After a moment, Naveen rolled onto his back and she moved with him, still holding the rods to the sides of his head. He opened his eyes, and although all she could see were two pinpricks of reflected light, she knew he was looking at her. She smiled. “Hello, Naveen.”
He smiled back. “Hello.”
“Your father says you’ve been very sick for a long time.”
He nodded. “I feel better. Am I all better now?”
“No, not yet. But I’m working on it. Can you tell me what you were doing before you got sick? Did you eat any strange plants? Or a frog? Or a mushroom?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe you touched something. Some black moss on a stone, a sharp red thorn, or a gray vine with blue flowers?”
“No.”
“Did you meet any strangers on the road?”
“No.”
“Come on, kid, help me out here. Did you go anywhere special? Into a cave, maybe?”
“No. But I did go to the old village.”
“What old village?” Asha asked.
“The one at the bottom of the valley. It’s only an hour’s walk away.”
“Were you visiting your friends or running an errand for your father?”
“No one lives there,” he said. “It’s all gone now. Just some rocks where the houses were. The forest is starting to grow over it. It’ll be gone soon, father says.”
She frowned. “Do you go there often?”
“Sure, in the summer.”
“What about six weeks ago?”
“No, it’s been too cold. But I did go down to the stream once looking for frogs. Sometimes they get frozen under the ice.”
“And were you near the old village?”
He shrugged. “I guess so. I couldn’t see very much that day. The fog was too thick.”
* * *
Asha used the boy’s discarded belt to tie the two iron rods to the sides of his head, but she still made him promise to hold the rods with his hands and to remain on his bed. Then she stood and went back outside, leaving the door standing wide open. Chandra leapt forward to close it, but she stopped him and nodded back at the figure on the bed.
“He’s so quiet. The light doesn’t hurt his eyes?” The man clamped his hand over his mouth, and then slowly removed it. “And he can hear again? You cured him?”
“No, I just gave him something for the pain. Iron can conduct all sorts of harmful things away from the body, temporarily at least. But I’m not sure what’s going on here. Whatever it is, his heart is still racing and his life is still very much in danger.” Asha led the man away from the house. “Priya, why don’t you and Jagdish say hello to him? I think he’d like the company. Just keep him quiet and calm.”
The nun nodded and found her way inside with the aid of her bamboo stick.
“Naveen told me he goes to play in the old village at the bottom of the valley.”
Chandra frowned. “I’ve told him not to go there.”
“Why not?”
The man blinked. “Because he shouldn’t. It’s not safe there.”
“Why? What happened to the village?”
Chandra exhaled. “Two years ago it was attacked by Persian soldiers.”
“Persians? Here?”
“It wasn’t an army. Just a dozen men or so. I’ve heard there was a battle somewhere far to the west in Rajasthan. Maybe these men were survivors or deserters who didn’t, or couldn’t, return home,” he said. “They found the village, killed everyone, took what they wanted, and moved on.”
“Did they burn the village?”
“They tried to. I saw the smoke myself. But the fire didn’t last. Most of the village was still standing when I went down to see for myself.” He swallowed. “I buried the people in their homes as best I could.”
Asha sighed. “I’m sorry. You were lucky that you and your son survived. Why didn’t you live in the village?”
“I did. I mean, I was born there. But there are weeds and grasses there that make my eyes itch and my head hurt so I moved up here to this old place when I married Naveen’s mother. It was hard, being alone up here, but at least I could breathe in my own home.”
“Allergies, huh?” Asha dug into her bag and pulled out two slender brown sticks. “If they ever flare up again, try burning this. The smoke should help.”
“Thank you.” He took them. “But what about my son? Can you help him?”
“I’m going to try, but first I need something from you.”
“What?”
“The truth about the village. I can hear your heart pounding and the breath shaking in your lungs. I know you’re lying, or at least holding something back,” she said. “What is it?”
He took a step back. “How could you possibly hear my heart and my lungs?”
Asha swept the hair from the side of her face to reveal her right ear and the man gasped.
“Are those scales?”
She dropped her hair and nodded. “Dragon scales. It’s a side effect of the venom, just like being able to hear the blood in your veins, or in your son’s, or in the lizard near your left foot.”
The man looked down and jumped away as a soft rustling in the grass darted away toward the stream. He looked her in the eye. “You’re cursed!”
“In more ways than one.” Asha raised an eyebrow. “And I’m still waiting to hear about the village.”
Slowly, he nodded. “All right, I’ll tell you everything. But you have to promise not to tell Naveen.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s about his mother.”
“What about her?”
“How she died.” Chandra covered his eyes. “It’s my fault that she’s dead. It’s my fault that they’re all dead.” After a moment, he looked up though he avoided her eyes and he said, “My wife hated living here, so far from her family and friends. She was lonely, and sometimes scared being so close to the road like this. She was terrified of being robbed for some reason, even though we had nothing worth stealing. She pestered me for years to move back to the village. I don’t think she believed me that the grasses made me sick. Either that or she thought a man shouldn’t let such a thing force him out of his home. I refused to move, so she left and she took Naveen with her. He was still very small then. As he grew older, he started to come out here to help me with the house and garden. We hunted birds together, back when there were birds to hunt. Even when he was small, he was a good hunter. Sharp eyes and sharp ears. And he can be very quiet when he wants to.
