Upon a Burning Throne

by Ashok K. Banker

  She still favored the use of that affectionate name, even though they had named the boy Vashta at his naming ceremony, claiming him as their own. Abandoned infants were not uncommon, and the priests had decreed it likely that the child had been the illegitimate product of some noblewoman’s indiscretion or a nobleman’s unwanted bastard. No one minded if a childless charioteer and his wife wanted to adopt him, and from that day, everyone simply regarded little Vashta as Adran and Reeda’s boy.

  But they never forgot the truth. He was not their natural-born child, and the unique markings on his body were unlike anything they or anyone else had ever seen. Kern had distinctive bumps on his ears, head, chest, shoulders and back. Reeda had touched them curiously, worried that they were some kind of disfigurement. Instead, she had found the bumps hard—as hard as, or even harder than, bone spurs. Not only were they not tender or sensitive to the touch, they actually served as some kind of protective shield to the boy.

  When Kern began to creep and then crawl, he was unaffected by the usual bumps and scrapes that every infant suffered: the growths on his upper body protected him so effectively that he would simply bang or bump into objects without a care, even chuckling at times. Surprised, Reeda had designed a special yoked garment for him to wear during those early weeks, hoping to conceal his uniqueness from prying eyes. Little Kern looked quite cute with his head and torso covered, peeping out from under the hood. But only a few hours later, she found him bare-topped again, the garment lying in shreds, cast aside. Every time she tried to cover him up again, he would simply tear off the clothing. It took her some time to accept the fact that he not only abjured protection from the harsh sun of Hastinaga, he actively desired exposure to it. He appeared to thrive on sunlight from his earliest days, and as he grew, his need to be out in the sun grew as well.

  Now Adran looked at her affectionately. “Kern,” he said, softly, though they knew that nothing would wake the boy except the first rays of sunshine through their front door—which they had taken to leaving open at his urging. “His name is Vashta, my sweet.”

  Reeda smiled. “I know, but I can’t help it. Those . . . growths on his body, whatever they are, they are so unique. And have you noticed? They are becoming stronger and harder as he grows. Their pattern is also taking shape, joining together, almost like . . .”

  “Armor. Like a suit of armor.”

  “Yes. Exactly. A suit of golden armor, with matching earrings and a helm. What does it mean, Adi? What is his fascination with sunlight? Why does he not suffer heat stroke or sunstroke like other people?”

  “He is special, our Vashta,” Adran said. He smoked his chillum, sucking lightly on the ganja pipe. It soothed and relaxed him at the end of a long hard day. Reeda took an occasional lungful as well, keeping her husband company as they enjoyed the relatively cooler evening air—if you could call a sultry stillness cool. Outside, the city settled down to another summer’s night, the streets and markets still bustling as people used the sunless evening hours to complete their chores and shopping . . . . and, of course, the drinking and revelry that was an essential part of city life in this rich, diverse heart of the Burnt Empire. People said Hastinaga never slept. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Hastinaga never slept . . . sober.

  “He is no ordinary mortal child,” Adran continued. “His natural body armor and markings aside, there is the matter of his unusual resilience to heat and sunlight. But that is nothing compared to his martial skills.”

  “What do you mean?” Reeda asked. “What martial skills? He is barely a boy, only just out of infancy!”

  Adran looked at her through the ganja haze, his grey eyes sleepy, the smoke weaving into his dark mustache and beard. His ropelike muscles knotted as he held out the chillum to her. “He watches the master warriors training and then goes to a field on his own and imitates their movements. This itself is not unusual. Many of the poorer warrior caste children of the city watch the masters during their open sessions and learn by simple observation. But what Vashta does is unique. He watches them all morning, then goes to a place where he can be alone—usually an open field away from the city or a clearing in the woods. There he repeats the movements he saw the masters make, perfect in every respect, then does them over and over again, completing entire circuits without a single error. His form, his skill, his body control, his mastery of the movements and the asanas, they are all immaculate. It is better than the best students achieve even after months of rigorous practice. Better by far than even Prince Shvate or my own master, Prince Adri. It is quite astonishing to watch him.”

