“Besides, what do you care what they looked like naked?” Sakhi propped her neck on an elbow and looked at Dhara’s shadowed face. “You said you’re not going to marry either of them.”
“I’m not going to marry anyone!” Dhara rolled onto her back and put her hands behind her head.
“What if a prince made his way up to Dhavalagiri to seek your hand?”
“He’ll be disappointed.”
“Your mother says it’s time you had a husband.”
“You don’t have one. I’m sorry,” Dhara added immediately. “You will find one.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.” Sakhi accepted that her prospects were nothing like Dhara’s. In truth, she didn’t want her friend to marry. At least, not outside the clan. But she was a chief’s daughter, after all. Her mother had ambitions for her: a good match in one of the lowland kingdoms, perhaps even a prince. Sakhi would probably never see her heart’s sister again, once she’d circled the fire seven times with some noble youth and gone to live with his rich family. “But what will you do? Be the next Koli chief?”
“Why not?” Dhara sat up, letting cold air rush under the covers. Sakhi shivered and tried to pull them closer. “Father says I’m as good a warrior as any boy my age.”
“Oh, Dhara. The warriors will never elect a woman as their chief.”
“How do you know? Besides, maybe I don’t want to be chief.”
“What, then?”
“I would go live in the sacred cave with the yogi Mala and learn all her secrets.” Her voice grew loud. “Then I would travel the Sixteen Kingdoms, using my sword and bow and yoga to fight for justice.”
“Shhh. Do you want your mother to hear?”
“I’m not afraid of her.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Well, maybe a little.” Dhara let out another laugh. “It would be wonderful to be free of her.”
“Tell me, how do you use yoga and a sword to fight for justice?”
“Well, you… ” Dhara paused. “Maybe I’ll leave for that cave tonight.”
The quiet way she said it roused Sakhi’s uneasiness. When they were younger, Sakhi had always gone along—half eager, half reluctant—with Dhara’s wild schemes, even now and then with the tricks she played on the suitors who strutted like peacocks before her. But lately, things had gone a bit beyond mischievous pranks like stealing Chitra’s clothes while he swam by the waterfall. The harmless charms the shaman’s wife had been teaching Dhara for several years had become dangerous spells.
Sakhi tried to ignore this. Dhara wouldn’t talk to her about what she did with Ghosha. But even though her heart’s sister wouldn’t admit it, Sakhi was certain that Dhara was the one who made a wart appear overnight on the nose of the pretty girl who was their friend Tilotamma’s rival for the warrior Prem’s affections.
It was not only that. Dhara’s fascination with the yogi had cooled not long after Mala first appeared, and for several years, warriors’ games were all that interested her. For some reason, though, that fascination with Mala had come back strong. It troubled Sakhi more than Dhara’s impossible dreams of being a chief. It seemed somehow darker, more dangerous even than death on the battlefield.
“Winter’s coming. You’ll freeze up there,” she said, hopeful this practical consideration would have some effect.
“Mala-ji hasn’t frozen,” Dhara began.
“How do you know? No one ever sees her. She could be dead, eaten by a wild animal or thrown into the ravine by a demon.”
“Two hunters caught a glimpse of her in the high forest not two weeks ago. They left her a deer haunch and some arrows.”
A light flickered in the passage that led from the main hall to the sleeping quarters.
“Now you’ve done it,” Sakhi whispered. “Here she comes.”
“What are you doing still awake?” Dhara’s mother appeared in the doorway holding an oil lamp high. A night wind stirred the thick grey blanket that hung over the window and batted the lamp’s little flame. The embers in the small brazier glowed. Huge shadows danced against the split log walls. “Tomorrow’s the soma sacrifice, Sakhi. You of all people should know how important it is to be rested.”
“I’m sorry, Lady Atimaya.” Sakhi swallowed. “We were just getting ready to settle down.”
Dhara elbowed her. “Oh, Mother, don’t scold us,” she said. “We’re not children. And we’re not sleepy. You should tell us a story. Like how blue-skinned Parvati stood on one foot for a hundred thousand years and ate only air until Lord Shiva said her mastery of yoga was perfect and fell in love with her.”
