Chapter 9 Bhumika #3
She paused long enough to let the words settle.
Long enough for his jaw to tighten, and his eyes to lower, as her words rattled through him and settled into his bones.
“Now,” she said, gesturing over the maid.
Compassion stitched into the shape of her mouth and her creased brow, so he would know they were allies still.
“Have more tea, Lord Chetan. And try these mathiya. I promise you they’re very good. ”
It was night when Bhumika climbed the Hirana again.
Pitch dark, nothing but the stars and a faintly silver half moon to guide her.
But the Hirana welcomed her like an old friend.
In the daylight, with an audience, it had moved like water.
Now, with the worshippers long gone, the stone merely molded to her feet.
This rising was a slow, gentle thing. She gazed up as she walked—at the fissures in the rock, and the figures carved upon it.
Yaksa stared down at her, their eerie faces glowing under moonlight.
Priya was already there. Sitting on the plinth at the center of the triveni. Around her, the triveni was open to the night—the stars shining on her through the open disc above the plinth, the lights of the city shining up from the velvet dark below.
“Tell me how it went,” Bhumika said, by way of greeting.
“Oh, it was fine.”
Bhumika pursed her lips. Something had gone wrong, then, but she’d have no answers from Priya now. Not without an argument she wasn’t in the mood to have.
“Why don’t you walk with me?” Bhumika asked instead.
Priya slid from the plinth and joined her.
Priya was so often gone, patrolling to deal with imperial soldiers or gather their bodies, traveling across Ahiranya with one of the mask-keepers or with Sima or one of Jeevan’s men, managing rot in the fields and orchards, or stopping the rot’s progress in sickened mortal bodies.
But she and Bhumika were never truly apart.
They met in the sangam. Beneath skeins of stars, on strange rivers, they spoke to each other. Shared truths and tales. They were temple elders, and flesh could no longer limit them.
But every time Bhumika saw Priya in person, she was struck by how worn Priya looked: her skin unevenly sun-darkened, her body in restless motion, her eyes tired but always searching, always rising to track the movement of birds on the horizon or swaying leaves on distant trees.
Like Bhumika, Priya could feel the pulse and lifeblood of Ahiranya: every vein of green, every blade of grass, every insect burrowing under the soil. Unlike Bhumika, she seemed to lack any ability—or desire—to ignore it.
Even now, with Bhumika maintaining a slow and even pace as they circled the triveni, Priya was restless—moving to the edge and back again, seeking magic in the stone around her. The Hirana responded to her eagerly.
“Maybe I should ask Billu for some of his hashish,” Priya said, carving grooves into the triveni with her heels. The stone shuddered under the press of her foot, pulsing in time with each swift, thoughtful blink of her eyelids. “Maybe it would make me feel calmer.”
“You could just grow your own,” Bhumika pointed out dryly.
Priya wrinkled her nose.
“Too much effort.”
Bhumika rolled her eyes. “It would be no effort and you know it. I don’t know why you insist on saying things you don’t mean.”
“Next time let me bring some wine with me and I’ll keep quiet.”
“I can smell the wine on you already,” Bhumika said dryly. “Besides, you need to be able to concentrate, Pri.”
“Oh, you know me,” Priya said. She smiled, a kind of reflexive twitch of her lips, as she looked at the edges of Ahiranya in the distance. “I never let my focus falter.”
“I met with Lord Chetan today,” Bhumika said instead of lecturing, and told Priya everything.
“I can’t believe you of all people told a highborn that we need to be self-reliant,” Priya said with a grin. “I don’t care for politics, particularly…”
“As I’m well aware,” Bhumika said.
“… but you’ve always been very, very clear that Ahiranya can’t survive alone. And now you’ve changed your mind?”
“My mind hasn’t changed.” Bhumika looked over the lip of the triveni—off, off at the horizon as Priya had done.
“I would never have chosen this path. But since we’re here, we must make the best of it.
And for all the empress’s promises—and generosity—we cannot rely on Parijatdvipa to trade with us when Parijatdvipa is ripping itself apart. ”
There was a certain expression Priya wore sometimes. It came over her most often in the dark of an evening, or in the lulls in conversation about the Parijatdvipan empire: its politics, its city-states, its ugly and grinding war. She wore it now.
“Priya,” Bhumika murmured.
Priya blinked. The look flitted away, swift as a bird in flight.
“We have to discuss the mask-keepers,” said Bhumika.
“Ganam spoke to me about it again.”
It. The deathless waters. The power waiting for them there, if they were willing to risk death.
The power Bhumika and Priya had.
“Of course he did.”
“They’re getting restless.” A pause. The ground shifted, as Priya rocked back on her heels. “Maybe it’s time it happens. We can’t say no forever.”
“We do need help,” Bhumika said, eventually. “We can’t continue to be the only two thrice-born in the world.”
“Well, we have a good division of labor,” Priya said with a shrug. “I deal with the fields and the sick, and those gangs out in the villages, and you deal with the highborn and the politics.”
“There are a lot of fields,” Bhumika said mildly. “And a lot of people.”
“There are,” Priya agreed. Then she huffed out a sigh; long and slow and achingly tired. “There are.”
“I don’t know if you want the mask-keepers to pass through the waters or not,” Bhumika said. “You argue in their favor and against them.”
“I’m not arguing. I’m just pointing things out.”
