Aetherium (Omnibus Edition)

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  “It wasn’t a teak tree.”

  “I remember now, you said that before. What sort of tree was it?”

  Asha said, “I have an idea, but it’s only a theory. I’ve heard about this sort of thing, but never seen it myself. I’ll know for sure when we get there. I’ll tell you then.”

  “As you wish.”

  An hour later they crossed the last stretch of road through the fields of freshly sown oilseeds. Ahead, Asha saw the familiar huddle of houses and market stalls, and even the flour mill drawn round and round by the same tired old ox. The almond tree stood straight and tall on the south side of the road. And on the grassy shoulder across from it, there was nothing at all.

  Asha stopped on the grass where the little tree had been and Priya stopped beside her.

  “Very quiet,” Priya observed.

  “There’s no one here,” Asha said. “No pilgrims, I mean.”

  “But there are voices. Listen.”

  Asha heard a distant babble of high voices. Talking. Laughing. The sound drew closer and soon a knot of five young girls emerged from around a corner. They saw the two women by the side of the road and the girls stopped and fell quiet.

  Asha smiled. “I think we’re in someone’s way. Come on.” She led Priya up the road into town and the girls continued on to the grassy strip where they sat in a convenient circle of shade cast by the almond tree across the way. Asha smiled a bit wider as the girls flopped down and began whispering to each other.

  “So the young sage is gone?” Priya asked.

  “Along with his tree, yes.” Asha kept walking. “Let’s find out what happened here.”

  They found the miller sitting on a wobbly stool and watching his ox walking its circle as the grindstone crushed wheat into flour.

  “Hello again,” Asha said. “I see business is…still going strong.”

  The miller shrugged.

  “Sorry, but we were here a few months ago and there was a strange boy sitting under a little tree just over there. We were wondering what happened to him. Can you tell us?”

  The miller shook his head. “Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. One morning there’s all this shouting so I went over to see what was happening. The boy, he fell over.”

  “He died?”

  “Sort of. I mean yes. But he didn’t just fall down. He fell in. Inward. Collapsed. Like he was all skin with no insides.” The miller shuddered. “Smelled like the back end of this ox.”

  “And the tree?”

  “Died. Rotted. Some sort of disease. It turned all black and soggy. It stank too. So we burned it right there, not that it burned too well. Some of the boys hacked it up and dragged it off into the woods somewhere up east.” He waved to his right, which was vaguely east. “They said they were going to try burning it again, and then bury and salt it. I assume they did.”

  Asha nodded. “Thanks.” She led the way back onto the main road where she turned north. The sun blazed high in the pale spring sky.

  “So what was it?” Priya asked when they were well away from the village.

  “A mandrake. Not the common mandrake. That’s just a little root. This was the swamp mandrake, which is related, but very different. It comes from the east.” Asha reached over to pet Jagdish on the nun’s shoulder. “The roots can drink up almost anything. If you feed one tea, they say it will grow blossoms and the crushed flowers can be used to treat all sorts of ailments. Feed it milk and it will grow little fruits good for curing even more diseases. But if you feed it blood…”

  “What happens then?”

  Asha sighed. “The mandrake will grow a polyp shaped like the creature whose blood it drank. The polyp isn’t good for anything. It’s full of rotted filth. The plant can’t digest blood, I suppose. The filth inside might even be poisonous.”

  “Then all those people were praying to a giant pustule? They were waiting for wisdom from a boy-shaped cancer?” Priya frowned. “And so was I.”

  “That’s why I couldn’t lift him. Somewhere underneath was the root connecting the boy to the rest of the tree. But it’s all right now. No one was hurt. It didn’t live long after I cut the roots. And from what the miller said, it sounds like they disposed of it thoroughly. No harm done.”

  “You cut the roots? You killed it?”

  “Yes. You said it yourself, it was just a big cyst full of toxic pus.”