Sakhi flinched, waiting for Atimaya to explode.
“Ah. You still want stories,” Atimaya replied, cold and hard as ice. “You should be telling stories to your own children. You’re long past your first blood. Not even married yet! Dhara, you have a dozen handsome suitors who would get fine babies on you.”
Dhara shuddered. “I don’t want babies.”
In a rare moment of weakness, Dhara had told Sakhi about how attending a birth with the midwife had terrified her—the blood, the mother’s pain, and the newborn’s helplessness.
“Listen to that, Sakhi,” Atimaya said, pulling her thin shawl tighter around her slender shoulders and shivering in the fine yellow silks she wore for the feast before tomorrow’s sacrifice. Under the folds of her eyelids, her dark eyes glittered. In her husband’s rough-timbered hall her jewels and silks had always seemed very grand, even if they were a little old and worn. Threadbare or not, they couldn’t detract from Atimaya’s beauty, which was an older and sharper version of Dhara’s captivating, youthful good looks. “You’re a good girl and listen to your parents. You learned to keep a home. Dhara should stop playing with bows and arrows and learn from you.”
Sakhi hated being held up as an example. She wanted to just go to sleep and leave the two of them to their bickering until it was time to go listen to her father chanting hymns to King Soma at the eagle altar in the morning.
Sakhi’s father could invoke the gods’ favor in most things, but there was no rite to invoke a dowry. Bhrigu had no land or cattle, as Brahmins in the rich kingdoms along Ganga’s waters often did. Sakhi’s looks were pleasant enough, or so she was told: a round face, light brown eyes flecked with gold, and wavy brown hair that even Atimaya praised. Her generous hips would be good for bearing the many babies that, unlike Dhara, she badly wanted. For her, though, no priest’s son would travel the dangerous mountain road to the village nestled beneath the mountain goddess’s peak.
For Dhara, warrior boys made the journey through the vast, game-filled forests that lay between their kingdoms. An alliance with the chief’s daughter would be easier than a nasty fight for this rich but difficult terrain. If territorial conquest by marriage wasn’t enough to draw suitors, it was widely known among nearby clans that Dhara promised to be as beautiful as her mother, with large, almond-shaped eyes dark as night, a delicate nose, and long blue-black hair like silk from across Himalaya’s high passes.
The main difference was that Dhara’s red lips often parted in mischievous laughter, while Atimaya’s were almost always pressed in a thin line of disapproval.
“Sakhi would be glad to have any of your suitors,” Atimaya was saying. “Maybe one of those boys who were here last week would rather have her.”
Sakhi recalled the two strapping Malla youths, well-muscled and stupid, flashing arrogant smiles at the prospective bride. Such suitors made marriage lose some of its appeal.
“Mother!” Dhara pinched Sakhi under the covers. Sakhi winced. “They’re warriors, not Brahmins. Not suitable at all for Sakhi. And even if they were, who would want to marry such boorish louts?”
Atimaya suppressed a faint smile. The Malla boys had been rather handsome, but after they left, she had complained loudly about the lewd looks and vulgar remarks they’d given her, wife of the
Koli chief, a Sakyan princess’s daughter. “It doesn’t matter what a girl wants. She will marry the suitor her parents choose.”
Dhara paused for effect. “I can hit a spinning weathervane at full gallop. How can I marry a man who can’t ride and shoot as well as me? Besides, Father says I deserve better.”
“Your father indulges your selfish whims all too often,” Atimaya said. Then she frowned and hesitated. She had a high opinion of her lineage. Not only did she have royal blood from her Sakyan mother, but on her father’s side the line was said to stretch back to the god Himalaya through a nymph of great beauty whom the divine King of the Mountains favored with his attentions. More than one would-be husband, even rich ones, had been sent away for having questionable ancestry. “Still not even betrothed. What will become of you?”
The dark thought of her parents’ death silenced Sakhi. Her parents were old. They had sent word to lowland relatives that they had a marriageable daughter, but without a dowry there had been no interest. If her parents didn’t find a husband for her before they died, she didn’t know what she would do.
