The SONG of SHIVA

by Michael Caulfield

  “So, can I count on you tonight?” Nora chortled. The dolmen’s captivating spell had evidently broken for her too.

  “For what?”

  “For winning our little wager.”

  “You? The only winner here is that pony you’re riding,” Lyköan mocked with a poke at the stallion’s flank. “C’mon, it’s obvious my filly doesn’t possess the lineage of your noble steed. We never stood a chance.”

  “Blaming your defenseless horse now, Lyköan? Do I detect the odor of a poor loser’s sour grapes?”

  “It’s a noble rot, if you smell anything.”

  “So,” Nora demanded, “You plan to deliver fair and square?”

  Lyköan was confused. “Listen, I understand. Competition runs in my blood too ― though not quite as hot, I see. I intend to pay off. But what was our wager – exactly?” He had accepted the challenge only because in his entire life he’d never been able to turn one down.

  “Like I said before I lit out ‘Last one to the oak at the top of that hill delivers my acceptance speech tonight.’ You raced, you lost, so unfortunately, you owe the payoff. How’s your speaking voice?”

  She’s not serious? he thought as his horse threw her head with a coincidental whinny, adding an equine laugh track to the suddenly more obvious hilltop burlesque. The mare stuttered back in the moist grass. He pulled down roughly on the reins to steady her and replied, “Look, I’m really lousy in front of audiences, okay? I’d embarrass us both.

  “Anyway, every word I’ve heard since arriving here in Pandavasland has been the same. The whole damn world wants to hear from their medical Minerva, victress of the hour. Hail, holy queen! Wouldn’t be right to disappoint them.”

  “A bet’s a bet’” Nora pressed. “You planning on welching?”

  “They’d never accept a broken down stand-in like me.”

  “You’d be a stand in, but ‘broken down?’”

  “When the aristocracy pays their money they expects their headliner,” Lyköan offered. “Accept your sentence and let it pass. Why the reticence?”

  “The aristocracy? You mean the hoi polloi. Anyway, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Maybe not, but barring that, the best I can offer ― like I said before ― is to short a circuit and blow the lights. Not high tech, I admit, but effective. Unfortunately, after that we’d have to hightail it by moonlight or else I’m sure they’d still force you to give your ‘I’ve got so many people to thank’ speech – in the dark.”

  “Well, the perceptive Egan Lyköan does understand,” Nora breathed with relief.

  “Beg your pardon? Understand what?”

  “That I don’t deserve the attention. If you were to list everyone who’s had a part in developing the TAI magic bullet, I’d be near the end of a mighty long list. Might not even make the list. In fact, other than not knowing why he’d do such a thing, I wonder if Dr. Pandavas doesn’t have an ulterior motive for making me the figurehead discoverer of a breakthrough his scientists developed. Even the WHO micro-team has been finessed into a sideline role. In a sentence, I don’t deserve the credit ― or the praise.”

  “Maybe a case of false modesty?” Lyköan suggested.

  “Not at all. I may not be responsible for the breakthrough, but I can understand how it was accomplished ― and I know I could never have come up with the mechanism on my own. Not in another dozen years.”

  “You’re right about one thing. You’re the scientist. I’m not. I’ve got my own issues with Innovac. But like you, they’ve all broken in my favor, so how can I honestly complain?”

  “Care to explain?”

  “At the risk of exposing the magnitude of my personal shortcomings? Maybe, but only because I’ve made damn few friends so far in this debacle – and no one I entirely trust. Why not add another poison to the pot?”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, mister. In return I’ll try to be less than a lethal dose.”

  Lyköan was chagrinned. He hadn’t meant anything by the remark. “Okay, for starters, why is Innovac, one of the most successful pharma companies on Earth, wasting their time with a penny-ante operation like Lyköan IE? As you may have guessed, the name describes the outfit’s total payroll. Hell, we’re ― I’m using the imperial “we” now ― not even in their league. And yet they’ve kept me on, signed me to a lucrative contract, treated me like one of the family ― especially after I was shot. Hey, I don’t explain it, I take the money and do the best job I can.

