Upon a Burning Throne

by Ashok K. Banker

  Karni’s first thought was that the visitor really did resemble the friezes and paintings of snake gods she had seen, as Maheev had so astutely pointed out earlier. She tried to suppress the lighthearted mood that still buoyed her heart after the earlier encounter with her beloved. It simply would not do to offend this man!

  But she couldn’t help thinking that he was quite a character.

  The sage’s long, angular face was set in a perpetual scowl. His bush of matted hair, overgrown eyebrows, and wild beard looked like they had never seen a comb. I bet he doesn’t scent his hair with sandalwood incense! He was seated with one leg crossed over the other, staring at nothing in particular. With his stick-thin limbs, bony torso, and long neck, he reminded Karni of a perched grasshopper. He continued to stare into the middle distance, contemplating goddess knew what. Karni felt sorry for the servants standing by with trays laden with various offerings for the guest’s refreshment. She could imagine how terrified they must be, though they stood ramrod straight and barely even blinked.

  She wondered why in the world one man, any man, should have the power to terrorize so many. Just because he is a priest? It seemed so unfair.

  The inequity of it outraged her sense of justice, but she sat as still and patient as the rest.

  At last, the visitor raised his head.

  “King Stonecastle,” he said in a voice as harsh and unconcerned with civility as his appearance, “I shall partake of your hospitality. Kindly ask your firstborn to attend me during my stay, as is customary.”

  Karni saw her father’s eyes widen.

  “Great One,” he replied with unctuous care, “I have no progeny of my own. However, by the grace of the stone gods, my cousin Karna Sura of Mraashk saw fit to grant me guardianship of his firstborn daughter, Karni. I have raised her as my own, and she is my sole heir. If it please you, I shall have her attend to your every need during your stay.”

  Karni felt herself flush, knowing that every pair of eyes in the court turned toward her. Her parentage was no secret. If anything, it gave her a certain status: not only was she sole heir and princess of Stonecastle, but she was also sister to Vasurava, prince of Mraashk, the capital of the Yadu nation. That made her a bridge between two nations. But right now, she would have given anything to have an elder sister, a brother, a half dozen siblings, a hundred even!

  She sensed the sage’s intense scrutiny on her and kept her own gaze demurely downcast.

  “So be it,” said the sage Pasha’ar.

  7

  It was the only time Karni’s foster father had ever appeared nervous and uncomfortable when addressing her.

  “I need you to play a more modern role,” he had said, and she had laughed at his choice of words.

  “Do you wish me to perform an entertainment for the sage, Father?” she asked, making light of the hermit’s notorious dislike of such vulgar pastimes.

  “Sage Pasha’ar . . .” He paused. “Is notorious for his temper. It would not do to make him irate. He is a powerful sage. A seer-mage. Stonecastle needs to please him and gain his blessings, not his curses.”

  She nodded, matching his serious tone. “Say what needs to be done, and I shall see to it, father.”

  “You must stand service on him yourself.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Myself?”

  He rubbed his leathery face. “I am asking too much of you, daughter. You are a princess, a queen-in-waiting, not a—”

  “I can be a serving woman, if that is what the good sage requires. A royal serving woman. I have seen how these sages expect to be treated during such visits. I have heard the stories, read the itihasas. I know what fury their curses can bring. Besides, I have with my own eyes seen Guru Pasha’ar’s powers at work. He is formidable. I would not want him to become irate with our good kingdom.”

  He looked up at her. “Thank you, daughter. Our nation’s good name and future depend on how well you serve the sage.”

  She lowered her chin, all merriment gone. “You can count on me, Father. I will make sure he has no cause for complaint.”

  8

  The following nights and days were a blur of endless chores. While the entire palace staff was kept on its toes by the presence of the venerated sage, none were worked as hard or as relentlessly as Karni. Pasha’ar would demand anything he pleased at any hour he pleased, with no thought for her need for rest, comfort, or nourishment.

  In the beginning, his demands were not impossible, but were unusual and difficult.

  “Go fetch me white marigolds,” he said one night at an unearthly hour.

  Karni bowed her head without hesitation and sent her maids running to pluck the flowers from her own personal garden. But before the girls had left Karni’s chambers, she was summoned to the guest chambers again.

  “They must be plucked by your own hands,” the sage added, “otherwise they are of no use to me.”

  Karni bowed her head without argument and backed out of the guest chambers. Once out, she ran faster than her maids and fetched the choicest white marigolds from her own garden. She ran all the way back to the sage and set them before him.

  He did not so much as glance at the flowers. “I desire sabudana vadas,” he said, using the local term for fried tapioca. Prepare it with your own hands and make sure it is neither too hot nor too cool when you serve it to me.”

  Karni backed out of the chamber and went to the royal kitchen, where she prepared the sage’s favorite repast. She carried it in a silver dish covered with another silver dish, removing the top only when she laid it before the sage. He took a bite of one of the tapioca balls and ate it without compliment or comment.

  “I also desire buttermilk flavored with mango,” he said. “I would like to partake of it the instant I have finished my snack.”