  The nun sighed. “You’re missing the point. Whatever it was, it fostered peace and hope and enlightenment among real people. Those people came for a miracle, and they saw a miracle, and they went home with that miracle in their hearts. Given time, such things can transform the world in powerful and wonderful ways.”

  “Transform the world?” Asha glared at her. “It lured dozens of people away from their families and their obligations, and led them all to sit in the dirt, sweating under the sun, shivering in the rain, doing nothing, waiting for someone to tell them what to think, what to believe.”

  “You take a very dim view of the search for wisdom.”

  “It was a fake miracle. It was just a plant. It filled up a country road with tired bodies. But now those people are at home, living their lives, actually doing something with themselves. And where there was a pile of vagrants, now there’s a group of children playing in the shade. The world I helped to make is better, Priya. It’s better because it’s real.”

  They walked along for an hour before either one spoke again.

  “Why did he do it?” Priya asked softly. “Why did that doctor feed the mandrake seed to the sick boy? Did he think the seed would heal him?”

  “No,” Asha said just as softly. “He knew the boy was going to die. He wasn’t feeding him the seed. He was planting the seed.”

  “But why?”

  “Why else?” Asha shoved a sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth. “To see what would happen. You see, Priya? They care about the big picture. The long term. Knowledge for its own sake. They have so many high-minded ideals and goals, but they tend to overlook the people that get trampled along the way.”

  “I see. I think I understand now. Thank you.”

  “They used to tell me that it was all for saving more lives in the future.” Asha looked down at the road at her feet. “But they never seem to mind losing lives in the here and now.”

  Priya nodded. “Well, at the very least, I suppose I’m glad those girls have their place to play again. It was nice to hear them laughing.”

  Chapter 6

  Asha lay awake, listening. She didn’t need her poisoned ear to track the souls of the men coming toward her hut. She could hear their boots crunching through the undergrowth, crashing along like mad elephants through the dry bracken.

  She reached over to cover Priya’s mouth just as the nun woke up. Asha whispered, “Stay very calm. Do whatever they say. Let me do the talking.”

  Priya nodded as Asha took her hand away. Both women sat up. Asha slung her bag of tools and herbs over her shoulder and Priya gathered up the long, lean form of Jagdish, their young mongoose who wasn’t so young anymore. Asha tried to remember how long they had been together. Has it really been three years?

  They had slept in yet another abandoned house, the decaying remains of something that had once been a home to someone but was now just a rotting arrangement of boards and pegs and dry grass. It had seemed as good a place as any to rest outside the bustling city of Jaipur. Now, as she sat listening to the soldiers approach, Asha wasn’t so sure it had been the right decision. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

  Footsteps circled the hut and shadows slid across the gaps in the walls. They moved toward the empty doorway, a gaping rectangle that offered her a view of a few trees and an unplowed field beyond. And then a man stepped into the doorway. He wore the blood-red armor of a Rajput soldier and carried a talwar saber sheathed at his side. His helmet fit close over his head, and his majestic black mustache swept out to each side in a manner that made him look as though he were smiling.

 
He was smiling.

  Asha blinked.

  The soldier asked, “Are you the herbalist Asha of Kathmandu?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “I have been sent by His Royal Highness, Maharana Pratap Singh, lord of all Rajasthan, to summon you to the royal palace on a most urgent and private matter.” The soldier bowed his head curtly.

  Asha stood up and helped Priya to stand beside her. They both stepped outside the hut into the early morning light and found eight more men armed and armored outside in two lines of four. To buy a few spare moments to think, Asha said, “Pratap Singh? I’m sorry, but we’re from the distant east. We’re not familiar that name.”

  The commanding soldier with the smiling mustache nodded. “Maharana Pratap is the grandson and heir of Maharana Sangram Singh, lord of Mewar. The wars with the Persians have brought us quite far from home. Through the vagaries of fortune and fate, our lord now finds himself master of all Rajasthan and the protector of our great nation against the foul Persians.”