  “And while it may sound foolish,” he went on, “I’ve had no trouble chalking it up to, let’s see ― good karma? Someone or something up there,” he pointed a finger skyward, at the same time ducking like he expected a lightning bolt, “liking and looking after me? My ship finally coming in? You name it. But none of these explanations are credible. You see now? So like I said before…”

  “You don’t look a gift horse ― like the one you’re riding ― in the mouth,” Nora interjected. “You take the money and don’t ask questions. Same as me. Only in my case I’m not being remunerated. So what’s happening to me is even more insidious. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out how I’m being harmed by it.”

  “Make you a deal,” Lyköan said with a nod and a wink. “You keep your eyes and ears open tonight, watch my backside and I’ll keep my eye on yours. Not that I haven’t already. There’s just something about Pandavas that bothers me.”

  “Why, Mr. Lyköan,” she breathed coyly, “I’m flattered ― I think.”

  “You’ve every right to be. Seriously though, you are planning to deliver that speech tonight, right? As you say, we’re probably only uneasy because of our good fortune. What’s that worth? Nothing. No harm, no foul. We can play it easy for now. Keep in touch. If it’s alright with you I’d like to do that for more personal reasons anyway. How about we get together after this wingding breaks up tonight and compare notes? See if we’ve learned anything.”

  “I’d like that. I was only teasing earlier. I’ve been working on the speech for days. Overworked it maybe. That bet business was just my attempt at stress relief. Successful for a while too. Had you going, didn’t I? Anyway, if I’m forced to play to the crowd, I intend to play my role to the hilt. The world is coming to praise Doc Carmichael ― I don’t intend to disappoint them. You’ll see.”

  “I bet I will,” Lyköan agreed.

  “I’ll deal with tonight when it arrives,” Nora said. “Right now I’d like to inspect these stones. You may think I’m crazy, but there’s something so familiar about them. This may be my only chance to get a closer look.”

  “Sure. And I agree. They’re powerful. A presence. I feel it too. We’ve got time. Let’s take that look.”

  He rode with her as she went back to circling the megalith. My, my, my, Doc Carmichael, but you do look absolutely fetching in the saddle. It even sounds as though you may harbor a reciprocating opinion of me in mine.

  But you’re too humble by half, my dear. Seize your moment. They’re rare. No matter how vehemently you may deny it ― I’m sure you’re shortchanging your contribution. Lives were saved. You played a large part in it.

  Lyköan had to admit that the last thing he would ever have wanted was a spot in the limelight. Apparently Nora felt the same. Was it human nature? He didn’t think so. Irrational though the feeling might be, he also felt some degree of impish glee seeing someone squirming in the glare of inordinate praise ― especially when that person dreaded the attention as much as this woman obviously did. Some sort of reverse schadenfreude, he wondered, joy at another’s fear of good fortune?

  “Learn to appreciate the beneficent inherent in the everyday,” Sun Shi had once said. “Accept and cherish what grief demands. Then move on. Everything changes with time. Even desire.”

  Grief might change, old man, Lyköan had responded and did so once again in the memory, as you said, even desire. People change every day. In the last four years I’ve changed plenty. But the past itself never changes. As badly as we might w
ant it to. No amount of effort is capable of satisfying that desire. Effort hasn’t worked. But might something else? Something like the present?

  Looking across at Penny orbiting the locus of the dolmen, he thought: Actually, right now’s not half bad.

  While he might not have admitted it to another person, Lyköan knew he had been smitten. For Nora, the clockwork of altered perception may have been ticking at a slower pace, but it was heading towards the same inexorable destination. That nervous klutz from the Ayutt Haya elevator, who seemed edgy and odd back in Bangkok, was being transformed.

  He certainly isn’t ugly, she thought. Not afraid of a challenge either. Interesting. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Even that self-deprecating cynicism is appealing ― almost gallant. And those eyes ― what’s really going on behind those eyes and under those ringlets, Mr. Egan Lyköan? I bet I could find out.