  Karni’s eyes widened, but she dared not question his wishes. She backed out, and this time she sprinted to the kitchen, where she shouted at a cook to fetch her buttermilk at once from the cooling pit, while she herself ran to the fruit pantry and selected the ripest, juiciest mango she could find. She poked open a tiny hole, tasting it to make sure it was in fact ripe and juicy. She didn’t bother with slicing, instead she rolled the mango in its skin between her palms until the flesh inside was reduced to a dripping pulp. Motioning to the cook to set the silver bowl before her, she squeezed out the mango pulp through the hole, and stirred it with the handle of a wooden ladle.

  She took but a moment to wipe her hands clean on a kitchen cloth, then she raced back to the guest chambers, where she slowed to a formal walk as she approached the sage. She entered the chamber just as Pasha’ar was finishing the last tapioca ball. She offered him the bowl and waited, heart still pounding, as he sipped of the treacly concoction. He made a sound that could possibly have indicated approval—or it might have just been him clearing his throat.

  When he set down the bowl and she saw it was empty, she almost beamed with relief. He, on the other hand, did not communicate in any other manner that he had enjoyed the proffering. But it did not matter. The empty bowl was enough of a sign that it was a job well done.

  9

  Over the following days and nights, Sage Pasha’ar ran Karni ragged.

  The worst nights were the ones where he would summon her and ask her to prepare one of his favorite items and then, after he was done eating it, sink into one of his meditative trances. She would wait in the expectation of further requests, not knowing if he would summon her again in an hour, half a watch, or even a whole watch later. She barely slept. The man seemed to spend almost all his time in chambers, either meditating or discoursing with other priests on a variety of philosophical matters.

  Oftentimes, he would ask her to fetch refreshments for himself and these guests, many of whom seemed discomfited at having the royal princess herself wait on them. Pasha’ar seemed to either not notice or not care about their discomfort.

  Once, he summoned Karni and asked her to wait awhile. She stood unobtrusively to one side
while he and his cadre continued a discussion of some inscrutable passage in the scriptures. Suddenly, he asked for her opinion on an obscure aspect of the passage in question. “Which interpretation do you favor?” he asked.

  She blinked rapidly. “Your own, Gurudev.”

  “Yes, but why do you favor my reading over the excellent interpretations of these venerated priests?”

  All eyes in the room were on her.

  “Because of the context, Gurudev,” she replied. “It is evident that the reference to storm in this particular instance refers specifically to the king of gods, Inadran, personified as a storm.”

  “It does not say so at all,” said an elder hermit, looking angry with Karni. “The language refers only to thunder, lightning, and a flash flood. There is no indication of personification at all.”

  “But there is, Great One,” she said, inclining her head to show respect for a superior mind. “In the third line of the second verse of the fourteenth parva, the text specifically uses the masculine when referring to the fury of the storm and the feminine when referring to the river, which clearly indicates that the river in question must be the Jeel, since none but River Goddess Jeel could stand before the masculine arrogance of Inadran.”

  Everyone stared at her. Even the elder hermit looked gobsmacked. Sage Pasha’ar leaned back with a gleam in his eye.

  “Any reference to a storm would be masculine, surely,” the sage said.

  “True, but in this case, the Krushan word used to describe the masculine fury of the storm is one that is associated with Inadran’s notorious tendencies. ‘With what thunderous fury does he strike . . .’ ” She quoted the rest of the verse from memory, then quoted three others that used the same phrasing to refer to the king of gods.

  All the white-haired heads in the room were nodding by the time she finished the last quote.

  “Hmmph!” said the sage, clearly perturbed. “I concede the point. However, on the matter of the river being the sacred Jeel, that is a highly perceptive deduction.” He turned his gaze to Karni. “You are King Stonecastle’s daughter? Commend your guru for me.”

  She bowed graciously, avoiding mention of the fact that since only male warrior castes were expected to be educated, she had read and mastered the sacred texts on her own, aided in private by a like-minded group of older women—much older than she, for the most part—who believed in the maxim that if women could fight, women should also be able to write and become educated. Had she enlightened the guru on this point, he would likely have choked on his sweet potato savory.

  10

  Shortly thereafter, the guests departed. Karni waited patiently for Pasha’ar to say something, to acknowledge her contribution in some way, if not outright praise her.

  But he said nothing, except to ask her to prepare more fried tapioca, this time with groundnuts.

  As the days and weeks passed, this familiar pattern continued, with Pasha’ar frequently calling on her to clarify some point of controversy or to break a deadlock, but never again acknowledging her scholarship or memory. If anything, he made it a point to always ask her to perform some completely mundane chore immediately after—clean his chambers, wash his garments, fetch him a particularly difficult-to-obtain item from the far end of the city—as if to remind her of her place. Intelligent, well-read, endowed with scholarly gifts—yet still a serving girl.

  She accepted all this with good grace. She toiled all hours without protest. Endured outbursts without a plaint. Yet the one thing that galled her was his stubborn refusal to permit her to handle the scrolls.

