Chapter 25 Ashok
ASHOK
He had thought that eventually it would stop feeling as if he were trapped in a strange dream, his skin hollowed out and uneasy over his bones, his consciousness tripping numbly through it all: the arrival at the mahal.
Reuniting with Bhumika. Seeing her face—the look upon it—as if through water.
Everything distorted. There were things he was meant to feel. And yet somehow, he could not.
He’d felt things very strongly, once.
Kritika had wept when they were finally alone. Gazed at him, and whispered his name with reverence, and said, “The others won’t believe it. They won’t, they won’t. You’re back.”
Was he?
“The yaksa,” he managed to say.
But Kritika was nodding and smiling through her tears. “They brought you back. They took so many of us, but you.” She’d grasped his hands. Her skin, soft, paper and pulp to the carved bone and flesh of his own limbs. “You, you are a gift.”
She told him his rebels had survived. Ruled Ahiranya, under the purview of Bhumika, who was thrice-born and Priya—
Priya, who had lived too. A distant feeling ran through him. It felt… golden.
He met his rebels—who named themselves mask-keepers, now. Tried to smile where it was appropriate to smile. Tried to remember what it meant to be human.
He’d been under the water for so long. It wouldn’t come easily.
He found that the orchard was a good place to be alone.
He liked to lie down, among the trees. There was one that called to him particularly: a great, strong thing that reminded him of the tree that had birthed the first yaksa he’d found.
The longer he lay under it, the more it changed. Wood, softening with rot. He plucked one of the ripe fruits from the tree. Opened it curiously, almost absently. It had the marbled quality of fat.
He heard a voice.
The yaksa he’d drawn from the tree—the yaksa who had called him, drawn him to her—was calling again. He turned, and there she was, gliding toward him. She brought the child yaksa with her. He was quiet, his eyes gleaming like fish scales.
“Should I still call you Ashok?” she asked, when she was near enough to speak.
“It is my name, yaksa,” he said, bowing his head.
“You need not venerate me,” she said with a smile. “Not you.”
Not you. It reverberated through him. It meant something.
Not you.
“Yaksa,” he said. Hesitated. He did not know what he had meant to say.
“Don’t you know my name?” she asked him. She cocked her head. There was a faint rustling noise. A snapping of wood, a noise green with sap.
“No,” he said.
“You called me Sanjana, when you first drew me out of the earth,” she replied. “And you call me that still. I thought it was a kind of game for you, at first. You always liked to play at being human. There was always a… softness, to you.” The look she gave him was thoughtful. “But perhaps not.”
She was watching him curiously.
“You are not as you should be,” she said.
“Something is wrong with me,” he whispered in return.
She approached him then. Took his face in her hands. Her skin was like wood—all grain, rich with the scent of sandalwood.
“Don’t worry,” she said, dabbing her fingertips over his cheek and then his jaw with the lightest of touches—as if the feel of his skin fascinated her and repelled her in equal measure. “You won’t feel like this forever.
“Let me tell you a tale,” she said, cupping his face now, turning it just so.
The perfect angle for their eyes to meet.
“A tale mortal children know, I think. Once there was a being who swam in the cosmic rivers where all universes meet. She was a creature of those rivers. Later, humans would only be able to envisage her as a fish.”
“Mani Ara,” he murmured. He remembered the Birch Bark Mantras. Remembered the stories he was taught as a boy, and taught his little sister in turn.
“Yes, good,” she said, sounding pleased.
“The first yaksa who found the shore of a world. And the world was green and loud and so alive. She crept onto its shore, and she tasted it. The green. The life. And it was beautiful, you understand? So she decided she would enter it and become of that world.”
“I know this,” he said. Not to boast, not to stop her, but to say—What is it that I don’t know? Why do you stare at me like I am a child, Sanjana-who-is-not-Sanjana?
“Deciding is easy,” Sanjana said. “But to do it is—was—harder. Oh, you can touch the sangam from this world. You can dream it and envision it and worm your way into it through your gods and your griefs. But to cross from one to the other with all your flesh—to breathe with it, move with it, be within it—that takes magic.” Her eyes gleamed, like coins, like the silt gold of a riverbed.
“That takes sacrifice. So Mani Ara sacrificed.”
This, he didn’t know. It was not part of the tale Ashok had ever been told, temple-raised though he’d once been.
“What did she sacrifice?” he asked.
“What all the yaksa did, in the end,” Nandi piped up.
His voice was like a hollow reed—like something carved out for wind and music.
“Rootlessness. We bound ourselves to this world. To its soil. To its green. We tried to make a home of it. But there were people who rejected what the yaksa offered. And they made a sacrifice of their own. In fire. And the yaksa burned. They burned, and it hurt, and they wanted to run, but they could not flee from this world. They’d sacrificed that strength, and the path was gone.