“Maybe I want your view,” Bhumika said, a little irritation bleeding into her voice. “Maybe I need the advice of my fellow elder.”
“Ah, Bhumika,” Priya said. “Do you really want me to advise you? We’ll only disagree.”
“If I can take advice from people like Lord Chetan, I think I can stay calm with you.”
“I don’t know about that. I can be very annoying when I want to be.”
“Priya.”
“See?”
Instead of pressing forward into the inevitable argument, Bhumika said, “I received another emissary from Srugna.”
“Did you?”
“Mm.” This time, the Srugani king had sent one of his minor wives—a shrewd, beautiful woman with fashionably blackened teeth and kohl thick around her eyes, who had shared a fine meal with Bhumika and cooed over her daughter, then laid out the desires of her husband and his council.
“They’re willing to pay us handsomely to have their own fields cleared or saved. ”
“Well then, I suppose I’m going to have to learn how to do that,” Priya said. She sounded tense. “The rot’s spreading farther and farther every day,” she muttered. “It won’t be the Srugani alone who need help soon, I expect.”
“And that could afford us an opportunity. But it isn’t one we can take advantage of with you alone to do the work. You understand?”
“I wish,” said Priya, “that I could cure it. That I… Ah, Bhumika, I wish I weren’t so slow.”
“You’re not slow,” Bhumika said. “You’re trying to attempt the impossible.”
Priya’s forehead wrinkled as she frowned.
“You don’t know that.”
“I know it would be easier if you had help, and I have no time to spare.” And nothing like Priya’s skill with the delicate work of untangling the rot. “I have grown to know Kritika a little better. But you’re more familiar with the other mask-keepers. What do you think of them?”
“I think they want a better Ahiranya,” Priya said. “Or at the very least, they want Ahiranya to survive, and they want it to be led by its own people. They’re always happy to help me with my work. But I don’t know if that makes them trustworthy.” A pause. “They’re not trustworthy.”
“You seem to be fast friends with Ganam.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t know what he is,” Priya said. “Spirits, Bhumika, you really think I’d trust anyone.”
“I don’t,” Bhumika said. “But you have put your faith in some… interesting people.”
Priya laughed. “I guess I have. And look where it’s got us. Ruling our own country.”
Instead of responding, Bhumika paused and pondered, rifling through possibilities.
Allowing the mask-keepers—the rebels, as they always would be named, in the privacy of Bhumika’s mind—to have the same sheer power that Bhumika and Priya now possessed seemed foolhardy at best. But Bhumika had ruminated over the problem; turned it over in her head, time and time again, and she could see no alternative.
She could not refuse them without civil war.
And ah, soil and sky, she and Priya desperately needed their burden lightened.
“If you really want my view,” Priya said slowly, watching Bhumika’s face, “then I think now that they’ve become once-born, it’s all inevitable.
I remember what it was like. Craving the waters.
They’re going to feel that want rolling through them day and night until they get the chance.
And that lot have never been afraid of death. ”
“No indeed,” Bhumika murmured. “Fine. I’ll talk to Kritika. We’ll do what’s needful.”
“Do you ever wonder,” Priya said, “what it would be like if more of us had survived? If we weren’t the only temple children left?”
“No.” Yes. Often. Always. “I don’t allow myself to dwell on it,” Bhumika lied.
“Do you think it would have been easier? All of this.”
Priya did not remember their siblings as Bhumika did.
“I think we would not be here,” said Bhumika. “I think our lives would have been very different. I can’t imagine it, and I don’t wish to.”
“Sima’s told me she’d like to pass through the waters,” Priya said then, cutting through the jumbled weight of Bhumika’s own thoughts. “And there are others—Billu, definitely—who’d like to try, too. And don’t tell me maidservants and cooks aren’t fit for it, Bhumika. I’m an ex-maidservant.”
“You were a temple child first. Besides, Priya—don’t you want better for them than this? Would you have chosen this for yourself, if there had been another path?”
Priya went silent at that.
“Tell me,” Priya said eventually, voice softer, “how Padma’s been. Does she still yell all the time?”
“Yes. Because she’s still a baby,” Bhumika said in her driest tone. “Come and see her in the morning, if you like. She misses you.”
Bhumika was finally considering whether it was time to prepare for bed, when there was a sharp rap on her chamber doors. Khalida opened them. Jeevan strode in.
“Lady Bhumika,” Jeevan said, with a neat bow. “There’s a messenger waiting for you urgently.” A pause. He straightened up. “From Empress Malini.”
Bhumika’s heart gave a thud.
“I’ll be there immediately,” she said.
This time, she headed to the receiving room with appropriate haste.
A thin man waited for her. He looked as if he had stumbled from his horse and come to her directly, and smelled like it too—but his bow was polite, his voice respectful when he said, “Elder. I have been sent with a message from the empress herself. A missive written in her own hand.”
Bhumika took the letter from him.
“Thank you,” she said, with as much grace as she could muster. “If you follow my maid, she’ll see to it that you have some sustenance and a comfortable place to rest.”
The messenger bowed again, murmuring his thanks. And Bhumika began to read.
It was a short message. Her hand trembled, just slightly, as she creased it shut once more.
“Jeevan,” she said, turning to the door where her commander waited, gaze alert. “Please. Summon Priya. I need her.”