by J. S. Bangs
* * *
“Not Jaitha,” Navran said. “The other way. Any other way.” He paced back and forth along the south wall of the little guest room. The lamp hanging from a chain on the far side of the room cast his shadow on the wall in shifting, titanic proportions.
“We have to go through Jaitha,” Mandhi said, crossing her arms and leaning against a cushion. “We cannot reach Virnas before the monsoon, but we might reach Jaitha. And how else will we cross the Amsadhu?”
“Red Men are in Jaitha. I am not going there. We go south until we meet the river. Boats cross it every day.”
“Not once the monsoon starts.”
Navran spoke in a low, even voice, attempting to hide the panic in his gut. “Then we get there before the monsoon.”
“And after that? Where will we stay? There are many Uluriya in Jaitha—”
“Children,” Gocam said, “both of you are right. We must go to Jaitha, but we must not approach it from the north. We will cross the Amsadhu, and then go east until we reach Jaitha.”
Both of them gaped at Gocam for a moment. Mandhi’s tongue came untied first. “Why?” she asked.
“Ruyam is following us, and we must meet him in Jaitha. Would you have him follow us all the way to Virnas?”
The scar on Navran’s chest burned. He scratched at it then put his hand aside before Mandhi saw. “I don’t want to meet him at all,” he said.
“Yet he follows us and will not cease to follow us. So in Jaitha, I will confront him.”
A deeper and longer silence followed. Navran stopped pacing. His whole body felt cold, except for the scar on his chest.
“What are you talking about?” Mandhi asked.
“We must come from the south,” Gocam went on. “The Emperor’s Bridge crosses the boundary of Ulaur’s chosen, but does not erase it. When the empire is broken, that will be its first fracture. Am must be chastened. But it can only be done if I stand on the southern shore.”
“I don’t understand,” Mandhi said. “What are you planning on doing in Jaitha?”
Gocam looked at her with a mixture of pity and exasperation. “Do you understand so little of the Powers, child? At least you understand that the Red Men who were in Ghatmi are now marching to Jaitha. And on the way from Daijasthi to here, we saw no scrap of red.”
“We didn’t,” Mandhi said.
“So Ruyam’s plan is clear. He has given up looking for us in the mountain villages and is withdrawing the Red Men to Jaitha. He expects to capture us when we try to reach the city.”
“Then why go?” Navran spat. His arms were folded into his armpits, but he couldn’t keep them from trembling. “We cross the Amsadhu, we go straight to Virnas. Or anywhere.”
“The rains will catch us on the road,” Mandhi muttered.
“We can walk in the rain,” Gocam said. “But the fault line is in Jaitha. What I must do, I must do there. And you, Navran, you know that Ruyam will chase you. Will you have him chase you to Virnas? Or Patakshar?”
“I don’t want to be found.”
“You cannot be free while you run. We are going to Jaitha.”
It was so very hard to argue with Gocam. Even when he made no sense. Especially when he made no sense.
“Gocam,” Mandhi began again, “what is going to happen in Jaitha?”
“I don’t know. But I must meet Ruyam somewhere, and there is no better place in Amur. The Amsadhu is the fault line which breaks Amur in two, and the Emperor’s Bridge is the stitch which holds it together. Do you understand?”
Mandhi shook her head and sighed. “Let’s go to bed. In the morning we can make our obeisances to Padna-kha and be on the road.”
* * *
Padna left them with enough roti and sheep cheese to get to Jaitha—if they were going to Jaitha. They certainly weren’t going by the direct road. At the first opportunity, they turned due south and began to race the monsoon to the river.
The road, at least, was easier than the struggle through the foothills. The roads here were broad, flat, and dry, shooting like arrows through dry rice paddies that waited for the rain. The villagers they spoke to were listless and indifferent. The sun was a tyrant in the day, and the dry air was its guard. Navran kept an eye on the east, hoping and dreading to see the first shadows of the approaching rains. Hope, because it would destroy the heat, and dread, because once the rains began they could barely travel at all, and only in the greatest discomfort. He often saw Mandhi looking to the east with the same face of fear and longing.