They could only sink into their roots. Into the rivers they’d bled for their priests.
The trees that grew from their own agony-charred bones. ”
The deathless waters. The trees of sacred wood. The forest that twisted time strangely, and the bones that hung from trees. All this. All this—
“We still want this world,” Sanjana said into the silence.
“And we were willing to sacrifice more of ourselves to belong. We became things of green, once, giving up our rootlessness for soil. Now we have to become… things of flesh.” She tilted her own face, side to side, like a child showing off a new toy or costume.
“A fair exchange,” she murmured. “The humans who worship us hollowed themselves—sacrificed their humanity—for power.
And now we wear their flesh and their bones and their hearts like garb.
“You are in a costume, brother,” she said kindly. “You wear it cinched tight, because that was always your way…”
“Stop,” he choked out. Wrenched away from her hand. Where she’d touched him, his face burned. He pressed his own fingertips to it, feeling nothing but his own skin—warm, faintly marked with stubble.
He thought again, of the weary voice in his mind when he’d woken from death. Tired. Old. I never wanted this. And it was true, absolutely true. He did not want this. What Sanjana was offering him.
He clutched his own hands, one over the other. Holding something in.
“Play your game, then,” she said, after a moment. She sounded faintly amused. “I will be excited, I think, to see what you do. But not all the others will be. Try and remember that, if nothing else.”
She turned, beginning to walk away. He watched the shape of her shoulders. Watched as Nandi trailed after her, ferns sprouting where his feet had pressed the soil. He thought of shells—of wearing a skin, an echo. He thought of Priya. And Bhumika.
“My sisters,” he managed to say.
Sanjana paused. Turned, and took in the look in his face, and shook her head.
“You worry for them? How like you. How sweet.” She smiled. “Don’t worry. They’re beloved. Necessary. But not us. The dead we wear are shells. Carapaces. But your sisters are soil seeded with flowers. They bloom into something new.”
“The rot—”
“Shh,” she murmured. Tender. “The whole world is ours to hollow, Ashok. And ours to grow into—to wear and remold. Rot isn’t a good name for it. Call it new life. Call it blooming, if you like.” She shrugged, and lightly began to walk away again. “You’ll remember eventually,” she told him.
“It kills people,” he called out after her.
“Just people,” she agreed, in an airy voice. “But not us.”
He didn’t really need to sleep. So at night he walked the mahal in darkness.
Rivers. Sacrifice. Cosmos to green, green to flesh. The story rattled strange through his skull. Contemplating it too closely made him feel sick; made him feel as if his mind were filling with water formed of knowledge and poison, steadily drowning his own thoughts out.
But there was no escaping those waters. He walked, and walked, and felt the pulse of the whole of Ahiranya around him, like a fist grasping his lungs.
He could feel the rot-riven—the people, the fields.
He could feel Bhumika, and somewhere, like a pulse of starlight, too far to touch, Priya.
He felt more than any mortal man should have felt.
A scuff of heavy footsteps on the floor. A sudden silence.
“Ashok,” a voice said. Male and low, relief shot through it. “I’m so glad you’re back,” Ganam said, approaching. “Can I walk with you?”
Ashok nodded jerkily. And Ganam came to his side. He was carrying a scythe at his back. He was perhaps on night guard duty.
“I couldn’t believe it when you returned,” Ganam said. “Couldn’t believe my eyes. But there you were. And the magic in me—it went wild.” He thumped a hand against his chest for emphasis. “I’d never felt the like of it. You’ve been missed, Ashok.”
Wherever Ashok had been, he had missed no one.
“Elder Bhumika and Elder Priya, they’ve been doing their best,” Ganam was saying. “A good job. You’ll be glad to know that.”
Ah, this made him feel more like himself.
“Better than I would have done?”
An infinitesimal pause. Then Ganam said, haltingly, “No. It’s different.
Frustrating. Slower. Not bad, but…” A huff of breath, head lowering, though his eyes never truly left Ashok’s face.
“I miss how decisive you were, my friend. Even if our goal of a free Ahiranya was distant, we never stopped moving. Now there’s too much stillness.
Now there’s just fighting and fighting, and we don’t even know what freedom should look like anymore.
” He took a step closer. “Ashok, what do you want of us? What are we meant to do?”
Careful words. Cunning words, under a cover of artless friendship. Ganam had never been a good liar.
Ashok felt his sister’s hand in this.
“I don’t know,” he said, suddenly exhausted. “I don’t know what I want.”
He took a step away. Stopped and turned and said, “It may be best if you leave me be. For the rest of the night.”
Silence.
“Of course,” Ganam said finally. “But if you ever want to talk again, you’ll find me, won’t you?”
I never will, Ashok thought. But he nodded all the same.