  Whoa! Getting a little ahead of yourself aren’t you, girl? But it would be interesting...

  Eight riders had set out from Cairncrest stables to explore the estate’s enormous acreage. Of the eight, only Nora and Lyköan were more than middling equestrians. Following a game trail that broke from the stable’s gravel road, they soon found themselves paralleling a sleepy brook meandering towards the River Avon some miles downstream.

  Nora, not content with simply plodding along, had decided on a whim, at one of the brook’s bends, to throw down the challenge to race for a certain oak barely visible above the brow of a nearby hill and taken off at a gallop. Without a second thought, Lyköan had bolted after her.

  In the space of two hundred yards, charging through the hail of hoof-thrown clods of turf flying from Nora’s horse, he had slowly closed the distance between them. On more than one occasion, flailing like a ruffled ribbon extended in a gale, the black stallion’s tail had whipped the tip of his straining mount’s nose, the ground rumbling deafeningly as the fifteen-hundred-pound animals thundered up the hillside.

  Leaning precariously over the mare’s neck, her streaming mane whipping his face, he had pulled inside just as they reached the second hedgerow. Hands too tight into the jump, the mare’s back hoofs had scrapped the pruned tops of the blackthorn and he barely cleared the far-side borrow ditch. The mare hesitated for an instant and Nora pulled two lengths ahead. Weaving between trees, jumping hedgerows and walls, galloping across the intervening hillside contours, Lyköan closed the gap half a dozen times only to have her consistently outmaneuver him at a ditch crossing or barrow transit.

  As the oak loomed larger ahead of them, he had gambled everything on a slightly different route to the tree, hoping to overtake Nora’s horse in the final hundred-yard sprint to the finish. The wind blew hard into his face, buffeting his hair tight against his skull. Fingers knotted in the reins, forearms taut, the animal panting loudly beneath him, he had passed the oak half a length out of the money.

  In a race between two horses, second place must be considered losing. But if racing was ultimately really about living, then the only possible loss was death. How long had it been since he had last felt this alive? He could remember to the day.

  How could that scene from years ago retain such clarity when these fresh events, he was certain, were already being altered by the biochemical action of consciousness? Where it specifically differed from the reality that had actually transpired he couldn’t say, for it was entirely unintentional. It was enough to know it was altered. “Don’t trust memories,” Sun Shi had warned. “They restrict forward vision.” Here we go again, Lyköan thought with a sigh.

  Back in the present, Nora looked down at the felted ground and dismounted. Standing in the sheep-cropped grass, the smell of humus thick in her nostrils, she looked up at Lyköan for an instant and told him with honest resignation, “I’ll be looking out in the audience for you tonight, knowing we share a secret. We may not know what that secret is yet, but maybe, together, we can find out – you think?”

  “Or find out we’re just paranoid and resentful because of our good fortune. Don’t think I haven’t considered that possibility too.”

  After tying the reins to a scrub oak growing from the base of one of the pylons she put her hand on the stone. Still wet from the rain, the moss covered surface produced an almost electric shock of recognition. Now she remembered where she had seen these stones before. Circling the megalith frantically on foot, she peered between the pylons half expecting to hear the crash of surf. Far off in the crisp distance, numerous hilltops away, bracketed between the dolmen cap, the dank earth and two pylon stones, back along the lazy brook’s ragged course, Cairncrest manse gleamed like a dusky jewel upon the horizon. Between here and there the green grass was so intensely brilliant it made her eyes ache.

  Lyköan came down off his horse and stood beside her. Holding the reins in one hand he asked, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He was finding the green just as painful. No one standing at this spot at this moment under these circumstances could have avoided the pain. He was suffering from other aches as well.

  “Beautiful? Maybe,” Nora said. “I remember reading somewhere that the source of beauty is a wound. Think they knew what they were talking about?”