  Reeda smoked silently for a moment. She blew out a small stream of blueish smoke. “All this just from watching them once?”

  “Yes. I have never seen anything like it. I have never even heard of anything like it. I don’t think any warrior caste in Hastinaga could claim such perfection. At any age. Mind you, these are not simply beginner’s asanas. These are the masters’ own exercises, the most advanced circuits of physical endurance and skill by seasoned veteran warriors with a lifetime of training, experience, and knowledge. It is quite extraordinary, yet I have seen it with my own eyes more than once.”

  Reeda considered his words. “What does it mean, then?”

  “This is not just talent, it is something else. This, coupled with his affinity for sunlight . . .” Adran shook his head slowly from side to side, his lined face appearing and disappearing in the haze. “It is something beyond human capacity. He is no ordinary mortal.”

  Reeda felt both pleased and anxious. Pleased, because Adran was speaking of little Kern, her Kern. Anxious, because he was not truly hers. Still, she took pride in the knowledge that she had been chosen to mother such an extraordinary child. “What are you saying, Adi? That he is blessed of the gods?”

  Adran stared at the far wall for a long time before answering. “All children are blessed of the gods. I think our little Vashta is something more than that. I think perhaps he is a god himself. Or at the very least, a demigod.”

  Reeda stared at him. “You mean . . . his parents were gods?”

  “One of them at least. And it doesn’t take a great mind to guess which god that might have been.”

  “Arka. Sharra. Surya. Call him what you will. The sun god.” She stared across the tiny hut at the still form of her little boy. Kern slept without covers in both the hottest and coldest seasons. Neither cold, nor heat, nor wet appeared to affect his health. He had never fallen sick for even a day, never showed any weakness of any kind—was always fresh, alert, and energetic, even when he forgot to eat for most of a day (which happened frequently since he went out at dawn and rarely returned before evening).

  These had all been signs, Reeda saw now. Signs of his extraordinary birth. She had wondered often, but this was the first time that she had heard the possibility mentioned aloud. Once Adran said it, she knew he was right. Her little Kern was a demigod, offspring of the sun god himself. That would explain everything.

  “We are blessed,” she said. “Our humble home has been graced by the presence of a god in human form. We must have done some great karma in past lives to have earned such a distinction.”

  Adran raised his hand to wave away the smoke. His sharp features looked at her intently.

  “What?” she asked, “Why do you look at me this way?”

  “Having a demigod in one’s house can be a blessing, yes, but it can also be a curse.”

  “A curse?”

  “Gods rarely cohabit with mortals without a purpose. There must be some intent behind Sharra God fathering our little Vashta on a mortal woman. Some larger purpose. A great mission for which a demigod was required. Some future plan.”

  “So, what of it? When the time comes, he will fulfill his purpose. If that is his destiny, so be it.”

  “What is that purpose is the question, Reeda. When the gods descend on Arthaloka, it is not always to the benefit of us mortals. Time and time again, as our puranas tell us, we become collatera
l damage in their great wars and missions. When elephants do battle, insects are crushed underfoot.”

  She tried to think through the implications of her little Kern being a demigod. “But he is our Kern. He will never do anything to harm us.”

  “How do you know that? How can we know anything for certain? Even he knows nothing of his fate or destiny now, for he is merely a child. But one day, when the time comes, he will awaken and rise, and go about his divine purpose, and you can be sure when that day comes, he will not be ‘our little Kern,’ as you call him, or even our little Vashta anymore. He will be his own man. His own god. And what he does then will impact lives, of that much you can be certain.”

  “How can you be so sure?” she asked.

