Upon a Burning Throne

by Ashok K. Banker

  “Mayla? How long have you been standing there?” Karni rose to her feet and came forward, taking Mayla’s hands as she peered up at her face with concern. “Are you well? You look—”

  “I look like cow dung,” Mayla said. “You don’t need to tell me. I know it.”

  Karni touched Mayla’s arm gently. “You are troubled. Tell me, what is the matter?”

  Mayla cried out and impulsively hugged Karni. “Karni, oh, Karni. I don’t know how to do this anymore. I . . . I can’t. I just can’t.”

  Mayla’s head felt as if all blood had suddenly left it, leaving her whole body feeling drained, as if she had been sucked dry by vampire urrkh. In a sense, she had. But not by vampires, by life itself.

  She felt her legs stagger as the will to stand left her.

  2

  Karni caught Mayla as she reeled, her arms surprisingly strong. She helped her to the stoop and sat her down slowly, then sat down beside her.

  “Calm yourself, Mayla,” Karni said in her firm, no-nonsense way. “There is no need to lose hope. We are all in this together.”

  “Yes,” Mayla said hoarsely, voice thickened by the tears that were forming. She cleared her throat. “Yes, and thank the gods for that. If you were not here with me, Karni, I don’t know what I would have done. I think I would have jumped in the river and drowned myself in the first few days alone. I felt so awful, so guilty, so ashamed, so miserable at playing a part in what happened in the jungle with Shvate and that sage and his wife. I wished I could have died rather than seen such a sight. I still wish I could die! Perhaps I should die. Just go to the high point over the waterfall and jump and let the river wash me away to the sea because—”

  Karni placed her hand over Mayla’s mouth, cutting off her last words. “Enough. No more talk like that or you’ll get one tight slap from me.”

  Mayla looked up at Karni’s pretty face and saw the first signs of age lines starting to appear faintly around her mouth and eyes and on her forehead. Karni’s eyes were hard, and her lips tightly pressed. Mayla knew that she meant it: on at least one previous occasion when Mayla had lost her self-control and begun ranting and babbling, alarming the young acolytes of the hermitage and upsetting the hermits, Karni had hauled off and slapped her hard across the face. Mayla had been struck in combat before, during battles and skirmishes—even during practice sessions by gurus while she was growing up—and so she could attest that Karni had quite a hand on her. That slap had shocked Mayla . . . and also shocked the hysteria out of her. To underline the action, Karni had slapped her again, on the other cheek. A one-two punch combination couldn’t have been more effective. Mayla had been rocked back on her heels, almost knocked off her feet, and from that day to this one, she had never lost control again, more than a little afraid of Karni’s iron arms and wooden hands.

  She cringed now at the reminder and reached up to take hold of Karni’s wrists. “Please. No more slaps. I can take a bear’s claws, but not another of your slaps, Karni.”

  Karni smiled at the comparison and lowered her hands, taking Mayla’s in her own. She massaged and played with Mayla’s fingers as they talked, using the action to relax and set her at ease. Mayla loved it when she did that. Mayla’s mother used to play with her fingers when she was very small, pushing each fingertip, rubbing the pads of her fingers against the tips of Mayla’s fingernails, twisting and bending the fingers as if pretending to break them but then letting them snap back, never actually hurting her, just teasing and toying; it had brought goose bumps to Mayla’s arms, and she felt goose bumps rise now.

  “That feels so nice,” she said. “Don’t stop. My mother used to do it.”

  Karni smiled, pleased at the change of tone. “You were lucky, then.”

  Mayla frowned. “Lucky?”

  “You had a mother. I didn’t. I never knew what it meant to touch or be touched by my mother, to feel her fingers on my face, her lips on my forehead, hear her laughter, smell her hair.”

  Mayla felt her throat catch. “Yes, of course. You were given away by your father to your uncle. He raised you as his own.”

  “And raised me well. But a father is not a mother.”

