by J. S. Bangs
Vapathi, I’m coming.
He took a deep breath and turned away from the view. He was coming, theoretically, but his odds of getting there would be so much better if he could learn the thikratta’s fire. He had been meditating and practicing every day, and felt like he was no closer than when he had started. And he was still stuck in Jaitha with the Red Men, and they hadn’t even crossed the goat-pissed Amsadhu. They were waiting for Chadram to heal and for the political situation to settle. After the king’s idiotic attempt to get back at the Red Men, Chadram had captured the king and dispersed his militia, and they were now involved in negotiations with the king’s extended household to either ransom him, or else to hand the city over to some other majakhadir eager to assume the title of “king.”
He had just finished a few hours of meditation and was returning to the full awareness of his body when he realized that his limbs ached and he was hungry.
“Anything good?” Apurta said with an apprehensive note in his voice.
“Not really,” Kirshta said. He wasn’t sure what Apurta considered a “good” revelation of farsight, but he was pretty sure that the same visions of the dead king and the endless throat of stone didn’t count.
“That’s too bad,” Apurta said with glum disappointment. “I don’t know why you keep doing it when you never see anything.”
“Practice,” Kirshta said. “And I do see things, I just don’t know what they are.”
“Well if you can’t decide what to see, then what’s the point?”
Kirshta got to his feet, bent at the waist, and stretched his arms and legs. There was a throbbing in his muscles which gradually lessened as he paced around the top of the watchtower. “You can, it’s just very hard. *In the stillness below the surface where the body lives,“* he said, quoting one of Ruyam’s books from memory, *“the wise man first sees what is nearby in the measure of the Powers, though it be distant by the measure of the flesh.* So I could see what was going to happen when we came to Jaitha, because it was somehow ‘nearby,’ and it concerned me directly. But the more practiced thikratta know how to go looking for things, and they can answer almost any question you ask them. I’m still trying to figure that out."
He didn’t know why the dead king and the throat of stone were close to him, nor what they represented. That was the other problem with farsight: interpreting what you saw. Seeing with farsight was seeing with the vision of the Powers, which didn’t often correlate with what men wanted to know. And in this, as in everything, he had no teacher and had to go it alone.
“You’ve been at this a long time,” Apurta said. “It doesn’t seem to get you anywhere.”
“It takes time,” Kirshta said, annoyed that Apurta echoed Kirshta’s own sentiments. He kept walking the perimeter of the tower, enjoying the feeling of blood and movement in his legs again. “How long did it take you to get good at shooting a bow?”
Apurta shrugged. “I’m still not great. Jhuma can hit the mark at a hundred paces every time.”
“So,” Kirshta said. “That’s how it works.”
Apurta pulled at his lip and nodded. “Do you want me to help you do the other thing, now?”
“Sure.”
The other thing was the summoning of fire. In his darker moments, Kirshta despaired of ever getting it to work without guidance. But he said, “Yes.”
Apurta went to the edge of the watchtower and picked up an unlit oil lamp. He lit the wick and then set it down to burn for a few moments. “Do you think you’ll ever become one of the Powers?” he asked.
Kirshta stifled a laugh. “You mean like those old thikratta in legends?”
“Yeah. I thought that was the final goal for all thikratta.”
“Am I really a thikratta?”
“I think so,” Apurta said. “I’d never met a thikratta until I met you. Or Ruyam, I guess, but I never spoke to him personally.”
“Let’s say I am a thikratta,” he said. “But not all thikratta try to become one of the Powers. In theory, the thikratta of Ternas are forbidden from trying.”
“What?” Apurta leaned against the parapet and picked off a flake of stone. “I’ve never heard that.”
“Most people haven’t, but most people these days don’t know about the different Ways of the thikratta.” Kirshta stopped and took a drink from the flask of water next to Apurta on the parapet.
“So what are the Ways of the thikratta?”
