“You’re going to the cave, aren’t you?” He kicked a pebble with his toe.
“Well, I did come all this way to see a rare creature. I don’t mind going a little farther to find one.”
“You won’t see the demon. I heard there was a rockslide years ago. The cave is blocked. And besides, it would anger the mountain spirit. It might dry up the river again.”
Asha nodded. She reached into the small pouch on her belt and brought out a small sliver of ginger root, which she poked into the corner of her mouth. “Well, if I see any spirits, I’ll be sure to be very polite to them.” She winked at him, and he frowned at her.
3
For two days she hiked upstream following the winding river higher and higher into the forest hills. And for two days she only saw and heard more of the same forest all around her. The same fish and frogs in the water, the same birds and monkeys in the canopy. As the earth dried out, more subtle fragrances began to drift on the breeze. She could taste the sweet nectar of the flowers and the savory oils in the nuts as she walked beside the river.
On the third day she reached the foot of the mountain. Looking up, she could trace the path of the river tumbling down over the rocks from pool to pool, half-hidden by the trees.
The trees.
“Maybe there are spirits here after all.”
The trees were like none she had ever seen before. She guessed that most were as thick as she was tall. As she stood there in the early morning light marveling at the towering trunks, she saw that there were no seedlings, no saplings, no small trees of any kind. Only giants stood on the mountain, pillars fit to hold up the heavens themselves.
Rough brown bark covered the trunks, wrinkled and pitted and folded so deep that she could slip her entire hand into the grooves of it all the way to her wrist. But looking up, it was not the brown of the trunks that colored the mountain wood but the dark green of the vines. The vines wound around and over every branch and limb and hung in countless slack arcs between them overhead. She saw no beginnings or endings to them at all, just the curving loops and lines and bands everywhere she looked.
As she stared up at the silent giants, Asha gently petted the tiny mongoose on her shoulder. “Is this what it feels like to be as small as you, I wonder?”
She started up the mountain path and soon had to stop looking at the trees altogether to stop the bouts of vertigo. Chewing her ginger slivers and keeping her eyes on the ground, she climbed slowly up the mountain.
The stream gurgled and gushed from ledge to pool to ledge, splashing over the rocks and carrying the odd leaf or twig downstream. After a time, Asha noticed that there were no sticks or branches lying on the ground anywhere. Nothing larger than her finger could be seen on the ground and she chanced a quick look up again. It was the vines. The vines had so thoroughly covered the tree limbs that even if a branch died or broke free, it would only dangle from the endless net of vines wrapped about it.
At noon she stopped to rest and soak her feet in a pool. Broad green leaves floated on the surface of the water around the edges where the current was slowest, and here and there among them she saw delicate white lotus blossoms standing above the rippling surface.
As evening fell, she circled yet another massive tree at the water’s edge and climbed up a rocky path beside a small waterfall to find an earthen ledge blessed by a small patch of sunlight piercing the canopy. A small white-haired langur stood on the ledge, twitching his tail. He had a black face and red eyes.
Jagdish squeaked in Asha’s ear.
“I know. I see him.” She stroked the mongoose’s head beside her ear. “But I don’t think he’s here to eat you.”
She stepped away from the tree, holding out one empty palm toward the small monkey. He scampered away up the slope beside the mountain stream, and Asha followed. At the next pool she found the langur sitting on a boulder beside the water, flicking his white tail back and forth across the rock. The sky above the canopy had faded to dusky violet and a cool wind blew through the leaves. The mountain trees shivered and sighed.
Asha looked past the monkey to the face of the mountainside. The stream went no farther. What little water flowed here emerged from a few cracks between the tumbled stones on the far side of the pool. “Looks like there really was a rockslide.”
At the edge of the stream seeping under the fallen stones, she knelt and stuck one of her ginger slivers in the muddy soil. “If there are any mountain spirits here, I hope they like ginger.”
She found a patch of soft grass in the lee of a stone to spread her wool blanket and she lay down in the deepening shadows with Jagdish murmuring in her ear.