“Sakhi and I aren’t going to get married, are we?” Dhara said.
“It is a girl’s duty,” Atimaya responded. “She must obey the dharma set down by the gods from the beginning of time, to wed and bear a hundred sons,” Atimaya prattled on, not waiting for an answer.
Sakhi would be only too happy to fulfill her dharma, have a husband and lots of sons. Still, in spite of her fears that she’d never find a husband, she knew marriage was not very pleasant for some, including Atimaya.
The chief’s wife defied her husband more often than was considered acceptable, even for a strong Koli woman—or so Sakhi’s mother Agastya told her. Sakhi had heard whispers that Atimaya sent her husband from her bed after Dhara’s birth. There was some terrible secret about that. Atimaya was rebellious and proud, said Agastya, and it was easy to see where Dhara got her spirited nature. Sakhi agreed. The two were more alike than either would admit.
Shadows danced on the bare walls. Sakhi’s eyelids drooped. Somewhere a handsome husband with smiling green eyes, a grand mustache and warm smile and strong arms waited. She didn’t know who he was or where he might be or whether he even existed, yet he was so vivid in her heart and mind that she felt he could not just be a dream.
As Dhara and her mother exchanged barbs, the night wind buffeted the house and it all mixed together, familiar and comforting, as Sakhi drifted toward sleep, curled safe and warm on the bed of skins. It was nicer to sleep at the chief’s hall than at her parents’ dark house. When the girls were small, Atimaya used to tell them stories of gods and heroes late into the night. It was a sharp contrast to home, where Sakhi was lulled to sleep by her father’s snores and the prayers her plump mother mumbled to the goddess of wealth in her sleep.
Another gust of wind sent the blanket over the window flapping. The lamp flame sputtered and flared. Atimaya’s dark eyes shone and her heavy earrings glowed in the soft lamplight. Even in frayed finery she filled Dhara’s bare little room like a gilded goddess in a temple niche.
“… As for you, my daughter, you may find yourself growing old alone like that crazy woman Mala.” She clucked her tongue. “Think of the way she lives, sitting in a cold, dirty cave and picking fleas. That’s your yoga.”
“I’d prefer that to marriage!” Dhara sucked in a breath. “Yes, I would. I want to live in a cave and be a yogi. And fleas don’t bother me.”
“Now it’s being a yogi?” Atimaya snorted with contempt. “What happened to that silly wish to be a great warrior?”
“A warrior can be a seeker of wisdom, too. Bhrigu has lots of stories about ancient kings who become holy hermits, hasn’t he, Sakhi? And they become even greater kings when they do.”
“Those are kings,” Atimaya said. “Not their wives.”
“Hmmm?” Sakhi wished Dhara would just stop fighting and settle down.
“Why couldn’t I be a yogi, too?” Dhara said with sudden great force.
An enormous gust of wind pounded on the hall’s cedar beams as if it heard her. A shiver ran down Sakhi’s spine. Even Atimaya hushed for a moment to shelter the lamp’s wildly flickering flame with a cupped palm. Sakhi wondered if the mountain goddess had sent the wind from her snowy heights to seize Dhara and carry her up beyond the forest that sheltered the village, up to the sacred cave. Something tugged at her consciousness, a dream or a premonition she’d had long ago.
“Dress in an antelope skin and have that creature Mala as your guru?” Atimaya’s scornful tone couldn’t quite hide a slight quiver.
So even Atimaya feared Mala. Mala was nothing like Asita, the cave’s former occupant. Many pilgrims had come to see him; few sought her. Those who did stumbled back hollow-eyed and silent, saying nothing of their encounters with her.
“You’ll see.” Dhara flung the words at her mother. “I’ll live up there one day.”
The gale abated. Atimaya held the lamp high again. “Not if I have anything to say about it. You have no idea how hard it is to follow a seeker’s path. A spoiled girl like you could never last.”
With a swish of silks, she turned and disappeared into the drafty passageway.
The mountain goddess
When the last glimmer of her mother’s lamp faded, Dhara threw the covers back. She unlatched the wooden shutter and slid it away from the window. Sharp, pine-scented air rushed into the room on a gust of the dying wind. Outside, Indra’s thousand eyes blazed against the black sky. Her heart soared up to them.