  Adran toked on the pipe. His long exhale resembled a plaintive sigh. “I have worked with kings and queens all my life. As did my father and forefathers. We have served the kings of Hastinaga for generations. The kings regard the game of chaupat as a window of insight into life itself. Whenever a great game is played out, the pieces are put on the board years, or even decades earlier. I once watched Shapaar play a game with his brother-in-law that lasted fifty-seven years and employed tens of thousands of moves! Shapaar finally won by using his elephants in a move that I have never seen rivaled since, but he had to prepare for that move thousands of moves earlier, and had to be prepared to sacrifice most of his other pieces in the meanwhile. The appearance of that little infant in the river, here in Hastinaga, was no accident. He is a piece in a great game, brought here for a purpose. I do not know whether his move will be made in ten, twenty, or even fifty-seven years from now, but I suspect it will be a game-changing one, and when it happens, it will cost many, many other lives. Mortal lives. Because gods play out their games of chaupat using us mortals as pieces on the board of Arthaloka. And our little boy is an elephant among those pieces.”

  Reeda continued to regard the sleeping child, thoughts and emotions swirling through her like the hemp smoke swirling through their hut. She couldn’t bring herself to think like Adran did. She knew he had been to battle and seen terrible things, things he could never unsee—things that had changed him forever. He was wise and knowledgeable and knew whereof he spoke. But Reeda too was wise, and she too knew things that he had never thought of, had seen and heard many stories, many true accounts, of mothers and children, of special or gifted children. Not different in exactly the way that her Kern was different, but each unique in their own way.

  Above all else, Reeda was a mother, while Adran was a father. A woman, while he was a man. There were things she knew instinctively that he could never know, not because he was incapable of knowing them, but because he had been raised and taught to think like a man, while Reeda herself simply thought as she thought. And her mind, her heart, told her that whatever Kern’s purpose in life might be, it would not involve harm to her or Adran. She knew this as surely as she knew it was now night and that the sun would rise again when it became morning again.

  “Elephants are beautiful creatures,” she said, looking at her little Kern, so beautiful, so perfect, so special.

  Adran raised one eyebrow, gazing at her. But he said nothing further.

  They smoked the rest of the chillum together in peaceful quiet.

  Kern

  Kern was in a clearing behind the elephant preserve practicing his asanas as usual. He liked this clearing. No one else ever came here because of the stench of elephant dung. He didn’t mind the smell. Hastinaga literally meant “City of Elephants and Snakes,” and the smell of elephants and their offal was the smell of home to him now.

  He liked spending his days away from other people, especially other children, because they were too puerile and immature for him and were always obsessed with things that made no sense to him, like playing pointless sports and engaging in useless games. To little Kern, this was play, being out in the bright summer sunshine, wielding his wooden sword, repeating his asanas, perfecting them.

  He was dressed in only a dhoti, exposing as much of his body to the sunshine as possible. The feeling of the sun’s heat penetrating his pores was wonderful. He felt energy seeping into him every hour he spent in the sunlight; after a whole day, he felt almost . . . powerful. If only the sun could shine all day and night, every day and night, he was sure the energy it gave him would make him stronger. For now, the long fifteen-hour summer days were a godsend; he intended to spend every possible minute out under the sun, and he could feel the rays invigorating him, empowering him.

  He had learned an interesting new asana that morning, after watching the yoddhas on the practice field, and was trying it out. He used a wooden sword he had made himself, deliberately shaping the shastra from tough, heavy sal wood instead of the usual balsa wood, to make it feel and weigh more like a real sword.

  He had completed his warm-up exercises and was now putting himself through niuddham, concentrating on the movements. He was accustomed to spending several hours this way, repeating a sequence of asanas, then varying them in subtle, minute ways to account for a variety of factors: wind direction and force, ground, temperature, the possible height and bulk of his imagined enemy, the enemy’s angle of approach, force, intensity, the number of opponents, their weapons, their ages, their sizes . . . He repeated each of these variations over and over until he was certain that in those circumstances, against those opponents, using those weapons, that angle and force of attack, he would be able to counter and overcome. He was focusing mainly on defensive moves because that was what the masters had been practicing this week. He hoped they would move on to offensive asanas soon. He liked offense better than defense. Anyone would defend themselves when attacked. A warrior’s purpose was to attack, overcome, conquer.