Kirshta leaned against the wall. “There used to be three different schools among the thikratta: Acakta, the Way of Power, Linjanya, the Way of Being, and Damana, the Way of Submission. They had different ideas about where their power came from, and therefore what the goal of the thikratta should be. The idea that you referred to, of becoming one of the Powers, that’s Linjanya. The Way of Being. These thikratta thought that the flesh was illusory, and one could learn to dissolve it and become a being of pure will and spirit, like the Powers.”
“Like Garattu.”
“I’ve never heard of Garattu,” Kirshta said with a shrug. “Is that some local legend from Gumadha?”
“Give me that water,” Apurta said, holding out a hand to Kirshta. He took a swig, then began speaking in the sing-song tone of someone repeating a very old, very familiar story.
“There is a banyan tree near Lashmirti called Garattu’s Seat. Garattu was a thikratta who sat under the tree for fifty years without speaking. When he was old and near death the people of the village came and asked him where he wanted to be buried. He pointed at the branches of the tree. The villagers laughed, thinking that he had grown mad, but the next day when they came to him they found him sitting in the topmost branches of the tree, on a twig that was too small to support a sparrow. Some children began to abuse him with stones and arrows. Then he struck them blind, rose into the sky, and disappeared into the clouds. The parents of the children prayed for him to remove their children’s blindness, and after they left him offerings of corn and beer, their children’s sight was restored.”
Apurta took another swig of water. “And now everyone in Lashmirti leaves offerings of corn and beer at his tree after the winter harvest. And if you’re very naughty your mother will threaten that Garattu will strike you blind.”
Kirshta nodded. “About like I guessed. There’s lots of places like that in Amur. Ruyam was always suspicious of these stories because they’re told by the devotees of Linjanya, and he thought they were greatly exaggerated.”
Apurta rolled his eyes. “Everyone in Lashmirti knows that it’s true.”
“Just what the Linjanya would want you to think.”
Apurta looked wounded that his one story of thikratta power was disbelieved by the old master. “Well, then what did they teach at Ternas, if they don’t believe our stories of Garattu?”
“What they taught at Ternas and what Ruyam believed are two different things. At Ternas everyone is theoretically supposed to follow Damana, the Way of Submission. They teach that the thikratta’s abilities are a gift from the Powers, a reward for devotion and self-denial. The Emperor made the monks agree not to teach any other path as a condition for allowing Ternas to remain open.”
“Then why are you telling me this?” Apurta said. “Who told you about it?”
“It was written in Ruyam’s books,” Kirshta said with a smirk, “because the monks of Ternas are very clever. They saved all of the documents they could from all of the schools of thikratta, and when they copied them they just wrote at the top that the unapproved schools were clearly nonsense and long live the Emperor. That way you could learn about any school you wanted, while staying within the law. Of course, those books are burned now, except the ones that Ruyam brought with him to Majasravi. And who knows what’s happened to those.”
He fell quiet. The loss of Ternas felt like a gaping hole in the world to him. Of all the crimes that Ruyam had committed, that might have been the worst.
“You seem awfully glum over some books,” Apurta said.
“I
like books,” Kirshta said quietly. “In the Ushpanditya, I had no friends, but I had books. Even if I had to read Ruyam’s books in secret.”
“I don’t even know how to read,” Apurta said. He hung his head, seeming to have caught Kirshta’s mood.
“I could teach you.”
Apurta shook his head. “What would be the point? Do you have books for me to read?”
“No,” Kirshta admitted. “Maybe when we get back to Majasravi.”
Apurta leaned against the parapet and plucked at the string of his bow, making it hum. “So what way are you following, then?”
“I don’t know. Whichever one works, I guess. Ruyam followed Acakta, the Way of Power, and it worked for him. Until Virnas.”
“Is their way about learning to be powerful?”
“They were the first ones to discover the mastery of fire, and they raised the other arts of the thikratta to their highest level. But their doctrines were the most extreme. They taught that the Powers don’t exist, and that all things in the world are driven by the nature of the elements that composed them.”