“One day while we were in the forest, I found a man peeing on a rock. His clothes were ragged and filthy, but he had a sword on his belt and a helmet on his head. The soldier saw me before I could run, but I waved Naveen back and he hid in the trees behind me,” Chandra said. “At first I thought the soldier was going to kill me where I stood. He spoke Persian. I had no idea what he was saying, but I recognized the sound of the language from travelers I had met on the road. He came toward me, his hand on his sword. But then he spoke in Hindi, though not very well. He wanted to know if there were people nearby. He wanted food and water.”
“What did you say to him?”
Chandra shrugged, his eyes dull and lifeless. “I was going to say no, but then I thought of how terrified my wife would be at the sight of this man wandering through her precious little village. I thought it might change her mind, and that she and Naveen would come back home to me. So I said yes. I pointed the soldier toward the village and he nodded, but he went off in the wrong direction. So I stayed with Naveen in the trees to wait and be sure that he was gone before we went home. And then he returned, leading a whole troop back through the woods toward the village. We watched them go past. I didn’t know what to do. I told myself that it would be all right. They just wanted food and then they would be on their way. They didn’t kill me, after all. So I took Naveen home and waited.”
“And the village?”
He shook his head and covered his e
yes again, his shoulders shaking, his voice cracking as he said, “An hour later, everyone was dead.”
Asha looked away to the north, to the edge of the bamboo forest where the aether mist was seeping out into the sunlight. “And Naveen doesn’t remember what happened?”
“No. And I couldn’t tell him. I just couldn’t. I can’t.”
“I believe you love your son,” she said. “So I won’t tell him the truth, and I won’t tell you to tell him the truth either. But it would be better for you both to leave this place and find a new home.”
Chandra nodded. “You’re right. But I can’t move him like this. He’s too sick.”
“He’s not sick,” Asha said. “He’s possessed.”
The man stared at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not and he is. His high temperature, the racing pulse, the sensitivity to light and sound, and the strange things he’s saying. I’ve seen this before. He’s possessed.”
“By a ghost?” Chandra looked back at the house. “By a ghost of someone who died in the village?”
“No. By the ghosts of everyone who died in the village. All of them.” Asha sniffed. “I’ve never seen a heart rate like his, beating so fast you can barely hear the individual beats at all. If we don’t stop it soon, his heart will fail completely and he’ll die.”
“You have to help him! Isn’t there something you can do?”
Asha slipped another long sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth. “Maybe. How do I find the village?”
* * *
It was a long hour’s walk along a seldom-used path through the forest down to the bottom of the valley. As Asha descended the trail she felt the air grow steadily cooler and the white mist swirling around her feet brushed her skin with a sharp chilling caress. The path itself was carpeted in brown bamboo leaves. Here and there a long slender branch lay across her way, and from time to time she found a young bamboo shoot in the center of the trail, some of them as high as her shoulder.
She walked softly, pausing every few steps to listen to the vast stillness around her.
Still nothing.
Still no birds, no crickets, no anything.
Eventually the trees thinned and parted. Asha stepped out onto the edge of a grassy field dotted with large gray stones and ancient cracked stumps. Fifty paces away she saw the brown line of a dry stream bed running from east to north along the valley floor. And everywhere she looked stood the broken remains of bamboo homes.
The houses closest to her still bore the black marks from the aborted fire, but the wind and rain had torn off most of the roofs long ago and the wooden slats and poles of the walls were cracking, sliding, and hanging away from the buildings on their slow journey into decay and oblivion.
As she moved through the village, she saw through the doorways the irregular mounds of earth that she took to be the graves that Chandra had mentioned.
After a few minutes in the village, a sound seeped into her right ear that wasn’t the whisper of the wind or the rustle of the bamboo leaves. It was a deep, soft rumbling like distant thunder, only it had the regular ebb and flow of a tide, like breathing. Asha recognized it and she felt her own pulse quicken. She gripped the strap of her bag tightly in her sweating hands.
She eased around the corner of another collapsing house and found the bear sitting on the roof of a small shack chewing on a thin branch bearing a handful of pale yellow flowers.
“A sloth bear.” She grimaced. “Perfect.”
The animal was tall but thin, its long fur standing up at wild angles, its long slender muzzle licking and chewing on its stick. Against the pale blue sky, the bear’s black fur created a sharp silhouette high on the shack’s roof and the narrowness of the bright white chevron across its chest showed her all the more clearly how starved the animal was.
Asha stood very still and very quiet. The bear was facing her but she couldn’t be certain it had seen her yet, though it would only be a matter of moments before it smelled her. She knew that sloth bears ate fruit and insects and they hunted at night, normally. But she also knew that on rare occasion they were known to fight tigers, and to fight packs of dholes, and even to attack armed men. And sometimes they won.