  Asha nodded politely, not caring at all about the vagaries of Rajput politics and hoping only to learn more about the man who had summoned her. How dangerous would it be to refuse? “And may I ask why Maharana Pratap wishes to see me?”

  The soldier frowned for the first time, but not at her. He glanced away and cleared his throat. “It is a private matter.”

  “A private matter to be addressed by a homeless herbalist from the east?” Asha glanced at the other men, but they all stared straight ahead at nothing, like dolls waiting for a command to return to life. She pitied them. “I suppose it must be serious.”

  The commander nodded.

  “A medical problem. One that the prince’s master physicians have already tried and failed to treat?”

  He nodded again.

  Asha reached into her bag for a fresh sliver of ginger. She chewed the soft root for a moment. “My friend must be welcome where I am welcome.”

  “Of course, Mistress Asha.”

  “And we must be free to come and go as we please.”

  “As long as it pleases my lord, yes.”

  Asha nodded. That’s probably the best offer we’re going to get. “All right then. I’ll come. Lead the way.”

  The men formed ranks in front and behind the two ladies and they all set off down the narrow dirt path back to the main road with the commander in the van. Once out on the dusty highway again, Asha glanced back at the overgrown lane where their hut stood absolutely hidden from the main road, and she wondered how the men had found her.

  Turning her attention back to the path ahead, Asha studied the outline of Jaipur, the city she had deliberately tried to avoid the night before by insisting that they sleep in the hut instead of finding shelter among the cottages crowding along the road. Farms and villages were one thing, but cities were quite another and it had taken her all night to prepare for the onslaught of noise.

  People.

  Too many people, too many busy people bustling around and over and under one another. Asha could hear them all, all their noisy souls clambering with ideas and schemes, with needs and desires, with hungers and passions. All those thousands of souls roared through the herbalist’s poisoned ear like a maelstrom, churning and gushing, noise beyond comprehension, beyond purpose. Just noise. Endless, pounding noise.

  Asha rubbed her forehead, and then her eyes, and then began digging through her bag for something, anything, that might be strong enough for the headache throbbing through her skull.

  The city rose up around them in fits and starts. A few larger houses here, a sprawling marketplace there, first one temple and then twenty more just beyond it. The height of the city steadily increased as well, the rooflines rising to block out the forests, and then the distant mountains, and then the sky itself. Soon Asha and her entourage were marching down a vast canyon of Rajput temples and estates and palaces and fortresses, some ancient and some new, some broken and partly repaired, others gleaming in perfection. Red stone and white stone, towers and domes. And the endless processions of windows in level upon level rising above them, repeating over and over in their intricate design until the design lost all meaning.

  “What’s it like?” Priya asked.

  “It’s big,” Asha said. “Bigger than I expected.”

  “Oh.” Priya touched her arm. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right.” Asha found a ginko leaf to chew. “I’ll just try to keep this visit brief.”

  For most of an hour they strode through the streets of Jaipur. The commander rarely had to speak to clear a path through the crowds. Most people took one glance at the red Rajput armor and silently moved aside. Still, Asha found the journey all too slow and miserable for the press of bodies and faces and voices all around them. Several times she thought to ask the commander how much farther, how much longer, but she kept her peace and chewed her leaves and waited.

  Eventually she noticed that the city was growing smaller and quieter again. The rooflines receded and the crowds thinned, and Asha began to wonder whether their destination was inside the city at all when the commander paused to point out a small palace just ahead.

  “The Jal Mahal.”

  Asha saw where the road ended and a vast lake began. The water lay quite low below the level of the street and rising above the surface of the lake was a wide bridge of many arches and small towers reaching out across the water to a small island.

  The palace, the Jal Mahal, sat on a low rise of earth so that it seemed almost to float on the water itself. As a building it was not at all remarkable, merely a large square two levels high with small domed towers in each corner and a great many dark windows staring out at the world. But as a creation of man and nature, as an act of artistry and subtlety, it was one of the most beautiful places Asha had ever seen. The walls shone with sunlight dancing off the little waves of the lake, and the lake reflected the towers and the bridge to create the illusion that the palace drifted serenely in empty space. It was a pocket of calm after the torrent of the city, a pocket world utterly audacious not in its size or grandeur, but in its elegance.

