Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “A few hours later, that man died.” The mother turned to inspect the bubbles in the kettle.

  Asha nodded. “But then something happened to his body, didn’t it?”

  “Yes. It was raining too hard to cremate him then, so they buried his body at the top of a steep bank overlooking the river, but soon all the plants and trees nearby began to wither and die. The villagers dug up the body and found it bloated and rotting far faster than it should have, crumbling and falling apart, with little green shoots growing up through his leg where the demon bit him. So they built a pyre far back in the woods, sheltered from the rain, and burned the body there, and then they heaped earth and stones on the ashes. After that, the poison seemed to disappear from the earth and the plants and trees recovered, and for a brief season there were lotus blossoms in the woods, far from the water.

  “But the river was still only a stream, and without the fish many of the villagers began to move away. Some went down the river, but most cut across the forest. They said they would never go near these waters again. The few who stayed in the village lived off the land, struggling to find fruit or hunt for frogs and birds. Those were lean years.

  “Several years later, the story of the demon in the cave had spread as the people moved out and settled their families in other villages. All manners of travelers, soldiers, and priests began passing through the village to see the demon for themselves. Some of these people stayed in the village for a day or two, visited the survivor’s two grave sites, and then left. Others climbed the mountain in search of the cave. None of them returned.” She poured the steaming water over the crushed leaves and the aroma of the steeping tea filled the hut.

  Asha stroked the mongoose in her lap. His thick fur was warm and soft, and he nestled against her, curling up tightly on her belly. “And this was all two hundred years ago?”

  “Nearly two hundred, so they say. After a while, the travelers stopped coming. But then, about ten years after they burned the survivor’s body, a young woman came to the village. She was a nun from Kolkata. She wore a saffron robe, and despite her shaven head, she was very beautiful. At least, that’s how the story is told,” the mother said. “Women are always beautiful in stories.”

  “Of course they are.” Asha smiled. “Most stories are told by men.”

  The mother did not smile back. “The nun didn’t stay long in the village. She visited the two graves and then she went up the river.”

  “Let me guess. She didn’t come back either?”

  “No, she didn’t. But a few weeks later when the monsoons came, the river swelled and rose. The villagers began catching fish and prawns again, not as large as before but enough to sustain them. There was no more talk of leaving and the village has been here ever since just as you see it now.”

  “I see.” Asha stared through the narrow gaps in the leaf curtain at the dark rain rushing down through the forest outside. “I’d like to stay here tonight, if that’s all right. I want to see the two graves before I leave in the morning. I think the rain will stop before sunrise.”

  The mother sipped her tea. “How do you know?”

  Asha watched the rain fall outside. “It sounds like it will stop soon.”

  The next morning the sun rose over a silent forest and Asha stepped out of the hut to see the early morning light streaming through the leaves overhead to paint the earth in brilliant greens and rich browns. Water still dripped and pattered from the branches and fronds, but the all-consuming shushing of the falling rain was gone. Asha could hear the river gurgling around stones and roots, and she heard the frogs and lizards dashing through the undergrowth along its banks. Above her, the monkeys leapt and chattered, and the birds fluttered and flitted from branch to branch. The little mongoose called Jagdish wrapped itself around the back of Asha’s neck, huddled within the veil of her unbound hair, warming her skin. “It’s nice to be able to hear myself think again,” she said.

  Kishan stepped out beside her, his bare feet slapping on the soft mud. “You want to see the graves, right? I’ll show you.”

  They walked upstream, picking their way around the large stones at the water’s edge. The rocks were warm and smooth underfoot. Just as the village passed out of sight behind them, they came to a bend in the river and Kishan led the way up the bank to a grassy bluff overlooking the rippling waters.

  “Here.” He pointed to a depression in the shadow of an old twisted tree. “This is where they buried him the first time.”

  Asha knelt and dragged her fingertips across the soft soil, listening. The grass was sparse and yellow, the tree roots dry and frail. “Whatever happened here, it’s gone now. Everything’s gone now. Even the worms.”

  Kishan shrugged and led her east away from the river. They descended a gentle slope and soon came to a clearing where several large flat rocks sat in a circle of tall grass.

  “The pyre?” Asha paced across the rocks.

  Kishan nodded. “They say it burned from dusk to dawn. And it stank.”

  “Did it now?” she said softly. A monkey cried out in the distance and a second one answered. A warm breeze played through the leafy canopy and for a few moments all the trees in the forest sighed and whispered their secrets to one another. Jagdish shivered on her shoulder and clutched the folds of her sari in his claws.

  Kishan leaned back against a green sapling that bowed under his weight. “So where will you go now? Back to the city?”

  She wondered which city he meant. “Actually, I think I’ll wander up the river a bit farther and see what else there is to see.”

  “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.

  * * *

  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 an
d 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.

  * * *

  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 l
egs out of the cold water. “I’ve got time for another story.”

  * * *

  “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.”