When the bear dipped its head to bite a fresh part of its branch, Asha stepped back smoothly into the shadow of the house behind her, backing away faster and faster to put more distance between them. With two crumbling buildings between her and the bear and still no sign that she had been seen, she slowed down and breathed a long deep breath. Then she turned to circle back to the trail through the forest and stumbled over a pole that had fallen from a nearby wall. She fell to all fours with the pole snapping and cracking beneath her knees.
Behind her, the sloth bear snorted, grunted, and roared.
* * *
Asha ran. She didn’t dare make for the trail now. In the narrow corridor between the bamboo walls there would be no place to hide and she couldn’t hope to outrun the bear. Instead she bolted down the hillside, following the dry stream bed north along the edge of the village and down across a wide grassy field strewn with large round stones.
The bear grunted and growled from the top of the slope behind her.
At the bottom she found a second creek that merged with the first in a small depression, but this one held a meager thread of silver water running over the brown earth. The grass gave way to bare dirt and small stones, the result of some ancient landslide or perhaps a more recent monsoon that had carried only the smallest and lightest bits of the valley walls down through the thick bamboo forest.
Glancing over her shoulder, Asha saw the sloth bear loping down the hill straight toward her, its long jaws hanging open to reveal yellow teeth veined with dark brown rot.
She ran. She ran with every fiber of muscle in her legs, with every shred of strength in her feet. There was no pain, no weariness, nothing but the cold clear knowledge that she wouldn’t survive more than a few seconds if the bear caught her.
Along the bottom of the valley she dashed between and around larger and larger rocks. Some were boulders that had tumbled down from above, but many were jagged spears thrust up from the ground and she began to spy deep, dark cracks in and among the rocks. She looked for one that was narrow enough and deep enough.
A gnarled tree leaned across her path and she spotted the same yellow flowers that the bear had been stripping from its branch when she first found it. Reaching out, she snapped off a branch of her own and ran on.
The bear roared, the sound echoing down the valley through the rocky corridor of the stream bed, and the sounds of clattering pebbles and heavy paws splashing in the meager waters followed close behind the running woman.
Finally Asha spotted an opening in the rocks to her left and she veered inside. It was a narrow crack but also a low one and she had to dive on her side to squeeze through. As she squirmed and wriggled her body forward, she heard the sloth bear huffing and shambling close by her feet and she grabbed the stones around her head to haul her legs farther into the shadows. But she soon found it was far from dark in her little cave. A long thin crack ran the length of the space just above her head where the two rock walls did not quite meet, leaving a jagged white scar of daylight across the ceiling.
A little farther in she found enough space to sit up properly and she leaned against the wall to catch her breath and listen to the bear grunting and sniffing outside. The rock wall pressing against her back was dry but cold and soon a shiver ran through her arms and legs. She pulled her bag off her shoulder and gently tugged out her wool blanket to wrap around her shoulders.
The sounds of the bear faded, but Asha knew it was still nearby. She couldn’t hear it moving or breathing, but her right ear could still catch the beating of its heart, quick and desperate and angry. The bear was starving. It wasn’t going to leave any time soon.
Asha pulled her flowery tree branch closer into the light. She saw rough brown bark like dry cracked skin, green leaves the size
and shape of her flattened hand, and pale yellow flowers. “Mahua. Well, that figures.”
“What figures?”
Asha spun to see a faint white figure crouched in the back of the cave behind her. It looked like an elderly man with rounded shoulders, a hollowed out chest, and a hairless head, but it was a figure of shadows drawn in white misty lines. Out of the corner of her eye, he seemed almost human, almost solid. She felt certain he had a careworn face with sagging cheeks and a large nose. But when she turned to study him properly, all the details vanished behind the wavering, smoky lines of the aether. Had it been colder and darker, the man might have appeared more clearly. But given the circumstances, Asha was content that he didn’t.
She blinked. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“What figures? About the mahua?” The ghost nodded at the little branch in her hand.
“Oh. It’s just the bear. I thought that it was strange that the bear was staying here where there’s no food for it. But this explains it. The bear is eating the mahua flowers.”
“Yes.” The frail image of the man hunched down even smaller in the darkness. “When the bear came last year, I thought it was a gift from the gods sent to punish Chandra. But it never went up the trail. It just stays here, eating the flowers. Season after season. It never leaves.”
“To punish Chandra? So you know what he did?”
“What he did?” The man’s reedy voice shook with rage. “He did nothing! He stood up there, looking down on us, listening to us dying, watching the village burn. You think it was luck that he took his boy hunting on the same day the Persians came? He knew. He knew they were coming. Perhaps he heard of them from some travelers, or perhaps he saw them on the road. But instead of warning us, he took his boy into the forest and left us all here to die. He let the Persians butcher us just so he could get his boy back from his wife.”
Asha opened her bag again and carefully removed her old mortar and cracked pestle and then several thin copper tubes with cork stoppers in each end. “I don’t think you have the whole story. I think Chandra still loved his wife, even though they were apart, and I doubt he wanted her to die, let alone the whole village. But what do I know?” She began plucking the mahua flowers from the branch, gently tearing them apart, and placing them neatly in the bottom of her mortar.
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