  “I’m certain of it,” Lyköan replied, placing his free hand over the one Nora had once again placed against the pylon, her tenuous anchor to a dream.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dinner at Eight, Purgatory by Eleven

  The calculus of existence does not permit good to exist in a vacuum. Wherever it is found, there too evil exerts an equal and opposing influence. Happiness must have its anguish, darkness its light and love its hatred. In the dualistic universe, therefore, every beginning mandates an end just as every end satisfies the dictates of its beginning.

  Vanýek Sabeiha : The Path of Ha’ph Sihn

  Lyköan rocked back in his chair with a raucous laugh, free of reservation and totally unembarrassed, a booming staccato of repeating, oddly-turned vowels, rising from somewhere way down deep. Bouncing off the ornate ceiling moldings it echoed back sharply, startling him for an instant. He shrugged. In the postprandial chatter of the banquet hall the outburst hadn’t even raised an eyebrow. It had been too long since he had felt this unencumbered, so totally beyond the reach of social intimidation.

  Sitting next to him, a mid-level bureaucrat from the Thai embassy, a complete stranger before this evening, had just finished happily embellishing a less-than-flattering anecdote limning the prodigious and long-celebrated carnal appetite of the newly elected Thai Prime Minister.

  Apparently arriving late for a meeting with a visiting Chinese cultural delegation one recent morning, disheveled and reeking of hired allure after a government limousine backseat tryst, the Thai head of state had been ushered into the meeting. A perceptive Chinese delegate, in impeccable Thai, had quipped, “Your celebrated love for the Thai people is well known, your Excellency. I trust the constituent responsible for today’s delay profited from your personal attention.”

  Without blinking an eye, the consummate politician had allegedly replied, “The demands upon a public servant often must take precedence over diplomatic protocol, I’m afraid.” Refusing to be cowed by his predicament, he excused both the dalliance and his poor manners by adding, “especially when that servant is obliged to provide so much service to so many.”

  While it lost a little in the translation, the story so appropriately illuminated its subject’s brash worldliness that anyone familiar with the man’s reputation had to laugh. The young bureaucrat’s freshly scrubbed face and congenial demeanor had been deft tools, adding immensely to the deadpan delivery. Lyköan knew that Thais considered a prime minister the perfect foil for such a tale. Whether it was true or not, he was considered fair game. And the current caricature-like holder of that office presented so fine a target that such potshots seemed almost obligatory. It may have been that only someone who had spent years in country and was familiar with the target would have found the anecdote humorous, but that final quip had illuminated the sub
ject of the story perfectly. No Thai would have dared circulate a similar ribald tale about the king. There were bounds to decorum and this young man hadn’t crossed any.

  It was quintessential sanuk, that sense of “fun” Thais valued so highly ― the very core of their cultural being. Sanuk was desirable above all else, even if achieved at another’s expense ― especially at another’s expense. Lyköan was pleased to have struck such an instantaneous chord of commonality with this stranger. Normally, Thais would never denigrate their nation or culture in front of a farang.

  This guy must feel comfortable with me, Lyköan thought. Winning the young man’s confidence was a wonderful denouement to an absolutely perfect day. Or maybe it was the combination of ethanol and an abundance of negative ions. The reason didn’t matter.

  Lyköan leaned forward, placing all four chair legs back on the floor and surveyed the room. He was seated at a table along the dining room’s exterior wall, his back to a line of tall Palladian windows. An immense centerpiece, containing every imaginable horticultural hue and fragrance available from the English August, blocked his view of the middle of the room, but it also shielded him from full exposure. Overhead, a sea of chandeliers cast scintillating highlights twinkling off crystal and polished silver.

  Through one of the tall windows, he watched as the last velvet of dusk played across the southern sky. In the gathering darkness, the twilight waltz of fireflies was dancing through the landscaped grounds like a flickering infusion of absolute tranquility. Around the room the sonorous rumble of after dinner chatter rolled like summer thunder, kilometers away and nonthreatening.