  “No, they surely are not.” Mayla found herself recalling all her most cherished memories of her mother and was about to speak them out loud, then thought better of it. She had come here in the hope that Karni could make her feel better, not to make Karni feel worse.

  “Would you like me to braid your hair?” Karni asked.

  Mayla felt her cheeks split as she beamed. “Please!”

  Karni knelt behind her on the stoop and began cleaning out her hair with a wooden brush. “Whatever do you do with yourself, girl? There are so many leaves and twigs in here!” She held out her hand in front of Mayla’s face to show evidence of her findings.

  Mayla shrugged. “I go wandering. I don’t care much about where I climb or how I get where I want to go, so long as I get there. I’ve always been like that. My mother used to call me a little vanar, climbing trees and cliffs and anywhere and everywhere. She was always yelling at me: “Mayla! Come down from there!” Whenever I did anything to upset her, which was all the time, she would yell, “Mayla! Climb down from your castle in the sky!”

  She felt Karni’s body vibrating with laughter, pressed against Mayla’s back. “You were quite a tomboy, I’m sure. You still are.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong. I’m no tomboy, Karni, I’m a tomgirl. I was one then, and I still am. You see, I always liked boys, liked being with them, liked playing and fooling around with them, liked kissing them—”

  “Stop! Stop!” Karni giggled, slapping Mayla’s back lightly to admonish her. “You are such a hot chili! You’ll say anything that comes into your head. Remember, I’m your sister wife, and your elder. I don’t need to hear about all your youthful indiscretions.”

  Mayla twisted her head around to look up at Karni, and winked. “Are you sure? There were some very handsome indiscretions.”

  Karni slapped Mayla’s back again, laughing and covering her mouth to stifle the sound as she always did. “Behave yourself, woman! You’re too much!”

  They were quiet for a few moments, still grinning and basking in the afterglow of the brief banter. Then Karni pressed Mayla’s shoulder with her strong fingers and asked, “What brought you down today? When I opened my eyes and saw you standing there, I thought you were about to collapse.”

  Mayla sighed. “I probably was. It’s harder for me than for you, Karni. You somehow know how to endure this, how to live here”—she gestured at the jungle around them—“how to adjust. I don’t.”

  “You’ve managed for a year,” Karni said gently from behind. “That’s quite an adjustment in itself.”

  “Yes, but today I woke up and realized that it was a whole year since we came here. It’s exactly a year today since we left Hastinaga. And I realized that this is only one year, that we’re going to be here not for six or seven or fourteen years, like Amara and Siya and Armanya in the legend of the exiled prince, but forever. For the rest of our lives. And when that dawned over me, I thought I would scream and go mad. I couldn’t take it. I can’t take it. I don’t know how I got through one year, let alone how I am going to get through two, or three, or ten.”

  Karni’s strong hands continued braiding Mayla’s hair, holding it firmly enough that she couldn’t move her head more than an inch or two. “The same as you got through the first year. It’ll get easier as it goes along. You’ll see.”

  “How do you know that? Have you been in exile before? How do you know what it’s like to live like this forever, to be able to do nothing, go nowhere, eat like a hermit-muni, wear the same garment every day, to have none of the comforts, luxuries, powers, things that you once had so much of? How is it even possible to go from being a prince or a princess one day to living like a jungle hermit the rest of your life? It’s impossible!”

  Karni sighed, paused in the braiding, and leaned gently against Mayla
’s back and shoulder. “I don’t know about exile; this is my first time, in case that wasn’t clear,” she said, the irony a familiar part of her conversation, “but I was young and impetuous and impatient too, full of life and energy—too much energy perhaps—always up to mischief and getting into tight scrapes from which it seemed impossible to get out.”

  “You were impetuous and mischievous?” Mayla said, starting to shake her head, then regretting it. “Ow. I don’t believe that, Karni. I can’t imagine you ever doing anything naughty or irresponsible. It’s impossible!”