Apurta snorted. “That doesn’t seem very likely.”
Kirshta hesitated. “I’m not sure. They thought that by knowing the nature of the elements of fire, they could command fire—and they could. They commanded lots of other elements, too. Ruyam laughed about going to the temple of Am to offer sacrifices, saying that he could control the fate of the empire far better than Lord Am. He only went because he thought that he’d have trouble keeping the loyalty of the Red Men if he were openly contemptuous of the Powers. And yet, something happened in Virnas that Ruyam couldn’t overcome.”
“Huh,” Apurta said. “I never heard anyone say that the Powers don’t exist before. You thikratta are stranger than I thought.”
Kirshta laughed. “So we are. But for now, I’m not concerning myself overmuch with the existence of the Powers. I think we’ve let that lamp burn for too long.”
Apurta started, then reached across the parapet laughing. “I forgot about it. It’s still got some oil though. Here you go.”
Kirshta arranged himself in the Lotus position and took the burning lamp from Apurta. When his feet were well positioned, he blew out the flame and placed the smoking wick in front of him. Then he closed his eyes and forgot about the world.
The trance came easy to him now, after weeks of constant practice. The first thing he did was to examine inward, and he decomposed himself into his elemental parts. His feet and hands, made of mingled earth and water. His inner organs, earth and water stirred by breath. His mind, knitted of will and spirit. This was another elementary tactic, a tool of the Way of Power. The simple man looked at his body as one thing, a man who moved and acted as a unit, but the way of Power said that the man was made of many elements, and that by knowing their natures one could know the man. And so it was with fire.
He allowed his awareness to spread, slowly expanding to cover everything around him, like butter melting in a pan. Before him was a shape of earth and water, with the memory of fire written on its bones. The clay lamp. Inside the lamp was oil, and at the tip of the lamp was a cotton wick, soaked with oil, with elemental fire still warming it. Smoke, the element of breath mingled with fire, rose from the tip of the wick.
The fire was already there. He had only to bring it out. In the past he had attempted to do this with command, using the element of his will to command the fire to bloom, and he had failed. There must be another way.
How does a woman start a banked fire from its embers? She blows on the coals. Breath, he thought. Fire needed breath.
He could not blow on the fire, not with his own breath—that would defeat the purpose. Instead, he held the wick in his awareness, and with his will urged the fire to breathe. The air around the wick stirred, and a bloom of heat rewarded him. Not a flame, yet, but close. He willed a little more air into the wick and felt it glow again with heat.
How much further should he go? He wanted fire. A third time he fixed his will on the flame, and this time he abandoned caution. Breathe, he thought, and pulled as much breath into the wick as he could.
It awakened into flame. And then exploded.
The air all around the wick shuddered with flame, and then his face was enveloped by a blast of furnace-heat. The force knocked him backward. He screamed at the scalding pain on his forehead and opened his eyes, his trance instantly destroyed. For an eye-blink he saw a fountain of flame arcing between the lamp and himself, and then it was gone.
Apurta was beside him, shouting, “Kirshta! Kirshta!” Water from the canteen splashed Kirshta’s face.
Kirshta sputtered and wiped water from his eyes. “I’m okay!” he shouted.
He pushed Apurta back, blinking, trying to take in what had happened. The lamp was blackened and cracked open, leaking oil onto the wooden floor of the watchtower. He touched his face. He wasn’t burned except for an area on his forehead the size of a thumbnail, but his eyebrows and the hair of his scalp were singed.
Apurta knelt a pace away from him, worry and fear written on his face. “What happened?”
“I don’t really know,” Kirshta said. “I made fire, I think.”
“You made fire? Is that all you can say? The lamp burst into fire like it was lit from a blacksmith’s forge, and then it looked like it was trying to eat you.”
“Because my will was driving it. I’ll have to work on that.” He started laughing. “But Apurta, I made fire.”
“You almost burned yourself to death!”