The langur stretched out on top of his rock to sleep, and Asha closed her eyes.
4
When Asha woke in the morning, the langur was gone and a pile of stones had been pushed away from the mountainside toward the pool. The opening in the rock wall was just wide enough for her to enter if she ducked her head a bit. Inside she could see nothing, but she heard the trickling of the water echoing over and over again in the darkness.
“Are you coming?” Asha looked back at the langur, now sitting on a stone a few paces away that had been bare a moment earlier. The monkey blinked. Asha nodded. “Yeah, I don’t blame you.”
There was nothing lying close at hand to make a torch, so she squinted as she ducked inside the cave. The floor was carpeted in soft, bare earth and the stone walls on either side were lined and grooved with narrow ledges in which she could feel more warm soil with tiny, fragile sprigs growing in them. Mushrooms, she guessed.
The tunnel ran straight back into the mountain and every few seconds she stepped in the muddy edges of the stream that wound its way across the floor in deep channels of clay and sand. The water tinkled softly as it rolled over on itself in the corners of the channel, running swiftly through the dark. Behind her, the entrance to the cave was a bright blue disc in the blackness that shrank bit by bit with each step she took.
Her eyes adjusted and then adjusted again, picking out fainter and fainter lines and shapes in the deep shadows. But then her eyes failed her altogether and Asha was forced to slow her progress, tracing the tunnel wall with her hand and probing the floor ahead with her foot. The sounds of running and falling water echoed higher and deeper and longer here in the tunnel, hiding the source of the noises.
After half an hour, her outstretched foot felt smooth, cold stone. Two more steps carried her out of the tunnel and the wall at her side abruptly curved away. Her instinct was to follow the wall, but she could see something now, a faint glowing shape far ahead. Moving even slower than before, she continued toward the light.
Five more paces brought her to the edge of a cold pool. The stone and sand at the water’s edge sloped down gradually, so she lifted the bottom of her sari and waded out into the pool. The cold water stung her bare skin, but the bottom underfoot was soft and rippled gently with the contours of the mountain stone beneath.
Up ahead, the illuminated object became clearer. It was a mound rising above the surface of the pool in a rough conical shape, though its outline seemed to ruffle and bulge irregularly.
Something brushed Asha’s leg and she looked down at the pale lotus blossom perched above the water by her knee. Looking up again, she realized that all of the faint glimmers in the dark were lotuses standing silent watch over the dark pool.
“Hello?” Her voice echoed softly again and again, far out into the distance and even farther up overhead.
When she reached the mound, she found it was actually a pillar rising sharply from the floor of the pool that allowed her to walk up to its edge while still standing waist deep in the cold water. The lotus leaves and blossoms clustered thickest here around the pillar and the jumbled mound on its top.
Asha explored the shape of the mound with her fingers, her eyes still struggling to see by the faint streaks of light falling from a narrow crack in the cavern’s roof. She felt the thick vines curling around the pillar and
over the mound. Her fingers encountered huge leaves on stiff stalks every so often and they rustled softly as she brushed against them. Here and there among the leaves she found more lotus blossoms, all open wide to display their golden seed heads.
Standing in the cold water, she could feel the heat coming from the vines, and even the leaves and flowers radiated a slight warmth. The stone pillar itself was warm to the touch.
Asha slipped her hands under and over the vines, poking blindly into the dark places underneath, trying to feel out what was forming the shape of the mound.
“Ah!” She jerked her hand back. She had felt something softer than stone, softer than the firm leathery vines, as soft as the lotus petals themselves. Asha reached out and parted the vines, and the pale light from the cavern’s roof fell on the face of a young woman.
Her eyes and mouth were closed in an expression of perfect serenity, and as far as Asha could see the woman was not breathing. A thick mass of black hair fell from her head to the stone pillar on which she sat, all twisted and intertwined with the heavy green vines. She sat with her legs crossed and her hands resting palm-up in her lap. Her right hand was closed.