  Karni smiled; Mayla heard it in her voice as she replied. “It seems impossible now to you. But it’s true. People change, Mayla.”

  “Why, Karni? Why do people change?” It was a serious question, one to which Mayla genuinely wanted the answer.

  “Because we have to. Because life changes, circumstances change, the river flows in different directions, grows hot and cold, goes over rapids and falls, slows and roars down furiously, and we’re like little boats bobbing on the great river. We have to adapt and adjust according to the river’s flow, or else we capsize and sink.”

  “So we change to survive.”

  “Yes. But also because we need to change in order to grow. A cub can play with her mother’s ears and tail and tumble over her snout, but when she grows old enough, the mother makes her hunt and kill and fend for herself, because the mother knows she won’t always be around, and the cub needs to be able to live without her.”

  “I don’t know about you, Karni,” Mayla said laconically, “but my mother never had a tail or a snout. Are you sure you weren’t raised by wolves?”

  Karni laughed softly, in politeness, but her tone was still serious. “I went through something when I was very young. Something that changed me, forced me to grow up quickly, maybe too quickly. In the course of a single summer, I had to change from being a young fun-loving, mischiefmongering girl to a grown woman.”

  Mayla was silent. She had never heard Karni speak of such things before. Karni rarely spoke about her childhood or youth, and then only in the broadest terms, keeping her purview mostly to politics and general matters. This was the first time in years that Mayla had heard her reveal something so personal. She decided to bite her tongue on the quips and smart witticisms and listen respectfully.

  “What happened?” she asked soberly, trying to encourage Karni to reveal more.

  Karni sighed, a long, deep sigh that Mayla felt through Karni’s chest and belly and thighs pressed against her back. “A great sage came to visit my father, and I was given the responsibility of serving him.”

  “Is that all? I mean . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest it was nothing. It’s just . . . well, I’ve waited on sages too, and they were difficult, scary people mostly, but they make a lot of demands and keep you up at all hours for a day or two, and then they’re gone. Besides, there are always cooks and servants and maids to do the real running around.”

  “Mostly, yes. But in this case, it was only me doing everything, and it wasn’t just a day or two, it was all summer and autumn as well. It felt like a year, or a lifetime.”

  Mayla recalled the few times she had been forced to serve the priests at her father’s palace in Dirda. It had been excruciating service, and it had never lasted more than a day or two. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to wait on a single priest all summer long, for months on end, and to do everything herself? Impossible!

  “I can’t imagine how much worse it must have been for you with that horrible sage,” she said, reaching up and touching the back of Karni’s hand. “It must have been excruciating.”

  “It was,” Karni admitted. “What made it really bad was that I lost someone that same summer . . . someone I cared about very deeply at the time.”

  “Oh, gods,” Mayla said, mortified. “That’s so awful. I’m so sorry, Karni.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said, then was silent for a moment.

  “But it feels like just yesterday,” Mayla said softly. “Doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Karni admitted, looking surprised at Mayla’s insight.

  Mayla nodded. “I can understand. I was thinking of someone I lost when I was very small. An older brother, my eldest, actually. He died in an accident during a chariot race. I was very small but I still remember how I felt. It hurt. It still hurts.”

  “Yes,” Karni said. “It’s like a wound that never truly heals.”

  They sat in silence for the next several moments as Karni finished up the braid. She patted Mayla’s back. “You’re done.”

  Mayla swiveled to swing her braids over her shoulders and looked at them. “Lovely. Thank you, Karni. You’re the sweetest.”

  She saw Karni standing on the stoop, gazing out at the forest, a faraway expression in her eyes and went over to her. “That person you lost meant a great deal to you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Karni said at last, wiping a single tear from her eye. “But when we lose something, life often gives us something else in return. That’s what grief is, Mayla. It’s life’s gift to us in exchange for our loss. It teaches us to be wiser, more mature, more responsible, to change and grow. It teaches us that change is inevitable, so the more readily we accept it, the better we adapt to it. That’s what I want to tell you, Mayla. Accept the change. Accept it and adapt. It seems hard at first, it seems unbearable or even, to use your favorite word—”

  “Impossible!”