Gocam, as usual, was immune to hope or dread, though there did seem to be a change in him. He stayed up late at night meditating, repeating mantras in a voice no louder than his breath. Sometimes when he walked to Navran’s right, the sunlight seemed to shine through him as if he were no more than mist. Sometimes Navran would look for him and wouldn’t see him at all, until a moment later when he looked again and he was there, appearing never to have moved.
And then they reached the Amsadhu.
A little village clung to the tops of the bluffs at the edge of the valley, overlooking a mosaic of gray and yellow paddies drying in the heat. Two miles off, the little brown stripe of the river wormed through the middle of the valley, waiting for the monsoon’s blessing to burst its banks, drown the paddies, and bring them back to life. Mandhi cried out in relief when she saw it, and she set off at a run down the slope that descended to the valley floor. Navran cursed and followed after her.
“Don’t run,” he snapped when he reached the bottom of the slope. “The river’s not going to flood in the next hour.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Beyond that river is something like home. Not Virnas, but at least the same land.”
Gocam descended leisurely behind them. “Is there a ferry?” he asked.
Navran grunted. “Should be someone with a raft. If not, we just follow the river until we find one.”
They followed a crooked farmer’s path between the patchwork paddies towards the river. At the river’s edge, they found a little lean-to of sticks and palm leaves shading an old man with a raft pulled up on shore and a long oar lying on the ground. “You cross?” Navran called out.
“Aye, I cross,” the man said. His accent sang in Navran’s ears.
“We’ve got no money,” Mandhi said. “Can we pay you in roti?”
The man groaned and looked at Mandhi with suspicion. “Roti but no coin? Strange way to travel.”
Navran affected the strongest valley accent he could muster, dredging up words and vowels he hadn’t used in a decade. “We’ve been on a queer walk. Thieves took our money; we’ve been getting by on pity. Thikram’s blessing, as ye say. Ye ken?”
“Aye, Thikram’s blessing.” The man looked at Navran with a curious twinkle in his eye, comparing Mandhi’s Virnas accent to Navran’s, then lumbered to his feet. “Give me what have ye. I’ll cross and ye be on the way. Ye go downriver?”
“Aye, to Jaitha. Hurrying to get there before the rain.”
The man looked to the east, as if he could already see the monsoon gathering. “Ye need a spot of luck for that. ’Tis true far before you get to Jaitha.”
“We’re hurrying.”
Satisfied, the man pushed the raft into the slow-moving, muddy water and helped Mandhi and Gocam aboard. Navran hopped onto the planking with practiced effort, and with a single lazy stroke the oarsman pushed them into the current.
Navran pointed to the south bank. “When we land, where be we? Ye knows the villages on the far shore?”
“Kadhimi where we land. After that, it’s Ravagana, then Usthan.”
He tried to hide the way his breath stuttered when the oarsman said this. None of these were names he knew, and he remembered every village between Idirja and Jaitha, and many of the ones upriver from Idirja. The fact that he knew none of these meant that they were farther upriver than he thought… and farther from Jaitha.
He glanced at Mandhi, who crouched at the edge of the raft watching the opaq
ue waters swirl. She gave no sign of having noticed. Did she even know the name of his village?
“Ye hear of Idirja?” he asked quietly. “What know ye of it?”
The man shrugged. “I heard of it, way downriver. I stay in Kadhimi. Never gone that far downriver.”
The temptation to ask further questions was nearly irresistible. But the oarsman would know nothing. And Mandhi would grow suspicious, or worse, would want to meet them. Because now that he thought of it, he had no desire to return to Idirja. He had left with a purse full of stolen money and a bad reputation. He was returning with less than that and a heavy secret besides. Returning to Idirja would only stir up the bones of the dead.
Please, for Manjur and the stars, let them reach Jaitha ahead of the rain.
They disembarked on the other shore and left the oarsman with a day’s worth of roti. “I didn’t know you were from this region,” Mandhi said as they followed the footpath between the paddies up to the village on the far side of the valley. Navran nodded as if indifferent. “Is your village nearby?”