  He was so absorbed in his asanas that he didn’t notice the others until they were only a dozen yards away. It was careless of him and ironic in a way; here he was, practicing defensive asanas, but when an actual threat approached, he failed to heed to it. He observed the figures and made a mental note to never let such a lapse occur again in the future.

  The intruders on his privacy were several young men, about a dozen of them ranging in age from eight to fourteen. He had seen some of the older ones before, engaged in activities that his father called “nefarious.” Kern wasn’t sure what the word meant but knew it didn’t signify anything good. He knew that Adran used words like that when he didn’t want Kern to know what he really meant, but just by using such words, he conveyed to Kern that it was something that elders considered bad.

  The boys approached across the open field in leisurely fashion, sprawling out in a wide, irregular formation. Some of them were smoking that odd-smelling stuff that his father and mother also smoked at night—what they called ganja. The boys were smoking it in the form of little tubes of tobacco leaf rolled tightly and lit at one end. They were passing the tubes to one another in a certain pattern, the older, bigger boys keeping them longer and sucking for longer before passing them to the younger, smaller boys. At least two of the boys didn’t get to smoke any at all, and hung back behind the others, looking beaten down and miserable, their clothes even more ragged and filthy than those of the others.

  The leader of the group was easy to make out. He was not the largest of the boys, nor the eldest, yet everyone deferred to him. He had a small chillum all to himself which he shared with no one, his clothes were new and of richer material, and he wore gold jewelry on his ears, around his neck, wrists, and arms. He also carried a real shastra: a shortsword with a jeweled hilt that he wore on a special leather belt around his waist. The two biggest and oldest boys—men, actually—walked on either side of him, both armed with longswords, plainer and without any jewels or decoration, their muscled bodies dressed in clean, crisp anga-vastras and dhotis, not as rich or fine as their master’s but not like the dirty rags of the other vagabonds with them.

  Kern observed all this in a single sweeping glance. He lowered his “sword” and returned his breathing to a waiting patte
rn as he had seen the masters do between sessions. This kept the body anticipatory and capable of being brought into play quickly, but not at full alert—somewhere between a resting heart rhythm and an active one. He said nothing. He spoke as little as possible to strangers, so little that at times he had been assumed to be mute by people unknown to him. From the very beginning, he had known that most arguments could be resolved by silence: if you did not engage, you could not lose. You only engaged when you wanted to destroy your enemy. This was true of arguments as well as physical combat. Never start a fight unless you intend to win it. And winning for a warrior could only mean the destruction of your opponents. Anything less was a fool’s victory.

  “The little cub that thought it was a lion.”

  This came from the rich boy. He was holding his little ivory chillum cupped in both hands, sucking on it every now and then, puffing out little circles of smoke. He was as stout around the waist as anyone Kern had ever seen, plump in the way a poor boy could never be: corpulence brought on by sheer excess. Kern stared at him with frank curiosity. How much must one eat—and how rich must one be—to become so large? And doesn’t all that bulk hinder him when moving, running, jumping, fighting? Despite the beautiful sword at his waist, Kern suspected the rich boy was no warrior caste. A warrior would never treat his body thus. The body is your first and greatest shastra, the masters taught. It was a warrior’s most valuable weapon.

  “What are you doing here, little cub?”

  Kern knew the question was directed at him but did not answer. He was used to strangers asking him questions. He never listened to the questions themselves. The words were irrelevant: it was the question behind the question that one had to listen for—the meaning and true intent behind the words.

  This rich boy wasn’t interested in what Kern was doing here. He was interested in Kern himself.

  The rich boy stopped about three yards away. The two muscular young men stopped too, one on either side of him. One of them eyed Kern’s wooden sword, assessed it to be of no significant threat, then ignored it. The other one kept looking around, sweeping the surrounding area. Kern liked their single-minded efficiency. They were both of a warrior caste for sure, and both clearly had experience with violence.