  “Yes, but in time it will get easier. You’ll see. Give yourself time, and you’ll do fine.”

  Mayla nodded. “At some level, I understand that, Karni. But that’s not what caused me to panic today. It was Shvate.”

  Karni frowned, her expression changing. “What about him?”

  “As bad as I have been finding it of late, I think he is finding it much harder, Karni. He keeps it from you. He hides it because he feels responsible and guilty for making you have to go into exile for no fault of yours. So he doesn’t tell you anything or share his darker, deeper thoughts with you. But I know. I know what he’s going through. It’s bad, Karni. It’s bad, and it’s getting worse. And I’m worried now that it could make him do something rash. Something terrible. That’s what really scares me. I’m struggling—that’s hard enough. But Shvate is reaching some kind of a crisis point, and today being the first-year anniversary, I am worried that he might do something.”

  “Like what?” Karni asked sharply.

  “I don’t know,” Mayla said. “I don’t know, Karni. But I am sure he will do something. He’s like me in that respect. He can’t not do anything. His anger and frustration and guilt have to be expressed somehow. And I think he’s at his breaking point now. I’m afraid he might do something . . . drastic.”

  Shvate

  Shvate stood at the edge of the cliff, looking down at the valley far below. For as far as the eye could see, every surface of the land was covered with dense, impenetrable jungle. The rolling hills to the west, the mostly flat plains to the north and east, and behind him, there was nothing but yojanas of close-growing ancient forest in every direction. There had been a time when he had loved the jungle, had considered it his true home, a home of the heart.

  He still recalled the first time Vrath had driven his brother Adri and himself to the jungle. They were on their way to the gurukul where they were to spend the next several years of their lives in the care of the gurus, learning the vidya, scriptures, and the essential subjects necessary for any future king. It had been a gloomy time for both of them. The first time either had been away from home, from the comforts and security of Hastinaga palace, and neither had known what to expect. When Vrath had made the unexpected detour, driving the chariot off the main marg and into the jungle, weaving his way between close-growing trees over a rough, barely visible pathway, Shvate had thought they must have reached the gurukul already, for what else could be out there in such wilderness?

  Shvate remembered the thrill that had coursed throug
h him when Vrath had stopped the chariot and asked them to step down, telling them that they were going to spend the next few days there in the jungle, then asking them both what they would like to do first. Over the following days, as Vrath taught them how to hunt, how to track spoor, stay upwind of prey, read the tracks of different species, bait a line, learn where the most fish were to be found—and the thousand other little insights that were essential to becoming a good tracker and hunter—Shvate had felt as if he had never lived until then. The sheer joy and beauty of the jungle itself, this canopy of green beneath an endless sky, this palace of wonders, this kingdom of beasts, had awed and inspired him to an extent he would never have believed possible.

  He recalled the moment when he had known that the jungle was the place he most loved in the whole wide world, that instant when he had smelled the mulchy swampy odor of dead trees, animal urine, wet earth, dewy leaves, freshly blooming wildflowers, breathed the cool, damp air that enveloped him like a living breath, listened to what Vrath called the “voice of the jungle”—which to a city dweller would sound like a single droning hum but that Shvate now knew was composed of a thousand different sounds, the chittering of insects, the calling of birds, the sounds of different animals, even the sounds of water, leaves, trees, and bushes: the orchestra of life primeval—and knew in his heart that he would never again in his life be as happy as he felt in that moment, in that place.

  He sighed now and lowered his head, grieving. He mourned the loss of that Shvate, that young boy who had his whole life ahead of him, for whom anything was possible. Despite his infirmity, despite the naysayers, he had succeeded against great odds—only to crash his chariot against the stone wall of karma.