by Dave Butler
A bullet struck Charlie, knocking him to the floor.
“You okay, mate?” Bob asked him.
“Just dented, I think.” Charlie stood. “We need to go now!”
Papa Wilhelm flickered, disappeared. He reappeared again, but his light was much dimmer, a cloud of gray fog rather than bright white light. “Now!” the phantasm shouted.
Ollie looked at Bob and shook his head. “Bob, mate, I’m so sorry.”
“This is not the time, Ollie!” Bob grabbed Ollie’s hand and dragged him into the Library Machine.
Charlie jumped through last of all.
Except that as he came through the gate and landed in a heap on paving stones in a tropical garden, he felt that one more person had come through with them.
Papa Wilhelm, gray and blurring, looked down at him with smiling eyes. “Goodbye, Charlie.”
Then Papa Wilhelm was gone.
Thunder crashed. A hot, wet wind shook the garden, and a ring of long, curving swords sprang up around Charlie and his friends.
A thick wash of rain hit Charlie in the face.
He raised his hands over his head in surrender, and the others followed suit.
Gnat threw herself underneath a broad green leaf, dodging the rain. Before Charlie could say anything about the men with swords helping her get inside, the rain striking him stopped and was replaced by a heavy drumming sound.
He looked up and saw a glass ceiling in the form of overlapping blades. They all sprouted out of the top of a large pole in the center of the garden, and as the rain fell, they unfolded downward, creating a shelter from the storm.
The men with swords wore their hair wrapped in navy-blue scarves, and on their feet they had long black shoes, decorated with gold stitching. A thin man with large hands and a thick mustache was speaking. After a few initial words, the Babel Card sorted out his speech for Charlie. “The rajah wishes to see you.”
“I understand,” Charlie and Thomas said at the same time.
“The rajah wants to see us,” Charlie added as an aside to his friends.
“What’s a rajah?” Bob asked. She stood at the far side of the group from Ollie, and her arms were crossed over her chest. She didn’t look angry, Charlie thought, but confused and…sad.
“A king or a prince,” Charlie said.
“Right.” Ollie straightened his peacoat and brushed raindrops off his hat. “That’s just who we want to see.”
“You are English,” the man with big hands said, switching to English himself. “Are you company men?”
Charlie remembered the stories his bap had told him, about the traders and soldiers of the East India Company. Sometimes it seemed as if those men were allies, friends, and trading partners with the princes of India, but sometimes it seemed—though Bap had never been one to dwell on unpleasant details—as if the relationship were darker than that.
Charlie had always identified with the company men. Suddenly, he wasn’t so sure.
More to the point, he wasn’t sure it was safe to be English here.
“We’re from all over,” he said. “Gnat’s a fairy. Thomas is Welsh. Meneer Doktor Professor Ingenieur Jan Wijmoor…I think he’s Dutch, but he lives in Germany.”
“I am a kobold,” Wijmoor added. He seemed to have regained his composure a little. “Of the Marburger Syndikat, of course in Germany.”
“I’m English!” Ollie jerked a thumb at his own chest.
“Might as well own it,” Bob added slowly. “So am I.”
“I am the captain of the rajah’s bodyguard,” the big-handed man said. “Follow me now, please.”
The captain went first, followed by Charlie and his friends, and then finally by the rest of the bodyguards, who never put their swords away. As they left the garden, Charlie heard a sudden rustling sound in the thick fronds to his right.
He thought of the presence he had felt, as if one more person than planned had come through the Library Machine with them. But he looked, and saw nothing.
“The garden is lovely,” he said to the captain.
“It is called the Bibighar Garden,” the captain said. “The rajah’s father built it, and when it rained, he liked to stand out in the weather and get soaked. The rajah wished to protect the plants from the worst of the storms, so he built the pavilion.” The captain pointed up at the glass covering, which was fully extended now and shielded all the garden from the tempest.
“Where I come from, it rains most of the time,” Thomas said. “But if you protect the plants from the rain, won’t they dry up and die? Don’t they need the water?”
The captain turned to look at Thomas. His eyes glittered, and Thomas staggered sideways two steps, but when the man spoke, his voice was gentle. “In mild rains, the shield is not opened. And rain is always collected in cisterns and fed to the plants as they need it. As a result, the plants prosper. They grow and produce all year round, rather than for a short season.”
There was machinery and invention, benefiting people. Or at least benefiting gardens.
“So it must not always rain so much,” Charlie ventured.
“It does not,” the captain agreed. “But it is the beginning of the rainy season now, and we have weeks of storms ahead of us. You English have borrowed the word monsoon from Arabic to describe this weather.”
“My father was from the Punjab,” Charlie said.
“Ah.” The captain nodded. “You didn’t tell me that.”
From the garden and its pavilion they passed into a long walkway. A roof upheld by two rows of columns kept the direct rain from soaking them, but the wind blew water sideways. Gnat flew high over Charlie’s head, close to the walkway’s ceiling, to stay dry and protect her wings.