  Pasha’ar frequently requested a particular text—or several texts all at once—often at a most inopportune time, such as during the evening meal or in the middle of the night. Karni was tasked with going to the priest quarters, which was situated a good five miles outside the city walls, disturbing the brahmacharya novices on night rotation—the round-the-clock verbatim “pad-a-pad” recitals—and asking one of them for the text in question. She would then wait while the novice fetched it, check that he had fetched the correct scroll (more likely than not, he had not). She would then have to accompany the novice back to the palace, bring him up to the sage’s chambers, and present Pasha’ar with the requisitioned scroll. After he finished with the text, Karni would accompany the novice back to the hermitage, and finally, of course, make the long trek back to the palace.

  In between, she would of course be asked to perform her usual tasks: fetching refreshments for the sage and his guests, sweeping and swabbing his chambers, or performing other chores he asked of her. But all this she endured without complaint. As she endured the dismissive looks that even the most hairless, green-eared novices gave her when she came to collect the scrolls, asserting their superiority of sex, scholarship, and caste all in a single sneer. Knowing the import of keeping the sage happy, she said nothing.

  What she could not brook was the fact that she was not permitted, at any time, or for any reason whatsoever, to so much as touch or breathe upon any of these sacred scrolls. The logic being that as a woman, subject to womanly foibles and monthly leakages, she was inherently impure and unfit to partake of the domain of Aravidya, the sacred lore of herbal and healing knowledge.

  I can be as intelligent as any man, as well read as any priest, as insightful as any scholar, yet because I am a woman, I have no right to any of those things? Hmmph! River Goddess Jeel, grant your worshipper patience to endure such absurd bigotry.

  On one occasion, the novice insisted (twice) at the hermitage that he had retrieved the exact text she had named—and indeed seemed incensed that Karni might question him—so Karni returned with him to the palace without double-checking the scroll. Yet when they arrived and presented the scroll to Pasha’ar, and the sage immediately fumed and raged at being given the wrong text, the novice had the audacity to immediately pin the blame on Karni. He claimed she had asked for this one and so it was the one he had brought, and of course he could hardly be blamed for an ignorant, illiterate, impure woman’s faults.

  Of his words, the one that stung the most was the accurate one: that she was a woman. Yes, she was a woman and proud of it. Did this young upstart think he had emerged wholly formed out of the stone god’s egg? Did he speak to his own mother and sisters with the same tone? He knew very well that she had requested parva 231, canto 89—not parva 89, canto 231, which he brought.

  She said none of these things aloud, merely bowed her head and endured the hailstorm of outrage and insults the sage heaped upon her while the novice looked on, smirking, even though her heart raged with the injustice, the unfairness, the sheer bigotry of it all.

  But none of these or similar incidents were the worst.

  No, the worst was yet to come.

  11

  It was a cold rainy day in the first half of winter. Stonecastle did not get snow, but it was far enough north and within blowing range of the Coldheart Mountains to get bitterly, dangerously cold. Cold enough to freeze water and deliver the occasional shower of hailstones the size of a man’s fist. And when the winter winds blew through the city, Shaiva help any unfortunate who happened to be out of walls. The daily count of travelers and drunks who froze to death from exposure was in double digits at this time of year.

  Pasha’ar had been in a particularly benign mood these past days. There was a rumor that the sage was planning to take his leave shortly, a rumor perpetrated by Karni herself, based on a conversation in which the sage had been asked by another priest if he would be there in the spring. “Distinctly not,” he replied, “I must be in Uttarkashi before the winter snows set in.”

  This alone had made Karni want to yell and throw her hands in the air, perform several somersaults and tumbles around the chamber, then dance a very unprincesslike caper, hooting and cheering all the while. She did in fact perform all these antics, but only much later that evening, when she was safely in the privacy of her own chambers with her friends.

  “Finally, we shall be able to see you ag
ain daily as we used to,” they said happily, once the initial euphoria had died down. “We shall go swimming in the lake, picking berries, climb to the top of the rookery, and do all the happy things we used to be able to do together.”

  She was about to correct them by saying that since it was winter, they could hardly do any of those things, but she realized it didn’t matter. The point was, she would be free soon. Free to resume her girlish ways and indolent, carefree life as a young princess. She would rather dive into a frozen lake than serve the sage Pasha’ar another season!

  So it was with sunshine in her heart that she waited on their honored guest over the next few days. The passes to the Coldheart Mountains were generally snowed in during the third month of winter. They were already at the start of the second month. That left less than a fortnight before the sage would have to leave if he meant to reach his destination before snow closed the passes; ideally he should leave within the week.

  Karni was wandering in her mind, daydreaming about resuming her sword-fighting training again. She had been so consumed with her round-the-clock duties for the sage that her fight guru—a crusty old woman veteran who had served in the Stonecastle army and trained three generations of royalty—had squirted a mouthful of betelnut juice with disgust at Karni’s irregular appearances, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and told her in her characteristically vulgar fashion to come back when she was able to extract her “head out of the elephant’s backside.” Karni missed the physical exertion of swordplay, the world reduced to just the edge of the blade, one’s opponent’s eyes, and the elegant dance of death.