickly, it will seize the base of her brain and her heart will cease to beat.”
“Yes, yes, of course, please, save her!” the prince implored. “You should not have delayed to speak to me. Only her life matters.”
“Well, I need something and thought I should ask permission.” Asha pointed out the door toward the garden square. “To make a cure for this anti-venom, I’m going to need the cockatrice itself. Bring it to me as quickly as you can. Dead, not alive. And tell your men to be careful of its bite.” She paused. “Actually, you need to stay away from its mouth altogether. It exhales traces of a poisonous fume wherever it goes. If it wasn’t for all the ginger I eat, its breath might have killed me last night as I lay in the garden.” She wiped roughly at her nose.
As the prince hurried out of the room, Asha quickly examined the patient once more for changes. There were none that she could find, but the princess seemed as close to death as ever, and Asha busied herself by spreading her tools and supplies across the floor beside the woman’s bed. Priya sat by the window, gazing out across the lake as though her eyes were not covered by a heavy band of cloth. “Asha? Is everything going to be all right?”
“I have the cause. Cockatrice egg anti-venom. Now I just need the cure.”
“Is there a cure for such a thing?”
“Of course there is,” Asha said. “I just need to invent it. Quickly.”
After an hour of arranging and cleaning and rearranging her materials, Asha was still waiting beside the princess’s bed for the dead cockatrice. And it was approaching the second hour when she finally stood and marched back out into the central courtyard to see what was the matter.
Over the short wall she saw a dozen men with drawn swords peering down through the ferns and flowers, muttering to one another, and poking and prodding at the unseen ground. The prince was coordinating the disorganized search from atop the wall itself, pointing here and there, occasionally barking at one man to go this way, or another to dive that way.
Asha called out, “Where is the cockatrice?”
The prince glared. “It seems to be hiding. We’ve spotted it several times, but each time it runs to a new hiding place and we have to start all over again. It’s silent, absolutely silent. Once it hissed at one of the men and a blue miasma wafted out of its beak. The venom you spoke of, I assume. So the men are being very cautious.”
“How much longer?” Asha asked.
“As long as it takes,” the prince replied sharply.
“It’s already been too long.” Asha spun and marched back into the princess’s bedchamber. “Priya? Can you come out here to help us? These poor gentlemen are having trouble finding something. I thought you might be able to encourage them.”
The nun smiled as she came to the door, Jagdish on her shoulder, and her bamboo rod in her hand tapping on the tiled floor. “I can certainly try. Did you think my sharp ears would be of use to them?”
Asha led her companion over to the low wall at the edge of the garden. “No. Not exactly.” She snatched the mongoose from Priya’s shoulder and gently tossed him down into the undergrowth of the garden. Jagdish darted away into the greenery.
“What have you done?” Priya asked, her voice straining to maintain its usual calm.
“I’ve always said a mongoose is a useful thing to have around. It’s time for him to prove me right. Jagdish should be immune to the cockatrice’s venom, and I’m sure he can sniff out that creature, even if he can’t see it or hear it.” Asha stared at the ferns, searching for a flash of brown fur or blue feathers.
“ Should be immune?”
Asha’s mouth hardened into a straight line. “Should be.”
5
Whatever happened in the underbrush was very brief and very violent. The ferns shook, the mongoose squeaked, the cockatrice hissed, and then all was still. The guards converged on the source of the noise and folded back the ferns to reveal Jagdish carefully cleaning the blood from his whiskers and the cockatrice lying dead beside him.
One of the men picked up both animals and held them out to Asha. She took the dead cockatrice by the tail and held it at arm’s length, but Jagdish refused to go near her and instead scampered over to Priya, who picked him up and placed him on her shoulder, where he nestled into her hair and peered out at Asha with small accusing eyes.
“I hope that was absolutely necessary,” the nun said.
“It was.” Asha paused only a moment to stare at the creature in her hand before striding back into the princess’s bedroom and shutting the door behind her.
She knelt down and spread the feathered body on a thick leather sheet, massaged the neck briefly, and then sliced off the head completely. With her scalpel and pins and probes, she deftly slit the cockatrice’s throat open to reveal the venom sacs at the base of the skull, and these she removed and placed in a porcelain dish. Then she tossed the body across the floor, out of the way, and went to work.
After three hours, four spent candles, a dozen silver trays, two buckets of water, and more herbs than she cared to admit, Asha finally sat over a dish of pale red oil in a shallow silver bowl. In addition to the flesh of the venom sac, she had used the shell of the last cockatrice egg and more than a little of the creature’s blood, and now she studied the product of her labors.
Logically, it was right. It should work. She had done everything just as she had been taught to do it, and now all that was left to do was use it.
Still she hesitated. It wasn’t doubt that gnawed at her. It was distaste. Disgust. A true healer did not gamble with life carelessly. A true healer would test the new medicine in the dish first, and in an animal second, and only in a human last of all. But there wasn’t time. There wasn’t even enough of the red oil to use, even if there had been time.
Asha carried the dish to the princess and began dribbling the oil into the woman’s bloodless lips. Then she drew a small amount of the oil up into a needle of blue glass and injected it into the princess’s neck.
Through the evening and the long quiet night that followed, Asha sat by the princess and administered her medicine by every means she could think of. Priya came and sat by the windows overlooking the lake. The maid brought supper, tended her mistress, and left. And at some late hour, Asha fell asleep.
Th
e next day the princess seemed to breathe a little easier. Asha continued to apply her red oil, answered the prince’s questions as briefly as possible, and slept very little.
Days passed. The princess slept easier, even murmuring in her sleep, but she did not wake.
Asha experimented with what little remained of the cockatrice, from the feathers to the beak to the liver, producing similar oils and powders. She tried them all. Some seemed to work better. Most didn’t. And all of them ran out all too soon. There simply wasn’t enough of the small animal’s body to create enough medicine.
After a week, the princess opened her eyes and spent a few precious minutes talking with her husband. Pratap Singh’s voice wavered as he sat beside her, stroking her cheek. But then she fell asleep again and couldn’t be roused.
A month passed.
And another.
Asha stayed beside the princess, rarely leaving her bedchamber, every day trying to coax some new secret from what little remained of the cockatrice until she was left scraping at its bones. But the princess slipped back into her rigid state, her muscles as hard as ironwood, her skin as firm as stone.
And then she died.
At the end, her body was so rigid that the servants couldn’t undress her or even untangle her from the sheets, and were forced to cut away the cloth. But the woman’s face was perfectly serene, unlined and unblemished, smooth and young and strong. Everyone agreed that she was the most beautiful corpse they had ever seen.
Asha and Priya stayed in Jaipur only as long as etiquette seemed to require. The heartbroken prince pressed them with gifts, left his palace open to them for all time, and gave them a place of honor in the funeral procession. But when it was over, they left.
6
Three months later.
Asha stood in the marketplace of Jaipur, haggling with an older woman over a fistful of ginger roots. After overpaying for her stock, Asha sauntered back toward Priya, who stood at the foot of the steps of a temple of Vishnu. The nun frowned. “I could be wrong, but I think someone is following us.”
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