The walkway led them into a palace. As they approached, Charlie looked through the arches enclosing him to note the white-plastered walls, the onion-shaped domes atop the towers, and the crenellations on top of the highest walls. The palace had no windows for its lower two or three stories, which suggested it was a fortress, and when Charlie and his friends passed from the walkway into the palace, they did so through a pair of double doors whose wood was thicker than Charlie’s chest and banded with iron.
Two flights of steps and a final broad hallway led them into a reception room. Here a man wearing a long yellow coat stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the storm through open doors and a balcony. The yellow coat had elaborate red stitching about the waist and shoulders, and that embroidery was the man’s only decoration. He wore red slippers whose toes curled up so much they pointed back at him, and his thick black hair was cut short; his head was bare; he smelled of flowers and cinnamon.
“Thank you, Captain,” the man in yellow said in English. “You may send the others to their usual posts. Please remain here.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The captain saluted and waved to his men, who left.
The room was large but simple, and it was dominated by a library. Shelves ran up walls that must have been fifteen feet high and groaned from the weight of all the books that sat on them. A table near the center of the room held a short stack of red-bound volumes, and several additional books lay open, with inkpots, knives, compasses, and other small objects weighing down their pages.
The man in yellow—the Rajah Amir Singh, presumably—turned to face Charlie. He was fairer and taller than Charlie’s father, but Charlie couldn’t resist making his connection with the prince. “My name’s Charlie,” he said. “My father is from the Punjab. His name was Joban Singh.”
He hadn’t expected the rajah to light up and announce their near relation, but he was nevertheless disappointed by the prince’s understated response. “Singh is a common name here. It means ‘lion.’ All Sikh men share that same last name.”
“All Sikh men?” Charlie was only dimly aware of what a Sikh was. “Are your men
Sikh too?” he asked.
“They are also all named Singh.” The rajah nodded. “Carrying their famous swords and wearing their dastars—their turbans, you would say.”
“Shouldn’t you also have a dastar, then?” Charlie asked. “And a sword?”
Jan Wijmoor cleared his throat at length, and the captain stepped forward as if to seize Charlie, but the rajah raised a hand to restrain him.
And then the rajah smiled. “How direct.”
“Sorry.” Charlie shrank a little. “I sometimes don’t know when I’m being rude.”
The rajah paced, but he kept his eyes fixed on Charlie. “It is true, many people would find such questions rude. I do not. I was born a Sikh—Sikhism is a religion, and also a culture, a people—and so I am named Singh.”
“So my father must have been a Sikh.”
The rajah shook his head. “Not necessarily. People who are not Sikh may be named Singh. But if your father came from this land, then perhaps.”
Charlie sighed. “But even if that’s true, the name Singh won’t help me find anything about him at all. All men are named Singh, so I can’t know who my family are.”
The rajah cocked his head to one side and frowned. “Or…all men are your family.”
The prince’s words struck Charlie so hard, he had nothing to say.
“I am Sikh, but here in the land of five rivers, in Mayapore, in my country, many people are Hindu, and many more are Muslim,” the rajah continued. “Do you know these religions?”
Charlie shook his head, still mute. His father had said very little to Charlie about religion.
“It doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say, each has its attractive face. Each has distinctive practices and teaches a unique path to walk in this life, and maybe in the next. Each teaches important truths and principles.”
“That sounds good,” Charlie said. “Truths and principles.”
“Does it? I don’t like principles much,” the rajah continued. “Principles cause people to sacrifice. They may sacrifice themselves, which can be very noble, but can also be tragic. Worse, principles may lead one to sacrifice others, which can be quite monstrous. Principles may lead a person to refuse to eat dinner with his neighbor, or refuse to trade with him, or become angry if his daughter wishes to marry his neighbor’s son.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. Could principles also lead someone to join the Iron Cog? If you believed strongly enough in principles, maybe you would think it was acceptable to force other people to follow them.
Might you be willing to kill other people, to force them to follow?
“All in all,” the rajah continued, “I would like fewer principles and more love. Any principles or practices that tell a person to choose God above his neighbor, I find unacceptable. And do you know what, Charlie?”
Charlie shook his head. He felt frozen in place.
“I think God finds it unacceptable too. And I will not wear a dastar or carry a sword, because although those things would tell my Sikh subjects that I am one of them—and this is true—it would tell my Muslim and Hindu subjects that I am not one of them…which is false. For this I am called heretic, unbeliever, sinner, infidel, and worse.” The rajah shrugged. “So be it.”
Charlie was silent. Rajah Singh and Rabbi Rosenbaum hadn’t said exactly the same thing, but they had said similar things. He thought the two of them would get along well.
“You’re a brave person,” Thomas said.
“It’s easy to be brave when I am surrounded by men with guns and swords who defend me.” The rajah addressed Charlie again. “A light was spotted in my garden, a flickering light, full of smoke, and then people came through it. You people, in fact. To ask me such questions, you must be a stranger to my lands—why, then, are you here?”
“We came looking for the nail of the intellectual world,” Ollie announced proudly.
The rajah shook his head. “What is that?”
Charlie’s shoulders slumped.
“You may not know the nail, but you know the vessel it was built into,” Bob said. “The Pushpaka chariot, the great pride of Viswakarman, archaeologist of heaven.”