The woman exhaled.
Asha stumbled back in the cold water, staring.
“Hello,” the woman said slowly. “Thank you.”
Asha blinked. “For what?”
“For this.” Her right hand opened to reveal a muddy sliver of ginger.
“Oh. You’re welcome.” Asha felt Jagdish trembling on her shoulder, his tiny claws digging into her skin. “You’re the nun, aren’t you? You came to see the demon in the cave two hundred years ago.”
“Yes.” Her words shuddered on her thin breaths as though the air was being gently forced through an old bellows. “My name is Priya.”
“I’m Asha.” She moved closer to the pillar again and peered at the nun’s face. Her skin was gray and smooth. “You’re not like any ghost I’ve ever seen before.”
“Ah. Perhaps because I’m still very much alive.”
“After two hundred years?” Frowning, Asha touched the woman’s wrist and after long moment of waiting, she felt a single weak heart beat. And several moments later, a second. “This is incredible. How is this possible?”
“I can tell you the whole story from the beginning, if you like.”
“Sure.” Asha crept up onto the stone pillar at the woman’s feet, and pulled her legs out of the cold water. “I’ve got time for another story.”
5
“I entered the monastery when I was very young,” Priya said. “I don’t remember my parents or where I lived before that. I studied and worked, mostly copying manuscripts. Life was good, except for some of the younger monks. They did not approve of women living in the monastery and they would find quiet ways to harass us. Dirtying our robes, spilling our food, and so on.”
Asha nodded. “I’ve heard stories like that before. Some monks still disapprove of nuns.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Priya. “Lord Buddha was reluctant at first to admit nuns into the sangha, but only to protect them from dangerous men. He thought some people would not accept the ordination of women. Obviously, he was wise to be so concerned.”
Asha shrugged. “You can’t expect too much of people. They’re only human, after all.”
The nun smiled, slowly spreading her lips against her stiff and smooth cheeks. “Truer words were never spoken. Eventually, the tensions between us and the young monks reached a breaking point. I awoke one night to find the house in flames and my sisters screaming. Those of us who escaped out into the night ran right into the waiting arms of several men. They were masked so I can’t be sure whether they were monks or outsiders. They beat us with sticks and chased us from the monastery through the city streets. For the first few minutes, I managed to keep a few steps ahead of them with two of my sisters by hiding in alleys under trash, dirty blankets, and rotting planks.”
“You must have been frightened.”
“The most frightened I had ever been. We ran and hid, ran and hid, all night long. Whenever we looked back, we saw the fire in the monastery and the smoke blotting out the stars. And then, sometime late in the night, I turned and discovered that I had lost my sisters, or they had lost me. It amounted to the same thing. I was alone.”
“What did you do?” Asha asked.
“I walked on. It was quieter then and I didn’t see the men again. I was very tired, but still so afraid. I kept walking all night, right out of the city into the hills. And the next day, I kept walking,” Priya said. “I survived on what charity was given to me. I had nowhere to go. I knew no one in the world except at the monastery, but I didn’t dare go back. I don’t know why I kept walking, but I did. Eventually I came to a small town where an elderly monk tended a shrine alone and he allowed me to stay with him for a while. He was a very kind man.”
“You were lucky. You could have died on the road.”
“Yes, I could have.” Priya’s fingers shuddered and her hands moved to her knees. She inhaled and exhaled slowly. “About a year later, a new family arrived in the town and they came to visit the shrine. They said they had been forced to flee their village because a demon had swallowed their river.”
“So you went to cleanse the demon?”
“No. There’s no such thing as demons,” the nun said softly. “But I did come to see the truth of the matter. It was the least I could do for those people. The monk at the shrine was too old for the journey, but I was still young and strong, and to be honest, I was feeling less than useful to him. So I set out for the village. I saw the graves of the man who returned from the mountain, and then I climbed the mountain and found this cave.”
“Did you see the creature that killed the men from the village?”