Navran swallowed. “No,” he said. “Farther upriver. We won’t pass through it.”
* * *
They traveled ten more days before the signs of rain appeared. The setting sun lit the crowns of clouds ablaze in the east. In the morning, the air was murky with hot mist, and towers of rainclouds had begun to march across the plains. The feet of the clouds were gray with rain. A muggy wind stirred the branches of the trees.
Mandhi watched the horizon with despair written on her face. “We won’t make it. Not to Jaitha.”
Gocam shrugged. “It will rain when it rains. We go.”
“And hurry,” Navran said. They had a chance to get past Idirja, at least, and avoid disturbing his ghosts.
Their steps along the road that day had an urgency they had lacked over the past few weeks. The heat was vicious, using the growing humidity as its last weapon before it would surrender to the rain. The baked dirt beneath their feet was hot to the touch. The muggy air stuffed their nostrils with the reek of rot and choked the pleasure from their breath. But they walked quickly, and every time they paused to eat roti or take a drink from a village well, Mandhi stood with her arms crossed and urged them onwards.
The rain clouds advanced. And with it, a sense of dread, because Navran had begun to recognize the land. His birthplace was near, and every step brought them closer.
An hour before sundown, the vanguard of the monsoon overtook them. Low, heavy clouds boiled up over their heads and swallowed the sky, transforming the afternoon into a gray, misty twilight. It did not rain yet, but the air was pregnant with the downpour. Villagers gathered in the doors of their homes to watch the sky and wait for the clouds to break.
“We should stop here,” Navran said. “Who knows when the rain will start?”
Mandhi shook her head. “A little farther. What’s the next village?”
Navran’s tongue grew dry as he tried to say the name. “Idirja.”
“Is it far?”
“It isn’t too far,” Gocam said. “None of the villages here are far from each other. It will rain when it rains.”
Navran couldn’t argue about the distance to Idirja. The villages of the Amsadhu were barely distinguished at all, linked together in a nearly-continuous line on the bluffs, with boundaries determined mostly by convention. “Then we should hurry,” he said. “Get as far as we can.” There was still a chance they could get beyond Idirja.
“I’ve been saying that all day,” Mandhi grumbled. “Let’s go.”
The clouds grumbled overhead. They hurried.
The sun went down. Navran’s gut tightened into a ball. Here was a house he recognized, painted but otherwise unchanged. There was the temple to Chaludra. The air grew cooler. A little farther. A little farther. But even Mandhi was looking up at the clouds.
“Have you seen a guest-house?” she asked.
“There are none here.” Never mind how he knew that. “We have to press on.”
There was the saghada’s house, painted with a pentacle above its door. Was Judhan still the saghada in Idirja? Would he recognize Navran if he glanced outside as they passed? Navran quickened his pace.
Gocam appeared beside him, matching his pace without any apparent effort. “Navran,” he said quietly. “You cannot outrun it.”
“Outrun what?”
Gocam made a broad gesture that seemed to encompass the village, the clouds, and Mandhi.
I can try, Navran thought. But the clouds thundered twice. And with a crash, the skies opened.
The rainfall on the packed dirt road made a noise like a tiger’s roar. In a moment they were drenched, and in a moment more the road became a causeway of mud, sucking at their feet and ruining any chance they had of continuing.
Mandhi shouted to be heard over the rain. “Where can we go? Is there anything?”
Navran’s pulse quickened. “There may be.”
“What? Quickly!”
He wiped the rain from his eyes, his heart twitching and fighting itself in his chest. “I may know a place,” he said so quietly he doubted they heard it. “Follow me.”
He ran ahead of them, past a dozen houses with curtains drawn against the rain, then turned right into a side alley. It was there. It had shrunk a little from its size in his memory, and the whole house slumped to the side where the mud-bricks at the base were crumbling. But there was no mistaking it. The curtain over the front door was drawn, and the windows were dark. He walked to the front door and gathered his courage.
Mandhi ran up beside him. “What is this place?”