“Architect, Bob.” Ollie grinned. “I looked that one up in the Almanack for my mate.”
Bob looked uncomfortable and stepped slightly away from Ollie.
“Of course,” the rajah said, “but I don’t see how you can possibly reach the Pushpaka chariot now.”
“Why not?” Charlie asked.
“It’s underwater.” The rajah pointed out the window as lightning flashed and the rain came down even harder. “And getting deeper underwater by the minute.”
They rode forth from the palace on elephants.
Each beast was guided by a mahout, a rider sitting behind its head. Each beast also had a canopy on its back, in which the rajah and Charlie’s party sheltered, four people to each elephant. The canopies stopped the rain that fell down on them from the sky above, but did nothing to stop the rain that blew sideways onto them in hot sheets.
The rajah, Charlie, Gnat, and Bob rode on the first beast. Gnat was sheltering inside a large wicker basket to get protection from the water on all sides. As soon as she had seen that there was one space left on the first elephant, Bob had leaped up the stepladder beside the creature’s belly without a word.
Avoiding Ollie.
Nine elephants carried the riders. Four additional elephants in the rear were burdened with large unmarked crates.
“Does this Pushpaka chariot belong to you, then?” Bob asked.
The rajah laughed. “No, it belongs to no one now. Once, it belonged to the demon lord Ravana. When he was shot down in battle, the chariot smashed a very deep hole in the earth.”
“I don’t really think of flying things when I hear the word chariot,” Charlie said.
“No?” Rajah Amir Singh smiled. “And yet the sun was said by the Greeks to ride a chariot. Have you not read the story of Phaethon?”
Charlie shrugged.
“That’s where you’re taking us, then?” Bob asked. “An ’ole?”
“No, no.” The rajah pointed along the side of the stone road over which his elephants tramped. “Tell me what you see there, young lady.”
No one corrected him. Bob had simply, with minimal fuss, become a girl.
Bob leaned over the edge of the canopy and squinted. “Water. In a long stream, flooding over its banks.”
“And does the stream look natural?” the rajah pressed.
“No,” Bob admitted, “it’s much too straight for that. You’re talking about irritation, then?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You mean irrigation, Bob,” Charlie said.
“Course I do. This is rainy season now, so it’s cats and dogs everywhere you look, an’ it feels like the water will never end. But when dry season comes, this place’ll parch like a desert. So you get water around by irritation ditches. Which are right now overflowing, on account of the rain.”
“Correct. In the dry season, we bring water down from the mountains. And in the rainy season, we try to capture all the water we can in deep wells.”
“ ’Oles in the ground,” Bob said.
“Yes. Perhaps not such as you imagine, but yes. And now we use pumps to bring water out of those wells and supplement the flow of water in the irrigation ditches with it. In the old days, in the dry season, you went to the well for water.”
“And let down a bucket?” Bob asked.
“No.” The rajah smiled.
“This was before pumps, though.” Bob looked puzzled. “What, then? The screw of Archimedes?”
Charlie wasn’t entirely sure Archimedes was the right word, but he didn’t know what Bob meant, so he didn’t correct her. He looked back for his friends and saw Ollie, struggling to keep Jan Wijmoor from falling off
the back of their elephant. The kobold was fascinated by the canopy and was examining it, but his investigations kept carrying him too close to the edge.
“You will understand shortly.” Rajah Singh nodded at the road ahead and a low, wide brick building, with brick towers at its corners. “We are arriving. But the point is that the well you are about to see was originally formed by the crashing of the demon lord Ravana’s chariot into the ground. This chariot, or vimāna, was known as Pushpaka. The annals of my kingdom Mayapore tell us all this.”
Bob nodded. “Yeah, I reckon that’s what Ollie read me out of the Almanack. Back when you were up at the castle, Charlie.”
They reached the building. The rajah whistled and the elephants came to a halt. The rajah himself climbed down first, taking along an umbrella from the elephant’s palanquin and popping it open to keep the worst of the rain off himself.
Charlie did the same. The umbrellas were red and yellow and made of silk, so they didn’t have the same mineral smell as the oiled-paper umbrellas Grim Grumblesson had had them use in London. Counting his friends to be sure they were all there, Charlie saw Gnat huddled under Ollie’s umbrella, clinging to the sweep’s shoulder to stay out of the rain.
Bob ignored Ollie.
The captain of the rajah’s bodyguard seemed to have a brother in the regiment, another man with the same face and mustache, who climbed down off the back of one of the last elephants.
“This way.” The rajah strolled through an open gate in the large brick building, and Charlie followed.
He found himself in a brick courtyard. The rain falling on the brick sounded like a cannonade. In the center of the courtyard was a pavilion, also of brick, and under the pavilion a crowd of people gathered around a cluster of pipes. The pipes sprouted from the ground, curved earthward, and emitted a steady stream of water. As they drew closer, Charlie saw that the water fell through metal grates in the brick and disappeared.
The people held large skins and clay pots, and they were collecting water. They weren’t gathered in one crowd, Charlie now saw, but in three, with a clear aisle of empty space between the groups.