“No. When I entered this chamber, I found a small girl standing here on this stone altar.”
Asha glanced down at the pillar they were sitting on. “Altar?”
“Yes. This is where the village elders offered their goats to the mountain each spring.”
Asha winced. “What was she? The girl you saw?”
“She was a ghost. A real ghost. I had heard of such things, of course, but I had never seen one before. Here in the dark, in the cold still air, the aether was thick enough for her to be seen and heard. She told me that she was the daughter of one of the elders.”
“He killed her? A human sacrifice?” Asha asked, her hand curling into a fist.
“No, he did not kill her. During the winter, the girl fell ill and died quietly in her sleep. But her father didn’t cremate her. He preserved her body until the spring and then brought her here instead of the usual offering. Perhaps he didn’t think the mountain spirit would care what he left, as long as he left something. After all, the goat would feed his family for days. I’m sure it seemed very reasonable to him.”
Asha shook her head. “Some people don’t think at all.”
“Don’t judge them too harshly. Here in the wilderness, these sorts of traditions and rituals can give people great peace of mind, even if they seem fruitless or even senseless to others,” Priya said.
“I don’t mean that!” Asha rubbed her eyes. “Even out here in the middle of nowhere, people should know better than to abuse a body. He should have known what would happen to his daughter’s ghost if he didn’t burn or bury her properly.”
“You come from the north, don’t you?”
Asha nodded.
“Well, here in the south ghosts are rare. They aren’t seen. They aren’t spoken of. At the monastery, I don’t believe I ever heard a single story about ghosts, but tales of the local spirits and gods were common enough.”
“The difference being that ghosts are real. So what happened when you met the girl?”
Priya sighed and her whole body shifted, tugging at the vines wrapped around her and shaking the leaves and blossoms. “She told me how she awoke here in this cave, in the dark, all alone. She didn’t understand that she was dead
because she was lying on this altar, with the sunlight streaming down from the roof of the cavern. But when she sat up, she saw her own body lying cold and still on the stone. It terrified her, and she ran away, ran all the way down the tunnel. But when she came to the exit, the heat and the light of the sun began tugging apart the aether of her ghostly form. There was a brief moment when she stood on the threshold, staring down at the pale outline of her fingers as the midday breeze teased them apart like spider silk or smoke. And then she ran back inside, into the darkness.”
“Poor girl,” Asha said. “If she’d risen from a proper grave, she would have understood. And if she’d been placed where it was warm, she never would have risen at all.”
Priya nodded, the white blossoms in her hair glowing softly in the dark. “She was filled with rage at her father, and terror at what she had become. She didn’t understand what had happened at all. I’m not even sure if she truly understood that she was dead. Perhaps she thought she’d been cursed or transformed into a demon. But her soul sank down into the earth here, into the roots, and her madness spread to all the living things on this mountain. She made the trees drink up the river to punish her father. That’s why they grew so tall.”
Asha nodded. “And what about the creature that killed the men from the village?”
“There is no creature. Not really,” Priya said. “When the men came, the girl lashed out with the only thing at hand. These lotus blossoms. The roots are extensive, filling this chamber and the tunnel, and covering half the mountainside. She twisted the lotus roots as she twisted the trees, and the flowers choked the life from the men. The one who escaped was stabbed with a seed that grew inside his body, killing him slowly from within.”
Asha tugged her right earlobe. “I see. And the ghost told you all this?”
“No. I learned this later. When I first arrived, all I knew was that there was a soul in this cave, tormented and terrified. So I came inside and sat on this stone, and began to meditate.” Priya reached up to gently caress the vines embracing her body. “When I awoke the next morning, these were wrapped around me, holding me up and keeping me warm. They even feed me, somehow. In the days and weeks that followed, I came to know the girl and her pain, and the missing pieces of her story. In return, I taught her peace and contentment. Together, we returned balance to the mountain and let the river flow once more.”
Chimera The Complete Duet Page 2