  “Where’s my patient?” Asha asked.

  * * *

  The commander led the group across the long bridge over the water, which shimmered silver and gold in the midmorning light. Tall pink flamingos stood in the shallows, gazing across the surface, while small brown ducks floated on the softly rippling waves in search of breakfast.

  Asha followed her escorts through the main entrance of the palace and through several airy corridors to the inner square, which was filled with a garden of flowering fruit trees and long-limbed ferns that screened the ground from view. The garden was ringed by a short wall, and on the top of the short wall sat a tall man studying the brilliant verdure of the plants. At the sound of the soldiers’ approach the man stood up, straightened his red jacket, swept one hand carefully over his shining black mustache, and nodded curtly at the commander, who stepped aside.

  The tall man said, “Mistress Asha?”

  “Maharana Pratap.” Asha bowed her head. Priya copied the gesture without being prompted. Jagdish, the sleeping mongoose, did not acknowledge the prince at all. “I have come to offer my services to your house. Where am I needed?”

  The prince nodded. “You’re very direct. Good. Come with me.” He led them around the edge of the walled garden. “I’m certain I can rely upon your discretion in this matter. No one is to know anything from you, either inside or outside the palace. Only one servant knows for certain that anything is amiss, though the others must all suspect something by now. I’ve only said that she is ill, nothing more.”

  “You have my absolute discretion, Your Highness.” Asha followed him to a tall door flanked by a pair of armored men. The prince opened only the right door and led the women inside, and shut the door behind them.

  Asha took in the room with a quick glance. Airy curtains rippled by the windows overlooking the lake. Silken pillows sat piled in the corners and around the b
ed. Lush Persian carpets covered the floor in red and brown and yellow patterns. Ming screens stood along one wall near the closet. In the center of the room was a shapeless bed, a mound of sheets and blankets and pillows that no doubt hid a square mattress of some sort, and atop the bedding lay a sleeping woman.

  She was young and beautiful, and from Asha’s view by the door, the woman looked perfectly healthy. “Your wife?”

  “Yes.” The prince nodded and led them closer.

  Asha stopped at the edge of the sheets and gestured to the bed. “May I?”

  “Yes, please.” The prince nodded.

  Asha pulled her bag from her shoulder and crossed the tumbled blankets and pillows in her dusty shoes. She sat on the edge of the bed by the princess’s head and quickly inspected the woman’s eyes and mouth, gently probed her jaw and neck, and then listened to her breathing and heartbeat, which were slow and regular. “Can she speak?”

  “Only with great effort, and great pain,” the prince said. “It all began several months ago, I believe. She used to be quite energetic. Athletic. Active. She rode her horses, visited the marketplaces, visited the shrines, and visited her friends outside the city. Always traveling, always very strong, very vital. Then she began slowing down. Sleeping longer. Leaving the palace less often. Excusing herself from dinners and affairs of state, claiming she was tired or ill. Then I began to notice the small pains when she moved, as though she had a stiff back or a bruised muscle. We tried making the bed softer, but it did not help. And now, she remains in bed, almost unable to move at all, and rarely speaking. Her maid helps her to eat her food, which must be ground into paste because she cannot chew it anymore. The maid also helps her with…other personal things. You understand.”

  Asha pulled back the hair from the right side of her face. The prince gasped at the sight of the gold scales crusting over her ear, but she ignored him as she pressed her head to the princess’s chest to listen. For a moment the sound of the prince’s fear overwhelmed her senses, but Asha tuned him out and found the sound of the princess’s soul, a sound so soft and small it might have been lost like a grain of sand on the beach. It was a steady hum. Too steady. Asha heard no dreams, no fears, and no desires either fleshly or otherwise in the young woman at all. “She’s not in pain.”