Navran swallowed the ball rising in his throat. “Mother!” he called out.
The curtain moved. An old woman appeared in the doorway, her skin wrinkled and cracked like sun-dried mud, her gray and silver hair drawn sloppily into an Uluriya bun. “Who are you?” she said. A moment later realization dawned. Her eyes grew wide and her mouth dropped open, her tongue lapping against rotten, betel-stained teeth. “Navran!”
She didn’t offer them any word of invitation but stared at Navran dumbly, as if he were a dream. The rain pounded.
“May we come in?” Navran asked.
She said nothing but pulled open the curtain over the door and stepped aside. Navran ducked through the doorway. The smell of the place hit him like a stone to the skull: boiled sheep’s milk, wool, hot rice, betel leaf, charcoal, palm thatch. His father’s beer flask hung from the ceiling pole, dusty and unused. Water leaked through the thatch and dribbled off of it into a puddle on the ground. Unspun wool was heaped in the corner, trailing off into a half-hearted hand spindle. A single reed mat lay on the dirt floor.
Mandhi and Gocam entered behind him. His mother gave them a short, suspicious glance, then walked up to Navran and took his face in her hands. She pulled at his beard for a moment and brushed the hair off of his forehead. “Navran. After ten years. Where have ye been?”
He looked away. Her gaze burned him as much as Gocam’s did. “All over. It’s a long story.”
“And now? Ye be here?”
His heart hammered as loud as the rain. “For a while. We were passing through when the rain started.”
She drew back and hid her hands in her skirt. “I see.” She gave Mandhi a contemptuous glance. “And this be your woman? Who is the old man?”
Mandhi made a noise of disgust. Navran answered before she could. “This is Mandhi. And Gocam, my teacher. Mandhi and I are his students.”
Mandhi’s glance at him was chilly, but she seemed to accept the story. She bowed and spread her hands. “Mandhi daughter of Cauratha. What may I call you?”
“Your teacher?” his mother said, ignoring Mandhi and looking at the rain-soaked, mud-splattered Gocam, water dribbling off of his beard onto the dirt floor. “I wonder what he teaches.” She turned away from them and put a few new sticks on the bed of coals. “You might as well sit down, though. Call me Bhundi. How long do ye stay?”
“Not long,
” Navran said. He looked at the crumbling walls and the mildewing wool. His mother was poorer than he had imagined. “You… are you well?”
“Well?” She cackled bitterly. “My husband is dead and my son….” She looked at Navran with a pained expression. “But I can card and spin wool for the khadir, so I haven’t died yet. Ye decide whether I’m well.”
“Do you have other family?” Mandhi asked brightly, as if to lighten the mood. Navran bit his lip, anticipating the response.
Bhundi cackled again. “They’re all dead. The saghada and the other Uluriya do have pity on me sometimes.”
Mandhi’s face flushed with embarrassment. “That’s good, I suppose.”
“If you call it good,” Bhundi said flatly.
They shared the damp roti from their packs with her. Navran could not bring himself to eat. The roof leaked on them. His mother asked them nothing but folded her knees against her chest and watched Navran. Her wrists and ankles were skeletal. She didn’t say anything to Navran, didn’t ask again where he had been or why he had gone, said nothing about the money he had taken and the family he had abandoned. Her gaunt face and ruined hovel was accusation enough, and he felt it like a stone in his ribs. The evening passed in miserable, awkward conversation until they slept.
Only Gocam did not sleep. He took up the Lotus position and meditated in silence, as he did every night. Except that tonight his eyes were open, and he watched Navran and Mandhi with a pained, paternal gaze.
* * *
In the morning they ate lightly. The rain had paused, though the churning gray skies promised more soon. As soon as a paltry meal was finished, Navran said to his mother, “You should come with us. We can take care of you in Virnas.”
“Wait—” Mandhi said, but Navran waved her aside.
“We’re going to Jaitha first. Traveling whenever the rain lets up. You’ll be fine.”
Bhundi folded her hands together and shook her head. “I cannot come. It’s too late for a woman my age to move to Virnas.”