“Who cares? I made fire. The thing I’ve been trying to do for months.” More laughter bubbled up out of his stomach, and he lay back on the floor of the watchtower to look at the sky. “The mastery of fire. Maybe I am a thikratta after all.”
Apurta got to his feet and dusted himself off. “You thikratta are even crazier than I thought. First you say there are no Powers, and then you burn yourselves to death trying to light a lamp.”
“Oh, shut up,” Kirshta said. “Let me enjoy my victory.”
Apurta laughed and playfully kicked him with his toe. “Fine, enjoy your victory. Then clean up all this oil before I slip on it and break my neck.”
“Sure,” Kirshta said. “I’ll find a rag.”
Vapathi, I’m coming, he thought, and smiled.
Mandhi
Sadja’s palace in Davrakhanda was a billow of white stone, like a foamy sea-wave perched at the top of the cliffs, ready to rush down over the city. The pure white limestone of its walls shone in the sunlight, and the green flags with the sea-eagle emblem striped its ramparts like emeralds. It occupied the highest, outermost level of the city, at the top of the cliffs which encircled the harbor. The rest of the city was built in the shallow bowl beneath the cliffs, descending in terraces and gentle slopes from the white-and-gray stone to the sapphire jewel of the harbor, where Mandhi now stood breathing the cool sea air and waiting for the sensation of swaying to stop.
She had never seen Davrakhanda from this angle before. Last time she had been here she had arrived at the break of dawn, ready to drop from exhaustion, following the body of her dying husband Taleg. Thanks to Sadja’s surgeon, Taleg had not died in Davrakhanda, but during his recovery they had stayed entirely within the bounds of the palace. Sadja had graciously hosted them for over a month and given them a wedding feast to boot, something that their elopement had never afforded them.
She was less impressed with Sadja’s hospitality this time around. Being his captive was less enticing than being his guest.
A platoon of servants unloaded everything that Sadja and Mandhi had brought from the boat onto the docks. Mandhi stood alone near the edge of the pier, as if there were a little circle of solitude around her which none of the dock-workers wanted to breach. Perhaps they thought she would break. She was seven months pregnant, after all, long past the period where the pregnancy could be hidden or passed off as just a little belly fat. She had to drape her sari over her belly, which made the front hang awkwar
dly around her knees, and her choli no longer fit comfortably because of how her breasts had grown. She would have to get something new tailored now that she was here. Assuming that Sadja let her.
Footsteps approached from behind her on the pier, and their firmness of purpose and lack of hurry suggested that it was not another dock worker. She turned and saw Sadja. She bowed to him, and said coldly, “Sadja-dar.”
He inclined his head to her. “Mandhi. I hope by now you’ve reconciled yourself to the circumstances under which I’ve brought you here.”
“Am I supposed to be pleased at being taken away from my family just before my child is born?”
“No one is pleased,” Sadja said with a pained expression on his face. “But it’s necessary. We often do unpleasant things for necessity.”
“I don’t see you undergoing any unpleasantness.”
“I’m leaving my nephew Sundasha-kha with Navran.”
Mandhi murmured and waved to indicate she was unimpressed.
“In any case,” Sadja went on, “I’m doing everything I can to keep you comfortable. I made arrangements ahead of time to purify a portion of the house for you, as the last time you were here. And you’ll have purified food, prepared in my kitchen under the eye of the local saghada. It’s the least I can do.”
“You’re right,” she said. “It is the least you can do.”
“And when we get to the palace you’ll have a servant girl waiting for you. Someone from an Uluriya family in the city.”
“That’s nice,” Mandhi said, trying to hide how pleased she was. In Veshta’s house little Kidri had served the household, but Mandhi had never had a maid of her own.
A man in green livery pushed through the dock workers, eyes darting back and forth, until he spotted Sadja. He fell to his knees and said, “Sadja-dar, your regent Ashturma-kha humbly requests the presence of you and Captain Bhargasa.”
“Ashturma-kha,” Sadja said with some annoyance. “Can you summarize for me?”