“There’s something in the air tonight. Can you feel it?”
“Hmm hmm.” Sakhi yawned. “It’s called frost. Get under the covers and help me get warm.” She snuggled deeper under the blanket and closed her eyes.
“Look at Dhavalagiri.” Dhara tugged at Sakhi.
“Hmmm. Beautiful. Let’s go to sleep now.”
How could anyone close her eyes to this sight? The immense peak filled the window. Any time of day and in all seasons, it radiated a power Dhara never sensed when Sakhi’s father made sacrifices at the eagle altar. The shaman’s wife Ghosha said that Dhavalagiri was a form of the Devi, as were all goddesses: Black Kali with her necklace of skulls, who dances on a god’s corpse; Durga, the brave warrior goddess who slew the demon. But lately it was Ghosha’s tales of Himalaya’s beautiful blue-skinned daughter Parvati, whose mastery of yoga won the heart of the Great God Shiva, that obsessed Dhara.
Let Bhrigu make his offerings to the sky gods. The mountain goddess, Dhavalagiri, the Devi, whose snowy heights glowed as if lit from within, would always be the Koli clan’s protectress, whatever name she bore. Though she filled Dhara with awe, she was comforting, too, and generous. Dhavalagiri gave many gifts to the clan: the game they hunted, the timber that built their homes and fires and from which they made their famous bows, and the streams that quenched their thirst and watered the terraced barley fields that hugged the slopes. By day, wherever Dhara was she felt the goddess’s eyes watching over her, protecting her from danger. At night, Dhavalagiri’s slopes held the village like a mother’s arms cradle her children.
Dhara buried herself under the covers again and snuggled against Sakhi. “Are you sleeping?” she said.
There was a brief silence. “Not anymore.”
“I need to ask you something.”
“Hmmm… ”
“Do you think Dhavalagiri would help me?”
“Help?” Sakhi yawned.
“Help me take a different way.”
“What way?”
“You know. I’ve been telling you. The way of yoga.”
“Dhara! Your head has always been full of crazy ideas, but a yogi? You don’t know anything about it.”
Dhara held her silence for a moment. “Please listen. I’m serious.”
“How would you eat? How would you keep warm up there?”
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“Mala eats and stays warm. Yogis fly through the air and change themselves into animals and read minds. And sometimes they are great warriors, too.”
“Only in stories. Father told me once that you have to master harsh disciplines to do those things.”
“Kings and warriors do become wise as Brahmins! It’s not just in the stories.”
“Name one.”
“All five Pandava princes! So I don’t see why a wise yogi couldn’t be a good warrior, too. Some people say that Mala was a warrior. She would teach me.”
“They say she was an outlaw, and a vicious one, too. As for the Pandava heroes, that was generations ago. And they were the sons of gods! What if you got all the way up there and Mala didn’t want to teach you?”
Dhara rolled over and sighed. She was beginning to see that some people could make their dreams come true, and that some—her own best friend, for one—could only think of obstacles. Everything was possible. You only had to believe you could do it. “Well, if I went and made an offering at the old shrine, do you think the Devi would help me?”
Sakhi rolled over to face her. “You’re not serious.”
“I am!” The shaman’s wife had taken Dhara there many times. She made little offerings there, cast spells, brewed her potions in front of the stone statue to make them stronger. Koli children terrified each other with stories about the spirits of men who were sacrificed at the shrine by the tribe that lived there before, but Dhara had never seen a ghost.
Sakhi’s eyes glinted in Dhavalagiri’s reflected light. “It’s dangerous,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
“You don’t really believe all the stories we told each other when we were little, do you?”
“Do you?”
Ghosts or not, Dhara had to admit the place made her hair stand on end, even when she was with Ghosha, who was not just the shaman’s wife but a sorceress in her own right.
“Father says there’s evil there.”
“The sky gods’ priests always fear the Devi.”
“He is not afraid,” Sakhi said, but she sounded a bit uncertain.
The Mountain Goddess Page 4
